Political Pressure

20

The man in the T-shirt came into the shop whistling a Grateful Dead song about a narcotized locomotive conductor. Helen Lendon thought he looked like a very nice young man. He slapped a Visa card on the counter and went about his business.

First he selected a black permanent marker from the display. Then he took a ream of white paper from the shelf and opened it, extracted a sheet and went to the counter where customers did their form filling.

Helen Lendon would watch them in the security mirrors. She wasn't the kind to poke her nose in other people's business, but she didn't want anything unsavory going on in her Mail Boxes & More store.

Somehow the young man with the marker managed to position himself so that she couldn't see what he was doing. He took something out of his pocket, did something with the marker, did something with the sheet of paper, then put whatever it was back in his pocket.

He capped the marker and took the sheet of paper to the fax machine. He poked and positioned the paper in various places, and Helen Lendon asked him more than once if he needed assistance. He said no. Finally he had the paper in the right place and looked across the shop. Helen Lendon nodded. He smiled with satisfaction and picked up the phone on the fax machine, then pressed the buttons as he shifted his weight, and Helen Lendon couldn't see what numbers the young man was dialing.

But she heard him speaking into the phone. "Blah, blah, blah," he said quite clearly. "Carrots and peas, carrots and peas." This went on for almost a minute.

"Hiya. It's about time," he said then. "Got a fax for you. No, I already pressed a button. I don't want to press another button. Send? How do you know there's a button that says Send? Even I know there's different kinds of fax machines. Oh, wait, there is a button called Send. So I press it, then what? You sure? Okay, here goes."

The young man pressed the Send button, then watched the page feed through the fax machine and slide out into the bottom tray.

The machine beeped.

"Aw, hell!"

"No, that's what it's supposed to do," Helen called out to him assuredly. "That means it's done. Look at the display." A few seconds later she clarified, "The display on the fax machine."

"Oh." He glared at the display, then shrugged and shredded the sheet of paper so fast Helen couldn't quite believe her eyes. The shreds fluttered into the wastebasket.

The young man charged it all to his Visa, the paper and the marker and the fax call, which Helen's computer claimed had gone to the Solomon Islands. The man didn't want to take the paper or the marker with him. "Don't write things down very often," he explained.

When he was gone, Helen Lendon's curiosity got the better of her and she poked around in the wastebasket. Not one tiny sliver of paper had missed it. She found a sliver with some black on it and peered at it intensely for a moment, then gasped. It was a fragment of a black fingerprint.

But the man hadn't sent his own fingerprint. That meant the thing in his pocket...

Helen Lendon let the little scrap of paper flutter away. This time it missed the wastebasket.