The Last Family

12

Eve Fletcher stood like a warden at her front door watching the spot of a dog on her lawn through the storm door’s dingy safety glass. The animal, which was being bathed in the early-morning North Carolina sunshine, was an ancient, gray-faced Chihuahua, hardly larger than a hood ornament. He was possessed of a forehead shaped like a tennis ball, batlike ears, and bulging eyes filled with the milk of blindness. The animal was arching its backbone and trembling like a cheap vibrator. She cracked the door so he could hear her.

“Hurry, Mr. Puzzle,” Eve said. “Toodatoo for Mommy. Yessireesir, it’s a good boy that does his little toodatoo.” Her voice had the quality of a hacksaw against mutton bone.

The dog turned its head toward the door, and as if by his mistress’s command something that resembled a burned-up chili pepper issued forth, swung as if at the end of a string, and then fell into the tall grass. This accomplished, Mr. Puzzle shook himself, took a feeble shot at kicking grass over the refuse, and headed for the door, following his earlier scent or his mistress’s voice. As he reached the stoop, Eve opened the door, waltzed down the three steps, and scooped him to her bosom, kissing him on the domed head. She was rewarded with a wet sneeze and a weakly wagging twig of a tail that might have been sectioned from a rat.

Eve shuffled toward the den on her stovepipe legs with the animal clutched to her chest like a treasure. Eve was almost six feet tall, a wide-shouldered woman of sixty-eight. She had large hands with thick wrists and huge breasts that hung from her chest like water balloons tied together and draped over a clothesline. Heavy prescription reading glasses balanced precariously on the tip of her wide nose.

The entire den was hardly more than a nest. It was littered with a confusion of accumulated clutter, including boxes in a wide range of sizes and states of disgorgement. There was an open sewing basket, a pink Easter basket filled with balls of yarn, stacks upon stacks of National Geographic, paperbacks, Soap Opera Digest, and other magazines. There were bundles of mail tied with string, paper grocery bags with newspapers tightly packed inside. There were also little black ruins of dog flop where the animal had sneaked a crap when Eve Fletcher wasn’t paying attention.

Eve had smoked Pall Malls at the rate of two cartons a week for most of her adult life. As a consequence her teeth looked like kernels of corn. Her world, the interior rooms of the small house, had yellowed as well over the years. A beanbag with a green aluminum bowl of ashtray was perched like a sleeping pigeon on the arm of her BarcaLounger. When each cigarette was no more than one-half its original length, she would crush and fold the butt unmercifully and, once certain it was dead, pour the contents into the ash can beside the chair, wiping the ashtray out with a facial tissue. It’s the last half of a cigarette has almost all the tar in it, she always told herself. Then she would replace the cleaned ashtray on the chair’s arm, where it would wait to receive the next offering. There was seldom much of a wait. She held her cigarettes between the wrong side of her middle finger and the next to last, so that if she fell asleep with one active, it would burn her awake and not fall to the bed or chair to smolder and ignite.

The walls in the den were papered in a nicotine-dulled floral and spotted with her favorite art. There was a textured reproduction of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, a painted-by-numbers Last Supper, and hanging over the television set, a large photograph of a thin-necked, bleak-eyed boy in his graduation cap. The color photograph had faded to a light-blue whisper, and noncritical sections of it had bubbled and adhered to the glass. A framed photograph of the same boy, though beefier, in Marine Corps dress blues, was perched on top of the television set beside a pot of orange plastic flowers held aloft by impossibly green stems.

Eve had seen herself as a beauty before she’d been married and forever lost her snappy figure to her sole pregnancy. During the Second World War she had worked in a factory making eyeglasses for soldiers and sailors. That was where she had met Martin’s father, a quiet man sidelined from the army due to flat feet. Milton Fletcher had passed away in 1954.

Eve shifted her legs, the stubble catching against the pink sheeny polyfibered nightgown, and studied the TV Guide carefully. She stared at the Big Ben clock on the tray.

“Nine thirty-three! They promised me the cable would be back on before my stories start. Can’t trust anybody.”

She closed the housecoat over her knees and rubbed the dog’s neck somewhat vigorously. After she’d located the remote control on the dinner tray and switched on the television, she watched the static for a few seconds, a deep frown embedded in her face.

