The portico was inhabited by three souls: a man of about fifty years with sixty extra pounds of belly, a sharp-featured woman who looked older than she probably was, and a girl of nineteen or twenty sitting on the banister wearing jean shorts and a tight red blouse. They were all what America calls white people.

I ascended the stairs, nodded at the congregation, and then moved toward the fancy glass-and-hardwood front door.

“Can I help you?” the man asked. He stood up from a redwood lounger and took a step in my direction.

“No,” I said honestly.

It’s too bad that frankness is not an asset in American race relations.

The man frowned and asked, “What are you doing here?”

The woman, who was short and wiry, gazed at me like a small bird eyeing an oversize grub.

“You ask everybody walks up your stairs about their business?” It would have been easier to explain the circumstances, but Easy is my name, not my nature.

“I’m asking you,” the man claimed.

Now the teenager was watching. I swear I saw her nostrils flare.

“I’m gonna walk through that front door and go to apartment three fourteen to have a friendly chat with Craig Kilian. If you wanna try and hinder me in any way I welcome the distraction.”

That set his head up straight, like a puppy dog that had just got his first whiff of wolf.

I passed through the front door without further conversation.

The building must have once been a fabulous mansion, but the job of breaking it up into apartments was necessarily jerry-rigged. The hallway on the first floor started out wide, but then, when it turned abruptly to the left, it became a slender passage with only two apartments. The stairs had been halved in some way, making me wonder how anyone moved their furniture in. The second-floor hall consisted of two left turns. The second of these revealed a group of little kids playing various games under the watch of a woman who should not have looked that tired so early in the morning. There had been quite a bit of noise before I walked by, but silence reigned as the brood of children watched mutely until I passed. They started howling again when I turned the first tier of the third-floor stairs.

The next floor was one great empty space with eight apartment doors along the encircling walls. No one was out and there was only one door open. Intuition told me that that door belonged to Craig—intuition was right.

I knocked on the open portal and called out, “Craig?”

Taking a step inside, I saw him at the end of a longish passage. He was just standing there, barefoot, in the middle of the sparsely furnished room, staring at the floor.

“Craig.”