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like a dark hippopotamus squatting on the stained oak floor. The bookshelves behind the desk were planed from ebony wood and the books upon them were each specially bound in dark-brown leather and fitted in a case of the same hide and hue.
    The man behind the desk had once been very tan, now not so much. His hair and eyes and suit were brown. He was rotund in a muscular way and, like the woman who came to my office earlier that day, he strongly resembled another.
    “How can I help you, Mr. McGill?” the man asked.
    “May I sit?”
    I indicated with a gesture of my head a large-bottomed pine chair that might have looked white against all those deep browns if it had not been burned by dozens of different cattle-brands. These sigils and signs gave the chair a darker hue and made it seem almost alive.
    “Suit yourself,” the second imposter told me.
    The chair had wide arms for the elbows. I used them.
    “Well?” the man asked.
    The only color divorced from the brunette family was the fading blue sky filling the window behind him and to the left. I considered the relief of the atmosphere and said, “Well what?”
    “How can I help you?”
    “I don’t know. What do you suggest?”
    “You’re the one who asked for this meeting,” he said, a slight twang making its way into the words.
    “Not exactly,” I replied, appreciating the accuracy of the hazy phrase.
    “Are you not the private investigator—Leonid Trotter McGill?”
    The fact that he knew my middle name meant either that I had been inquired about or that Phil made a report as soon as he was out of earshot.
    “I am,” I said.
    “And did your secretary call to arrange a meeting with Cyril Tyler?”
    “Zephyra, yes, she did.” Maybe the TCPA had given my whole name.
    “Then how can I help you?”
    “You can bring out the real Mr. Tyler and hang up this sham.”
    The brown white man did not like me. His sudden glare was very clear on that fact.
    I crossed my right leg over the left and sat back comfortably. It was a relief to be with someone else who had problems with anger management.
    He stood up and for a moment I wondered, idly, if he might have a gun somewhere on his person.
    Instead of shooting me, the angry man with the subdued accent strode from the room, slamming the door behind him.
    I remained seated, staring at the darkening blue sky. This was the respite I had needed. I took a deep breath and then let it go. I did that again and allowed my eyes to close. Solitude is a dear friend to anyone in my profession. Most people I meet I cannot trust, believe, or believe in. The only thing that separates the majority of the people I work for from the targets of my investigations is the fact that my clients pay for the privilege of my attention. There are few people I come across that I can bank on, or even feel friendly toward—and so, sitting alone, even in that unpleasant color scheme, was a balm for me.
    After five or six minutes of breathing I got up to examine the odd books lined up like so many dominoes in their box. The first volume I cracked open was a pulp novel about some warrior woman named Zarra the Magnificent. The next book was one of the Tarzan series by Edgar Rice Burroughs. I must have looked into a dozen of those cheap novels in expensive bindings. There was John Carter of Mars, Doc Savage, a volume in the Fu Manchu series, The Shadow, and other, less memorable, characters.
    It must have cost thousands of dollars to rebind and case those worthless fifties reprints of the adventure magazines from the thirties. But what did that mean to a man who could dream of someone’s death and have it become reality?
    There came a small sound like the sigh of a toy trumpet. I turned to my left to see that the plain brown wall had concealed a door that was now open. In that doorway stood a slender white man who looked very much like the rotund imposter and maybe a bit more like the chubby man in the photograph posing with the woman who looked like