Even the Wicked

"TJ called," she said. "He wants you to beep him."

I would have if the phone I was using had a number on it. Most of them have had their numbers removed from the dials, and even if you manage to worm the number out of a cooperative operator, it won't do you any good; NYNEX has rigged the bulk of their pay phones so that they can no longer

receive incoming calls. This is all part of the never-ending war on drugs, and its twin effects, as far as I can tell, have been a momentary inconvenience for the dealers, all of whom promptly went out and bought cellular phones, and a slight but irreversible decline in the quality of life for everybody else in town.

I had a plate of jerked chicken and peas and rice at a West Indian lunch counter on Chambers Street and went back to Whitfield's building on Worth. It was past five o'clock so I had to sign in with the guard downstairs. I scribbled something illegible on the sheet and rode up on the elevator. There were lights on in the law offices and a quick glance in passing showed me a man and two women seated at desks, two of them plugging away at computers, one talking on the phone.

I wasn't surprised. Lawyers keep late hours. I walked the length of the corridor and tried the men's room door. It was locked. The lock seemed unlikely to pose much of a challenge—it was designed, after all, to keep out the homeless, not to protect the crown jewels. On the other hand, if I was going to commit illegal entry I ought to be able to spend the next couple hours in a pleasanter spot than a lavatory.

At the opposite end of the hall I found the one-room office of one Leland N. Barish. His name was painted on the frosted glass, along with

"CONSULTANT." The lock looked to be the building's original equipment, shaped to take a skeleton key. I've carried a couple on my key ring for years, although I'd be hard put to tell you the last time I had occasion to use one of them. I didn't expect them to work now, but I tried the larger of the two and it turned the lock.

I let myself in. There was nothing to show who Barish was or who'd want to consult with him. The desk, its top uncluttered except for a couple of magazines, had a coating of dust that looked a good two weeks old. A stack of glassed-in bookshelves held only a few more magazines and eight or ten paperback science fiction novels. There was a wooden chair on casters that went with the desk, and an overstaffed armchair on which a cat had once sharpened its claws. The gray-beige walls showed rectangles and squares of a lighter shade, indicating where a previous tenant had displayed pictures or diplomas. Barish had neither repainted nor hung up anything of his own, not even a calendar.

I'd have gone through the desk drawers out of the idle curiosity that is an old cop's stock in trade. But the desk was locked, and I left it that way, unable to think of a reason to break in.

I'd switched the light on when I entered, and I left it on. No one could make out more than a silhouette through the frosted glass, but even if they could I had little to worry about, because it was odds-on nobody in the building had seen enough of Barish to remember what he looked like.

My guess was that "consultant" was what it so often is, a euphemism for "unemployed." Leland Barish had lost a job and took this little office while he looked for another one. By now either he'd found something or he'd given up looking.

Maybe he'd found employment that took him to Saudi Arabia or Singapore, and had left without bothering to clear out his office. Maybe he'd stopped paying rent months ago and his landlord hadn't gotten around to evicting him.

Whatever the actual circumstances, I didn't look to be running much of a risk cooping in his office for a couple of hours. I thought of TJ and decided to beep him, figuring it was perfectly safe for him to call me back, perfectly all right for Barish's phone to ring. I lifted the receiver and couldn't get a dial tone, which tended to confirm my guesses about Barish. I picked out the most recent magazine, a ten-week-old issue of The New Yorker, and settled myself in the easy chair. For a few minutes I tried to guess just what had become of Leland Barish, but then I got interested in an article about long-haul truckers and forgot all about him.

* * *

After an hour or so I noticed, a key hanging from a hook on the wall next to the light switch. I guessed that it would unlock the door to the men's room, and it turned out I was right. I used the John, and checked Whitfield's office going and coming. It was still occupied.

I checked again an hour later, and an hour after that. Then I dozed off, and when I opened my eyes it was twenty minutes to twelve. The lights were out in the law office. I walked on past it and used the lavatory again, and the lights were still out when I returned.