Keller's Fedora (Kindle Single) (2 page)

“Well.”

“No reason to waste your time telling you about it. What’s the point? Better for you to tell me something cute that Jenny said.”

“Spots is dead.”

“Well, I’m sorry to hear that, although I don’t know that I’d call it cute. Poignant, maybe. Do I know who he is?”

“The white alligator.”

“The white alligator. At the zoo?”

“Not anymore.”

“No, I guess you can’t keep the dead ones around. Look, I’ll hang up, and you can put the Pablo phone away for another couple of years. I bet you had to charge it just now, didn’t you?”

“It was dead.”

“Same as mine. Dead as a white alligator, I’d have to say. So we can both forget what I called to tell you, and our next conversation can be on an open line.”

Yes, I think that would be best.
That was the sentence he heard in his mind. But what he said, to their mutual surprise, was, “Wait a minute.”

I
T WAS, AS
she explained it, pretty straightforward. Until it wasn’t.

“You’ve probably never heard of it,” she said, “but there’s a town in Illinois called Baker’s Bluff.”

“South and west of Chicago,” he said.

“Don’t tell me you’ve been there.”

“I haven’t.”

“There’s a stamp dealer there.”

“Not that I know of.”

“I give up.”

“It was the birthplace of a man named Bronson Pettiford, who did something important in the early days of aviation. He was sometimes referred to as the third Wright Brother.”

“Wilbur, Orville, and Bronson.”

“Something like that,” he allowed. “There was a stamp with his picture on it, standing next to an airplane no one in his right mind would set foot in, and they held the First Day ceremony at Baker’s Bluff.”

“An American stamp.”

“Well, it would have to be, wouldn’t it? The rest of the world never heard of Bronson Pettiford.”

“As opposed to here in the good old U S of A, where the son of a bitch is a household word. But you don’t collect American stamps, do you? I’ll tell you, Keller, if I didn’t know better it would make me doubt your patriotism, but I know you have your reasons.”

“A person can’t collect everything.”

“See? There’s a reason right there.”

“And I may not collect US, but I read
Linn’s
every week, and they report on new stamps and first day ceremonies, and this just happened to stick in my mind.”

“But the point is you’ve never been there.”

“Why would I go?”

“In a minute or two,” she said, “you’ll still be asking yourself the same question. Okay, there’s a fellow in Baker’s Bluff who’s got a lot of money, which is always a desirable quality in a client. He’s also got a beautiful trophy wife, and she’s got a boyfriend. Does a subtle pattern begin to emerge?”

“It does have a familiar ring to it. I don’t suppose he’s got an iron-clad prenuptial agreement.”

“He may,” she said, “or he may not. But it doesn’t matter, because he wants to keep her.”

“He wants something to happen to the boyfriend.”

“God, you’re quick on the uptake. That’s one thing I’ve always loved about you, Pablo.”

He frowned. “You said this was something only I could handle,” he said, “but it sounds pretty ordinary. Client has a wife, wife has a lover, client wants the lover out of the picture. I must be missing something. The last time there was a job that only I could be trusted with, the target was a young boy.”

“And a stamp collector in the bargain, if I remember correctly.”

“A very nice kid,” Keller remembered. “First-rate collection of post-World War I German plebiscite issues. Allenstein.”

“That was his name? Allen Stein?”

“It was one of the plebiscite regions. In 1920, the citizens of Allenstein voted overwhelmingly to remain part of Germany. Anyway, I got a card from him at Christmas.”

“Did it have a nice stamp on it? Never mind, you don’t have to answer that. I don’t know how kinky the trophy wife may be, but I think we can take it as a given that her boyfriend’s over eighteen.”

“Then what’s the problem? You’ve got other people you could call.”

“Two or three,” she said, “and I’m not crazy about any of them, but when something’s simple and straightforward I can work with them.”

“But taking out a boyfriend in Illinois is too much for them? What am I missing here?”

“Nothing that I’m not missing myself, Pablo.”

He was forming a question when she dropped the rest of the shoe.

“The son of a bitch knows she’s got a lover,” she said. “What he doesn’t know is who it is.”

