Someone to watch over me

stay with us, did you? We never would have made a suit that fit that badly.“
    “I’ve lost weight since it was made,“ Robert said, unruffled by the tough old bird. Lots of his grandfather’s old pals had gone a bit gaga in the social graces when they managed to pass their seventy-fifth birthday, and he wasn’t intimidated by bad manners in the successful elderly crowd. He’d always been pretty good at jollying them along.
    “This is our suit,“ Mr. Blackstone said, pointing at the one from the corpse. “So often people buy one, and their wives have their maids sew the label into a cheaper one when the man outgrows ours. The maids never do it right. Men tend to get heavier—and stingier—as they enter middle age. But I can tell by the way it’s stitched that we put the label in.“
    “Could you make a guess at who it belonged to?“ said Howard Walker, who never paid attention to whether suits had labels or not.
    “I don’t think so. But it wasn’t a New Yorker. We put black labels in the suits of our regularly returning local customers. This is a dark gray. That means it was a first-time buyer from elsewhere. That was before we went to all-black labels because the yokels had figured out they weren’t impressing the locals.“
    “When was the change made in the color of the labels?“ Walker asked.
    “May of 1923.“
    “So the person was alive then?”
    Mr. Blackstone cackled horribly. “We seldom have the necessary time between death and burial to make our customers a new suit. We provide quality, not speed. Though we’ve done so on rare occasions. The last time was for one of ‘your’ Vanderbilts,“ he intoned gruffly, looking at Robert, making clear that he didn’t believe his genealogical remarks.
    “Could you tell us this person’s size?“ Howard Walker asked, tired of the snobby contest being conducted by the other two men.
    “He must have been approximately five foot eleven and a quarter. Weighing—I’d guess—about two hundred seven pounds. Long-legged and short-waisted with heavy shoulders and the beginning of a paunch.“
    “Approximately five foot eleven and a quarter,“ Robert said with a chuckle.
    “That could be a lot of men,“ Walker said. “The suit very well might not have been made for the person you found wearing it,“ Mr. Blackstone said. “These days lots of clothing gets passed down to the more unfortunate.”
    The two men thanked Mr. Blackstone effusively for his opinions, snubbed the butler, and were soon back on the street with the suit in its paper bag.
    “What a waste of time!“ Walker said.
    “Not necessarily. We have an approximate date of purchase—at least a last date of purchase—and a rough idea of his physique in life. It’s more than we knew this morning.“
    “Unless Mr. Blackstone was right about the suit being a hand-me-down,“ Walker said, with a frown.
    Chapter 8
    Jack Summer arrived in Washington, D.C., on Saturday night just after eight. The weather was stifling. He caught his breath and wondered why the center of the U.S. government had been built on a swamp. What were the Founding Fathers thinking? Anywhere else would have been better. What had been wrong with Philadelphia? Even a few miles away from here there were hills where at least you might catch the occasional breeze that didn’t stink of rotting fish and sewage.
    It was the height of summer, and the air was heavy, fetid, and foul. Dragging along his battered old suitcase of clothing and his notebook, he started out from the train station and had to stop periodically just to wipe his brow with an already damp, grubby handkerchief. He checked his map at every street he passed. At least he knew where he was going, the office of Superintendent of Police Pelham Glassford.
    The office would probably be closed this late on a Saturday, but someone would be around to direct him to the men he wanted to find. He hoped that on Monday he could interview Glassford. He was a good man. He’d been in the thick of battle himself in the Great War, had welcomed the Bonus Army to Washington, and housed the first contingent in some abandoned office buildings in the city. He’d raised funds, including a generous amount of his own salary, to set the men up in what comfort he could.
    There were men in groups all over the streets, so Jack asked one who’d just given directions to someone else, “How can I find people I’m looking for here?”
    The man, who wasn’t much older than Jack