5

The post office lobby wasn’t much larger than most apartment hallways.  There were sixty boxes in all, and Box 16 required me to bend over.  I peered into the little square window.  A single letter was in there, lit from behind.  I strained to read the return address:

Darryl Alexander

PO Box 14557

Alexandria VA 22310

I stared in shock, blinking at it, as if at a mistake.  But there was no mistake.  A letter to Walter Mills from Darryl lay in Box 16.

But why?

Maybe the letter held nothing in it, I surmised.  Maybe Darryl knew I’d be trying to ID Walter, and that it would be helpful if there was a letter in the box because then I might see who Walter is.  But the return address . . . why would Darryl put his return address on the envelope?  Did he want Walter to write him back?  If so, that meant there was a note inside.

What would such a note say?

I went to the pay phone on the wall near the front door, picked it up, and then set it down again as a chill radiated out through my shoulders.  A bizarre thought flashed into my mind the same instant.  What if Darryl knew Walter?

No, that was silly.  Crazy.  That would mean Darryl was involved in this thing, whatever it was.  That would mean Tactar had . . .

Had gotten Darryl to convince me to leave town?

I looked back toward Box 16 as a second wave of icy apprehension flashed under the skin of my cheek.  What if Darryl was ‘Cindyboo?’  Because I suddenly realized that Darryl would know how to infect my computer with a virus over the Internet.  As Tactar’s computer programmer, Darryl would know how to steal and then delete all records from my office, too.  So he had access and opportunity.  But what about motive?  New baby?  Early retirement?

It seemed ludicrous, even considering it.

Yet passcodes would be no problem for Darryl, and weren’t always used, anyway.  Plus, how difficult was it to break into AOL records?  Wasn’t that impossible?  Yet Darryl claimed to have done it, with help.

With Walter Mills?

This was nuts.  I forced a chuckle from my throat at my wild train of thought, set in motion by seeing Darryl’s letter in Box 16.  But my levity wouldn’t stick, and seemed unnatural.  I tapped at the phone’s headset sharply with one index finger, looking out at Main Street.  If Darryl was in cahoots with Walter, why would he give up Mills’ name?  Wouldn’t that mean Mills didn’t exist, and that the letter in Box 16 was empty, for this reason?  Was Walter Mills only a red herring to keep me out of town, or to put me off the trail?

My chuckle blossomed into something like an open laugh.  The contrivance faded again, though, as a reflected image of myself came into focus in the front window, and that image frowned in memory.  How well did I know my car pool buddy, anyway? I wondered, with another wave of uneasy anxiety.  I’d never met Darryl’s wife in person, and I’d never been invited over for dinner.  Darryl and I had gone out for drinks on occasion, and argued over politics and Tactar S.O.P., but had Darryl ever really opened up to me on personal matters?  Then there was that odd period when Darryl became inexplicably depressed after losing a company softball game against visiting Burroughs-Wellcome during a Washington biopharmaceutical convention.  Heavy hitters at Eli Lilly eventually won the friendly tournament, in addition to FDA approval for their human recombinant insulin.  But Darryl had remained inconsolable for a month, despite my cajoling a long weekend out of Jeffers to drive Darryl up to an Orioles game.  Darryl had passed on the strip club idea after that game, but not on the drinks.  Never said what else was bothering him, either, although in the middle of one drunken stupor during that summer he’d confessed that his doctor wanted to put him on the MAO inhibitor Nardil, for his depression.  For several months afterward Darryl carried a bottle of St. Johns Wort with him everywhere, too, popping the capsules like they were Life Savers, unaware of possible side effects at the time.

Still, I’d dismissed the episode then, and soon forgot about it.  Because Darryl never seemed incapacitated by his temporary affliction, and soon thereafter proved he wasn’t on the way to becoming an alcoholic, either.  Besides, millions of Americans suffered from mild depression that had no specific, underlying cause.  And herbal antidepressants, along with SAM-e or the aminos L-Carnitine or L-Tyrosine, had become about as popular as Tylenol or Excedrin.  In any event, that was that.  Darryl went quickly back to his old self.  And our friendship—such as it was—went back to its usual rhythm of mutual, good-natured putdowns.

Until now.

At this very moment, and in this present situation, I was forced to admit to myself for the first time that I don’t know Darryl well enough to swear there was absolutely no way the man could be involved in something.  Maybe even some kind of coverup, setup or theft.  But then, who did I know well enough at Tactar to say the same thing?

