The first thing TJ tried was the phone number. It was his cell phone, Louise had told us, and the prefix was 917, which is one of two area codes set aside for mobile phones in the New York area. There’s an online reverse directory TJ knows how to use, and that’s where he went, hoping to find a name and address. But there was no listing for that number.

“Might be he walked into a store, bought a phone with prepaid minutes on it. You dealing in product, that’s how you do. Walk into one of those stores on Fourteenth Street, pay cash for a phone, and you in business. Don’t even have to give a name, ’cause you ain’t opening an account, you just buying a phone with the minutes already on it. They start to run out, you go back where you bought it and give the man more money, and they give you some more minutes.”

“And it’s all off the books.”

“Far as you’re concerned, it is. Whether the store declares the cash, well, we don’t care about that part, do we?”

“It won’t keep us up nights. I don’t suppose you have to be a dope dealer to get a phone that way.”

“Way I got mine. It’s simpler and you don’t get no bill every month. Don’t get no telemarketers, either. Don’t have to get on the Do Not Call list, ’cause you ain’t on the Call list to begin with.”

“Those are definite advantages,” I had to admit. “The only way to improve on it would be not to have a phone at all. For David Thompson, though, you wouldn’t think he’d want to play hard to get. He’s a freelance copywriter. If nobody knows his phone number, how does he get work?”

“His clients would have the number. Same as the dope dealers.”

“What about new business?”

“Be a problem.”

“He told Louise it’s feast or famine in his line of work. During famine times, I wouldn’t think you’d want to make it hard for people to get in touch with you. He’s got to have more than one phone.”

“ ’Less he stupid.”

“He’d have a land line in his office. He might not give her the number because that’s his business line.”

“Or because he ain’t who he says he is.”

“Always a possibility.”

“Whole lot of David Thompsons in the phone book. Plus all the D Thompsons.”

“It’s a place to start,” I said.

And it didn’t require computer skills, either, just a sedentary version of the kind of doggedness I’d learned fresh out of the Police Academy. GOYAKOD was the acronym, and it stood for Get Off Your Ass and Knock On Doors. I did just that, albeit metaphorically, and made phone calls, working my way through the D and David Thompsons in the Manhattan white pages.

“I’m not sure I have the right party,” I’d tell whoever answered. “I’m trying to reach the David Thompson who writes direct-mail advertising copy.”

One man pointed out that the one thing to be said for direct-mail advertising was that it didn’t interrupt your day the way a phone call did. But most of the people I reached were polite enough, if unhelpful; they weren’t the David Thompson I was looking for, nor had they heard of the fellow. I thanked them and put a check mark next to their names and moved on to the next listing.

That’s how it went when I got an actual person on the phone, which didn’t happen all that often. Most of the time I got a machine or a voice mail system, in which case I left a message saying essentially what I’d have said to a human being, and adding my phone number. I didn’t expect a lot of callbacks, but you never know, and there was always the chance someone might be monitoring his machine, waiting to see who it was before picking up. That happened once; I was halfway through my spiel when a woman came on the line to tell me her husband was not a copywriter but an insurance agent with Vermont Life. But maybe she could help me after all, she suggested. How long had it been since I’d had a thorough review of my insurance needs?

“I suppose I had that coming,” I said. “I’ll make you a deal. I won’t call you anymore, and you don’t call me.”

She said that sounded fair enough, and I put a check mark next to her husband’s name.

I’ve known a few people in advertising over the years, but if I’d met them in AA I rarely knew their last names, or where they worked. There was a fellow named Ken McCutcheon I’d known when I first got sober, but I’d long since lost touch with him, and I spent a lot of time calling people I thought might have kept track of him. Eventually one of them remembered he’d moved to Dobbs Ferry, in Westchester County. I found a listing for him, not in Dobbs Ferry but nearby in Hastings, and reached a woman who turned out to be his widow. Ken had died six, no, seven years ago, she told me. I said I was sorry to hear it. She asked my name, and how I’d known him.

He was dead, and anyway she’d been his wife, so preserving his anonymity wasn’t an issue, and I’ve never made much of a thing out of preserving my own. I said I’d known him in AA, and she surprised me by asking if I was still sober. I said I was.

