“Aw, I guess it was a pretty old doll. Handed down, like.”
“I know the feeling—all the clothes I ever saw came from my big sister.”
For some reason he looked away awkwardly when I said that. I reached out and touched the photo. “This is a picture of the stamp, the best one I could take of it. I was wondering what you might be able to tell me about where it was made, maybe where it came from.”
He hardly glanced at it before shaking his head. “You don’t understand,” he said. “This is useless. And it’s not a stamp intended for use as real postage.”
“How do you know?”
“Well, for a start you’ll notice that it hasn’t been postmarked. It was on an envelope but it was never intended to go through the mails. More important, a googol is ten to the hundredth. Making a stamp that says it has a value of ‘one googol’ is the sort of joke that the math class would have done back at Princeton.”
It had taken me another half hour to discover what a googol was. “You went to Princeton?”
“For a while. I dropped out.” His voice was unemotional as he went on: “There are plenty of interesting stamps that were never intended for postage and don’t have currency value—Christmas seals, for example, that Holboll introduced in 1903 as part of an antituberculosis campaign. Some people collect those. But what you have given me isn’t a stamp at all. It’s just a picture of a stamp, and that’s a whole lot different. For instance, you missed off the most important piece.”
“Which is?”
“The edges. You’ve blown the main picture up big, and that’s good, but to get it you’ve cropped all four edges. I can’t see how it’s perforated. That’s the first problem. Then there’s the materials—the dyes and the gum, you can’t tell one thing about them from a photograph. And what about the type of paper that was used? And the watermark. Look, you said you found the stamp in Lockyer’s apartment. Don’t you have it anymore?”
“I do.”
“Then why on earth didn’t you bring it with you? I’ve got all sorts of things in the back of my shop just for looking at stamps.” He leaned closer across the counter. “If you would let me take a look at it here I’m sure I could squeeze out some information. There are analytical techniques available today that no one dreamed of twenty years ago.”
Finally, some enthusiasm—and such enthusiasm! He was itching to get his hands on the golliwog stamp. I wanted to hear more, but whatever miracles he had in the back of the shop were apparently of no interest to my stomach. It chose that moment to give a long, gurgling groan of complaint. I had breakfasted on a cup of black coffee and lunched in midmorning on a dry bagel, and it was now after five. Hunger and nerves. I put my hand on my midriff.
“Pardon me. I think that’s trying to tell me something. Look, I’m sorry about not bringing the stamp. It’s locked up in my safe. I’ve grown so used to protecting original materials—if I don’t do it, the courts and the lawyers beat me into the ground. But if you’ll let me pick your brains some more for the price of dinner…” He was going to say no, I knew it, and I hurried on, “—then I’ll go get the stamp and bring it here in the morning. And if there’s work for you to do—for God’s sake don’t destroy that stamp, though—I’ll tell Mrs. Lockyer that I need you and I’ll pay you at the same rate I’m being paid.”
“How much?”
“Three hundred and fifty a day, plus expenses.”
He didn’t seem thrilled by the prospect, though it was hard to believe he made that much in a month in the store. I think it was the chance of getting a look at the stamp that sold him, because he finally nodded and said, “Let me lock up.”
He turned to the unpainted inner door of the store and shielded the lock from me with his body while he did something to it.
“Not much in there to appeal to your average downtown thief,” he said when he was done. He sounded apologetic. “No trade-in value, but a lot of the things are valuable to me.”
Did Tom Walton spend everything he had on stamps? That idea was strengthened when we went out to his car, parked in the alley behind the store, and drove off to the Iron Gate Inn on N Street. He drove a 1974 white Dodge Dart rusted through at the bottom of the doors and under the fenders. I think cars are one of humanity’s most boring inventions, but even I noticed that this vehicle was due for retirement.
I was a regular at the restaurant and I knew the menu by heart. He insisted on studying it carefully, a fixed stare of concentration on his face. I had the impression that he was more accustomed to food that came out of a paper bag.
