Keller 05 - Hit Me

by Lawrence Block

  She shook her head, raised her glass, sipped its contents. “Passes were made,” she said. “What an odd way to put it. ‘Passes were made.’ Well, they were, verbal and physical. Made and deflected, with no embarrassment on either side. I was not tempted.”

  “No.”

  “But I get lonely, you know. And I miss intimacy. Physical intimacy.”

  “Well.”

  “This is whiskey,” she said, brandishing her glass. “I usually have a glass or two of wine of an evening. Tonight I’ve been drinking whiskey because I wanted it to hit me, and it has. Can you tell I’m drunk?”

  “No.”

  “I’m not slurring my words, am I?”

  “No.”

  “Or speaking in too loud a voice, the way drunks do?”

  “No.”

  “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. Of course you’ve heard that slogan.”

  “Yes.”

  “My husband and I subscribed to that philosophy. He had to do a certain amount of travel for his business, and if he had an opportunity for a dalliance, he was free to pursue it. When he was at home he was married, and faithful. When he was miles away, he was a free agent.”

  “I suppose a lot of couples have that sort of understanding.”

  “I would think so. I’m going upstairs now. I’m sure I’ll be able to sleep. I’m glad we’ve had this little talk, aren’t you, Nicholas?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “And tomorrow’s our last day. I can’t remember the name of the buyer we’ll be seeing tomorrow.”

  “I believe it’s a Mr. Mintz.”

  “As in pie? Shame on me. It’s ridiculous to make jokes about a person’s name, and the person will have heard all of them, time and time again. When he’s gone we’ll open the envelopes. And you’ll be able to have dinner, won’t you?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Boeuf bourguignon, I think. With the little roasted potatoes, and a salad. Good night, Nicholas. No, I can get upstairs under my own power. It’s just my tongue that’s loosened, that’s all. I’ll see you at breakfast.”

  He had a shower. He’d felt the need for one ever since he left the Arapahoe Street loft. He toweled dry, brushed his teeth.

  Too late to call Julia. He’d thought of calling her from La Quinta, decided not to, and now it was too late. Was it too late to call Dot? Probably not, but he didn’t want to call Dot. It was possible she’d called him, or tried to. He’d turned his phone off earlier and had never turned it back on.

  He got in bed, turned off the light. What happens in Cheyenne, he thought, stays in Cheyenne.

  He didn’t think he was going to be able to sleep, and thought about putting on a robe and going downstairs to drink whiskey. But he didn’t have a robe, and didn’t much care for whiskey, or for the whole sad business of sitting up late drinking it.

  He owned a robe, a very nice maroon one with silver piping. It had belonged to Julia’s father, who’d been an invalid during the short time Keller had known him. Mr. Roussard hadn’t known quite what to make of Keller, though they got along well enough, and then the man’s illness ran its course, more or less, and he was gone.

  Keller had admired the robe once, and after her father’s ashes had been scattered in the Gulf, Julia got the robe dry-cleaned and told him it was his now. He liked owning it, but he hardly ever wore it. It didn’t smell of the old man, or of the sickroom, the dry cleaner had seen to that, but still it stayed unworn in Keller’s closet. Robes, pajamas, slippers, they worked fine for some men, not so much for others, and Keller—

  Dropped right off to sleep, thinking of robes and slippers.

  Forty-Five

  The representative of Talleyrand Stamp & Coin arrived twenty minutes late. Keller, on the patio with a second cup of coffee, watched as the fellow parked his black Lincoln Navigator in the driveway and headed for the front door, briefcase in hand. Like his predecessors, he wore a conservative suit and a tie; in manner and body type he fell somewhere between the two.

  “Pierce Naylor,” he said, first to Keller, then a moment or two later to Denia Soderling. “Lew Mintz couldn’t make it. As I understand it, I’m the third stamp buyer to cross this threshold in as many days. Ma’am, you must be sick to death of the whole tribe of us.”

  “It’s been no hardship for me,” she said. “Mr. Edwards has enabled me to stay very much in the background.”

