I'd baffled him, however, and he wanted an explanation.

"What's this all about, Brew?"

"I have no idea, Mr. Lacone," I admitted honestly enough.

"All I know is that Bernie was killed while he was responsible for the chops. That's a pretty remote connection, obviously. But if I want to earn what you're paying me, I have to look into every conceivable hint of trouble, no matter how implausible it seems."

Which was why I needed to know where Hong's knee-jerk distrust came from.

"Fair enough." He had his smile tuned to a stronger signal now. Maybe he thought that every potential threat I identified and blocked reduced the eventual cost of long-term security.

"You're doing a fine job, Brew. Keep up the good work."

That made it easy to get off the phone. When we'd said good-bye, I hung up.

By then I was nearly lost again. The accumulating traffic demanded my attention, which made me feel that I'd wandered off my route. And on top of that, I was not in a good mood.

The chops had been in Bernie's care when he was killed. La-cone had mentioned Bernie's name to his business associates. As connections went, those weren't just remote, they were bloody intangible. Which left me pretty much right where I'd started clueless. If I didn't find something useful at Bernie's apartment, I'd have a hell of a time tracing his killer.

Unless the killer cut his way through more innocent bystanders to reach the chops A man who didn't mind hacking down a frail old security guard wouldn't stop until he got what he really wanted.

Involuntarily I shuddered, and my guts squirmed. For a moment or two, sweat blurred my vision, despite the Plymouth's AC. If this kept up, I'd find myself in the kind of black funk that positively begged for booze.

Luckily I hadn't missed any turns. By now rush hour had clogged itself down to a thin trickle, but that made spotting street signs easy.

Stoplights and hostile drivers clotted my route, but eventually I reached Bernie's neighborhood.

His apartment turned out to be upstairs in a brick four-plex on a block full of identical buildings with narrow strips of lawn like dog runs between them and exactly one unconvincing sycamore in each front yard.

Some of the flower beds against the walls showed more care than others, but they all seemed to hold the identical gardenias and peonies. On the inside, Bernie's building sported carpeting like Astroturf, designed to hide dirt and stains, and planters occupied by forlorn plastic palm fronds. It was well lit, however, like the rest of Garner, with uncompromising fluorescent bulbs partially humanized by frosted shades.

A staircase took me up to a landing with a numbered steel door on each side. I knocked on Bernie's just in case the cops, a relative, or some fiduciary friend happened to be there but there was no answer. When I hadn't heard anything for a minute or so, I jimmied the door and let myself in.

Someone had left a light on in the living room. With my back to the door, I glanced around. The living room ran half the length of the building, but that didn't make it large. And it was crowded with furnishings a couple of spavined bookcases, an old pre remote TV, a cracked Naugahyde recliner, a couch with defeated springs, a sturdy little workbench littered with tools and glue, and four assorted end tables, all set around an ersatz Oriental rug. The whole space including the rug looked neglected, abandoned to depression and dust with the exception of the framed photographs on the walls, and the wine bottles and jugs of various sizes carefully positioned on their sides in delicate stands on every available surface.

Bottles and jugs with wooden sailing ships inside them. I counted eighteen.

The photographs were all of the same woman, middle-aged, tending to fat, with nondescript hair, a wide forehead, small brown eyes too far apart and a smile so utterly and entirely seraphic that it wrung my heart. It beamed like a blessing out of every frame, warming everything she saw.

I knew intuitively who she was, without a scrap of actual identification. Bernie's wife. Dead for a number of years now, if the condition of the rug were any indication.

Every day he'd worked his twelve-hour shift at The Luxury. And every night he'd taken refuge here under her loving gaze, meticulously building ships in bottles because she was gone and he was alone.

I found more in the kitchen, some jaunty, others trudging against forgotten winds. And more in the bedroom. Even in the bathroom. Ships in bottles and pictures of his wife were the only decorations he'd cared to have around him.

I had a lump in my throat I couldn't swallow as I started searching his apartment.

If the cops had been here ahead of me, they were neat as hell about it.

I didn't find any disturbed dust to indicate that something had been moved, any of the usual scrap of police investigations in the wastebaskets. Which meant that whoever had the job of putting Bernie's "affairs" in order and disposing of his "effects" hadn't been here yet.

Maybe he'd died intestate, so un cared-for that the residue of his life would just sit here until his landlord evicted it.

In the end, I didn't have to do much searching. I found everything that interested me, including his address book, neatly organized in a filing cabinet in one of the bedroom closets.

Everything except a will. But that didn't mean much. The cops might've taken it to deliver to some lawyer or agency.

Assuming the cops had been here, they must've copied what they wanted out of his address book. That made my job easier, but I still didn't like it. It suggested that Edgar Moy wasn't taking this investigation very seriously.

