Dead Certain

that morning, but other than my profligacy with electricity, there was nothing else worthy of notice.
    Elliott proceeded to work his way toward the back of the apartment. At each doorway he paused while I groped for the light. Then he stepped inside like a character in a TV cop show to check it out. With every room I felt more and more ridiculous. There was absolutely nothing out of the ordinary in the apartment. My dirty coffee cup still sat beside the kitchen sink, and the towel I’d used to dry myself after my shower lay on the floor of the bathroom exactly where I’d dropped it. A copy of Clinical Anesthesiology lay open on Claudia’s bed.
    Elliott stopped on the threshold of my bedroom, which was the last one at the end of the hall. He reholstered the Browning and turned to me with an enormous grin on his face.
    “I guess the only thing the burglars did was trash your bedroom,” he said, surveying the tumult of dirty clothes and rumpled linen that was my room’s natural state.
    “What pigs,” I said, slipping my arms around Elliott’s waist. “Why don’t you go into the living room and put on some music while I clear a path to the bed. Then I’ll see if I can find us a bottle of wine in the fridge.”
    “Why don’t you let me get the wine,” he said. “It looks like you’re going to be in here for a while.”
    “You’d better leave that to me. Grown men have fainted when they open up the door to our refrigerator. Claudia has been known to store anatomical specimens there.”
    “In that case I hope you weren’t planning on cooking me dinner any time soon,” remarked Elliott as he turned to head back down the hall.
    “You’re safe,” I called after him. “I can’t cook a thing.”
    As I shoveled my dirty clothes into the laundry hamper I found myself feeling vaguely uneasy. I might not mind leaving my clothes on the floor, but the lawyer in me abhorred loose ends. While I was convinced that there was an innocent explanation for the front door having been left open, the fact that I didn’t know what it was nagged at me.
    As I hastily smoothed the sheets on my bed and pulled up the duvet cover, I told myself that Claudia had probably just gotten careless. Lord knows the combination of Mrs. Estrada’s death and the malpractice suit was starting to make her come unglued. I figured I could live with the occasional lapse at home, just so long as she didn’t start getting forgetful in the operating room, too.
    After I was finished, I stopped to survey my handiwork. Elliott had put on music in the living room, and I was intrigued by the fact that he’d chosen one of the CDs from Claudia’s collection as opposed to one of mine. It was a digitally remastered recording of Billie Holiday’s. For some reason the sound of her voice made me feel as though the evening was back on track. Our Starsky and Hutch interlude already forgotten.
    I made a quick stop in the bathroom to tidy up my hair and brush my teeth before making my way to the kitchen. I opened the refrigerator door and was rewarded by the sight of a congealed piece of pizza wrapped in a paper napkin and a sliver of something in a plastic bag that might have been a lemon at some point in the distant past. However, in the back behind the ketchup bottle I spied a bottle of champagne. One of my clients had given it to me when I’d made partner.
    “Perfect,” I said, and headed to the butler’s pantry in search of champagne flutes.
    The butler’s pantry, like the crown moldings and enormous dining room, was a holdover from the day when cooks cooked and butlers butled. Even though it was bigger than my first office at Callahan Ross, it was really nothing more than a wide internal passageway between the kitchen and the dining room lined with elaborate glass-fronted cabinets for china, as well as having a sink for washing glassware.
    With the bottle of champagne in one hand, I put my shoulder to the swinging door to the pantry and was surprised to find it blocked from the other side. In an apartment that old nothing worked right. The doorstop had probably slipped down on the other side, but rather than walk all the way around, I just gave the door another shove.
    I don’t remember screaming, although I know that I must have. It was the only way to account for the speed with which Elliott found me, with his gun drawn and a look of alarm spreading across his face. But by the time he arrived, I was already on the floor, my knees slippery