I hadn’t planned to spend the day in the post office, but the postal inspector Thelma had been expecting turned up early in the afternoon and we sat around in Thelma’s tiny office. Clyde Kingston wore a suit and tie, which immediately marked him as a stranger in town. He was heavyset with retreating dark hair and a large bushy mustache. Thelma explained briefly who I was and why I was there.
Inspector Kingston had a “been there, done that” attitude; I suppose it comes with the territory. After all, the Postal Inspection Service is the oldest law enforcement agency in the country, even if most people have never heard of it. He wasn’t very impressed with the vandalism. He dismissed the series of pranks as strictly a local matter.
The postcards were something else altogether.
“Got another one,” he said, and handed Thelma a card. She read it and handed it to me.
SAVE TAX DOLLARS! WHO NEEDS A POST OFFICE IN LITTLE OLD FOUNTAIN?
“Same old thing,” she said.
Kingston shook his head. “Worse. He sent this little bullet to the governor and both state senators.”
Thelma stared at him. “The hell you say!” She looked at me. “This is serious. Big time.”
Her pen pal could send the postal department all the cards he wanted to; that was in the family. But adding governors and senators made it a political issue. And bureaucracy being what it is, Thelma was automatically on the hot seat.
Nobody said anything for a minute. I looked at Kingston. “Did your lab boys get anything off the cards?”
He shook his head. “Damn little. No fingerprints. No way to trace the cards, they’re even sold in vending machines now. We think he used a Smith Corona Model 600. A top-of-the-line machine but not an office model. And he can type; no strikeovers, no erasures.”
“No help,” I said.
Kingston turned to Thelma. “I’m not in the real estate section, but I looked up your lease. I see it’s due for renewal next month.” He consulted a small notebook. “How do you get along with Mrs. Lucinda Peaselee? You think she might be doing this?”
Thelma shook her head.
“Not her style. She’s an in-your-face old broad. If she doesn’t want to renew the lease, she’ll spit in Albany’s face. She might want to offer the building to a new convenience store that’s sniffing around town. Maybe she thinks she can get more money from them.”
Thelma’s temper was taking hold. “If she’s holding us up for money, give her the goddamn building and find me another spot. I started out as a clerk when the post office was in a hardware store. I sold more horseshoes than stamps, and I’ll be selling stamps long after Lucy Peaselee’s gone to...”
“Sure, sure,” Kingston said. “We’ll just move the office if we have to.”
That was the end of that. I never doubted that Fountain would continue to have postal service, no matter how tiny a town it was. In your really small towns the post office is a social and cultural center as well as a link to the federal government. It goes back to 1737 when the British colonial authorities appointed Ben Franklin postmaster. Pretty soon he had a network of seventy-five little offices throughout the colonies, all on the same wavelength.
But we still had somebody out there, trying to make trouble with a handful of postcards.
Inspector Kingston shot a look at his watch to remind us that his time was limited. He asked Thelma, “What about this mail fraud scheme you think you have here in Fountain?”
“It’s the dead man operation.” Thelma reached for a clipboard hanging on the wall. “We’ve got a guy out here on Route 10 who runs a wooden toy company. Cheap souvenirs. He comes in three or four times a month and sends a package collect. Twenty-nine ninety-five, plus charges.” She tapped the clipboard. “All here in the log.”
She took a small package from a shelf and handed it to Kingston. “This one came in this morning; going out on the truck tonight.”
The agent passed the package over to me. It was about the size of the box a book club uses and weighed only a few ounces. It had a colorful mailing label, UNCLE BOB’S WOODWORKING SHOP, decorated with a cartoon bird on one side and a grinning squirrel on the other. It was addressed to a man in Bethpage, Long Island.
Kingston looked a bit puzzled. “Most small toy companies do business by mail order, Mrs. Otis,” he said. “Of course, most of it is prepaid.”
“I know that,” Thelma shot back, “hut this outfit gets damn little mail.”
She rapped the package with her finger.
“I’ll bet a month’s pay this Mr. Whoever is dead. And that he died last week.”
There was nothing Kingston could say to that. He tried to be reasonable. “I’ll take a copy of your C.O.D. log and check all the offices for complaints. You may be right,” he said diplomatically; “you may have a fraud artist around here. These crooks love small towns. They think they can get away with what they’re doing because nobody will notice.” Thelma bristled at that. “But that’s certainly not true here in your office, Mrs. Otis,” he added hastily.
When I was on duty, I spent most of my time trying to nail the scum who peddled dope to school children, but I know how this scam works.
The operator gets the name of a deceased person from the obituary section of a paper. He picks someone who died suddenly in a hospital or in an accident, never from a long illness. He wants someone with a large family with grandchildren. He puts a high price on some cheap gift and mails it C.O.D.
Naturally the family’s upset, and they think the package is something Grandpa or Grandma ordered, maybe something for the grandchildren. So they accept it and pay the charges. The operator walks away with the money. If the family does refuse the package and files a complaint, the operator says it was a shipping error or whatever and hands back the money. This rarely happens. It’s an old scam. Probably the Pony Express delivered something for a guy in Boot Hill who never ordered it.
“What do you know about this Uncle Bob person?” the agent asked Thelma.
“His name is Donald Parks. He bought the Uncle Bob business a year or so ago. Located about four miles out on Route 10 toward Keene. I think he and his wife moved here from Ohio.”
Kingston shook his head. “We’ll have to wait for a complaint.”
I hated the idea of somebody’s being conned out of thirty dollars for a little piece of plywood. “Outside of a complaint,” I asked him, “what would you need to stop this guy?”
“We would have to prove intent to defraud.”
I picked up the package and took a penknife out of my pocket.
“Let’s open it,” I suggested, “Maybe there’s a note or something.”
Thelma leaned forward. “I can’t hear a word you’re saying.”
Kingston held up his hand. “I can’t let you do that, Mr. Sessions,” he said sternly. “I would have to arrest you for interfering with the mail.”
I knew he meant it. I dropped the package and sat back. The mail must go through. Play by the rules even if it means another thirty bucks for Uncle Bob.
I think Thelma was disappointed that I backed down.
I wasn’t really surprised to see Trooper Lee at the counter talking to Nancy, conferring about the case no doubt.
“We were just talking about those postcards,” he said when I came up. “If this person thought his message was so important, why did he use a postcard instead of a first class letter?”
“Maybe for more visibility, more exposure,” Nancy said. “Everybody reads postcards no matter who they’re addressed to.”
“Or maybe he thinks a postcard is more democratic,” Frank said, “but in that case he would put his name on the message.”