Keller's Adjustment

by Lawrence Block

  Some members of his profession, he knew, typically threw up after a piece of work, just as some veteran actors never failed to vomit before a performance. Keller had known a man once, a cheerfully coldblooded little murderer with dainty little-girl wrists and a way of holding a cigarette between his thumb and forefinger. The man would chatter about his work, excuse himself, throw up discreetly into a basin, and resume his conversation in mid-sentence.

  A shrink would probably argue that the body was expressing a revulsion which the mind was unwilling to acknowledge, and that sounded about right to Keller. But it didn’t apply to him, because he’d never been one for puking. Even early on, when he was new to the game and hadn’t found ways to deal with it, his stomach had remained serene.

  This particular incident had been unpleasant, even chaotic, but he could if pressed recall others that had been worse.

  But there was a more conclusive argument, it seemed to him. Yes, he’d thrown up outside of Stuart, and again in Georgia, and he’d very likely do so a few more times before he reached New York. But it hadn’t begun with the killings.

  He’d thrown up every couple of hours ever since he sat in front of his television set and watched the towers fall.

  A WEEK OR SO after he got back, there was a message on his answering machine. Dot, wanting him to call. He checked his watch, decided it was too early. He made himself a cup of coffee, and when he’d finished it he dialed the number in White Plains.

  “Keller,” she said. “When you didn’t call back, I figured you were out late. And now you’re up early.”

  “Well,” he said.

  “Why don’t you get on a train, Keller? My eyes are sore, and I figure you’re a sight for them.”

  “What’s the matter with your eyes?”

  “Nothing,” she said. “I was trying to express myself in an original fashion, and it’s a mistake I won’t make again in a hurry. Come see me, why don’t you?”

  “Now?”

  “Why not?”

  “I’m beat,” he said. “I was up all night, I need to get to sleep.”

  “What were you … never mind, I don’t need to know. All right, I’ll tell you what. Sleep all you want and come out for dinner. I’ll order something from the Chinese. Keller? You’re not answering me.”

  “I’ll come out sometime this afternoon,” he said.

  He went to bed, and early that afternoon he caught a train to White Plains and a cab from the station. She was on the porch of the big old Victorian on Taunton Place, with a pitcher of iced tea and two glasses on the tin-topped table. “Look,” she said, pointing to the lawn. “I swear the trees are dropping their leaves earlier than usual this year. What’s it like in New York?”

  “I haven’t really been paying attention.”

  “There was a kid who used to come around to rake them, but I guess he must have gone to college or something. What happens if you don’t rake the leaves, Keller? You happen to know?”

  He didn’t.

  “And you’re not hugely interested, I can see that. There’s something different about you, Keller, and I’ve got a horrible feeling I know what it is. You’re not in love, are you?”

  “In love?”

  “Well, are you? Out all night, and then when you get home all you can do is sleep. Who’s the lucky girl, Keller?”

  He shook his head. “No girl,” he said. “I’ve been working nights.”

  “Working? What the hell do you mean, working?”

  He let her drag it out of him. A day or two after he got back to the city and turned in his rental car, he’d heard something on the news and went to one of the Hudson River piers, where they were enlisting volunteers to serve food for the rescue workers at Ground Zero. Around ten every evening they’d all get together at the pier, then sail down the river and board another ship anchored near the site. Top chefs supplied the food, and Keller and his fellows dished it out to men who’d worked up prodigious appetites laboring at the smoldering wreckage.

  “My God,” Dot said. “Keller, I’m trying to picture this. You stand there with a big spoon and fill their plates for them? Do you wear an apron?”

  “Everybody wears an apron.”

  “I bet you look cute in yours. I don’t mean to make fun, Keller. What you’re doing’s a good thing, and of course you’d wear an apron. You wouldn’t want to get marinara sauce all over your shirt. But it seems strange to me, that’s all.”

  “It’s something to do,” he said.