“S
O THERE YOU
go,” she said. “I know what you’re thinking, and it’s something he thought of himself. What he needs is a private detective. But fortunately he stopped right there.”

“Fortunately?”

“If he hires a private eye, and if the private eye brings him a name and a photograph, and if a week or two later the guy in the photograph turns up dead, then what happens?”

“Oh, right.”

“The private eye’s a problem,” she said, “because if he was bright enough to find the boyfriend in the first place, he’s certainly bright enough to figure out what happened to him. And either he turns up with his hand out or he goes straight to the cops but either way it’s bad news for the client.”

He saw where this was going.

“So it has to be the same person for both parts of the job,” he said.

“There you go.”

“First to identify the boyfriend, and then to do something about him.”

“Something permanent.”

“Dot, I’m not a private detective.”

“Who said you were? Pablo, you’re a stamp guy and a construction guy. When you pick up a magnifying glass, it’s not to look for clues. It’s to check perficulations.”

“Perforations,” he said. “And for that you use a perforation gauge.”

“My life is richer for knowing that. But think back to Buffalo, will you? That kid you saved?”

“I don’t know that I saved him. I didn’t kill him. That’s not the same thing as saving him.”

“What happened to his uncle?”

“No more than he deserved.”

“The uncle was our client,” she reminded him. “But we didn’t know that. He worked through a cutout, so all you knew was that there were at least three people who had a reason to want the boy dead. And you investigated, the same way a private detective would do.”

“I just poked around a little. Kept my eyes and ears open, talked to people, worked it out.”

“Right.”

“You think I could do this,” he said. “Go to Baker’s Bluff, play Sherlock Holmes—”

“More like Sam Spade, I’d think. Or Philip Marlowe. When they make the movie, Humphrey Bogart can play you.”

“Isn’t it a little late for that?”

“They’ll make an old movie,” she said. “Black and white, with men in hats. And I don’t know if you could do it, Pablo, or why you’d even consider it, to tell you the truth. All I know is I don’t know anybody else I’d even suggest it to, and there was a time when I’d have handed it to you right away, and you’d have been on it like a mongoose on a cobra. But you’re pretty much retired, and I’d be retired if I weren’t such a greedy old lady, and you’ve got stamps and houses to keep you busy, so tell me to forget it and I’ll let my phone go dead again.”

Baker’s Bluff, Illinois. How would he even get there?

“Pablo? Don’t tell me you hung up.”

“No, I’m here,” he said. “Look, don’t put the phone away, all right? Give me an hour and I’ll call you back.”

“I
T’S CRAZY
,”
HE
told Julia. “In the first place I’ve got other things to do. And it’s not as though we need the money.”

“That’s true.”

“And it’s complicated. First I’d have to figure out who the target should be, before I even do anything.”

“That doesn’t make it simple.”

“And he could be an easy target or a hard one,” he said. “There’s no way to know.”

“You want another cup of coffee?”

“Sure, but sit there, I’ll get it. Another thing, I might have to have contact with the client. I’d try to run everything through Dot, because it’s never a good idea for the client to be able to identify you. The cops pick him up, he falls apart under questioning, and there you are.”

“But if all the contact is through Dot—”

“That’s better. And if I absolutely had to talk to him, it’d be on a burner.”

“The Pablo phone.”

“No, but one like it. Buy it, talk to him, toss it in the river. If there’s a river near Baker’s Bluff.”

“I suppose a lake would do in a pinch.”

“Or a storm drain. Donny could get along without me for a week or two. There’s stuff that needs doing, but I don’t have to be there when it gets done. And all I have to do is mention the stamp business, and that’s as much of a reason for my absence as he’d need.”

‘Well, that’s good.”

“I’d miss you and Jenny.”

“And we’d miss you. But it’s the same when you go on a buying trip. You’re away for a few days, and then you come back, and we’re happy to see you.”

“I suppose an occasional break is good.”

“They say it makes the heart grow fonder,” she said, “although I can’t imagine being any fonder of you than I already am. You know, it comes down to one thing, really. Do you want to go? And the answer seems to be that you do.”

“Why? It’s not as though I enjoy killing. As soon as it’s done, I do everything I can to put it out of my mind.”

