"I wish I could say yes. It doesn't make any more sense than anything
else about these cases."

"What do you do next?"

"Damned if I know. There are thousands of old people in the city. Only
a few of them take this way out. I have to try to find them before
they do."

"If they're loaded, they won't say so, Mark, and there's no way of
telling them from those who are down and out."

I rubbed my pipe disgruntledly against the side of my nose to oil it.
"Ain't this a beaut of a problem? I wish I liked problems. I hate
them."

Lou had to get back on duty. I had nowhere to go and nothing to do
except worry my way through this tangle. He headed back to
Headquarters and I went over to the park and sat in the sun, warming
myself and trying to think like a senile psychotic who would rather
die of starvation than spend a few cents for food.

I didn't get anywhere, naturally. There are too many ways of beating
starvation, too many chances of being found before it's too late.

And the fresh ink, over half a century old....

* * * * *

I took to hanging around banks, hoping I'd see someone come in with an
old bankbook that had fresh ink from 50 years before. Lou was some
help there--he convinced the guards and tellers that I wasn't an
old-looking guy casing the place for a gang, and even got the tellers
to watch out for particularly dark ink in ancient bankbooks.

I stuck at it for a month, although there were a few stage calls that
didn't turn out right, and one radio and two TV parts, which did and
kept me going. I was almost glad the stage parts hadn't been given to
me; they'd have interrupted my outside work.

After a month without a thing turning up at the banks, though, I went
back to my two rooms in the theatrical hotel one night, tired and
discouraged, and I found Lou there. I expected him to give me another
talk on dropping the whole thing; he'd been doing that for a couple of
weeks now, every time we got together. I felt too low to put up an
argument. But Lou was holding back his excitement--acting like a cop,
you know, instead of projecting his feelings--and he couldn't haul me
out to his car as fast as he probably wanted me to go.

"Been trying to get in touch with you all day, Mark. Some old guy was
found wandering around, dazed and suffering from malnutrition, with
$17,000 in cash inside the lining of his jacket."

"_Alive?_" I asked, shocked right into eagerness again.