"I don't own a black T-shirt."

"I'll get you one. I'd get you a black tanktop if I thought you'd wear it, but would you?"

"No."

"That's what I thought. Let me put these in water, and then I'll close up and you can walk me home. Unless the flowers were for the apartment?"

"No, I thought they'd look nice here."

"You're right, and I've even got an empty vase the right size. There, don't they look pretty? We'll stop at the Korean and pick up something for a salad, and I'll fix us some pasta and a salad and we'll eat at the kitchen table. How does that sound?"

I said it sounded fine.

After dinner I opened the envelope I'd been carrying around all day and got out the printouts of the TRW reports, along with the letter of commendation Wally had dictated to the client. Elaine went into the other room to watch Jeopardy and I had a look at what just about anybody with a couple of bucks to spend could find out about the financial standing and bill-paying habits of the fourteen living members of the club of thirty-one.

I had gone through most of the stack when Elaine brought me a cup of coffee and the news that none of the three contestants had known that Benjamin Harrison was the grandson of William Henry Harrison.

"Neither did I," I admitted. "What was the category, Guys Named Harrison?"

"Presidents."

"Oh, William Henry Harrison. Tippecanoe?" She nodded. "And Tyler, too. It all comes back to me. He died, didn't he?"

"No shit, Sherlock. He was elected president in 1840, so what do you want from him? What's this?" She took the client's letter from me and read it through. "This is great," she said. "Wally dictated it?"

"So he says."

"It's perfect, don't you think? You should make it a point to get one of these whenever you've got a client who tells you what a great job you did for him."

"I suppose."

"Your enthusiasm is contagious."

"I guess I should have it framed and hang it on my office wall," I said, "if I ever get a real office. And I could tuck a copy in the portfolio I show to prospective clients."

"If you ever put together a portfolio."

"Right."

"But you don't know if you want all that."

The coffee was too hot to drink. I blew on the surface to cool it. I said, "It's about time I got off my ass, don't you think? It's been twenty years since I turned in my gold shield."

"You were bottoming out with your drinking," she said. "Remember?"

"Vividly."

"And then you were getting sober."

"And now I've been dry so long I'm a fire hazard, as I've heard it said, and what the hell have I done with my life?" I tapped the sheaf of credit reports. "Here's a group of guys my age," I said, "and they've got families and careers, they own their own homes, and most of them could retire tomorrow if they wanted to. What have I got to put up against that?"

"Well, for one thing," she said, "you're alive. More than half of those men are dead."

"I'm talking about the living ones. Anyway, nobody's been trying to kill me."

"Oh? I can think of one fellow who really put his mind to it for a while there. If you forget what he looks like, look in the mirror."

"I get the point."

"And," she said, "give yourself a little credit, will you? From the day you left the department you've made a living."

"Some living."

"Were you ever on welfare? Did you ever miss a meal or sleep in the park? Did you break into parked cars and steal radios? I don't remember seeing you on the street with a paper cup, asking for spare change. Did I miss something?"

"I got by," I said.

"You made a living," she said, "doing the work you're best at, and you didn't chase after it, either. You let it come to you."

"The Zen detective," I said.

"And now you're fifty-five years old," she said, "and you think you ought to be more of a man of substance. You got along for twenty years without a PI license, but now you think you need one. Your clients somehow found their way to you when you worked out of your hotel room, but now you think you need an office. Look, if you want those things, that's terrific. You can rent office space in a good building and get stationery and promotional brochures printed and go after the law firms and the corporate clients. If that's what you want, I'll back you up all the way. I'll run the office for you, if you'd like that."

"You've got a shop to take care of."

"I can hire an assistant. Every day I get people asking if I can use help, and some of them are better qualified to run the place than I am. Or I could close the place."

"Don't be ridiculous."

"What's ridiculous? It's a hobby, something to keep me from going crazy."

"When I walked over there this afternoon," I said, "I stood in front of the window and I was in awe of what you've done."

"Come on."

"I mean it. You've made something out of nothing. You took an empty storefront and all the artworks you've collected over the years, and you've added things nobody else saw the beauty in until you pointed it out to them."

"My thriftshop masterpieces."

"And Ray's stuff, for God's sake. He was nothing but a cop with a useful skill until you made him realize he was an artist."

"That's exactly what he is."

"And you put it all together," I said. "You've made it work. I don't know how the hell you did it."

"Well, I've been having fun with it," she admitted. "But I don't know if it'll ever make a profit. Fortunately it doesn't have to."

"Because you're a rich lady."

