As she rides by

stuck up from the middle of the board something about him wanting a level, please, mate. I didn’t even bother hanging around to find out what the heck he was going to do with a level, of all things—maybe check and see if one of the records was warped.
    I collected the keys, and King, and had a good look around all that there was to look around. One of the two doors in the rec room that wasn’t padded and soundproof led to a bathroom; I looked around that. The other led down a short corridor to the shipping room, and I looked around that. As far as I could tell, it looked exactly like a shipping room—there were shelves of singles, albums, tapes, and compact discs all piled up neatly and labeled, there were large rolls of brown wrapping paper and a lot of sticky tape and stacks of stick-on labels for parcels and one small desk with an “In” and “Out” tray and a covered-up typewriter and a stamp machine and a spike and, among other office staples, a thick, leather-bound ledger, into which I peeked.
    Inside, as one might well have expected, was a daily record of what orders were received, how, at what time, and from whom, with a note of which orders had been prepaid, and the sums involved, and the means of payment. Facing these entries was a record of when the orders were filled, how delivery was made and the costs thereof, total amount due from each account, when the account was due, and so on and so on. I must say it all seemed boringly normal to me. Not that I expected anything else, but if you divide my hourly rate into $2,000 you come up with a certain number of hours and in good conscience I had to put those hours in doing something, after all.
    I looked around for something else to look at. I looked at a small worktable in the corner. It had a vise clamped to it and tools neatly affixed to a sheet of pegboard above it, and a couple of oil tins under it. I looked at a coatrack beside it, and took note of one pr. heavy gloves, one imitation leather jacket, one (cracked) crash helmet, and one dirty scarf. The clues were mounting up fast. Stepping over a small portable metal ramp, I unlocked, and then slid open the back door, then poked my head out. A sign beside the aluminum door read, “Continual Deliveries—Do Not Block Or You Will Be Towed Away. City Bylaw 1227.” So I locked up again, told King that the alarm system seemed satisfactory to me, and that was it. Aside from replacing the keys, which I did, and putting the folder with all Tex ’s papers on the secretary’s desk, which I did, along with a short note saying, “For Tex, from V. D. Thanks Ever So,” what else was there to do? I could only think of one other remote possibility, so, as the phone on the secretary’s desk hummed back at me when I picked it up to check, I called my brother Tony’s place of work, which was in the basement of the LAPD Records building in downtown LA, not that far from Mel’s, actually. It was not, however, my kid brother Anthony with whom I wished to parlez-vous. It rarely was, alas. Or maybe not alas, quien sabe.
    Who I did wish to speak to was Tony’s boss Sneezy, who worked a computer terminal across the room from him. Sneezy always reminded me of that archfoe of Bugs Bunny, the little guy with the red hair and red mustache who was invariably boiling with rage. Sneezy had an incurable malady, which was lucky as far as I was concerned, because it kept him broke. In case some of you cannot divine from such slim evidence what his malady was—because, true, he might well be an inveterate follower of the sport of kings, for example, which would certainly keep one broke—Sneezy’s malady came wrapped in silks, furs, and gossamer, which left after their passing lingering traces of expensive fragrances, often had French names, and sometimes had limbs so breath-takingly long and shapely they could reduce the strongest man to jelly. Even Samson. Even Samson after he couldn’t see anymore, I forget just why. I think it had something to do with the Gaza strip, which was the first time he saw Delilah with no veils on.
    Sneezy kept marrying them, too; he’d been wed at least as often as Mickey Rooney. Come to think of it, he was about the same size... remind me to write a slim monograph some time on the number of times shrimps get married compared with steady, loyal, devoted guys over, say, at random, six foot six. Anyway, the switchboard put me through to him, and he growled, “Records,” at me.
    “Hi,