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quest, and probably the easiest to solve. The Beacon-Light has already offered me my old position, but I don’t want to write editorials anymore. I seem to have run out of opinions.”
    Tess almost snorted water through her nose. “That’ll be the day. But I am surprised they wanted you back,given the way you left.” Whitney had quit the paper under a cloud, although the only thing she had ever done wrong was save Tess’s life. It turned out there had been an office pool, and one of the clerks made $200 for having Whitney as the “one most likely to go postal.” Terribly unfair and not at all accurate, but what could one do?
    “New management,” Whitney said airily. “The five top editors aren’t even sure who Spiro Agnew was, and his past is much more accessible than mine.”
    “Didn’t they keep your personnel file?”
    “Shredded. My mother’s lawyer made a call.”
    Tess looked fondly at her old friend. It’s a rare person who can get away with the sentence, “My mother’s lawyer made a call.”
    “Well, I’m on a job hunt,” Crow said cheerfully. “Shockingly, a degree from the Maryland Institute, College of Art is not a hot commodity on the market. So Tess is the only one of us who’s gainfully employed.”
    “Gainfully might be stretching it, but I do have some work. Interesting work at that.”
    “Details?” Whitney pressed.
    “Confidential, dearest. You know that.”
    “Of course. Why else would I care? Besides, maybe this is what I was meant to do with my life. We can be Starsky and Hutch. It goes without saying that I’ll be the tall blond one.”
    “Wasn’t he the wife beater?” Tess asked. “Which would be forgivable, since he got counseling, but he also sang that awful, awful pop song. The one where he rhymed ‘reminiscing’ with ‘kissing.’ Hutch was really much sexier.”
    “Does this scenario make me Huggy Bear?” Crow wondered. Ah, Nick at Nite and TV Land, Tess thought, our true universal language.
    “Can’t you tell me anything?” Whitney asked.
    “I can tell you it’s a Jane Doe case. I’m trying to identify a dead girl, a homicide victim. Hey, why is it Jane Doe? Or John Doe? How did that usage enter the language?”
    “It’s from common law,” Crow said. “John Doe was the plaintiff and Richard Roe was the defendant.”
    Whitney was not put off the scent so easily. “No, really, why couldn’t I be your partner?”
    So many answers occurred to Tess that it was hard to pick just one. “Because I work alone. Because I can’t afford you. Because you would go cross-eyed with boredom the first time you had to do surveillance, or sort through receipts found in a dumpster dive. Besides, what use are you now that you no longer have access to the Beacon-Light ’s resources? I have to pay Dorie Starnes for the kind of stuff you used to give me for free.”
    “Oh well, it was just a passing fancy. I think what I really want is my own talk show, one of those NPR ones, all erudite and earnest,” Whitney said. “You know, one of the really boring ones, where the guest is always some State Department undersecretary no one has ever heard of.”
    “How does one go about getting a talk show?” Crow asked.
    Whitney waved her hand in the air. “I haven’t the vaguest idea. But how hard can it be?”
    A waiter was unloading a trayful of appetizers at the table—meat and vegetable samosas, nan, a round of Kingfisher beer. Apparently Whitney hadn’t waited for them to order the first course. Tess wondered if she had allowed them their choice of entrées. The maddening thing was, Whitney often did know better than Tess what Tess really wanted, or needed. If she had saved her lifeonce, in the literal fashion, she had saved it a hundred times over in other ways. Tess was never bored when Whitney was around.
    “I think,” Tess said, “you should get an advice column, one where people write to you about their most heart-felt problems and you respond by telling them