Murder at the Foul Line

by Otto Penzler (ed)

  But then she did talk about it. “I thought it would be good to have,” she said. “You can go out there and practice anytime you want, and the other boys will see you there and come over and play.”

  She was half right. He practiced, dribbling, driving toward the basket, trying set shots and jump shots and hook shots from different angles. He paced off a foul line and practiced foul shots. If practice didn’t make perfect, it certainly didn’t hurt. He got better.

  And the other boys saw him there, she was right about that, too. But nobody ever came over to play, and before long he stopped going out there himself. Then he got an after-school job, and he put the basketball in the garage and forgot about it.

  The backboard stayed where it was, securely mounted on the garage. It was the elephant in the driveway that nobody talked about.

  The Pacers won in overtime, in what Keller supposed was an exciting game, although it didn’t excite him much. He didn’t care who won, and found his attention drifting throughout, even at the game’s most crucial moments. The fact that the visiting team was the New York Knicks didn’t make any difference to him. He didn’t follow basketball, and his devotion to the city of New York didn’t make him a partisan follower of the city’s sports teams.

  Except for the Yankees. He liked the Yankees and enjoyed it when they won. But he didn’t eat his heart out when on rare occasions they lost. As far as he was concerned, getting upset over the outcome of a sports event was like getting depressed when a movie had a sad ending. I mean, get a grip, man. It’s only a movie, it’s only a ball game.

  He walked to his car, which was where he’d parked it, and drove to his motel, which was where he’d left it. He was $75 richer than he’d been a few hours ago, and his only regret was that he hadn’t thought to sell both tickets. And skip the game.

  Grondahl had a backboard in his driveway.

  That was the target’s name, Meredith Grondahl, and when Keller had first seen it, before Dot showed him the photograph, he’d supposed it was a woman. He’d even said, “A woman?” and Dot had asked him if he’d become a sexist overnight. “You’ve done women before,” she reminded him. “You’ve always been an equal-opportunity kind of guy. But all that’s beside the point, because this particular Meredith is a man.”

  What, he’d wondered, did Meredith’s friends call him for short? Merry? Probably not, Keller decided. If he had a nickname, it was probably Bud or Mac or Bubba.

  Grondahl, he figured, meant green valley in whatever Scandinavian language Meredith’s forebears had spoken. So maybe the guy’s friends called him Greenie.

  Or maybe not.

  The backboard, which Keller saw on a drive-by the morning after the basketball game, was freestanding, mounted on a post just a couple of feet in front of the garage. It was a two-car garage, and the post was positioned so that it didn’t block access to either side.

  The garage door was closed, so Keller couldn’t tell how many cars it held at the moment. Nor was anybody shooting baskets in the driveway. Keller drove off picturing Grondahl playing a solitary game, dribbling, shooting, all the while considering how his testimony might expose corporate shenanigans, making of basketball a meditative experience.

  You could get a lot of thinking done that way. Provided you were alone and didn’t have to break your concentration by interacting with somebody else.

  South and east of downtown Indianapolis, tucked into a shopping mall, Keller found a stamp dealer named Hubert Haas. He’d done business with the man in the past, when he’d managed to outbid other collectors for lots Haas offered on eBay. So the name rang a bell when he came across it in the yellow pages.

  He’d brought his Scott catalog, which he used as a checklist, so he could be sure he wasn’t buying stamps he already owned. Haas, a plump and owlish young man who looked as though his chief exercise consisted of driving past a health club, was happy to show Keller his stock. He did almost all of his business online, he confided, and hardly ever had a real customer in the shop, so this was a treat for him.

  So why pay rent? Why not work out of his house?

  “Buying,” Haas said. “I’ve got a presence in a high-traffic mall. That keeps the noncollectors aware of me. Uncle Fred dies, they inherit his stamp collection, who do they bring it to? Somebody they heard of, and they not only heard of Hubert Haas, they know he’s for real, because he’s got a store in the Glendale Mall to prove it. And then there’s the walk-in who buys a starter album for his kid, the collector who runs out of hinges or Showgard mounts or needs to replace a lost pair of tongs. Helps with the rent, but buying’s the real reason.”

  Keller found a comforting quantity of stamps to buy from Haas, including an inexpensive but curiously elusive set of Venezuelan airmails. He walked out imbued with a sense of accomplishment and took a few minutes to walk around the mall, to see what further accomplishments might be there for the taking.

  The mall had the sort of stores malls usually have, and he found it easy enough to scan their window displays and walk on by. Until he came to the library.

  Who had ever heard of a public library in a shopping mall? But that’s what this was, occupying substantial space on the second and third levels, and complete with a turnstile and, yes, a metal detector, its purpose unapparent to Keller. Was there a problem of folks toting guns in hollowed-out books?

  No matter. Keller wasn’t carrying a gun or anything metallic but a handful of coins and his car keys. He entered without raising any alarms, and ten minutes later he was scanning back issues of the Indianapolis Star, learning all manner of things about Meredith Grondahl.

  “It’s pretty interesting,” he told Dot. “There’s this company called Central Indiana Finance. They buy and sell mortgages and do a lot of refinancing. The stock’s traded on Nasdaq. The symbol is CIFI, but when people talk about it, they refer to it as Indy Fi.”

  “If that’s interesting,” she said, “I’d hate to hear your idea of a real yawner.”

  “That’s not the interesting part.”

  “No kidding.”

