Act of God

drummer for a marching band. In his mid-fifties, the hair was still black and lay in clotted curls on his head. The eyes were sweeping the room, as though he expected to hear a joke about his weight and wanted to spot the joker. He wore pants with suspenders, and a shirt that strained at the waistline but billowed on the arms.
    He addressed Swindell. “What’s happening?”
    She said, “Joel, this is John Cuddy, the investigator Pearl hired. Mr. Cuddy, Joel Bernstein.”
    I stood to shake with him and nearly flinched at the strength of his grip. I had the feeling he was putting more behind it than just a businesslike firmness.
    Bernstein said, “You know, I don’t approve of this, right?”
    “Mrs. Rivkind told me that was the general opinion.”
    “Well, Abe was my partner but her husband. She wants to spend their money on you, it’s hers to spend. You and Beverly finished here?”
    “For now.”
    “Come down to my office then, get this over with.”
    I thanked Swindell and followed Bernstein into the corridor. “Who has the offices across the hall?”
    Over his shoulder he said, “What?”
    “The offices on the other side of this hall. Who’s in them?”
    “Nobody.”
    “Can I see them?”
    Bernstein let out a deep sigh, then fished around in a side pocket, coming out with a chain that held at least twenty different keys. He walked back to the door opposite Swindell’s office, having no trouble choosing, the first time, a key that opened the cylinder lock on it. He swung the door open for me.
    I looked into an office that wasn’t just unoccupied but abandoned. Two old desk chairs, each missing a wheel, a couple of plastic chair runners with broken-off corners and deep cracks in the plastic, a framed landscape somebody had sliced through with a knife, three old IBM standard typewriters. The dust on the linoleum floor looked undisturbed, the view out the windows that of the red brick building next door.
    I said, “Hasn’t been used in a while.”
    “Try decades.”
    “How about the other one?”
    Bernstein locked that door and moved on up the hall to the one across from his and Rivkind’s office. Same key, so far as I could tell.
    “A master?”
    He said, “What?”
    “The key. A master for all the doors on the floor?”
    “Oh. Yeah. Easier that way.”
    He didn’t elaborate, but did swing this door open for me, too. More modernly appointed, no obvious junk, carpet on the floor so no dust layer to disturb. “Who used to have this?”
    “Our day manager.”
    “Where’d he go?”
    “To Heaven, I hope. More directly, St. Michael’s in Roslindale.”
    “The cemetery.”
    “Right.”
    “How long ago?”
    “Two years. Heart attack, went out like a match.”
    I looked at him. Bernstein said, “I know what you’re thinking.”
    “That it’s odd you haven’t replaced him?”
    “No. This economy, it was a break he went so quick, we didn’t have to lay him off and could give his bonus to the widow. No, what you’re thinking is, ‘Sight unseen, I’d have bet Bernstein’d have the big one before this other guy,’ am I right?”
    “No.”
    He made a derisive face. “You’re telling me, you saw me walk into Beverly ’s office, you weren’t thinking about some kind of fat joke?”
    The bass drum image came back. “I thought about it. Not exactly a joke, but I thought about it.”
    Bernstein said, “All my life, I’ve been like this. I weigh three-ten now, have for twenty years, and before that it was two-seventy, two-eighty, around there. I go for a plane, they try to make me buy two tickets. I go shopping in the food market, people watch what I put in my cart. I was in school, the other kids made oink noises when I tried to eat in the cafeteria. You live a certain way long enough, there’s nobody can fool you about what they’re thinking.”
    “I’m thinking, who else has a key to this office.”
    “This one? Abe had one, a master like mine. The big
    Irish has one... ”
    “That’s Quill?”
    “Right, right. Security. Beverly ’s got hers.”
    “Also a master?”
    “Yeah. It just makes it easier, like I said. Who else? Probably Pearl and Larry, though when they ever used theirs I couldn’t tell you.”
    “Darbra Proft?”
    “No. She was just a secretary, not here long enough for that.”
    “To be trusted with a master, you mean?”
    “With any key, except to her own door.”
    I pointed to the dosed door next to the partners’ office. “That