At 2:10 P.M. on March 30, Heather Lelache was seen leaving Dave’s Fine Foods on Ankeny Street and proceeding southward on Fourth Avenue, carrying a large black handbag with brass catch, wearing a red vinyl rain-cloak. Look out for this woman. She is dangerous.

It wasn’t that she cared one way or the other about seeing that poor damned psycho, but shit, she hated to look foolish in front of waiters. Holding a table for half an hour right in the middle of the lunchtime crowd—”I’m waiting for somebody.”—”I’m sorry, I’m waiting for somebody.”—and so nobody comes and nobody comes, and so finally she had to order and shove the stuff down in a big rush, and so now she’d have heartburn. On top of pique, umbrage, and ennui. Oh, the French diseases of the soul.

She turned left on Morrison, and then suddenly stopped. What was she doing over here? This wasn’t the way to Forman, Esserbeck, and Rutti. Hastily she returned north several blocks, crossed Ankeny, came to Burnside, and stopped again. What the hell was she doing?

Going to the converted parking structure at 209 S.W. Burnside. What converted parking structure? Her office was in the Pendleton Building, Portland’s first post-Crash office building, on Morrison. Fifteen stories, neo-Inca decor. What converted parking structure, who the hell worked in a converted parking structure?

She went on down Burnside and looked. Sure enough, there it was. There were Condemned signs all over it.

Her office was up there on the third level.

As she stood down on the sidewalk staring up at the disused building with its queer, slightly skewed floors and narrow window slits, she felt very strange indeed. What had happened last Friday at that psychiatric session?

She had to see that little bastard again. Mr. Either Orr. So he stood her up for lunch, so what, she still had some questions to ask him. She strode south, click clack, pincers snapping, to the Pendleton Building, and called him from her office. First at Bradford Industries (no, Mr. Orr didn’t come in today, no, he hasn’t called in), then at his residence (ring. ring. ring.).

She should call Dr. Haber again, maybe. But he was such a big shot, running the Palace of Dreams up there in the park. And anyhow what was she thinking of: Haber wasn’t supposed to know she had any connection with Orr. Liar builds pitfall, falls in it. Spider stuck in own web.

That night Orr did not answer his telephone at seven, nine, or eleven. He was not at work Tuesday morning, nor at two o’clock Tuesday afternoon. At four-thirty Tuesday afternoon Heather Lelache left the offices of Forman, Esserbeck, and Rutti, and took the trolley out to Whiteaker Street, walked up the hill to Corbett Avenue, found the house, rang the bell: one of six infinitely thumbed bell pushes in a grubby little row on the peeling frame of the cut-glass-paneled door of a house that had been somebody’s pride and joy in 1905 or 1892, and that had come on hard times since but was proceeding toward ruin with composure and a certain dirty magnificence. No answer when she rang Orr’s bell. She rang M. Ahrens Manager. Twice. Manager came, was uncooperative at first. But one thing the Black Widow was good at was the intimidation of lesser insects. Manager took her upstairs and tried Orr’s door. It opened. He hadn’t locked it.

She stepped back. All at once she thought there might be death inside. And it was not her place.

Manager, unconcerned with private property, barged on in, and she followed, reluctant.

The big, old, bare rooms were shadowy and unoccupied. It seemed silly to have thought of death. Orr did not own much; there was no bachelor slop and disarray, no bachelor prim tidiness either. There was little impress of his personality on the rooms, yet she saw him living there, a quiet man living quietly. There was a glass of water on the table in the bedroom, with a spray of white heather in it. The water had evaporated down about a quarter inch.

“I dono where he’s gone to,” Manager said crossly, and looked at her for help. “You think he hanaccident? Something?” Manager wore the fringed buckskin coat, the Cody mane, the Aquarius emblem necklace of his youth: he apparently had not changed his clothes for thirty years. He had an accusing Dylan whine. He even smelled of marijuana. Old hippies never die.

Heather looked at him kindly, for his smell reminded her of her mother. She said, “Maybe he went to the place he has over on the Coast. The thing is, he’s not well, you know, he’s on Government Therapy. He’ll get in trouble if he stays away. Do you know where that cabin is, or if he has a phone there?”

“I dono.”

“Can I use your phone?”

“Use his,” said Manager, shrugging.

She called up a friend in Oregon State Parks and got him to look up the thirty-four Siuslaw National Forest cabins which had been lotteried off and give her their location. Manager hung around to listen in, and when she was done said, “Friends in high places, huh?”

“It helps,” the Black Widow answered, sibilant.

“Hope you dig George up. I like that cat. He borrows my Pharm Card,” Manager said and all at once gave a great snort of laughter which was gone at once. Heather left him leaning morose against the peeling frame of the front door, he and the old house lending each other mutual support.

Heather took the trolley back downtown, rented a Ford Steamer at Hertz, and took off on 99-W. She was enjoying herself. The Black Widow pursues her prey. Why hadn’t she been a detective instead of a goddam stupid third-class civil rights lawyer? She hated the law. It took an agressive, assertive personality. She didn’t have it. She had a sneaky, sly, shy, squamous personality. She had French diseases of the soul.

The little car was soon free of the city, for the smear of suburbia that had once lain along the western highways for miles was gone. During the Plague Years of the eighties, when in some areas not one person in twenty remained alive, the suburbs were not a good place to be. Miles from the supermart, no gas for the car, and all the split-level ranch homes around you full of the dead. No help, no food. Packs of huge status-symbol dogs—Afghans, Alsatians, Great Danes—running wild across the lawns ragged with burdock and plantain. Picture window cracked. Who’ll come and mend the broken glass? People had huddled back into the old core of the city; and once the suburbs had been looted, they burned. Like Moscow in 1812, acts of God or vandalism: they were no longer wanted, and they burned. Fireweed, from which bees make the finest honey of all, grew acre after acre over the sites of Kensington Homes West, Sylvan Oak Manor Estates, and Valley Vista Park.