Small World by Tabitha King

chair.
    ‘Sure. ’ He was willing and eager to get down to brass tacks. And change the subject.
    She looked at her wrist watch and frowned, it’s getting on. Perhaps the best course of action would be for you to come to my apartment and see the dollhouses I have there. Unfortunately, my best one isn’t there right now.' She smiled apologetically. ‘We can talk more comfortably there. Have dinner. I can teach you a lot about miniatures.’
    Roger’s heartbeat bounded. She was right. And he’d never had dinner with a beautiful woman in a fancy apartment before. It was not an experience he was going to pass up. She was still beaming at him, as if she wanted to pat him on the head.
    Almost without being aware of it, he went to the closet and retrieved the minimizer from the closet.
    ‘Might want to take some pictures, for reference,’ he mumbled.
    She stood up and slipped her hand around his left arm. Roger breathed heavenly air. He allowed himself to be led away.
    Dorothy Hardesty Douglas lived in one of those glass towers. Roger wondered, staring up at it as they passed it on the street below, how much window washers were paid for a job like that.
    They entered through an underground garage packed like a box of Christmas ornaments with Mercedes-Benzes, Rolls-Royces, and a sprinkling of yet more expensive and exotic vehicles. Roger could imagine the lot of them shrunk to matchbox size and tucked neatly into a shoebox. The place smelled like a garage and looked like a garage, but it summoned for Roger memories of celebrity funerals at Forest Lawn, when there were lines of dinosaur cars like these, rolling slowly by, as if to some nearby tar pit.
    A pair of security guards watched a short, glossy lobby that led to elevators. The guards were courteous but not what Roger would call warm. They looked about eight feet tall. Their eyes passed over Roger, seeing him and not seeing him, like the klieg lights in prison movies. Or perhaps more like X rays, looking for malignancies, but not much interested in recording the presence of healthy tissue.
    The elevator was empty but for Roger and the lady. It carried a perpetual passenger, a rubber plant in a glass booth. The plant looked healthy enough, but Roger thought it must be boring, riding up and down in that glass booth day in and day out. Better the rubber plant than Roger.
    The lady did not seem to be in a communicative mood. In fact, she was about as stiff as the rubber plant. Roger examined the control panel, the only other thing to look at besides the plant and his withdrawn companion. One button indicated the building had its own swimming pool and some kind of health club.
    Rich people lived different from regular people, that was something Roger knew. They owned apartments instead of renting them, and had these little private clubs together. They must feel safer in gangs.
    The lady’s apartment was impressive. It wasn’t what his mother would call cozy. It was . . . glamorous. About what he’d expect his fairy godmother to live in. The colors were all shimmery.
    A doughy-looking woman in a charcoal-gray uniform appeared and Mrs. Douglas instructed her to fetch Roger a beer. Then she excused herself and disappeared on the heels of the maid. Nobody told Roger to go sit in the kitchen, so he sat down. He presumed the lady wanted to fix her face, not that it didn’t look fine to him, or visit the can, or something private like that. He savored the luxury around him. A maid, for Christ’s sake.
    Wallowing in the pale blue sofa, he studied the picture over the fireplace. He recognized the woman, Elizabeth Payne Hardesty, the lady’s mother, may she rest in peace, and probably a saint by now, considering who she married. Roger struggled to summon up a faint, ghostly memory of a ceaselessly, painfully, smiling woman trailing around after the old toad, Mike Hardesty. He didn’t recall her as being as beautiful as the picture painted her, but then he’d been just a kid. It