She stopped smiling.

Over the past month, she'd had occasion to observe this artist in the streets and the halls during his infrequent contacts with the humans who also lived on his planet. Martin made people nervous for all the minutes it took to determine that he was odd, but harmless.

"Yes, red lipstick, but what did the writing say?"

She smiled again to worry him into a faster response. She didn't have all damn day for this crap, did she?

"Thick lines," said Martin.

The man was a badly lip-synced foreign movie with unrelated narrative. A ghost of Helen Markowitz automatically corrected the grammar of her next thought.

You can kill him, but you may not.

There was no more forthcoming. He was only standing there, not waiting, not anticipating, only occupying space. Well, he was still a man, wasn't he?

"Could you tell me what the words were?" Mallory asked gently with a low sultry voice that pulled his eyes into hers by invisible silk strings. Martin broke the strings abruptly and turned around to face the wall. He had spent his words, said the back of him. He had none left.

Behind her own back, her hands were balling into fists. She kept the fists out of her words. "It's an interesting building, isn't it, Martin? I mean the way the tenants tuck in their heads when they slide past each other in the halls. It's like they all know what's in each other's closet and under the bed. A little mutual embarrassment. A little creepy, wouldn't you say?"

His head dropped an inch. Considering who she was dealing with, she could read much into that inch. She sat down on one of the white pedestals and stared at his back, willing him to turn around. She was not at all surprised when he did turn to face her. His senses were that acute. She weaved more silk into her voice.

"There's not much turnover in this building. That's strange. New York is such a transient town. I wonder what keeps you all here. You were here when George Farmer attempted suicide ten years ago. The next tenant to leave was the one who used to live across the hall from Charles. He just disappeared one day, packed up and left no forwarding address. He abandoned his security deposit and fifteen years of interest on it. What makes a man do a thing like that?"

Martin's eyes collided with hers and rolled away in pain.

She held up both her hands, palms-up with a question.

"You think he saw the writing on the wall?"

Martin turned his back on her again. His head shook from side to side, not to a negative response, but as though he were shaking the words from his head.

She'd gone too far.

She rose to her feet and moved slowly to the door. As she opened it, Martin said, "Be careful. You will not know the hour nor even the minute."

When Charles returned to the office, he was surprised to see Mallory there during daylight hours. She stood at the kitchen counter putting together a plate of sandwiches garnished with the finesse of a professional chef.

"Hello, Mallory." He never slipped and called her Kathleen anymore. She was Mallory in all his thoughts, spoken and not. She had trained him well. And she fed him well and simplified his life. Even Arthur, the accountant, had praised her for making his own life easier; no more messy shopping bags of papers with coffee and tea stains washing out the figures in the amount-due columns.

Yet something told him life was just about to get more complicated.

"I had a long talk with Edith Candle," she said, ever so offhand.

He supposed it was inevitable that she should meet Edith. Every tenant in the building was drawn to that apartment at one time or another. But that was another puzzle and low on his list of priorities.

"She's like a prisoner in that apartment," said Mallory. He looked fondly at the roast beef on rye with crisp lettuce and parsley garnish. "It does look that way, I know." The coffee-maker, haunted by Louis Markowitz, gurgled and dripped, insinuating itself into the conversation.

Perhaps he should give the puzzle of Edith more immediate consideration. Mallory was hideously single-minded, and her all-consuming interest was Louis's murderer. What was the connection?

"Do you know why she never leaves the building?" she asked.

Mallory was not given to small talk. She couldn't ask an offhand innocent question; it just wasn't in her. Well, if he never learned anything from her responses, there might be something to be had from her questions.

"She's still in mourning for her husband." And now he noticed the pastrami with mustard and mayonnaise, and he was torn between the two sandwiches.

"Nobody mourns for thirty years, Charles." One corner of Mallory's disbelieving mouth slipped into a deep dimple of skepticism, and Louis's coffee machine sputtered. "Maybe there's a little more to it?" She set the plate of sandwiches on the checked tablecloth. "Something to do with her husband's accident?" 'She told you about that?"

"Sit," she said, pointing him to a chair by the kitchen table while she turned back to the coffee-maker where Louis abided.

He had shared many meals with her, and not one of them had been in a kitchen. As he recalled, her father had been a kitchen-sitting person – but to a purpose. In Louis's opinion, conversation was greased by a kitchen atmosphere and hampered by a more formal setting.

It occurred to him that the poker-players had steered him wrong. Her behavior might be more predictable if he concentrated on what she had learned from Markowitz and not Helen.

"Thirty years," said Mallory. "It's like jail time."

"I guess it does seem like a penance." He picked up a sandwich and suddenly forgot his appetite. Penance. Why had that never occurred to him before? Memories were surfacing, but still vague yet. "She might feel responsible for the accident."

"Because…" Mallory prompted him.

"I'm not sure. I was only nine when Max died."

"You have a memory like a computer. Now give."

"Eidetic memory doesn't work that way. I can recite chapters from books and even tell you if I spilled any coffee on the pages, but I'm not good at recalling conversations that went over my head when I was a child."

"I don't think much has gone by you since you left the womb, Charles. These conversations you can't remember, did they happen close to the day your cousin died?"

"Probably. Max lived with us for the last three days of his life."

"Only Max? He left his wife?"

"Yes, I think so. Oh, right. They'd had a quarrel. It was something to do with the new act. Edith thought it was too dangerous. I think she wanted him to give it up. But he couldn't. You see, the're was a time when he'd had top billing as Maximilian the Great. Then later, he became the husband of the great Edith Candle. All of his brilliant illusions, his own gifts had gotten lost somewhere."

"So this was his comeback? He was taking another shot at it?"

"Yes. He created a fantastic new set of illusions for this act. I remember all of us, Max and my parents, sitting around the table reading the reviews the morning after his opening." His photographic memory was calling up the newspaper column which had so impressed him as a child, it had remained with him for thirty years. "The New York Times called him a maestro." Now he was on familiar ground as he called up the printed word from another newspaper column and read the lines as though he held the paper in his hand." "The master is incomparable at the height of his creative powers", they said. His star was on the rise again."

The following morning, after the second performance had ended in tragedy, the newspapers had been kept out of his sight.

"So Max's career was on the rise. What about Edith's act?"