“How did it make you feel when that man set fire to your house?” the WBR asks squatting to the level of the dazed and blanketed five-year-old. “I bet it really hurts to watch your house burn to the ground, a nice house like yours. Somebody told me your cat was in that house. That’s sad, isn’t it? Now you’ll never see her again. You’ll never see your cat or your shoes or your mother’s boyfriend ever again. Can you tell me how that makes you feel inside?”

A PCD was another common icebreaker. Nothing pleases me quite so much as the ever-popular Physically Challenged Detective. Nowhere else on television do you find the blind, deaf, and paralyzed holding down such adventurous and high-paying jobs. Gill once had an idea for a show about a detective in an iron lung called “Last Gasp for Justice.” The clients, eager to track down their kidnapped daughter, would gather by the bedside and stroke his forehead, begging him to take the case.

Gill was always full of good ideas. So it shocked me when he changed so suddenly. I never saw it coming. We made plans to meet for dinner at an Indian restaurant that doesn’t have a liquor license. You just buy it down the block and carry it in with you it’s cheaper that way. So Gill and I were in the liquor store, where I asked him if we should buy two six-packs and a pint of J&B or one six-pack and a fifth. Or we could just go ahead and get the two six-packs and the fifth because, why not? I was weighing the odds when, out of nowhere, Gill started twisting the buttons on his coat and said, “Forget about me — you just buy something for yourself, Dolph.” Dolph is the name I go by because really, nobody can walk around with the name Adolph. It’s poison in a name. Dolph is bad too, but it’s just box-office poison.

“You go ahead, Dolph. Don’t worry about me.”

Later in the restaurant, figuring he’d changed his mind, I offered Gill one of my beers. He grew quiet for a few moments, tapping his fork against the table before lowering his head and telling me in fits and starts that he couldn’t have anything to drink. “I am, Jesus, Dolph, I am, you know, I’m . . . Well, the thing is that I’m . . . I am an . . . alcoholic.”

“Great,” I said. “Have eight beers.”

Gill became uncharacteristically dramatic, pushing the hair off his forehead. He leaned toward me and said, “I can’t have a drink, Dolph. Don’t you understand anything at all? I can’t.”