“God-dangit, where the hell’s those TV people?” she wondered aloud. “I bet I’ll just deduct these hours from the bill if they don’t get a move on!” she told the dog. She did the applicable math in her head but had a pencil in her hand just in case she needed to figure on paper. It was a talent she had. “Cable’s thirty-two a month. Kill the extra dollar and, say, a dollar a day, and at twenty-four hours a dollar that’s four cents an hour. Now. From seven-thirty to…”

She heard a car door close, then another, and the dog began growling. She scratched under her wig, which sat on her head like a gray turban, with the eraser end of the pencil. Then she stood and carried the barking dog toward the door. The buzzer sounded just as she got there. She had the pencil in her hand in case she needed a weapon. You never know, she thought. Martin says anything can be a weapon.

“Yes?” she said loudly so the people on the porch might hear her through the storm door.

“Cable trouble, Miss Fletcher?”

She opened the door a crack and looked at the people in matching coveralls standing on the porch and at the white pickup truck with CABLE VISION painted on the door. Mr. Puzzle, who could hear the voices, began having a conniption fit. Eve tried to quiet him by gripping his muzzle, and he bit her so hard it broke the skin above the ragged pink nail on her thick trigger finger. The closest one was a woman with her thumbs hooked into her tool belt. Behind her was a thin younger man with round-lensed, gold-frame glasses. There was a cigarette dangling from the girl’s lips. Eve managed to get a grip on the dog’s mouth and clamp it, whereupon the dog’s cheeks inflated. He sounded like a motorboat.

“Pocket hound,” the girl said cheerily. “My mama has one of them handheld attack dogs. Gotta get in close to use ’em.” She laughed. Eve stared at her, her drawn face announcing that she was not a woman easily amused.

“Miss Fletcher?” the man said.

“Mizzus Fletcher,” she corrected. “I’m a widow.”

“You reported your cable out?”

“I most certainly did. Last night at eight twenty-one on that answering machine, and this morning first thing they opened, to the lady that answered. I didn’t think you would get to it before my stories. I have to keep up every day. It’s Monday, and they leave you in the lurch on Fridays. If you miss Monday, you’re just swimmy-headed about what’s happening the rest of the week. I hope my bill will show an adjustment for the inconvenience. The money I pay for this is criminal!”

“That so?” the cable woman said, taking over from the man. “Never watch it. We’ll need to come in. The trouble is most likely inside. Must be an old hookup.”

“Well, I’ve had cable since seventy-seven. Don’t ever watch the first story or you’ll be hooked. I like that HBO sometimes, too.” Mrs. Fletcher opened the door wide so they could enter. “Go about your business. TV’s in the den.”

“We’ll need to get in the attic,” the man said.

“They didn’t need to get in the attic when they installed it,” she said suspiciously.

“They probably snaked it in from the eaves, but we’ll have to look at running new cable. The early cable was coaxial three, and it gets brittle with age. I’ll probably have to replace it with this new finer gauge.” He held up a piece of fiber-optic line for her inspection. “This stuff lasts forever and doubles your reception quality.”

“I can’t see the picture too good. But there’s nothing wrong with my ears. Door to the attic is in the hallway. Just pull the chain and the stairs come down. Do you adjust color?”

Eve watched as the two checked the cable box on her set, and then the man went out in the hallway and climbed up into the attic with the roll of cable and a silver toolbox. The woman looked at the picture on the wall.

“He’s a looker,” she said.

“That’s my boy, Martin,” she said.

“Nice looking,” the woman said. “Married?”

“Goodness no!” Eve said. “Hasn’t found the right girl.”

“What does he do?”

Eve shifted closer and confided, “He was in law enforcement. He’s a police consultant to governments and such. He knows lots of very important individuals like you see on the news.”

“Where is he these days?”

“How long is this going to take?” Eve asked nervously. She didn’t want to discuss her son, what with the communists always trying to get revenge on him and doing things like framing him up and all that.

“Not long. What’s the dog’s name?”

“Puzzle. I call him Mr. Puzzle.”

“Cute.”

