When I came out, Steve was gone.

A car motor roared outside and I ran to the window, fingered open blind blades and saw a two-tone green Plymouth taking off, fast.

“Shit,” I said.

I sat on the edge of the Beautyrest where Steve had perched minutes ago. I breathed hard. I clenched my fists. Tried not to trash the room. Then, slowly—and it took a good two minutes—I came to my senses. Steve had left things here. Extra clothes, toiletries, an unfinished bottle of I.W. Harper. This last alone meant he had not checked out of the Coral Court.

He would be back. He would likely still make that meeting at the Pink House at four P.M. He may have heard me puking but that didn’t mean he was on the run from me. Quite the opposite—he likely wanted me to settle down, after my unexpectedly human reaction to hearing that a little boy had been murdered. We needed a time out, before we completed our hot money transaction. Or perhaps he had things to do, unaccompanied.

So I was breathing normally as I poked around the room, a detective again. Steve hadn’t brought much with him, but I did find in the wastebasket yesterday’s morning edition of the Post-Dispatch. I lay it open on the bed and paged through. An ad in the classifieds was circled in pen—for a two-room furnished apartment at 4504 Arsenal Street.

From the Coral Court to the apartment house on Arsenal took only fifteen minutes, even for a non-native. The area was somewhat schizophrenic, scenic Tower Grove Park with its sassafras trees, manicured grounds, and gazebos facing a row of once-proud brick residences now given over to apartments—4504 somewhat larger than most buildings here, probably home to seven or eight flats on its two floors.

The middle-aged, well-preserved landlady on the ground floor accepted unquestioningly the badge I flashed, though a closer look would have revealed it to designate a State of Illinois Licensed Private Investigator. The salt-and-pepper-haired, blue-eyed Mrs. Webb seemed to like me—I was well-preserved, too—and answered all of my questions unhesitatingly.

About noon yesterday, John Grant of Elgin, Illinois (maybe she had read my badge) rented for twenty dollars and a five-dollar key deposit her only available apartment. He and his wife Esther were staying in St. Louis while Mrs. Grant recovered from a serious illness.

“Don’t know what her problem is,” Mrs. Webb said. “But she seemed very weak. She was leaning on her husband.”

“What did he look like?”

The description of John Grant was Steve Strand right down to the five o’clock shadow and oily complexion. He had dragged in and up the stairs, one at a time, two very heavy pieces of luggage. Later in the day he had carried them back out, one at a time.

Mrs. Webb took me upstairs and knocked, said, “Mrs. Grant?” a few times, before unlocking the door for me and smiling and nodding and leaving me to it.

I went in and the place was two rooms that I would describe more as under-furnished; still, pleasant enough with its floral wallpaper and fleur-de-lis rugs. The lumpy double bed had a lumpy woman in it. In a slip, she was walking the line between deep sleep and out cold. The nightstand bore two whiskey bottles (one empty, one two-thirds empty), a water glass and the small radio Steve bought yesterday.