Perry Mason. Sherlock Holmes. Encyclopedia Brown. After this past weekend, I felt that my name should be mentioned along with these great figures in investigative history.

I find missing persons. Sports people. I've made a living locating long-lost athletes. Bill Walton. Dennis Eckersley. Bernard King. I found them when no one else could.

But this weekend, I outdid myself. After eons of pain-staking research and fieldwork, everything fell into place.

Take Larry Bird. I've been on this case for almost a year now. He was last seen hobbling around, complaining of having rocks in his ankles that rattled whenever he walked. He just melted into the backwoods of Indiana.

For 10 months I tried to pick up the scent, but to no avail. I heard rumors of him resurfacing last spring. Stories of a triumphant return to rescue the rudderless Celtics and steer them to a showdown with the Lakers. Dead end.

But the trail got warmer this fall. A blond guy with a funny accent was shooting hoops at Hellenic College. He dressed in green, but he wasn't that good. He couldn't be Larry.

But I had a gut feeling, you know, one of those instinctive things. I followed him to Chicago where he was trying to help Boston overcome the road jinx that plagued the team last season.

He wasn't very successful. The game was on the line. This blond guy with the drawl turned the ball over three times. I shook my head in disgust and prepared to leave, two months of research down the drain.

But with three seconds left in the game, it happened. A turnaround jumper. Stake in the heart. It was him. I knew it.

The Bird case was a challenge, but I always knew he'd be back. But I had just about given up on the McNamara case.

John McNamara was last seen leaving Fenway Park in Boston in July 1987 but he had really gone away back in October 1986. His team, the Boston Red Sox, was one strike away from winning the World Series for the first time since World War I. Then a lot of stuff happened that isn't fit to print in a Boston-area, family newspaper, and Johnny Mac was gone.

I'd had experience with this sort of thing. Back in 1979, I was hired to find Don Zimmer, the Sox manager who was ostracized for the '78 fiasco. But it took me 11 years to find him this year in Chicago, where he is now a cult hero.

This McNamara thing was tough. He's a scout for the Mariners, I was told. I was puzzled. Mariner? I looked it up in the dictionary, and found the entry "member of a clown act that generally performs on an artificial, indoor baseball field in the Pacific Northwest."

Johnny had really sunk low. A trip to Seattle proved fruitless. "You just missed him," I was told. "He took a job even worse than this one."

Worse than scouting for the Mariners? How could that be? Lesser minds would've been stumped. But I knew where he was.