Page 172 - Labelle Gramercy, Detective

Slow Burn

Labelle’s bluntness had been aimed at breaking through his calm
demeanor; no luck so far, but she kept on trying. “No, he burned
down but the kitchen is still standing. Now, what about yesterday?
What were you doing?”
He glanced at his desk. He had a shoebox full of envelopes and a
stack of correspondence next to an old typewriter. A coffee mug held
an assortment of marking pens. I could read the letterhead in the
typewriter: A Quasar of my Very Own.
“I was here all afternoon, working.”
My curiosity got the better of me. “But what kind of work is that?”
Quarles smiled and pointed to a well-thumbed book by the
envelopes. “I am selling the stuff that dreams are made of:
immortality, of a sort. I advertise in various popular magazines,
offering to assign anyone’s name to a star which has previously been
known only by an astronomical code. For ten dollars, I do a little
calligraphy on the name and type in the star’s location on this
certificate and mail it back. All very legal, I assure you.”
I looked at the cheaply-printed documents he was peddling,
imitation parchment with a big five-pointed golden star in the center.
It was impossible to judge how many of these requests he got in a
day, or how often he took his output to a mailbox.
“And you were in here, alone, from when to when?” Labelle stuck
to her guns, totally undistracted by the curious means of making a
living this quint had hit upon.
“Oh, I went out for a walk around noon. It takes me almost an
hour to do the lettering on each, and I need a break every so often.
Then I went out again, this time in my car, about a quarter to five.”
“Did you stop anywhere, talk to anyone?”
nd
“Just the clerk at the convenience store down on 32 Street, at the
corner of Avenue 90. I was in there a minute or two past five to buy
a can of chili and some bread for dinner.”
“Could you be more precise about the time?”
He stared off into space, appearing to search his memory. Labelle
had told me something once about neurolinguistics and brain
hemispheres, that people look off in one direction when they are
trying to remember something, and the other when they need to
make it up. I couldn’t remember which was which.

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