Looking for Mr. Green（Chapel 2）
So he stood in his big-skirted trench coat with a large envelope in his hand and papers showing from his pocket, wondering why people should be so hard to locate who were too feeble or sick to come to the station to collect their own checks. But Ray nor had told him that tracking them down was not easy at first and had offered him some advice on how to proceed. “If you can see the postman, he’s your first man to ask, and your best bet. If you can’t connect with him, try the stores and trades-people around. Then the janitor and the neighbors. But you’ll find the closer you come to your man the less people will tell you. They don’t want to tell you anything.”
“Because I’m a stranger.”
“Because you’re white. We ought to have a Negro doing this, but we don’t at the moment, and of course you’ve got to eat, too, and this is public employment. Jobs have to be made. Oh, that holds for me too. Mind you, I’m not letting myself out. I’ve got three years of seniority on you, which are all. And a law degree. Otherwise, you might be Breitling Replica back of the desk and I might be going out into the field this cold day. The same dough pays us both and for the same, exact, identical reason. What’s my law degree got to do with it? But you have to pass out these checks, Mr. Grebe, and it’ll help if you’re stubborn, so I hope you are.”
“Yes, I’m fairly stubborn.”
Ray nor sketched hard with an eraser in the old dirt of his desk, left-handed, and said, “Sure, what else can you answer to such a question. Anyhow, the trouble you’re going to have is that they don’t like to give information about anybody. They think you’re a plain-clothes dick or an installment collector, or summons-server or something like that. Till you’ve been seen around the neighborhood for a few months and people know you’re only from the relief.”
It was dark, ground-freezing, pre-Thanksgiving weather; the Replica Watches wind played hob with the smoke, rushing it down, and Grebe missed his gloves, which he had left in Radnor’s office. And no one would admit knowing Green. It was past three o’clock and the postman had made his last delivery. The nearest grocer, himself a Negro, had never heard the name Gulliver Green, or said he hadn’t. Grebe was inclined to think that it was true, that he had in the end convinced the man that he wanted only to deliver a check. But he wasn’t sure. He needed experience in interpreting looks and signs and, even more, the will not to be put off or denied and even the force to bully if need be. If the grocer did know, he had got rid of him easily. But since most of his trade was with relievers, why should he prevent the delivery of a check? Maybe Green, or Mrs. Green, if there was a Mrs. Green, patronized another grocer. And was there a Mrs. Green? It was one of Grebe’s great handicaps that he hadn’t looked at any of the case records. Neither Breitling Replica Watches ray nor should have let him read files for a few hours. But he apparently saw no need for that, probably considering the job unimportant.
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