  “You’re fortunate,” he said. “The less time you spend around stamp buyers, the better off you are. Well, it’s my intention to make this as simple and easy for you as I possibly can, and profitable in the bargain. Unless I’ve been misinformed, you were visited in turn by E. J. Griffey and Martin Rombaugh, and I’d be surprised if either one of them got out of here in less than five or six hours.”

  Keller was preparing a reply, but Naylor didn’t wait for one. “That’s far more of your time than I intend to take,” he said, “nor will I eat you out of house and home, as I’m sure Marty Rombaugh made every effort to do. One hour’s all I’ll need.”

  Oh?

  In the stamp room, Keller indicated the chair that had served Griffey and Rombaugh in turn. Naylor stayed on his feet and walked over to the shelved stamp albums. “Spain,” he announced, and carried an album to the table. Still standing, he opened it apparently at random, studied the stamps, flipped a few pages, closed the album, and returned it to the shelf. He spent a little more time with Sweden, and not much time at all with Turkey.

  “All right,” he said, after replacing the Turkish album where he’d found it. “Griffey and Rombaugh, with Griffey leading off. He’d have tried to make his offer preemptive, but that little ploy quite obviously didn’t work. And Marty would have tried to add a little sweetener. He’d top Griffey’s bid and slip you a little something for your troubles. But that couldn’t have worked, either, because the stamps are still here, aren’t they?”

  Keller agreed that they were.

  “How high did Griffey go? And was Marty able to top it?”

  “We haven’t opened the envelopes.”

  “You’re kidding,” Naylor said, and looked intently at him. “You’re serious,” he announced. “Well, that makes it interesting, doesn’t it? Why don’t we bring in Mrs. Soderling? I have a suggestion to make.”

  “You want us to open both envelopes,” she said. “In front of you.”

  “That’s right.”

  “And you’ll guarantee to top the high bid by twenty percent. I believe that’s what you said.”

  “It is.”

  “But you barely looked at the stamps. How can you know they’re worth that much?”

  “I know the Griff,” Naylor said. “I know Marty Rombaugh. If they say the collection’s worth X dollars, I know it’s worth that and more.”

  “Twenty percent more,” Keller said.

  “That’s right. I looked briefly at three albums, and that was enough to give me a sense of the quality and the degree of completeness. I’ll take the word of my predecessors as to the actual value, and at the same time I’ll trust them to have shaded their bid enough to leave ample room for profit. Enough room so that I can bid twenty percent higher and still come out ahead.”

  “Or back out,” Keller said.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Suppose we open the envelopes,” he said, “and one bid’s three times as high as the other, so high that you wouldn’t even want to match it, let alone top it by twenty percent. ‘My employers would never go for that,’ you’d say, and what could we do about it?”

  “Not a damn thing,” Naylor allowed. “But so what? You’d go ahead and sell the stamps to Griffey or Rombaugh, whoever’s the higher, but that’s what you’d do anyway, isn’t it?”

  There had to be a flaw in the argument, but Keller couldn’t spot it. Denia questioned the fairness of it. Wouldn’t they be giving Naylor an edge over the competition?

  “I had that edge from the start,” he said, “because I’m the last of the three play
ers in the game. If I’d already come and gone, and one of the others got to go last, he’d be giving you a version of the same pitch. Ma’am, you want to be fair to yourself, and to do right by the man who gathered all these philatelic treasures together in the first place. Which is to say you want the highest price. And that’s exactly what you’ll get if you open those envelopes.”

  It was getting on for noon when they opened the envelopes. By ten minutes to four, the entire cargo compartment of the oversize SUV was filled to capacity, with one additional carton, its seat belt securely fastened, riding shotgun. There was another box on the floor containing a two-quart Thermos bottle and half a dozen sandwiches in individual self-sealing plastic bags.

