Spend that much on a room, you wanted to get your money’s worth. If you never left the room, it would only be costing you $40 an hour. If, on the other hand, you used it solely to sleep and shower…
At 56th Street he crossed to the west side of the avenue, and at 57th Street he turned to his left and walked about a third of a block, stopping to look into the window of a shop that sold watches and earrings. Once Keller had heard one woman tell another on QVC that you couldn’t have too many earrings, a statement that he had found every bit as baffling as the snake tattoo.
Keller wasn’t really interested in looking at earrings, and it wasn’t long before he’d turned to gaze instead across 57th Street. Number 119 West 57th Street was directly across the street, and Keller stayed where he was and tried to pay attention to the people entering and leaving the office building. People came and went, and Keller didn’t see anyone who looked familiar to him, but 57th was one of the wide crosstown streets, so he wasn’t getting a really good look at the faces of those who were coming and going.
It wasn’t the hotel room, he realized. The price of it, the novelty of being in a New York hotel. He hadn’t wanted to leave the room because he was afraid to be out in public in New York.
Where there were people who used to know him as Keller, and who knew, too, that one fine day in Des Moines, that very Keller had assassinated a popular, charismatic midwestern governor with presidential aspirations.
Ten
Except he didn’t. It was a frame, he was the fall guy, and it cost him his comfortable New York life and the name under which he’d lived it. When all was said and done he didn’t have any regrets, because the life he now led in New Orleans was worlds better than what he’d left behind. But that hadn’t been the plan of the man who set him up.
That plan had called for Keller to be arrested, or, better yet, killed outright, and it had taken all Keller’s resourcefulness to keep it from turning out that way. The man who’d done the planning was dead now, thanks to Keller, and so was the man who’d helped him, and that was as far as Keller saw any need to carry it. Someone somewhere had pulled the trigger and gunned down the governor, but Keller figured that faceless fellow was probably dead himself, murdered by the man who’d hired him, a loose end carefully tied off. And if not, well, the best of luck to him. He’d just been a man doing a job, and that was something Keller could relate to.
And Keller? He had a new name and a new life. So what was he doing back in New York?
He walked back to the corner of Sixth and 57th, waited for the light to change, then crossed the street and walked to the entrance of 119 West 57th. This was a building he’d entered a dozen or more times over the years, and always for the same purpose. There had been a firm called Stampazine on the second floor, and every couple of months they held a Saturday auction, and there was always some interesting and affordable material up for grabs. Keller would sit in a wooden chair with a catalog in one hand and a pen in the other, and every now and then he would raise a forefinger, and sometimes he’d wind up the high bidder. At six or six thirty he’d pick up his lots, pay cash for them, and go home happy.
Stampazine was gone now. Had they closed before or after he’d left New York? He couldn’t remember.
He recognized the uniformed lobby attendant. “Peachpit,” he said, and the man nodded in recognition—not of Keller but of Keller’s purpose. “Seven,” he said, and Keller went over and waited for the elevator.
Peachpit Auction Galleries was a cut or two above Stampazine. Keller had never visited them during his New York years, but after he was settled in New Orleans an ad in Linn’s Stamp News sent him to the Peachpit website. He bid on a couple of lots—unsuccessfully; someone else outbid him—but, having registered, he began to receive their catalogs several times a year. They were magnificently printed, with a color photograph of every lot, and he always found an abundance of choice material.
There was a way to bid online in real time, during the actual floor auction, and he’d planned on doing so but always seemed to be at work during their midweek auctions. Then a few months ago he’d had the day off—he and Donny had the whole week off, actually, although they’d have preferred it otherwise. And he remembered the Peachpit sale, and logged on and went through what you had to go through to bid, and he found the whole process impossibly nerve-racking. An auction was anxiety-ridden anyway, but when you showed up in person you could at least see what was going on, and know that the guy with the gavel could see you in return. Online, well, he supposed a person could get the hang of it, but he hadn’t, and wasn’t inclined to try again.
Then, a couple of weeks ago, Julia and Jenny walked into his upstairs office—Daddy’s Stamp Room—to find him shaking his head over the new Peachpit catalog. Julia asked what was the matter.
“Oh, this,” he said, tapping the catalog. “There are some lots I’d like to buy.”
“So?
“Well, the sale’s in New York.”
“Oh,” she said.
“Daddy ’tamps,” said Jenny.
“Yes, Daddy’s stamps,” Keller said, and picked up his daughter and set her on his lap. “See?” he said, pointing at a picture in the catalog, a German Colonial issue from Kiauchau showing the kaiser’s yacht, Hohenzollern. “Kiauchau,” he told Jenny, “was an area of two hundred square miles in southeast China. The Germans grabbed it in 1897, and then made arrangements to lease it from China. I don’t imagine the Chinese had a lot of choice in the matter. Isn’t that a pretty stamp?”
“Pity ’tamp,” Jenny said, and there the matter lay.
Until the phone rang two days later. It was Dot, calling from Sedona, and the first thing she did was apologize for calling at all.
