“You don’t think that phone number would lead anywhere?”
“No,” he said, “or they wouldn’t have given it to me. But as far as I can tell, it’s all we’ve got.”
“I wonder,” she said.
In the morning she drove him and Dot to the airport. Keller had thought they would take a cab, but Julia wouldn’t hear of it. Dot headed inside with her suitcase, to give them a moment, and Julia got out of the car to kiss him good-bye.
She said, “Be careful, you hear?”
“I will.”
“I’ll tell Donny you were called away. Family business, I’ll tell him.”
“Sure.” He studied her. “Is there something else?”
“Not really.”
“Oh?”
“It’s nothing,” she said. “It’ll keep.”
34
“The area code’s five-one-five,” Dot said, squinting at the slip of paper. “That’s Des Moines? And you’ve been carrying this around for months and never dialed it?”
“Why would I dial it?”
“I see your point. If it’s the number they gave you, it’s not going to lead anywhere. Dial it anyway.”
“Why?”
“So we can rule it out, and you’ll have more room in your wallet for all the money you’ve got in the Caymans.”
He took out his cell phone, opened it, closed it again. “If it’s a live number, and I call it—”
“Is that the phone you called me on in Sedona? The one where not even you can say what the number is?”
“Well, yes, but—”
“Dial the number,” she said, “and if the guy with the hair in his ears picks up, we’ll throw the phone out the window.”
Coo-wheeeet!
“That’s what I thought,” she said, “but now we know for sure. What else do we know? I talked to Al a couple of times on the phone. Not for very long, and he didn’t say much, but I might recognize his voice. Enough to pick him out of an auditory lineup, if there was such a thing.”
“I just wish we had a place to start.”
“So do I. He called me out of the clear blue sky, you know. Never a word about how he heard of me, who gave him the number. But he had to have heard from somewhere, and he didn’t just dial numbers at random. He knew my number and he knew my address. The first FedEx envelope full of money, he didn’t have to ask me where to send it. He just sent it.”
“So somebody who knows you also knows him.”
“We don’t know that, Keller. Somebody who knows me talked to somebody who knows him, and we don’t know how many extra somebodies may have gotten into the act. And the old man was running that show a long time, and never changed his phone number once in all those years.”
“So there are a lot of people out there who could have had the number.”
“And there could be a long chain between the first one and Al, and all you’d need is one broken link along the way and you wouldn’t get anywhere.” She frowned. “Still, if I ask enough people, somebody might know something. You think it’s a different name every time he picks up the phone? Call me Al, call me Bill, call me Carlos?”
“Or he’s a creature of habit and never got past Al.”
“That would make it easier for him to remember who he was supposed to be. One of the few things I brought along from White Plains was my phone book, and there are a lot of numbers I could call. The more people I talk to, the better the chance that one of them will know what I’m talking about. Of course that’s only the half of it.”
“The more people you talk to, the more likely it is he’ll know somebody’s looking for him.”
“That’s the other half, all right. And I’ll have to talk to these people without letting them know who I am, because I died in a fire in White Plains, as you may recall.”
“Now that you mention it, it seems to me I heard something along those lines.”
“I don’t know who else did. It would have been a pretty small story outside of the New York area. But I can’t be alive with one person and dead with another. It’s too small a world for that.” She shrugged. “I’ll figure something out. Maybe I’ll use one of those gizmos you clamp on the phone and it changes your voice. If there was anyplace else to start…”
“Well, there might be.”
“Oh?”
“They gave me a phone,” he said. “The guy with the ears gave it to me when he took me to the motel they picked out for me.”
“The Laurel Inn, or something like that.”
“That was it. The Laurel Inn. Gave me this phone, told me to use it to call in. Well, I wasn’t going to use that phone any more than I was going to stay in that room.”
“You were suspicious from the jump.”
“There are certain precautions that are automatic, and yes, it felt a little hinky, but it was my last job and it was going to feel that way no matter what. I wasn’t going to stay at the Laurel Inn, and I wasn’t going to make any calls on that phone, and I wasn’t even going to carry it around with me, because I figured they could locate it whether or not it was turned on.”
“They can do that?”
“My rule of thumb is anybody can do anything. So if they tried to locate the phone, all it would do was lead them to the Laurel Inn, because that’s where I left it.”
“In your room.”
“Room two-oh-four.”
“You remember the number. I’m impressed, Keller. It’s almost as impressive as your trick with the presidents. Who was our fourteenth president, do you happen to remember?”
“Franklin Pierce.”
“That’s my boy. Now for the bonus round, what color stamp was he on?”
“Blue.”
“Blue, Franklin Pierce, and room two-oh-four. That’s some memory, but—”
“But so what? Dot, it’s possible that they bought that phone the same way I bought this one, and never made a call with it before Hairy Ears handed it to me.”
She was right on it. “But if not,” she said, “you could press a button and get a list of the last eight or ten numbers called.”
“Right.”
