James Siegel - Epitaph

The weather's lovely. And I'm doing fine.

Times three.

And yet the handwriting was different on each card- in fact, both Mrs. Dillon's companion and Mr. Waldron's next-door neighbor had sworn the handwriting genuine. The message was the same, but the authors weren't.

What to do. Call Ripley maybe and have it put under Strangest Coincidences. Call Mr. Brickman and listen to everything he didn't want to know about Mr. Wilson's funeral. Call Elsa the She Wolf of the SS and pay homage to her tattoo. Call a good private investigator.

Call it quits.

After all, William the Meek would be delighted by that, might even throw a party and invite the whole house in for cheese dip and Mantovani. This William the Con- querer fellow was getting annoying lately, was making him go on trips and stay in broiling hotel rooms and talk to all sorts of people he didn't like. He was making him puzzle things out, and he wasn't good at that stuff; why you had to spell things out for this guy, fling open the curtains at the Par Central Motel and say see before he even suspected his wife was employing the services of the Three Eyes Detective Agency on a regular basis. And it's not like he got around so good anymore either, he had some physical limitations here, he had pain. Maybe calling it quits was just what the doctor ordered.

But William the Conquerer would have none of that- he could tell; he'd heard the arguments but he wasn't buying. After all, he was still staring down at the lists- he hadn't put them away, they were still there. He was stymied by one, fine, but he'd gone on to the other- those numbers, which despite a modest proclivity for mathematics, were proving hard to figure.

He'd at least, okay the very least, matched a person to the names, but he'd matched the numbers to zilch, to the sorriest number there was, to zero. Even their appearance had him stumped; the names and addresses had been as neat and orderly as wedding invitations, but the numbers had been written down haphazardly, as if Jean had been jotting down the license plates of a speeding car. That, of course, had been his first guess: license plates-buzzzz, oh, we're sorry, care to try again? (They were too long for license plates.) Okay, zip codes. Buzzz. Telephone numbers. Buzzz. Social Security numbers. Buzzz. Credit card numbers. Buzzz. And they weren't passport numbers, driver's license numbers, model numbers, combination numbers, lottery numbers, prison numbers, or even Numbers numbers. He knew only that they were annoying numbers.

The phone rang.

William stared at it as if it were something strange, a meteorite perhaps, a moon rock, perhaps even a blue moon rock, for that's about as often as it rang these days-once in a blue moon. And when it did, more often than not it was a wrong number, the caller embarrassed by his mistake, William embarrassed at knowing it before even picking up the phone.

But this time, it wasn't a wrong number.

"Is this, uh… William?" the caller said.

William said that it was.

"But who's this?" he asked, thinking that it was probably someone trying to sell him a subscription, or a time share in the Poconos, or even that it was someone looking for William, but not this William. That's what he thought, that's what he would have bet on-but conforming to his track record at every track in the metropolitan area, he was wrong. In fact, he could have guessed all day, and guessed all night, and taken a slow boat to China and back and continued guessing, and he wouldn't have come close. The fact was, the person on the other end of the line was the very last person on earth he would've expected. At least, one of the twelve last people on earth. Mainly because he didn't think that person was actually still on the earth.

"This is Arthur," the caller said. "Arthur Shankin. I've heard you've been looking for me."

"Yes," William said, once he could form the words and actually get them out, "I have."

Yes. I have.

Three small words, but under the circumstances, a speech. I have been looking for you, I've been looking for you in Florida, and I've been looking for you here, and I didn't find you and I thought you were dead, you and eleven others of you. Of course, he didn't say that, or anything close to that. What he said was: "How did you get my number?" "It's in the book." "Yeah. But who-?" "What kind of inheritance?" Mr. Shankin interrupted. "A relative or something? What about it, am I rich or what?" "Mr. Shankin, is this a local call?" "That's right." "So you're not in Florida anymore?" "Not unless Florida's local." "But you were in Florida?" "Sure. Why?" "You sent a postcard to a friend. Mr. Greeman-" "Greely." "Of course, Greely, and you put a return address on it." "So?" "That address doesn't exist." "So I made a mistake. What's the difference. Do I have money coming to me or don't I…?" "How long you been back?" "Oh… six months I suppose." "Six months-and not even a hello to your old friend Mr. Greely?" "As a matter of fact, I said hello to my old friend Mr. Greely today. And old friend Mr. Greely told me about new friend William. He said you were a lawyer and that you had a nice present for me. An inheritance. So what about it, what about this inheritance…?" "There isn't any." "Come again?" "I'm not a lawyer. There isn't any inheritance." "Okay. There isn't any inheritance. You just like to tell people there's an inheritance. Why do you do that exactly?"

"It's just a story I made up. I needed to find you. I have."

"Find me. What for?"

"For the same reason Jean Goldblum wanted to find you. Did he?"

"Who's Jean Goldblum?"

"Guess not."

"Who's Jean Goldblum? And who are you? You're not a lawyer, fine. Who are you?"

"Could we meet someplace and talk about it?" He wanted to see him in the flesh; he suddenly felt a real need to do that.

"What's wrong with talking on the phone?"

Yes, what was wrong with talking on the phone? People talked on the phone every day, all sorts of things got done on the phone. And it was raining cats and dogs outside, that too. It's just that he'd been out chasing phantoms in places called Magnolia Drive and Coral Avenue and Beaumont Street, and now he wanted to press some flesh.

"It's a little complicated, Mr. Shankin. I've got a lot of questions."

"Oh yeah?" A drawn-in breath, a slight grunt, William could almost hear his fingers drumming on an armrest. "Okay-but you'll have to come here-I've got a bum leg. You want to talk to me about something, you've got to come here."

"Sure. Where are you?"

"Ten-thirty-two Cherry Avenue in Whitestone. Know where that is? The house at the end of the block. You know where Whitestone is?"

"Yeah, I'll find it. In an hour?"

"Okay, in an hour. Why not?"

Yeah, why not.

William put away his lists and tucked away his theories, each and every one of them, from the half-baked ones to the seriously delusional ones. Perhaps he wouldn't need to search for a beginning after all. Perhaps he was being given the ending. Maybe he'd been on the proverbial wild- goose chase and perhaps everyone had known it but him. Arthur Shankin was alive and well and living in White- stone. Maybe they all were-maybe they all were alive and well and living somewhere-in Whitestone or Florida or Pango Pango. Maybe Jean had just been an old man telling tales and he'd just been an old man listening to them. The truth was, he felt foolish, as foolish as old fools are supposed to feel he guessed, which is very foolish. Maybe it was time to put an end to it, to order the cheese and crackers and lay on the Mantovani. So let's.

He called a cab company; he was becoming quite the spendthrift these days, plane rides and taxis and all in the same week. Then again, it wasn't every day someone came back from the dead-the last time it happened they'd gone and started a religion about it. Besides, from the sound of it, the rain had gotten nastier-not just cats and dogs anymore, but alley cats and rottweilers maybe.