The bungalow turned out to be Russ Hewett’s office on Treasure Island. There was a desk and a chair, a drafting table and a display easel, some functional shelves, and a leather armchair fronted by a coffee table and flanked by two straight-backed chairs. To the immediate left of the entrance was a door marked WASHROOM with a key in its lock.

For nights like these, the space heater in the corner would have made the room comfortable. We did not turn it on, though. Comfort was apparently not high on the agenda.

It’s eerie to enter the office of a person who had not expected to die. Paperwork that assumed it would be finished was waiting in a patient litter on the desk. Photographs of the Heritage Picnic lay about. A mystery novel, open midway with its spine facing up, rested on the right arm of the leather chair. It was, for Russ, the first case that Perry Mason would never solve. A small bottle of violet ink on the desk lay open and on its side, but rather than having been blotted up, the ink had simply dried where it was, forming a thin violet cake that went right up to the desk’s edge. It had miraculously stopped short of spilling onto the carpet. A table radio was staying tuned with admirable loyalty to a radio station that had gone off the air for the night; the dull static created the aural illusion of soft rain outside.

Gunther went to turn off the radio, but Martha stopped him and did it herself. “You can’t touch anything in this room with your bare hands,” she cautioned him. “Gail and I have both been here during the last year, but you haven’t. If the police ever decide to give the place the once-over, I want everything as Russ left it.”

Gunther nodded and, lowering the gun in his right hand, unbuttoned his shirt pocket with his left and took out a pack of cigarettes. He held the pack to his mouth and plucked out a cigarette with his lips. He’d likely seen someone do this in a movie, and so far he was okay. But then he produced a box of matches from the same pocket and stared at it as he tried to figure out how to light a match with only one hand. He finally abandoned the project, dropping the matchbox back into his shirt pocket, which he quickly rebuttoned. He glared briefly at me, embarrassed that I’d witnessed his clumsiness.

“Make yourselves comfortable,” Martha said. “We’ll be here for a little while.”

Gail hung her coat and mine on a rack as I peered around the room. “So . . . no surprise visit from Russ?” I asked her.

“That’s it for him,” she said, with the same amount of anguish as a soda jerk saying he was out of butterscotch.

“And where was he on the totem pole, Martha?”