We turned corners more times than I could keep track of. At last we stopped in front of a heavy-looking door with a little window in it, and Rico knocked. Chill air hit me when it swung open.

“Hold it,” I said. I had figured out where we were. “Why do we—”

“It’s the only thing I have. Scared?” She sounded pleased.

Detective Linn greeted me gravely, and might even have remembered me from the Danceland business. I remembered him. Rico’s partner was sort of a cross between the King of Elfland and Mr. Spock, but he dressed better than either of them. He was sublimely out of place in the cold little room, tall and white, his almost luminous white hair freshly cropped and showing the tops of his pointed ears. He wore a dark maroon suit with an agate pin in his cravat.

“How do you get this place so damn cold?” I asked.

“Magic,” he said, and didn’t seem to think it was funny. “You are good to help us.”

I decided I didn’t have to answer that.

Linn stood by a sturdy marble-topped table that, now that I think about it, probably started work in a .commercial bakery. The thing on it was covered with a white sheet. Rico put a firm hand between my shoulder blades and got me beside the table, and Linn drew the sheet back.

After a moment I stepped away and leaned against a wall. “Long walk off a short pier,” I said, when I could talk.

“And somebody drained the ocean,” Rico replied. She shook two herbal rigs out of a pack, tapped them down, and handed me one. “Can you use him to find whoever killed him?” She lit for me.

“No.” I rubbed a cold hand over my face. “And if I could, I’d just have a fix on another legman.”

“Jesus Christ on the Tree, do you think I’d mind having a fix on a legman? I wouldn’t mind having a fix on the legman’s goddamn laundromat. Don’t you understand? I don’t have anything right now. Will you just try it?”

I looked up. Rico wore that hungry face again.

“All right. But for God’s sake, cover him up.”

Linn did, except for one bare, discolored arm. I stood over Charlie’s unlovely corpse, empty of anything. Outside, people were drinking, dancing, fighting, making love. Outside was a foreign land, and there were no flights to it from here. Who killed you, Charlie, and where is he now? Nothing answered me. I reached two fingers out—from sheer horrified fascination, I think—and touched dead skin.

Rico had her hands under my armpits, holding me up. My legs were folded under me. Rico’s face, looking down into mine, was ashy under her tan. “What happened?” I said.

“Just what I was going to ask. You touched the body and dropped like a brick.”