“Hello, Dad,” I moaned.

“Dad” was not actually my father in the biological sense. We met when I was twelve years old and tried to pick his pocket in a bar. He pretty much raised me after that, even to the extent of teaching me a trade.

The trade he taught me included such skills as breaking and entering, following people, stealing documents from offices, searching hotel rooms, and finding the lost, missing, and running.

In short, he taught me how to be a private eye.

Like him.

“You don’t sound happy to hear from me!”

I could picture him on the other end of the line, sitting in his immaculate Murray Hill apartment, his artificial right arm set at a kitchen table that Christian Barnaard could operate on. I could imagine his cherubic little face, his thin, sandy hair greased straight back, and his aggravating, satanic grin.

“Not exactly.”

I know, I know. Petulant and rude. But a phone call that starts in code is not going to be good news. The single ring and thirty-second gap meant that this wasn’t a social call, but business.

And I didn’t want to get back to business.

Graham said, “My feelings are hurt.”

“Yeah, right.”

The Giants blowing the point spread with twelve seconds to play, that might hurt Graham’s feelings.

“How are the wedding plans coming?” he asked politely.

Wedding plans? I thought in a moment of alarm. What was there to plan? I figured that everyone would show up at the Milkovsky ranch, and Karen and I would say the I do’s, and that would be about it.

“Uhh, fine,” I answered.

“Have you registered your patterns?”

“Uhhh, yeah.”

Registered? Patterns?

“What about the honeymoon?”

“In favor of it.”

“Great vacations don’t just happen, you know,” Graham said.

I had never thought of a honeymoon as precisely a vacation, but I let it pass. Instead I said, “You didn’t call me just to nag me about wedding plans.”