I opened the file on William Ryan, the man whose death I was investigating. There wasn’t much there: a copy of the application, the policy itself, and the death claim. At the time he applied for the life insurance policy, a year and a half earlier, Ryan was thirty-two years old, lived on Eureka Street and listed his occupation as businessman. Under intended beneficiary was the name Nick Trejo, a twenty-two-year-old who lived at the same Eureka Street address. Beneath the space for “beneficiary’s relationship to insured” was the word “roommate.” Reading between the lines—two unrelated men, one older than the other, living together in the heart of the city’s gay neighborhood—it was obvious Trejo was Ryan’s lover and the older man had taken out the policy to provide for the younger one in the event of his death.

“Roommate,” “companion,” “friend,” “lover,” “partner.” I thought about all those words, some innocuous, some salacious, and always pronounced with a slight, mocking hesitation that simultaneously acknowledged and dismissed the bond, the way Ruth Fleming had paused before describing Nick Trejo as William Ryan’s “male companion.” A man joined to a woman was a love story. A man joined to a man was a smutty joke. Well, at least the company wasn’t trying to withhold payment because Trejo was Ryan’s lover as it might have in an earlier time. That was progress, I guess.

I called Brendan Scott, the insurance agent who had issued Ryan’s policy, from the restaurant payphone and made an appointment to see him at three. That gave me an hour to kill. What could I learn about William Ryan in that hour? It occurred to me I could look up his obituary at the nearby city library.

Mrs. Chu was working the cash register. She took my money and made change and I went back to the booth and left a five for Adam who was back in the kitchen.

“Will you tell Adam I said goodbye?” I asked Mrs. Chu on my way out. She smiled and nodded.

The last of the city’s Indian summer had been washed away in a violent storm over the weekend. The damp streets were filled with small tree branches and the gutters were clogged with leaves. The gray sky cast a funereal pall across the city where everything and everyone, cars, buses, streetcars, pedestrians, seemed to move in slow motion. I pushed open the doors to the gloomy library building with cold fingers. A reference librarian directed me to the fourth floor reading room where back issues of magazines and newspapers were piled on wooden shelves.