Keller 05 - Hit Me

by Lawrence Block

  Turkey officially ceded the islands to Italy in 1924, under the Treaty of Lausanne, but as early as 1912 the Italians had begun overprinting stamps for use there, and each island had its own stamps. One island’s stamps looked rather like another’s, the overprints constituting the only difference, but Keller liked them, and some of the early issues, though priced at only a few dollars apiece, were virtually impossible to find.

  They were well represented in Jeb Soderling’s collection. Keller, tongs in hand, went to work, selecting a stamp, slipping it into a glassine envelope, noting its catalog number and price. Calchi 5, $3.25. Calino 4–5, $6.50. Caso, same numbers, same value, and Soderling also had the Caso Garibaldi issue, the only Garibaldi set Keller still needed. Caso 17–26, unused, lightly hinged: $170.

  And so on.

  There was a moment when he sensed Denia Soderling’s presence in the room, but by the time he looked up she was gone, and a fresh cup of coffee had replaced the empty one. He was working his way through French Colonial issues by then, and got all the way to an early overprinted issue from Gabon, when she returned to ask if he’d like to break for lunch.

  “In a few minutes,” he said, without raising his eyes from the stamp. Then he forgot about her, and about lunch, and the next thing he knew the door had opened and closed again, just barely registering on his consciousness, and there was a tray at the far end of the desk holding a plate of sandwiches and a glass of iced tea.

  He forced himself to take a break, ate the sandwiches, drank the iced tea. Away from the stamps, even for the short time he spent eating his lunch, his mind returned to the burned-out suburban home a hundred miles to the south. He’d caught a Denver newscast on the motel’s TV before breakfast, read a morning paper while he ate his breakfast, and as far as he could make out the situation was essentially unchanged. Richard Hudepohl remained in critical condition, a fire department spokesman attributed the fire’s rapid devastation to the use of “multiple accelerants strategically deployed,” and Joanne Hudepohl, having released a statement through an attorney, seemed to have lawyered up.

  No concern of his, Keller assured himself. It was impossible to keep from thinking about it, but there was nothing to do about it, and it vanished from his mind the moment he returned to the stamps.

  It was hard to know when to stop. Jeb Soderling’s collection had no end of stamps lacking in Keller’s, but it wasn’t his intention to go through it like locusts through a field of barley. He worked diligently, keeping a running tally as he went along.

  At one point he looked over at the window and was surprised to note that day had apparently turned to night. He hadn’t glanced at his watch, and didn’t do so now. He told himself it was time he got out of there, but first there was one more album he ought to have a look at…

  By the time he emerged from the stamp room, it was almost ten o’clock. He was pretty sure Denny’s would be open, not that he felt much like eating.

  But the dining room table was set for two, and before he knew it she had steered him to a chair and suggested he pour the wine. While he filled their glasses from the opened bottle of California Cabernet, she brought their dinner to the table—a tossed salad in a large wooden bowl, a pot of chili.

  He’d been ready to apologize for his lack of appetite, but once he got a whiff of the chili he had nothing to apologize for. He polished off one bowl and let himself be talked into another.

  “I know beer’s the natural accompaniment to chili,” she said, “but my husband preferred wine. He said a full-bodied red transported the dish from a West Texas juke joint to a three-star restaurant.”

  “It’s great chili,” Keller said.

  “The secret’s the cumin,” she said, “except it’s not much of a secret, because you can smell it, can’t you? But there is a secret. Would you like to know what it is?”

  “Sure.”

  “Coffee. Leftover coffee, although I suppose you could make a pot for the occasion if you didn’t have any left over. You simmer the beans in it. You can’t taste it, can you? I can’t, not even if I know it’s there. But it is there, and it makes all the difference.”

  Over coffee—in china cups, not in their chili—he told her that he’d finished selecting the stamps that would constitute his commission on the sale. He estimated the fair market value of what he’d picked out at around $50,000, though of course the book value was a good deal higher than that.

  The stamps, he added, were in the shoe box she’d given him that morning. And the box would remain in the stamp room until it was time for him to take it back to New Orleans.

  “Of course,” she said. “It wouldn’t be safe to leave it in your motel room.”

  Keller supposed that was true enough, although he hadn’t even thought of that aspect of it. The stamps weren’t his yet, and wouldn’t be until the rest of the collection was sold.

  “And that brings up another question,” she said. “We’ll have a stamp dealer here on each of the next three days, and I don’t suppose they’ll breeze in, flip through albums for half an hour, and breeze out again.”

  Keller agreed that it would take each dealer the better part of a day.

  “And you’ll be here while they are? Not that I wouldn’t be safe, but—”

  “Whenever somebody’s looking at the stamps,” he said, “I’ll be in the room with him.”

  “Today’s Sunday, so Monday Tuesday Wednesday, and then you’d fly back on Thursday.”

  He nodded. He’d booked his flight as soon as he’d confirmed the appointments with the three dealers.

  “Well, isn’t it a nuisance having to drive back and forth each day? Not to mention the waste of money? I’m sure the guest-room bed is at least as comfortable as you’d get in a motel room, and the coffee’s better. I would think you’d get more rest without the traffic noise, too. You could stay here tonight, as late as it is, and tomorrow you could fetch your things and check out of your room. Doesn’t that make sense?”

