Lawrence Block: The Best American Mystery Stories 1999

Like the reflected light of a city set to burning, the lurid sunset hung low in the direction of New Jersey. The streets were crammed with the living and the guiltless, heading home in the day’s horizontal rays, blinking from the subway’s flicker and a long day spent at computer terminals. Bech hesitated a second before relinquishing his letter to the blue, graffiti-sprayed box, there in front of Victoria’s Secret. A young black woman with an armful of metered nine-by-twelve envelopes impatiently arrived at his back, to make her more massive, less lethal drop. He stifled his qualm. The governmental box hollowly sounded with the slam of the lid upon the fathomless depths of sorting and delivery to which he consigned his missive. His life had been spent as a votary of the mails. This was but one more submission.

Morning after morning, the Times carried no word on the death of Deborah Frueh. Perhaps, just as she wasn’t in Who’s Who, she was too small a fish to be caught in the Times’ obituary net. But no, they observed at respectful length the deaths of hundreds of people of whom Bech had never heard. Former aldermen, upstate prioresses, New Jersey judges, straight men on defunct TV comedies, founders of Manhattan dog-walking services — all got their space, their chiseled paragraphs, their farewell salute. Noticing the avidity with which he always turned to the back of the Metro section, Robin asked him, “What are you looking for?”

He couldn’t tell her. “Familiar names,” he said. “People I once knew.”

“Henry, it seems morbid. Here, I’m done with Arts and Sports.”

“I’ve read enough about arts and sports,” he told this bossy tootsie, “to last me to the grave.”

He went to the public library, the Hamilton Fish Park branch on East Houston, and in the children’s section found one of Deborah Frueh’s books, Jennifer’s Lonely Birthday, and checked it out. He read it and wrote her another letter, this time in blue ballpoint, on unlined stationery with a little Peter Maxish elf-figure up in one corner, the kind a very young girl might be given for her birthday by an aunt or uncle. “Dear Deborah Frueh,” he wrote, “I love your exciting work. I love the way at the end of ‘Jennifer’s Lonely Birthday’ Jennifer realizes that she has had a pretty good day after all and that in life you can’t depend on anybody else to entertain you, you have to entertain your own mind. At the local library I have ‘The Day Dad Didn’t Come Home’ on reserve. I hope it isn’t too sad. ‘Teddy Bear’s Bequest’ they never heard of at the library. I know you are a busy woman and must be working on more books but I hope you could send me a photograph of you for the wall of my room or if your too busy to do that please sign this zerox of the one on the cover of Jennifer’s Lonely Birthday.’ I like the way you do your hair, it’s like my Aunt Daphne, up behind. Find enclosed a stamped envelope to send it in. Yours hopefully, Judith Green.”

Miss Green in Bech’s mind was a year or so older than Mary Jane Mason. She misspelled hardly at all, and had self-consciously converted her grammar-school handwriting to a stylish printing, which Bech slaved at for several hours before attaining the proper girlish plumpness in the o’s and m’s . He tried dotting the i’ s with little circles and ultimately discarded the device as unpersuasive. He did venture, however, a little happy face, with smile and rudimentary pigtails. He intensified the dose of hydrocyanic acid on the envelope flap, and eased off on the sugar water. When Deborah Frueh took her lick — he pictured it as avid and thorough, not one but several swoops of her vicious, pointed tongue — the bitterness would register too late. The bitch would never know what hit her. A slowed heart, inhibited breathing, dilated pupils, convulsive movements, and complete loss of consciousness follow within seconds. He had done his research.

The postmark was a problem. Mary Jane up there in New Rochelle might well have had a father who, setting off in the morning with a full briefcase, would mail her letter for her in Manhattan, but two in a row and Frueh might smell a rat, especially if she had responded to the last request and was still feeling queasy. Bech took the Hoboken ferry from the World Financial Center, treating himself to a river view of his twinkling, aspiring home town. He looked up Greens in a telephone booth near the terminal. He picked one on Willow Street to be little Judy’s family. He deposited his letter in a scabby dockside box and, leaving the missive to move on its own tides toward Seattle, took the ferry back to lower Manhattan. The writer’s nerves hummed; his eyes narrowed against the river glare. What did Whitman write of such crossings? “Flood-tide below me! I see you face to face!” And, later on, speaking so urgently from the grave, “Just as you are refresh’d by the gladness of the river and the bright flow, I was refresh’d, Just as you stand and lean on the rail, yet hurry with the swift current, I stood yet was hurried.” That “yet was hurried” was brilliant, with all of Whitman’s brilliant homeliness.

A week went by. Ten days. The desired death was not reported in the Times . Bech wondered if a boy fan might win a better response, a more enthusiastic, heterosexual licking of the return envelope. “Dear Deborah Freuh,” Bech typed, using the hideous Script face available on his IBM PS/1. “You are a great writer, the greatest as far as I am concerned in the world. Your book titled ‘The Day Dad Didn’t Come Home’ broke me up, it was so sad and true. I don’t want to waste any more of your time reading this so you can get back to writing another super book but it would be sensational if you would sign the enclosed first-day cover for Sarah Orne Jewett, the greatest female American writer until you came along. Even if you have a policy against signing I’d appreciate your returning it in the enclosed self-addressed stamped envelope since I am a collector and spent a week’s allowance for it at the hobby shop here in Amityville, Long Island, NY. Sign it on the pencil line I have drawn. I will erase the line when you have signed. I look forward to hearing from you soon. Yours very sincerely, Jason Johnson, Jr.”

It was a pleasant change, in the too-even tenor of Bech’s days, to ride the Long Island Rail Road out to Amityville and mail Jason Johnson’s letter. Just to visit Penn Station again offered a fresh perspective — all that Roman grandeur from his youth, that onetime temple to commuting Fortuna, reduced to these ignoble ceilings and Tartarean passageways. And then, after the elevated views of tar-roofed Queens, the touching suburban stations, like so many knobbed Victorian toys, with their carefully pointed stonework and gleaming rows of parked cars and stretches of suburban park. In Amityville he found a suitable Johnson — on Maple Drive — and mailed his letter and headed back to town, the stations accumulating ever shabbier, more commercial surroundings and the track bed becoming elevated and then, with a black roar, buried, underground, underriver, undercity, until the train stopped at Penn Station again and the passengers spilled out into a gaudy, perilous mess of consumeristic blandishments, deranged beggars, and furtive personal errands.

Four days later, there it was, in four inches of Times type, the death of Deborah Frueh. Respected educator was also a noted critic and author of children’s books. Had earlier published scholarly articles on the English Metaphysicals and Swinburne and his circle. Taken suddenly ill while at her desk in her home in Hunts Point, near Seattle. Born in Conshohocken, near Philadelphia. Attended Barnard College and Duke University graduate school. Exact cause of death yet to be determined. Had been in troubled health lately — her weight a stubborn problem — colleagues at the University of Washington reported. Survived by a sister, Edith, of Ardmore, Pennsylvania, and a brother, Leonard, of Teaneck, New Jersey.