“I told myself I’d just call to see how you’re doing,” she said, “and to find out the latest cute thing Jenny said, but you know something, Keller? I’m too damn old to start fooling myself.”
Dot still called him Keller. And that figured, because that’s who she was calling to talk to. Not Nick Edwards, who fixed houses, but Keller. Who, in a manner of speaking, fixed people.
“The last thing I should be doing,” she went on, “is calling you. There’s two reasons why this is a mistake. First of all, you’re not in the business anymore. I dragged you back in once, that business in Dallas, and it wasn’t your fault that it didn’t go off perfectly. But it wasn’t what you really wanted, and we both agreed it was what the British call a one-off.”
“What does that mean?”
“One time only, I think. What’s the difference what it means? You went to Dallas, you came back from Dallas, end of story.”
But if it was the end of the story, what was this? A sequel?
“That’s one reason,” she said. “There’s another.”
“Oh?”
“Three words,” she said. “New. York. City.”
“Oh.”
“What am I even thinking, Keller, calling you when I’ve got a job in your old hometown? I didn’t throw New York jobs your way when you lived there, because you lived there.”
“I worked a couple of New York assignments.”
“Just a couple, and they weren’t exactly what you’d call problem-free. But at least you could walk around the city without wearing a mask. Now it’s the one place in the world where it’s not safe for you to be you, where even a waitress in a coffee shop can take a second look at you and reach for a telephone, and here I am calling you with a New York assignment, and that’s as far as this is going, because I’m hanging up.”
“Wait a minute,” Keller said.
The receptionist at Peachpit told him to have a seat, and he leafed through an old auction catalog while he waited. Then a stoop-shouldered man with his sleeves rolled up and his tie loosened came to show him inside and seat him in a stackable white plastic chair at a long table. He had already prepared a slip of paper with the numbers of the lots he wanted to inspect, and he looked them over carefully when they were brought to him.
The stamps were tucked into individual two-inch-square pockets of a chemically inert plastic, each plastic pocket stapled to its own sheet of paper bearing the lot number, estimated value, and opening bid. Keller had brought a pair of tongs, and could have taken out a stamp for closer inspection, but there was no need, and the tongs remained in his breast pocket. Given that the catalog had already shown him clear color photos of all of these stamps, it probably wasn’t necessary that he look at them in the first place. But he’d learned that actually looking at a stamp, up close and personal, helped him decide just how much he really wanted to own it.
He’d requested a dozen lots, all of them stamps he needed, all of them stamps he genuinely wanted—and he didn’t want them any less now that he was getting a look at them. But he wasn’t going to buy them all, and this would help him decide which ones to buy if they went cheap, and which ones deserved a firmer commitment. And, finally, which ones he’d go all out to get, hanging on like grim death, and—
“Hello, there! Haven’t seen you in a while, have I?”
Keller froze in his white plastic chair.
“She loves watching you work with your stamps,” Julia said. “‘Daddy ’tamps,’ she says. She has a little trouble with the s-t combination.”
“I suppose philately is out of the question.”
“For now. But before you know it she’ll be the only kid in her class who knows where Obock is.”
“Just now I was telling her about Kiauchau.”
“I know. But see, I know how to pronounce Obock.”
He was silent for a moment. Then he said, “There’s something we have to talk about.”
Eleven
They sat at the kitchen table with cups of coffee and he said, “I’ve been keeping something from you, and I can’t do that. Ever since we found each other I’ve been able to say whatever’s been on my mind, and now I can’t, and I don’t like the way it feels.”
“You met someone in Dallas.”
He looked at her.
“A woman,” she said.
“Oh, God,” he said. “It’s not what you think.”
“It’s not?”
If he had to kill this man, how would he do it? He was close to sixty, and he looked soft and pudgy, so you couldn’t call him a hard target. The closest thing Keller had to a weapon was the pair of stamp tongs in his breast pocket, but he’d made do often enough with nothing but his bare hands, and—
“I guess you don’t recognize me,” the fellow was saying. “Been a few years, and it’s safe to say I put on a few pounds. It’s a rare year when I don’t. And the last time we saw each other the two of us were on a lower floor.”
Keller looked at him.
“Or am I wrong? Stampazine? I never missed their auctions, and I’d swear I saw you there a few times. I don’t know if we ever talked, and if I ever heard your name I’ve long since forgotten it, but I’m pretty good with faces. Faces and watermarks, they both tend to stick in my mind.” He stuck out a hand. “Irv,” he said. “Irv Feldspar.”
“Nicholas Edwards.”
“A damn shame Stampazine’s gone,” Feldspar said. “Bert Taub’s health was bad for years, and finally he closed up shop, and then the word got around that he missed the business and wanted to get back into it, and the next thing we knew he was dead.”
“A hell of a thing,” Keller said, figuring something along those lines was expected of him.
“Plenty of other auctions in this city,” Feldspar said, “but you could just show up at Stampazine and there’d be plenty of low-priced material to bid on. No fancy catalogs, no Internet or phone bidders. I don’t think you and I ever bumped heads, did we? I’m strictly U.S. myself.”
