“And it never rains,” he said.
It rained that night, in New York if not in Tucson. I stayed in and watched a lackluster fight card on ESPN. The next day dawned cool and clear, and the city felt bright with promise. TJ and I met for breakfast and compared notes, and decided we were making the kind of progress Thomas Edison described, when he asserted that he now knew twelve thousand substances that wouldn’t make an effective fila-ment for a lightbulb. We’d established about that many ways not to find David Thompson, and I was starting to wonder if he was there to be found.
I didn’t have anything for TJ to do, so he went home to sit in front of his computer and I got home myself in time for a phone call from one All the Flowers Are Dying
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of the David Thompsons for whom I’d left a message. He was calling to let me know that he wasn’t the David Thompson I was looking for.
Then why had he bothered calling? I thanked him and rang off.
Sometime in the middle of the afternoon it occurred to me that the only hook I had for Louise’s David Thompson was his phone number, so why didn’t I use it? I couldn’t trace it, I couldn’t attach a name or address to it, but the one thing I could do was dial it and see who answered. I did, and at first no one did, and then after five rings his voice mail kicked in and a computer-generated voice invited me to leave a message. I rang off instead.
I thought I might run into Louise at a meeting that night, and when I didn’t I gave her a call. “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe I jumped the gun, hiring you when I did. I haven’t heard from the guy since. I hate it when a person dumps you and doesn’t even tell you.”
“Have you tried calling him?”
“If he’s dumping me,” she said, “I don’t want to give him the satisfaction, you know? And if he’s not, I don’t want to crowd him. I’m old-fashioned when it comes to girls calling guys.”
“Okay.”
“But screw that. If I can sic a detective on him, what’s so extreme about calling him? Hang on, Matt, I’ll get back to you.” She called back in no time at all. “No answer. Just his voice mail, and no, I didn’t leave a message. I didn’t even ask. Did you find out anything about him?”
I said I’d put in some hours on the case, but didn’t have much to show for them. I didn’t tell her how close I was to inventing the lightbulb.
“Well,” she said, “maybe you shouldn’t keep the meter running, you know? Because if I never hear from him again, the whole thing becomes academic. If I’m gonna forget about a guy, it’s not like I need to know a whole lot about him.”
I tend to relate to a case like a dog to a bone, and have been known to keep at it after a client has told me to let it go, but in this instance it was easy to stop. It might have been harder if I could have thought of 68
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something productive to do, but all I could come up with was waiting until he had a date with her and following him home afterward. I couldn’t very well do that if he never called her again.
Late the following afternoon I was at the Donnell Library on West Fifty-third, reading a book on direct marketing. It wouldn’t help me find David Thompson, but I’d grown interested enough in some aspects of the subject from what I’d encountered online to spend an hour or two skimming the subject. I walked from there to Elaine’s shop on Ninth Avenue, figuring I’d keep her company and walk her home when she closed up, but she wasn’t there.
Monica was, and had been for most of the afternoon. “I just dropped in,” she explained, “figuring we’d kill an hour with girl talk. I stopped at Starbucks for a couple of mocha lattes, and as soon as she’d finished hers she said I was an angel sent from heaven, and could I mind the store while she ran out to an auction at Tepper Galleries.
And I’ve been stuck here ever since, and one latte only goes so far, and I’ve been positively jonesing for a cup of coffee.”
“Why didn’t you lock up for fifteen minutes and go get one?”
“Because to do that, dear Matthew, one would have to have had the key, which your good wife didn’t see fit to leave with me. I’m sure there’s a spare tucked away somewhere, but I couldn’t find it. You want to hold the fort while I get us both a couple of coffees?”
“No, I’ll go. Did you say a mocha latte?”
“I did, but that was then and this is now. Get me something really disgusting, will you? Something along the lines of a caramel mocha frappuccino, so gooped up with sugar crap that you can’t taste the coffee, but with a couple of extra shots of espresso in there to kick ass.
How does that sound?”
It sounded horrible, but she was the one who was going to drink it.
I repeated the order verbatim, and the ring-nosed blond barista took it in stride. I brought it back to the shop, and we found things to talk about until Elaine breezed in, reporting a successful afternoon at the auction.
Monica’s reward for shop-sitting was a good dinner at Paris Green.
The two of them did most of the talking, with one or the other of them All the Flowers Are Dying
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periodically apologizing to me for all the girl talk. What no one talked about was Monica’s mystery man.
We put her in a cab and walked home, and as we walked in the door my cell phone rang.
It was Louise. “He called,” she said. “Late last night, very apologetic for the hour and the long silence. Busy busy busy, and he’s out of town this weekend, but we’ve got a date Monday night. It was too late to call you last night, and then today I was the one who was busy busy busy, and besides I wanted to think about it.”
“And?”
“Well, he’s evidently not dumping me after all, and I really like him, and I think what we’ve got might have a future. And there’s a point where you have to have faith, you have to be able to let go and trust somebody.”
“So you want to call off the investigation?”
“What, are you out of your mind? I just said I have to trust him, and how can I trust the son of a bitch when I don’t know for sure who he is? I called to tell you to go ahead.”
8
He’s up before the alarm rings. He showers, shaves, dresses. He’s saved a change of clothes for this day—clean underwear, a fresh white shirt. He puts on the dark gray suit he wore on his first visit to the prison, and re-jects the silver tie in favor of a textured black one. Somber, he decides.
You can’t go wrong with somber.
He checks himself in the mirror and is pleased with what he sees.
Could his mustache use a trim? He smiles at the thought, grooms the mustache with thumb and forefinger.
His shoes aren’t dirty, but they could use polishing. Is there a bootblack within fifty miles? He rather doubts it. But when he picked up the ice cream at the Circle K (and he’d bought two pints, not one, and ate them both) he’d also picked up a flat tin of Kiwi black shoe polish.
Some motel amenities include a disposable cloth for polishing your shoes, provided less for the guest’s convenience than to save the hotel’s towels. This Days Inn has been remiss, and it’s their loss. He uses a wash-cloth to apply the polish, a hand towel to buff it to a high sheen.
Before he leaves, he uses another towel to wipe surfaces he may have touched. It’s not his habit to touch things unnecessarily, and there’s not going to be anyone dusting his room for prints, but this is the sort of thing he does routinely, and why not? He’s got plenty of time, and it’s never a mistake to take precautions. Better safe than sorry.
He boots up his computer a final time, logs on, checks his e-mail. Vis-All the Flowers Are Dying
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its the several Usenet newsgroups to which he subscribes, reads a few entries. There’s been a flurry of activity in a thread dealing with the im-pending execution of Preston Applewhite, and he catches up on the new posts. He finds a few provocative observations, tucked in among the usual predictable cries of outrage from the diehard foes of capital punishment, balanced by the cheers of death penalty fans whose only regret is that the proceedings won’t be televised.