More to the point here: no Pearl, no Dandy, no Felix, and I’d gone as far as I could go. The dead man was dead. If he’d needed my help, it was already too late to be of service. First thing in the morning I’d call Aaron Blumberg and pass along what I’d learned. Armed with a first name and a description of the deceased, he might track down a doctor who could fill in the blanks. “A bum named Terrence with a bad limp” was hardly definitive, but it was a step in the right direction. Meanwhile, my participation was at an end.

3

Monday, I tried three times with no luck to reach Aaron Blumberg at the coroner’s office. I left messages, asking him to call me when he had a minute. I could have taken the opportunity to detail the scanty facts I’d picked up, but I was hoping for a pat on the head for my resourcefulness. I spent most of the day puttering around the office, feeling distracted and oddly out of sorts. I left early, arriving home at 4:15 instead of the usual 5:00 P.M. I passed Rosie’s twice in my search for a parking place and noted the building was now draped in enormous rectangular tarpaulins that were clipped together along the edges. The red, white, and turquoise stripes gave the place the look of a circus big top. I parked the car around the corner on Bay in the only semi-legal spot I could find.

When I reached the backyard, Henry was hard at work in shorts, a T-shirt, and bare feet, his flip-flops tossed aside on the flagstone walk. His face was smudged with dirt, his white hair dampened by sweat, and his shins flecked with mud. His nose and cheeks were rosy from the autumn sunshine. He’d apparently spent the past couple of hours aerating the lawn in preparation for overseeding the grass. Some sections he’d attacked with a rototiller, then leveled the ground with a weighted roller he’d rented for the occasion. A scoop of fine lawn mulch had been piled to one side with a shovel resting against the wall.

He’d recently acquired a cypress potting bench that was now attached to the garage. The unit boasted a zinc top and two drawers where he kept his gardening gloves and the smaller of his gardening tools. On the shelf below he’d placed his galvanized watering cans and a big bag of sphagnum moss. The adjacent wall was designated for the larger tools—his wood-handled garden forks, trowels, cultivators, and graduating sizes of pruning shears. Painted outlines assured that each piece would be returned to its proper place.