  “I’ll drive straight through,” Pierce Naylor said. “It’s around nine hundred miles to St. Louis, all of it on interstates, and with the sandwiches and coffee I’ll never have to leave the vehicle. Very thoughtful of you, Mrs. Soderling. I’ll have FedEx get your Thermos back in good shape.”

  “It’s a spare, Mr. Naylor, and the cap’s chipped. Don’t bother returning it.”

  “You’re sure? Because it wouldn’t be any trouble. Well, then. Mr. Edwards, Mrs. Soderling. A pleasure doing business with you.”

  They stood in silence and watched him drive off. He’d flown from St. Louis to Denver, where he’d reserved the Navigator, making sure he got the largest SUV any of the rental outlets had on offer. If he’d missed out on the collection, he’d have driven back to Denver and flown home. But he’d been successful, so he’d drive home, pay the car rental people a drop charge, waste his return air ticket, and his employers would count it all money well spent.

  “It was remarkable how smoothly it went. He called the firm he works for, and someone there called a bank and arranged a wire transfer, and in no time at all Mrs. Soderling’s bank confirmed that the money was in her account.”

  “I guess I knew you could do that,” Julia said, “but it never would have occurred to me. And she’s happy with the price?”

  “Very much so.”

  “And your other business?”

  “All taken care of. I’ll be home tomorrow.”

  She put Jenny on, and he listened happily as she babbled away about a puppy. Was it too early to get her a dog? This was not the first time he’d asked himself this question, and the answer still seemed to be yes, that she wasn’t old enough yet. Soon, though.

  He rang off, switched phones, called Dot. “You won’t believe this,” she said, “but the damnedest thing happened on Arapahoe Street in downtown Denver. An ex-con not too long out of Cañon City looked up his old girlfriend and slapped her around enough to leave marks. So she got her gun and put three rounds in his chest, and then I guess she felt remorseful, because she turned the gun on herself.”

  “These things happen.”

  “One in the heart. I understand men go for head shots, the mouth or the temple, but a girl wants to look her best.”

  “So they say.”

  “And they found something, don’t ask me what, that has them looking at the dead guy for that house that burned down a few nights ago.”

  “Maybe there was something in his wallet with the address on it.”

  “Of the house that went up in smoke? That might do it. Whatever it is, my guess is it’s enough for them to clear the case. Time for Pablo to head for home.”

  “Tomorrow,” he said. “Uh, as far as us getting paid—”

  “Won’t be a problem.”

  “When the husband recovers—”

  “That won’t be a problem, either.”

  It took him a moment. “You’re saying he—”

  “Died, Pablo. El esposo es muerto. Or should it be está? I think es, because it’s a permanent condition.”

  “I thought she hired security.”

  “She did, amigo, but all the king’s horses can’t keep a man’s kidneys from quitting on him. Acute renal failure, and I gather the only surprise at the hospital was that he lasted as long as he did. And this way she got to forgive him and fall back in love with him and get revenge on the people responsible for his death, and she doesn’t have to worry that he’ll find some other tootsie and put her through it all over again. Which we both know he would have done sooner or later. I have to say she comes out of this in good shape, Pablo. The little lady got her money’s worth.”

  Forty-Six

  The boeuf bourguignon was tender and savory, the little potatoes crisp on the outside and soft in the center. The wine was a Burgundy, appropriately enough, full-bodied and hearty, but neither of them managed more than a glass of it.

  They talked through the meal, but mostly about the philatelic transaction. Of the two bids they’d opened, E. J. Griffey’s was the higher by a substantial margin, and that had surprised them both.

  Over coffee, she said she wanted to pay him a bonus. The stamps he’d selected, he told her, were ample compensation for his time. He’d enjoyed the visit, and he’d learned a great deal from the three men, from listening to what they said and from paying attention to the way they operated.

  “You made me an offer,” she said. “A quarter of a million dollars. And in the next breath you advised me not to take it.”

  “Aren’t you glad you didn’t?”

  “I wound up with almost five times as much.”

  “I thought you might.”

