"The place doesn't look as bad as you made it sound over the phone," said the insurance agent.

"We've had a chance to clean up." The cold tone of the agent's voice made me nervous. "Perhaps if you had arrived the day it happened, you would have seen the full extent of the damage."

"I think I've got a pretty good idea of the damage, Mr. Ciccarelli." he retorted, and scribbled in his notebook.

"We have a video."

"Is the date encoded on it?"

"I think so."

He lifted the Polaroid camera around his neck and took a picture of the cardboard duct-taped to the ceiling. He laid the picture out on the counter next to the ruined espresso machine. "Can you get the stained glass fixed?"

"It's in shards. It'll have to be replaced."

"Expensive?"

"It was commissioned. Yes."

I watched as his eyes narrowed, squinting like Clint Eastwood in a Sergio Leone western. I half-expected him to tell me to draw. "They always are."

He snapped another picture and laid it down next to the other one.

"It was a gift."

"Hmm."

He looked down at the floor, tapped a cracked tile with his foot and separated the broken pieces with the tip of his shoe.

"Much money in coffee houses, Mr. Ciccarelli?"

"We do okay. I'm not a business genius, If that's what you mean."

"Getting tired of it?"

He snapped another picture.

*****

Greg and I got into it later that night over Mike.

"You think he did it, don't you?"

I stifled a yawn. "I have no opinion on whether he did it or not."

"I don't believe you."

"Well, Greg, it wouldn't be the first time you thought with your big head instead of your little one."

"He didn't wreck the place, Hugo." Think. Think. Think. "Right there you're a jerk, Hugo!"

That's one thing I love about Greg, he's always so easy to insult.

"Yeah, you're right. Maybe Mike didn't wreck the place, but he was the last person to leave the building and didn't set the alarm. If he had done his job, then the alarm would have gone off and I could still be up and running."

"He tells me that he turned on the alarm before he left. He remembers punching in the code."

"Drugs addle the brain, my child. One pill makes you larger, one pill makes you small, as the song goes."