Part 3 — Where The Refund Money Went
My friend on the sorting floor, a woman named Marlene who had started at the post office the same year I did, called me at nine oclock that night. I could hear a sorting machine humming behind her, so I knew she was on a break.
She said, Gus, I traced the refund claims. The money was paid out by the shippers through a payment app, and it went to a single account. The account is not Dereks. It belongs to a man named Troy Mackey. I knew the name. Troy was Dereks brother in law, and he lived across the lake in Superior.
Marlene said the account had received claim payments from nine different delivery complaints, in four different neighborhoods across Duluth. Every complaint described a package that never arrived. Every package had in fact been delivered, signed for and scanned.
I forwarded the information to the Postal Inspection Service that very night. An inspector named Alvarez called me the next morning. She said my tracking printouts, together with Marlenes tracing, were the cleanest evidence she had seen in years.
Within a week, inspectors had interviewed Derek, Troy and two other people in the ring. Derek had been the local face, ordering items online, signing for them and filing the false claims, then passing the money to Troy in exchange for a cut.
Thirty five years of honest delivery meant that when somebody needed to blame a mailman, every scan, signature and photograph was already on my side.
Troy and Derek were arrested and charged with wire fraud and filing false claims. Derek cooperated right away. He gave a full statement, identified the others and agreed to repay every dollar. The court gave him a probation term with restitution, along with community service.
Troy, as the organizer, received a harsher sentence, and the shippers recovered over thirty thousand dollars across the region. Several neighbors who had been wrongly accused of taking packages over the years were quietly cleared too.
Derek came to my door a month later. He stood on my porch with his hat in his hands, and he did not try to explain. He said, Mr. Gus, I am ashamed. I put your face on a post because I needed somebody to look at besides me. I am sorry.
I told him I appreciated that, and that I had one request. He asked what it was. I said, Deliver meals for the senior center on Tuesdays and Thursdays, as part of your service. He nodded, and he did it for a year without missing a day.
The neighborhood association invited me to its next meeting. Mrs. Lindqvist presented me with a framed card the church ladies had signed, along with a plate of her famous lemon bars. The card read, World Best Mailman, with an extra apology written underneath.
I hung the grandkids drawing back on the refrigerator that evening, right where it used to be. My wife kissed me on the cheek and said, See, Gus. People forget. I said, They do, but the scanner never does.