"Still had to put the money in it," said Don. "What do you think, three carriages or four?"

"My money's on four," said Jay. "Or three really thick ones. Nowadays you put up a stairway that heavy, you get accused of gouging the customer by putting in needlessly expensive materials. So you put in a light one and they complain that the stairway bounces when they run up and down it. Go figure."

The apartment doors were not locked, and the apartments behind them were just what Cindy had expected. Ancient shabby furniture that had obviously been used by vagrants or small animals—or both—probably leading to the installation of the padlock on the front door. Faded rectangles on the walls showed where paintings or posters had been. The paint had been lazily applied over wallpaper, which had been applied over even older wallpaper, all of it put up with overlapping edges so that ugly seams ran up the walls under the ugly paint.

"Was this place remodeled by a blind person?" asked Cindy.

"Paint wasn't this color when it first went up," said Don. "It's cheap stuff that fades so fast you have to finish painting it in one day or you can see the dividing line."

"What color was it when it was first painted?" she asked.

"Even uglier," said Jay. "I'm betting it was painted in the seventies. We're just lucky the owner was too cheap to recarpet, or we'd be looking at green or orange shag."

"Is that mildew I smell or a dead animal?" asked Cindy.

"Just the smell of bad taste liberally applied," said Jay.

So maybe he wasn't a macho pig. Maybe he was just a guy who liked making jokes.

They were in the north apartment, which Jay decided must have been the original parlor, while the front room on the other side might have been a consulting office or a library or a study or even a groundfloor bedroom if there was a mother-in-law or a nephew or something. Don led the way through the door leading into a dark, cramped hallway. Small narrow bedrooms opened off the hall.