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thimble-size container behind a broken section of the medicine cabinet that lifted out of the back. It was better than a safe because it didn’t call attention to itself. In the past, Ralph had concealed everything there from a complete run of phony Rolex watches to a bag of marijuana that had turned out to be Nabisco shredded wheat.
    Yawning now, he went back to bed feeling uncommonly well for 6:00 A.M. His hangover had lifted—even if he still couldn’t remember where he’d been the night before—he had two hundred and forty dollars in his pocket, and photographs of a dead Catholic priest in a prostitute’s bed. Things were looking up all around.
    He woke up when a big black fireman chopped down his bedroom door with an axe.
    â€œWhere’s the fire?” inquired the black man.
    Ralph sat up and rumpled his hair. “Ain’t that my line?”
    â€œWrong floor, Tyrell,” someone called from the hallway. “Some broad’s apartment upstairs.”
    â€œSorry about the door.” Tyrell withdrew.
    Ralph said shit and looked for his hat.

Chapter 4
    The arson investigator’s name was O’Leary.
    His suit was smoke-colored and he had runny eyes that he kept wiping with a sooty handkerchief that left smudges. He was nearly as big as the fireman who had awakened Ralph and a couple of years Ralph’s junior, with more smudges in his yellow hair and a big scorched-looking face with a small upturned nose that someone had tried to alter with a pair of pliers, leaving the end squinched and slightly twisted. He wrapped a smoky paw around Ralph’s hand in greeting and ushered him out of the charred hallway into an empty apartment two doors down from Lyla Dane’s. There he lit a cigarette and dropped the match at his feet. The carpet began to smolder.
    â€œToo much smoke out there.” He puffed up a great cloud.
    Ralph said, “Smells like a wienie roast.”
    â€œThat’d be the tenant. Know her well, did you?”
    â€œTo say hello to on the stairs. She going to make it?”
    â€œBy now she’s on her way to the University of Michigan Burn Center in Ann Arbor, if she survived the trip to Detroit General. They do some nifty things there. What’s she do for a living?”
    â€œHook. What happened, gas?”
    â€œProbably. She entertain any visitors recently?”
    â€œThat’s how she paid for the gas.”
    â€œGet a good look at any of them?”
    â€œYou don’t look at johns if you can help it. One of them could be the mayor.”
    â€œEver hear any loud arguments from her apartment?”
    â€œThere any other kind?” Ralph groped his pockets for a matchstick, then decided against it, given the company. “You saying the fire wasn’t an accident?”
    O’Leary wiped his eyes. “Just routine. You’re not much help, Mr. Poteet.”
    â€œYou should be asking Vinnie this stuff. He’s the landlord.”
    â€œI tried. He wasn’t any more help than you. What do you do?”
    â€œPrivate dick.”
    â€œReally? With an agency, or are you a loner like Sam Spade?” He tapped some live ash onto the carpet. There was a little flame burning there now.
    â€œFuck Sam Spade. I work for Lovechild Confidential Inquiries on Michigan. I got to be there in a half hour.” He had spent the past ninety minutes in the hallway with the other residents, watching the firefighters put out the blaze and the ambulance crew carry a blanket-wrapped Lyla Dane downstairs. Vinnie had found her crumpled at the base of the wall opposite her apartment door, where the blast had hurled her when she’d come home. Ralph had slept right through the explosion and the sirens afterward. “Listen, if some cookie is running around blowing up people in this building, I got a right to know it.”
    â€œWe’ve got no reason to think anything of the kind. Fire resulting in casualty is our beat,