Tiffle to Dexter as a white man. Claude Tiffle had virtually no color at all. He looked like something that had evolved underground: eyes as pale and soiled as mushrooms, hair like alfalfa sprouts, a sparse mustache that looked like a scraggle of centipede's legs. Fat, wet, white lips it was easy to imagine him licking, a dirty dimple in his chin that you could have sharpened a pencil in, and a belly so beery I expected to hear it slosh when he got up.Four weary-looking young Chinese women, whom Dexter had nicknamed Weepy, Bleary, Mopey, and Snowbell, had reluctantly passed me, like the baton in a relay no one wants to win, toward the sanctum of Tiffle's office in the back room of the cottage, the one Tran and I had seen lighted first.My watch said four p.m. Everett was reclining in Dexter's bathtub, wrapped in an honest-to-god straitjacket Dexter had proudly pulled from his closet, thereby justifying all my suspicions about what went on in that glittering, clinical decor. Tran and Dexter and I had been watching in turns for most of the day, timing the arrivals and exits of the staff and getting to know them by sight, with the odd man out racing to Dexter's apartment to relieve the one keeping Everett company.