Reluctantly, I rapped on the postmaster’s inner door.  A moment later the top half of the door unlatched, and the postmaster appeared in the sectioned opening.  He was a tall, skinny man with a shrunken, withered face.  Perhaps a cancer survivor maintaining a strict diet.  “Excuse me, can you help me?” I repeated, hoping for no practical joke this time.

“Yes, need stamps?”  The postmaster’s voice was high and strained.

“No, I was wondering if you can tell me where I can find boxholder sixteen.  I’ve lost Walt’s address.”

“Sorry, I can’t do that.”

The reply was matter-of-fact.  Friendly, but final.  I stared and smiled and . . . and then accepted defeat at last, moving away to check out the notices pinned up on the little bulletin board nearby.  As the office door closed and relatched, and while I tried to decide what to do next, I stared at the thin handlebar mustache that had been penciled onto the sullen face of a kidnapper from Sioux City.

The Slow Poke Diner across the street had the stained glass etching of a bird in its window.  I wasn’t up on birds, but my camera and binoculars might come in handy as an alternate cover.  The door dinged as I entered, owing to the bell bolted to the inside top of it.  Since I was early and therefore the only customer, I was almost immediately approached by a middle-aged waitress wearing the name plate EDIE.  She looked like I imagined an Edie might look, too: shoulder length curly red hair, and freckles, possessing a kind face with lots of laugh lines radiating from her startling green eyes.

“Howdy, stranger,” Edie greeted me, smiling to keep those lines flexed and healthy.  “Gonna do some bird watching, are ya?”

“Yeah,” I joked.  “Ever seen a yellow-bellied sapsucker around these parts?”  I smiled back, but saw her laugh lines retreat a bit, while her smile froze and then frayed at the edges.  Perhaps she thought I was making fun of her, which was not my intention.  After taking a seat at one of half a dozen tables in the small room, I opened the menu she handed me.  It was handwritten on notebook paper taped in a plastic holder.  “I’ll have a western omelet and coffee, please,” I decided.

Edie frowned at me.  “That’s breakfast, honey,” she scolded. “Try the other side?”

She hooked an index finger over the right side of the menu I held.  I scanned the ‘supper’ selections, then looked up into Edie’s inquisitive green eyes.  She seemed about to ask me where I was from when I said, “How about the chicken fried steak, with biscuits and gravy.”

She scribbled my order on her pad, nodding.  “And to drink?”

“Iced tea, sweetened.”  I grinned and handed the menu back to her.

“Comes unsweetened,” she informed me, “but here’s sugar, sugar.”  She touched the little chrome cage in front of me, which also held salt, pepper, Tabasco, and napkins.

“Make that Coke, then,” I told her, visualizing my attempt to make the sugar mix into a tall glass crammed with ice cubes.

“Bottle or can?”

“You don’t carry the syrup for fountain drinks?”  I waved one hand.  “Never mind.  Sorry.  Bottle.”

Edie made the note.  I glanced at her name tag again, and almost asked her right then if she knew Walter Mills.  But it occurred to me that I should probably be more careful than I’d been with Wally.  A little less obvious, at least.  If my lies got too tangled and out of hand, I might be introduced to a hanging judge before I unraveled the Mills mystery and thereby restored my shaky reputation.  Instead, I substituted, “So you get a lot of birders around here, do you, Edie?”

Edie stared at my camera and binocular cases first.  “We get a few,” she admitted.  She met my eyes, doubt forming in her own.  “You one of ‘em, are you?”

Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we . . .

“No,” I confessed, then added impulsively, “but my friend Walter Mills is.  This is his stuff.  He left it with me by mistake when he visited me in Richmond.  I’m here to return it to him, and to see where he’s moved, now.”

Edie’s expression never changed.  The name Walter Mills hadn’t registered with her.  After five long seconds she said, “What does your friend look like?”

I dodged the question with a sneeze.  “You see a lot of newcomers here, do you?”  I’d added the ‘do you’ at the last moment, trying to mimic her without being noticed.

“Not really.”  She shrugged.  “Let me give your order to Paul, sweetie.”  She turned from me, and disappeared through a squeaky swinging door.

I loved it.  She’d called me sweetie and honey and sugar, already.  And that, after we both might have appeared to be condescending.  It beat the sour glares or the robotic have-a-nice-days one got in cafes around DC, unless your first name was Senator.

