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was saving up news for when she came to visit. When Christmas came and went and she didn’t show up I got Miss Brock on the horn.
    “She said that Maria dropped out two weeks before the Christmas break. She told Miss Brock that she was going to get married and was on her way back to Phoenix with her fiancé to introduce us. She wouldn’t be coming back to school. Later, one of her roommates saw her getting into a car parked in front of the school with a man behind the wheel. They took off before the roommate could catch up. That was the last anyone saw of her.”
    “Any description of the man or the car?”
    He shook his head. “The car was either green or blue, or maybe black. The man was in shadow and had on a dark suit with a dark tie. You know kids. They never look at anything.”
    “Did you go to the police?”
    “I got out of that habit fifty years ago when I found out you could blind most of them with a twenty-dollar bill. First thing they’d do is tip the press and then it’d be all over the country. ‘Police Seek Mob King’s Ward.’ That’s the kind of attention I raised her to avoid.”
    “Publicity could help turn her up.”
    “Not in this case. Just the opposite.”
    “What does that mean?”
    The look on his face alarmed me. If he had a bad heart, and there was no reason to think he hadn’t with everything else that was wrong with him, that grimace was as good an indication as any that an ambulance was in order. But then he resumed speaking and I realized the pain went much deeper.
    “I hired a private dick in Lansing right after she disappeared, but he didn’t have enough to go on and gave up when his last lead came up empty two months ago. He’s thrown over his practice since and moved to California along with all the others who can’t take this climate. I found out he’d gone the other day when I tried to reach him to tell him about this.”
    Slowly, much more slowly than the first time he went for it, he reached into the same pocket from which he’d drawn the graduation picture and came up with another square of white cardboard slightly larger than the first. He held it out for me to take as if the weight of it were too much for him to push. I had to come part way up out of my chair and seize it from his fingers.
    I was holding a black and white snapshot mounted on heavy stock designed to withstand a lot of handling. It wasn’t good photography. The lighting was bad and it was hard to tell at first glance just what was going on in the shabby room with a print of September Morn just visible in one corner on the wall. What was going on was a hell of a lot less subtle than the artist’s rendition of a coy female bather. A pretty, dark-haired girl, nude except for a black garter belt, net stockings, and high heels, was down on one knee performing what the Supreme Court calls an unnatural act upon an amply endowed male. The girl could have been Maria Bernstein. Nobody had touched it up and the mortarboard was missing.
    “Could be any one of a hundred girls,” I said. “What makes you so sure it’s her?”
    “It’s her.” The tuning fork or whatever it was that imitated the vibration of vocal cords was barely buzzing. “I watched her grow up. I know. If I had any doubts, that mole on her right shoulder blade would clear them up.”
    I looked again. I hadn’t seen it before. It wasn’t the sort of picture in which you noticed such details right off.
    “Have they seen this?” I inclined my head toward the sliding doors.
    “They know about it. You’re the only one I’ve shown it to since I first saw it a week ago. I wasn’t figuring on pasting it in no scrapbook.”
    “Are you a collector?”
    “Certainly not.” A spark glowed in the viscous eyes. “An old associate of mine, never mind who, has part interest in a business that wholesales this garbage to porno shops and grindhouses in the area. It’s a sideline. He hardly ever sees the stuff that passes through, but ten days