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the pleasure of it, but with the intent to promote patience. This for me at age six when no child is content to sit for more than a minute at a time.
    More to the point here: no Pearl, no Dandy, no Felix, and I’d gone as far as I could go. The dead man was dead. If he’d needed my help, it was already too late to be of service. First thing in the morning I’d call Aaron Blumberg and pass along what I’d learned. Armed with a first name and a description of the deceased, he might track down a doctor who could fill in the blanks. “A bum named Terrence with a bad limp” was hardly definitive, but it was a step in the right direction. Meanwhile, my participation was at an end.

3
    Monday, I tried three times with no luck to reach Aaron Blumberg at the coroner’s office. I left messages, asking him to call me when he had a minute. I could have taken the opportunity to detail the scanty facts I’d picked up, but I was hoping for a pat on the head for my resourcefulness. I spent most of the day puttering around the office, feeling distracted and oddly out of sorts. I left early, arriving home at 4:15 instead of the usual 5:00 P.M . I passed Rosie’s twice in my search for a parking place and noted the building was now draped in enormous rectangular tarpaulins that were clipped together along the edges. The red, white, and turquoise stripes gave the place the look of a circus big top. I parked the car around the corner on Bay in the only semi-legal spot I could find.
    When I reached the backyard, Henry was hard at work in shorts, a T-shirt, and bare feet, his flip-flops tossed aside on the flagstone walk. His face was smudged with dirt, his white hair dampened by sweat, and his shins flecked with mud. His nose and cheeks were rosy from the autumn sunshine. He’d apparently spent the past couple of hours aerating the lawn in preparation for overseeding the grass. Some sections he’d attacked with a rototiller, then leveled the ground with a weighted roller he’d rented for the occasion. A scoop of fine lawn mulch had been piled to one side with a shovel resting against the wall.
    He’d recently acquired a cypress potting bench that was now attached to the garage. The unit boasted a zinc top and two drawers where he kept his gardening gloves and the smaller of his gardening tools. On the shelf below he’d placed his galvanized watering cans and a big bag of sphagnum moss. The adjacent wall was designated for the larger tools—his wood-handled garden forks, trowels, cultivators, and graduating sizes of pruning shears. Painted outlines assured that each piece would be returned to its proper place.
    Along with his other fall projects, he was transplanting three dozen marigolds from the original plastic commercial nursery containers to terra-cotta pots. He’d already lined my modest porchlet with half a dozen of these rust-and-gold arrangements, which I thought quite festive.
    “You’ve been busy,” I remarked.
    “Getting the jump on winter. Another couple of weeks we’ll lose daylight savings time and it’ll be close to dark by this hour. How about you? What are you up to?”
    “Nothing much. I was asked to ID a guy at the morgue, but I’d never seen him before.”
    “Why you?”
    “He had my name and number on a slip of paper in his pocket. Blumberg, the coroner’s investigator, assumed we were acquainted.”
    “What was that about?”
    “Who knows? He was a homeless fellow, found dead in his sleeping bag on the beach. This was Friday morning. I’ve been trying to get a line on him but haven’t picked up much. Business is down so at least it gives me something to do. You need help?”
    “I’m just about done with this phase, but I’d love the company. I haven’t seen you since, what, Thursday?”
    “Yep. After Rosie and William left,” I said. I set my shoulder bag on the porch and I settled on the step where he’d laid his three-ring binder for ready reference. While Henry returned two pieces of