Elevators are so slow, aren’t they? But I do try to be polite when it is unavoidable, so I smiled reassuringly at the old lunatic. “You didn’t like your paper?” I asked.
“I didn’t get my goddamn paper!” he shouted at me, turning a light purple from the effort. “I called and I told you people and the 200
JEFF LINDSAY
colored girl on the phone said to call the newspaper! I watch the kid steal it, and she hangs up on me!”
“A kid stole your newspaper,” I said.
“What the hell did I just say?” he said, and he was getting a little bit shrill now, which did nothing to make waiting for the elevator any more enjoyable. “Why the hell do I pay my taxes, to hear her say that? And she laughs at me, goddamn it!”
“You could get another paper,” I said soothingly.
It didn’t seem to soothe him. “What the hell is that, get another paper? Saturday morning, in my pajamas, and I should get another paper? Why can’t you people just catch the criminals?”
The elevator made a muted ding sound to announce its arrival at last, but I was no longer interested, because I had a thought.
Every now and then I do have thoughts. Most of them never make it all the way to the surface, probably because of a lifetime of trying to seem human. But this one came slowly up and, like a gas bubble bursting through mud, popped brightly in my brain. “Saturday morning?” I said. “Do you remember what time?”
“Of course I remember what time! I told them when I called, ten thirty, on a Saturday morning, and the kid is stealing my paper!”
“How do you know it was a kid?”
“I watched through the peephole, that’s how!” he yelled at me.
“I should go out in the hall without looking, the job you people do?
Forget it!”
“When you say ‘kid,’ ” I said, “how old do you mean?”
“Listen, mister,” he said, “to me, everybody under seventy is a kid. But this kid was maybe twenty, and he had a backpack on like they all wear.”
“Can you describe this kid?” I asked.
“I’m not blind,” he said. “He stands up with my paper, he’s got one of those goddamn tattoos they all have now, right on the back of his neck!”
I felt little metal fingers flutter across the back of my neck and I knew the answer, but I asked anyway. “What kind of tattoo?”
“Stupid thing, one of those Jap symbols. We beat the crap out of the Japs so we could buy their cars and tattoo their goddamn scrib-bles on our kids?”
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201
He seemed to be only warming up, and while I really admired the fact that he had such terrific stamina at his age, I felt it was time to turn him over to the proper authorities as constituted by my sister, which lit up in me a small glow of satisfaction, since it not only gave her a suspect better than poor Disenfranchised Dexter but also inflicted this beguiling old poop on her as a small measure of punishment for suspecting me in the first place. “Come with me,” I said to the old man.
“I’m not going an
ywhere,” he said.
“Wouldn’t you like to talk to a real detective?” I said, and the hours of practice I had spent on my smile must have paid off, because he frowned, looked around him, and then said, “Well, all right,” and followed me all the way back to where Sergeant Sister was snarling at Camilla Figg.
“I told you to stay away,” she said, with all the warmth and charm I had come to expect from her.
“Okay,” I said. “Shall I take the witness away with me?”
Deborah opened her mouth, then closed and opened it a few more times, as if she was trying to figure out how to breathe like a fish.