‘That’s all? A hobby?’

‘He did not like it that his father let people call him Swede when they are Norwegians. It seemed important.’

‘Maybe he took a trip in a time machine,’ I said.

Rhys-Smith smiled politely. He was in that cosy world where it is always warm for a drunk with enough booze. He was feeling fine, and closing time would never come. I slipped a dollar into his jacket pocket when I left. It made me feel big.

Outside the bar I flagged another cab and rode back up to Twenty-Third Street. The McBurney is a big YMCA, but the pool man thought he remembered an Olsen who was a regular. He checked his sign-in sheets for me. Jo-Jo had not missed a week-end at the pool in over a year — until now. Jo-Jo had not signed into the pool at the past week-end.

In the street again I felt half foolish. A nineteen-year-old cuts some classes and a test, leaves a buddy high and dry, skips a big race, and doesn’t swim for a week-end. For all I knew, Jo-Jo was on the beach at Atlantic City. There are a thousand things that can make a nineteen-year-old suddenly change his mind, and what is four days?

Marty was waiting for me, and I don’t like to keep Marty waiting.

And yet I felt only about half-foolish — Jo-Jo Olsen did seem to be a little missing.

Chapter 4

I decided to work on Jo-Jo Olsen a few more days, go through at least the standard routine. Pete Vitanza’s fifty was worth that much, and, somehow, Jo-Jo did not sound like he should have done a rabbit. Maybe he had been pushed.

I checked the hospitals, the jails, and the morgue, with no results. They had no Olsen, and only two John Does fitted Jo-Jo’s description at all. One was a blond kid off a ship, who turned out to speak no English, and the other was an over-age ‘youth’ in Bellevue who had been rolled by a sailor and who said that Jo-Jo sounded darling. It was slow, hot, tedious work. Do you have any idea how many hospitals there are in New York City with emergency wards?