After dinner, they took their coffee out on the front porch. It was pleasant out there, watching people walk by, watching the day fade into twilight. He saw what she meant about the shrubbery, though. It had been allowed to grow a little too tall, and cut off a little too much of the light and the view.
He could probably work out how to trim it. As soon as he had a day off, he’d see what he could do.
One night, after they had made love, she broke the silence to point out that she’d called him Nicholas. What was really interesting was that he hadn’t even noticed. It seemed appropriate for her to call him that, in bed as well as out of it, because that seemed to be his name.
That was what it said on his Social Security card and his passport, both of which had turned up in the mail. The same day’s mail that brought the passport also contained an invitation to apply for a credit card. He’d been preapproved, he was told, and he wondered just what criteria had been used to preapprove him. He had a mailing address and a pulse, and evidently that was all they required of him.
Now, under the slow-moving blades of the ceiling fan, he said, “I guess I might not have to sell those stamps after all.”
“What are you talking about?”
She seemed alarmed, and he couldn’t imagine why.
“I thought you lost them,” she said. “I thought you said your whole collection was stolen.”
“It was, but I bought five rare stamps in Des Moines, before everything went to hell. They’d be tough to unload, but they’re still the closest thing I’ve got to a negotiable asset. The car’s worth more and there’s a bigger market for it, but you have to have clear title, and I don’t.”
“You bought the stamps in Des Moines?”
He got the stamps from his top dresser drawer, managed to find his tongs, and switched on the bedside lamp to show her the five little squares of paper. She asked a few questions — how old were they, what were they worth — and he wound up telling her all about them, and the circumstances of their purchase.
“I would have had plenty of cash for the trip back to New York,” he said, “if I hadn’t shelled out six hundred dollars for these. That left me with less than two hundred. But at the time that looked like more than enough, because I’d be charging everything, including my flight home. I had the stamps all paid for when the announcement came over the radio.”
“You mean you hadn’t heard about the assassination?”
“Nobody had, not when I was talking myself into buying the stamps. The best I can make out, Longford was eating rubber chicken with the Rotarians right around the time I was parking my car in Mr. McCue’s driveway. I didn’t grasp the significance right away, I thought it was coincidence, me being in Des Moines the same time a major political figure was assassinated. I had a completely different job to do, at least I thought I did, and, well — what’s the matter?”
“Don’t you see?”
“See what?”
“You didn’t kill the man. Governor Longford. You didn’t kill him.”
“Well, no kidding. It seems to me I told you that a long time ago.”
“No, you don’t get it. You know you didn’t do it, and I know you didn’t do it, but what you and I know is not enough to stop all those policemen from looking for you.”
“Right.”
“But if you were sitting in some stamp shop in — where did you say?”
“Urbandale.”
“Some stamp shop in Urbandale, Iowa. If you were sitting there at the very moment the governor was shot, and if Mr. McWhatsit was sitting across from you—”
“McCue.”
“Whatever.”
“His name used to be McWhatsit,” he said, “but his girlfriend said she wouldn’t marry him unless he changed it.”
“Shut up, for God’s sake, and let me get this out. This is important. If you were there and he was there, and he’ll remember because of the announcement on the radio, then doesn’t that prove you weren’t downtown shooting the governor? It doesn’t? Why not?”
“They went on making that announcement all day,” he said. “McCue will remember the sale, and he might even remember that it happened right around the time he heard about the assassination. But he won’t be able to swear exactly when that was, and even if he did a prosecutor could make him look like an idiot on the witness stand.”
“And a good defense attorney—”
But she stopped when she saw the way he was shaking his head. “No,” he said gently. “There’s something you don’t understand. Let’s say I could prove my innocence. Let’s say McCue could offer testimony that would absolutely get me off the hook, and while we’re at it let’s say that some other witness, some rock-solid pillar of the community, could come along to corroborate his testimony. It doesn’t matter.”
27
“It doesn’t matter. The case would never come to trial. I wouldn’t live that long.”
“The police would kill you?”
“Not the police. The cops, the FBI, they’re all the least of it. The police never caught up with Dot, they never even knew she existed, and look what happened to her.”
“Who then? Oh.”
“Right.”
“You told me his name. Al?”
“Call-Me-Al. Which only means that’s not his name, but it’ll do if we need something to call him. I wonder if he even knew what he was going to use me for when he first began setting me up. Well, that’s something else that doesn’t matter. Longford’s dead and I’m the guy everybody’s looking for, but if I turn up, I’m the fly in Al’s ointment. If he finds me, I’m dead. If the cops find me first, I’m still dead.”
“He would be able to make that happen?”
He nodded. “Nothing to it. He’s pretty resourceful, that’s clear enough. And it’s not all that difficult to arrange for something to happen to someone in custody.”
“It doesn’t seem—”
“Fair?”
“That’s what I was going to say. But who ever said life was fair?”