  Thirty-Nine

  Keller, back at La Quinta, heard the phone ring once as he emerged from the shower. When it didn’t ring a second time, he reached for a towel and dried off, then found his cell phone on the dresser. It was turned off, so he turned it on to find out who’d called. There weren’t any calls, and even if there had been, how could he have heard the ring if the phone was turned off?

  He picked up the room phone and rang the front desk, where a man who sounded as though he had better things to do informed him there had been no calls to his room. Keller hung up and worked on the puzzle for a moment before he remembered he had another phone, the one he used only for conversations with Dot.

  But that phone often went unused for weeks on end, and he kept it turned off unless he was expecting a call or had one to make. Where was it, anyway?

  He couldn’t seem to find it, and decided that was ridiculous, because he knew it was here, in this small room. Hadn’t he just heard it ring?

  If it rang once, it could ring again, and couldn’t he make that happen? All he had to do was use his other phone to call his own number.

  But he couldn’t do that, he realized when he had his regular phone in hand, his thumb poised over the numbers. Because, of course, he didn’t know his own number, and had never added it to his speed dial. Why would he? He never had occasion to call it himself, or to give it out to others. Only Dot used it, and only for calls that had to be kept private.

  So much for that shortcut. He had a phone he couldn’t locate, and it was somewhere within earshot, but he couldn’t make the damn thing ring. All he could do was keep looking for it, knowing it was there, drawing precious little joy from the knowledge, and wishing it would ring.

  It rang.

  And, of course, there it was on the desk, invisible beneath a complimentary copy of Cheyenne This Week, which he’d picked up and paged through and tossed aside earlier. Evidently he’d tossed it right on top of his phone, but it had landed in such a way that it looked to be lying flat, an i
llusion that the ringtone instantly dispelled.

  “Hello,” he said.

  “Well, hello yourself,” Dot said. “Are you all right? You sound as though you just ran up three flights of stairs.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Whatever you say, Pablo.”

  Pablo?

  “You’re still there, right? Counting stamps?”

  “I’m here, but I’m not counting anything.”

  “Not even your blessings? Well, whatever you do with stamps. I don’t suppose you lick them, but then neither does anybody else these days, not since the Post Office switched from lick-and-stick to whatever they call the new ones.”

  “Self-adhesive.”

  “Catchy. When’s the last time you actually licked a stamp, Pablo?”

  He did so whenever he had a letter to mail, but Dot didn’t need to hear about discount postage. “It’s been a while,” he said, “but why are you calling me Pablo?”

  “To keep from calling you by name.”

  “Oh.”

  “It’s reflexive,” she said. “I have this habit of calling you by name, using your name the way other people use commas. Not your new name. The old one, the one that’s one silly little vowel away from your occupation.”

  Huh?

  “I guess there’s nobody who calls you that anymore, is there?”

  Julia did, sometimes. She’d known him before he’d picked the name Nicholas Edwards off a child’s tombstone, and like everyone else she’d called him by his last name, Keller. She never slipped and called him Keller in front of other people, and he didn’t think Jenny had ever heard the name spoken, but when they were making love, or when she was in the mood to make love, all at once he was Keller again.

  But less so lately. Subtly, gradually, Nicholas was displacing Keller in the romance department, edging him out in the bedroom…

  “Hence Pablo,” Dot said. “If you hate it I can probably come up with something else. I just always liked the name.”

  “Pablo.”

  “You hate it, don’t you?”

  “It’s fine. Is that why you called? To see if I liked being called Pablo?”

  “No, I just wanted to check in. I guess you’ve been keeping busy with stamps.”

  “Pretty much.”

  “Well, it’s not as though you missed anything. Richard Hudepohl’s still got a pulse, and nobody knows who burned his house down with him in it.”

  “The wife hasn’t talked?”

  “She hasn’t,” Dot said, “and I have to say I don’t blame her. I’ve been thinking about her.”

  “Oh?”

  “I think she’s our client.”

  “Isn’t that what we said the other day?”

  “Not exactly, because at the time I thought she’d set it all up. Took the kids, left the house, and made sure she stayed away until the deed was done.”

  “Makes sense.”

  “It does,” she said, “except it doesn’t. Pablo, she hasn’t got a thing to wear.”

  “Huh?”

  “What woman gets someone to burn down her house with all her clothes in it? That might seem like a good idea to Charles Lamb, but I bet Mrs. Lamb would see it differently. Mrs. Hudepohl, the good news is that your husband is dead. The bad news is your fifty pairs of shoes are history.”

  “She had fifty pairs of shoes?”

  “If she did, Pablo, she doesn’t anymore. And her husband’s not even dead.”

  He thought about it. “All right,” he said. “She hired us, but while I was taking my time, somebody else went ahead and did the job. Who?”

  “Suppose we just call him the other guy.”

  “Okay. Who hired the other guy?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I know the wife didn’t, and she’s pissed.”

  “Pissed.”

