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I ran out of the house to my car, my eye on my watch. Not
quite four. I had one more haunt of Victor s to check out this
afternoon.
I sat in my MG outside U Vic s administration building
parking lot, keeping my eye on Farkas car. I thought the greater
part of wisdom might be to cool my heels here until I saw him
drive off. I wouldn t want to pick the lock of his office door only
to find him sitting there in the dark like a troll, brooding.
I listened to the radio, read the paper, then went inside to
use the ladies room. I walked around, bought two roast beef
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sandwiches and a carton of milk from a machine, and had my
lunch just inside the building s main entrance where I could
see the car. I picked up a copy of the undergraduate student
newspaper, the faculty newspaper, and the grad student
newspaper, and went back to my car to read. Four-fifty. At five-
o-three Farkas came out, unlocked his car, and got in. Almost
simultaneously, Harrington and Jerome came along and joined
him. Farkas drove out of the parking lot.
Just after five is a good time to be around administrative
offices. There s a lot of confusion and hurrying. No one wants to
work any unpaid overtime. So the very rushed young secretary I
approached was, while buttoning up, only too happy to give me
as short an answer as possible..
Victor Farkas? Who? Oh, you mean Vic. Yeah, sure. His
office is in the basement. Right next to the elevator. But he s
probably gone. Listen, I ve got to run. Why don t you come back
tomorrow?
Right, I thought, and took the stairs. In the basement was a
short hall leading to a student lounge with chairs and tables and
dispensing machines, and a duplicating center which was just
closing. Lining the hall was a bunch of locked doors that said
respectively, Men, Women, and V.A. Farkas, Chief of Maintenance. I
went on into the student lounge, got a cup of perfectly vile coffee
from one of the machines, and sat in a corner where I could see
the whole room. Gradually it emptied as students melted away in
search of dinner or evening festivities, except for a kid sacked out
on a couch, and another one engrossed in a copy of PC Magazine,
his back to the door.
The hall was empty, and I had my picks out before I got to
Farkas door. For the ten seconds it took me to pick his lock, I
sweated. And then I was in. I closed the door quietly behind me,
heart beating hard, and looked around.
It was a perfectly ordinary looking office, maybe fifteen feet
square. One window, covered with wire mesh and set high in the
wall, gave me not quite enough light to see. I cursed, because in
a few minutes I would have to either turn on his office light or
use my flashlight. So I worked as fast as I could.
The top of his desk was no help. Work orders, requests for
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repairs, invoices, all separated into neat piles. The top middle desk
drawer was a jumble of paper clips, pencils, BIC pens, erasers,
magic markers, rubber bands, staples, and tape. The right-hand
top drawer held blank forms, letterhead, envelopes, plain bond,
and about half a dozen 10 x 15-inch brown envelopes.
Plain bond and brown envelopes. A small light went on in
my brain. I took out the brown envelopes and examined them. In
each of the upper left-hand corners was a small dimple, just like
the envelopes that had been sent to Tonia and Val. I took one of
the sheets of bond between my fingers and held it up to the light.
A watermark. The hair on the back of my neck began to lift a
little. I took one of the brown envelopes, stuffed a sheet of bond
in it, and put it in my pocket. Comparison shopping.
I resumed my search of the desk. In the bottom right-hand
drawer were personnel evaluation reports. Top left drawer held
a coffee mug, a spoon, a package of Lipton instant chicken soup,
and a small jar of MJB coffee. Terrific.
The bottom left-hand drawer was locked. Excited, I picked it,
and when I pulled it open, I was acutely disappointed. Well, what
had I really expected anyhow? The letters? A signed confession?
There was only a bottle of Canadian Club whiskey. I felt like
taking a swig.
I locked the drawer, and looked around the office. It was
now very late. In the waning light I saw a filing cabinet shoved
against one wall and a bookcase against the other. I checked
the bookcase first. No luck. It was filled with such tasty tomes
as the city and campus phone books, a five-volume set entitled
University Personnel Policy, and some old folded newspapers.
That left the filing cabinet. By now it was too dark to read
anything, so I pulled out my penlight. The lock yielded easily,
and shielding the light with my cupped hand, I opened the
top drawer. It was filled with old work orders and invoices in
individual files from 1979 to 1982. The second drawer contained
more of the same, only of a more recent vintage. With the third
drawer, however, I hit the jackpot.
I couldn t believe it. I sat on the floor, gingerly opening the
10 x 15 brown envelope that held the letters, and shook them
out to make sure. There they were, all six of them. I counted the
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pages. Twenty-seven, just like the voice on the phone had said.
There was nothing else in the drawer.
Scuttling back over to the desk, I opened the stationery
drawer, took twenty-seven sheets of bond and put them into
white envelopes, then stuffed the whole lot into a new 10 x 15
brown envelope. When I was finished I had a package of about
the same size and heft as the letters. I put the new package into
the filing cabinet, and closed the drawer. Unless Farkas was
addicted to reading the letters every day, only the poorest of luck
would reveal the switch.
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