Even the Wicked

"Well, that's safe," he said, "if not terribly adventurous. Another of the same for me, Darlene. And don't ever change, understand?"

She walked off and he said, "The zip code's one-oh-oh-oh-one, or should I say one-zero-zero-zero-one? You notice how they been doing that lately?"

"Doing what?"

"Saying zero. You give a credit card number over the phone, say

'oh' for 'zero,' and they'll replace all your ohs with zeroes when they read it back to you for confirmation. You know what I think it is?

Computers. You copy down a number by hand, what's it matter whether you make an oh or a zero on the page? They both look the same. But when it's keystrokes, you're hitting different keys. So they have to make sure."

Our drinks came. He picked up the shot and tossed it off, took a small sip of the beer. "Anyway, that's my theory, take it or leave it, and it's got nothing to do with Will's letter, anyway. He got the zip code wrong."

"He put an oh for a zero?"

"No, no, no. He wrote down the wrong number entirely. The right address, 450 West Thirty-third Street, but for some goddam reason he put one-oh-oh-one-one instead of one-oh-oh-oh-one.

One-oh-oh-eleven's the zip for Chelsea and part of the West Village."

"I see," I said, but I didn't. "But what difference does it make? He did get the street number right, and you're the New York Daily News, for God's sake. You shouldn't be that hard to find."

"You would think that," he said, "and I take back what I said before, because it's all of a piece with people saying zero instead of oh, and having to get the keystrokes right. It's fucking technology getting in everybody's face is what it is."

I waited for him to explain.

"It delayed the letter," he said, "if you can believe it. I'd hate to guess how many pieces of mail a day get sent to the News, most of them written in crayon. So you'd think the dorks who sort the mail could figure out where we were, especially since it's no more than a long five-iron shot from the main post office. But all you have to do is put a one where an oh ought to be, pardon me all to hell, I mean a zero, and they're lost. They're fucking stymied."

"There must have been a postmark," I said.

"More than one," he said. "There was the original one, when it went through the machine at the intake station before it got shipped uptown to the Old Chelsea station on West Eighteenth, which is where they ship the mail for delivery to the one-oh-oh-one-one zips. Then it went out in somebody's route bag and came back again, and then it picked up a second postmark when they bounced it from Old Chelsea to the Parley building on Eighth Avenue, which is where the one-oh-oh-oh-one mail gets delivered out of.

The second one was handwritten, which probably makes it a collector's item in this day and age, but what you're interested in, what anybody'd be interested in, is the first postmark."

"Yes."

He knocked back his glass of beer. "I wish I had it to show it to you," he said, "but of course the cops took it. It tells you two things, the zip for the intake station and the date it went through the stamping machine. The zip was one-oh-oh-thirty-eight, indicating the station was Peck Slip."

"And the date?"

"Same night Whitfield was killed."

"What time?"

He shook his head. "Just the date. Which escapes me at the moment, but it was that night, the night he died."

"Thursday night."

"Was it a Thursday? Yeah, of course it was, and we were on the street with it Friday morning."

"But the postmark was Thursday."

"Isn't that what I just said?"

"I just want to make sure I've got this right," I said. "It went through the stamping machine before midnight, and as a result it had Thursday's date on it and not Friday's."

"You've got it right." He pointed to my glass. "What's that, Coca-Cola? You want a refill?" I shook my head. "Well, I damn well do," he said, and got Darlene's attention and signaled for another round.

I said, "Whitfield died around eleven that night, and the first news flash was on New York One just before midnight. Unless I'm missing something, the letter went in the mail before Whitfield was dead."

"Probably true."

"Just probably?"

"Well, you're assuming the post office did everything right," he said, "and you already know how long it took them to deliver the fucking letter, so why should they be letter-perfect in any other area of operations? Meaning it's entirely possible somebody neglected to advance the date on the postmark at

the stroke of midnight. But I'd certainly say it's odds-on that Adrian Whitfield still had a pulse when Will mailed the letter."

"Peck Slip," I said. "That's down by the Fulton Fish Market, isn't it?"

"That's right. But the post office serves the whole three-eight zip code, and that includes a big chunk of downtown. One Police Plaza, City Hall—"