Get Real

8

JUDSON BLINT WAS TIRED of opening envelopes. Oh, sure, every envelope he opened was another check, twenty percent of which would go directly into his own pocket, the easiest money he could ever hope to find, and slitting open envelopes with a very good letter opener was not exactly hard labor, but still. Here he was, at a desk in a seventh-floor office in the Avalon State Bank Tower in midtown Manhattan, slitting open envelope after envelope, scanning into the computer the return addresses, keeping track of the check totals, and even though he knew very well what he was actually doing was mail fraud—in fact, three different mail frauds, as any federal law officer would know at once—there were still some moments, and this was one of them, when what he was doing here just felt like a job.

So here he sat, late on this Wednesday afternoon in April, when spring fever should by all rights have had him in its grip, and still he was making these repetitive movements, with the envelopes and the letter opener and the check piles and the scanner and the pen and the ledger, and if this wasn’t work, Judson wanted to know, then what the hell was it?

The inner office door opened and J. C. Taylor came through. A dangerous-looking black-haired beauty in her mid-thirties, she paced forward like a predator who’d just picked up a fresh scent. Behind her in her office was Maylohda, the fictitious South Pacific island nation she used in her developing-country scams. (So many people want to help!) Looking at Judson, she said, “You still here?”

“Pretty heavy today, J. C.,” he said. “I’m done with the detective course and the sex book and I’m just finishing up with the music.”

“Don’t stay too late,” she advised. “You don’t want to get stale.”

“No, ma’am, I won’t.”

“Ma’am,” she said, with a scornful look, and left. Judson shrugged—it was so hard to know the right reactions to people when you were barely a person yourself at nineteen—and went back to, face it, work.

He always saved the music business for last, because those people were the most fun. The people who just wanted to be a detective at home in their spare time or just wanted to look at dirty pictures at home in their spare time were pretty cut-and-dried, merely sending in their money, but the people who sent music to Super Star Music to have lyrics set to it, or alternatively, lyrics for an infusion of music (sometimes A’s request meshing just fine with B’s, so what came in could be shipped right back out again, neither participant any the wiser), tended to write confessional letters of such mawkish cluelessness that Judson wished there were, somewhere in the world, a publisher gutsy enough to put out a collection of them.

But that was not to be, since dispassionate self-knowledge is not a quality held in much esteem by the majority of the human race, so not enough people would find the product funny. Oh, well; at least he could enjoy the sincerity of these simpletons, to ease his own stress in the workaday world.

Ah; this grandmother of eight had been compelled at last to her true vocation as love-song lyricist by the flaming car-crash death of her favorite seventeen-year-old grand-daughter. Well, Grandma, lucky for you she bought it.

And this is the last of today’s talents. Judson totted up the three totals and pushed his chair back from the desk, and the phone rang.

Answer? If he had already gone, the voice mail would take it. On the other hand, not too many phone calls came to this office, and he was bored enough and curious enough to pick up the receiver and deliver into it the standard patter: “J. C. Taylor. Mr. Taylor isn’t in at the moment.”

“That’s okay, Judson,” a known voice said. “We’re trying to get the book group back together again.”

“John,” Judson said, delighted. “I haven’t heard from you for a while.”

“I haven’t had anything to say for a while.”

Hope leaping in his breast, Judson said, “But now you do?”

“That’s why we wanna get the book group together,” John said. “We thought maybe the OJ at ten tonight.”

“That sounds very good, John,” Judson said, because it did, and smiled at the phone as he listened to John hang up.

Very good; yes. Though there was unlikely to be a book group involved in tonight’s meeting, Judson knew from past experience that this sort of get-together often ended in gains much more ill-gotten than these little scammed checks here, but on the other hand far much less like work.

Whistling, he double-locked the office and legged it to the elevator.