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as a model. She went back the next morning to have him take some pictures of her and…” Farmer John trailed off, his broad chest rising and falling. “And that was the last I saw of her. She never even came back for her clothes. Not that she left much behind. But I keep thinking she’ll come back.” He gazed at me imploringly. “Do you think she’ll come back?”
    â€œI don’t know.”
    â€œWill you do me a favor if you find her? Will you tell her that I miss her? So does Leon. He’s the kitten we got. She loved that little cat.”
    â€œSure, I’ll tell her.”
    He mustered a smile. “Thanks. And come on back any time. I’ll put you to work. I’ll even buy you that beer. Deal?”
    *   *   *
    I HAD TWO VOICE MAILS from the great Morrie Frankel on my cell phone. The first one was quite cordial: “Benji? It’s Morrie. I was wondering if you’ve made any progress yet. Call me back, okay?” The second was considerably less so: “Benji? It’s Morrie. Again . I want to know what’s going on. Call me the fuck back, you little pisher!”
    My dad taught me to never give a client too many details in the early stages of an investigation. Those details have a way of mutating on you as the hours go by. So I didn’t call Morrie the fuck back. Not yet.
    I rode the No. 3 from Brownsville back to the Wall Street station, where I joined up with the sweaty mass of subterranean straphangers who were packed in down there like stewed tomatoes waiting for a train, any train. I caught the M, which took me to the Lower East Side. I was in search of a dirty old man.
    His name was Phillip J. Barsamian, known by his friends as Philly Joe. Back when I landed two days of work on Law & Order: Criminal Intent playing a prep school drug dealer it was Philly Joe who played my weary old public defender. The two of us got to talking between setups and I discovered that way back in the late 1960s Philly Joe had been a hot young Broadway somebody who’d scored huge as the goofy kid brother in a hit Neil Simon comedy. From there he’d landed the goofy second lead in an offbeat little Robert Altman film. Goofy was in real demand in those days, and Philly Joe was the clown prince of goofy—tall and gangly with a shock of curly red hair, a huge Adam’s apple and such unusually long arms and legs that he resembled an ungainly prehistoric bird. He’d gone out to L.A. to star in a sitcom pilot for Norman Lear that CBS didn’t pick up. Was quickly offered a role on the sitcom Rhoda but chose instead to return to Broadway to star in a play that folded in a week. And then, before Philly Joe knew what hit him, goofy was out and so was he. Now, forty years later, he was just another struggling actor who worked in his family’s business to make ends meet.
    His family’s business was Helen’s, a dairy restaurant that had been selling blintzes, borscht and mushroom barley soup on the same corner of Second Avenue and East 8th Street since the 1930s. Helen had been Philly Joe’s grandmother. His brother and sister ran the restaurant now. Philly Joe waited tables there when he wasn’t going on auditions, same as he had when he was a teenager.
    I was looking for him because Philly Joe happened to be a rather unusual authority. The man devoted every free moment of every day and night to the singular pursuit of watching online porn. This made him someone whom I occasionally found helpful. Like, say, when a guy has just told me that his hot young girlfriend answered an ad in Craigslist and was never heard from again. Philly Joe was, by most people’s definition, a perv. But my job brings me into contact with people who are far pervier. Besides, I felt sorry for him. He was a gifted actor who’d flamed out. And he hadn’t enjoyed any non-virtual sexual activity since 1982. That was when the last woman