I frowned, as if that would bring the photograph into sharper focus. The woman, I remembered, had shoulders like a halfback. But she didn’t get them on a football field, or in a gym, either. She was wearing shoulder pads, even more exaggerated than the ones that had blossomed anew in the recent shoulder-pad renaissance.

You weren’t seeing shoulder pads as much lately. And you weren’t seeing silver fox stoles either, the kind she was wearing with little heads and feet still attached. They hadn’t experienced a revival, as far as I knew, and I could understand why.

Probably an old photo. Notes from the world of fashion notwithstanding, it had looked like an old photograph to me. Was it because cameras were different then? Had the print faded with time? Or was it just that people composed their faces differently in different eras, so that their faces were indelibly marked as if with a date stamp?

He was a crowd pleaser, this Smilin’ Jack. A credit to his dentist, too. Damn, where had I seen his beaming countenance before? And what would he look like if he covered those big teeth with his lips and took a serious picture?

He had a face that would look good on a coin, I decided. Not an old Roman coin, his wasn’t that sort of face. Something more recent…

Bingo.

I don’t think I said anything, but maybe my ears perked up, because Raffles leaped from his perch over in Philosophy amp; Religion and came out to see what was going on. “Not a coin,” I told him. “A stamp.”

That seemed to satisfy him; he did a set of stretching exercises and trotted off to the john. I found my way to Games amp; Hobbies, where there was a Scott’s world postage stamps catalog on the very bottom shelf, right where I’d last seen it. It was four years out of date but too useful a store reference to consign to the bargain table.