I tried the taxi companies and the airports. I turned up one lead. A taxi driver had had a passenger early last Friday who he thought had looked something like the picture of Jo-Jo. The driver thought maybe he had taken the fare from Chelsea to the East Side Air Terminal. Some lead.

Bad as the lead was, it ended at the terminal anyway. Even if I could have had a look at passenger lists, I didn’t think it would have helped. If Jo-Jo was doing a fadeout, he was sure to be using a phony name.

I put out feelers for information to some of my more reliable connections in the bars, restaurants, bowling alleys, coffee shops, and candy stores in Chelsea, the Village, and Little Italy. I hinted at something being in it for words on Jo-Jo. (For fifty dollars I could not put out much; but, all else aside, most cases in this world are solved by informers, and informers sing only for cash. Eighty per cent of the time police work consists of waiting for a stool pigeon to call.) So I let it be known that I wanted to hear about Jo-Jo Olsen and sat back to wait for someone to come to me and let me earn my fifty.

Two days passed. I had no results from my own hard work. And my feelers turned up nothing at all. No one even whispered to me. I had not really expected the pigeons would sing to me. Not only do I carry the taint of cop, despite the old ‘pirate’ nickname and the ancient history of being like most people in Chelsea, but I don’t really belong in Chelsea anymore. I’m not regular. I don’t act quite right. I’ve been away too long and too far.

Over the last twenty years I’ve lived in a lot of places. In most of the big cities of the world. I’m a city man, that much I know about myself. Big cities: London and New York, Paris and Amsterdam, San Francisco and Tokyo. Sometimes I think that that is about all I do know about myself. At that, it’s probably more than most men know about themselves.