Instead I was looking at the red and blue vest of a white man even taller than I. He had a bald head and not much facial hair. His skin was the color of yellowing ivory, and his eyes were a luminous gray — like a mist-filled valley at dawn.
“Mr. Vaness?” the stranger asked, in a magnificent tenor voice.
“Yes?”
“My name is Harding, Lance Harding. I am here representing the last wish of Seth Vaness.”
“What?”
“I work for a small firm called Final Request Co. We execute the last wishes of clients who have passed on.”
“You’re a lawyer?”
I looked the slender tenor up and down. He had on a nice suit, but it was reddish brown, not a lawyer’s color in my estimation.
“No, Mr. Vaness. We at FRC don’t execute wills. Our job is to deliver messages from the dead.” He smiled after the last word, giving me a slight chill.
“Uh-huh. You use a Ouija board or somethin’?”
“We are engaged by the deceased before their demise.”
“My brother hired you to give me a message after he was dead?”
Harding smiled and nodded.
“He died six and a half months ago,” I said. “What took you so long?”
“His wish was for us to execute his desire not less than half a year after his demise.”
“Is this some kinda legal thing?”
“It is a simple agreement between FRC and your brother,” Lance Harding said, maintaining an aura of imperturbable patience. “Often individuals wish to pass on knowledge outside of the rubric of wills and other legal formats. Some leave a spoken message, others might wish to pass along a note or a small package.”
“Seth didn’t have much,” I said. “He couldn’t have anything to hide.”
“We all have something to hide, Mr. Vaness. Either that or something is hidden from us.”
“So you’re—”
“May I come in?” Harding asked, cutting off my question.
“Oh,” I said.
“Is this a bad time?”
“No, no it’s OK, I just...”
“I came by on Wednesday, but you weren’t here,” Harding said. “Your neighbor, Mrs. Henley, told me that you were at work.”
“You talked to Rose?”
“May I come in?”
My house was untidy, to say the least. When I have a girlfriend, I usually pick up and air out my little place at least once a week, but I lose the drive when I’m unattached. As a rule, the mess doesn’t bother me unless I have unexpected guests.
Harding didn’t seem put off by the clutter. I moved a small stack of old comic books from a chair next to the one I had been sitting in and gestured for him to take it.
“The Fantastic Four,” he said, looking at the topmost magazine as I set the stack on the table next to him.
“They were my father’s,” I said. “I have one through twelve. Know anybody who might want to buy them?”
“Your blood father?” he asked. “Patrick Hand?”
I nodded, wondering how he knew my real father’s name.
He flipped through the issues, smiling slightly. Harding was maybe ten years older than I. That would have made him about fifty.
“Not in mint or near-mint condition,” he said. “That makes them nearly worthless. At any rate, these books call up your father from across the pale. That’s a connection that money can’t buy.”
“How do you know my father’s dead?”
“Both of your fathers,” he said. “Patrick, who sired you, and Norland, who married your mother and adopted her three children.”
“How do you know all that?”
“They were Seth’s fathers too.”
“Oh... yeah. That’s why you’re here.”
“Shall we begin?”
“It’s funny that you came here just now,” I said. “I mean, not funny, but... I was just writing to my sister—”
“Angeline Vaness-Brownley,” Lance Harding of the FRC interjected. “She lives in Cambridge with her husband, Ivan Brownley, the union organizer.”
“Wha’? Oh, right, Seth’s sister too. How much do you know about us?”
“About you, particularly, we know that you have never been charged with, much less convicted of, a crime and that most of your adult life you were either employed or at college. You have three years matriculation at Cal State. Your concentration was in history, but you dropped out and began to work for various businesses. You’ve never been married, but you were once engaged to a woman named Irene Littleton.”
“Seth told you all that?”
“No.”
“Then where’d you get it?”
Harding’s face was oblong and a little larger than even his tall frame might predict. For the most part his expression was tranquil, but my question teased out a mild frown.
“I am here at your brother’s request,” he said.
“But you know all this shit about me, and he didn’t tell you. So I’d like to know where you got it.”
“Nora Dunbar,” he replied, his face once again at peace.
“Who?”
“She is the statistical and research analyst at our firm. When a client engages our services, Miss Dunbar does a background check on the client and the recipient of the message or package.”
“Why?”
Harding sighed and then said, “Suppose the message that someone wished to pass on was a name and an address. If the recipient was a known killer, or maybe someone who had a grudge against a person with the name we were being asked to deliver, we would refuse the job. We are not bound by fealty to the state, but we are a moral corporation.”
“So you wanted to make sure that I wasn’t a hit man or a stalker or somethin’?”
“Quite right.”
“But you figured that I was a good bet and that you could deliver your message without messin’ anything up.”
The great sculpted face smiled and bobbed.
“You got a sliding scale you charge?” I asked. I realized that I wasn’t eager to obtain information passed on to me across the border of death.
“We charge five thousand dollars, plus expenses, for every message a client wishes to charge us with.”
“Expenses?”
Lance Harding smiled and seemed to relax a bit. He gave the impression of having surrendered to my fear of his charge.
“Once we were engaged by a woman to deliver an apple pie she’d baked to the man she loved but never married,” he said. “In order to keep the pie in fair condition we had to freeze it. The accommodations were made, and she was charged accordingly.”
“So, Seth paid five thousand dollars for you to deliver this message to me?”
“That is the fee all clients are charged,” he said, “plus expenses.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Three reasons. First, I can’t see Seth payin’ that kinda money, when he coulda sent a letter to my sister or our mother to give me after he died. Secondly, I can’t see Seth spendin’ that kinda money on me — period. And third, traveling all over the country and the world makin’ these kinda visits would cost a lot more than five thousand dollars.”
I would have talked all day long to keep this man, the most official man I had ever met, from discharging his message.
“As to your first two arguments — we question our clients, but never their money, once they’ve passed our qualification test. Your third dispute would make sense if the FRC didn’t have regions of responsibility divided among its various agents. My area is California. You asked why I’m late delivering this message. That is because I was in central and northern California for the last two weeks. We would like to have delivered this communication exactly at the six-month mark, but the wording of your brother’s last request allowed me some leeway: ‘not less than six months after my demise.’”