  “It’s heroic.”

  He shook his head. “There’s nothing heroic about it. It’s like working in a diner, dishing out food. The men we feed, they work long shifts doing hard physical work and breathing in all that smoke. That’s heroic, if anything is. Though I’m not sure there’s any point to it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, they call them rescue workers,” he said, “but they’re not rescuing anybody, because there’s nobody to rescue. Everybody’s dead.”

  She said something in response but he didn’t hear it. “It’s the same as with the blood,” he said. “The first day, everybody mobbed the hospitals, donating blood for the wounded. But it turned out there weren’t any wounded. People either got out of the buildings or they didn’t. If they got out, they were okay. If they didn’t, they’re dead. All that blood people donated? They’ve been throwing it out.”

  “It seems like a waste.”

  “It’s all a waste,” he said, and frowned. “Anyway, that’s what I do every night. I dish out food, and they try to rescue dead people. That way we all keep busy.”

  “The longer I know you,” Dot said, “the more I realize I don’t.”

  “Don’t what?”

  “Know you, Keller. You never cease to amaze me. Somehow I never pictured you as Florence Nightingale.”

  “I’m not nursing anybody. All I do is feed them.”

  “Betty Crocker, then. Either way, it seems like a strange role for a sociopath.”

  “You think I’m a sociopath?”

  “Well, isn’t that part of the job description, Keller? You’re a hit man, a contract killer. You leave town and kill strangers and get paid for it. How can you do that without being a sociopath?”

  He thought about it.

  “Look,” she said, “I didn’t mean to bring it up. It’s just a word, and who even knows what it means? Let’s talk about something else, like why I called you and got you to come out here.”

  “Okay.”

  “Actually,” she said, “there’s two reasons. First of all, you’ve got money coming. Miami, remember?”

  “Oh, right.”

  She handed him an envelope. “I thought you’d want this,” she said, “although it couldn’t have been weighing on your mind, because you never asked about it.”

  “I hardly thought about it.”

  “Well, why would you want to think about blood money while you were busy doing good works? But you can probably find a use for it.”

  “No question.”

  “You can always buy stamps with it. For your collection.”

  “Sure.”

  “It must be quite a collection by now.”

  “It’s coming along.”

  “I’ll bet it is. The other reason I called, Keller, is somebody called me.”

  “Oh?”

  She poured herself some more iced tea, took a sip. “There’s work,” she said. “If you want it. In Portland, something to do with labor unions.”

  “Which Portland?”

  “You know,” she said, “I keep forgetting there’s one in Maine, but there is, and I suppose they’ve got their share of labor problems there, too. But this is Portland, Oregon. As a matter of fact, it’s Beaverton, but I think it’s a suburb. The area code’s the same as Portland.”

  “Clear across the country,” he said.

  “Just a few hours in a plane.”

  They looked at each other. “I can remember,” he said, “when all you did was ste
p up to the counter and tell them where you wanted to go. You counted out bills, and they were perfectly happy to be paid in cash. You had to give them a name, but you could make it up on the spot, and the only way they asked for identification was if you tried to pay them by check.”

  “The world’s a different place now, Keller.”

  “They didn’t even have metal detectors,” he remembered, “or scanners. Then they brought in metal detectors, but the early ones didn’t work all the way down to the ground. I knew a man who used to stick a gun into his sock and walk right onto the plane with it. If they ever caught him at it, I never heard about it.”

  “I suppose you could take a train.”

  “Or a clipper ship,” he said. “Around the Horn.”

  “What’s the matter with the Panama Canal? Metal detectors?” She finished the tea in her glass, heaved a sigh. “I think you answered my question. I’ll tell Portland we have to pass.”

  After dinner she gave him a lift to the station and joined him on the platform to wait for his train. He broke the silence to ask her if she really thought he was a sociopath.

