I checked my illegal cell phone for messages but Roger Brown hadn’t called. So when I was out on the street again I felt lighter, easier. Maybe everything would be okay. It didn’t matter if my client only found out about three lowlifes. It didn’t matter at all.

I WALKED UP TO Thirty-ninth Street and over to the Tesla Building, between avenues Six and Seven.

“Hello, Mr. McGill,” Warren Oh said in greeting. Warren was one of the daytime weekday guards who stood behind a green-and-white marble podium set under a huge dark-red-and-white plaster mural in the lobby of the most beautiful Art Deco building in the world.

The fresco was of big blocky men and women walking/marching under a Romanesque arch that stood against a tiled azure sky. Some of the people were clothed, others not. They were all white, but I accepted the racial wish-fulfillment of the thirties.

“Hey, Warren,” I hailed. “I haven’t seen you for a while. Where you been?”

“Down home. My mother was sick.”

“How is she now?”

“Fine, fine. Thank you for asking, Mr. McGill.”

<„e="3">“How’s the kids?”

“Doin’ okay, sir. My boy got into technical college, and Mary’s expecting.”

Warren was Jamaican by birth. His mother was a black woman and his father a Chinese descendant of a long line of indentured servants.