The agency never existed on paper, and the door of Room 211 never proclaimed FRIENDS OF THE FAMILY, but that’s what the agency came to be called, and the word passed quickly around the locker rooms and boardrooms of southern New England. The word was that if you needed something done quietly, go visit Bill or drop a word at the bank. That old stone building housed Friends.

Of course, the needs of Friends’ clients changed with the century. Prohibition brought in its wake waves of arrests, which, in turn, brought showers of envelopes cheerfully dropped on enteprising police and judiciary. And a wave of a different sort-the immigrant wave-changed New England forever. But the bank held its ground, and Friends, with both fists and favors, carved out a modus vivendi with other tight-knit ethnic organizations. The Depression winnowed the bank’s customers and forced the bank to burrow deeply into its reserves to survive until Hitler and Tojo filled the shipyard with contracts and workers again, and people remarked over dinner how provident the Kitteredges had been to invest in the arms industry way back in the Thirties.

New England was already on its way to becoming a backwater, however. The textile mills packed up and went south to the cheap labor, and the business talent caught the train to New York City, whose glass and steel monoliths began to buy up more and more New England businesses. Friends’ clients were increasingly finding the worms in the Big Apple, so in 1960, a quiet branch office was opened in Manhattan. Not long after that, Friends hired a foul-mouthed, one-armed, too-clever-by-half private dick named Joe Graham. Not long after that, on one of his early cases, Graham was sitting in a quiet West Side bar when some kid tried to pick his pocket.