When the bird clock on the wall behind me chirped five times on the hour, I began to wonder who, if anyone, would show up for dinner.  If Walter really existed, did he know what I looked like?  I had to assume that he did.  I glanced down at my buttoned dress shirt and cotton Dockers, my brown socks and Hush Puppy ripoffs.  Should I be wearing a brimmed cap?  Should I dress in Levi’s and western shirt, with boots?  Or maybe a fly fishing cap, with lots of little handmade lures stuck in the wide brim?  And dark sunglasses, waders?

My order came out to me, and as Edie placed it in front of me, I realized why the name of the place was the Slow Poke Cafe.  “You ever get busy?” I asked.

She bobbed her head, made a surprised face.  “Well, sure, you just wait and see.  Early bird gets the worm round here, since there’s jus’ Paul and me.  Come lunchtime we do the most business, though, with to-go orders.”

“Rush hour?”  I chuckled at the idea.  “So the name keeps folks from complaining?”

“You got it, hon.  And some of the old timers?  They’d linger round ‘til two or three o’clock, if they could.  Have ta shoo’em out, make room.  We don’t do as well evenings, like I said.  Jus’ get some regulars who got no wife cookin’ for ‘em.  Like you, maybe?”

She was looking at my bare ring finger.  I said, “If the food’s as good as it looks, I may be back, even from Richmond.”

“Virginia?  Got an uncle there.  Bill Polk, in Newport News.”

I nodded, then forked a tender bite of steak into my mouth.  It was more delicious than I’d hoped.  “Ummmm.”

“The secret’s in the gravy,” Edie confided.  “You jus’ need to find you a woman there in Richmond, make a wife of one knows how to cook.”

I smiled as I chewed, took a swig of Coke from the bottle, then said, “Maybe you’re right.  But then most of the women I’ve met who know how to cook are already cooking for their own families.”

Edie opened her mouth, about to share her wisdom on relationships, but she seemed to decide it would be lost on me because she shut her mouth instead, made a polite smile, and left me to enjoy my dinner.  I looked out the front window toward the post office across the street.  An old man entered over there, wearing shiny overalls held up with suspenders.  The overalls were slick with muck.  I imagined the old guy had just finished slopping his hogs, and now wanted to check on what those swine known as his creditors were demanding today, after discarding whatever hogwash his junk mail touted.  With my limited view of the postal boxes, I was positioned to see everyone who came and went over there, but I didn’t bother to lift my binoculars or ready my camera yet.  It was more likely to see Edie or Wally checking Box 16 than that old timer.

Fifteen minutes later a middle aged dark-haired woman arrived with her teenage son.  They drove up in a Jeep, and the kid ran in, holding his mother’s keys, to check a box higher than I knew 16 to be.  Five minutes later a bearded yokel in his mid-fifties pulled into the spot vacated by the Jeep.  He drove the same blue Chevy pickup I’d seen in the bay at Wally’s Shell station.  As he entered, his burnt orange Bulldog sighted me from the truck’s bed twenty yards away.  The thing looked like its last bath had been in acid.  It barked, hoarsely.  I noted the Iowa plate below the dented fender, and then went back to my own plate.  I finished off the steak and then sopped up the remains of my gravy with a final flaky biscuit that was so tasty I doubted Betty Crocker herself had ever made better.

“Another Coke there?” Edie called to me from the register where she kept boxes of mints, beef jerky, and pickled eggs floating in a jar of vinegar.

I must have been looking at the eggs as if staring at cue balls basting in urine, because Edie appeared perplexed until I shook my head and asked, “How about a cup of coffee and a slice of pie?”

“Cherry, apple, rhubarb, or lemon?”

I considered the possibility of visiting every tiny café in every tiny town in America during my retirement, and writing a book about it.  “Apple, with a scoop of vanilla ice cream if you got it,” I replied.

Edie scribbled on her pad, then called my request back to Paul somewhere behind the swinging doors.  Suddenly the front door binged, and I turned my head to see a man my own age push his way inside.  He was alone, a few inches under six feet, and had a beer gut filling out his green flannel shirt like he had a blue ribbon watermelon hidden under there.  His dark eyes were set narrow, and seemed guilty somehow, or wary.  He acknowledged me mistakenly, it seemed.  But I nodded back anyway, like a stranger to the big city who is forced to share his first subway car with a potential nut case.

“Hi there, Earl,” Edie greeted him.  “How’s Karen?”

