It was sunset when the plane swung in over the water and landed at La Guardia Airport. I took the bus into the East Side terminal at Thirty-eighth Street and a cab from there to the Holiday Inn at West Fifty-seventh Street. The Wiener schnitzel had been so good in Red-ford, I thought I might as well stay with a winner.
The West Side hadn’t gotten any more fashionable since I had been there last and the hotel looked as if it belonged where it was. The lobby was so discouraging that I didn’t bother to check the dining room for Wiener schnitzel. Instead, I walked over to a Scandinavian restaurant on Fifty-eighth Street and ravaged its smorgasbord.
The next morning I made some phone calls to the New York Department of Social Services while I drank coffee in my room. When I finished I walked along Fifty-seventh Street to Fifth Avenue and headed downtown. I always walk in New York. In the window of F.A.O. Schwarz was an enormous stuffed giraffe, and Brentano’s had a display of ethnic cookbooks in the window. I thought about going in and asking them if they were a branch of the Boston store but decided not to. They probably lacked my zesty sense of humor.
It was about nine forty-five when I reached Thirty-fourth Street and turned left. Four blocks east, between Third and Second avenues, was a three-story beige brick building that looked like a modified fire station. The brown metal entrance doors, up four stairs, were flanked with flagpoles at right angles to the building. A plaque under the right-hand flagpole said CITY OF NEW YORK, DEPARTMENT OF SOCIAL SERVICES, YORKVILLE INCOME MAINTENANCE CENTER. I went in.
It was a big open room, the color a predictable green; molded plastic chairs in red, green, and blue stood three rows deep to the right of the entrance. To the left a low counter. Behind the counter a big black woman with blue-framed glasses on a chain around her neck was telling an old woman in an ankle-length dress that her check would come next week and would not come sooner. The woman protested in broken English, and the woman behind the desk said it again, louder. At the end of the counter, sitting in a folding chair, was a New York City cop, a slim black woman with badge, gun, short hair, and enormous high platform shoes. Beyond the counter the room L’d to the left, and I could see office space partitioned off. There was no one else on the floor.
Behind me, to the right of the entry, a stair led up. A handprinted sign said FACE TO FACE UPSTAIRS with an arrow. I went up. The second floor had been warrened off into cubicles where face to face could go on in privacy. The first cubicle was busy; the second was not. I knocked on the frame of the open door and went in. It was little bigger than a confessional, just a desk, a file cabinet, and a chair for the face to face. The woman at the desk was lean and young, not long out of Vassar or Bennington. She had a tanned outdoor face, with small lines around the eyes that she wasn’t supposed to get yet. She had on a white sleeveless blouse open at the neck. Her brown hair was cut short and she wore no makeup. Her face presented an expression of no-nonsense compassion that I suspected she was still working on. The sign on her desk said MS. HARRIS.
“Come in,” she said, her hands resting on the neat desk in front of her. A pencil in the right one. I was dressed for New York in my wheat-colored summer suit, dark blue shirt, and a white tie with blue and gold stripes. Would she invite me to her apartment? Maybe she thought I was another welfare case. If so, I’d have to speak with my tailor. I gave her a card; she frowned down at it for about thirty seconds and then looked up and said, “Yes?”
“Do you think I ought to have a motto on it?” I said.
“I beg your pardon?”
“A motto,” I said. “On the card. You know, like ‘We never sleep’ or maybe ‘Trouble is my business.’ Something like that.”
“Mr.”—she checked the card—“Spenser, I assume you’re joking and there’s nothing wrong with that, but I have a good deal to do and I wonder if you might tell me what you want directly?”
“Yes, ma’am. May I sit?”
“Please do.”
“Okay, I’m looking for a young woman who might have showed up here and gone on welfare about eight years ago.”
“Why do you want to find her?”
I shook my head. “It’s a reasonable question, but I can’t tell you.”
She frowned at me the way she had frowned at my card. “Why do you think we’d have information about something that far back?”
“Because you are a government agency. Government agencies never throw anything away because someone someday might need something to cover himself in case a question of responsibility was raised. You got welfare records for Peter Stuyvesant.”
The frown got more severe, making a groove between her eyebrows. “Why do you think this young woman was on welfare?”
“You shouldn’t frown like that,” I said. “You’ll get little premature wrinkles in the corners of your eyes.”
“I would prefer it, Mr. Spenser, if you did not attempt to personalize this contact. The condition of my eyes is not relevant to this discussion.”
“Ah, but how they sparkle when you’re angry,” I said.
She almost smiled, caught herself, and got the frown back in place. “Answer my question, please.”
“She was about eighteen; she ran away from a small midwestern town with the local bad kid, who probably ditched her after they got here. She’s a good bet to have ended up on welfare or prostitution or both. I figured that you’d have better records than Diamond Nell’s Parlor of Delight.”
The pencil in her right hand went tap-tap-tap on the desk. Maybe six taps before she heard it and stopped. “The fact of someone’s presence on welfare rolls has sometimes been used against them. Cruel as that may seem, it is a fact of life, and I hope you can understand my reticence in this matter.”
“I’m on the girl’s side,” I said.
“But I have no way to know that.”
“Just my word,” I said.
“But I don’t know if your word is good.”
“That’s true,” I said. “You don’t.”
The pencil went tap-tap-tap again. She looked at the phone. Pass the buck? She looked away. Good for her. “What is the girl’s name?”
“Donna Burlington.” I could hear a typewriter in one of the other cubicles and footsteps down another corridor. “Go ahead,” I said. “Do it. It will get done by someone. It’s only a matter of who. Me? Cops? Courts? Your boss? His boss? Why not you? Less fuss.”
She nodded her head. “Yes. You are probably right. Very well.” She got up and left the room. She had very nice legs.
It took a while. I stood in the window of the cubicle and looked down on Thirty-fourth Street and watched the people coming and going from the welfare office. It wasn’t as busy as I’d thought it would be. Nor were the people as shabby. Down the corridor a man swore rapidly in Spanish. The typewriter had stopped. The rest was silence.
Ms. Harris returned with a file folder. She sat, opened it on the desk, and read the papers in it. “Donna Burlington was on income maintenance at this office from August to November nineteen sixty-six. At the time her address was One Sixteen East Thirteenth Street. Her relationship with this office ended on November thirteenth, nineteen sixty-six, and I have no further knowledge of her.” She closed the folder and folded her hands on top of it.
I said, “Thank you very much.”
She said, “You’re welcome.”
I looked at my watch: 10:50. “Would you like to join me for an early lunch?” I said.
“No, thank you,” she said. So much for the operator down from Boston.
“Would you like to see me do a one-hand push-up?” I said.
“Certainly not,” she said. “If you have nothing more, Mr. Spenser, I have a good deal of work to do.”
“Oh, sure, okay. Thanks very much for your trouble.” She stood as I left the room. From the corridor I stuck my head back into the office and said, “Not everyone can do a one-hand push-up, you know?”
She seemed unimpressed and I left.