I asked if she had mailboxes for rent and she nodded. I said I didn’t see them. Could she show me where they were?
“Is not a mail box,” she said, framing a box with her hands, the sides, the top and bottom. “Is a mail service.”
“How does it work?”
“You pay for the month, an’ you get a number, an’ you come in an’ tell me your number an’ I bring you your mail.”
“How much does the service cost?”
“Not so much. Fifty dollars. You pay three months in advance, you get the fourth month free.”
I flipped open my wallet and showed her a card Joe Durkin had given me. It was a Detectives Endowment Association courtesy card, and it wouldn’t keep a meter maid from tagging you for parking too close to a hydrant, but it looked official enough from a distance. “I’m interested in one of your customers,” I said. “His number is twelve-seventeen. That’s one two one seven.”
She looked at me.
“You know his name?”
She shook her head.
“You want to look it up for me?”
She thought about it, shrugged, went in the back room. When she returned her broad forehead was creased with a deep frown. I asked her what was the matter.
“No name,” she said.
I thought she couldn’t tell me, but that wasn’t it. She meant she didn’t have a name to go with the number, and I believed her. Her puzzlement over the situation was evident.
I said, “If there’s any mail for him—”
“That’s why I take so long. If there is mail for him, there is his name on it, yes? No mail for him. He come in one, two times a week. Sometimes mail, sometimes no mail.”
“And when he comes in he tells you his number.”
“Twelve-seventeen. An’ I give him his mail.”
“And when he gets a letter, is there a name on the envelope?”
“I don’t pay attention.”
“If you heard the name, would you recognize it?”
“Maybe. I don’t know.”
“Is the name David Thompson?”
“I don’t know. Is not José Jiménez. He’s Anglo, but that’s all I know.”
She excused herself, waited on another customer. She came back and said, “You buy the service, you get a number, we write your name in the book. Next to the number.”
“And there’s no name in the book next to 1217.”
“No name. Maybe he come in the first time when somebody else is working, somebody who forgets to write down the name. Is not right, but…” She shrugged, shook her head. I think it bothered her more than it did me.
I’d brought along the photo Louise gave me, and I took it out and showed it to her. Her eyes lit up.
“Yes!”
“It’s him?”
“Is him. Twelve-seventeen.”
“But you don’t know his name.”
“No.”
I gave her a card. Next time he got a letter, I told her, she should call me and read me the name off the envelope. She said she’d do that, and held my card as if it were a pearl of great price. She craned her neck, took another look at the photograph.
She said, “He do something bad, this man?”
“Not that I know of,” I said. “I just need to know who he is.”
I got home before Elaine did. She called ahead to say she was running a little late, could I put a pot of water on the stove? I did, and lit a fire under it, and it was boiling when she walked in the door. She tossed a salad and made pasta, and we left the dishes in the sink and walked down Ninth to a small off-Broadway house on Forty-second Street, where we had complimentary tickets for a staged reading of a play called Riga, about the destruction of the Latvian Jews. I knew the playwright from around the rooms, that’s why we were there, and after the curtain we congratulated him and told him how powerful it was.
“Too powerful,” he said. “Nobody wants to produce it.”
On the way home Elaine said, “Gee, I can’t imagine why anybody would pass up a chance to produce that play. Why, it just makes a person feel good all over.”
“I’m glad we saw it, though.”
“I don’t know if I am or not. I’m afraid it’s all going to happen again.”
“You don’t mean that.”
“The hell I don’t. There are whole sections of the Times I can’t read anymore. Anything with national or international news. I can manage the Arts section, except half the time the Book Review’s as bad as a news story. The Tuesday Science section’s okay, and the Wednesday one with the recipes and restaurants. I never want to go to the restaurants or try the recipes, but I can stand to read it.”
“It’s a shame you’re not interested in sports.”
“Yeah, it’d be something I could keep up on and not wind up thinking about Prozac. Does TJ read the business section?”
“I think so.”
“Maybe he’ll support us in our old age. If we have one.”
I stepped to the curb, held up a hand. A cab pulled up.
She said, “I thought we were walking. What’s the matter, don’t you feel well, baby?”
“Not well enough to walk fifty blocks.” I told the driver to go up Tenth Avenue, that we wanted Amsterdam and Ninety-third.
“Mother Blue’s?”
“I was just a few blocks from there this afternoon,” I said, “but there’s no reason to go there at that hour. At night it’s got music.”
“And Danny Boy.”