“Oh, yeah. You’re returning my call.”
“That’s right.”
“I uh… I saw your name and your picture in the paper,” she says.
Dead silence on the other end. I wonder for a moment if the line’s gone dead.
“Hello? Are you there?” I ask.
“Yeah. I’m still here,” she says. “The woman you’re defending, is she the one you told me about, the one you want Kathy Merlow to help?”
“She is. Do you know where I can find Mrs. Merlow?”
“Maybe. I might be able to help you.”
“How?”
“I can’t talk on the phone. They monitor our calls,” she says. “They keep track of the time we’re on the phone. If they catch us making personal calls ” She leaves the thought hanging, but I can hear the swift glide of the guillotine blade in its runners. The sweatshop school of management. They spend two million designing a chic logo for better image, an eagle’s head with a beak like the Sunset Limited, but still they can’t resist shoveling metric tons of psychic guano on the help.
“Can we get together? I can meet you wherever you say,” I tell her. “My office?”
“No. No I don’t want to do that. Besides, I can’t leave here during the day.”
“After work?” I say.
“I have to pick up my kids from the sitter. How about over here?”
“The post office?” I say.
“Yeah.”
“Are you sure you won’t get in trouble?”
“Mr. Haslid is off today.” For Marcie Reed trouble starts with an H. “He was the shouter on the loading dock?” I say. “Yeah. But he’s gone today.”
And the mice will play, I think. “Why not?”
“I take my lunch at one. I have forty minutes,” she says. “We can talk in Kathy’s old office.
There’s nobody in there right now.” I look at my watch. It’s nearly twelve-forty.
“Do I come to the front counter?”
“No. Don’t do that. I’ll meet you on the loading dock. One o’clock.
Gotta go now,” and she hangs up. Sarah’s run out of tokens and is grounded playing with the stick, a little blond boy eyeing the craft jealously. I pluck her out of the helicopter and make his day. I will have to cut short the date with my daughter, drop her at day care a little early. On the loading dock two mail carriers are putting letter crates into the back of little jeep-like vans. There’s no sign of Marcie Reed, so I hang back at the end of the alley. I’m about five minutes late, and I begin to wonder if she has already come and gone, or had second thoughts about talking to me. I lean against the wall of a building, one eye on my watch, the other on the loading dock. Several minutes pass and finally the door opens. It’s Marcie. I move down the alley until she sees me. She says something to one of the guys working on the dock. He stops long enough to look at her, hands on his hips. He shakes his head. As I get closer I can hear part of their conversation.
“You get caught, it’s your ass,” he says. She appears undaunted and waves me on.
“You’re late. I thought you weren’t comin’,” she says.
“I had to drop my daughter at day care.”
“I don’t have much time.” She’s carrying a sack in her hand. I assume her lunch. The two men on the dock are sizing me up, the look in their eyes, like get caught inside and you’re dead meat. “Are you sure this is all right?”
“Yeah. It’s okay, but let’s not stand out here,” she says. To Marcie okay means not getting caught. There’s the gleam of excitement in her eye. The boss is gone, time to play. I climb the dock. The looks I get from the two mail handlers tell me I am probably violating several sections of postal regulations, thoughts of the inspector upstairs with his badge and gun. “Are you sure it’s okay? There’s a coffee shop down the street. My treat,” I tell her. Last gambit to do it off-site. “It’s all right.” She looks at me, like grow some balls. Marcie strikes me as one of those impish characters, hammered all her life, always in trouble, capable of feigning great fright but never truly afraid, something from never-never land. I’m on her heels and we’re through the swinging door, the one with the big red sign on it:
AUTHORIZED
POSTAL
PERSONNEL
ONLY
. Inside is a maze of tables, canvas mail bags tied open to metal hooks, rolling dollies and carts. Maybe a dozen people, dressed in various versions of the uniform, blue-gray shirts with the postal emblem on the shoulders, jeans, and sneakers. “How old’s your kid?” she says. Small talk as we walk, under her breath. “Seven,” I whisper. I feel like some teenager sneaking onto the driving range after hours to steal balls. “Same as my boy,” she says. We are doing a circuitous course at a quick-step that seems to take us the long way, around mail carts and stacks of sorting trays, skirting any contact with other employees. I can see hands flipping letters, and midriffs as they work at tables one aisle over, the upper bodies concealed by cabinets that I assume on their side contain pigeonholes for mail or parcels being sorted. Near the front of the building Marcie stops. She’s fumbling with several keys in the lock of a door dark, mottled glass in the upper part of the frame. Stenciled on the glass the words
CUSTOMER
SERVICES
. She finds the right key, flips on the light, and we are inside, with the door closed. She finally takes a deep breath. “There, that wasn’t so bad,” she says. She turns to look at me. The excitement of a mission accomplished written in her eyes. The frizzled ends of her pigtails look like she’s stuck her finger in a light socket. Freckles on her face. If she were a little shorter, she could pass for one of Sarah’s friends. She sits in the chair on the other side of a clean desk, just a little dust on the surface of green metal, and catches her breath. I drop my attache case on a chair in the corner and slide the other chair over, in front of the door, and sit. Inside my briefcase I have a little tape recorder in case Marcie knows something and is willing to talk on tape. If not, there is a note pad. “I take it if they catch you here with me, you could lose your job?”