“Somebody must have,” he said. “At one time or another. But it wasn’t me.”
A little later she said, “Suppose… no, it’s silly.”
“What?”
“Oh, it’s straight out of TV. A man’s framed and the only way out is to solve the crime.”
“Like O.J.,” he said, “searching all the golf courses in Florida for the real killer.”
“I told you it was silly. Would you even know where to start?”
“Maybe a graveyard.”
“You think he’s dead?”
“I think Al’s a believer in playing it safe, and that would be the safest way to play it. He used me as the fall guy, because he knew there was no trail that could lead back from me to him. But the actual shooter would know somebody, Al or somebody who worked for Al, so there’d be some linkage there.”
“But no one would be looking for it because everybody would think you were the real shooter.”
“Right. And meanwhile, just to guard against the possibility of anybody finding out what really happened, or the chance the shooter would brag about what he’d done, because he was drunk or to increase his chances of getting laid—”
“Would that work?”
“I suppose it might, with a certain sort of woman. The point is, once the governor was dead, the shooter made the jump from asset to liability. If I had to guess, I’d say he took his last breath within forty-eight hours of the assassination.”
“So he’s not playing golf with O.J.”
“Not a chance. But he might be sharing peanut butter and banana sandwiches with Elvis.”
That Thursday they ran into a plumbing problem at work. It demanded a higher level of expertise than Donny’s, so they knocked off early and left the field to a master plumber from Metairie. Keller came straight home so he could tell Lucille to take the rest of the day off, but found Julia on the front porch. He could tell she’d been crying.
The first thing
she said was that there was coffee in the kitchen, and he went there and filled two cups to give her a minute to compose herself. He brought them to the porch, and by then she’d freshened up a little.
“He almost died this morning,” she said. “Lucille’s not an RN but she’s had some training. His heart stopped, and either it started up again on its own or she got it going. She called the school where I was working and I came home, and by then she’d called the doctor, and he was here when I got here.”
“You said almost died. He’s all right?”
“He’s alive. Is that what you meant?”
“I guess so.”
“He had a small stroke. It affected his speech, but it’s not too bad. He’s just a little harder to understand, but he made himself very clear when the doctor wanted to take him to a hospital.”
“He didn’t want that?”
“He said he’d rather die first, and the doctor’s a crusty old bastard himself, and said that’s what it would probably come to. Daddy shot back that he was going to die anyway, and so was the damn doctor, and what was so bad about dying? Then the doctor gave him a shot so he could get some rest, but I think maybe it was just to shut him up, and then he told me that the thing to do now was get him to the hospital.”
“What did you say?”
“That my father was a grown man who had the right to decide what bed he was going to die in. Oh, he didn’t want to hear that from me, and he laid such a good guilt trip on me that he could teach a course on the subject, if they were to add it to the med school curriculum. Assuming it’s not already there.”
“You held your ground?”
“I did,” she said, “and it may have been the hardest thing I’ve ever done, and do you know what was the hardest part?”
“Questioning your own judgment?”
“Yes! Standing firm and arguing, and all the while a little voice in my own head is yammering away. Where do I come off thinking I know more than the doctors, and am I just doing this because I want him to die, and am I being brave with the doctor because I haven’t got the courage to stand up to my own father? There was a whole committee holding a meeting in my head, all of them pounding the table and hollering.”
“He’s resting now?”
“Asleep, last I looked. Are you going in there? If he’s awake, he may not know you. The doctor told me to expect some gaps in his memory.”
“I won’t take it personally.”
“And there’ll be more strokes, he told me that, too. They’d have him on blood thinners if it wasn’t for the cancer. Of course, if he was in the damn hospital they could monitor the blood thinners, balancing the level every hour so he wouldn’t bleed out or stroke out, and — Nicholas, did I do the right thing?”
“You honored the man’s wishes,” he said. “What’s more important than that?”
He went into the sitting room, and the sickroom smell was worse than usual, or maybe it was his imagination. At first he couldn’t detect the old man’s breathing, and thought the end had come, but then the breathing resumed. He stood there, wondering how to feel, what to think.
The old man’s eyes opened, fixed on Keller. “Oh, it’s you,” he said, his voice thickened but otherwise clear as a bell. Then his eyes closed and he was gone again.
When Keller got to work the next morning, he took Donny aside and handed him a ten-dollar bill. “You gave me too much yesterday,” he said. “Sixty dollars, and we only worked five hours.”
Donny pushed the bill back at him. “Gave you a raise,” he said. “Twelve dollars an hour. I didn’t want to say anything in front of the others.” Meaning Luis and a fourth man, Dwayne. “You’re worth it, buddy. Don’t want you looking for the grass to be greener somewhere else.” He winked. “Nice to know you’re an honest man, though.”
He waited until after dinner to tell Julia, and accepted her congratulations. “But I’m not surprised,” she said. “Patsy’s mother didn’t have any stupid children. He’s right about that, you’re worth it, and he’s smart not to chance losing you.”
