I may be able to hurry things along from the other side, too. I’ve let sleeping dogs
Take it easy,
Here he had scrawled his barely legible signature, then added this below it:
P.S. Don’t worry about your son. I think he’s on his way home. I really do. I’ll call you in a week or 2. If you don’t hear from me in 2 weeks, please ask Joshua to read PS23 to Irene.
I stared at this for a long time, not because I was studying his typing, but because some things will put your hands right into those of a ghost, and this was one of those things.
“Do you understand it?” Edison asked.
“Most of it, I think.” Except his faith in my fairness.
When I didn’t say more, Edison began talking about another page. Gradually, I tuned into what he was saying. “Could you repeat that?”
“The numerals. That’s the first giveaway. You could see that even if you didn’t notice the
I looked at the page he was discussing. Another apartment-house survey.
“See how Lucas almost always types numerals instead of spelled-out numbers?” Edison asked, pointing to the first page we had studied, and then at the numerals in the note. “He was experienced with typing numerals, used them a lot in his work. Except in those places in the body of the thesis itself where the style book would say numbers should be spelled out, he used numerals. I could show you many examples. But look at this other typist’s work.”
Sure enough, the new page showed numbers spelled out as words. “Three children: two males, aged eight and four; one female, aged six,” one line read. On Lucas’s survey, a similar line read: “3 children: 1 female, aged 12; 2 males, aged 10 amp; 9.”
“He used an ampersand here, the forger didn’t. Is that true throughout?”
He grinned. “Excellent. What else do you notice?”
I used the magnifying glass. “The
He laughed, seeing me point at certain letters. “Yes. Excellent.”
“The letters
“Yes, yes! When she uses the left-hand shift key, she doesn’t always depress it properly, or she releases it too soon. Very good, very good!”
I looked up at him. You’d think I’d just asked him to dance. “What can you tell from this, besides that it’s typed by a different typist?”
“That’s quite a big discovery, wouldn’t you say? But to answer your question, based on information Lucas gave me, I would suspect our culprit is Nadine Preston, not Andre Selman.”
“He told you a lot, then.”
“Only after I showed him I could prove two different typists were involved.”
“How do you know it’s Nadine?”
“I’m guessing there, but almost any sample of her typing would probably confirm my suspicions. Lucas said that the little finger of her left hand was crooked-broken in high school and never properly set. Perhaps that finger was a little weaker than the others, or so crooked her typing was impaired. That would explain what we see on the page.”
“So this is what it was all about. Lucas’s mother will be so relieved. If I can find the original documents, we can prove that someone tampered with his thesis. That would clear his name.”
“Clear his name? Oh, that wasn’t really what he was after.”
“Then what?”
He picked up the pages, placed them neatly in the folder, but kept it open, staring down at the stack of copies. “Well, I don’t claim to know all of his plans, of course. But we talked about a few of them. The ones concerning these.” He fingered the edges of the pages, then looked up at me. “These weren’t just numbers on a page, you know. Not to Lucas. They were people. Whole families. He felt a great injustice was done to them, and that he was partly to blame.”
“What do you mean?”
“His statistics. He wanted the statistics to represent what was really going on in these neighborhoods. Low- income families, seniors, were living in these places.”
“People who couldn’t afford to move,” I said, understanding where he was headed. “But redevelopment forced them to.”
“Yes.”
“But an argument might be made that the neighborhoods were decaying. That they needed to be brought to life again.”
“Lucas said that some of the places they studied would benefit from office buildings and new retail districts. He said that was what excited him about the study in the first place. But then he saw that it wasn’t enough for Andre Selman and his cronies. They saw money to be made from redevelopment.”
“Andre Selman’s study was used to decide where the boundary lines were to be drawn for redevelopment,” I said. “I’ve already seen how the money-making end of this can work. But Lucas must have had some firsthand knowledge of what Andre’s part in the scam was.”
He nodded. “Lucas said that once he was off the project, Selman tampered with the statistics. Selman made sure that Lucas was discredited. Then he phonied up the numbers so that it looked as if fewer people were living in these places. Instead of an apartment hotel that had fifty families living in it, it suddenly had five. Fewer people to move, so the city doesn’t look so bad forcing them out.”
“And so Lucas decided to confront these people with his proof of their tampering with the numbers.”
“Right. I think that’s what he meant about awakening those sleeping dogs. All this time, they’ve been able to get away with it. Lucas always acted like there was more to it than disproving this study, but this was going to be the start of it.”
It would have been easy to say to him, “This was all so long ago. It’s too late to make amends.” I wasn’t even sure there was a way to make amends. The people who had lived in those buildings had either moved to other places or they were on the street. The “male aged ten” would be in his twenties now.
But I didn’t say any of those things to Edison Burrows. For the most part, I didn’t say them because I was certain there was more to this story, that Lucas had not told him everything. I had made up my mind after reading Lucas’s note-he had wanted my help, and I would not refuse it this time.
“I need to see your son,” I said. “Do you know where he is?”
“I can usually find him. If I haven’t seen him for a while, it will take days. But I saw Joshua last week, after that night it rained. I wanted to make sure he was all right. He was hanging out with some guy they call Blue.”
“Blue? Wait-is your son called Corky?”
“Yes, that’s Joshua’s nickname. Have you met him?”
“I’ve met him.” Once again, I decided against details. “He helped me out one day.”
“Good, good. This will go easier if he’s met you.”
I wasn’t so certain that was true, but didn’t argue. We made arrangements to look for him the next morning.
ENSCONCED ON THE COUCHin a big warm blanket, the cat at my feet, dogs on the floor at my side, I started going through Ben Watterson’s calendar for1977. It was, I soon discovered, a diary after all. While he hadn’t made long, journal-like entries in the seven-ring binder, these pages were obviously used to note events that had passed, not for reminders of his future engagements, although sometimes he did note that an item required follow-up, usually with an asterisk. The pages, two for each day, were preprinted from a company that specialized in appointment books. Each day was divided into twelve hours on each page, morning to the left, evening to the right. Ben put in some very long days.
His handwriting was neat and easy to read. The first time he entered a person’s name, he wrote it in full. After that, he used initials or a shortened version of the name. I supposed the ones who were referred to with
