A Few Minutes Past Midnight by Stuart M. Kaminsky

meringue.”
    “Fascinating,” I said. “You’ll have to write it out for me.”
    “It’s not for you,” she said sternly. “You couldn’t cook a can of mush. It’s for that sister-in-law of yours. I’ll write it all out.”
    “Thanks,” I said. “I’m sure she’ll appreciate it.”
    In the other room, the bird began to screech hysterically.
    “The bird,” she said. “I have come to the sad conclusion that a strain of idiocy runs in him. I have changed his name.”
    She had run through five birds since I had been living in her boardinghouse. She changed their names on an almost weekly basis.
    “I call him Westinghouse now,” she said firmly.
    I knew better than to ask why. I simply left the room, got out of her apartment, and climbed the stairs. A small box stood in front of the hall pay phone. It was the box Gunther used to stand on when he made calls. Gunther wasn’t in sight. I went to his room. A woman was singing inside in what sounded like German. Her voice was raspy, challenging, and she proudly belted out what sounded like “Mine Berlin.” Mining Berlin sounded like a good idea to me.
    I knocked.
    The woman suddenly stopped singing.
    “Come in,” Gunther said.
    Gunther was seated in the swivel chair at his desk, busily looking at the open phone book and writing something on a pad of paper in front of him.
    “One moment,” he said, with only the slightest trace of an accent.
    I looked around Gunther’s neat and comfortable room. A regular-size bed with a dark comforter and big green pillows stood in the corner. There was a low dresser, a small kitchen table covered with a neat, green cloth near the window, a comfortable overstuffed green chair with a reading light and table next to it, and a two-passenger matching love seat across from it. The walls were covered by bookcases that were packed, but neat.
    “There,” he said with a sigh and turned, pad in his hand.
    “I have called the number of forty-seven Sullivans and reached thirty-one of them. None had a Fiona in the house-hold or knew of any Fiona Sullivan with the exception of one Daniel Sullivan who believed he had an old aunt in Cork named Fiona. I shall continue after we dine.”
    I looked at the clock on his desk where a line of reference books and dictionaries stood against the wall, held in place by matching brass bookends that looked like curious owls.
    Gunther reached over to his record player and carefully removed a record. He put it carefully back into the album cover on his desk and looked at me.
    “Claire Waldoff,” he said, looking at the photograph of the woman on the album cover. “I was playing it a bit too loud perhaps.”
    “No,” I said.
    “I confess to having a passion for certain German popular music that predates the current Nazi regime. It is the music of my early youth. Claire Waldoff, Rudi Schuricke, Marlene Dietrich, Zarah Leander, Willi Fritich. I find it best in these times to keep my taste in music to myself.”
    “I understand. We’re expected for dinner with Mrs. Plaut in five minutes,” I said.
    He looked at the clock.
    “Then I shall have to change,” he said. “If you will excuse me.”
    He was dressed in a perfectly matched dark blue suit with a thin red-and-white-striped tie. His white shirt looked as if it had just been ironed, and his shoe shine would have been the envy of General Patton.
    “Heard from Gwen?” I asked as he climbed down from the chair.
    Gwen was the University of San Francisco graduate student in music whom Gunther had met when we had been on a job more than a year earlier. He had twice mentioned the possibility of marriage. Gwen was pretty, dark, wore glasses, was about fifteen years younger, and a foot and a half taller than my friend. That didn’t seem to make any difference to either of them, though the four hundred miles between them did tend to get in the way. Gunther made monthly weekend pilgrimages to San Francisco and everything seemed to be going well. At