night of staring out the window.
Guess what? The Towers aren’t coming back, and neither is Monica.”
“No.”
“It’s not a dream. Waking up won’t fix it.”
“No.”
“It’s gonna take time. It’s what, twenty-four hours since we heard? If I was all better I’d be disgusted with myself. Time takes time, isn’t that what they say?”
“That’s what they say.”
“I wish I could take a pill and wake up six months from now. Except I’d still feel the same way, because I wouldn’t have spent those six months dealing with it. Anyway, nobody’s invented a six-month pill yet.”
“Not that I’ve heard of.”
“They’ve got a permanent pill. You take it and you don’t wake up at all. I’m not ready for that yet.”
“Good.”
“Sometimes,” she said, “it’s not all that hard to understand why you used to drink.”
“It did shut things down.”
“I can see the appeal, I have to admit it. But the hell with all that, and the hell with me me me, as far as that goes. Did you talk to Sussman?”
“They haven’t made any progress,” I said, “or if they have he didn’t bother to report it to me.” I told her about TJ’s wild hunch, and how I’d tried it out on Sussman even though neither of us thought it stood much of a chance of being true.
All the Flowers Are Dying
165
“If he smoked,” she said, “she’d have told me about it. She never would have hooked up with him in the first place, she didn’t even like to be around people with the smell of smoke on their clothes, but if he just plain charmed her so much she was willing to overlook the smoking, the one thing she’d have done is mention it. ‘I can’t tell you anything about him, but he smokes, can you believe it, and I still like him.’
Whatever. She’d have found a way to say something about it.”
“Eventually,” she said, “they’re going to rebuild. First everybody in the city gets to voice an opinion, and the relatives of the victims get to vote twice, and finally they’ll build something. And I wonder what it’s going to be like, standing here and looking out at it.” She was at the window, of course.
“I wish something would happen,” she said, and my cell phone rang.
It was the woman I’d given my card to, the mailbox lady. She was calling to tell me that the morning’s mail had held a letter for the holder of box 1217. “An’ I write down the name,” she said. “I think is the same name you say. David Thompson.”
“That’s the name,” I agreed. “Who sent the letter?”
“Who send it? How I know who send it?”
“In the upper-left corner of the envelope,” I said, “there’s usually a return address.”
“Maybe. I don’t remember.”
Jesus, it was like pulling teeth. “Could you get the envelope now and take a look?”
“Is gone.”
“It’s gone?”
“He come an’ pick it up. Same man as the picture you show me.”
“He came and picked it up.”
“Is his letter. He ask for it, I give it to him. You never say not to do this.”
Nor had I asked her to note the return address. It wasn’t her fault, it was mine, but knowing this somehow failed to make me feel better about the whole thing.
I asked her if she remembered anything about the envelope. It was, 166
Lawrence Block
she said, a long envelope, not the smaller kind that bills come in. And the address was typed or printed, not handwritten.
“An’ he was disappointed,” she volunteered.
“Disappointed?”
“He open it an’ look inside an’ he make a face.” Because there was no check in there, I thought. That’s why he’d turned up, to look for the check he thought I was going to send him, and he got some other letter instead, probably some relentless credit card issuer telling him he’d been preapproved, and he was understand-ably disheartened.
I thanked her, and she said next time she would write down whatever it said on the envelope. In fact she would make a photocopy. I hadn’t noticed a copying machine, but now that she mentioned it I recalled another hand-lettered sign in the window, offering copies at fifteen cents apiece. That would be good, I told her, and I thanked her again and hung up.
“He’ll be back tomorrow or the next day,” I told Elaine, “because he wants the check he thinks I’m going to