  “Keller,” she said, “it was just an idle remark, and I didn’t mean anything by it. Anyway, I’m no psychologist. I’m not even sure what the word means.”

  “Someone who lacks a sense of right and wrong,” he said. “He understands the difference but doesn’t see how it applies to him personally. He lacks empathy, doesn’t have any feeling for other people.”

  She considered the matter. “It doesn’t sound like you,” she said, “except when you’re working. Is it possible to be a part-time sociopath?”

  “I don’t think so. I’ve done some reading on the subject. Case histories, that sort of thing. The sociopaths they write about, almost all of them have the same three things in their childhood background. Setting fires, torturing animals, and wetting the bed.”

  “You know, I heard that somewhere. Some TV program about FBI profilers and serial killers. Do you remember your childhood, Keller?”

  “Most of it,” he said. “I knew a woman once who claimed she could remember being born. I don’t go back that far, and some of it’s spotty, but I remember it pretty well. And I didn’t do any of those three things. Torture animals? God, I loved animals. I told you about the dog I had.”

  “Nelson. No, sorry, that was the one you had a couple of years ago. You told me the name of the other one, but I can’t remember it.”

  “Soldier.”

  “Soldier, right.”

  “I loved that dog,” he said. “And I had other pets from time to time, the ways kids do. Goldfish, baby turtles. They all died.”

  “They always do, don’t they?”

  “I suppose so. I used to cry.”

  “When they died.”

  “When I was little. When I got older I took it more in stride, but it still made me sad. But torture them?”

  “How about fires?”

  “You know,” he said, “when you talked about the leaves, and what happens if you don’t rake them, I remembered raking leaves when I was a kid. It was one of the things I did to make money.”

  “You want to make twenty bucks here and now, there’s a rake in the garage.”

  “What we used to do,” he remembered, “was rake them into a pile at the curb, and then burn them. It’s illegal nowadays, because of fire laws and air pollution, but back then it’s what you were supposed to do.”

  “It was nice, the smell of burning leaves on the autumn air.”

  “And it was satisfying,” he said. “You raked them up and put a match to them and they were gone. Those were the only fires I remember setting.”

  “I’d say you’re oh-for-two. How’d you do at wetting the bed?”

  “I never did, as far as I can recall.”

  “Oh-for-three. Keller, you’re about as much of a sociopath as Albert Schweitzer. But if that’s the case, how come you do what you do? Never mind, here’s your train. Have fun dishing out the lasagna tonight. And don’t torture any animals, you hear?”

  TWO WEEKS LATER HE picked up the phone on his own and told her not to turn down jobs automatically. “Now you tell me,” she said. “You at home? Don’t go anywhere, I’ll make a call and get back to you.” He sat by the phone, and picked it up when it rang. “I was afraid they’d found somebody by now,” she said, “but we’re in luck, if you want to call it that. They’re sending us something by Airborne Express, which always sounds to me like paratroopers ready for battle. They swear I’ll have it by nine tomorrow morning, but you’ll just be getting home around then, won’t you? Do you figure you can make the 2:04 from Grand Central? I’ll pick you up at the station.”

  “There’s a 10:08,” he said. “Gets to White Plains a few minutes before eleven. If you’re not there I’ll figure you had to wait for the paratroopers, and I’ll get a cab.”

  It was a cold, dreary day, with enough rain so that she needed to use the windshield wipers but not enough to keep the blades from squeaking. She put him at the kitchen table, poured him a cup of coffee, and let him read the notes she’d made and study the Polaroids that had come in the Airborne Express envelope, along with the initial payment in cash. He held up one of the pictures, which showed a man in his seventies, with a round face and a small white mustache, holding up a golf club as if in the hope that someone would take it from him.

  He said the fellow didn’t look much like a labor leader, and Dot shook her head. “That was Portland,” she said. “This is Phoenix. Well, Scottsdale, and I bet it’s nicer there today than it is here. Nicer than Portland, too, because I understand it always rains there. In Portland, I mean. It never rains in Scottsdale. I don’t know what’s the matter with me, I’m starting to sound like the Weather Channel. You could fly, you know. Not all the way, but to Denver, say.”

