I EXCERPT I REVIEWS I

     At a meeting over the weekend a woman whom I knew by sight came up to me and said she’d heard I was a private investigator. Was that true?
     “Sort of,” I said, and explained that I was semi–retired, and didn’t have a license, which meant I lacked any official standing.
     “But you could investigate someone,” she said.
     “Anyone in particular?”
     “I have to think about this,” she said. “Is there a number where I can reach you?”
     I gave her a card, one of the new ones with my cell phone number on it, along with the phone in our apartment. I avoided a cell phone as long as I possibly could, until the realization that I was being ridiculous gradually overcame the stubbornness that seems to be an irreducible part of me. I still forget to carry it half the time, and don’t always remember to turn it on when I do, but I’d done both Monday morning, and when it rang I even managed to answer it without disconnecting the caller.
     “This is Louise,” she said. “You gave me your card. The other night, I asked if you could investigate someone, and–––”
     “I remember. You had to think about it.”
     “I’ve thought all I need to, and I’d like to talk to you. Could we meet somewhere?”
     I was having breakfast with TJ, who’d kept a remarkably straight face while I’d fumbled with the phone. “I’m at the Morning Star,” I said.
     “Are you really? Because I’m at the Flame.”
The Morning Star’s on the northwest corner of Ninth and 57th; the Flame’s at the 58th Street end of the same block. They’re both New York–style Greek coffee shops, and neither one’s a candidate for the next edition of Zagat, but they’re not terrible, and God knows they’re handy.
     She said, “Will you still be there in fifteen minutes? I want to finish this cup of coffee, and then I want to stand around outside long enough to smoke a cigarette, and then I’ll come to the Morning Star, if you’ll still be there.”
     “They haven’t even brought my eggs yet,” I told her. “Take your time.”