I say. She doesn’t answer. Instead she’s looking at me, studying me up and down, taking stock before she talks. I’m waiting for the pitch. How much is this worth? Marcie’s information market. “Is this Kathy Merlow’s office?”
She nods. “It was,” she says. “For two months and four days. Before she left.” There’s a sweater hanging on a hook on the back wall. A few directories on a bookshelf. The look of an abandoned office. “You must have got to know her in a short time?”
“Soulmates,” she says. “Kathy and I had some things in common.
Management didn’t like us,” she says. “Did she go on to another job?”
She shakes her head and continues to look at me.
“What exactly did she do?” I nod toward the stenciled letters. “What’s customer services?”
“A title.”
“That’s all?”
“That’s what they gave her. An office and a title and a paycheck,” she says. “She must have been civil service?” I say.
“Not exactly.”
“How do you get a job ”
“We don’t have time for this,” she says. “We can talk about all that later. Right now I need to know a few things. This charge against your client. I need to know whether there’s anything you can do to get her off without Kathy’s help.” The way she says this makes me wonder who’s asking the question, Marcie or Kathy Merlow? “I don’t know,” I say. “A trial is a crap shoot. This one I wouldn’t want to bet on.” Maybe she’s testing the ante, I think, trying to find out how much her information is worth. “Do you know where the Merlows are?” I say. She turns to the bag she’s been carrying. It’s on the desk. I think maybe I’m finally going to get some answers. She opens it. Takes out a package, wrapped in waxed paper. Peanut butter and jelly on white bread. “You want half?”
“No, thanks.”
“How much do you know about Kathy and her husband?”
“I know that they lived next door to the house where the murder occurred. I think they saw something that night.” She gives me a face, no confirmation. But she has told me enough already for me to put the pieces together. “Then they haven’t told you,” she says.
“Told me what? Who’s ‘they’?”
She seems mystified, like there is something manifest, an obvious item I have missed. Part of the equation. “What do you know?” I ask her.
“I know your client didn’t do it.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because I know who did it, and why.”
“Kathy Merlow told you this?”
Her expression is a stone idol, but I can read yes in her eyes.
“What did she tell you?”
“Someone was hired to do it.”
“The murder?”
She nods.
“Who hired the killer?”
“You want more, you gotta talk to her, to Kathy.”
“Fine. Tell me where she is.”
A lot of deep sighing from across the desk, nervous hands all of a sudden, fingers to the mouth. I notice that her nails are chewed to the quick. She studies me for a long moment, quiet contemplation. Then she reaches down and slides open the center desk drawer. She pulls out a small white envelope, the kind that carry little thank-you notes. I can see a penned scrawl on the outside. “I got this about a week ago,” she says. “It’s a note from Kathy.
Nobody else knows about it. I don’t think George even knows she sent it.
She wanted something she left behind. I mailed it to her yesterday. I have to have your word that if I tell you where she is, you won’t tell anyone else. You’ll talk to her yourself. You won’t send somebody else.”
I give her a face, consternation. “Depends where she is,” I say. “I’m preparing for a trial. Usually we use an investigator.” She starts to slip the envelope back into the drawer.