“Next thing I know,” he said, “you’ll be telling me I’ve got a future in this business.”
“It may not look like it. I don’t suppose the pay amounts to much, compared to what you used to get.”
“I used to spend most of my time waiting for the phone to ring. When I worked I got paid okay, but you can’t compare it. It was a different life.”
“I can imagine. Or maybe I can’t. Do you miss it?”
“God, no. Why would I?”
“I don’t know. I just thought this might be boring, after the life you were used to.”
He thought about it. “What was interesting,” he said, “and not all the time, but sometimes, was the aspect of having a problem and solving it. You rip out a dropped ceiling and you’ll find all the problems any man can ask for, and you can solve them without anybody getting hurt.”
She was silent for a long moment, and then she said, “I think we’d better see about getting you a new car. What’s so funny?”
“Dot used to complain that I’d go off on tangents. Master of the Non Sequitur, she called me.”
“So you want to know how I got there?”
“It’s not important. It just struck me funny, that’s all.”
“How I got there,” she said, “is I was thinking it sounds as if you might want to hang around for a while. And the one thing that could screw things up is that car of yours. The license tags may be a dead end, but if you got pulled over and they asked to see the registration—”
“I’d have the papers that were in the glove box when I switched plates at the airport. I thought of doctoring them, substituting my name and address for what’s on there.”
“Would that work?”
“It might get past a quick glance, but not a long hard look. And it’s an Iowa registration for a car with Tennessee tags being driven by a damn fool with a Louisiana license. So no, I’d have to say it wouldn’t work. That’s why I haven’t bothered to try.”
“You could stay under the speed limit,” she said, “and obey every traffic regulation, and never even risk another parking ticket. And then some drunk rear-ends you, and the next thing you know you’ve got cops asking questions.”
“Or some cop could come back from a vacation at Graceland and wonder why my Tennessee plate doesn’t look much like the ones he saw up there. I know, there are all kinds of things that could go wrong. I’m putting money aside, and when I’ve got enough saved—”
“I’ll give you the money.”
“I don’t want you to do that.”
“You can pay me back. It won’t take long, you’re making an extra two dollars an hour.”
“Let me think about it.”
“I’m all for that,” she said. “Think all you want, Nicholas. Saturday morning we’ll go car shopping.”
There wasn’t much shopping involved. The next time he saw Donny, he mentioned he was going to be looking for a car. You get yourself a truck, Donny said, and you’ll never be happy with a plain old car again. Donny knew somebody with a Chevy half-ton pickup, not much on looks but mechanically sound. It would have to be all cash, Donny said, but he could probably find somebody to take the Sentra off Nick’s hands. Keller said he already had somebody lined up.
The truck’s owner was an older woman who looked like a librarian, and it turned out that’s just what she was, at what she described as the big branch library in Jefferson Parish. Keller couldn’t guess how she’d wound up owning the truck, and her air suggested she was somewhat baffled herself. But the papers looked okay, and when he asked the price she sighed and said she’d been hoping to get five thousand dollars, which made it pretty clear she didn’t expect to. Keller offered four, figuring to meet her somewhere in the middle, and felt almost guilty when she sighed again and nodded her agreement.
Julia had driven him to the woman’s house in the Taurus, and he followed her back and parked out in front on the street. He
told her how he’d wanted to raise his own bid when the woman said yes to four thousand, and she told him not to be silly. “It’s not her truck,” she said.
“Not anymore. It’s ours.”
“It was never hers. Some man owned it, her son or her boyfriend or I don’t know who, and one way or another she wound up with it, and believe me, the truck’s not the saddest part of the story. What?”
“I was just thinking,” he said. “You realize you’re not more than a handful of notes away from a country song?”
The Sentra wound up in the Mississippi. If he’d felt guilty lowballing the librarian, he felt worse deep-sixing a car that had given him trouble-free performance for months. He’d eaten in it, he’d slept in it, he’d driven it all over the country, and now he was showing his gratitude by dumping it in the river.
But nothing else he could come up with struck him as one hundred percent safe. If he left it to be stolen, he’d sever his own connection with it. But it would provoke official attention sooner or later, and when it did it would still be the vehicle Governor Longford’s assassin had rented in Des Moines, and whoever ran the engine serial number would learn that much readily enough. And anyone with a strong interest in finding him would have a reason to start looking in New Orleans.
It was a good bet to stay in the river forever, he told Julia, and if it ever did get hauled out, nobody was going to bother looking for the serial number.
Back in the city, he took her for a ride in his truck.
28
Her father seemed at first to be recovering from his stroke. Then he must have had another one, because when Julia went in there one morning he had taken a sharp turn for the worse. His speech was impossible to make out, and he didn’t seem able to move his legs. Earlier, he’d had to use a bed pan; now Keller found himself called to help when Julia changed her father’s diapers.
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