“Doin’ just fine,” Earl announced broadly.  “How’s Paul these days?”

“Howdy Earl,” a scratchy nicotine voice croaked from the kitchen.  “Can’t stay away from my pork chops, can ya?”

“No can do,” Earl confessed loudly, then looked at me as if trying to place a face in a detective’s mugshot book.  “And who might you be?”

“He’s from Virginia,” Edie informed him.  “Richmond, Virginia.”

“That right.”  Earl’s brassy voice sounded mildly skeptical.  His thin set blueberry eyes studied me with a secret animosity I couldn’t place, as if the memory of a past cowardice with another stranger still ate at him like an ulcer.  “Looking for somebody, are ya, pal?”

“Now, Earl,” Edie said, and looked over at me as though to explain a rabid dog.  “Earl’s a bit suspicious of strangers.  Always has been.  Isn’t that right, Earl?”

Earl ignored her, dropping his level gaze to my binocular and camera cases.  “You a birder, or what?” he asked, not careful enough to keep the tin from his intonation.

From where I sat at the window I could feel his natural, underlying bent toward confrontation, his covert inclination toward domination.  I guessed him to be competitive, but shallow.  He had sixty pounds on me at least, but I knew he’d fold in the end.  I’d seen his type before.  The sports freak who’d never played the game, only watched it on ESPN.  The ugly kid who’d never been picked, and made up for it later by seeing who he might intimidate.  Strangers were easy targets, since he’d never see them again.  But there was a sense that he’d once picked the wrong man to practice his self-therapy on, too.  Maybe that man hadn’t seemed much of a threat, either.  So I looked away, and didn’t answer.

“What’s that?” Earl asked, as if I’d spoken.  “Eh?”

“Earl,” Edie warned, her usually sweet voice stern.

I smiled at the window, wondering what other voices he heard in his own head.  Edie gave Earl an iced tea, then brought me my coffee.  Homemade pie a la mode was coming right up, she assured me.  Earl gulped his tea, his eyes continuing to assess me, but I never met his gaze.  After a moment, he laughed, dismissing me.  Then he made small talk with Edie about Zion’s Pastor Felsen, and someone named June Applegate.

I stared out the window as I sipped at my coffee.  It was six o’clock now.  No one else was going into the post office this late, although there seemed to be more people on the street.  Two of them, I soon noticed with surprise, were Wally and the town Sheriff.  These two walked along the far side of Main, and the Sheriff—a pot bellied balding man—held a sheet of paper in front of him, which Wally pointed at while talking.  When they looked into the post office first, it occurred to me the sheet of paper was probably my rental agreement with Avis, once locked in the glove box of the Taurus.  Using my binoculars, I confirmed it.  As they started to cross the road, following several others who now entered the Slow Poke, I got up nervously, my heart suddenly beating faster and erratically.

“Got a restroom?” I asked Edie, interrupting her as she greeted her new customers.  She seemed surprised, not by my request, but by the number of people now entering her establishment.  She hooked a thumb toward the swinging door behind her.  “Thanks,” I said, and pushed my way through as if I couldn’t wait any longer with my spastic bladder.

I turned back just in time to glimpse a third new face entering the diner.  It was eclipsed by the door swinging back, although not before our eyes met.  The man I’d seen was fiftyish, resembling a younger Anthony Hopkins, but with hair the color and unruly consistency of corn silk.  I knew his slovenly appearance to be a disguise somehow, too.  Partly because his pale blue intelligent eyes had seemed to recognize me.

Walter Mills?

I never looked at Paul, although I knew he was watching me as I came through, heading straight toward the open bathroom door.  I had the impression, in peripheral vision, of a tall man busy at his pots, who paused to cock his head at an intruder.  The smell of meat and baked bread soon mingled with the faint odor of urine as I stood in the tiny restroom and contemplated the cracked window above me.  Should I go back and face the music, maybe reveal my hand to the man I’d come here to find?  What did my poker hand hold so far but a pair of deuces?

No, I decided.  I’d lock myself in here, let Wally and the Sheriff interrogate me through the door.  I wouldn’t be exposed in front of Hannibal Lecter.

But then I noticed that the door’s latch was broken.  It explained why the door was open.

My pulse went up tempo, like a snare drum in a Rumba band.  Panicking, I jammed a thin sliver of soap from the sink into the door frame, to keep the thing shut so that Paul wouldn’t see me climb up onto the toilet and snake my way out through the window.