by Ed McBain
“The dentist’s best friend,” she said. “I remember them now. I wonder if they still make them.”
“ ‘Do me a favor, kid, see if they got any of my candy bars downtown.’ Then one day it was do me a favor, here’s a gun, go see this guy and give him two in the head. Out of the blue, more or less, except by then he probably knew I’d do it. And you know something? It never occurred to me not to. ‘Here’s a gun, do me a favor.’ So I took the gun and did him a favor.”
“Just like that?”
“Pretty much. I was used to doing what he told me, and I just did. And that let him know I was somebody who could do that kind of thing. Because not everybody can.”
“But it didn’t bother you.”
“I’ve been thinking about this,” he said. “Reflecting, I guess you’d call it. I didn’t let it bother me.”
“That thing you do, fading the color out of the image and pushing it off in the distance . . .”
“It was later that I taught myself to do that,” he said. “Earlier, well, I guess you’d just call it denial. I told myself it didn’t bother me and made myself believe it. And then there was this sense of accomplishment. Look what I did, see what a man I am. Bang, and he’s dead and you’re not, there’s a certain amount of exhilaration that comes with it.”
“Still?”
He shook his head. “There’s the feeling that you’ve got the job done, that’s all. If it was difficult, well, you’ve accomplished something. If there are other things you’d rather be doing, well, now you can go home and do them.”
“Buy stamps, see a movie.”
“Right.”
“You just pretended it didn’t bother you,” she said, “and then one day it didn’t.”
“And it was easy to pretend, because it never bothered me all that much. But yes, I just kept on doing it, and then I didn’t have to pretend. This place I stayed in Scottsdale, there were all these masks on the walls. Tribal stuff, I guess they were. And I thought about how I started out wearing a mask, and before long it wasn’t a mask, it was my own face.”
“I guess I follow you.”
“It’s just a way of looking at it,” he said. “Anyway, how I got here’s not the point. Where do I go from here? That’s the question.”
“You had a lot of time to think up an answer.”
“Too much time.”
“I guess, with all the stops in Nashville and Coffee Pot.”
“Coffeyville.”
“Whatever. What did you come up with, Keller?”
“Well,” he said, and drew a breath. “One, I’m ready to stop doing this. The business is different, with the airline security and people living behind stockade fences. And I’m different. I’m older, and I’ve been doing this for too many years.”
“Okay.”
“Two, I can’t retire. I need the money, and I don’t have any other way to earn what I need to live on.”
“I hope there’s a three, Keller, because one and two don’t leave you much room to swing.”
“What I had to do,” he said, “was figure out how much money I need.”
“To retire on.”
He nodded. “The figure I came up with,” he said, “is a million dollars.”
“A nice round sum.”
“That’s more than I had when I was thinking about retirement the last time. I think this is a more realistic figure. Invested right, I could probably get a return of around fifty thousand dollars a year.”
“And you can live on that?”
“I don’t want that much,” he said. “I’m not thinking in terms of around-the-world cruises and expensive restaurants. I don’t spend a lot on clothes, and when I buy something I wear it until it’s worn out.”
“Or even longer.”
“If I had a million in cash,” he said, “plus what I could get for the apartment, which is probably another half million.”
“Where would you move?”
“I don’t know. Someplace warm, I suppose.”
“Sundowner Estates?”
“Too expensive. And I wouldn’t care to be walled in, and I don’t play golf.”
“You might, just to have something to do.”
He shook his head. “Some of those guys loved golf,” he said, “but others, you had the feeling they had to keep selling themselves on the idea, telling each other how crazy they were about the game. ‘What time?’ ”
“How’s that?”
“It’s the punch line of a joke. It’s not important. No, I wouldn’t want to live there. But there are these little towns in New Mexico north of Albuquerque, up in the high desert, and you could buy a shack there or just pick up a mobile home and find a place to park it.”
“And you think you could stand it? Out in the boonies like that?”
“I don’t know. The thing is, say I netted half a million from the apartment, plus the million I saved. Say five percent, comes to seventy-five thousand a year, and yes, I could live fine on that.”
“And your apartment’s worth half a million?”
“Something like that.”
“So all you need is a million dollars, Keller. Now I’d lend it to you, but I’m a little short this month. What are you going to do, sell your stamps?”
“They’re not worth anything like that. I don’t know what I’ve spent on the collection, but it certainly doesn’t come to a million dollars, and you can’t get back what you put into them, anyway.”
“I thought they were supposed to be a good investment.”