While he read the menu I had an opportunity for a closer look at him. I changed my original estimate of his age. His innocent face said early twenties, but his hair was thinning at the temples. (Later, when I referred to him to Jill Fahnestock as “the Walton kid” she stared at me and said, “Kid? He’s thirty-two—three years older than you.” “But he looks—I don’t know—brand-new.” “You mean unused. I know. There’s more to Tom than meets the eye.”)
There was quite a bit of him that did meet the eye. “I’m on a diet,” he explained, when he was ready to order.
“I see.” Not before time, but I could hardly tell him that. “How long have you been dieting?”
“This time?” He paused. “Four years, almost.”
Then he went ahead, quite unself-consciously, to order and eat a vast meal of hummus, couscous, and beer. I couldn’t complain, because he was also determined to earn his dinner. We talked about stamps, and only stamps. At first I made a feeble attempt to take notes but after a few minutes I concentrated on my own food. There was no way I would remember all that he said, and with him as my consultant I didn’t need to.
Stamps are colored bits of paper that you lick and stick on letters, right?
Not to Tom Walton and a million other people. To the collectors, stamps are an obsession and an endless search. They spend their lives rummaging through dusty old collections, or bidding on large lots at auctions to get a single stamp, or writing letters all over the world for first-day covers. They have their own vocabulary—double impressions (where a sheet of stamps has been put through the press twice, and the second imprint is slightly off from the first one); mint (a stamp with its original gum undamaged and with an unblemished face); inverted center (when a stamp is made using two plates, and a sheet is accidentally reversed when it is passed through the second press, so the stamp’s center is upside down relative to its frame); tête-bêche (where a plate has been made with one stamp upside down in the whole sheet of stamps).
They also have their own versions of the Holy Grail, stamps so rare and valuable that only the museums and superrich collectors can own them: the 1856 “One-Penny Magenta” stamp from British Guiana; the Cape of Good Hope “Triangle” from the 1850s; the 1843 Brazilian “Bull’s-Eye,” first stamp issued in the western hemisphere; the tricolored Basel “Dove” issued in Switzerland in 1845; the 1847 Mauritius “Post Office” stamp.
And there are the anomalies, the stamps that are interesting because of some defect in their manufacture. Tom Walton owned a 1918 U.S. Airmail stamp, an example of an inverted center in which the plane in the stamp’s center is flying upside-down. He told me it was very rare, with only one sheet of a hundred stamps ever reaching the public.
I don’t know how much time he spent alone in that store of his but he was starved for company. He would probably have talked to me all evening, and to my surprise I was enjoying listening to him. But by the time we were onto baklava and a second cup of coffee my own preoccupations were beginning to take over.
“I’m sorry, Tom.” I interrupted his description of the “$1.00 Trans-Mississippi” commemorative stamp, one of his favorites. “But I’ve got to pay the check and go now. I promised Mrs. Lockyer that I’d be over to see her this evening at her apartment.”
He nodded. “Ready when you are, Rachel.”
He seemed to assume that he was going with me. I hadn’t intended it, but it made sense. I
f I were considering adding him to the payroll it was a near-certainty that Eleanor Lockyer would want to talk to him. (Though I was not sure that I wanted to expose him to her.)
The Lockyer apartment was out in yuppie-land on Massachusetts Avenue, far from any subway stop. Tom Walton’s car received an incredulous look from the guard at the main entrance, but when we told him who we were going to see he couldn’t refuse to let us in. We parked between a Mercedes 560 and an Audi 5000. Tom carefully checked that all his car doors were locked.
As we went inside and entered the elevator I decided that the second cup of coffee had been a mistake. I have an incipient ulcer, and my stomach hurt. Then I decided that the coffee was not to blame. What was getting to me was the prospect of another meeting with Eleanor Lockyer.
She was on the telephone when the maid ushered us in, and she took her time in finishing the conversation. We were not invited to sit down. She was obviously preparing to go out, because she was wearing a long dress and a cape that my year’s income would not have paid for. I introduced Tom Walton as someone who was helping me with the investigation. She gave him the briefest of glances with bored gray eyes, dismissed him as a nonentity, and waved her arm at the table.
