“Just wait at the café. I’ll be there in thirty minutes. Maybe twenty… What do you look like?”

“Why?”

“So I can recognize you.”

“Oh… I have dark hair, almost black. Kind of long. I’m wearing a yellow dress and a kind of thick white sweater.”

“Okay… I’ll have a tan cap on. Not to frighten you, but my most distinctive feature is my white eyebrows. I’m not an albino. The sun has bleached them over the years. I’ll be there by four thirty.”

“I guess so,” she said, a bit nonsensically. Her voice was practically a whisper. She wasn’t sure she was doing the right thing. I cursed myself for possibly blowing it with the mention of the white eyebrows and sounding like a nut.

“Everything will be okay. I’ll find your sister,” I said.

“All right,” she said meekly.

“See you in a little bit,” I said, and hung up, before she changed her mind.

I put on a tie, loosened it at the collar, and undid the top button to give myself a rumpled, world-weary private-detective look, and I threw on my gray-tweed Brooks Brothers sport coat, since there was a slight chill in the air. Also, on all the covers of my Chandler novels, Philip Marlowe, the great private detective, is always wearing a sport coat. Then, so the girl would recognize me, I put on my cap, and I usually wear a hat of some kind, anyway, since I’m bald and buzz my hair down, and without hair it’s a very drafty world. I was already wearing my favorite olive green corduroy pants and looking at myself in the mirror, I felt, overall, quite capable of finding this missing NYU coed, at least wardrobe-wise.

I grabbed Black Friday to read in the subway and was out of the apartment within five minutes of hanging up the phone.

The café had uncomfortable aluminum chairs and we sat with our legs practically touching. She was a cute little thing—very white skin and very dark hair. Her mind was soft, though, and that cut down the attraction and made it easier to keep my attention focused on the business at hand. I got the following information out of her, expanding on what she had told me on the phone: the sister, Lisa, about a year ago, had disappeared for a week with an older boyfriend (early thirties) and the family had gone into a panic; now she had a different boyfriend, but the same genus—thirtysomething, guitarist in a rock band, a bartender, and possibly a junkie; Rachel didn’t want to get the parents or the police or NYU security involved, because it was probably nothing and her sister would kill her if she blew the whistle; at the same time, she had a bad feeling—she was worried that her sister had maybe starting using heroin.