“They’re better than spending the money on caviar and champagne,” he said, “because you get something back when you sell them, but dealers have to make a profit, too, and if you get half your money back you’re doing well. Anyway, I wouldn’t want to sell them.”
“You want to keep them. And keep on collecting?”
“If I had seventy-five thousand a year coming in,” he said, “and if I lived in some little town in the desert, I could afford to spend ten or fifteen thousand a year on stamps.”
“I bet northern New Mexico’s full of people doing just that.”
“Maybe not,” he said, “but I don’t see why I couldn’t do it.”
“You could be the first, Keller. Now all you need is a million dollars.”
“That’s what I was thinking.”
“Okay, I’ll bite. How’re you going to get it?”
“Well,” he said, “that pretty much answers itself, doesn’t it? I mean, there’s only one thing I know how to do.”
“I think I get it,” Dot said. “You can’t do this anymore, so you’ve got to do it with a vengeance. You have to depopulate half the country in order to get out of the business of killing people.”
“When you put it that way . . .”
“Well, there’s a certain irony operating, wouldn’t you say? But there’s a certain logic there, too. You want to grab every high-ticket job that comes along, so that you can salt away enough cash to get out of the business once and for all. You know what it reminds me of?”
“What?”
“Cops,” she said. “Their pensions are based on what they make the last year they work, so they grab all the overtime they can get their hands on, and then when they retire they can live in style. Usually we sit back and pick and choose, and you take time off between jobs, but that’s not what you want to do now, is it? You want to do a job, come home, catch your breath, then turn around and do another one.”
“Right.”
“Until you can cash in at an even million.”
“That’s the idea.”
“Or maybe a few dollars more, to allow for inflation.”
“Maybe.”
“A little more iced tea, Keller?”
“No, I’m fine.”
“Would you rather have coffee? I could make coffee.”
“No thanks.”
“You sure?”
“Positive.”
“You took a lot of time in Scottsdale. Did he really look just like t
he man in Monopoly?”
“In the photo. Less so in real life.”
“He didn’t give you any trouble?”
He shook his head. “By the time he had a clue what was happening, it was pretty much over.”
“He wasn’t on his guard at all, then.”
“No. I wonder why he got on somebody’s list.”
“An impatient heir would be my guess. Did it bother you much, Keller? Before, during, or after?”
He thought about it, shook his head.
“And then you took your time getting out of there.”
“I thought it made sense to hang around a few days. One more day and I could have gone to the funeral.”
“So you left the day they buried him?”
“Except they didn’t,” he said. “He had the same kind of funeral as Mr. Lattimore.”
“Am I supposed to know who that is?”
“He had a house I could have bought. He was cremated, and after a nondenominational service his ashes were placed in the water hazard.”
“Just a five-iron shot from his front door.”
“Well,” Keller said. “Anyway, yes, I took my time getting home.”
“All those museums.”
“I had to think it all through,” he said. “Figuring out what I want to do with the rest of my life.”
“Of which today is the first day, if I remember correctly. Let me make sure I’ve got this straight. You’re done feeding rescue workers at Ground Zero, and you’re done going to museums for dead outlaws, and you’re ready to get out there and kill one for the Gipper. Is that about it?”
“It’s close enough.”
“Because I’ve been turning down jobs left and right, Keller, and what I want to do is get on the horn and spread the word that we’re ready to do business. We’re not holding any two-for-one sales, but we’re very much in the game. Am I clear on that?” She got to her feet. “Which reminds me. Don’t go away.”
She came back with an envelope and dropped it on the table in front of him. “They paid up right away, and it took you so long to get home I was beginning to think of it as my money. What’s this?”
“Something I picked up on the way home.”
She opened the package, took the little black clay pot in her hands. “That’s really nice,” she said. “What is it, Indian?”
“From a pueblo in New Mexico.”
“And it’s for me?”
“I got the urge to buy it,” he said, “and then afterward I wondered what I was going to do with it. And I thought maybe you’d like it.”
“It would look nice on the mantel,” she said. “Or it would be handy to keep paperclips in. But it’ll have to be one or the other, because there’s no point in keeping paperclips on the mantel. You said you got it in New Mexico? In the town you’re figuring to wind up in?”
He shook his head. “It was a pueblo. I think you have to be an Indian.”
“Well, they do nice work. I’m very pleased to have it.”
“Glad you like it.”
“And you take good care of that,” she said, pushing the envelope toward him. “It’s the first deposit in your retirement fund. Though I suppose you’ll want to spend some of it on stamps.”