“Then you’re one of the lucky ones,” she said. “Ken had nine years, nine wonderful years, and then I guess he thought he was cured. And he just couldn’t stop drinking. He was in and out of treatment, he went out to Hazelden for thirty days. He flew home, and I met him at the airport, and he got off the plane drunk. And drank for another year or two after that, and then he had a seizure and died.”

I apologized for disturbing her, and she apologized for telling me more than I may have wanted to know. “I should change the listing,” she said. “In the phone book. But I never get around to it.”

“They don’t like to call it direct mail anymore,” Bob Ripley told me. “Don’t ask me why. Nowadays it’s either direct marketing or direct-response advertising. And that’s very nearly the extent of my knowledge of the subject, but I know a guy who can tell you anything you need to know, including why you get six copies of the Lands’ End catalog every goddam month.”

I suppose I should have thought of Bob sooner. I’d seen him less than two months ago, the same night I’d booked Ray Gruliow to speak at St. Paul’s. Bob, like Ray, was a fellow member of the Club of Thirty-one, and a vice president of Fowler & Kresge. I didn’t know what he did in that capacity, but I knew F&K was an advertising agency, and that was enough.

Mark Safran, the fellow he referred me to, was in a meeting, but I left my number and mentioned Bob’s name, and that got me a callback within the hour. “I could tell you a lot about direct marketing,” he said, “but you’re looking to find a particular guy, is that right?”

“Or to find out that there is no such guy.”

“That’d be tough, because there’s a ton of freelance copy guys out there, and it’d be hard to prove he’s not one of them. It’s not like doctors or lawyers, there’s no single professional organization you have to belong to. No state or municipal licensing bureau, like I guess there is in your field.”

I let that pass.

“The thing is,” he said, “we do almost everything in-house, and when we’re in a hurry and need to go outside, we use somebody we’ve worked with in the past. So we’ve got our own list of six or eight guys, and then there are the big corporate shops, but your guy’s not there because he’s a freelance. You know what I’m going to do? I’m going to put you in touch with one of the guys we use.”

He gave me a name and number, and it was easy to believe the guy was a freelance because he actually answered his own phone. “Peter Hochstein,” he said, and when I explained my quest he asked the name of my quarry. “Never heard of him,” he said, “but that doesn’t prove anything. I don’t go out and meet my colleagues. Mostly I stay home and work. And if I had heard of him, it’s not a name that sticks in your mind.”

“No.”

“He might belong to the DMA, but probably not. Most of the members are corporate, because membership’s expensive. But he could have a free listing in Who’s Charging What. Or he could be the kind of guy who runs small-space ads offering his services in DM News or Direct or Target Marketing. You could check there, and also in the classifieds in Adweek and Advertising Age.”

He was full of suggestions, and I wrote everything down. If David Thompson had won an award or made a speech, he’d probably turn up on a Google search, but that might be tricky because his name was such a common one. “You could find me that way,” he said, “along with the Peter Hochstein who’s serving a life sentence for a contract killing in Nebraska, not to mention Peter Hochstein the German scientist.”

There was a good chance, he said, that David Thompson might fly under the radar. “I have a listing in Who’s Charging What,” he said, “because it’s free, so what could it hurt? But I don’t run classifieds in Ad Age, and I don’t run ads in the direct marketing publications. I don’t think it’s worth the money, and I’m not the only one. Most of us who’ve been doing this for a while seem to feel that way. It’s almost as if we’ve stopped believing in the power of advertising, which is funny, when you think about it. I don’t belong to any trade organizations, either. The business I get is all referrals, and what kind of client is going to pick you because he saw your ad? That’s as unlikely as getting business from a listing in the Yellow Pages.”

I thanked him, and the first thing I did was something I should have done earlier. I looked for Thompson in the Yellow Pages—not the consumer book but the business-to-business edition. There was no separate listing for direct marketing copywriters, but there was a section of advertising copywriters, and I wasn’t surprised not to find David Thompson there.

