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“Want a Diet Coke?”

“I want a detective, Ham.”

I called Ham’s office from a pay phone near the Clayton Street post office the next morning. Between dreams the night before that I was sleeping in a bed and not a backseat, I developed an itch to drop Angie a postcard and tell her I was … well, I figured I’d come up with something if I bought a stamp and a postcard, but ended up dialing ShoeString.

“I’d have sent flowers,” Ham said, “if I’d known where to send them.”

“I don’t have a vase for flowers, Ham.”

“When can I see you again?” I heard him call out to his assistant, “Got that list, Sam?” Then he was back on the mouthpiece. “Got something to write with?”

I didn’t, so I couldn’t write down the four or five names of private investigators and agencies that he read off Samantha’s list. The only agency names that sounded familiar were Vulture and Vulcan.

“So when?” Ham asked. “Don’t I deserve a phone number at least?”

“I think we both like games,” I said.

I got the Vulcan number from information—god! I hate paying for information just because all the phone books are chewed up or missing—and dialed it next. A woman’s voice drowsy with decongestants instructed me to leave my name, number and the purpose of my call. I called the Vulture number. When the tape came on I introduced myself as “a very close friend of Ham Cohan.” I didn’t hang up right away, and sure enough, the same man who hadn’t wanted to give me the time of day before said, “Okay, it’s Fred Pointer.”

“Ham Cohan thought you could help me.”

“What did he say?”

“It’s a missing-persons case—”

Fred cut me off. “What exactly did Ham say about me?”

I lied. “He said maybe you don’t do missing persons anymore, but that you were the best. Let me just describe the case to you, Fred.”

“Ham said that?”

“Yep.”

“Ham doesn’t like me. Why would he say that about me?”

“Because he admires you?”

“Ham knows I’m a persistent prick, I get things done.”

“When’s the soonest opening?”

“Middle of November. Of next year.”

“How about today, Fred?”

“You’re pretty persistent yourself.” Fred laughed.

He gave me an early-evening slot for later that week, and suggested a coffee in my neighborhood.

“I’ll come to your office. Easier that way.”

“Name a coffee shop,” he insisted. “What’s your native habitat? I need to know the client.”

“How about the Boss Bean?” I’d been inside only once; it looked like the kind of place that had survived many owners and many names.

“Start making notes,” Fred counseled. “Whatever you have on the missing person, get it down.”

“You mean, like tattoos and harelips?”

“Whatever the fuck you have. Anything. I figure if it’s a harelip you don’t need an expensive investigator like me.”

Hint, hint, Mr. Pointer. Expensive is good. I can be First Class, too. I couldn’t admit I didn’t have a thing, not even a real name. “How’ll you recognize me?”

“Relax, I’ll find you.” He hung up.

I called Ham again. “That drink you promised yesterday? What if I were to collect tonight?”

“How about right now?”

Tung and Phuk caters “Love Bird Specials” on houseboats of cash-paying special friends. We drove to Sausalito, listening to jazz tapes, stuff on his generation that I had to fake an interest in. Life is a learning curve for upstate orphans.

“Jazz at its best,” he explained, “is all about white men acting black and black men acting white, for the sake of music.”

Maybe because I wasn’t one or the other, I never quite caught the difference between jazz and the blues or jazz and swing or, for that matter, jazz and anything that played on radio stations that advertised cruises, health care for seniors and IRAs. Ham’s music just sounded old.

I wasn’t tone deaf, like Pappy and Angie; I hadn’t been born a DiMartino, thank god! I did know about twenty kinds of rock from my summer stint at the Record Barn in Latham Mall. Well, actually, I only knew all the songs and groups that’d made the charts in June and July 1992. But that expertise didn’t count with Ham. Ham