“Jason’s mail for the past two days. I haven’t looked at most of it, but you probably want to open it all and see what’s there.”
“I’ll do that,” I said. Tom Walton began to edge his way over to the stack of letters and envelopes.
“Right. You’ve been working on this for four days now. I hope you have results. What have you found out?”
“Quite a bit. We’re making good progress.” The tone in her voice was so critical I felt obliged to overstate what I had done. “First, we can rule out any possibility of kidnapping. Wherever he went, his trip was planned. The woman who cleaned the apartment in Baltimore is sure that there are a couple of suitcases missing, along with his clothes and toilet articles. She also thinks there are some spaces in the bookcases, but she can’t remember what books used to be there, though they were in the middle of a group of books about single-celled plants and animals. Second, he’s almost certainly still somewhere in this country. His passport was in his study here. Third—the absolute clincher, in my opinion—he left his notes for the rest of the semester with his teaching assistant at the university. Fourth—”
“But where is he?” she interrupted.
“I don’t know.”
“And you call that progress? You’re telling me he could be anywhere in fifty states, millions of square miles, and you’ve no idea where, or how to find him. That’s not what I’m paying you for. What good does that do me?”
“It’s part of the whole investigative process. We have to rule out certain possibilities before I can explore others. For instance, now that we know he wasn’t abducted against his will—Mrs. Lockyer, I don’t know an easy way to ask this; but is there any chance that Jason Lockyer might have had a girlfriend?”
She didn’t laugh. She sneered. “Jason? Why not ask a sensible question? He has the sex drive of a lettuce. One woman in his life is too much for him.”
You’d be too much for most people. But that’s the sort of thing you think and don’t say. Fortunately I didn’t have to ask a “sensible question” because we were interrupted by a loud whistle from Tom Walton.
“Look at this letter!” he said. “Professor Lockyer is going to be awarded the Copley Medal of the Royal Society, for his work on bacterial DNA transfer. That’s really great.”
It was a breakthrough, of sorts. It proved that Tom Walton was interested in something other than postage stamps.
But it did nothing for Eleanor Lockyer. She changed the direction of her scorn. “That’s just the sort of nonsense I’ve had to put up with for five years. Bacteria, and worms, and slimes. If anyone deserves a medal it’s me, having to live with that sort of rubbish.” The buzzer sounded. She looked at her watch, then at me. “I must say, I’m most disappointed and dismayed by your lack of progress. You have to do better or I’m certainly not going to keep on paying you for nothing. Get to work. Look at this apartment again, and go over that mail with a toothcomb. When you are finished here Maria will let you out. I have to go. General Shellstock’s limousine is waiting downstairs and the general asked me to be on time.”
She was turning to leave when Tom Walton said quietly, “Walter Shellstock, by any chance?”
“Yes. He’s visiting Washington for a few days.”
“Say hello.”
“Hello? You mean from you?”
“Sure. Wally Shellstock’s my godfather.”
It was a pleasure to watch Eleanor Lockyer’s reaction. Her bottom lip went down so far that I could see the receding gum-line on her lower teeth, and she said, “You. You’re…But who…?”
She had forgotten his name, or never registered it when I introduced them.
He realized her problem. “Well, in business I just use Tom Walton. But my full name is Thomas Walton Shellstock. Actually it’s Thomas Walton Shellstock the Fourth, though I don’t know why anyone would care about counting the numbers.”
“The Pennsylvania Shellstocks?”
“That’s right. Well, have fun with Wally.” Tom turned back to the pile of letters, peering at each one and ignoring Eleanor.
I’ve never seen a woman so torn. The buzzer sounded again, this time more urgently. She turned toward the door, but then she hurried back and took Tom by the arm.
“Thomas, I’m having a small dinner party here next week. I’d love it if you could come.”
“Send me an invitation. Rachel has my address.”
