spent the early part of the evening devising ways to put off the phone call to Lilah Cheswick. It was amazing how inventive he could be when desperation drove him to it. He began by retracing the steps of his cleaning lady earlier that day, but since she took perverse pleasure in being even cleaner than him (a near impossibility) there was not a single speck of dust to discover throughout his ruthlessly organized and sparsely furnished apartment. Alarmed by his restless activity, Brenda and Eddie followed him the entire time, meowing ceaselessly for more food just in case he suffered a temporary lapse of memory and they got lucky. They didn't—T.S. had put them both on strict diets since they resembled seals more than cats— but they did each nab an anchovy-stuffed olive when T.S. finally decided to tackle the refrigerator. There wasn't much to do. Like every single one of the rooms in his six-room apartment, the refrigerator was spotless and gleaming clean. He wiped out the butter compartment, just in case the cleaning lady had missed it, then restacked his frozen dinners according to the main entree.
