Invasion of Privacy

like you’re kind of watching over it.”
    “Me?” Elmer looked defensive. “No, man. Just keep an eye on the lot, don’t want nobody break no windows, steal the radios.”
    I nodded. “You wouldn’t have been here when this one came in?”
    “Yeah, I was here.”
    Bingo. “When was that?”
    “Thursday night, maybe nine, nine-thirty. I work nights, weekends. Need the money, you know it?”
    “You see who was in the car?”
    The confident grin. “That is worth something to you, man?”
    I took out my wallet and held up a twenty.
    The grin broadened. “There two people in it, that is forty, no?”
    I brought out another twenty. “Description?”
    Elmer took the bills, put them in his chest pocket. “Guy and his woman.”
    “What did the guy look like?”
    “I don’t know, man. Dark hair.” A shrug.
    “White, black?”
    “Not black, I don’t think.”
    I gave him one of my photos of Andrew Dees. “Could this be the guy?”
    Elmer held it up, moving his hand back and forth like a trombone player, and I felt a little twinge.
    “Could be, man. Dark hair, and your guy here, he is tall, no?”
    “How do you know that?”
    “I don’t see him too good when the car go past my booth. You don’t need me to get in, just to get out, you know it?”
    “Yes.”
    “So I counting the money in my drawer, and I see this Porsche come in. I watch the guy take it to the space too, hot car like this.”
    “The man was behind the wheel?”
    “Like I said.”
    That didn’t sound right. When I first met Olga Evorova in my office, she told me no one drove the Porsche but her. “You’re sure?”
    “Sure I’m sure. He park the car over here, then they get out, with some luggage. The guy look over to me, and he wave.”
    “He what?”
    “He wave to me, like you did before, man.”
    That didn’t sound right, either. “The woman wave, too?”
    “No. I don’t really see her too good. It is dark, and she is behind the other cars, walking.”
    “Walking?”
    “With one of the suitcases. To the terminal.”
    I looked around. “So he was over here when he waved to you.”
    “By his door.”
    I gestured toward the lot entrance, a hundred feet away. “And it was dark, and you were at your booth.”
    “Like I tell you, man.”
    “Elmer, tell me something else.”
    “What?”
    “You need glasses?”
    A sheepish grin. “Kind of.” He tapped his chest pocket. “What I maybe use your forty for, you know it?”

    Inside the terminal, I showed my photo from Plymouth Willows to skycaps, ticket agentb, and custodians. Unlike Elmer, most of them hadn’t been working Thursday night, but even those who had said they didn’t recognize Dees/ DiRienzi. On the way out, though, I noticed a mailbox next to a coin-operated stamp dispenser.
    I stopped in my tracks. If Evorova was running with “Andrew Dees,” he probably would have told her that he was really Alfonso DiRienzi. He also might have warned her against using any telephones. But maybe, just maybe, she would have mailed me something from the airport, something that wouldn’t arrive till long after they were gone but still let me know that she was all right. Thursday night mail from Logan could have arrived at my office on Friday, but Saturday was more likely. And I hadn’t been there since late Friday afternoon.
    I walked out to redeem my car from Elmer’s lot.
    Driving back through the Sumner Tunnel, I went over what I had so far. Alfonso DiRienzi fears his cover might be blown after I pay him a visit Wednesday at the photocopy shop. He doesn’t run that night, but he’s nervous enough the next day to leave work in the afternoon and withdraw most of his money. About the same time, I’m telling Olga Evorova from Vermont that “her Andrew” isn’t on the level. According to Filomena, DiRienzi doesn’t come back to work Thursday afternoon. That night, when the Robinettes are off at a band concert, a woman argues with DiRienzi in his townhouse at Plymouth Willows loudly enough for both the Stepanians and Norman El-mendorf to hear. Probably the woman is Olga, since Steven Stepanian notices “ Dees ” loading luggage into a car like hers around eight o’clock. Between nine and nine-thirty— or about driving time from Plymouth Mills to Logan that late at night—Elmer the attendant sees the orange Porsche arrive, a man and a woman getting out. He can’t see well enough to really identify the man as DiRienzi, and the “tall” is probably more