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This job, I sometimes have a lot of time on my hands. Like now, driving the back roads. I could listen to the radio, play tapes. But what I do is, I make up puns. The trick is, you start with the punch line, and once you’ve got that, you work backward, make up the story that leads to it. It keeps my mind active and alert.”
    â€œSurely,” I said, “there’s got to be a more productive way to spend your time. Knitting pot holders, for example.”
    â€œYeah,” he said. “I knew a guy like you once. Told him some excellent puns, couldn’t get him to crack a smile. It got to be a kind of challenge for me. Finally I made a bet with him. I bet him if I told him my ten best puns, one of ’em, at least, would make him laugh.”
    I figured I was being suckered, but I said, “And? Did it?”

    â€œNaw,” he said. “No pun in ten did.”
    I said nothing.
    â€œYou there, Brady?” said Cahill after a minute. “Did I lose you?”
    â€œI’m here,” I said. “You called me for that?”
    â€œSure. Well, I also wanted you to know I’m making good progress on your case.”
    â€œThat didn’t take long.”
    â€œThis ain’t brain surgery, you know.”
    â€œSo what can you tell me?”
    â€œNot quite sure what it adds up to yet,” he said. “I’m working on it this weekend. Should have a handle on it in a day or two. Let’s get together Monday morning. Sometime between seven and nine work for you?”
    Cahill’s office was in Copley Square, right around the corner from mine. I could leave for work a half hour early. “I’ll be there around eight or eight-fifteen,” I said.
    His voice crackled and stuttered. I heard him say, “ … bring me a muffin or something.”
    â€œYou got the muffin. Can you hear me?”
    â€œ … losing you,” he said.
    â€œWhere are you now?”
    â€œHeading into the hills.”
    â€œWhat hills?”
    â€œHang on ’til Monday morning, okay? I don’t …” His voice faded for a second. When he came back, he was saying, “ … those boys …”
    â€œWhat?” I said. “What boys?”
    But I’d lost him completely.

FOUR
    M onday morning I left the house around quarter of eight—about half an hour earlier than normal—so I’d have time to talk with Gordon Cahill in his office and still get to mine by nine. Julie had a morning full of client meetings lined up for me, and being late would be a bad way to start the week. My clients could handle it, but Julie would make my life miserable.
    It promised to be another fine Indian summer day in Boston. The maples and beeches on the Common and in the Public Gardens had started turning crimson and gold and bronze, and the low-angled morning sun glowed in the tops of the foliage. Squirrels scampered under their branches gathering acorns and beechnuts. Pigeons waddled around on the sidewalks looking for stale French fries and popcorn. Ah, Mother Nature.
    It was the kind of early-autumn morning that gave me an itch to prowl through some real woods, spy on some wild animals, maybe even go trout fishing one more time before the snow flew.

    I stopped at a coffee shop on Newbury Street and bought two large coffees and half a dozen bran muffins. As I recalled, Gordon Cahill liked bran.
    St. Botolph Street runs between Huntington and Columbus Avenues behind Copley Place. Cahill’s office was halfway down the street on the second floor above a Thai restaurant. The last time I was there he had the air-conditioning running high and was burning incense—a futile effort to neutralize the exotic aromas that wafted up from the kitchen below.
    Gordie hated all Southeast Asian cuisine—a vestige, I assumed, of his time in Saigon thirty-odd years ago—but he wasn’t thinking about moving. He said the rent was cheap and, anyway, he liked