“Fine,” Lenny sputtered, still gasping for air.

I knew without looking his face was as red as a radish. Yours would be too if you’d just trudged up nine full flights of stairs to the office, as Lenny did every Monday-through-Friday morning of his life. The rail-thin, dark-haired, bespectacled twenty-three year old art assistant was deathly afraid of elevators.

“Still snowing up a storm outside?” I asked, stirring cream into Crockett’s coffee and turning to face my breathless, red-cheeked chum.

“Sure is,” he said, giving me a wide, slightly snaggle toothed grin. He set his lunch sack on the nearest chair (when you work on the ninth floor and you’re too scared to use the elevator, you always bring your own sandwich), then hung his slouch hat and overcoat on the tree. “Got three, maybe four inches already. By the time we get off work we’ll have to hail dogsleds to get home.”

I smiled. There was a time when Lenny wouldn’t have been so genial and chatty with me. He would have mumbled a shy answer to my question and scurried off to his desk at the back of the workroom, as breathless and red-faced from embarrassment as from exertion. But that was eight long months ago-before Lenny and I had become true comrades. Before we’d discovered our ardent respect and esteem for each other. Before he had saved my life.

But that’s another story. (The Babs Comstock story, to be exact. See, I was trapped on the fifth floor landing of the office stairwell, being molested and strangled by a cold-blooded murderer-the same man who had murdered Babs Comstock-when Lenny just happened to come barging up the stairs on his way to work, in the miraculous nick of time to prevent my sudden death and accidentally cause the sudden death of my assailant. It was a freaky, but very fortuitous outcome. Ever since then Lenny and I have been as close as brother and sister-two peas in a mutually protective pod.)