“Common names make it tough. You must know his e-mail address.”
“DThomps5465 at hotmail.com. Anybody can set up a free account at Hotmail, all you have to do is go to their site and register. I have a Yahoo account, FareLady315. That’s F-A-R-E, as in subway fare, because I ride it to and from work every day.” She glanced at her watch.
“I’m all right. I live on Eighty-seventh Street, I rode down to Columbus Circle. Then I had a bagel and coffee, and then I came here, and my office is a five-minute walk from here. I’ll smoke a cigarette on the way over there, because it goes without saying we’re not allowed to smoke in the fucking office. I could keep a bottle in my desk and drink, that’d be fine, but God forbid I should smoke a cigarette. Did I mention that he smokes? David?”
“No.”
“I specified that in my ad. Not just that I smoked, but that I was looking to meet a smoker. People say they’re tolerant, but then they All the Flowers Are Dying
39
wind up waving their hand in the air, or run around opening windows.
I don’t need that. I don’t drink a day at a time, and I don’t take drugs, I won’t even take fucking Midol for cramps, so I figure I can smoke all I want, and the hell with the mayor.” She let out a sudden yelp of laughter. “Jesus, listen to me, will you? ‘Hey, Louise, why don’t you tell us how you really feel?’ The thing is, I know one of these days I’m going to quit. I don’t even like to talk about it, but one of these days when I’m good and ready it’s gonna happen. And, just my luck, it’ll most likely happen in the middle of a terrific relationship with a guy who smokes like a chimney, and the last thing he’ll want to do is quit, and his cigarettes’ll wind up driving me crazy.”
It’s a hard old world. “Does David know you’re in the program?”
“Dave, he likes to be called. And yes, that was one of the first things I told him, when we were just DThomps and FareLady. He’d said something about it’d be nice to share a bottle of wine, and I wanted to let him know that wasn’t gonna happen. He’s a light social drinker. Or at least he is when he’s around me, but that’s another thing I don’t know about him, because he could be controlling it when we’re together and knocking back the silver bullets when we’re not.” She gave me a picture, one he’d sent her that she’d downloaded and printed. It was, she assured me, a pretty good likeness. It showed the head and shoulders of a man with the forced expression most people have when trying to smile for the camera. He looked pleasant enough, with a square jaw, a neatly trimmed mustache, and a full head of dark hair. He wasn’t movie-star handsome, certainly, but he looked okay to me.
For a moment I thought she was going to ask for the photo back, but she made her decision and sat back. “I hate doing this,” she said, “but I’d hate myself more if I didn’t. I mean, you read things.”
“Yes.”
“And I’m no heiress, but I have some investments and a few dollars in the bank. I own my apartment. I’ve got something to lose, you know?” After she left I called the waiter over and got the check. She’d tried to leave a buck for her cup of coffee, but I figured I could afford to treat 40
Lawrence Block
her. She’d given me five hundred dollars as a retainer, and all she got in return was a receipt, along with an explanation of the ground rules: I wouldn’t be giving her elaborate written reports, but would let her know what I found out, and would make my inquiries in a manner designed to keep him from getting wind of their source. I’d cover my own expenses, which didn’t figure to amount to much anyway, and if I wound up putting in more time than the five hundred bucks covered, I’d let her know, and she could decide whether or not to pay it. That’s a little unstructured for some people, but she didn’t have a problem with it. Or maybe she was just in a hurry to get outside where she could smoke.
“Glad I never got the habit,” TJ said. “You a smoker, back in the day?”
“Once or twice a year,” I said, “I would drink myself into the kind of mood that led me to buy a pack of cigarettes and smoke six or eight of them one right after the other. Then I’d throw the rest of the pack away, and I wouldn’t want another for months.”
“Weird.”
“I guess.”
He laid a finger on the photo of the putative David Thompson. “You want me to see what shows up online?”
“I was hoping you would.”
“You know,” he said, “ain’t nothing I can do that you couldn’t do for yourself. Just get on Elaine’s Mac and let yourself go. You don’t even have to log on, ’cause now that she’s got the DSL line you’re logged on all the time. You just start with Google and poke around some and see where it takes you.”
“I’m always afraid I’ll break something.”
“Won’t even break a sweat, Chet. But it’s cool, I’ll take a shot at it.
What say we go over what we know about the dude.” That didn’t take long because we didn’t know much. I suggested some lines of inquiry that might lead somewhere, and we both made some notes, and he pushed back his chair and stood up. “I’d best get back to my room,” he said. “Market opened ten minutes ago.”
“You still doing okay?”
“Some days be better than others. Some days the whole market goes All the Flowers Are Dying
41
up, and you look like a genius whatever you do. ’Less you went short, in which case you look like a fool.”
I have two grown sons, Michael and Andrew. Michael and June live in Santa Cruz, California, and Andy was in Wyoming the last time I heard from him. I’m not sure of the city; he’d recently moved, but whether it was from Cheyenne to Laramie or the other way around I can’t be sure, and I don’t suppose it’s too important, because that was around Christmas and he’s probably moved again since then. I haven’t seen him in four or five years, when he flew east for his mother’s funeral. Michael’s been back once since then, on a quick business trip the summer before last, and then last year Elaine and I flew out there shortly after their second daughter was born.
Antonia, they called her. “We wanted to name her for Mom,” Michael told me, “but neither of us really liked the name Anita, and Antonia has all the same letters, plus an O and an extra N. June says that means Anita is living on.”
“Your mother would like that,” I said, wondering if it was true. I’d left the woman thirty years ago, and even then I had never been too clear on what she would or wouldn’t like.
“We were sort of hoping for a boy. To keep the name going, you know? But to tell you the truth we were both a little relieved when the sonogram indicated we were going to have a girl. And Melanie, well, she was very clear on the subject. She wanted a baby sister, period, end of story. A brother would not be an acceptable substitute.”
“They might have another, you know,” Elaine said on the flight home. “To continue the Scudder name.”
“It’s not that uncommon a name,” I told her. “Last time I looked, there were hundreds scattered all over the country. Maybe thousands, for all I know, plus a whole family of mutual funds.”
“You don’t mind not having a grandson?”
“Not at all, and I’ve got to say I think Antonia goes a lot better with Scudder than Antonio would.”
“Well,” she said, “I’ve got to agree with you there.” The point is that there’s a distance between me and my sons, and 42
Lawrence Block
geography is only a part of it. I didn’t really get to watch them become the men they are today, and I can only view their continuing evolution as from across a great divide. All of which makes TJ’s company especially gratifying. For all that I don’t know about him—like his last name, and what, if anything, the T and the J stand for—I get to see him up close and watch at point-blank range his continuing self-realization.