Send Along a Wreath

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Geoffery O’Neill’s office was a small two-room affair on the tenth floor of a business building in Chicago’s Loop. The uncarpeted reception room contained a leather sofa, a desk and telephone and several chairs. O’Neill’s inner sanctum contained a desk, a comfortable reclining chair and two filing cabinets. The window faced the brick wall of the adjoining building — one of the reasons O’Neill had chosen the office. He liked the feeling of a brick wall at his back when he working at his desk.

The green-shaded desk lamp was on now, throwing a huge shadow against the Venetian blinds and high-lighting the planes of his square, rugged face. A cigarette burned in an ashtray on the desk, its smoke curling in a blue spiral to the ceiling.

He was working through a pile of dusty papers and yellowed correspondence — the accrued residue of six years as an unofficial investigator for the State’s Attorney. The papers and letters, which he had removed from the steel filing cabinets, were in reference to cases he had handled, and some of them still contained enough dynamite to blow sections of the city wide open.

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