“Martin named him. He said it was a puzzle how come the breed even survived.” She laughed out loud, and her foul breath staggered Sierra. “Why the rattlesnakes and Mexicans didn’t eat them all up, he says, is man’s greatest puzzle. Martin has a well-developed sense of humor. Gets his personality from my side. We moved in here in fifty-four, and first thing you know Milton’s gone across the river. Well, I-”

The man yelled down. “Sierra, I’m gonna have to rewire.”

“How long?” Eve asked, feeling the stories were in the pipe somewhere on their way to the TV set from the station, like water heading toward a shower nozzle from a reservoir.

“Half hour to an hour,” Sierra said. “I better help him. He’s a bit slow unless you work him. You know how men are.”

“I should say I do! I had to stay on my Milton day and night.”

Sierra slipped into Eve’s bedroom and, being as quiet as possible, fired the small nail gun, placing a transmitter in each heel of the four pairs of orthopedic shoes in Eve’s closet. Then she sneaked back to the ladder and climbed up so she could look in on her partner’s progress.

The attic was one shallow space that ran the length and width of the narrow house, peaking at four feet and sloping to inches at the outside edges. Agent Walter Davidson moved like a snake to avoid hitting his head on the roof beams, and within a half hour he had installed the fiber-optic lenses so the team could view the activity in any room in the house at will from the mobile observation van. The lenses at the end of the cable would have fit into the barrel of a cheap ballpoint pen. Each had been positioned in a corner, up where the walls met the ceiling. Even in the bathroom and hallway. The microphones for each room were so sensitive, they “would pick up a mouse breaking wind between the mattresses,” Walter had said. After he finished, he and Sierra climbed down, and she went outside to reconnect the cable to the house. That was easy, since it had been disconnected the night before. Eve’s calls to the cable company had been fed to a cellular phone in the step van parked a block away.

As soon as the people had left the house, Eve settled down to watch her first story. Mr. Puzzle, unused to such excitement and physical exertion, fell fast asleep in her lap, the small beast rattling loudly as he exhaled.

Sierra and Walter returned to the long motor home and went into a rear room illuminated by a cluster of nine-inch screens. The German coach was the agency’s best-equipped surveillance van. The front of the van looked as if it should be filled with tourists from Iowa. The driver’s and passenger’s seats fronted a dining area, the kitchen, and a door that would seem to lead to the bed and bathroom. Behind that door there was a large open area that held a network of sophisticated electronics, with two swivel chairs at the console. Beyond that room were four bunk beds, which folded into the wall, and a bathroom, which had a shower head in the wall over the toilet. Water drained down from a large tank on the roof, and electricity was supplied by means of a diesel generator. Agents could remain in the van, in relative comfort, until a job was over, ideally in a few days.

Eve Fletcher’s post-office branch was located in a strip mall beside a large grocery store less than a quarter mile from Eve’s house. McLean’s assortment of federal warrants guaranteed access to mail addressed to three hundred twenty-one Tucker and allowed phone taps for the same address, and entry and search for the house and grounds at Joe McLean’s discretion. He even had a pair of warrants signed by a federal judge but not yet filled in as to specifics of the search.

Joe led the young agents through the sorting room to the rear office door. Larry Burrows carried an aluminum case the size of an orange crate, and Joe was lugging a pair of small cases. Stephanie had been given responsibility for the thermos of hot coffee. Joe tapped at the door, which was opened almost immediately by a short, wide man with a stiff toupee set on his head like a beanie. He was dressed in a crumpled seersucker suit, and his shiny black wing-tip loafers looked as wide as they were long. His face seemed too red, his hands trembled slightly, and his breath smelled of fresh peppermint over old bourbon.

“Andy Lustiv,” he said as he shook Joe’s hand. “Come on in, and Ed’ll get you whatever you need here. You have any problems, call my beeper. Day or night.”

The postal clerk, a man who looked like a thin Burl Ives, opened an office door for them and handed the inspector a nine-by-eleven-inch manila envelope.

“This is to be delivered to the house tomorrow. Only Ed here is aware that you’re working the address. He’s a valued employee. His lips are sealed as tight as a frog’s asshole, and that’s waterproof,” Andy said. Ed was a man who had just been threatened into silence and looked it. If he was the sort of man to drop hints at the water fountain, letting his co-workers know he was important enough to be trusted with classified information, he understood that to do so would mean the loss of his job. He was close enough to retirement to hear the fish jumping.