“Erasing the memory.”

“As well as I can. But—”

“You want to do it,” she said, “because it’s who you are.”

“A man who kills people.”

“Except that’s not the point of it. It’s the resolution, but the point is solving a particular kind of a problem.”

“I guess. I wonder.”

“You wonder what?”

“Well, when Dot told me the complication—”

“Not knowing the identify of the target.”

“Right. That would have been the time for me to tell her to forget it.”

“But it’s when you found yourself getting drawn in.”

“That’s right. ‘Oh, that’s really crazy and stupid,’ I said to myself.”

“‘So sign me up!’”

“Just about. That’s insane, isn’t it? Perverse, anyway.”

“It makes it more interesting,” she said. “You like things to be interesting.”

T
HE TRAIN HAD
just pulled out of Greenwood, Mississippi, when he went to the dining car. It was still light out, and while he’d brought his book with him, he spent most of his time looking out the window, wondering who lived out there and what their lives were like. And maybe someone out there was looking at the passing train, and wondering about the people on it.

His meal was a leisurely one, and it was dark by the time he returned to his roomette. He read for an hour or so, then got Ainslie to turn the facing seats into a bed. He undressed and killed the lights and got under the blanket, and lay there wondering how much sleep he was likely to get.

Next thing he knew they were coming into Kankakee. That was in the song, wasn’t it? He looked at his watch, and it was a quarter after seven, and time for breakfast. And when he got back from breakfast, Ainslie had restored the roomette’s original configuration, and his dark gray fedora was perched on the opposite seat, along with his suitcase.

He could have checked the suitcase. You could do that before your train was available for boarding, and pick it up at Baggage Claim when you arrived. He hadn’t, figuring there might be something in it that he wanted en route, and of course there wasn’t.

He was wearing the hat when they got to Chicago, and he’d have been carrying the suitcase if Ainslie hadn’t insisted on performing that task for him. Once Keller was on the platform, Ainslie handed over the suitcase. “Here you go, Mr. Edwards,” he said. “Now you have a fine stay in Chicago, hear?”

A brief one, Keller thought.

He walked through the train station, found the queue of taxis, and took one to O’Hare Airport. Half an hour later, when he emerged from the taxi, he stopped being Nicholas Edwards.

T
HAT WAS THE
name on his Louisiana driver’s license and his US passport, the name by which everybody in both New Orleans and the philatelic world knew him. His wife’s name was Julia Roussard Edwards, and his daughter’s name was Jenny Edwards. The Edwards name had come from a gravestone, and in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina it had been easy enough to explain away lost records and get a copy of a dead infant’s birth certificate as his own. Everything else had followed in due course, and at this point it would be a neat trick for anyone to prove that he was not Nicholas Edwards.

Which was just as well. There was still an open file somewhere, with one John Paul Keller of New York, NY, being sought in connection with a high-profile homicide in Des Moines, Iowa. Nobody was pressing the case, and it seemed likely they thought he was dead if they thought about him at all, but it was reason enough to protect his new identity.

And one way to protect it was to put it in mothballs for the time being.

I
N THE PASSENGER
terminal, he looked for the Hertz counter, then walked on past it to the men’s room. There he switched his wallet for another, slimmer one. Nicholas Edwards now reposed in a zippered compartment in his suitcase, and the wallet on his hip identified him as James J. Miller, of Waco, Texas. There was a Texas driver’s license in that name, a pair of valid credit cards, and the usual filler—membership cards in hotel loyalty programs and the American Automobile Association, a courtesy card from the Ft. Worth Chamber of Commerce, and last year’s calendar, the gift of an insurance agent in Galveston.

All he had to show was the driver’s license and James Miller’s Visa card. They had his reservation, gave him a Japanese compact with the tank filled, and told him he could bring it back empty.

“But we had a gentleman two weeks ago who cut it a little too close,” the attendant told him. She was not quite flirty, but almost. “He made it into the lot, and he got halfway up the aisle, and the engine went dry and cut out. Now you just might want to give yourself a little more leeway.”

Touched his wrist as she spoke the last line. Well, semi-flirty, anyway.