  “Maybe.”

  She tapped the photo with her fingernail. “Now according to them,” she said, “the man’s not expecting anything, and not taking any security precautions. Other hand, his life is a security precaution. He lives in a gated community.”

  “Sundowner Estates, it says here.”

  “There’s an eighteen-hole golf course, with individual homes ranged around it. And each of them has a state-of-the-art home security system, but the only thing that ever triggers an alarm is when some clown hooks his tee shot through your living room picture window, because the only way into the compound is past a guard. No metal detector, and they don’t confiscate your nail clippers, but you have to belong there for him to let you in.”

  “Does Mr. Egmont ever leave the property?”

  “He plays golf every day. Unless it rains, and we’ve already established that it never does. He generally eats lunch at the clubhouse, they’ve got their own restaurant. He has a housekeeper who comes in a couple of times a week—they know her at the guard shack, I guess. Aside from that, he’s all alone in his house. He probably gets invited out to dinner a lot. He’s unattached, and there’s always six women for every man in those Geezer Leisure communities. You’re staring at his picture, and I bet I know why. He looks familiar, doesn’t he?”

  “Yes, and I can’t think why.”

  “You ever play Monopoly?”

  “By God, that’s it,” he said. “He looks like the drawing of the banker in Monopoly.”

  “It’s the mustache,” she said, “and the round face. Don’t forget to pass Go, Keller. And collect two hundred dollars.”

  SHE DROVE HIM BACK to the train station, and because of the rain they waited in her car instead of on the platform. He said he’d pretty much stopped working on the food ship. She said she hadn’t figured it was something he’d be doing for the rest of his life.

  “They changed it,” he said. “The Red Cross took it over. They do this all the time, their specialty’s disaster relief, and they’re pros at it, but it transformed the whole thing from a spontaneous New York affair into something impersonal. I mean, when we started we had name chefs knocking themse
lves out to feed these guys something they’d enjoy eating, and then the Red Cross took over and we were filling their plates with macaroni and cheese and chipped beef on toast. Overnight we went from Bobby Flay to Chef Boy-Ar-Dee.”

  “Took the joy out of it, did it?”

  “Well, would you like to spend ten hours shifting scrap metal and collecting body parts and then tuck into something you’d expect to find in an army chow line? I got so I couldn’t look them in the eye when I ladled the slop onto their plates. I skipped a night and felt guilty about it, and I went in the next night and felt worse, and I haven’t been back since.”

  “You were probably ready to give it up, Keller.”

  “I don’t know. I still felt good doing it, until the Red Cross showed up.”

  “But that’s why you were there,” she said. “To feel good.”

  “To help out.”

  She shook her head. “You felt good because you were helping out,” she said, “but you kept coming back and doing it because it made you feel good.”

  “Well, I suppose so.”

  “I’m not impugning your motive, Keller. You’re still a hero, as far as I’m concerned. All I’m saying is that volunteerism only goes so far. When it stops feeling good, it tends to run out of steam. That’s when you need the professionals. They do their job because it’s their job, and it doesn’t matter whether they feel good about it or not. They buckle down and get it done. It may be macaroni and cheese, and the cheese may be Velveeta, but nobody winds up holding an empty plate. You see what I mean?”

  “I guess so,” Keller said.

  BACK IN THE CITY, he called one of the airlines, thinking he’d take Dot’s suggestion and fly to Denver. He worked his way through their automated answering system, pressing numbers when prompted, and wound up on hold, because all of their agents were busy serving other customers. The music they played to pass the time was bad enough all by itself, but they kept interrupting it every fifteen seconds to tell him how much better off he’d be using their website. After a few minutes of this he called Hertz, and the phone was answered right away by a human being.