All the Flowers Are Dying

There was a good chance, he said, that David Thompson might fly under the radar. “I have a listing in Who’s Charging What,” he said, “because it’s free, so what could it hurt? But I don’t run classifieds in Ad Age, and I don’t run ads in the direct marketing publications. I don’t think it’s worth the money, and I’m not the only one. Most of us who’ve been doing this for a while seem to feel that way. It’s almost as if we’ve stopped believing in the power of advertising, which is funny, when you think about it. I don’t belong to any trade organizations, either. The business I get is all referrals, and what kind of client is going to pick you because he saw your ad? That’s as unlikely as getting business from a listing in the Yellow Pages.”

I thanked him, and the first thing I did was something I should have done earlier. I looked for Thompson in the Yellow Pages—not the consumer book but the business-to-business edition. There was no separate listing for direct marketing copywriters, but there was a section of advertising copywriters, and I wasn’t surprised not to find David Thompson there.

I didn’t find him in the back pages of Advertising Age or Adweek, either, which were the two publications he’d mentioned that you could find on the newsstand. I bit the bullet and sat down at Elaine’s computer, and I Googled my way to some of the sites he’d mentioned.

Everybody tells me what a timesaver the Internet is, and how they can’t believe they ever got along without it. And I know what they mean, but every time I use it I wind up wondering what people did with their spare time before computers came along to suck it all up. I sat down at the damn thing in the middle of the afternoon, and I couldn’t get away from it until Elaine was putting dinner on the table.

She said she’d wanted to check her e-mail but hadn’t wanted to disturb me. I told her I’d have welcomed a disturbance, that I’d spent hours without accomplishing much of anything. “I couldn’t find the son of a bitch,” I said, “and I couldn’t find half the websites I was looking for, and I wound up Googling Peter Hochstein, don’t ask me why, and he wasn’t kidding, there really is somebody with the same name doing life in Nebraska for murder for hire. He was sentenced to death originally, and the sentence was changed on appeal, and it was a pretty interesting case, though why I spent the better part of an hour reading about it is something I’d be hard put to explain.”

“You know what I think? I think we should get a second computer.”

“That’s funny,” I said, “because what I think is we should get rid of the one we’ve got.”

New York neighborhoods rarely have sharply delineated boundaries. They’re formed by a shifting consensus of newspapermen, realtors, and local inhabitants, and it’s not always possible to say with assurance where one leaves off and the next one begins. Kips Bay, where David Thompson lived—or where the man who claimed to be David Thompson claimed to be living—is that area in the immediate vicinity of Kips Bay Plaza, a housing complex that fills the three-block area bounded by Thirtieth and Thirty-third streets and First and Second avenues. The neighborhood known as Kips Bay probably runs south from Thirty-fourth Street and east from Third Avenue. Bellevue and the NYU Medical Center take up the space between First Avenue and the FDR Drive. The southern edge of Kips Bay is hardest to pinpoint, but if you occupied an apartment at Twenty-sixth Street and Second Avenue, say, I don’t think you’d tell people you lived in Kips Bay.

The overall area was pretty small no matter how you figured it, and it didn’t take me much more time to cover it on foot than I’d spent learning next to nothing on the Internet the day before. It’s predominantly residential, with a good sprinkling of the service businesses and neighborhood restaurants that cater to local residents, and that’s where I went, showing David Thompson’s photograph in bodegas and delis, dry cleaners and newsstands. “Have you seen this fellow around?” I asked Korean greengrocers and Italian shoe repairmen. “You know this man?” I asked Dominican doormen and Greek waiters. None of them did, nor did a mail carrier in the middle of his rounds, a clerk at a copy shop, or a beat cop who started out thinking that he ought to be the one asking the questions, but who lost the attitude when he found out I’d been on the job myself, especially when it turned out I’d known his father.

“He looks like a lot of guys,” the cop said. “What’s his name?” I told him, and he shook his head and said that was a big help, wasn’t it? His own name was Danaher, and I remembered his father as a backslapping gladhander who could have doubled as a ward boss. He was living in Tucson, the son said, and playing golf every day unless it rained. “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 filament 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 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 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 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 rejects the silver tie in favor of a textured black one. Somber, he decides. You can’t go wrong with somber.