Write me a Letter

said. ”It’s important.”
    ”Forget it,” I said. ”I am gone. I am history. Be right there, dear!” I called out to some imaginary female. ”Sorry, I’ve got a lady waiting in the car.”
    ”No, you don’t,” she said.
    ”Oh, yes, I do,” I said. ”And she’s taller than you, and prettier, and is completely within my thrall.”
    ”Funny,” she said. ”I can see your car, if yours is the one that looks like a bumper car, and I don’t see anyone in it. Maybe she’s hiding in the trunk.”
    ”Where the hell are you, anyway?”
    ”Somebody’s Taco-Burger,” she said.
    ”Mrs. Morales’ Taco-Burger,” I said to a dead line. ”Don’t have the combination plate, whatever you do.”
    I had just time to scatter a few papers around on my desk so I could appear to be deeply engrossed when in waltzed Miss Ruth Braukis. She was wearing a white linen suit, a red ruffled blouse, red high heels, and she had a red ribbon in her ebon hair. Her shoulder bag was red, also, as were the frames of the sunglasses she was negligently twirling in one hand.
    ”Hi,” she said. ”Sorry to be such a nuisance.”
    ”Who’ve you got a letter from this time?” I said. ”Golda Meir?”
    She smiled. Her lipstick was exactly the same red as all her accessories.
    ”May I sit down for a minute, please, Mr. Daniel? Just for a minute?”
    ”What’s mine is yours, Miss Braukis,” I said, gesturing toward the chair opposite mine. ”Especially as I don’t see how I can stop you without doing something ungentlemanly like giving you the bum’s rush.”
    She sat herself down demurely.
    ”Back in a sec,” I said. I went to the small washroom in the back, got her six hundred dollars’ worth of travelers checks from the safe, ran a comb hurriedly through my hair, then rejoined her in the office. I aligned the checks neatly and placed them on the desktop between us. ”Excuse the mess,” I said, indicating the paperwork, ”but it’s all go these days.”
    She didn’t even glance at the money. She made a noncommittal noise, then took a long look at me, as if she was trying to make up her mind about something. I trusted her long looks as much as I did her Estonian fables. Then she said, finally:
    ”I did lie to you.”
    ”That, Miss Braukis, is yesterday’s news,” I said. ”But do continue.”
    ”There were reasons, good reasons.”
    ”Such as?”
    She hesitated.
    ”Here we go again,” I said.
    ”Mr. Daniel,” she said with some asperity in her tone. ”It is possible there are things it’s better you don’t know.”
    ”Better for who?”
    ”You,” she said, pointing one finger at me. ”And for ‘better’ read ‘safer’.”
    ”Oh,” I said. ”I didn’t know you cared.”
    ”I can tell you this much,” she said. ”We’ve had a possible sighting.”
    ‘A UFO?” I exclaimed. ”Really! How thrilling. Where? Up near Lafayette ?”
    ‘A sighting,” she repeated patiently, ”of one person in a long list of people we’ve been looking for on and off for over forty-seven years.”
    ”You must have started young,” I said. ”But I can’t say I’m overwhelmed with surprise, I knew it already, I knew right away you were after one of those old shits.”
    ”We need confirmation,” she said, ”of the possible sighting.”
    ”From Uncle Theo?”
    ”We hope so,” she said. ”That’s why we brought him here.”
    ”All the way from sunny Estonia ,” I said.
    ”Well,” she said, ”he did stop off somewhere else on the way, for about thirty years.”
    ”Bet I can guess where,” I said. ”Bet it’s got a lot of sand and a hell of a lot of navel oranges.”
    She smiled again briefly. I don’t believe I ever did see her laugh, but you could pry a smile out of the serious Miss Braukis from time to time. It was worth the effort.
    ”Why me?” I said. ”Why not use your boyfriend what’s-his-name, Lethal Lou, who was in the car with you last time and is probably waiting around the corner right now?”
    She arched her eyebrows in mild surprise.
    ”I have my little methods,” I said smugly.
    ”The blond boy on the motorcycle,” she said, nodding. ”We thought so. First, the man you refer to is my colleague, not my boyfriend. Second, his name is Shlomo, which is short for Solomon. Thirdly, he is comparatively new out here and does not know the terrain as intimately as you do. Nor is he as experienced a babysitter, to use Mr. Lewellen’s term.”
    ”Call me what you will,” I