Write me a Letter

the $500.
    ”And fifty cents, please,” I said, tucking the bills away in my wallet and replacing it in the jacket pocket.
    ”Excuse me,” he said, digging out the change and dropping it on the table. ”Now, if there’s nothing else— maybe you hired a helicopter and forgot to tell me—where is that little welsher Gince?”
    I took out the one slip of paper remaining in the folder and flicked it across the table. ”That’s what took two days to get,” I said untruthfully; it had taken five minutes at Ron’s. It was a photocopy of an airline ticket he’d made out for me on a proper Air France ticket form, and it revealed that one William Gince had taken Air France flight 229 to Paris three days ago and from there had gone on to Rome, or at least he had been ticketed to, the following day. Fats looked it over, then looked me over; there was not a lot of warmth in his regard.
    ”Two days,” I said bitterly. ”You know how many flights leave Kennedy? About one a minute, I almost went blind. And I had to call in outside help. I might’ve been able to persuade one airline to give me access to their recent passenger lists by telling them some yarn about trying to check on a friend I missed contact with at the airport, but not them all. A New York cop I know helped me out; it cost, check the expenses; he and a security type at Kennedy split four hundred, but it got us into a small room, it got us two computers to use, and it got us all the access codes. Did you know passenger lists aren’t alphabeticized? I do, now.” (Whether they really are or not, who does know, or care.) ”What we were checking on was every flight out of the country since Tuesday; there was only about a million. If we came up empty, then we planned to cover all interior flights we had time for, although as Willy could have used any name for one of those, good luck.”
    ”How did you know he was in New York ?” Fats said. ”From his sister,” I said. ”I went to see her. She heard him phoning for a reservation L.A. — New York . She told me he had a passport that he took; the whole family got them at the same time to go to England one vacation. London was so quaint, she said. And so old!”
    ”So I heard,” Fats said. ”Maybe she knows where he is now.”
    ”No way,” I said firmly. ”Know what she said when her mom was in the kitchen making us all a nice cup of tea? See, I didn’t know how much Willy might have told them about the fix he was in, but they sure knew something was rotten in Denmark, he took off so quickly, he didn’t even tell his boss where he worked he was going. I convinced them I was a friend, like his only hope, and there could be serious consequences for him if I couldn’t get in touch with him before some far-less-friendly types got to him. Sis was practically crying by then. What she said was she only wished she could help but Willy had deliberately not told them where he was going so no one would come bothering them, there’d be no reason—least he could do was try and keep them out of it.” I hoped Fats believed me because that was my plan, too. ”Oh, yeah, he did say that if anyone did hassle them he had a way of finding out about it and he’d drop the fuzz a line, naming names. But hell, Fats, you wouldn’t go bothering a widow lady and her only daughter, now would you?”
    ”Perish the thought,” Fats said.
    ”But I’m a mite confused, Fats,” I said. ”What’s he running all the way to Roma and, who knows, Singapore and points east, over a few measly grand? It must have cost him half that for his plane fare, for God’s sakes.”
    ”With small-time crooks like that, who can figure,” he said.
    ”Who indeed?” I said.
    ”So that’s it, eh?” he said.
    ”That’s about all she wrote,” I said. ”But I do have an idea. He’s not going to stay away forever, what’s he going to do, and on what? He’ll probably be back in six months with a dose of yellow fever or something. He’s also probably too dumb to change his name even if he knows how, so what you do is wait awhile, then get some hotshot kid to run a computer trace on him. If you don’t know anyone, I can put you in touch with a guy I know, Phil the Freak, who is frankly unbelievable, he taught me what little I know about computers when I got mine. Ever tell you I call it Betsy? That’s the same name Davy Crockett, king o’ the wild frontier, gave his favorite rifle.”
    ”Live and learn,” Fats said. He got