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with me. Pick a time.”
    “You tell me. I’ll be home all day.”
    “Two o’clock?”
    “Two is fine.”
    After I’d hung up I sat on the edge of the bed wondering what sort of favor it would turn out to be and why she hadn’t wanted to request it over the phone. I told myself I’d find out soon enough, and that I evidently didn’t care all that much or I would have gone straight down there. I didn’t have anything important to do before I saw Elaine later. There was a welterweight fight on
Wide World of Sports
that I was planning to see, but no one was billing it as the Fight of the Century. I wouldn’t eat my heart out if I missed it.
    I picked up the phone again and dialed the 718 number, and when a man answered I asked to speak to Mr. Thomas. He said, “Uh, did you say ‘Mr. Thomas’? Or did you want to talk to Tom?”
    I checked the message slips. “It says ‘Mr. Thomas’ here,” I said, “but my messages tend to be more or less accurate depending who takes them. My name’s Matthew Scudder and somebody left two messages for me to call a Mr. Thomas at this number.”
    “Oh, right,” he said. “I see what happened. I’m the person who called you, but they made a slight mistake on the name. I didn’t say ‘Thomas,’ I said ‘Tom S.’ ”
    “I guess I must know you from the rooms.”
    “Actually,” he said, “I don’t think you know me at all. In fact I’m not a hundred percent positive I got the right person. Let me ask you something. Did you ever speak at a meeting called Here and Now?”
    “Here and Now.”
    “It’s a Brooklyn group, we meet Tuesdays and Fridays in the Lutheran church on Gerritsen Avenue.”
    “I remember now. It was a three-speaker meeting, and a fellow named Quincy had a car so he drove. And we got lost and barely got there in time. That must be a good two years ago.”
    “More like three. I can be fairly precise about the date because I’d just made my ninety days. In fact I announced it at that meeting and got a round of applause.”
    I almost congratulated him.
    “Let me just make sure I got the right person,” he went on. “You were a New York City cop, you quit the police department, and you became a private detective.”
    “You’ve got a good memory.”
    “Well, nowadays I’ll hear somebody’s qualification and forget it ten minutes later, but the ones you listen to in the first few months make a deep impression. And the night you spoke I was hanging on every word. Let me ask you, are you still doing the same thing? Working as a private detective?”
    “That’s right.”
    “Good. That’s what I was hoping. Look, Matt—excuse me, is it all right to call you Matt?”
    “I guess so,” I said. “And I’ll call you Tom, since that’s the name I’ve got for you so far.”
    “Jeez, that’s right. I still didn’t say my last name. I dunno, I’m not handling this so good, am I? Maybe that’s the best place to start, with my name. The S stands for Sadecki.”
    It took a minute, but then the penny dropped. “Oh,” I said.
    “George Sadecki’s my brother. I didn’t want to leave the name before because, well, I just didn’t. Not that I’m ashamed of my brother. Don’t think that, because I’m not. He was always a hero to me. Certain ways he still is.”
    “I gather he’s been having a rough time.”
    “For years. He hasn’t been right since they brought him back from Vietnam. Oh, he had his problems before then, you can’t go and blame everything on the war, but you can’t deny it changed him. At first we kept waiting for his life to straighten out, for him to get a handle on it. But it’s more’n twenty years, Chrissake, and a while back it became clear nothing was going to change.
    “Early on he had different jobs but he never held on to one for very long. He couldn’t get along with people. He didn’t start fights or anything, he just couldn’t get along with people.
    “Then he became completely unemployable, because his