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anyone off. I looked at my watch: 12:15. I went back up toward what was left of the business district and found a restaurant. I had fried clams and cole slaw and two bottles of beer. Then I strolled back down to Centre Street and took up station about five past one. On North Water Street a municipal crew was at work with a backhoe and some jackhammers, while several guys with shirts and ties and yellow hard hats walked around with clipboards and conferred. Nobody came down Centre Street, or up it. Nobody had anything to do with Centre Street. No evidence of life appeared at number three. I had picked up a copy of the New Bedford Standard Times on my way back from lunch and I read it while I leaned on a telephone pole on the corner of North Water and Centre. I read everything, glancing regularly over the rim of the paper to check the house. I read about a bean supper at the Congregational church in Mattapoisett, about a father-son baseball game at the junior high school field in Rochester, about a local debutante’s ball at the Wamsutta Club. I read the horoscope, the obituaries, the editorial, which took a strong stand against the incursion of Russian trawlers into local waters. I read “Dondi” and hated it. When I finished the paper, I folded it up, walked the short length of Centre Street and leaned against the doorway of an apparently empty warehouse on the corner of Centre and Front streets.
    At three o’clock a wino in a gray suit, a khaki shirt and an orange flowered tie stumbled into my doorway and urinated in the other corner. When he got through I offered to brush him off and hand him a towel but he paid me no attention and stumbled off. What is your occupation, sir? I’m an outdoor men’s room attendant. I wondered if anyone had ever whizzed on Allan Pinkerton’s shoe.
    At four-fifteen Pam Shepard came out of the shabby house with another woman. Pam was slim and Radcliffy looking with a good tan and her brown hair back in a tight French twist. She was wearing a chino pantsuit that displayed a fine-looking backside. I’d have to get closer but she looked worth finding. The woman she was with was smaller and sturdier looking. Short black hair, tan corduroy jeans and a pink muslin shirt like Indira Gandhi. They headed up the street toward the museum and turned left on the Purchase Street pedestrian mall. The mall had been created by curbing across the intersection streets and had a homemade look to it. Pam Shepard and her friend went into a supermarket and I stood under the awning of a pawnshop across the street and watched them through the plate-glass window. They bought some groceries, consulting a shopping list as they went, and in about a half-hour they were back out on the street, each with a large brown paper sack in her arms. I followed them back to the house on Centre Street and watched them disappear inside. Well, at least I knew where she was. I resumed my telephone pole. The warehouse door had lost some of its appeal.
    It got dark and nothing else happened, I was beginning to hope for the wino again. I was also hungry enough to eat at a Hot Shoppe. I had some thinking it over to do and while I always did that better eating, the fried clams had not sold me on New Bedford cuisine and I would probably have to sleep sometime later on anyway. So I went back and got my car and headed back for Hyannis. There was a parking ticket under the wiper but it blew off somewhere near a bowling alley in Mattapoisett.
    During the ride back to Hyannis I decided that the best move would be to go back to New Bedford in the morning and talk with Pam Shepard. In a sense I’d done what I hired on for. That is, I had her located and could report that she was alive and under no duress. It should be up to Shepard to go and get her. But it didn’t go down right, giving him the address and going back to Boston. I kept thinking of Eddie Taylor’s final look at her, lying on the bed on her back screaming at the ceiling. There