An appalling sight met me. The papers I had left in eight discrete piles were thrown pell-mell around the room. Drawers were open-ended, pictures pulled from the wall, pillows torn from a daybed in the corner and the bedding strewn about.

The wreckage was so confused and so violent that the worst abomination didn’t hit me for a few seconds. A body lay crumpled in the corner on the far side of the desk.

I walked gingerly past the mess of papers, trying not to disturb the chaos lest it contain any evidence. The man was dead. He held a gun in his hand, a Smith & Wesson .358, but he’d never used it. His neck had been broken, as nearly as I could tell without moving the body—I couldn’t see any wounds.

I lifted the head gently. The face stared at me impassively, the same expressionless face that had looked at me two nights ago in the lobby. It was the old black man who’d been on night duty. I lowered his head carefully and sprinted to Boom Boom’s lavish bathroom.

I drank a glass of water from the bathroom tap and the heaving subsided in my stomach. Using the phone next to the king-size bed to call the police, I noticed that the bedroom had come in for some minor disruption. The red and purple painting on the wall had been taken down and the magazines thrown to the floor. Drawers stood open in the polished walnut dresser and socks and underwear were on the floor.

I went through the rest of the apartment. Someone had clearly been looking for something. But what?

The night guard’s name had been Henry Kelvin. Mrs. Kelvin came with the police to identify the body, a dark, dignified woman whose grief was more impressive for the restraint with which she contained it.

The cops who showed up insisted on treating this as an ordinary break-in. Boom Boom’s death had been widely publicized. Some enterprising burglar no doubt took advantage of the situation; it was unfortunate that Kelvin had surprised him in the act. I kept pointing out that nothing of value had been taken but they insisted that Kelvin’s death had frightened off the intruders. In the end I gave up on it.

I called Margolis, the elevator foreman, to explain that I would be delayed, perhaps until the following day. At noon the police finished with me and took the body away on a stretcher. They were going to seal the apartment until they finished fingerprinting and analyzing everything.