  “You’re an honest man,” she said, “and an ethical one, but I don’t see why that should stop you from accepting a bonus. You have a daughter. You told me her name but I don’t remember it.”

  “Jenny.”

  “I bet she’s smart.”

  “Like her mother,” he said.

  “Oh, I think you probably deserve some of the credit. But she’s college material, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Not for a few years now.”

  “That’s just as well,” she said, “because what I’m going to do is put a hundred thousand dollars into a trust fund to mature on her eighteenth birthday. It should appreciate considerably by then, and might even increase as much as the cost of a college education. You really can’t object to this, Nicholas. It doesn’t even concern you. It’s between me and Jennifer.”

  “Jenny.”

  “Jenny, but isn’t it Jennifer on her birth certificate?”

  “No, just Jenny.”

  “And my husband’s given name was Jeb, not short for Jebediah, as some people tended to assume. His full name was Jeb Stuart Soderling, though I’ve no idea why his father, a North Dakota Swede, would name his son after a Civil War general. And Jeb was an acronym to begin with, you know.”

  “It was J. E. B. Stuart, wasn’t it? I don’t remember what the initials stood for.”

  “James Ewell Brown Stuart. I would know, wouldn’t I, having been married to his namesake. Well, that’s a handful, isn’t it? You can see why they went with Jeb. But won’t it be awkward for your daughter? She’ll spend half her life correcting people who assume her full name is Jennifer.”

  He’d had this conversation with Julia. “She can always change it,” he said. “But for now it’s Jenny. See, she was a breech birth.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “A breech presentation. She was upside down in the birth canal, and—”

  “I understand the term, Nicholas. What I don’t begin to understand is why that would make her a Jenny instead of a Jennifer.”

  He reached for his cup, took a sip of coffee. “I’m not sure this will make any sense,” he said, “but that’s when we realized she wasn’t going to be, you know, ordinary. And there were so many little girls named Jennifer, and we knew we weren’t going to call her Jennifer anyway, so—well, that’s why it says Jenny on her birth certificate.”

  “And it doesn’t have to be short for Jennifer,” Denia said. “Think of Pirate Jenny, in The Threepenny Opera. But your little pirate’s name is Jenny Edwards. And does she have a middle name, Nicholas? Because I’m serious about putting that money in trust for her.”
r />   “It’s Roussard,” he said, and spelled it. “My wife’s maiden name.”

  Forty-Seven

  Pirate Jenny,” he said. “Maybe that’s what you’ll be next Halloween. We’ll get you an eye patch, and your mother can make you a cutlass out of cardboard.”

  “Daddy home,” said the future pirate, bouncing happily on his lap. “Daddy home!”

  “Daddy’s home,” he agreed. “And in fifteen years or so, he’ll be the one stuck at home while you toddle off to college.”

  “And it’s all paid for,” Julia said. “You really think she’ll go through with it? Set up our little bundle of joy with a six-figure trust fund?”

  “Well, you never know,” he said. “It was her idea, and I couldn’t talk her out of it. She could change her mind, but I don’t think she will.”

  “And where will the pirate go to college, do you suppose? She could follow in her mommy’s footsteps and go to Sophie Newcomb, but they went and merged my old school into Tulane. I’m not sure it would be the same. With all that money she could go someplace fancy. All New England preppy. Where would you want her to go?”

  “Nowhere, for the time being. Fifteen years from now? I don’t know. Some school where there aren’t any boys, how’s that?”

  “Aren’t you the dreamer. How about Sweet Briar, in Virginia? I knew a girl who went there, and don’t you know she got to keep her own horse there.”

  “Right in the dormitory?”

  “In the stable, you idiot. Jenny, you’ll be a pirate on horseback. How does that sound?”

  “Daddy home,” Jenny said.

  “Well, you know what’s important, don’t you? Yes, Daddy’s home. Aren’t we lucky?”

  After they’d put Jenny to bed and then gone to bed themselves, after the lovemaking and the easy shared silence that followed the lovemaking, she said she didn’t think she’d ever known anyone named Gardenia.