“No. You headed somewhere?”

“Toward the hypothesis that Chodo isn’t in a coma, only a poststroke state resembling a coma, induced chemically or by sorcery. I don’t think he’s unconscious. I think he just can’t communicate.”

Giant hairy spiders with cold claws crept all over my back. That presented a gaggle of unpleasant possibilities. “Suppose you’re right. Chodo had willpower like nobody I ever met. He’d get around it, somehow.”

“Absolutely. He would.”

“And you’re somehow part of that?”

“That would mean he saw it coming. He was clever, Garrett. He read people like nobody else, but he wasn’t a seer.”

“But?”

“Yes. But. He was an obsessive contingency planner. We spent hours every week brainstorming contingencies.”

“Uhm?” I understood that. We’d done a lot of it when I was still a handsome young Marine making sure the wicked Venagetan hordes didn’t come suck the life and spirit and soul out of the king’s favorite subjects. Most of whom weren’t sure who the king was that week.

“He thought well of you.”

“And I’m sure I’m not glad to hear that.” We were back to my obligation to Chodo Contague because he’d been so good to me. Whether or not I wanted it.

“His contingencies usually ended up with him or me calling you in to restore the balance.”

“Restore the balance?”

“His words. Not mine.”

“Have you seen him lately?” I hadn’t.

“No. And it was an accident, last time I did. I went out to the estate and just walked in. Like I always did. The guards didn’t stop me. I’d done it for years and Belinda hadn’t said to keep me out. She wasn’t happy, but she was polite. And uncooperative. I didn’t actually get to see Chodo up close. I got to watch Belinda pretend to ask him if he felt up to talking business. She told me she was sorry I’d wasted the trip. Her daddy felt too sick to work today. Could I come back some other time? Better yet, how about he came to my place next time he was in the city?”

“And he’s never showed up.”

“You are good.”

“I’m a trained detective. Where does that leave us?”

“Here’s the thing.”

Gods, I hate it when people say that. It guarantees that everything to come will be weasel words. “Umh?”

“Belinda is in and out of town all the time. When she does come in she doesn’t leave Chodo behind. Somebody might see him without her standing in between. I found out by spying. By lying in wait, hoping to get to him while she was away.”

“Dangerous business.”

“Yes.”

“The woman isn’t stupid.”

“Crazy, yes. Stupid, no. She brings him in and stashes him.”

“That could be handled by having somebody see when she comes in and find out where she drops him.”

Temisk chewed his lower lip.

“You’ve tried that.”

“Yes. And lost the man I hired. I’m lucky he didn’t know who I was, anymore. I might’ve lost me, too.”

I tried to recollect someone in my racket turning up dead or missing recently. There aren’t many of us. On the other hand, ours isn’t a well-known and respected profession like palm reader or potion maker. “Anyone I’d know?”

“No. He was an old soak named Billy Mul Tima who used to run numbers on the north side. I gave him little jobs when I could. He worked hard for Chodo before he got into the sauce too far.”

So there I was, snoot to snoot with a crisis, getting a face full of Fortune’s bad breath. A cusp. A turning point. An instant when I had to make a moral choice.

I resisted the easy one. And said not one word about a lawyer with a heart, and, more remarkably, a conscience. “Tell me about it.”

“There isn’t much to tell. I gave Billy Mul what I could and sent him off. I assume he bought all the cheap wine he could carry, then got to work.”

“Wino would be a good cover. They’re everywhere. And nobody pays attention. Go on.”

“They found him in a room on the north side a few days later, after he started to stink. He’d burned to death.”

I frowned. For a year there have been reports of people burning up without benefit of a fire, always in some slum on the north side.

“Garrett, he burned to death without setting fire to the place where he died. Which was about as awful a tenement as you can imagine.”

I can imagine some pretty awful places. I’ve visited a lot of them. Especially back when my clientele wasn’t quite so genteel. “Somebody brought him there.”

“No. I went up there myself. I talked to people. Even the Watch. He burned right where they found him. Cooked down like a chunk of burned fat. Without getting hot enough to start a bigger fire.”

That jibed with stories I’d heard about other burning deaths. “How could that happen? Sorcery?”

“That would be everybody’s first guess, wouldn’t it?”

“Always is when an explanation isn’t obvious. We’re conditioned by long, direct, dire exposure to those idiots on the Hill.”

Sorcery, great or small, isn’t part of daily life. But the threat of sorcery is. The potential for sorcery is. Particularly dark sorcery. Because our true rulers are the wizards who infest the mansions on the Hill.

I said, “You don’t think sorcery is the answer.”

“Those kind of people don’t show up in that part of town.”

A self-taught rogue set on becoming a one-man crime wave might, though. But how would he profit from burning winos?

“It’s not a part of town where humans show up much, is it? Isn’t that Elf Town?”

“No. But right on its edge. It’s mainly nonhuman immigrant housing now. Here’s the thing, though. The building belonged to Chodo.”

I nodded and waited.

“When I went up I thought it looked familiar. I dug into the records when I got back. We bought the place four years ago. I handled the legal stuff.”

“Chodo wasn’t there.”

“Not when the body was found. But he might have been. People remembered a man in a wheelchair.”

“Uhm?”

“I didn’t take it any further. I didn’t want to attract attention.”

“Probably the smart thing.” It’s unhealthy to ask questions near an Outfit operation. You might develop black-and-blue lumps. At the least.

Temisk asked, “Any brilliant theories?”

“Just the obvious one. Billy Mul tried to get to Chodo. Somebody made him dead for his trouble.”

“How would they do that?”

“That would be the question, wouldn’t it?”

“And why do it that way? Those things are done simple. Unless somebody wants to send a message.”

“A burn-up wouldn’t be a message anyone could read. They’d just wrinkle their noses and ask, what the hell?”

There wasn’t any sense to it. Pieces of the puzzle were missing. Even its general shape wasn’t apparent.

Temisk said, “One of the things Chodo paid me to do was bail him out if he got caught up in something weird. This qualifies. And he expected you to help.”

“I got that part. I don’t like it, but I got it. He knew me better than I know me. What’re you thinking about doing?”

“I did it when I got hold of you. You’re the expert.”

Me. The expert. Cute.

“Then let’s set some priorities. What’s the most important thing to do?”

“Make sure Chodo is still alive tomorrow morning.”

“Back to the birthday party?”

“Back to the party.”