The Egyptologist Read Free

Ralph
     
     
     
    Sunset on the Bayview Nursing Home Sydney, Australia
    December 3, 1954 Dear Mr. Macy,
    I am in receipt of your letter of the 13th November and I'm delighted to make your acquaintance, if only by post. I'm sickened to hear of your lovely aunt Mar• garet's passing. It's my dearest wish that she thought of me fondly now and again. We met in times of crisis, high drama. You never forget those, I can tell you. She was a beautiful, vibrant woman when I saved her back in '22. 1 never saw her again after I brought to justice the man who caused her suffering.
    I'm certainly most intrigued by your "small request to tap into [my] no doubt excellent memory." True enough, sir, it is still excellent, and I'll make an extra ef• fort to prove it to you. In my day, I was known for having perfect recall.
    I might also add that you're no insignificant sleuth yourself to have tracked me here to this hellhole of a pensioners' house, this human wastebin, thirty years after the facts, young Mr. Macy. Should the investigative field ever interest you professionally, I think you well-suited, and that's high praise, that is, coming from me. Of course, maybe you're the sort of fellow who doesn't have to work at all, eh? To answer your first question, which maybe was only politeness showing off your breeding, even in a letter to a stranger, but nevertheless, the answer is: bored. Bored nearly to death, thanks, which I suspect is the idea behind these places. Drink up the last of our savings and then bore us to death to open up the narrow, sagging bed and one of the few stinking pots to piss in, 'cause the next old fellow's
    crossing his legs for it.
    I can't tell you how pleased I am at your request to hear about my greatest case, to help fill the blank spaces of your "private Macy family history." And you're in luck: see, I brought very little with me to this damnable place, not one for fine clothes or possessions, me, a simple man, always ready to move fast if circumstances demanded, but when I saw for certain that I was heading here, I said to myself, 'Ter• rell, you'll be a royal fool if you don't haul your files along and write down your case histories in your many spare hours. It'll be a bright, shining warning to the criminal types out there, a fine teaching tool for other detectives, and a gripping yarn for the general reader." Which is why your letter pleases me so very much.
    You want clear recollections? Well, I'm historical truth on two legs, I am, but I need a fellow just like you if I'm going to stop sitting on these dynamite tales and pop them into the public eye. I'm safe in assuming you know people in New York publishing, yes? True-crime magazines maybe? Let's give that some think• ing. I know you said you're only asking for "personal family history," but I'm too close to the finish line to play fancy-dress games, Mr. Macy. I see where we can go on this, and I think we've a winner. See, I kept notes, wrote everything out verba• tim, as they say, just as soon as I could after interviews. We didn't have the ma• chines they have now to make a taped recording, so we compensated. Young detectives today with their magnetic recorders don't even know what they don't know how to do anymore, but in our day, we had good memories and we wrote fast. If I don't have every last word right here in front of me, well, I have a fine memory of the sort of thing people said or meant to say, so I can reconstruct just fine. It just needs colour, quotation marks, literary frills, typewriting. I'll provide the heroics, you do the rest, eh?
    Even if, at the end, some of it wasn't crystal clear to me, still I think this case is my finest, so if you're ready to be my Mr. Watson, let's begin here, and after this one, let's figure I've another dozen at least for us to pull together.
    Now, you say you have documents which "may shed light on lingering ques• tions" I might have, and that's a rich piece of bait to dangle in front of a