Free The Forgers by Bradford Morrow Page A

door, I hesitated, wondering if I really, truly wanted to awaken the sleeper. It wasn’t as if I knew what I was going to ask or say, although I had toured through all kinds of scenarios in my head over the days and nights after Meghan and I returned from Montauk. How did you know Adam? What else did you sell him? How did you ever manage to pull off that splendid Baskerville fabrication? Who the hell are you?
    The woman who opened the door was too old to be the mother of young children. White hair tucked up into a loose bun, a wrinkled royal blue housedress. Of all things, she pressed a ball of tissue paper to her left nostril. “Can I help you with something?”
    Swallowing back my disconcertment at her nosebleed, I said, “I’m looking for Henry Slader,” peering past her into the foyer. “He lives here, right?”
    â€œDid. I rented him an apartment at the back of the house. But he left a couple months ago. If you know him, I got mail for him.”
    Here I hesitated. This was a line probably not to be crossed, although I wanted to say, Yes, thanks, I’ll get it to him. She could easily have caught me out on such a schoolboy ruse, however, and I half-wondered if her easy offer wasn’t a setup. “I know someone who knew him, my girlfriend’s brother.”
    â€œWell, I’m sorry but I can’t help you. I have no idea where he went or I’d forward him his mail.”
    â€œWould you happen to remember if an Adam Diehl ever visited him? Tallish guy with red hair, book collector.”
    She needed no time to consider the question. “He never had no visitors, except for some police who wanted to ask him about something out in Long Island. He didn’t know nothing about it, was what he said. So I’m sorry but—” and she lifted away the bloodied tissue, frowned at it, shrugged, and sighed. “I wish I could help you but I’m afraid I can’t.”
    â€œMom, what is it?” a woman in her thirties asked, appearing abruptly by her side in the doorway with a young boy, clearly the owner of the ball and bike, in tow.
    â€œThis gentleman is looking for Mr. Slader.”
    â€œOh,” she said, as the boy pressed past her and myself, heading for the front yard to play. “We have some mail of his. Mostly catalogues it looks like.”
    Without a thought, I leapt on this unexpected second chance. “I was telling your mother here that my girlfriend’s brother knows him and—”
    â€œGreat,” she said, disappeared for a moment while the boy’s grandmother and I, each of us distracted, watched him kick his soccer ball around.
    As I drove back to the city, I realized my purloined invoice might simply have been one among others the authorities had found, followed up on, and deemed too insubstantial to pursue further. Had they known—how could they have?—that the Baskerville letters were not what they appeared to be, they might have looked into it further. They didn’t, but I had to. At the same time, I quarreled with myself about having taken Slader’s mail. The vague claim I would try to get it to him was so obviously specious—why would I come looking for him in Dobbs Ferry if I knew where he was?—that I was embarrassed for his landlady and her daughter when they accepted my offer. But I couldn’t help myself. The catalogues and a couple of letters sat next to me on the passenger seat, accusatory, yes, but also promising. Enough illegitimacy seemed to hover, like thick blinding fog, around Henry Slader that I knew these were my only hope of figuring out his story. Paranoid, I kept glancing in the rearview mirror expecting to see revolving bright lights atop a squad car, the landlady in the front seat pointing her finger at me, the forging, mail-thieving felon, as the police bore down. Patent lunacy, to be sure. I would never see those people again in my life.
    Back in my apartment