We drove back to the post office in silence; there wasn’t anything that needed saying. When we got there, Thelma told Nancy to take a break. Nancy and Frank Lee went outside to talk in the sunshine. They had a long conversation as young people are prone to do. Thelma and I drank coffee, and I told her I was pretty sure she wouldn’t have to pack up and move.
When Nancy came back in, Thelma couldn’t resist making a comment. “That Frank is cuter than a spotted pup.”
Nancy gave us both an innocent, wide-eyed look. In a little girl voice she said, “Mother, if he follows me home, can I keep him?”
The next afternoon I telephoned Thelma. “See how fast you can get your inspector back up here. Tell him you’ve got a mail fraud artist who’s ripe for picking.”
She didn’t ask questions. “I’ll have him here in the morning.”
Clyde Kingston was there by nine o’clock — Albany is only three hours away by car — and we were waiting for him. Thelma told him the governor could rest easy; there’d be no more postcards. The newspapers I’d liberated from Donald Parks’s trash were piled on her desk.
I had gone by the vet’s clinic yesterday to drop them off, but one of the papers caught my eye. It was the Long Island Newsday, I’d been down there once on a case. I leafed through it, and then I saw there were other out-of-town papers. I examined a few, and then I called Thelma.
I showed Kingston some of the papers. “Mrs. Otis was right about Parks,” I said. “He’s been using the mail to cheat people. He gets his prospects by combing the obituaries for the names of the recently deceased.
“Here are Newsday and the Northshore Observer from Long Island, the Bristol Press from Connecticut, the Star-Ledger from Newark.” I opened the latter to the obit page. “Here’s a notice about a man who died in an accident. It’s been circled with a blue marking pen. That name shows up on the C.O.D. log of three weeks back. I’ll bet Parks mailed him one of his thirty dollar pieces of junk. See the pattern here?”
Clyde was getting excited. He opened another paper to the obit page; there was a name with a blue circle around it. In another he found the same thing. He grinned at us. “I wonder where...” he began, but I was ahead of him.
“Look at the top of the first page. That’s where the mailing address is always printed for copies mailed out of town.”
The Long Island papers were addressed to Donald Parks, Keene, New York. The Connecticut paper went to E’town; the Jersey paper to Keeseville. It was mailed in a brown paper sleeve that had been discarded along with the paper.
“You get the picture? Parks has these papers sent to different addresses so he doesn’t attract attention.”
“Right,” said Kingston, “and he mails his junk from different post offices so nobody gets suspicious. Pretty smart.”
“Not smart enough,” Thelma snorted. “The son of a bitch.”
Clyde was opening more papers, finding more blue circles. “Some of these obits give the street address of the deceased, some don’t. How do you suppose he gets around that?”
“The funeral home’s name is always there. He could call, say he wants to send flowers, ask for a florist. Then he cons the florist out of the address.”
“Sure, he could do that.”
“He’s got a zip code directory in his office. I saw it.”
“You went to see Parks? What were you doing there?”
“We were talking politics.”
“Sneaky,” Thelma said. “I always said you were a sneaky so-and-so.”
Clyde was frowning, ruffling his big mustache with his fingers and staring at the floor. I could guess what he was thinking. No warrant, no probable cause, an unlawful search, no case.
Casually I asked, “You want to know how I came by these papers?”
“I sure as hell do.”
“I found them. Found them in the middle of the highway. Must have fallen off a truck on its way to the landfill. Now, I couldn’t just leave them there, could I?”
Clyde was staring at me, not quite convinced. “And littering is against the law, isn’t it?” I asked blandly.
“Damn right,” Thelma said.
“It was my civic duty to stop and pick them up, wasn’t it?”
“Sure it was,” Clyde replied. “Sure it was.”
That was that. “Well now,” I said. “Do you think you have enough here to prove intent to defraud? You think you can put Parks away?”
“Just watch me,” he said. “Just watch me.”
We shook hands. “Mrs. Otis, you’ll be hearing from me,” he said to Thelma. To me he said, “Nice work, Mr. Sessions. I hope we meet again.”
I helped him tie up the newspapers and put them in his car. I knew Kingston would check the C.O.D. logs in the other post offices; maybe even get Parks’s telephone bills. I went back into Thelma’s office to finish my coffee before I went home.
Thelma stood up behind her desk. “Hank,” she said, “you remember what you did after the homecoming game our senior year, when we beat the Peru Indians?”
That was a long time ago. I didn’t remember the game or the score or the year.
“What did I do?”
“You grabbed me and kissed me.” Thelma came around the desk.
“Now it’s my turn. Hold still.”
Who Killed Lord Pacal?
by Gary Alexander
You ought not to get yourself in a jackpot for accusing someone of bumping off his own father thirteen hundred years ago.
Wouldn’t you think?
Being a reasonable person, I did. But I’ll get to that later. All that concerned me at the moment was fresh air and not doing a Humpty Dumpty number. I don’t mind admitting I’d contemplated faking an old football injury.
The stone steps looked about ten degrees steeper than vertical. Slick and smooth, they were sweating as much as me. Bare bulbs dangling from a cord provided lighting, and illumination ranged from dim yellow to Black Hole of Calcutta.
“Bricklin Bates, come on,” Darla said, waving from deep in the mouth of that thing.
She only used my full moniker when she wanted to needle me or boot me in the backside. So down I went.
The core of Palenque’s Temple of the Inscriptions was a claustrophobic sauna. It was the final resting place of Lord Sun Shield Pacal, one of the longest reigning monarchs in history. Pacal’s bones were gone, but his profile and all sorts of gingerbread were carved into the sarcophagus lid suspended two feet above his tomb in a cramped, vaulted crypt. The limestone slab must have outweighed a Buick. The crummy light flickered, giving the chamber the appearance of a fly-by-night paint job.
Once outside, where I couldn’t get to quick enough, Darla noted that my butt was dragging and cut me some slack. She said we could do the full tour of the ruin tomorrow. It was late anyhow, and we hadn’t checked into our hotel yet. We’d been in four airports today and had driven a hundred and fifty harum-scarum klicks in a rental car from Villahermosa to Palenque, beelining it to the Temple of the Inscriptions.
Darla said it was the highlight of Palenque and that Palenque was the highlight of Mexico. This was like having your dessert first, at least from her viewpoint.
We’d compromised on our Mexican trip, which is to say she won and I lost. My druthers was Cancun and two weeks of bobbing around a pool bar clutching a cold Corona as a life preserver while my balding scalp roasted. Darla said Cancun was an aberration, the total antithesis of Yucatan Mexico, whatever that meant. Some of Darla’s words are bigger than my paragraphs.