Maybe my ears were still ringing. I thought I heard something like a kitten crying inside. I knew it couldn't be a cat. I'd given Dean the word about his strays. He wouldn't lapse.

I heard shuffling and whispering inside. I did some more yelling. "Open this damned door, Dean. It's cold out here." I didn't threaten. Mom Garrett didn't raise no kids dumb enough to lay threats on somebody who could just go back to bed and leave me singing in the rain.

The door creaked open after a symphony of curses and clanking bolts and rattling chains. Old Dean stood there eyeing me from beneath drooping lids. He looked about two hundred right then. He is around seventy. And real spry for a guy his age.

If he wasn't going to get out of the way I was going to walk over him. I started moving. He slid aside. I told him, "The cat goes as soon as the rain stops." I tried to sound like it was him or the kitten.

He started rattling bolts and chains. I stopped. All that hadn't been there before. "What's all the hardware?"

"I don't feel comfortable living somewhere where all there is is one or two latches to keep the thieves out."

We needed to have us a talk about assuming and presuming. I knew damned well he didn't buy that hardware out of his own pocket. But now wasn't the time. I wasn't at my best.

"What's that you've got?"

I'd forgotten the butterfly. "Drowned butterfly." I took it into my office, a shoe box of a room behind the last door to your left heading back to the kitchen. Dean hobbled after me, bringing a candle. He has decrepitude down to an art. It's amazing how incapacitated he gets when he has a scam running.

I used his candle to light a lamp. "Go back to bed."

He glanced at the closed door of the small front room, a door we shut only when there's somebody or something in there we don't want seen. Something was scratching its other side. Dean said, "I'm wide-awake now. I might as well get some work done." He didn't look wideawake. "You plan to be up long?"

"No. I'm just going to study this bug, then kiss Eleanor good night." Eleanor was a beautiful, sad woman who lived once upon a time. Her portrait hangs behind my desk. I go on like we're into a relationship. That drives Dean buggy.

I have to balance the scale somehow.

I settled into my worn leather chair. Like everything else around my place, including the house, it was secondhand. It was just getting adjusted to a new butt. Just getting comfortable, I pushed my accounts aside, spread the butterfly on my desk.

Dean waited in the doorway till he saw I wouldn't react to the accounts being out. Then he huffed off to the kitchen.

I popped a quick peek at the last entry, made a face. That didn't look good. But go to work? Gah! Sufficient unto the day the evil thereof.

Meantime, there was this raggedy old green butterfly. It could've been a beauty before, but now its wings were cracked and chipped and split, bent and washed out. A disaster. I suffered a moment of déjà vu.

I'd seen its cousins in the islands while I was doing my five years in the Royal Marines. There're a lot in the swamps down there. There's every kind of bug the gods ever imagined, except maybe arctic roaches. Maybe creation was handled by a heavenly committee. In areas where departmental turfs overlapped, the divine functionaries went to competing. And they all for sure dumped their bug-production overruns in those tropical swamps.

But the heck with the bad old days. I'm all growed-up now. What I had to ask was, what was I doing with the flutterbug in the first place?

I was definitely, for sure, guaranteed, not even a little bit interested in anything involving dried-up old geezers with stomachs so sour they belched up butterflies. I'd done my good deed for the decade. I'd rescued the maiden fair. It was time to get on with things dearer my heart, like hustling Dean's latest fuzzball charity out my back door.

I swept the bug cadaver into the trash bucket, leaned back, started thinking how nice it would be to put myself away in my nice soft bed.

4

Garrett!

"Hell!" Every time I forget my so-called partner...

The Dead Man hangs out in the larger front room that takes up the whole front side of the house opposite my office, an area as big as my office and the small front room together. A lot of space for a guy who hasn't moved since before TunFaire was called TunFaire. I'm thinking about putting him in the basement with the other junk that was here when I moved in.

I went into his room. A lamp was burning there. That was a surprise. Dean doesn't like going in there. I glanced around suspiciously.

The room contains only two chairs and two small tables, though the walls are hidden by shelves of books and maps and memorabilia. One chair is mine. The other has a permanent resident.

If you walk in not knowing what to expect, the Dead Man can be a shock. First, there's just a whole hell of a lot of him. Four hundred and fifty pounds' worth. Second, he's not human, he's Loghyr. Since he's the only one of that tribe I've ever seen, I don't know if he'd set the Loghyr girls swooning, but by my standards he's one homely sucker. Like he was the practice dummy when the guy with the ugly stick was doing his apprenticeship.

After fat you notice he's got a snoot like an elephant, fourteen inches long. Then you notice that the moths and mice have nibbled him over the years.

The reason he's called the Dead Man is that he's dead. Somebody stuck a knife in him about four hundred years ago. But Loghyr just don't get in a hurry. His soul, or whatever, is still hanging around in his body.

I gather you have had an adventure.

Since he's dead, he can't talk, but he doesn't let that slow him down. He just thinks right into my head. He can also go rummaging around in there, amongst the clutter and spiders, if he wants. Mostly he's courteous enough to keep out unless he's invited.

I took another look around. The place was too clean. Dean had even dusted the Dead Man.

Something was up. Those two had gotten their heads together. That was a first. That was scary.

I'm nothing if not cool. I covered my suspicion perfectly. Knowing it was going to be something I wouldn't like, I decided to get even first.

The Dead Man made a big mistake when he taught me to remember every little detail of everything when I was working. I started talking about my evening.

The theoretical basis of our association is I do the legwork and suffer the slings and arrows and thumps on the head and he takes whatever I learn and runs it through his self-proclaimed genius brains and tells me whodunit or where the body is buried or whatever it is I'm trying to find out. That's the theoretical basis. In practice, he's lazier than I am. I have to threaten to burn the house down just to wake him up.

I was dwelling in lingering detail upon the charms of the strange Miss Contague when suspicion bit him. Garrett!

He knows me too well. "Yes?" Sweetly.

What are you doing?

"Filling you in on some odd occurrences."

Occurrences, incidentally, of but passing interest. Unless your passions have overcome your brain yet again. You could not possibly be considering involving yourself with those people, could you?

I thought about lying just to rattle his chain. We do a lot of that, back and forth. It passes the time. But I said, "There are limits to how much I'll let a skirt override my good sense."

Indeed? I am amazed and surprised. I had concluded that you have no sense at all, good or bad.

We do get going. Usually it's play, wit and half-wit. It's up to you to guess who's who.