“Help me, sir,” Ignatius slobbered, grabbing histrionically at the lapels of Mr. Levy’s sports jacket. “Fortuna only knows what she will do to me. I know too much of her sordid activities. I must be eliminated. Have you thought of speaking to the Trixie woman? She knows far more than you suspect.”

“That’s what my wife says, but I never believed her. After all, Miss Trixie is so old. I wouldn’t think she could write a grocery list.”

“Old?” Mrs. Reilly asked. “Ignatius! You told me Trixie was the name of some cute girl worked at Levy Pants. You told me you two liked each other. Now I find out she’s a grammaw can’t hardly write. Ignatius!”

It was sadder than Mr. Levy had thought at first. The poor kook had tried to make his mother think he had a girlfriend.

“Please,” Ignatius whispered to Mr. Levy. “Come into my room. I must show you something.”

“Don’t believe a word Ignatius says,” Mrs. Reilly called after them as her son dragged Mr. Levy through the door into the musty chamber.

“Just let him alone,” Mr. Levy said to Mrs. Reilly somewhat firmly. This Reilly woman wouldn’t even give her own child a chance. She was as bad as his wife. No wonder Reilly was such a wreck.

Then the door closed behind them and Mr. Levy suddenly began to feel nauseated. There was a scent of old tea leaves in the bedroom that reminded him of the teapot that Leon Levy had always had near his elbow, the delicately cracked china pot in whose bottom there was always a residue of boiled leaves. He went to the window and opened the shutter, but as he looked out his eyes met those of Miss Annie, who was staring back at him from between the blinds of her shutters. He turned from the window and watched Reilly thumbing through a loose-leaf folder.

“Here it is,” Ignatius said. “These are some notes that I jotted while working for your company. They will prove that I loved Levy Pants even more than life itself, that my every waking hour was spent in contemplating means of helping your organization. And often at night I had visions. Phantoms of Levy Pants flitted gloriously across my slumbering psyche. I would never write a letter like that. I loved Levy Pants. Here. Read this, sir.”

Mr. Levy took the loose-leaf folder and, where Reilly’s fat forefinger indicated a line, he read, “Today our office was at last graced by the presence of our lord and master, Mr. G. Levy. To be quite honest, I found him rather casual and unconcerned.” The forefinger skipped a line or two. “In time he will learn of my devotion to his firm, of my dedication. My example, in turn, may lead him to once again believe in Levy Pants.” The guidepost of a forefinger indicated the next paragraph. “La Trixie still keeps her own counsel, thereby proving herself even wiser than I had thought. I suspect that this woman knows a great deal, that her apathy is a façade for her seeming resentment against Levy Pants. She grows most coherent when she speaks of retirement.”

“There is your evidence, sir,” Ignatius said, snatching the folder from Mr. Levy’s hands. “Interrogate the Trixie jade. The senility is a guise. It is part of her defense against her work and the company. Actually, she hates Levy Pants for not retiring her. And who can blame her? Many times when we were alone, she would babble for hours about plans to ‘get’ Levy Pants. Her resentment surfaced in the form of vitriolic attacks upon your corporate structure.”

Mr. Levy tried to assess the evidence. He knew that Reilly had really liked the company; he had seen it at the company, the woman next door had told him, he had just read it. Trixie, on the other hand, hated the company. Even though his wife and the kook claimed that the senility routine was a front, he doubted that she would be able to write a letter like that. But now he had to get out of the claustrophobic bedroom before he possibly got ill all over the tablets that covered the floor. When Mr. Reilly had been standing next to him pointing out the passages in the notebook, the scent had grown overpowering. He felt for the doorknob, but the Reilly kook threw himself against the door.

“You must believe me,” he sighed. “The Trixie trollop had a fixation about a turkey or a ham. Or was it a roast? It was all rather fierce and confusing at times. She swore vengeance in connection with not being retired at the proper age. She was filled with hostility.”

Mr. Levy eased him aside and got out into the hall, where the maroon-haired mother was waiting like a doorman.

“Thank you, Mr. Reilly,” Mr. Levy said. He had to get out of that claustrophobic miniature of a heartbreak house. “If I need you again, I’ll call you.”

“You’ll need him again,” Mrs. Reilly called as he passed her and ran down the front steps. “Whatever it is, Ignatius done it.”

She called out something else, but Mr. Levy’s roar drowned out her voice. Blue smoke settled over the stricken Plymouth and he was gone.

“Now you done it,” Mrs. Reilly was saying to Ignatius, her hands grasping the white smock. “Now we in trouble for real, boy. You know what they can do you for forgery? They can throw you in a federal prison. That poor man’s got a $500 thousand case on his hands. Now you done it, Ignatius. Now you really in trouble.”

“Please,” Ignatius said weakly. His pale skin was turning an off-white that shaded into gray. He felt really ill now. His valve was executing several maneuvers that exceeded in originality and violence anything it had done before. “I told you it would be like this when I went out to work.”

Mr. Levy picked the shortest route back to the Desire Street wharf. He sped out Napoleon to the Broad overpass and got onto the expressway, fired by an emotion that was a distant but recognizable version of determination. If resentment had really driven Miss Trixie to writing that letter, then Mrs. Levy was the person responsible for the Abelman suit. Could Miss Trixie write something as intelligible as that letter? Mr. Levy hoped that she could. He drove through Miss Trixie’s neighborhood quickly, flashing past the bars and the BOILED CRAWFISH and OYSTERS ON THE HALF SHELL signs that stuck out everywhere. At the apartment house he followed the trail of scraps up the stairs to a brown door. He knocked and Mrs. Levy opened it with, “Look who’s back. The idealist’s menace. Have you solved your case?”

“Maybe.”

“Now you’re talking like Gary Cooper. One word I get for an answer. Sheriff Gary Levy.” She plucked at an offending aquamarine lash with her fingers. “Well, let’s go. Trixie’s gorging on the cookies. I’m getting nauseous.”

Mr. Levy pushed past his wife into a scene he could never have imagined. Levy’s Lodge had not prepared him for interiors like the one he had just seen on Constantinople Street—and for this one. Miss Trixie’s apartment was decorated with scraps, with junk, with bits of metal, with cardboard boxes. Somewhere beneath it all there was furniture. The surface, however, the visible terrain, was a landscape of old clothes and crates and newspapers. There was a pass through the center of the mountain, a clearing among the litter, a narrow aisle of clear floor that led to a window where Miss Trixie was seated in a chair sampling the Dutch cookies. Mr. Levy walked down the aisle past the black wig that hung from atop a crate, the high pumps tossed on a pile of newspapers. The only aspect of the rejuvenation that Miss Trixie had apparently retained was the teeth; they gleamed between her thin lips as they knifed into the cookies.

“Suddenly you’re very silent,” Mrs. Levy observed. “What is it, Gus? Another mission ended in failure?”

“Miss Trixie,” Mr. Levy screamed into her ears. “Did you write a letter to Abelman’s Dry Goods?”

“Now you’re scraping rock bottom,” Mrs. Levy said. “The idealist fooled you again, I guess. You really fall for that Reilly’s line.”

“Miss Trixie!”

“What?” Miss Trixie snarled. “I must say you people know how to retire a person.”