“Of course. You and…” She turned to give me a look of frustration. It meant, I sure as hell don’t want to have to invite you, you’re the hired help—but I’m not sure what your relationship is to Thomas Walton Shellstock, and if you two are screwing I may have to include you just to get him.
“Both of you,” she said at last. Tom didn’t give her another look, and finally she went out.
“You’d really come to her dinner party?” I said. I had a lot of questions but that seemed like the most important one.
“What do you think? Saying ‘send me an invitation’ is a lot easier than saying no in person.”
“What are the Pennsylvania Shellstocks? She almost dropped her teeth.”
“Ah.” He had finished looking at the stamps on the unopened letters, and now he was sitting idly at the table. “‘Old money, my d-dear,’” he said in a falsetto. “‘The only real kind of money.’ That’s what people like Mrs. Lockyer say—and that’s why I don’t use my full name. We happen to have rather a lot of it—money, I mean, no thanks to me. Isn’t she revolting?”
“I wondered if it was just me. When I hear her talk about her husband it doesn’t sound like she wants me to find him. It sounds like she wants me to prove he’s dead.”
“I don’t understand why they’re married at all. You said he’s in his sixties, she can’t be more than forty.”
“Forty-five, if she’s a day,” I said. Pure malice. “His first wife died—he’s got grown-up kids, and contacting them is on my agenda. Eleanor knew a good thing when she saw one. No responsibilities, lots of money—so she grabbed him.”
“No children in this marriage?”
“Perish the thought. Children, my dear, they’re such a nuisance. And having them is so messy.”
He was laughing without making a sound. “And worse than that, my dear, I’m told it actually hurts. Rachel, it’s none of my business but I think you have a problem.”
“Mrs. Lockyer? Don’t I know it.”
“I wasn’t thinking of that. From what you said it’s quite obvious that Jason Lockyer disappeared because he wanted to disappear. If he intended his wife to know about it he’d have told her. So now you’re trying to go against what he wanted, just to please her. Doesn’t that give you fits?”
“Tom, she’s my client.”
“So drop her, my dear.”
&nb
sp; “Right. And find at the end of the month I can’t pay the rent. I’m in a funny business, Tom. Some of my clients are people you’d cross the street to avoid meeting. And I won’t even touch the worst cases, the bitter divorce settlements and the child abusers. But the nice, normal people of the world don’t seem to have much need for detectives.”
There was a conscience inside all that fat, because after a moment he shook his head and said, “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that, it’s not my business.”
“No, and it never will be. Know why, Tom? Because you’re rich.” I was angry but most of it was guilt. He was right, I shouldn’t be hounding Jason Lockyer just to please Eleanor Lockyer. “You don’t have the same pressures on you. I saw your face when I offered you three hundred and fifty dollars a day to work on this. A lousy three-fifty, you thought, that isn’t worth bothering with. Why do you run that stamp store at all if you don’t need money? Why don’t you do something important?”
There must be a branch of etiquette that says you don’t harangue near-strangers; but poor Tom Walton didn’t feel like a stranger, so I unloaded on him.
After a few moments he sighed. “All right, all right. I’ll help you look for Jason Lockyer. And why do I run the stamp store? I’ll tell you, I do it to avoid conversations like this—with my own damned family. They’re all overachievers, and they went on at me for years, telling me to go out and change the world—run for public office, or buy a position on the New York Stock Exchange, or win a Nobel Prize.” His voice was becoming steadily louder. “I don’t want to do any of those things. I want a nice, peaceful life, looking at interesting things. And no one else is willing to let me do that! That’s one nice thing about stamps. The family accepts that I’m running a business, they stay away and the stamps don’t harass you.”
That was the moment when I began to revise my opinion of Tom Walton. I had neatly pegged him as a pleasant, shy, introverted, and slightly kooky young man, preferring stamps to people, silence to speeches, and solitude to most types of company. I didn’t think he knew how to shout. Now I saw another side of him, stronger and more determined. Anyone who got between Tom and what he wanted was in for a tough time.
Georgia On My Mind and Other Places Page 24