I didn’t find him in the back pages of Advertising Age or Adweek, either, which were the two publications he’d mentioned that you could find on the newsstand. I bit the bullet and sat down at Elaine’s computer, and I Googled my way to some of the sites he’d mentioned.

Everybody tells me what a timesaver the Internet is, and how they can’t believe they ever got along without it. And I know what they mean, but every time I use it I wind up wondering what people did with their spare time before computers came along to suck it all up. I sat down at the damn thing in the middle of the afternoon, and I couldn’t get away from it until Elaine was putting dinner on the table.

She said she’d wanted to check her e-mail but hadn’t wanted to disturb me. I told her I’d have welcomed a disturbance, that I’d spent hours without accomplishing much of anything. “I couldn’t find the son of a bitch,” I said, “and I couldn’t find half the websites I was looking for, and I wound up Googling Peter Hochstein, don’t ask me why, and he wasn’t kidding, there really is somebody with the same name doing life in Nebraska for murder for hire. He was sentenced to death originally, and the sentence was changed on appeal, and it was a pretty interesting case, though why I spent the better part of an hour reading about it is something I’d be hard put to explain.”

“You know what I think? I think we should get a second computer.”

“That’s funny,” I said, “because what I think is we should get rid of the one we’ve got.”

New York neighborhoods rarely have sharply delineated boundaries. They’re formed by a shifting consensus of newspapermen, realtors, and local inhabitants, and it’s not always possible to say with assurance where one leaves off and the next one begins. Kips Bay, where David Thompson lived—or where the man who claimed to be David Thompson claimed to be living—is that area in the immediate vicinity of Kips Bay Plaza, a housing complex that fills the three-block area bounded by Thirtieth and Thirty-third streets and First and Second avenues. The neighborhood known as Kips Bay probably runs south from Thirty-fourth Street and east from Third Avenue. Bellevue and the NYU Medical Center take up the space between First Avenue and the FDR Drive. The southern edge of Kips Bay is hardest to pinpoint, but if you occupied an apartment at Twenty-sixth Street and Second Avenue, say, I don’t think you’d tell people you lived in Kips Bay.

The overall area was pretty small no matter how you figured it, and it didn’t take me much more time to cover it on foot than I’d spent learning next to nothing on the Internet the day before. It’s predominantly residential, with a good sprinkling of the service businesses and neighborhood restaurants that cater to local residents, and that’s where I went, showing David Thompson’s photograph in bodegas and delis, dry cleaners and newsstands. “Have you seen this fellow around?” I asked Korean greengrocers and Italian shoe repairmen. “You know this man?” I asked Dominican doormen and Greek waiters. None of them did, nor did a mail carrier in the middle of his rounds, a clerk at a copy shop, or a beat cop who started out thinking that he ought to be the one asking the questions, but who lost the attitude when he found out I’d been on the job myself, especially when it turned out I’d known his father.

“He looks like a lot of guys,” the cop said. “What’s his name?” I told him, and he shook his head and said that was a big help, wasn’t it? His own name was Danaher, and I remembered his father as a backslapping gladhander who could have doubled as a ward boss. He was living in Tucson, the son said, and playing golf every day unless it rained. “And it never rains,” he said.

It rained that night, in New York if not in Tucson. I stayed in and watched a lackluster fight card on ESPN. The next day dawned cool and clear, and the city felt bright with promise. TJ and I met for breakfast and compared notes, and decided we were making the kind of progress Thomas Edison described, when he asserted that he now knew twelve thousand substances that wouldn’t make an effective filament for a lightbulb. We’d established about that many ways not to find David Thompson, and I was starting to wonder if he was there to be found.

I didn’t have anything for TJ to do, so he went home to sit in front of his computer and I got home myself in time for a phone call from one of the David Thompsons for whom I’d left a message. He was calling to let me know that he wasn’t the David Thompson I was looking for. Then why had he bothered calling? I thanked him and rang off.

Sometime in the middle of the afternoon it occurred to me that the only hook I had for Louise’s David Thompson was his phone number, so why didn’t I use it? I couldn’t trace it, I couldn’t attach a name or address to it, but the one thing I could do was dial it and see who answered. I did, and at first no one did, and then after five rings his voice mail kicked in and a computer-generated voice invited me to leave a message. I rang off instead.