“Everything but U.S.,” Keller said. “Worldwide to 1940.”
“So I was never bidding against you, so why would you remember me?”
“I didn’t come all that often,” Keller said. “I live out of town, so—”
“What, Jersey? Connecticut?”
“New Orleans, so—”
“You didn’t come in special for Bert’s auctions.”
“Hardly. I just showed up when I happened to be in town.”
“On business? What kind of business are you in, if I may ask?”
Keller, letting a trace of the South find its way into his speech, explained that he was retired, and then answered the inevitable Katrina questions, until he cleared his throat and said he really wanted to focus on the lots he was examining. And Irv Feldspar apologized, said his wife told him he never knew when he was boring people, and that she was convinced he was suffering from Ass-Backward syndrome.
Keller nodded, concentrated on the stamps.
Julia said, “I knew there was something. Something’s been different ever since you got back from Dallas, and I couldn’t say what it was, so I had to think it was another woman. And you’re a man, for heaven’s sake, and you were on the other side of the state line, and things happen. I know that. And I could stand that, if that’s what it was, and if what happened in Dallas stayed in Dallas. If it was going to be an ongoing thing, if she was important to you, well, maybe I could stand that and maybe I couldn’t.”
“That wasn’t it.”
“No, it wasn’t, was it?” She reached to lay her hand on top of his. “What a relief. My husband wasn’t fooling around with another woman. He was killing her.”
“I don’t know what to say.”
“Do you remember the night we met?”
“Of course.”
“You saved my life. I was taking a shortcut through the park, and I was about to be raped and killed, and you saved me.”
“I don’t know what got into me.”
“You saved me,” she said, “and you killed that man right in front of me. With your bare hands. You grabbed him and broke his neck.”
“Well.”
“That was how we met. When Jenny’s old enough to want to know how Mommy and Daddy met and fell in love, we may have to give her an edited version. But that’s not for a while yet. How was it? In Dallas? I know it went smoothly enough, and I think it’s pure poetry that the man you framed wound up confessing.”
“Well, he thinks he did it.”
“And in a sense he did, because if he hadn’t made that first phone call you would never have left the hotel.”
“I probably wouldn’t even have gone. I’d have sent in a few mail bids and let it go at that.”
“So he got what was coming to him, and it doesn’t sound as though either of them was a terribly nice person.”
“You wouldn’t want to have them to the house for dinner.”
“I didn’t think so. But what I wanted to know was how was it for you? How did it feel? You hadn’t done anything like this in a long time.”
“A couple of years.”
“And your life is different from what it was, so maybe you’re different, too.”
“I thought of that.”
“And?”
He thought it over for a moment. “It felt the same as always,” he said. “I had a job to do and I had to figure out how.”
“And then you had to do it.”
“That’s right.”
“And you felt the satisfaction of having solved a problem.”
“Uh-huh.”
“At which point you could buy that stamp without dipping into capital.”
“We only collected the first payment,” he said, “but even so it more than covered the cost of the stamps I bought.”
“Well, that’s a plus, isn’t it? And you didn’t have any trouble living with what you’d done?”
“I had trouble living with the secret.”
“Not being able to mention it to me, you mean.”
“That’s right.”
She nodded. “Having to keep a secret. That must have been difficult. There are things I don’t bother to tell you, but nothing I couldn’t tell you, if I wanted to. How do you feel now?”
“Bett
er.”
“I can tell that. Your whole energy is different. Do you want to know how I feel?”
“Yes.”
“Relieved, obviously. But also a little troubled, because now I seem to be the one with a secret.”
“Oh?”
“Shall I tell you my secret? See, the danger is that you might think less of me if you knew.” Before he could respond, she heaved a theatrical sigh. “Oh, I can’t keep secrets. When you told me what happened in Dallas? What you did?”
“Yes?”
“It got me hot.”
“Oh?”
“Is that weird? Of course it is, it’s deeply weird. Here’s something I’m positive I never told you. It got me hot when you killed the rapist in the park. What it mostly did was it made me feel all safe and secure and protected, but it also got me hot. I’m hot right now and I don’t know what to do about it.”
“If we put our heads together,” he said, “maybe we can come up with something.”
Back in his room at the Savoyard, Keller figured it out. Asperger’s syndrome—that’s what Feldspar had, or what his wife said he had.
Though Ass-Backward syndrome wasn’t a bad fit.
“If I’d known what it would lead to,” he said, “I’d have told you right away.”
“But you didn’t.”
“No. I was afraid, I guess. That it would ruin things between us.”
“So you didn’t say anything.”
“No.”
“And then you did.”
“Right.”
She didn’t say anything, but he felt besieged by her thoughts, bombarded with them. He said, “I figured I was done with it, I’d never do it again, so why bother mentioning it? I could just keep my mouth shut and seal off the episode and let it fade out into the past.”
“Like the faces you picture in your mind.”
“Something like that, yes.”
Keller 05 - Hit Me Page 5