  “Royally. I got a call from somebody who got a call from somebody who got a call from her. I know, it sounds like a bad song. The way she sees it, whoever burned her house down has to be the stupidest, craziest, most amateurish moron in the business.”

  “Well,” Keller said, “I have to say I agree with her on that one.”

  “It’s a pretty good description of our friend the other guy, isn’t it? I passed the word that it wasn’t us, so either one of the sub-brokers made more than one phone call—”

  “Or someone else had the same idea she did. Are we sure she didn’t make arrangements with some joker she met in a bar, then call in a pro when she figured he wouldn’t go through with it?”

  Dot was silent.

  “And he went through with it after all? Except burning down the house that way called for some expert knowledge, wouldn’t you say? I certainly wouldn’t have known how to do it.”

  “You wouldn’t have done it in the first place.”

  “Well, there’s that. Still, does it sound like the work of some tattooed joker that you’d find on the Internet and meet in a bar?”

  “Or find in a bar,” she said, “and meet on the Internet. I’ve got some calls in, Pablo, and I think I might make a few more. On the one hand, what do we care? Nobody’s asking us to give back the first payment, and there’s no way to earn the balance, so for us the war is over. Even so…”

  “It’d be good to know.”

  “It would,” she agreed. “I’ll be in touch. You’re with the Stamp Widow tomorrow? Keep your phone handy.”

  Forty

  The first stamp buyer was due at ten thirty, so Keller had a quick breakfast at Denny’s, read the Denver paper’s coverage of the Hudepohl case, and got to the Soderling house a little before ten. He wanted to make sure the fellow didn’t get there first.

  The previous evening, when Mrs. Soderling proposed he stay the night and check out of his motel in the morning, he’d invented a reason why that wasn’t a good idea, some work he needed to do that very night on his computer. This morning, after his shower and shave, he packed up everything and stowed his bag in the Toyota’s trunk.

  But he kept the room, and even left the DO NOT DISTURB sign on the knob so the maid wouldn’t assume he’d left early. Just keeping his options open, he told himself.

  “I was up early,” he told Denia Soderling. “I’m afraid I’ve already had my breakfast.”

  “But I’ll bet you can manage another cup of coffee,” she said. And he agreed that he could.

  They sat together at an outdoor table, and quite out of the blue she began talking about the Hudepohl case. Had he been following it? He said he hadn’t, which eliminated the possibility that he might disclose something that hadn’t made the papers, but led her to furnish a full account of everything that had.

  “That poor woman,” she said. “She’s lucky to be alive.”

  “If she’d been home—”

  “Exactly! And her children. They seem quite certain it’s arson, but you have to wonder.”

  “I guess you do.”

  “He kept tropical fish, didn’t he? I wonder if there might have been chemicals involved. Spontaneous combustion, you know.”

  She topped up his cup of coffee, and when she put the pot down her hand brushed his. It might have been accidental, he told himself. Just like the fire on Otis Drive.

  The stamp buyer, whose name was either Griffin or Griffith, was a short and slender man who wore a red-and-black striped vest with a black pinstripe suit. He had a narrow face, a sharp nose and sharper chin, and a full head of lustrous auburn hair, so full and so lustrous Keller was reasonably certain it was a wig. He looked as though he ought to be dealing blackjack in a casino, or touting horses at a track, and he bolstered this image when he hung his suit jacket over the back of his chair. The more you saw of his vest, the more it held your attention.

  Then, as he seated himself at Jeb Soderling’s stamp table, he completed the picture with a green eyeshade. He’d turned down the offered coffee, shook off the suggestion of tea or water, and drew a pair of tongs from one vest pocket and a magnifier from another.

  �
��Europe,” he said.

  His voice was soft, and if he’d been a stage actor he’d have been inaudible past the first row. Keller, sitting just across the table from him, had to work to hear him.

  “From Iceland to Turkey,” Keller said.

  “Actually,” the man said, “there’s some question as to whether Iceland is in fact a part of Europe. There’s a geological fault line that runs right through the country. One side’s Europe, other’s North America. Philatelically, of course, it’s grouped with the Scandinavian countries. I don’t remember your name.”

  “Edwards.”

  “Edwards. Are you planning on sitting here the whole time? Because once I begin I won’t want to talk, and I won’t want to be talked to, either. I assure you I’m perfectly comfortable sitting alone with the collection.”

  “I’ll stay,” Keller told him.

  The man didn’t say anything. Neither did Keller, and eventually the man let himself be outwaited. He drew a breath and let it out without quite sighing.

  “There are approximately a third of a million Icelanders,” he said, as softly as he said everything, “and they are all descended from five Viking men and four Irish women. If you’re going to stay here, you might as well bring me some albums.”

  Keller got to his feet.

  “Not Iceland,” the man said, answering a question Keller had not been about to ask. “France. I’ll begin with France.”

  When he left his motel that morning, he’d set his phone—the one reserved for calls to and from Dot, the one he was already thinking of as the Pablo phone—on vibrate. He’d never done that before, and when a call actually came in it took him a moment to realize what it was. A strange sensation, really, as if a large centipede were dancing around in his breast pocket.