A quick scan of Bernie's financial records didn't supply any surprises.

I was no CPA, but the numbers looked about right for a man who'd worked steadily and spent very little no unexplained infusions of cash, no unidentified expenditures. Rent aside, his biggest monthly expense was a payment to a nursing home.

The address book made my eyes ache when I looked at it. It was relatively empty compared to others I'd seen, and every blank space seemed to describe a life of emotional poverty. It gave me the phone number for the nursing home, however, along with a collection of other numbers, some self-explanatory, others just labeled with the names of people I didn't know.

My stomach complained to remind me that I hadn't eaten for a while, but I figured its objections were mostly an excuse to stop what I was doing, so I ignored it. Feeling like an intruder, I helped myself to a tall glass from one of the kitchen cabinets and filled it with water.

Then I sat down on the couch the recliner was so obviously his that I didn't want to violate it and started to make phone calls.

Talking to the nursing home turned out to be the worst of the lot.

Bernie's sister, Maureen Appelwait, lived there, alone in the world except for her link with her brother, supported by him while she drifted in and out of Alzheimer's, and no one had told her that he was dead. I caught her between lucidity and confusion, apparently trying to go in both directions at once, and my news didn't help. She cried some, forgot what I'd told her a few times, demanded details I loathed giving her. But in the gaps she revealed a little bit about his life.

He was her only brother. They had a sister, Florence, who'd passed away five years ago or was it three? Eight? One night while she slept her heart had simply stopped. His wife, Alyse Maureen spelled and pronounced it for me, "ah-LEASE" died fifteen years ago, killed by a misdiagnosed kidney cancer. He was devastated, just devastated. The three women had been such friends, Florence and Maureen never married, Alyse couldn't have children, they and poor Bernie had given each other the only family they had, and what was the name of that nice doctor who told her she was doing fine, just fine? Was it yesterday? Or maybe when she moved into the nursing home?

I listened to her for half an hour. Not once did she ask what would happen to her without Bernie to pay the bills. If she had, I couldn't have answered.

After I hung up, I gulped down the glass of water. Then I got off the couch, located Bernie's vacuum cleaner a wheezy upright nearly as old as I was and cleaned the hell out of the rug. I didn't stop until I could push a damp finger down into the nap and not pick up anything.

By then evening had become full dark outside. Night stained the windows black, and shadows leaked in past the shades, or under the front door, until they filled the apartment, crowding it with questions. Trying to keep Bernie's loneliness at bay, I switched on more lights and went back to work.

Fortunately the rest of my calls were easier. There were a few that I wanted to postpone because I had no legal standing a law office, a bank, an insurance agency, The Luxury's day-shift manager. For a wonder, I managed to catch most of the others at home. The majority worked for The Luxury, primarily on Bernie's shift. Two were neighbors. The ones left over turned out to be either acquaintances of Bernie's the kind of acquaintances you share a beer with occasionally and don't tell anything personal or friends of Alyse's.

One way or another, they all told the same story. Bernie Ap-pelwait was exactly what he looked like, an aging security guard grown isolated and short-tempered since the death of his dear wife. He could've retired a while back, rested on his pension, but he wanted to keep busy. Since he did good work, The Luxury let him stay.

Alyse's friends made tsk-ing sounds, emitted little gusts of sympathy and sadness, but they didn't have anything new to add. And what you might loosely call Bernie's drinking buddies contributed even less.

Mostly they were just surprised to hear that it was possible for a hotel security guard to get killed on the job.

After a couple of hours continuously on the phone, I'd learned nothing that helped me do anything except fume. The picture emerging under Alyse's poignant gaze was pretty much the one I'd expected and dreaded.

Bernie hadn't been killed because he was Bernie Appelwait. Or even because he was The Luxury's Chief of Security. He'd been killed because he happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

To that extent, it was a senseless crime. And senseless crimes were always the hardest to solve. Always. They lacked the motivation that linked killer and victim in simpler murders. Like a drive-by shooting, they revealed a great deal about the killer, and very little about the victim.

Typically killers like that escaped clean unless they left an eyewitness or some definitive circumstantial evidence behind.

Nevertheless I was sure that Bernie's death could be explained. My nerves insisted on it, and I believed them.

He'd died because he could identify his killer. And, somehow, because of the chops.

On that happy note, I probably should've relocked the apartment and driven away. Found myself something to eat on the off chance that raising my blood sugar would lift my mood. But the sheer effort which Bernie had put into his ship building seemed to require more of me. And from her pictures Alyse smiled glowingly, like a woman sure in her heart that I wouldn't let her down.

I checked the time. In a little more than an hour, I was supposed to meet Anson Sternway back at Martial America.

Groaning at the offense to my bedraggled pride, I dialed Marshal Viviter's cell phone number.