The Dud Avocado - Elaine Dundy [114]
Receiving your letter last month, I rang up Frank Carson in Washington and after a bit of delving he was able to inform mie (rather humorously, I thought at the time) that your passport was perhaps the most famous passport lost last year. Your steady bombardment of letters to the Department was a source of considerable entertainment to the civil servants, not as devoid of wit as you apparently imagined, and Frank assured me the general feeling being that by then you had been sufficiently chastised for your carelessness, a new one was shortly to be issued.
The next thing that happened was the arrival of Frank Carson on my doorstep in a state of considerable agitation—indeed, one almost matching my own, for I had just trained my microscope on a really interesting nymph of a cimex lectularius (dismissed so contemptuously by most entomologists as flat, ill-smelling, blood-sucking insects infesting beds—indeed my late friend C. F. Metcalf went so far as to call them “loathsome pests” in his otherwise excellent book, but I assure you, they are creatures of far more subtle and fascinationg habits), and was watching it at work, when Frank burst in. He announced without preamble that your passport had been discovered, or rather accounted for, and then went on to relate the circumstances.
It had been used to admit a somewhat reckless (perhaps I should say feckless) young French girl to these shores. She turned up at the Police Station late one night, at the end of her rope, begging to be returned to Paris. It was finally established that she had entered this country illegally. Upon arrival her passport was immediately removed from her by the vice-racketeers into whose hands she had been directed, and who thereby gained what they expected to be a permanent hold on her. Fortunately, however, the diabolical scheme backfired. For the initial offer both to supply the passport and arrange the trip had been presented to the young lady in terms so disingenuous—to say the least—that, as a professional dancer of some ambition, she soon began to resent what she had been led to believe was merely a temporary sideline (i.e. being a prostitute) turning into a full-time career. Her back to the wall, she eventually took the only sensible way out and gave herself up to the police.
The originator and executor of this scheme was a man named Larry Keefer, or Keeble (no doubt you can supply me with his exact name), and they were able through her evidence of dates and places and so forth, to identify the passport in question as yours. That was all the information Frank had at the moment, except that wheels were being put in motion for the arrest of the man in question. But as you may imagine, it left me with little stomach for returning to the study of my bedbug.
Two days ago Frank came around with further news. Keefer had been apprehended in France in the company of a young woman driving northward toward Paris. Questioned about your passport, he coolly explained that he had been instructed by you to pass it on to some mysterious persons and that, having no idea what the whole thing was about, had merely done so as a favor. Confronted with the French girl’s statement, he began breaking down, but it was the girl in the car—his tootsie, or patsy, or whatever the current term is— that broke the case wide open. She had been under the impression until then that she was his sole employee, so to speak, and in a frenzy of jealous rage turned against him and began regaling the police with her own story. In the midst of these further revelations Keefer panicked. He started the car up and tried to make his getaway. The girl grabbed the wheel, wrenched it violently and smashed the car into the nearest ditch. They are both in the hospital now, and he is suffering from severe injuries that will prevent him from standing trial for