She owns rental properties in Queens, all of it managed for her by a company that does that sort of thing. Every month she gets a check.

She said, "That's part of it, isn't it?"

"What's part of what?"

"I have some money saved," she said. "And you don't."

"Both of those statements are true."

"And we're living in an apartment I paid for."

"Also true."

"Which means you ought to have a more substantial career so we can be on an even footing."

"You figure that's it?'

"I don't know. Is it?"

I thought about it. "It's probably a factor," I said. "But what it does is make me take a good look at myself, and I see a guy who hasn't accomplished a hell of a lot."

"You've got some former clients who would disagree with that, you know. They might not be able to give you an endorsement on a fancy company letterhead, but they amount to a lot more than helping some manufacturer of schlock patio furniture avoid a lawsuit. Look at the difference you've made in people's lives."

"But I haven't done much for my own self, have I." I brandished the stack of credit reports. "I was reading these," I said, "and imagining what the wonderful people at TRW would have to say about me."

"You pay your bills."

"Yes, but-"

"Do you want the license and the office and all the rest of it? It's up to you, honey. It really is."

"Well, it's ridiculous not to have the license," I said. "There have been times when it's cost me work not to have it."

"And the respectable office, and a string of operatives and security personnel under you?"

"I don't know."

"I don't think you want it," she said. "I think you feel you ought to want it, but you don't, and that's what upsets you. But it's your call."

I went back to the stack of credit reports. It was slow going, because I didn't know what I was looking for. My hope was that I would recognize it when I saw it.

Douglas Pomeroy. Robert Ripley. William Ludgate. Lowell Hunter. Avery Davis. Brian O'Hara. John Gerard Billings. Robert Berk. Kendall McGarry. John Youngdahl. Richard Bazerian. Gordon Walser. Raymond Gruliow. Lewis Hildebrand.

I knew what a few of them looked like. I'd seen Gerry Billings on television, talking about cold fronts and the threat of rain. In my library research I'd come upon news photos of Gordon Walser (with two partners, celebrating the opening of their own ad agency) and Rick Bazerian (with two punked-out rock stars who'd just signed with his record label). And of course I'd been seeing Avery Davis's picture in the paper for years.

I'd been in the same room with Ray Gruliow a couple of times over the years, although we'd never been introduced. And I knew Lewis Hildebrand, my client.

But it seemed to me as though I could picture all of them readily enough, including the ones whose faces were wholly unfamiliar to me. As I read their names and reviewed their credit histories, images kept popping into my mind. I saw them walking behind power mowers over suburban lawns, I saw them dressed in suits, I watched them bend over to scoop up small children and hold them aloft. I pictured them on the golf course, then saw them having a drink in the clubhouse after they'd showered and changed, drinking whiskey and soda, say, in a tall frosted glass.

I could see them, in their well-tailored suits, leaving their houses at dawn, coming home at dusk. I could see them standing on platforms with their newspapers, waiting for the Long Island Rail Road or Metro North. I could see them striding purposefully along a midtown sidewalk, carrying brassbound attacheб cases, on their way to meetings.

I could picture them at the opera or the ballet, their wives finely dressed and bejeweled, themselves at once resplendent and slightly self-conscious in evening clothes. I could imagine them on cruise ships, in national parks, at backyard barbecues.

It was silly, because I didn't even know what they looked like. But I could see them.

"I'll give it another day or two," I told Elaine, "and then I'm going to call Lewis Hildebrand and tell him it's just a statistical anomaly. His group's running a high death rate and an unusual number of homicides, but that doesn't mean somebody's knocking them off one by one."

"You got all that from a batch of credit reports?"

"What I got," I said, "is a picture of fourteen very orderly lives. I'm not saying these men don't have a dark side. The odds are a couple of them drink too much, or gamble for high stakes, or do something they wouldn't want their neighbors to know about. Maybe this one slaps his wife around, maybe that one can't keep it in his pants. But there's a degree of stability in every one of their lives that just doesn't fit a serial murderer."

"If he's been doing it for this long," she said, "he's unusually disciplined."

"And patient, and well organized. No question about it. But there'd be chaos in his life. He'd be holding things together, but not without a lot of backing and filling, a lot of fresh starts and makeovers. I'd expect to see a lot of job changes, a lot of geographics. It's almost inconceivable that he'd have stayed married to the same person for a substantial period of time, for example."

"And have they all managed that?"

"No, there have been quite a few divorces. But the ones who've divorced show a consistent pattern of career stability. There's nobody in the whole group who looks at all like the kind of loose cannon he'd almost have to be, in order to do the damage he's done."