#

     “I feel funny about this,” she said. “Here I’m having this romance, and it feels as though it might really go somewhere, and a relationship ought to be based on trust, and how trusting am I if I hire a detective to investigate the guy? It’s like I’m sabotaging the whole process from the get go.”
     Louise was somewhere in her late thirties, medium height and build, with dark brown hair and light brown eyes. She’d had acne in adolescence, and its legacy was a light pitting on her cheeks and pointed chin. She was dressed for the office in a skirt and blouse, and she’d put on some cologne, a floral scent that blended imperfectly with the smell of cigarette smoke.
     She’d joined us at our table, a little taken aback to discover that I wasn’t alone. I introduced TJ as my assistant and that mollified her some. He’s a black man in his twenties–––I don’t know his exact age, but then I still don’t know his last name, for all that he’s a virtual member of the family–––and this morning he was dressed for comfort in baggy bleached denim shorts and a black T–shirt with the sleeves and neckband cut off. He didn’t look much like my assistant, or anybody else’s, except perhaps a dope dealer’s. I could tell she’d be more comfortable if it were just the two of us, but I’d only have to fill TJ in afterward, and I figured she could get over it, and she did.
     I said, “Trust is at the basis of most enduring relationships.”
     “That’s what I keep telling myself, but–––”
     “It’s also a key component of most scams and con games. They couldn’t work without it. You might have an easier time trusting this guy if you can establish that there’s no abiding reason not to trust him.”
     “And that’s the other thing I keep telling myself,” she said. “It seems tacky, but I can’t get past the fact that I don’t really know a thing about him. It’s not like my parents and his parents are friends, or I met him at a church social.”
     “How did you meet?”
     “On the Internet.”
     “One of the dating services?”
     She nodded, and gave its name. “I don’t know how the hell else people are supposed to hook up in this city,” she said. “I work all day. In fact I’m supposed to be at my desk in twenty minutes, but Tinkerbell’s not gonna die if I’m ten minutes late. I spend my days at the office and my nights at AA meetings. My last relationship was with somebody I knew from the program. That gets you past the small talk, but then when things don’t work out one of you has to start going to different meetings.” She glanced at my left hand. “You’re married, right? Is she in the program?”
     “No.”
     “How’d you meet, if you don’t mind my asking?”
We met in an after–hours gin joint, at Danny Boy Bell’s table. She was a young call girl then and I was a cop with a wife and two kids. But that was a lot more than she needed to know, and what I said was that Elaine and I had known each other years ago, that we’d met up again after having lost contact, and that this time it had worked out for us.
     “That’s romantic,” she said.
     “I suppose it is.”
     “Well, the men in my past, I hope to God they stay there. My boyfriend in high school was cute, but he never got over it when I threw up in the middle of. . .well, never mind. Jesus, I wish you could smoke in here. If you can have a cup of coffee you ought to be able to have a cigarette with it. Our tightass mayor should go fuck himself. Can you believe he wants to ban smoking outside, too? Like it’s not bad enough you have to go out in the street for a smoke? I mean, who does he think he is?”
     She didn’t wait for an answer, which was just as well, as I didn’t have one handy. “I should get to the point, Matt. I met this guy on the Internet, and we had a lot of exchanges, first by email and then with instant messaging. You know what that is, right? Sort of an online conversation?”
     I nodded. Elaine and TJ IM back and forth regularly, like a couple of kids with two cans and a wire. He lives right across the street from us, in the hotel room I occupied for years, and he comes over a couple of nights a week for dinner, and he and Elaine are both easy enough to reach by phone, but evidently there’s something irresistible about Instant Messaging. One of them will notice that the other’s online, and the next thing you know they’re chatting like magpies.
     “It can get very intimate, or at least it seems that way. People let their guard down in emails, or forget to put it up in the first place. I mean, it’s so easy. You type something out like you’re writing in a diary, and before you have time to think about it you hit the Send button, and it’s gone. You can’t even check the spelling, let alone give some thought to whether you really wanted to tell him you had an abortion your senior year in high school. So it seems intimate, because you’re finding out a lot about the person, but it’s only what he chooses to tell you, and you’re just reading it on the screen. It’s just words, there’s no tone of voice to go with it, no facial expressions, no body language. You fill in the rest in your mind, and you make it what you want it to be. But it may not be an accurate reflection of the real person. Sooner or later you trade jpegs, that’s online photographs–––”
     “I know.”
     “–––so you know what he looks like, but that’s just the visual equivalent of words on the screen. You still don’t know him.”
     “But you’ve met this man.”
     “Oh, of course. I wouldn’t be wasting your time if this was still just an online flirtation. I met him about a month ago and I’ve seen him seven or eight times since then. I didn’t see him this weekend because he was out of town.”
     “I gather the two of you hit it off.”
     “We liked each other. The attraction was there. He’s nice looking but not handsome. Handsome puts me off. A therapist once told me it’s a self–esteem issue, that I don’t think I deserve a handsome boyfriend, but I don’t think that’s it. I just don’t trust men who are too good–looking. They always turn out to be narcissists.”
