As I would have expected, it didn’t take Sunny Rico much time at all to come down four flights of stairs. I saw her through the heavy glass in the door; she came loping round the corner and down the last few steps into the little dim-lit tiled hall with the smooth, swooping motion of a good hurdler. Whatever stresses this case had put her under, they hadn’t cut into her energy.

She opened the door and stood in it.

“Hello,” I said, stalling for time.

“Hello. What’s up?”

“I have a lump of new information for you.”

“You,” she said with a barely perceptible increase in force, “are not supposed to be concerned with information for me. At least, I remember telling you so. Do you remember?”

Ouch. “Could we go somewhere a little more private? And comfortable?”

“What for?”

“Oh, for crying out loud. Look, I have things you should probably hear. Is it going to do either of us any good for you not to hear ‘em? Will that make it all right that I didn’t do what you told me to?”

She breathed out, loudly. “No. But if I listen to you, it’ll only encourage you. Christ, I have to listen to you, don’t I?” She stepped back and held the door. “Come on up.”

I would have loved to have known how long it ordinarily took Rico to go up four flights of stairs, but this wasn’t a fair test; she climbed them at a staid pace out of respect for company. The stair layout suggested, as the doorbells had, that each floor was a separate apartment. The fourth floor certainly was. It had a tidy floor plan, probably not much different from the way it was when the place was built. The walls were mostly white, framed and bordered and vaulted in dark oak, except for the dining room, which was papered in a small-figured monochrome print of flowers and leaves in a light rusty-rose. A row of casement windows set into the front wall of the parlor were all open. Rico led me through the parlor, the dining room, and down a short hallway with a couple of closed doors in it to the back of the apartment, and the kitchen. This was mostly white, too, and none of the very few things on the countertop was purely ornamental. It was the kitchen—the apartment, in fact—of someone who couldn’t spend a lot of time there, and when she could, didn’t want to spend it dusting knick-knacks. Still, something about it made it strongly hers, and I was torn between feeling as if I ought to tiptoe, and wanting to sneak looks into cupboards.

Rico gestured at a little drop-leaf table under the back window, and one of the chairs pulled up to it. “Tea?” she asked. “Beer? Blackberry juice?”