The office was government issue. The Steelcase desk and chair were in matching olive drab. There were two four-drawer file cabinets in olive and a calendar depicting three identical, undoubtedly playful, kittens in and around a basket with several balls of colorful yarn in it. The bulletin board was layered with official announcements. Agent Andy Lustiv might have been in the employ of the Soviet Union rather than the U.S. government.

The nervous clerk left, and Andy leaned against the wall. As soon as the door closed, Larry and Stephanie cleared the desk surface and began unpacking the cases.

“What sort of setup is that?” Andy asked. He gestured at the cases.

“Larry?” Joe said.

“This is a print recovery and identification kit.”

Andy looked at Larry, ran the name through his personal filter, and smiled. “It’s a Prick!” he laughed. “The initials. P-R-I-K. That’s rich! I swear it is.”

Stephanie rolled her eyes. Joe smiled. He wouldn’t have imagined Andy for a brain that worked so well. Looks could be deceiving.

Larry ignored the remark and said, “It consists of a laser-beam scanner that isolates any body oils. It’s from Lawrence Livermore research and development. The print scanner isolates and scans, the fingerprint is digitized and fed into this computer. The computer is armed with a complete set of fingerprints belonging to our subject.”

“I’ll be dogged,” Andy said. “It works?”

“It sure does. One of only four in existence.”

“We’re field-testing it,” Stephanie added as she pulled on a pair of white cotton gloves.

“Mind if I watch?” Andy said.

“No,” Joe said. Stephanie cut her eyes toward Larry, who frowned.

Stephanie opened two bottles, and the small room filled with the odor of solvent. She selected a piece of mail and began dabbing the two solvents on the back edge of the envelope. Within seconds the flap popped open.

“I’ll be dipped in shit,” Andy said. “Dries fast.”

“Four to five seconds and doesn’t leave a water mark,” she said as she slipped out and opened the letter using steel tongs with rubber tips. She placed it on the glass plate of the scanner. Suddenly a copy of the document appeared on the computer screen, and two blue swirls appeared at one edge of the latter. “Folded by hand,” Larry said hopefully.

Larry tapped on buttons creating a black border around the individual prints, and the blue swirls grew in size until they filled the screen, one at a time. After a few seconds the words “No Match” appeared at the top of the screen.

“Sheeeit,” Larry said.

“Junk mail is usually printed, folded, and stuffed by machines,” Stephanie said.

“We know the subject stays in touch with the target. We suspect that the subject is contacting by mail. He’s too bright to call her, and she’s a shut-in,” Joe said.

Andy nodded.

The room was silent as the process was repeated over and over again until all ten pieces of mail had been thoroughly scanned. After each failed to turn up Martin’s finger tracks, Andy clucked his disappointment, but he was impressed.

“You boys always get the best toys,” he said.

Stephanie began the task of resealing the envelopes. It was a slow process because it was of the utmost importance that none of the seams appeared to have been tampered with. A chemical reanimated the original glue strip, and she closed the envelopes one at a time.

For one and a half hours Andy and Joe leaned against the wall and watched closely. After each envelope was resealed, Larry would look at the seams through a powerful lighted pocket loupe to make sure there were no visible marks left by the tampering.

“What if he-the subject… target-already wrote her?” Andy said. “What if she got the letter yesterday? They haven’t got a time machine for you to test yet, do they?” Andy said.

Joe laughed. “It’s coming. Soon as they get those crashed UFOs figured out.”

After they had completed the search, Joe handed Andy the manila envelope and they packed the kits. Andy handed the envelope of cleared mail in turn to Ed, who had fallen asleep in a chair outside in the sorting room and had to be awakened. Then they filed out into the alley where the cars waited. Ed stood in the open door, watching them leave.

Andy paused with his car door open and his arm on the roof. He spoke over the gleaming expanse of government-standard white. “Remember, if we can be of any assistance, call. Ed’ll let you in from now on. Thanks for showing me your Prick!” He laughed loudly and slid into the Taurus.

“Can I ask what y’all are looking for?” Ed asked from the doorway.

“Sure you can,” Joe said as he and the rookies climbed into the rental car and rolled away, leaving a confused-looking postal employee standing in the doorway.