     “Been a real problem for me,” TJ said.
     She grinned. “But you’re dealing with it.”
     “Best I can.”
     “I like the guy,” she said. “He didn’t rush me into bed, but we both knew that’s where we were going, and it didn’t take us that long to get there. And it was nice. And he likes me, and I’d love to jump up and down and tell the world I’m in love, but something holds me back.”
     “What don’t you know about him?”
     “I don’t know where to start. Well, what do I know about him? He’s forty–one, he’s divorced, he lives alone in a fifth–floor walkup in Kips Bay. He’s self–employed, he creates direct–mail advertising packages for corporate clients. Sometimes he has to work long hours and sometimes he has dry spells with no work at all. Feast or famine, he says.”
     “Does he have an office?”
     “A home office. That’s one reason we always go to my place. His is a mess, he says, with a sofa that he sleeps on. It’s not even a convertible because there’s no room to open it up, with his desk and filing cabinets taking up so much floor space. There’s a fax, there’s a copying machine, there’s his computer and printer and I don’t know what else.”
     “So you’ve never been there.”
     “No. I said I’d like to see it and he just said it was a mess, and a mess you have to climb four flights of stairs to get to. And it’s plausible enough, it could certainly be true.”
     “Or he could be married.”
     “Or he could be married and live anywhere at all. I thought I could go to his building and at least see if his name’s on the mailbox, but I don’t even know the address. I have a phone number for him but it’s his cell. He could be married, he could be an ex–con, he could be a fucking axe murderer for all I know. I don’t honestly think he’s any of those things, but the problem is I don’t know for sure, and I can’t let go emotionally if I’ve got these worries in the back of my mind.”
     “And not that far back, from the sound of it.”
     “No, you’re right. It’s always there, and it gets in the way.” She frowned. “I get this spam, everybody does, links to these websites where they claim you can find out the truth about anybody, I’ve gone to the sites, and I’ve been tempted, but that’s as far as I’ve gone. I don’t know how reliable those things are, anyway.”
     “They probably vary,” I said. “What they do is access various publicly–available data bases.”
     “You can find out anything on the Internet,” TJ put in, “but only part of it is true.”
     “His name’s David Thompson,” she said. “Or at least I think his name’s David Thompson. I did a Yahoo People search, and it’d be a lot easier if his name was Hiram Weatherwax. You wouldn’t believe how many David Thompsons there are.”
     “Common names make it tough. You must know his email address.”
     “DThomps5465 at hotmail.com. Anybody can set up a free account at Hotmail, all you have to do is go to their site and register. I have a Yahoo account, FareLady315. That’s F–A–R–E, as in subway fare, because I ride it to and from work every day.” She glanced at her watch. “I’m all right. I live on 87th Street, I rode down to Columbus Circle. Then I had a bagel and coffee, and then I came here, and my office is a five–minute walk from here. I’ll smoke a cigarette on the way over there, because it goes without saying we’re not allowed to smoke in the fucking office. I could keep a bottle in my desk and drink, that’d be fine, but God forbid I should smoke a cigarette. Did I mention that he smokes? David?”
     “No.”
     “I specified that in my ad. Not just that I smoked, but that I was looking to meet a smoker. People say they’re tolerant, but then they wind up waving their hand in the air, or run around opening windows. I don’t need that. I don’t drink a day at a time, and I don’t take drugs, I won’t even take fucking Midol for cramps, so I figure I can smoke all I want, and the hell with the mayor.” She let out a sudden yelp of laughter. “Jesus, listen to me, will you? ‘Hey, Louise, why don’t you tell us how you really feel?’ The thing is, I know one of these days I’m going to quit. I don’t even like to talk about it, but one of these days when I’m good and ready it’s gonna happen. And, just my luck, it’ll most likely happen in the middle of a terrific relationship with a guy who smokes like a chimney, and the last thing he’ll want to do is quit, and his cigarettes’ll wind up driving me crazy.”
     It’s a hard old world. “Does David know you’re in the program?”
     “Dave, he likes to be called. And yes, that was one of the first things I told him, when we were just Dthomps and FareLady. He’d said something about it’d be nice to share a bottle of wine, and I wanted to let him to know that wasn’t gonna happen. He’s a light social drinker. Or at least he is when he’s around me, but that’s another thing I don’t know about him, because he could be controlling it when we’re together and knocking back the silver bullets when we’re not.”
     She gave me a picture, one he’d sent her that she’d downloaded and printed. It was, she assured me, a pretty good likeness. It showed the head and shoulders of a man with the forced expression most people have when trying to smile for the camera. He looked pleasant enough, with a square jaw, a neatly–trimmed mustache, and a full head of dark hair. He wasn’t movie–star handsome, certainly, but he looked okay to me.
     For a moment I thought she was going to ask for the photo back, but she made her decision and sat back. “I hate doing this,” she said, “but I’d hate myself more if I didn’t. I mean, you read things.”
     “Yes.”
     “And I’m no heiress, but I have some investments and some money in the bank. I own my apartment. I’ve got something to lose, you know?”

This concludes the excerpt from ALL THE FLOWERS ARE DYING.

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