“And you might even be able to trace it, find out who bought it and when.”
“It’s possible.”
“Same question, Keller. So what? I never stayed at the Laurel Inn, and maybe the maids there aren’t in the same league with your average Dutch housewife, but do you really think the phone’s going to be there after all this time?”
“It might be.”
“Seriously?”
“They gave me a room with a king-size bed,” he said.
“Which is nice, I suppose, but since you were never going to sleep in it—”
“And when I left the phone, I didn’t want anybody using it. So I lifted up the mattress and stuck the thing all the way in the middle of the bed.”
“Can you imagine the way the cops must have tossed that room?”
“After a high-profile political assassination? Yes, I think I can.”
“All they had to do was take the mattress completely off the bed.”
“They might have done that.”
“But maybe not?”
“Maybe not.”
“Assuming it’s still there, would it even work? Wouldn’t the battery be dead by now?”
“Most likely.”
“But I suppose they sell batteries.”
“Even in the middle of Iowa,” he said.
“The Laurel Inn. You wouldn’t happen to remember their phone number, do you? No, of course not. They never put it on a stamp.”
He went over to the window and looked out at the city while she used the phone and spoke first to an information operator, then to the reservations person at the Laurel Inn. She hung up and said, “Well, there’s a woman who’s convinced I’m completely out of my mind.”
“But it worked.”
“‘We have to be on the second floor, because my husband can’t bear to have footsteps overhead. And I don�
�t want traffic noise, and I’m sensitive to light, and we both need to be near the stairs, but not right on top of the stairs, and I looked at a diagram on the Web and you know what room would suit us perfectly?’”
“It sounds nuts,” he agreed, “but when you were talking to the clerk, you sounded perfectly reasonable.”
“We’ve got two-oh-four for three nights starting tomorrow. What’s the matter?”
“Oh, I don’t know. That seems like a long time to share a room.”
“One night would be a long time for the two of us to share a room, Keller. You’re not going to be spending even one night at the Laurel Inn, and neither am I. The only reason to book us in there is so that we can get the key. You didn’t happen to keep your key all these months, did you? Along with that phone number?”
“No, and it wouldn’t be good anyway. They use key cards and they reset the system every time they turn the room over.”
“You have to pity all the guys who spent years learning to pick locks, and woke up one morning in an electronic world. They must feel like linotype operators in the age of computerized type-setting, with these sophisticated skills that turned out to be completely useless. Why are you looking at me like that?”
“Like what?”
“Never mind. I had to book three nights because I couldn’t go through all that song and dance about how only two-oh-four would do, not if I was only going to keep the room for a single night. I wonder if they’ve even got a diagram of the layout on their website.”
“I wonder if they’ve even got a website.”
“Everybody does, Keller. Even I have a website.”
“It’s under construction.”
“And it may stay that way for quite a while. I’ll book us a couple of tickets, or do you want to drive? How far is it?”
“It’s got to be a thousand miles, or close to it.”
“And our reservation’s for tomorrow night, so I guess we fly. Do you still have a gun?”
“The SIG Sauer I picked up in Indiana. I can’t take it on a plane.”
“Not even in checked luggage?”
“There’s probably a regulation against it, and even if there isn’t, it’s too good a way to draw attention. Some clown sees the outline of a gun in your bag and you’re in for a long day.”
“You want to drive? I’ll fly up and pick up the room key and you can hit the road in your dusty pickup. Des Moines’s north of here, right?”
“Like most of the country.”
“But pretty much due north? Right there on the Mississippi, isn’t it?”
He shook his head. “West of it.”
“Weren’t you in Iowa, that time the client did a number on us—”
“That other time a client did a number on us.”
“The Mercenary Times case. Wasn’t that Iowa, and didn’t you throw something into the Mississippi?”
“That was Muscatine.”
“That’s the name of the damn place. I was trying to think of it earlier and I kept getting Muscatel, and I knew that wasn’t it. Des Moines is west of there, not on the Mississippi?”
“Now you’ve got it.”
“Unless I get on Jeopardy! I don’t know why I need to fill my head with all this crap. You want to do that, drive up while I fly?”
“Just so I can bring a gun? No, the hell with it. Anyway, I don’t want to be there in a vehicle that somebody could trace back to New Orleans.”
“I didn’t even think of that. We’ll both fly.” She picked up her phone. “I’ll book our flight. Tell me your name again, will you? I don’t know why I can’t remember it. What they need to do, Keller, is put your picture on a stamp.”
35
They flew Delta to Des Moines, with a change of planes in Atlanta. Both legs of the flight were routine, except that they had to sit three rows apart from Atlanta to Des Moines, and Dot was sure the man next to her was an air marshal. “I kept telling myself not to do anything suspicious,” she said. “It was nerve-racking and reassuring at the same time.”
