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wouldn’t be alone when she woke up; but decided just to leave a note, with my room number, if she wanted me and my help. I was, at this point, intruding.
    So I got out of there.
    Back in my room, in bed, I kept going over the scene of the... crime? Accident? I couldn’t make up my mind.
    Roscoe Kane had never attended a Bouchercon, or any fan gathering before, for that matter; and I was the one who’d convinced him to come to this one. Me. I brought him here. All but put him in that damn tub. Tom, who was the current president of the Private Eye Writers of America, had asked me to get Kane to the ’con, so that the PWA could surprise him with their annual Life Achievement Award.
    “We’re a young organization,” Tom had told me over the phone a few months back, “and we need the sort of publicity we can stir up by having a Roscoe Kane on hand. Kane may not be a household word these days, but a man who sold that many books—but who has
never
been honored for his work, in fact who has been pilloried for it—will make good fodder for the media. We can get ink, we can get on the tube, we can build some recognition for our group, and some credibility. I needyou to make sure Kane is there in person, Mal... otherwise we’re dead in the water.”
    I’d made sure Kane was here, all right. Dead in the water.
    The last thought I remember having, before drifting off to sleep, was, “Where the hell’s Gat Garson when you really need him?”

PART TWO
    FRIDAY

4
    The phone rang and scared hell out of me.
    I’d been sleeping deeply, and was in the midst of a disturbing, just-short-of-delirious dream in which Gat Garson and I were chasing Roscoe Kane’s killer down the corridors of the Hotel Caligari; a faceless killer whose form shifted but who had a gun, and Garson said, “Look out!” as the killer fired the gun at me and the phone-ring came out the barrel. My eyes jumped open and saw the phone, and I stopped it before it could ring again. I spoke thickly into the receiver: “Mae?”
    It wasn’t Mae Kane; it was the wake-up call I’d left for ten o’clock, figuring I’d wake before that. But I hadn’t. I thanked the operator, hung up, sat and rubbed my eyes with the heels of my hands. The feel of the dream was still with me, a physical sensation, a film in my mind as real as my morning mouth. I stumbled up out of bed and brushed my teeth, and my mouth tasted better, but the dream was still there.
    And so was the death of Roscoe Kane; that wasn’t something I could shake easily, either.
    I drew a bath.
    I went to the window and looked out at Michigan Avenue; the park was across there, but you could barely see it. Fog had settled on Chicago like a private eye’s porkpie hat. It would’ve struck me as nice, appropriate weather for a Bouchercon; only,fun-and-games murder à la mystery books and movies seemed, after last night, trivial, in bad taste.
    I got in the hot tub. A lot of people prefer taking showers these days, particularly in hotels; but writers—like Roscoe Kane and I—like to take baths. We can sit and soak and ruminate, or maybe read; a bath is passive, and lets you do that. Showers are entirely too active for my taste. It’s tough to read in a shower.
    But I wasn’t reading, I was ruminating. Thinking about Roscoe sitting in the tub last night, a floor above me, sitting and soaking and drinking and passing out and dying. Had he done that? Had he really done that?
    I washed up and got the hell out of the tub.
    I sat naked on the edge of the bed and called down to the desk to see if there’d been any messages from Mae; there hadn’t been. Perhaps she was still sleeping. I could check later.
    I threw on a sweater and jeans and went down to the lobby. The coffee shop was called the Gazebo and was an affair full of latticework and lawn chairs and fake foliage. The convention didn’t begin officially till late this afternoon, but most of the mystery writer guests were already here, so the booths and