I parked the car outside Victor’s apartment building in the furry district. Buildings like these littered most of the city; some were just a couple of stories high, but the one Victor lived in was high … very high. As I walked into the building I noticed there was no janitor or even a front desk, just a line of mail boxes, half of which had names on them while the other half were apparently either empty or the names had fallen off the mail box.

Victor’s name was way up there. He lived in apartment number 2033; the twentieth floor. I got into the elevator and pressed the button for 20. It zoomed up, as dreadfully cheery Muzak played. It beats me why people still install them; what was so bad about silence in an elevator? You weren’t in them for a long time, unless you got stuck in one; and in those circumstances the last thing you would want would be to hear cheery songs.

As the doors opened on the twentieth floor I walked out, only to be pushed aside by an otter furry making his way into the elevator; he looked angry and stuck his tongue out at me as the doors closed once more.

The hallway was cleaner than I had expected; from the outside the building had looked grim and antisocial, and I had expected discarded toys on thefloor, mothers screaming at their children, domestic arguments and cheating husbands forced to sleep in the hallway.

But none of that; instead, the air smelled heavy of cheap perfume and flea shampoo. As I reached his door I knocked on it, as the doorbell seemed to have been torn off in a rage; there were claw marks around the plaster where the bell used to be.

Victor opened the door and gave a soft smile as he saw me. His apartment looked a lot like his office in the university; the walls were almost covered in paintings, ranging from portraits of Victor to various landscapes, even some of the city. He offered me a chair that looked a little dusty, then walked over to the kitchen and returned with two glasses of milk, placing one in front of me and taking the other as he sat down on a large sofa.

“So what brings you to my home uninvited, Tara?” he asked as he sipped the milk.

I picked up the glass and noticed it looked like it hadn’t been washed in some time. I took a careful sip. “Well, I think I might have something on that riddle we found,” I replied.

He sat up straight, put his pipe in his mouth and lit it. “Interesting. What did you find out?” he asked.
“I think it might be a river; there are river beds, and a river never sleeps, but about the other parts of the riddle I’m not so sure,” I said.

Victor hit his forehead. “Of course! How did I not see that before? A river,” he said as he got up and looked at the note he had made. “That painting over there is of a river head – the start of a river – and this one is of a river mouth, the place where a river flows into the sea or another river. How could I not have seen that,” he said, his words coming rapidly. He looked at me like a young cub would at his siblings at play time. “That was smart of

you. Don’t worry, I don’t want to know how you came up with that one,” he said as he walked to the coat rack and took down his hat and coat.
I looked at him. “Are you leaving?” I asked.
He nodded. “Yes we are going to go somewhere; maybe the girl is at the river head or mouth,” he said excitedly.

He was right, she could be; but as I got up I realized that those were just two of the three things mentioned in the riddle. “What about the river beds? The city has several of those.”

He sighed and hung his hat back on the rack. “You’re right, that would take too longs” His face showed his disappointment.
I gave him an encouraging smile. “Perhaps not. Can I use your phone? It’s time we made the police do some goddamn work for a change.”  

Next Chapter: The surfer dude