Read Online Write me a Letter by David M Pierce - Free Book Online

else? It’s completely legal, although you wouldn’t want to do it every couple of days. What you do is write checks in the normal way at the end of the month to all your regular creditors. You mail them. The next day you call up your bank and tell them your checkbook and various other bits and pieces got stolen out of your office. You might have to tell your wife the same. You ask the bank to please close your account immediately. You ask the bank for a letter confirming you have reported a stolen checkbook and thus your account has been closed. You tell them, to avoid any possibility of confusion in the future, you think it wiser to open a new account at a different branch. OK?”
    ”I’m with you,” he said. ”Press on, McDuff.”
    ”So you immediately open another account, but better you do so at another bank entirely, because banks have been known to make mistakes and some employee might just run a couple of your creditors’ checks through your new account in error. Anyway, so says Benny, and when Benny talks, I listen. I might yawn a lot, but I listen.”
    ”Me too,” my friend said.
    ”Then you make copies of the bank’s letter, which you send, along with a heartfelt letter of apology, to the billing departments of all your creditors, asking them to kindly return your now-worthless checks and informing them that of course new checks will be in the mail as soon as the bank prints them up. All of which will take some time, which is exactly what you need. That cheer you up any?”
    ”No,” he said. ”It is in no way cheering, but it is distinctly helpful, and I thank you.” He slapped the desktop lightly with both palms and got to his feet. He held out his hand; I took it.
    ”Thanks again, pard.”
    ”Anytime, amigo.” He left. I went to the window and watched him drive away, thinking, Ain’t love the bee’s knees until it gets expensive. I bet whoever she was, though, she wasn’t half as cute as my latest heartthrob. But then I thought, what was it that didn’t add up about the whole... affair, one might say? Although it had to be more than that, given the considerable sum of money involved (mine, thank you), and John having to cover it all up and lie to his wife and goodness knows what else. One might conjecture a spot of blackmail on the fair damsel’s part, but (a) John, although not brimming with cheer, hadn’t behaved like VD.’d behave if he was being blackmailed, i.e., to name but three, going through the fucking roof, plotting for dire revenge, and swearing off the so-called ”fair” sex (make that all sex) for life. And (b) I find it impossible to believe that any damsel, fair, brown, or red, would stoop to such behavior in the first place. So what did that leave a poor deducer to deduce? That a certain door-to-door diaper service might have a new client some half-a-dozen, say, moons in the future? Getting warmer, maybe... and maybe, like a lot of things, maybe it was none of my business.
    Right about then, the phone rang, disturbing my sensitive reflections on such things as young love, not-so-young love, autumn leaves a-falling, and calendar leaves likewise. It was my least-favorite bail bondsman, a guy called Fats Nathan, and Fats wasn’t called Fats using the kind of reverse humor hoboes and other noted comedians often employ wherein a midget will be nicknamed Lofty and a skyscraper like me Peewee, Fats was called Fats because he was fat. I suppose he wasn’t really a bail bondsman anymore if one wanted to nitpick, and it’s surprising how many do; since a fairly recent change in the law, the courts now accepted a person’s personal recognizance bond, as in a check, which pretty much obviated the need for outside sureties that used to be supplied by guys like Fats for a hefty price. So Fats had moved more into loan sharking, but he also continued with his old lucrative sideline, which was acting as an intermediary between felon and fuzz.
    Say, for example—perish the thought,