Выбрать главу

“You got my message?”

“About the name Jerry Tobin. Yes. My friend is on a sabbatical, but the graduate student who works for him had your letter here for me. I would say it helps confirm what we already suspected.”

“I agree.”

“Travis, I selected the seven most likely years, making the best possible estimate of the man’s age. I found that the Office of the Director of Development and Endowment has a library facility, and they were kind enough to provide me with adequate space and access to their complete collection of yearbooks, from the university facility here and also from the branches in Arlington, Dallas, and El Paso. They also have yearbooks from every other facility in the state. So I can state that the man did not graduate from any division of the University of Texas, or from Texas Christian in Fort Worth, Texas Tech in Lubbock, Texas Wesleyan in Fort Worth, Texas Southern in Houston, Texas Eastern in Tyler, Texas Lutheran in Seguin, Texas A and I at Kingsville, Texas A and M at College Station and Prairie View, East Texas Baptist at Marshall, East Texas State at Commerce, North Texas State at Denton, or West Texas State at Canyon. Or the University of Dallas at Irving.”

“Did you-”

“Let me finish. I found lots of people named Lawrence and lots of people named Tobin. I could not match them up in any productive way. I made the assumption that he may have attended without graduating, so I have been poring over the group photographs in all the yearbooks, one hundred and twenty-five, to be precise. One from East Texas Baptist, an unlikely place and an unlikely year, was missing. If it is possible to wear out a rather large magnifying glass, I have done so. I have had the picture of the man at hand to constantly refresh my memory. Have you ever realized how much most young men look like one another? Just as we, I suppose, look rather alike to them. I have made some reference notes as to certain possibles. Such and such an institution, yearbook for such and such a year, page fifty-six, football squad, second row from rear, fifth fellow from the left. There are about fifteen possibles, and I want to go back to them once I have gotten some transparent plastic for overlays, and a grease pencil to add facial hair in the same pattern as the possibles. I don’t expect to be able to eliminate them all. Whatever number is left out of the fifteen, I will assemble vital statistics for each.”

“That sounds like a lot of drudgery.”

“It is, it is. Research is part of my basic training. The accumulation of facts. One expects it to be dull. When enough facts are assembled, a conclusion can be drawn. That’s the interesting part.”

“Have we got a choice of conclusions?”

“I will find him, and we will learn who he really is, or was. I will not find him and we can conclude he did not graduate from a Texas institution and probably did not attend one or, if he did, was inactive in extracurricular activities.”

“You find that exciting?”

“Interesting, I said. My impression of him was that he had some education. A smattering. About what you’d get if you graduated from a state university after attending on an athletic scholarship, or if you had gone to one of the technical schools.”

“How soon will you be done?”

“I might finish up tomorrow. I would be done by now if they’d let me work evenings. But they close up at five, lock the doors, and set the alarms.”

“Makes for long evenings.”

“Travis, I have learned a very curious thing about television. The sponsors seem to be paying advertising agencies to create commercial spots which criticize competing products. The Lincoln is better than the Cadillac. California Cellars is better than Gallo or Inglenook or Almaden. Headache remedies, stomach acid remedies, deodorants-all of them are claiming to be better or stronger or more lasting.”

“So?”

I heard the little sniffing sound he makes when he is impatient at not being understood. “Travis, as an economist with a reasonable grasp on reality, I can tell you that the manufacturers who permit such obvious nonsense are guilty of monumental stupidity. One expects a kind of fumbling inanity from advertising account executives, but not from the men who are paying the bills.”

“I’m not following.”

“Merchants from the days of prehistory have known that the practice of knocking the product or service of the competition is self-defeating. When Jones, Smith, and Brown own stores on Main Street, and each tells customers that the other two merchants are thieves, within a reasonable period of time it will occur to the customers that all three are selling inferior goods and performing inferior services, and so their businesses will inevitably decline. And, on television, the average consumer pays so little attention to commercials, I would suspect that when a competing product is mentioned by name, it is lodged as firmly in the consciousness as the name being advertised. I am sorry to bring it up, but I am appalled at such expensive stupidity. It could only occur in a culture based upon administration by consensus, by committee. One can express resentment only by never buying a product which is held up as being better than another competing product. If enough of us would do that… Forgive the digression. What about Hack’s boat?”

“I walked down and took a look. It isn’t back in the slip yet. I asked around and they said it was still at the yard.”

“How’s Anne?”

“Just fine and dandy.”

“Is something wrong?”

“I said fine and dandy. What’s wrong with that?”

“A forced blitheness. A hollow cheer.”

“She’s going to be offered a better job, she thinks. Running a much bigger complex in Hawaii.”

“And if it is offered, she’ll take it.”

“Yes.”

“Hence the hollow cheer?”

“I guess so.”

“I plan to catch a midday flight back to Houston Saturday. Would it be convenient for you to-”

“I’ll be there in the afternoon, and see you at the apartment.”

“Find out when your flight will be in and call me back, and we can probably meet at the airport.”

By four o’clock on an almost bearable Saturday afternoon, we were back in the apartment. The interior air smelled hot, stale, and lifeless. Meyer turned on the air conditioning. The emptiness of the place was a further confirmation of the death of the niece. There was a collection of small pottery cats on a bookshelf, a closet still packed with her clothes.

Meyer had bought himself a shirt in Austin. Gray, in a western cut, with short sleeves and pearl buttons. His black pelt curled up out of the open neck. He sat and read the Xerox copy of the clipping about the death of Miss Doris Eagle.

“No doubt of its being the same man?” he asked.

“None. It really hit Eagle very hard.”

“And so that man is out there somewhere,” Meyer said, with an all-inclusive wave of his arm. “Eating, sleeping, washing his hands, thinking his thoughts, remembering his women. Let me show you what I’ve got.”

He had narrowed it down to four faces and had photocopies of the groups in which they appeared. “I tried to get the original negatives,” he said, “but because yearbooks are not reordered or reprinted, after the press run the artwork and photographic work and dummy pages are discarded. I’ve circled the possibles in red grease pencil. Look at them through the glass. You have to think of them as be mg Evan Lawrence, twenty years earlier. These seem to match the coloring, shape of the head, placement of the ears and eyes.”

I looked at the four. A baseball squad, an intramural track team, members of the theatrical club, and the members of a fraternity. I looked up at Meyer standing over me. “These could all be the same person.”

He handed me four file cards. Warren W Wyatt from Lubbock, Cody T. W Pittler from Eagle Pass, Coy Lee Rodefer from Corpus Christi, and B. J. Broome from Waco.