Georgia on My Mind and Other Places (30 page)

The inside was no better. Narrow and gloomy, with a long wooden counter running across the middle to separate the customer from the shopkeeper. Bare dusty boards formed the floor and one unshaded light-bulb just above the counter served as the only illumination. Cobwebs hung across all the corners of the ceiling. As furniture there was one stool on my side and a tall armchair on the other. In that chair, peering through a jeweller’s loupe at a stamp in its little cover of transparent plastic, sat a fat man in his early twenties. At the ring of the shop’s doorbell he took the lens away from his eye and gave me a frown of greeting.

“Mr. Walton?” I said.

“Mmph. Yer-yes.” A quiet voice, with the hint of a stammer.

“I’m Rachel Banks. I don’t want to buy any stamps, or sell any, but I wondered if you could spare me a few minutes of your time. Jill Fahnestock gave me your name.”

“Mm. Mmph. Yes.”

It occurred to me that I should have asked Jill a few more questions. I hadn’t, because there had been a fond tone in her voice that made me think Tom Walton might be an old boyfriend of hers. But seeing him now I felt sure that wasn’t the case. Jill was one of the beautiful people, well-groomed and chic and dressed always in the latest fashions. Tom Walton was nice looking in a chubby sort of way, with curly fair hair, a beautiful mouth, and innocent blue eyes. But he hovered right at the indefinable boundary of fatness beyond which I cannot see a man as a physically attractive object. Also he hadn’t shaved, his shirt was poorly ironed, and he was wearing a baggy coverall cardigan that was as shapeless as he was. There was even a smudge of oil or something around his left eye that had come from the lens he had been using.

Not Jilly’s type. Not at all.

“I have a question,” I said. “About a postage stamp. Or what may be a postage stamp. Jill thought you might be able to help me.”

“Ah.” At least that was a positive sound, a tone approaching interest. But I still had to get the preliminaries out of the way. I’d been in trouble before when I didn’t announce at once who I was and what I was doing.

“I’m a private investigator,” I said. “Here’s my credentials.”

He hardly glanced at the card and badge I held out to him. Instead, a faint expression of incredulity crept across his face, while he stared first at my face, then at my purse.

“Hmph,” he said. “Hmph.”

Those particular “hmph”s I could read. They meant, you don’t look tough enough to be a private eye. Too young, too nervous. And anyway, where’s your gun? (Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett—I’d like to bring them back to life long enough to strangle the pair of them. Between them they ruined the image.)

“I’m investigating the disappearance of Jason Lockyer,” I said. I
was
nervous, no doubt about it. Eleanor Lockyer had that effect on me.

“Jason Lockyer. Never heard of him.”

“No reason you would have. Mind if I sit down?”

I took his silence for assent and perched on the stool. Tall and skinny I may be, but high chairs were made for legs like mine.

“Lockyer is a biologist,” I went on. “A specialist in algae and slime molds and a number of other things I’m forced to admit I know nothing about. He’s famous in his own field, a man in his early sixties, very distinguished to look at and apparently a first-rate teacher. He’s on the faculty over at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, as a full professor of an endowed chair, and he has an apartment there. But he also keeps an apartment here in Washington. Not to mention an apartment in Coral Gables and half an island that he owns in Maine. As you’ll guess from all that, he’s loaded.”

With some people you can lose it right there. They resent other people’s money so much, they can’t work around them. Tom Walton showed nothing more than a mild disinterest in Jason Lockyer’s diverse homes, and I went on: “He usually spent most of the week over on campus in Baltimore, and his wife is mostly down in Florida. So when he disappeared a couple of weeks ago she didn’t even realize it for three or four days. She called me in last Friday.”

“Why you? Why not the p-police?”

The question came so quickly and easily that I revised my first impression of Walton. Slob, maybe, but not dumb.

“The police, too. But Eleanor Lockyer doesn’t have much faith in them. When she reported that he had disappeared, all they did was file a report.”

“Yeah, I know the feeling. Same as they did when my shop was robbed last year.”

“She expected more. She thought when she called them they would run off and hunt for him in all directions. As it was they didn’t even come to search their apartment.”

I was losing him. He was starting to fidget in the armchair and fiddle with the jeweler’s loupe on the counter in front of him. It didn’t look as though he’d had a customer in days, but I probably had only two more minutes before he made up a reason why he was too busy to listen to me.

I opened my bag and took out a 9” x 12” manila envelope. “But I did search the apartments,” I said. “All four, the one here in Washington and the one in Baltimore and then the other two. No signs that he left in a hurry, no signs of any problem. A dead loss in fact, except for one oddity. An empty envelope in the Baltimore apartment, addressed to Jason Lockyer—didn’t say Professor, didn’t say Doctor, just Jason Lockyer—standard IBM Selectric typewriter, but there was a very odd stamp on it. Here.”

I took the photograph out of the envelope and slid it across the counter. It was an 8” x 10” color print and I was rather proud of it. I had taken it with a high-power magnifying lens, and after half a dozen attempts I had obtained a picture with both good color balance and sharp focus. The image showed the head of a black-faced doll with staring eyes and straight hair sticking up wildly like a stiff black brush. The doll was black and green and red, and an oval red border ran around it. At the bottom of the stamp was a figure “1” and the words, “One Googol.”

My satisfaction at the work was not shared by Tom Walton. He was staring at the photo with disdain.

“It’s a color enlargement,” I said. “Of the postage stamp. And the picture in the middle there—”

“It’s a golliwog.”

That piece of information had taken me hours to discover.

“How did you know? Until two days ago I had never even
heard
of a golliwog.”

“I used to have a doll like this when I was a kid.” He was a little embarrassed, but the sight of the picture had brought him to life. “Matter of fact, it was my f-favorite toy.”

“I never knew a doll like that existed—I had to ask dozens of people before I found one who knew what it was. It started out as a character in children’s books, you know, nearly a hundred years ago. How on earth did you get one to play with?”

“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.