“Water up here is too wild for children,” said the captain, laughing as loud as a First Avenue fire brigade. “I was just going for a swim!”

I returned Copeland’s clipping to his envelope. If I’d felt like wasting time, I would have pulled the file on Alice Pearl and read over the three faded clippings that had been pinned to my father’s wall for years—“Vanishes On 48th,” “Usher Tells A Tale,” and the hopelessly brief “Police Enthusiastic In Search.” If I’d felt like making myself sick, I could have pulled the file for Virgil Carr. Instead, I remembered the odd notation in Copeland’s datebook. The scrap of paper was still in my pocket: “brass,” scrawled out in Copeland’s quivering hand.

The old bookkeeper brought me three heavy envelopes on the subject. An hour’s reading taught me more than I needed to know about brass piping, brass wiring, brass cookware, brass bands, brass clocks, alpha brasses, beta brasses, gamma brasses, and white brasses. Brass was germicidal, I learned—totally resistant to infection, and that seemed true in a spiritual sense as well. In all those clippings, I saw not one reference to criminal misbehavior. Brass must be the most genteel alloy known to man.

“Are you happy, Hellida?” I said, rubbing my reddening eyes. “I’m buckling down.”

I reached for the next envelope. I was struggling through an item on copper mining when Max dropped into the chair beside me and threw his feet onto the table. He inspected a handful of clippings and tossed them aside in disgust.

“Brass,” he said. “Brass, brass, brass.”

“You’re getting the idea.”

“You sure it’s the metal?”

From his back pocket, he pulled a wrinkled copy of the day’s paper. He slapped it onto the table, open to the city page. I scanned headlines—“Blazing Oil Burns Ten Men To Death”; “Banker Shot Dead By Masked Youth”; “Taxicab Kills Boy As Sister Looks On”—until Max tired of waiting and jabbed at a teaser for the society page.

“A party at Aiken’s penthouse,” I said. “Pictures inside.”

“A. P. Aiken.”

“I don’t know the name.”

“You don’t know nothing.”

He tore the paper open to the society column. There, in the penthouse of the Hyperion Hotel, a withered old man sat before the largest jazz band ever assembled on the stem.

“The man’s a certified jazzhead,” said Max. “That’s why they call him Brass.”

“It seems like a stretch.”

“Better than whatever you’re reading.”

He was probably right.

He retrieved Aiken’s file, and I paged through it without enthusiasm, learning more than I cared to about the city’s foremost fight-promoting, jazz-loving, gin-swilling, white-shoed gangster. I was about to give up when Max pulled the clipping from the back of the stack, an artifact from 1903.