Chapter 4: The Tea

Being a superintendent means everyone has a problem before breakfast.

By eight the next morning I had bled a radiator on three, unstuck a window on five and silenced a smoke alarm in 4C.

Every tenant said thank you by name, and every one of them looked at me a beat too long.

They were not staring at a stranger.

They were looking at a woman who had been on a stairwell last night with a man who had been waiting for her.

Somebody had talked, or somebody had heard.

The sticking door of my own apartment was last on the list.

I was kneeling at the hinge of 1B with a screwdriver when boots stopped beside me.

"The top hinge is bent," Perry said. "It's been bent since the nineties."

I didn't look up.

"I noticed."

"I can shim it in ten minutes. I'll stay on the hall side."

"You're not going to touch me?"

"Not unless you do first."

I turned my head.

He stood with a small cardboard box and a thin piece of cedar in his hand, and his eyes were careful.

He looked like a man who had slept nowhere and shaved anyway.

"Go ahead," I said, and went back to the screws.

He crouched next to me and shimmed the hinge without a word.

Our shoulders almost touched, and I felt that almost all the way down my spine.

When the door swung straight he tried it twice, then nodded.

"That should hold," he said. "Dara, about last night."

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