For the second time, Sammy went down to the Birch-ville City Hall to check the marriage records. It was a slim chance, but perhaps he'd missed the marriage of some man named Mortimer on the date Llona had specified. He hadn't. According to the records, the only Mortimer married on that day was Mortimer Valentine. And Mortimer Valentine's cousin Arch had already been ruled out.
Then Sammy had a hunch. It was a slim chance, but he decided to check the records for marriages which had taken place on the Sunday prior to the one Llona had mentioned. When that hunch yielded no results, Sammy skipped to the Sunday following the one on which Llona had wed George Rutherford. Now he was luckier. He got his first break. The records showed that a Mortimer Quincy had married a girl named Agnes Pflugle on that date. Sammy jotted down the pertinent data and left the marriage bureau.
The next morning, bright and early, Sammy arrived at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Mortimer Quincy. Mr. Mortimer Quincy was not at home; he was at work. Mrs. Mortimer Quincy, nee Agnes Pflugle, received Sammy in the accepted morning-wear of the suburban housewife: shapeless kimono, Martian hair-curlers, and no eyebrows.
"Agh!" Sammy gasped at the apparition which appeared in response to his ringing of the bell.
"Yes? What is it?" The skin of Agnes's face, doughy at best, now contracted pox from the sunlight streaming through the screen door.
"I'm from the census bureau." Sammy recovered himself and told her the cover story he'd made up on his way out to the Quincy residence. "We're checking some of our figures. Would you mind answering a few questions, Mrs. Quincy?"
"All right. But I was just going to take the curlers out and dry my hair. Why don't you come inside and we can talk while I'm doing that. Murder two sparrows with one pebble. Okay?"
"That will be fine." Sammy followed her through the house to the kitchen at the rear. She waved him vaguely toward the kitchen table, and he pulled out a chair and sat down there. Leaning his elbow in a pool of spilled breakfast coffee, Sammy started to ease into the "interview." "Now, Mrs. Quincy," he began. "Can you tell me-"
"Just a minute, huh? Let me get set up, and then we can start." Agnes Quincy climbed up on a stepladder and got a large box down from the top shelf of the dish closet. She opened the box and removed a contrivance that looked not unlike a centrifuge with tentacles. An electric wire and plug dangled from it. She bent over and inserted the plug in a socket at the baseboard of the wall. Then, with the wire trailing and unraveling behind her, she carried the apparatus to the table and sat down across from Sammy. She took the futuristically designed plastic bag with the elastic around the wide mouth of it and fit it over her forehead at the point where her eyebrows would have been if she'd had any eyebrows. Then she adjusted it so that it reached to the nape of her neck in back and encased every stray tendril of lank hair. The curlers pushing out the plasticized material gave it an appearance not unlike the craggy surface of the moon as it might have been photographed by an astronaut with a bad case of palsy. Attached to the top of this was something that looked like a vacuum hose. As Agnes tripped the switch, the hose roared into action, and the plastic atop her head billowed out like an empty bra cup caught in a gale while hanging on a washline. The sudden inflation made Agnes look both cerebral and other-worldly, an overall effect that lacked only a flying saucer hovering in the background to complete the picture. "I'm ready now. What do you want to know?" she said to Sammy.
"What?" He couldn't hear her over the jet-like roar of the hair-dryer.
"Fire away!" she shouted.
"Oh. Well, I just want some statistics," he answered back. "Now, your husband's job."
"I found that out right after we got married."
"I beg pardon?"
"That he was a slob."
"Who?"
"My husband. I'm agreeing with you. He's a slob."
"Not slob. Job!" Sammy shouted. "What's his job? What does he do for a living?"
"Oh! I wondered how you knew." She giggled. "He's a sock-tucker."
"He'sawhat?"
"A sock-tucker," she shouted. "He works in a factory
that manufactures men's socks. It's his job to tuck the toes in the heels and roll them before they're packed. His union classification is 'sock-tucker.' "
"Oh! I see. I thought you said-"
"Well, you've got your nerve!"
"Sorry! Sorry!" Sammy apologized hastily. "It's hard to hear you clearly with that thing going. Now, how long has your husband been tucking?"
"See here, Mister!"
"How long has he been working at his present occupation?" Sammy bellowed.
"Oh." She was mollified. "About four years."
"Did his job require much training?"
"Are you kidding? There isn't a cloud in the sky."
"Skip it!" Sammy sighed. "What about you? Did you work before you were married?"
"In a store."
"As a what?"
"Not 'as a'! 'In a'! In a store. That's where I worked before I was married. A lighting-fixture store. I sold brass."
"Your husband didn't mind about your-umm-premarital occupation?"
"Brass! BRASS!" she shouted. "BAAA-RRR-ASSS!"
"No need to be descriptive," Sammy told her. "I just want the facts, ma'am. Your working costume-or lack of it-is of no concern to this census."
Agnes shook her head with exasperation and gave up on the point. The tone for the interview had been set, and it continued in the same fashion for about twenty minutes. By then, Sammy felt that he had established a certain atmosphere of authenticity, and he got down to what he was really there to find out.
"Do you have any brothers and sisters?" He edged around to the question that would tell him what he wanted to know.
"I'm an only child. Daddy was a pastor." "Father illegitimate." Sammy made a note. "Cousins?" he asked. "Do you have any first cousins?"
"Two male, one female. All on my mother's side. None on Daddy's side. They were infertile."
"I don't care about pets," Sammy told her. He took a deep breath. "How about your husband?" he shouted. "Has he any brothers and sisters?"
"None."
"One? Which sex? Male or female?"
"Not one! None! Do you understand?"
"Perfectly. One sister in the Church." Sammy faked making another note. "Now," he got down to the nitty-gritty. "How about cousins? Does your husband have any cousins?"
"Dozens."
"That's right. Cousins. Does he have any?"
"He has dozens."
"Yes. I understand that. But how many?"
"Dozens," Agnes repeated wearily. "He has dozens of cousins!" She summoned up the energy to shout.
"Ah! I see. Dozens of cousins. Yes. Well, for the purposes of this survey, we're only interested in the cousins he may' have living in this district. How many males and how many females in the Birchville area?"
"Three males, six females."
"I'm sorry. Is it some sort of ailment that afflicts all the women in his family?"
"Not sick! Six! SIX! Six female cousins!"
"Ah. Well, now, could you just give me the names of the male cousins. For our records."
"Peter Porter, Abraham Lincoln, and-"
"I beg your pardon? That sounded like you said Abraham Lincoln," Sammy interrupted. "That damned noise-"
"I did. I did say Abraham Lincoln. That's his name. That's Mortimer's cousin's name. Abraham Lincoln. Nice
fellow, Abe. Wears a beard. Very active in civil rights. Hates the theatre, though. But then what can you expect from a rail-splitter? No culture."
"Of course." Sammy was getting a headache, and he'd only heard half of what she'd said and made very little sense out of that. "The third cousin?" he asked, pressing grittily onward. "What's his name?"
"Archer Hornsby. He's on Mortimer's mother's side. Mortimer hates him, though."
"Archer Hornsby!" Sammy had heard it through the roar of the dryer, and the instant satisfaction which filled him dispelled the headache. "Does he have a wife?" he asked.
"Does he ever! Riley should have it so good. But it isn't going to last."