“Okay,” I tell her. “I’ll talk to her alone. Nobody else. But I may have to subpoena her.” She gives me a smile. “Good luck.”
There’s a rap on the glass behind my head. Cramped quarters. I look at her. She is white as a sheet, more than a little fear. She’s looking at the shadow through the glass. She silently mouths a single word:
“Haslid.”
I read her lips.
But the light is on. Whoever is outside can see us through the translucent door.
He knocks again.
She gives me a little shrug, a concession like we may as well open it up and take our licks. I do the honors. I get the door open just enough for the guy to stick his head through. It’s the mail carrier from the loading dock. I can hear her breath of relief from this side of the desk. Marcie is hyperventilating. “Goddamn it, Howard you took five years off my life.”
“Good,” he says. “Maybe you’ll get the hell out of here and go back to work.”
“What do you want?”
“Courier with a package for you.”
“For me?”
“That’s what he says.”
I get up, move the chair away from the door. Outside is a guy in another uniform dark blue, with white running shoes, a white stripe down the side of his uniform pants, a private courier. He is young, maybe late twenties, good-looking, square jaw, hair cut close like something from the military. He’s either wearing an undersized shirt or maybe he does weights in his off-hours. “Got an express packet,” he says.
“This is looking like a fucking convention.” Howard is pissed. “I’m supposed to be in charge when the man’s gone, and you put me on the spot,” he says. “Finish up and get the hell out of there. He’s not supposed to be in here.” The guy’s looking at me. “And you’re not supposed to be in that office.”
“Just a couple more minutes,” Marcie tells him. Howard is the kind who screams and yells a lot, uses profanity like it is a second language. But he lacks a command presence.
In any shouting match I suspect that infants probably throw up on his shirt and dogs lick his face. Marcie looks at the courier. “Who’s sending me a package?” she says.
“Sign here.” The deliveryman is in the middle. He just wants to do his job and run. He can’t get through the door, so he hands me the letter pack and a clipboard with the form to be signed. “She’s number eighteen.” He puts an X on the line for her signature.
The package is heavy, bowing out the seams of its cardboard container.
“And you” Howard, the postal employee, is looking at me “somebody wants to see you at the loading dock.”
“Me?”
“Is there anybody else in there?”
“Nobody knows I’m here,” I tell him.
“Good for you,” he says. “All I know is that somebody wants to talk to the guy who’s inside meeting with Marcie. Somebody knows you’re here.”
“Who is it?”
“What am I, Western Union?” he says.
Marcie’s finished with the clipboard and I hand it back. The deliveryman is gone like a shot. At a quick jog he’s headed for his van. Howard looks at him, shakes his head, a mocking grin, like he’s seen the kind before, some butt-licking hustler looking to make an impression with his employer. Howard’s civil service. Besides, he knows there isn’t a hope in hell of his owning the post office one day. I follow him out toward the loading dock. This time we take the direct route, through the center of the sorting area. Employees looking at me. Little sniggers. I can see Howard’s head shaking from behind. Like he’s running a tour-and-escort service. We get to the dock. Howard’s friend is still loading the other van.
Except for Howard and me, he is alone on the dock. “Where did he go? The guy who wanted to see me?”
Howard scratches his head, walks to the edge of the dock, and looks down the alley. Nobody. He asks the other carrier. “I dunno. Here a minute ago. Musta got tired waiting and left,” he says. He gives us the government-issue shrug. I look up the alley the other way. The courier is at the curb, standing at the open door of a vehicle, looking back over his shoulder in my direction. There’s no one else in sight, just an old lady and a vagrant walking down the sidewalk that cuts the alley at Seventh Street. “If he comes back, tell him to wait.” I’m looking at Howard. “What am I your messenger?”
“I’m going back inside. Unfinished business,” I tell him. Howard gives me the look, the face of authority, withering like blossoms in a drought. He makes no effort to stop me.
Alas, the man is not management material. I head back through the door, wondering who could have been looking for me here. I didn’t tell the office where I was going. It couldn’t be Harry. One of those nagging things, like a ringing phone in the night, with nothing but heavy breathing on the line. An annoyance. I try to put it out of my mind. As I clear the mail-sorting area, I am still filtering the sights from the loading dock, like light through a camera lens set on a quick shutter speed, fading images being processed, the man’s silhouette at the curb.