‘Hm.’ I looked at the list of names and addresses, and at my watch. ‘I think we’d better check them.’
‘I had a feeling you’d say that.’ A touch of gloom.
I smiled at him. ‘I’ll start it, if you like. Do you know where we can get good enlargements of a snapshot done quickly?’ He nodded and mentioned a name, and I gave him the negative. ‘The top left hand corner. A couple. Man and girl.’ He nodded again. ‘And there’s this handkerchief.’ I produced it. ‘Would you mind making a tour of all the offices on this floor, and perhaps the fifth as well, and finding out what everyone associates with it?’
Walt took the small white square curiously.
‘Yogi Bear,’ he said. ‘What’s the point?’
‘It belonged to a girl who may know more than she ought about Chrysalis. The girl on the negative.’
‘Find her, find the horse?’ He was half incredulous, a fraction excited.
‘Maybe.’
‘Right then,’ he said at the door. ‘See you.’
I studied the list. Snail Express had done their best. Most names had two addresses, the old and the new. All were followed by a place and a date, the depot where the trailer had been checked in after its trip. There were several telephone numbers for the eastern addresses, a few for the west.
Working stolidly down the list, with long pauses while new inhabitants went to find the new telephone numbers of the old, I said I was calling from Snail Express, wanting to know that the service had been satisfactory, or if the customers had any suggestions or complaints. I listened to more praise than criticism, and eventually checked off twenty-seven genuine hirings.
Walt came back while I was biting the end of one of his pencils and wondering what to do next. It was three o’clock. He’d added lunch to his itinerary but he carried a large white package, which he opened carefully. Six enlargements of the corner of Peter’s negative. Various sizes, from postcard to nine by seven. The faces were clearest on the smallest print, too fuzzy on the largest.
‘He says he’ll run off as many as you want by this evening, if you let him know at once.’
‘Ask him for six, then. Postcard size.’
‘OK.’ He picked up the receiver, pressed the buttons, and asked.
The boy and girl stood side by side, their heads turned slightly to the left, towards where we had sat under the sun umbrella. Their faces were calm, good-looking, and somewhat alike. The boy’s hair was darker. They were of almost the same height. The checks of the boy’s shirt stood out clearly, and one of its buttons was either undone or missing. The girl had a watch with an extra wide strap on her left wrist. She hadn’t been wearing it while she hung on to the post.
‘All-American kids,’ Walt commented. ‘So what?’
‘So how did you get on with the handkerchief?’
Walt produced it. A little limper, a little grubbier than before.
‘Fifteen Yogi Bears, ten don’t-bother-me-nows, six lewd suggestions, and one Yellowstone Park.’
‘One where?’
‘Yellowstone Park?’
‘Why Yellowstone Park?’
‘That’s where Yogi Bear lives. At least, it’s called Jellystone in the cartoons, but it’s Yellowstone really.’
‘Real live bears still in Yellowstone?’
‘Oh sure.’
‘A natural beauty spot... holiday place, isn’t it?’ I remembered vaguely.
Walt nodded.
‘With souvenirs?’ I suggested.
‘Great lot of help that would be to us.’
I agreed. It would only narrow the field down to one of the thousands who’d been to Yellowstone sometime, or one of the other thousands who knew someone who’d been to Yellowstone sometime. But I remembered a Jamaican would-be assistant to the Biological Warfare Defence Laboratory at Porton who’d been turned down because of a Russian-made bust of Castro in his bedroom. Souvenirs sometimes had their uses.
‘The handkerchief probably came from Japan. Do you have a leg-man who can check who imported it, and where it was sold over here?’
‘Leg-man?’ Walt echoed dismally. ‘That’s me.’ He put the handkerchief away in its envelope, chased up a few answers on the telephone, and heaved himself reluctantly to his feet. ‘I may as well go see a man about a Yogi, then. How’re the trailers?’
‘Twenty-seven are OK. Of the other eight, five don’t answer, and three have no telephone.’
I tried two of the non-answerers yet again. Still no reply. Walt looked through the shorter list I’d made of the unchecked.
‘They sure went all over, didn’t they?’ He said, ‘Nebraska, Kentucky, New Mexico, California, Wyoming, Colorado, Texas, and Montana. Just don’t ask me to leg it around all those places!’ He drifted out of the door and his solid footsteps diminuendoed down the passage.
I went on trying the numbers now and then. After two hours I had crossed Texas off the list, bitten the end right off Walt’s pencil and started on it an inch farther down, decided I couldn’t work many days in his rabbit hutch of an office, and wondered how Eunice was making out beside her pool.
The telephone buzzed.
Are you staying at the Biltmore again?’ Walt said.
‘Yes.’
‘Meet me in the bar there,’ he suggested. ‘I’m nearer there than to you.’
‘Sure,’ I said. ‘I’m on my way.’
Lynnie wasn’t back. I left a message at the desk for her and joined Walt. His pale blue suit looked as if it had just come out of a spin dryer and there was a damp translucent look to his skin. Repentant, I bought him a large Scotch on the rocks and waited until he had it where it would do most good. He sighed, rubbed the back of one wrist across his eyes, fished a crumpled piece of paper out of his pocket, and spread it open on the bar.
‘To start with,’ he said disgustedly, ‘it’s not Yogi Bear.’
I waited in sympathetic silence and beckoned to the barman for a refill. On the paper a list of about eight souvenir manufacturers and distributors had been crossed out, a single line through each. The top lines were neat and straight, the last three a great wild slash across the paper. Walt had had a very bad day.
‘The handkerchief came from Japan, like you said.’ He took a swallow of his second drink and began to revive. ‘Several of the firms phoned their west coast offices for me. No dice. It seems as if at least half of the souvenirs sold in the west are made in Japan, but all these Yogi Bear concessionists say that this isn’t Yogi Bear at all, it’s the wrong shaped head.’
He pulled out of the by now battered envelope a very bedraggled looking handkerchief and looked at it with loathing.
‘If it was sold at or near Yellowstone Park, it could have come from any two-bit import business. As it’s not Yogi Bear, no one will have had to pay commission to use the picture, and there isn’t any way that I know of finding who brought it into the country and who sold it to where.’
After ten seconds I suggested diffidently, ‘We could start from the other end.’
He glared at me incredulously. ‘Are you plumb nuts? You can’t mean what I think you mean.’
The rocks in my drink had melted to pebbles. I tasted the drowned whisky and put the glass back on the bar.
I said, ‘One of the Snail Express trailers was checked in at Rock Springs, Wyoming. It’s still there: they haven’t had another customer for it yet. I’ve asked them to hold it until I’ve had a look at it.’
‘Why that one? Why that one particularly?’ Walt asked. Irritation only half repressed sharpened his voice.
‘Because it’s one of the three with no phone number. Because it’s in the same state as Yellowstone. And because it gives me an itch.’
‘Yellowstone is clear across Wyoming from Rock Springs,’ he said. ‘Must be four hundred miles.’