Free Jade in Aries by Donald E. Westlake

and a brass letter-slot at about the level of my waist.
    I stood to one side while Weissman unlocked the door and reached inside to switch on some lights, and then we both went in.
    Inside, it was very crowded and disorganized-looking, with round racks of clothing everywhere, counters on both sides, shelves up behind them, and narrow meandering aisles for customers amid the confusion of stock. The ceiling, a mass of heat ducts, exposed wiring, suspended fluorescent lights, plumbing and odd angles, had been painted flat black—like the top-floor ceiling in Cornell’s apartment—undoubtedly in order to get rid of it.
    Weissman said, “I guess you want to see the office. It’s back here.”
    I followed him—with the bright colors and the crowding, it was more like being in a plastic jungle than a clothing store—and at the rear we went around a counter piled with see-through shirts, through a hanging paisley drape, and directly into the nineteeth century.
    It was an office out of Dickens: small, piled high with papers, crowded with old furniture made of wood. There was no paint on any of the wood, only stain that let the grain show through. There was a very old roll-top desk, a wooden swivel chair, even a tall wooden filing cabinet. The calendar on the wall above the desk was of this new year we had just embarked on, but the picture was a Currier & Ives print of ice-skaters, and the company which had sent out the calendar—a belt and wallet maker in Philadelphia—had chosen an old-fashioned kind of script for its name and message.
    Was I at last in the influence of Ronald Cornell? All the rest of it, the apartment, the storefront, the store itself, seemed to bear the heavy stamp of Jamie Dearborn, whose confident Now face I had seen only once in the advertisement Cornell had shown me. But this room was not Dearborn; Dearborn would have made it all Camp somehow, would have mocked the spirit of wood. This was no fey imitation of a bygone style, it was a room that a man worked in, and which he had made comfortable for himself so he could do his work better.
    I said to Weissman, “Did Cornell do most of the business details around here?”
    “Oh, sure,” he said. “Jamie brought in the customers, you know, he was the contact man. But Ronnie did all the paperwork.” He looked around the little office, smiling. “Jamie hated this place. He kept threatening he was going to come in some day and rip it all out and turn the place into a big white cube. Translucent white glass on all the walls and the floor and the ceiling, with fluorescent lights behind them. And two more white cubes in the middle of the floor, one with a typewriter on it and the other for Ronnie to sit on.”
    “Did he mean it?” I asked. It occurred to me that men had killed other men for less violent forms of rape.
    “No, not really. He meant he thought it would be better that way, look better, but it would, wouldn’t it? Ronnie likes all this old stuff, though, so Jamie wouldn’t actually do anything to it.”
    I thought of Ronald Cornell in the living room we’d just left, with the 747 perpetually in flight, perpetually coming at him. I thought of the clothing he’d worn when he’d come to see me. I was beginning to understand just how totally he’d submerged himself within a reflection of Jamie Dearborn, and just how empty he must be now, with Dearborn gone. Cary Lane had gone ahead and superimposed his ideal onto his own body, but Cornell had sought it in another person and then lived on reflected light, like the moon with the sun.
    I sat down at the desk, and Jerry Weissman stood back and watched me, attentive, prepared at any time to be of assistance. The top was shut, and I tried it experimentally, to find it wasn’t locked. I rolled it back, and the surface of the desk—like the top, like the top of the filing cabinet, like the surface of the small wooden table against the opposite wall, like the floor beside the desk—was spread with