ventory. “The nice thing about all that theatrical training,” she said, “is that she speaks distinctly and with expression, and you can sit in the last row and hear every word. Unfortunately, every word is me me me.” Rachel said she looked familiar, and maybe she’d seen her in something. Abie said she didn’t look familiar to him, and that was odd, because he never missed a Rolaids commercial.
“She said she had two lines,” Rachel said, “but maybe it was a voice-over, and she wasn’t on camera at all.” It was hard to tell if she was taking him literally or matching his irony with her own.
I didn’t get around to turning on my cell phone until I was back home, and there was a voice mail message waiting for me. A voice I hadn’t heard before said, “Hey, thanks, man. Here’s the address.” I wrote it down: 755 Amsterdam #1217, New York NY 10025. “Don‘t forget the suite number,” he said, “or it won’t get here. That’s probably what happened the last time.”
In Manhattan, the numbered streets run east and west, and the numbers start at Fifth Avenue. If you know the house number, you can readily tell what avenues it lies between.
The avenues run north and south, and each one has a different numbering system, depending where it starts. But there’s a key, printed in street maps and pocket atlases, and to be found in most edi-tions of the White and Yellow Pages. There are slight variations for certain thoroughfares, but the basic idea is that you take the address, drop the last digit, divide the result by two, add the particular number listed for that particular avenue, and the result is the nearest cross street.
Some realtor had had the table printed on a wallet-sized plastic card, and it was a better giveaway than a calendar, because I’d had mine five years now and used it all the time. The realtor wouldn’t get much business from me, nothing was going to move us from the Parc Vendome, but she had my thanks, whatever that was worth.
And I in turn had the knowledge that the address I had for David Thompson was a block or two north of Ninety-sixth Street. That was a 104
Lawrence Block
little more than a half mile from the corner of West End and Eighty-eighth, and a whole lot farther from Kips Bay.
I got there on the subway, walked a block east from Broadway, and found 755 Amsterdam where Amalia Ferrante’s card said it should be, right in the middle of the block between Ninety-seventh and Ninety-eighth. The building was a five-story tenement, not yet noticeably affected by gentrification, but something was wrong, because even if they’d chopped it up into a rabbit warren over the years, there was no way there could be an apartment numbered 1217.
Maybe it was Thompson’s idea of a code; when an envelope came with #1217 on it, he’d know it was from the man who’d called him. But that didn’t make sense either.
I went into the vestibule and looked at the row of buzzers. There were sixteen, which worked out to four to a floor for floors two through five, with the ground floor given over to a store. Nine or ten of the sixteen had a name in the slot provided for that purpose. The rest were empty. I checked the names, and most were Hispanic. None was Thompson.
I went outside again and took a look at the store on the ground floor.
It wasn’t terribly inviting, with the merchandise on display faded by time or bleached by the sun, but it tried to make up for that by offering everything a marginal neighborhood could require—check cashing, passport photos, notary public, hardware and housewares, umbrellas, shoe polish, Pampers, and assorted snacks. Three neon beer signs, one for a brand they’d stopped making ten years ago, shared window space with a Cafe Bustelo poster. There was so much going on that it took me a while to notice the only relevant item in the window, a yellowing sheet of paper with the hand-lettered inscription private mailboxes available.
The inside of the store was about what you’d expect. I didn’t see any mailboxes, and wondered where all twelve hundred and seventeen of them could be hiding. A woman behind the counter, with a stocky build and hair like black Brillo, was keeping an eye on me. I don’t know what she thought I could possibly want to steal.
All the Flowers Are Dying
105
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.