She’d booked her ticket in her new name, Wilma Ann Corder. She’d found the name years ago, the same way Keller had found Nicholas Edwards, and had assembled a whole identity kit, passport and driver’s license and Social Security, along with half a dozen credit cards. She’d rented a post office box in that name and even subscribed to a needlepoint magazine, which she tossed every month when she checked her box. “Then for three years,” she said, “they sent me these plaintive requests to renew my subscription. But what the hell do I care about needlepoint?”
As Wilma Ann Corder, she picked up a rental car in Des Moines. It wasn’t from Hertz and it wasn’t a Sentra, and Keller thought that was all to the good. On the way to the Laurel Inn she said, “You were lucky, Keller. Nick Edwards suits you, especially with the new haircut and glasses. And Edwards is common as dirt. Corder’s pretty rare, but there are just enough of them around so that I keep getting asked if I’m related to this one or that one. I tell them it was my ex-husband’s name and I don’t know anything about his family. As for Wilma, don’t get me started.”
“You don’t like it?”
“I can’t stand it. I’ve got just about everybody trained out of calling me that.”
“What do they call you?”
“Dot.”
“How did Dot get to be short for Wilma?”
“I made an executive decision, Keller. Tell me you haven’t got a problem with that.”
“No, but—”
“‘People call me Dot,’ I say, and that’s generally enough. If anybody asks, I just say it’s a long story. Tell people something’s a long story and they’re usually happy to let you get away without telling it.”
Keller waited in the car while Dot went to the front desk to register, wishing she’d parked in back, or at least somewhere other than the waiting area opposite the front door, wishing he’d remembered to bring his Saints baseball cap. He felt more visible than he wanted to be, and tried to remind himself that no one at the Laurel Inn had ever laid eyes on him.
She came out brandishing two key cards. “One for each of us,” she said, “just in case we get separated between here and the room. The girl who checked me in must have been a Chatty Cathy doll in a previous life. ‘Oh, I see we’ve got you in two-oh-four, Ms. Corder. That’s sort of a celebrity suite for us, you know. The man who shot the governor of Ohio stayed in that very room.’”
“Oh, Christ. She said that?”
“No, of course not, Keller. Help me out here, will you? Where do I park?”
Something made him knock on the door of Room 204. The knock went unanswered. He slid the key into the slot and opened the door.
Dot asked him if it looked familiar.
“I don’t know. It’s been a while. I think the layout’s the same.”
“That’s a comfort. Well?”
For answer he tugged the spread off the bed, lifted a corner of the mattress, and burrowed in between the mattress and the box spring. He couldn’t see what he was doing, but he didn’t have to see anything, and at first his hand encountered nothing at all. Well, that figures, he thought, after all this time, and —
Oh.
His hand touched something, and the contact shifted the object out of reach. He wriggled forward, his feet kicking like a swimmer’s, and he heard Dot asking him what the hell he thought he was doing, but that didn’t matter because he’d moved the extra few inches and his fingers closed on the thing.
It took an effort to get out again.
“Damnedest thing I ever saw,” Dot said. “It looked for a minute as though some creature in there had a hold of you and was dragging you under, like something out of a Stephen King novel. By God, I don’t believe it. Is that it?”
He opened his hand. “That’s it,” he said.
“All this time, and nobody found it.”
“Well, look what I had to go through just now.”
“That’s a point, Keller. I don’t suppose
too many people go mattress diving as a sport, like all those idiots walking around in the woods with metal detectors. ‘Look, Edna, a bottle cap!’ How many people do you suppose slept right on top of that gizmo and never had a clue?”
“No idea.”
“I just hope one of them wasn’t a real princess,” she said, “or the poor darling wouldn’t have had a wink of sleep. But I don’t suppose the Laurel Inn’s a must-see for European royalty. Well? Aren’t you going to see if it works?”
He flipped the phone open.
“Wait!”
“What?”
“Suppose it’s booby-trapped.”
He looked at her. “You think someone came here, found the phone, fixed it so it would explode, and then put it back?”
“No, of course not. Suppose it was booby-trapped when they gave it to you?”
“I was supposed to use it to call them.”
“And when you did — boom!” She frowned. “No, that makes no sense. You’d be dead days before Longford even got to town. Go ahead, open the phone.”
He did, and pressed the Power button. Nothing happened. They got back in the car and found a store that sold batteries, and now the phone powered up just the way it was supposed to.
“It still works,” she said.
“The battery was dead, that’s all.”
“Would it still retain information, though? With the battery dead?”
“Let’s find out,” he said, and pressed buttons until he got the list of outgoing calls. Ten of them, with the most recent one at the top of the list.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Dot said. “Keller, you’re a genius.”
He shook his head. “It’s Julia,” he said.
“Julia?”
“Her idea.”
“Julia? In New Orleans?”
“Suppose the phone’s still where you left it, she said, and suppose it still works.”
“And it was and it does.”
“Right.”
“Keller,” she said, “you keep this one, you hear me? Don’t send her off to walk the dog. Hang on to her.”
36
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