Pat said she had too much to do to come with us, so we set out alone.
Jan Sleet was wearing a snugly tailored black three-piece suit with a yellow silk shirt and a black tie. The yellow handkerchief in her breast pocket was folded to display three sharp points, and her glasses and cane were polished. She was a striking and unusual figure anywhere (or at least anywhere we'd ever been, and we'd been to lot of places since I'd started to work for her), but especially so in U-town, where it sometimes seemed as though people were issued a T-shirt and a pair of jeans when they crossed the bridge.
The walk wasn't too far, only about a dozen blocks, and I'd made sure my employer had eaten a good breakfast, so we arrived there in pretty good time. The front door of the spray-painted tenement building was unlocked.
She smiled as we climbed up the stairs to the second floor apartment. "You know the main problem with not having police?"
I shrugged.
"There's nobody to preserve the crime scene. It makes it a lot harder to reconstruct what happened." She smiled. "Sometimes."
She walked up to the apartment door and rapped on it with the head of her cane. After a moment, the door opened and a man looked at us curiously, then suddenly realized who we were. He glanced around behind him, probably realizing what a mess the place was. He wiped a hand on his jeans and held it out.
"I'm Leo," he said, shaking our hands, then he abruptly turned, motioning us into the apartment. "Please come in. Did Patricia send you, or are you–"
"Pat sent us," Jan said, stepping inside and looking around slowly. The living room, if that's what it was, looked like a particularly messy college dorm room. "We understand that people are blaming you for the death of your girlfriend. I'd like to investigate and find out the truth."
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