I thought I might run into Louise at a meeting that night, and when I didn’t I gave her a call. “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe I jumped the gun, hiring you when I did. I haven’t heard from the guy since. I hate it when a person dumps you and doesn’t even tell you.”

“Have you tried calling him?”

“If he’s dumping me,” she said, “I don’t want to give him the satisfaction, you know? And if he’s not, I don’t want to crowd him. I’m old-fashioned when it comes to girls calling guys.”

“Okay.”

“But screw that. If I can sic a detective on him, what’s so extreme about calling him? Hang on, Matt, I’ll get back to you.”

She called back in no time at all. “No answer. Just his voice mail, and no, I didn’t leave a message. I didn’t even ask. Did you find out anything about him?”

I said I’d put in some hours on the case, but didn’t have much to show for them. I didn’t tell her how close I was to inventing the lightbulb.

“Well,” she said, “maybe you shouldn’t keep the meter running, you know? Because if I never hear from him again, the whole thing becomes academic. If I’m gonna forget about a guy, it’s not like I need to know a whole lot about him.”

I tend to relate to a case like a dog to a bone, and have been known to keep at it after a client has told me to let it go, but in this instance it was easy to stop. It might have been harder if I could have thought of something productive to do, but all I could come up with was waiting until he had a date with her and following him home afterward. I couldn’t very well do that if he never called her again.

Late the following afternoon I was at the Donnell Library on West Fifty-third, reading a book on direct marketing. It wouldn’t help me find David Thompson, but I’d grown interested enough in some aspects of the subject from what I’d encountered online to spend an hour or two skimming the subject. I walked from there to Elaine’s shop on Ninth Avenue, figuring I’d keep her company and walk her home when she closed up, but she wasn’t there.

Monica was, and had been for most of the afternoon. “I just dropped in,” she explained, “figuring we’d kill an hour with girl talk. I stopped at Starbucks for a couple of mocha lattes, and as soon as she’d finished hers she said I was an angel sent from heaven, and could I mind the store while she ran out to an auction at Tepper Galleries. And I’ve been stuck here ever since, and one latte only goes so far, and I’ve been positively jonesing for a cup of coffee.”

“Why didn’t you lock up for fifteen minutes and go get one?”

“Because to do that, dear Matthew, one would have to have had the key, which your good wife didn’t see fit to leave with me. I’m sure there’s a spare tucked away somewhere, but I couldn’t find it. You want to hold the fort while I get us both a couple of coffees?”

“No, I’ll go. Did you say a mocha latte?”

“I did, but that was then and this is now. Get me something really disgusting, will you? Something along the lines of a caramel mocha frappuccino, so gooped up with sugar crap that you can’t taste the coffee, but with a couple of extra shots of espresso in there to kick ass. How does that sound?”

It sounded horrible, but she was the one who was going to drink it. I repeated the order verbatim, and the ring-nosed blond barista took it in stride. I brought it back to the shop, and we found things to talk about until Elaine breezed in, reporting a successful afternoon at the auction.

Monica’s reward for shop-sitting was a good dinner at Paris Green. The two of them did most of the talking, with one or the other of them periodically apologizing to me for all the girl talk. What no one talked about was Monica’s mystery man.

We put her in a cab and walked home, and as we walked in the door my cell phone rang.

It was Louise. “He called,” she said. “Late last night, very apologetic for the hour and the long silence. Busy busy busy, and he’s out of town this weekend, but we’ve got a date Monday night. It was too late to call you last night, and then today I was the one who was busy busy busy, and besides I wanted to think about it.”

“And?”

“Well, he’s evidently not dumping me after all, and I really like him, and I think what we’ve got might have a future. And there’s a point where you have to have faith, you have to be able to let go and trust somebody.”

“So you want to call off the investigation?”

“What, are you out of your mind? I just said I have to trust him, and how can I trust the son of a bitch when I don’t know for sure who he is? I called to tell you to go ahead.”