He set the pizza on the floor and crept along the corridor, nudging doors open. Behind the fourth door he found the office.

A rug stretched before the file cabinets, muffling his feet. The drawers made liquid hisses as one by one he pulled them out. He took the penlight from his hip pocket. He crouched down. The pin of light slid along the rows of manila files and stopped at the divider marked K.

A moment later Waldo had the KOENIG, CORDELIA folder in his hand. He tipped the pages out, folded them, tucked them under his shirt.

A button on the desk telephone winked lit.

Waldo raised himself from his crouch and quietly lifted the receiver. The machine had already answered and the recorded voice was saying, “Hello, you have reached …”

After the beep a live voice said, “Doctor, it’s Hildy, I’ve got to talk to you, please pick up.”

There was a click. “Yes Hildy? Is this an emergency?”

Waldo’s heart lurched.

“He phoned.” Hildy was sobbing. “Robert phoned.”

“Hildy, sooner or later you’re going to have to break with Robert. This might be an excellent opportunity.”

Dr. Flora Vogelsang finally got Hildy off the line and hung up the phone. “Meshuggener,” she muttered.

She lit a Pall Mall, smoked half of it, and realized she wasn’t going to get back to sleep by natural means.

She slid her feet into her slippers.

Waldo crept to the doorway. A shaft of light spilling into the hallway caught the pizza box on the floor.

An old woman stumbled into the corridor. She didn’t see the pizza. She turned on the bathroom light. There was a rush of water and Waldo saw her through the open door gulping tablets, then downing a tumbler of water.

The bathroom light clicked off and the old woman stumbled back. Her slipper pushed the pizza but she didn’t look down. She leaned on the doorframe, one hand to her abdomen, and burped. A moment later the bedroom light went out.

Waldo waited five minutes. Sweat was pouring off him. He inched down the hallway and picked up the pizza box.

The bedroom door was half open. He peeked in.

Light came through the filmy window curtain. The old lady’s hair was a frazzled spill of gray on the pillow. She lay on her back, hands folded across her as if she had died in her sleep.

Waldo couldn’t believe there was any sleeping pill in the world that worked that fast.

He went down the hall to the bathroom. The bottle was on the ledge above the sink. He shoved it into his pants pocket.

“Whoever gave you your information, you should shoot them.” Waldo Flores’s dark eyes stared at Cardozo above the rim of his cup. “Vogelsang was home.”

“Did she see you?”

They were sitting in a booth at Danny’s. The ripped blue Naugahyde benches had been bandaged together with electrician’s tape.

“No way. She was too zonked on downs to see the walls.” Waldo reached into his I LOVE NEW YORK T-shirt and pulled out three sheets of paper.

Cardozo flattened out the pages on the Formica tabletop. Creased down the middle and smeared with red grease, they bore the letterhead FLORA Z. VOGELSANG, M.D., PH.D.

“These are a fucking mess, Waldo. What did you do, slaughter a canary on them?”

The air conditioning was blasting. Waldo had to cup his hands around the match to light his Winston. “Excuse me. I musta forgot to wear my kid gloves.”

Cardozo flipped pages.

“Hey, Lieutenant, I gotta get back to the garage.”

“So? There’s the door.”

“I could use a hundred.”

For an instant Cardozo’s eyes hardened. “Here’s twenty.”

PRIVILEGED AND CONFIDENTIAL

Re: Cordelia Koenig

psychiatric

evaluation

age: 13-2

occupation: student

tests administered

Wechsler intelligence test

human figure drawings

Rorschach

thematic apperception test

EKG

blood analysis

urine analysis

vaginal smear

Cordelia Koenig was agreeable, attentive and polite, with something of a precociously socialized manner. Indeed, in the “grand” manner of a far older woman, she attempted to put the examiner at ease, complimenting the examiner on “your lovely office,” recognizing a flower vase as Meissen, suggesting that the examiner “take your time” and inquiring if she was answering questions too quickly.

Based on observation alone, the examiner had the impression of an obsessive albeit well-contained preadolescent person, whose hostilities are quite unconscious, and at variance with her social intent.

Miss Koenig’s work on the Wechsler reflects superior intelligence. Her full-scale score is 131, very superior, consisting of a verbal score of 130, superior, and a nonverbal score of 129, superior. The similarity between scores tends to obscure fluctuations in functioning, indicative of an emerging disturbance.

The projective tests reveal a shrewd, manipulative, resentful, and confused preadolescent whose modes of adaptation are unstable and tenuous. Her efforts at accommodation are forced and, at times, inappropriate—a fact of which she is obliquely aware. Impelled by aspirations for prestige and approval, she attempts to integrate both her accurate and her bizarrely inaccurate perceptions by linking objectively unrelated aspects of reality and at times grossly distorting these to fit her preconceived matrix of meaning.

Miss Koenig is very much concerned with the problem of self-importance, unconsciously intermixed with furtive rebellious impulses and an urge for extraordinary, godlike powers: in this regard, she equates female fertility with the power to bestow life and/or death. Consciously, in reaction-formation, she is unable to accept all but the most benign, loving, “good daughter” aspects of herself, despite an awakening realization that the aggression against which she so defends herself originates not in a hostile environment, but

in herself.

Adroit at deceiving both others and herself, Miss Koenig relies on intellect to rationalize away the darker side of her own nature. Given her age and history, and the marked narcissistic infantilism of her parents and parent substitutes, it is not unusual that her identities and identifications are many and unstable, but overall they point to profound sexual bewilderment, morbid preoccupation with biological processes, and a denied longing for exotic, spectacularly attractive female roles.

Miss Koenig exhibits marked erotic inclination toward her father and toward any man who can be seen as a father surrogate. This, of course, clashes with her image of herself as a model of dignity, self-containment, and aristocracy. She is impelled to irresponsible, hedonistic activity, associating spontaneity (doubtless through observation of her elders) with liquor and psychoactive drugs.

Unconsciously, as revealed in her human figure drawings, Miss Koenig feels herself to be at the command of a cold, absent paternal figure and of a cruel, watchful maternal figure, both of whose nurturing is fiercely desired and seductively withheld. She saves her deepest conscious resentment for her father, but on an unconscious level she sees her mother as a dreaded rival upon whom she must humiliatingly depend for survival. Her strongest conscious need is to be noticed; her strongest unconscious need is for the infantile gratifications of affection, specifically to be fed (primary orality).

Miss Koenig is fending off feelings of despondency, helplessness, aggression, and guilt, despite her persistently positive denial. She wants to take flight from the unbearable contradictions of consciousness and to find respite in unconsciousness, without, however, any loss of prestige and importance. Sudden perceptions of consciously disdained but unconsciously coveted forms of sexual exhibitionism indicate a dangerous rift in her distinction between the imaginary and the real.