“That’s nice,” his father said. “Perhaps you would like to visit the main post office some day next week. I go there frequently to check on shipments, and it might help your report to see something of the duties that are performed there.”
“I think I have enough information,” Charley said. “But thank you anyhow. Mrs. Lansdale helped me with the hard part already.”
Driving to his business headquarters the next day Mr. Burton kept finding a nagging thought poking at his mind. He couldn’t quite get a handle on it, but in time he would. Funny about Charley, he thought. Making a report on the postal system. Well, it was probably just as well that the boy didn’t need to go to the post office for a tour. The post office would be a very busy place for the next several days while Mr. Burton’s fellow workers tried to trace that envelope. Strange the way that material had disappeared and then turned up again. It wasn’t important material, but it could have been. He would have to be more careful, would have to do more of his work at his company’s headquarters and less of his work at home. Security would have to be shored up. He would have to try harder. He would have to go deeper undercover to look more like an ordinary businessman. It was back to the old rigid rules again. He shook his head in irritation as he passed the signpost bearing an arrow and the words LANGLEY AIR FORCE BASE. AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.
A vision of Charley’s puzzled face came to him as he pulled into his usual parking space. Poor kid, he thought. What a shame to see him so confused about things. But he was much too young to talk to about, well, spies and such. The little guy wouldn’t even understand what the word undercover meant. Well, thank goodness the boy didn’t have to worry about such things. It must be easy being a fourth grader, Mr. Burton thought. It would be so easy going through life without any worries at all.
Out the Window
by Lawrence Block
There was nothing special about her last day. She seemed a little jittery, preoccupied with something or with nothing at all. But this was nothing new for Paula.
She was never much of a waitress in the three months she spent at Armstrong’s. She’d forget orders and mix up others, and when you wanted the check or another round of drinks, you could go crazy trying to attract her attention. There were days when she walked through her shift like a ghost through walls, and it was as though she had perfected some arcane technique of astral projection, sending her mind out for a walk while her long lean body went on serving food and drinks and wiping down empty tables.
She did make an effort, though. She tried. She could always manage a smile. Sometimes it was the brave smile of the walking wounded and other times it was a tight-jawed brittle grin with a few tabs of amphetamine behind it, but you take what you can to get through the days and any smile is better than none at all. She knew most of Armstrong’s regulars by name and her greeting always made you feel as though you’d come home. When that’s all the home you have, you tend to appreciate that sort of thing.
And if the career wasn’t perfect for her, well, it certainly hadn’t been what she’d had in mind when she came to New York in the first place. You no more set out to be a waitress in a Ninth Avenue gin mill than you intentionally become an ex-cop coasting through the months on bourbon and coffee. We have that sort of greatness thrust upon us. When you’re as young as Paula Wittlauer you hang in there, knowing things are going to get better. When you’re my age you just hope they don’t get too much worse.
She worked the early shift, noon to eight, Tuesday through Saturday. Trina came on at six so there were two girls on the floor during the dinner rush. At eight Paula would go wherever she went and Trina would keep on bringing cups of coffee and glasses of bourbon for another six hours or so.
Paula’s last day was a Thursday in late September. The heat of the summer was starting to break up. There was a cooling rain that morning and the sun never did show its face. I wandered in around four in the afternoon with a copy of the Post and read through it while I had my first drink of the day. At eight o’clock I was talking with a couple of nurses from Roosevelt Hospital who wanted to grouse about a resident surgeon with a Messiah complex. I was making sympathetic noises when Paula swept past our table and told me to have a good evening.
I said, “You too, kid.” Did I look up? Did we smile at each other? Hell, I don’t remember.
“See you tomorrow, Matt.”
“Right,” I said. “God willing.”
But He evidently wasn’t. Around three Justin closed up and I went around the block to my hotel. It didn’t take long for the coffee and bourbon to cancel each other out. I got into bed and slept.
My hotel is on 57th Street between Eighth and Ninth. It’s on the uptown side of the block, and my window is on the street side looking south. I can see the World Trade Center at the tip of Manhattan from my window.
I can also see Paula’s building. It’s on the other side of 57th Street a hundred yards or so to the east, a towering highrise that, had it been directly across from me, would have blocked my view of the Trade Center.
She lived on the seventeenth floor. Sometime after four she went out a high window. She swung out past the sidewalk and landed in the street a few feet from the curb, between a couple of parked cars.
In high school physics they teach you that falling bodies accelerate at a speed of thirty-two feet per second per second. So she would have fallen thirty-two feet in the first second, another sixty-four feet the next second, then ninety-six feet in the third. Since she fell something like two hundred feet, I don’t suppose she could have spent more than four seconds in the actual act of falling.
I got up around ten thirty. When I stopped at the desk for my mail, Vinnie told me they’d had a jumper across the street during the night. “A dame,” he said, which is a word you don’t hear much any more. “She went out without a stitch on. You could catch your death that way.”
I looked at him.
“Landed in the street, just missed somebody’s Caddy. How’d you like to find something like that for a hood ornament? I wonder if your insurance would cover that — what do you call it, act of God?” He came out from behind the desk and walked with me to the door. “Over there,” he said, pointing. “Where the florist’s van is where she flopped. Nothing to see anyway. By the time I came on duty there wasn’t a trace left.”
“Who was she?”
“Who knows?”
I had things to do that morning, and as I did them I thought from time to time of the jumper. They’re not that rare and they usually do the deed in the hours before dawn. They say it’s always darkest then.
Sometime in the early afternoon I was passing Armstrong’s and stopped in for a short one. I stood at the bar and looked around to say hello to Paula but she wasn’t there. A doughy redhead named Rita was taking her shift.
Dean was behind the bar. I asked him where Paula was. “She skipping school today?”
“You didn’t hear?”
“Jimmy fired her?”
He shook his head, and before I could venture any further guesses he told me.
I drank my drink. I had an appointment to see somebody about something, but suddenly it ceased to seem important. I put a dime in the phone and cancelled my appointment and came back and had another drink. My hand was trembling slightly when I picked up the glass. It was a little steadier when I set it down.
I crossed Ninth Avenue and sat in St. Paul’s for awhile. Ten, twenty minutes, something like that. I lit a candle for Paula and a few other candles for a few other corpses, and I sat and thought about life and death and high windows. Around the time I left the police force I discovered that churches were very good places for thinking about that sort of thing.