Vital Parts by Thomas Berger

found the pile of discarded clothing on a bedside chair. As it happened, Reinhart, despite his financial difficulties, always managed to maintain a little cache of loot which he kept between the pages of a World Almanac for the year 1953. Before leaving his study this night he withdraw a fin from it, leaving three dollar-notes.
    The clothes stank of perspiration, as he had supposed. Oddly enough, the pants had no pockets. Blaine and his ilk liked snug hips. So Reinhart pushed the folded bill into a little kangaroo-niche in the vest. Blaine slept soundly, in the regular breathing of an impeccable soul. He always had. Reinhart remembered him well as a baby.
    With no more illumination than the dime-sized spot of the pen-light and no finer instrument than a pair of Japanese-made desk shears, Reinhart cut his son’s hair to within approximately two inches of the scalp. During the operation Blaine murmured occasionally, and when Reinhart gently lifted his head off the pillow and bent it forward to get at the back, the boy burbled like an infant, giving Reinhart an intimate feeling he had not had in years.
    Before retiring, Reinhart flushed the shorn locks down the toilet, took two Sominex, and eventually was hummed to sleep on his narrow couch under the window by a duet of mosquitoes to whom his corpus would furnish late dinner.

4
    Reinhart entered an elevator in the Bloor Building, in the city, a skyscraper that might have been commonplace in New York but was the highest edifice hereabouts, and was projected, with funny ears, to the twenty-seventh floor. His fund of odd information as usual came in handy: he knew that the familiar nightmare of the elevator-rider, given the nod in many films and TV episodes, had no base in reality. The cab never came unhooked and plunged to the bottom of the shaft; because of many safety devices this could not happen.
    But here was his floor. He found the number and opened a frosty-paned door labeled CRYON FOUNDATION .
    â€œI believe I spoke to you earlier on the phone,” he stated to the young woman who sat behind a kidney-shaped desk of crystal-clear plastic. Her telephone was of a rusty hue that Reinhart had not known was one of the options. She wore outsize metal-rimmed glasses which he doubted were prescription. Her hair was a sort of mane of tan intermixed with black. The bosom of her dress, puffy and colored in pastel streaks, defied the eye to tell whether flesh was immediately underlying, or air, padding, or whatnot. Time was when Reinhart knew exactly what an office girl had beneath her blouse: an impeccably white brassiere, fastened over the groove of her spine with two or possibly three metal hooks sewn into strained elastic.
    â€œI understand your hangup,” she said. “It takes more than a deep breath to plunge into something like this. Has the death already occurred or is it in the works?”
    â€œAs I told you on the telephone—but perhaps it was difficult to hear: I was in one of those lousy outdoor booths, which was filthy, and furthermore it was so ravaged by vandals that frankly I didn’t expect to get through at all.” It also stank of piss and the glass walls were covered with obscenities written with a wide-tipped laundry marker in green ink and various phone numbers accompanied by sundry promises of a sexual nature. Some years before Reinhart in a desperate moment had dialed one such combination of digits, lifted off the plaster flanking a coin phone in a bar, and got the Public Library.
    â€œThe point is,” he went on, “that I am a personal friend of Mr. Bob Sweet’s. He wrote down the number for me himself.” Reinhart held up the leaf from Sweet’s lizard notebook.
    â€œExcuse me?” She had a large, pale, fashionable mouth and big white teeth.
    â€œWell, I’d like to see him if he’s in.”
    â€œHe isn’t.” She cocked her head and, smirking, pronounced an impersonally cute