Two days later he was working on his stamps when the phone rang. “I’m in the city,” she said. “Right around the corner from you, as a matter of fact.”
She told him the name of the restaurant, and he went there and found her in a booth at the back, eating an ice cream sundae. “When I was a kid,” she said, “they had these at Wohler’s drugstore for thirty-five cents. It was five cents extra if you wanted walnuts on top. I’d hate to tell you what they get for this beauty, and walnuts weren’t part of the deal, either.”
“Nothing’s the way it used to be.”
“You’re right about that,” she said, “and a philosophical observation like that is worth the trip. But it’s not why I came in. Here’s the waitress, Keller. You want one of these?”
He shook his head, ordered a cup of coffee. The waitress brought it, and when she was out of earshot Dot said, “I had a call this morning.”
“Oh?”
“And I was going to call you, but it wasn’t anything to discuss on the phone, and I didn’t feel right about telling you to come out to White Plains because I was pretty sure you’d be wasting your time. So I figured I’d come in, and have an ice cream sundae while I’m at it. It’s worth the trip, incidentally, even if they do charge the earth for it. You sure you don’t want one?”
“Positive.”
“I got a call,” she said, “from a guy we’ve worked with before, a broker, very solid type. And there’s some work to be done, a nice upscale piece of work, which would put a nice piece of change in your retirement fund and one in mine, too.”
“What’s the catch?”
“It’s in Santa Barbara, California,” she said, “and there’s a very narrow window operating. You’d have to do it Wednesday or Thursday, which makes it impossible, because it would take longer than that for you to drive there even if you left right away and only stopped for gas. I mean, suppose you drove it in three days, which is ridiculous anyway. You’d be wiped out when you got there, and you’d get there when, Thursday afternoon at the earliest? Can’t be done.”
“No.”
“So I’ll tell them no,” she said, “but I wanted to check with you first.”
“Tell them we’ll do it,” he said.
“Really?”
“I’ll fly out tomorrow morning. Or tonight, if I can get something.”
“You weren’t ever going to fly again.”
“I know.”
“And then a job comes along . . .”
“Not flying just doesn’t seem that important,” he said. “Don’t ask me why.”
“Actually,” she said, “I have a theory.”
“Oh?”
“When the Towers came down,” she said, “it was very traumatic for you. Same as it was for everybody else. You had to adjust to a new reality, and that’s not easy to do. Your whole world went tilt, and for a while there you stayed off airplanes, and you went downtown and fed the hungry, and you bided your time and tried to figure out a way to get along without doing your usual line of work.”
“And?”
“And time passed,” she said, “and things settled down, and you adjusted to the way the world is now. While you were at it, you realized what you’ll have to do if you’re going to be in a position to retire. You thought things through and came up with a plan.”
“Well, sort of a plan.”
“And a lot of things which seemed very important a while ago, like not flying with all this security and ID checks and all, turn out to be just an inconvenience and not something to make you change your life around. You’ll get a second set of ID, or you’ll use real ID and find some other way to cover your tracks. One way or another, you’ll work it out.”
“I suppose,” he said. “Santa Barbara. That’s between L.A. and San Francisco, isn’t it?”
“Closer to L.A. They have their own airport.”
He shook his head. “They can keep it,” he said. “I’ll fly to LAX. Or Burbank, that’s even better, and I’ll rent a car and drive up to Santa Barbara. Wednesday or Thursday, you said?” He pressed his wrists together. “ ‘What time?’ ”
“What time? What do you mean, what time? What’s so funny, anyway?”
“Oh, it’s a joke one of the golfers told in the clubhouse in Scottsdale. This golfer goes out and he has the worst round of his life. He loses balls in the rough, he can’t get out of sand traps, he hits ball after ball into the water hazard. Nothing goes right for him. By the time he gets to the eighteenth green all he’s got left is his putter, because he’s broken every other club over his knee, and after he fourputts the final hole he breaks the putter, too, and sends it flying.
“He marches into the locker room, absolutely furious, and he unlocks his locker and takes out his
razor and opens it up and gets the blade in his hand and slashes both his wrists. And he stands there, watching the blood flow, and someone calls to him over the bank of lockers. ‘Hey, Joe,’ the guy says, ‘we’re getting up a foursome for tomorrow morning. You interested?’ ”
“And the guy says”—Keller raised his hands to shoulder height, pressed his wrists together—“ ‘What time?’ ”
“ ‘What time?’ ”
“Right.”
“ ‘What time?’ ” She shook her head. “I like it, Keller. And any old time you want’ll be just fine.”