  “The stock’s very volatile,” he said. “It pays a high dividend, which makes it attractive to investors, but it could be vulnerable to changes in interest rates, which makes it speculative, I guess. And a couple of hedge funds have shorted the stock heavily, along with a lot of private traders.

  “Let me know when we get to the interesting part, will you, Keller?”

  “Well, it’s all kind of interesting,” he said. “You walk around in a shopping mall, you don’t expect to find out this stuff.”

  “Here I am, finding it out without even leaving the house.”

  “There’s this class-action suit,” he said. “Brought on behalf of the Indy Fi stockholders, though probably ninety-nine percent of them are opposed to the whole idea of the suit. The suit charges the company’s management with irregularities and cover-ups, that sort of thing. It’s the people who shorted the stock who are behind the suit, the hedge fund guys, and their whole reason for bringing it seems to be to destroy confidence in the company and further depress the price of the stock.”

  “Can they do that?”

  “Anybody can sue anybody. All they risk, really, is their legal expenses and having the suit get tossed out of court. Meanwhile the company has to defend the suit, and the controversy keeps the stock price depressed, and even if the suit gets settled in the company’s favor, the short interests will have had a chance to make money.”

  “I don’t really care about any of this,” Dot said, “but I have to admit you’re starting to get me interested, although I couldn’t tell you why. And our quarry’s going to testify for the people bringing the suit?”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “They subpoenaed him,” he said. “Meredith Grondahl. He’s an assistant to the chief financial officer, and he’s supposed to testify about irregularities in their accounting procedures, but he’s no whistle-blower. He’s more of a cheerleader. As far as he’s conce
rned, Indy Fi’s a great company, and his personal 401(k) is full of the company’s stock. He can’t really damage either side in the suit.”

  “Then why would somebody decide to summon you to Indianapolis?”

  “That’s what I’ve been wondering.”

  He thought the connection might have broken, but she was just taking her time thinking it over. “Well,” she said at length, “even though this gets us interested, Keller, we’re also disinterested, if you get my drift.”

  “It doesn’t change things.”

  “That’s my drift, all right. We’ve got an assignment and the fee’s half paid already, so the whys and wherefores don’t make any difference. Somebody doesn’t want the guy to testify about something, and as soon as you nail that down, you can come on home and play with your stamps. You bought some today, didn’t you tell me that earlier? So come on home and you can paste them in your book. And we’ll get paid, and you can buy some more.”

  The next morning, Keller got up early and drove straight to Grondahl’s house in Carmel. He parked across the street and sat behind the wheel of his rented Ford, a newspaper propped on the steering wheel. He read the national and international news, then the sports. The Pacers, he noted, had won last night, in double overtime. The local sportswriter described the game as thrilling and said the shot from half-court that fell in just as the second overtime period ran out demonstrated “the moral integrity and indomitable spirit of our guys.” Keller wished he’d taken it a small step further, claiming the ball’s unerring flight to the basket as proof of the Almighty’s clear preference for the local heroes.

  Reading, he kept an eye on Grondahl’s front door, waiting for Greenie to appear. He still hadn’t done so by the time Keller was done with the sports pages. Well, it was early, he told himself, and turned to the business section. The Dow had been up, he learned, in heavy volume.

  He knew what this meant—he wasn’t an idiot—but it was something he never followed because it didn’t concern him or hold interest for him. Keller earned good money when he worked, and he didn’t live high, and for years he had saved a substantial portion of the money that came into his hands. But he’d never bought stocks or mutual funds with it. He tucked some of it into a safe-deposit box and the rest into savings accounts. The money grew slowly if it grew at all, but it didn’t shrink, and there was something to be said for that.

  Eventually he reached a point where retirement was an option, and realized that he’d need a hobby to fill the golden years. He took up stamp collecting again, but in a far more serious fashion this time around. He started spending serious money on stamps, and his retirement savings waned as his collection grew.

  So he’d never managed to get interested in the world of stocks and bonds. This morning, for some reason, he found the business section interesting, not least because of an article on Central Indiana Finance. CIFI, which opened the day at $43.27 a share, had fluctuated wildly, up five points at its high for the day, down as much as seven, and finishing the day at $40.35. On the one hand, he learned, the shorts were scrambling to cover before the ex-dividend date, when they would be liable for the company’s substantial dividend. On the other, players were continuing to short the stock and drive the price down, encouraged by the pending class-action lawsuit.

  He was thinking about the article when the door opened and Meredith Grondahl emerged.

  Grondahl was dressed for the office, wearing a dark gray suit and a white shirt and a striped tie and carrying a briefcase. That was to be expected, it being a Thursday, but Keller realized he’d unconsciously been waiting for the man to show himself in shorts and a singlet, dribbling a basketball.

  In the driveway, Grondahl paid no attention to the basketball backboard but triggered a button to raise the garage door. There was, Keller noted, only one car in the garage, and a slew of objects (he made out a barbecue grill and some lawn furniture) took up the space where a second car might otherwise have been parked.

  Grondahl, given his position in the corporate world, could clearly have afforded a second car for his wife. Which suggested to Keller that he didn’t have a wife. The fine suburban house, on the other hand, suggested that he’d had one once upon a time, and Keller suspected she’d chosen to go away and had taken her car with her.

  Poor bastard.

  Keller, comfortable behind the wheel, stayed where he was while Grondahl backed his Grand Cherokee out of the driveway and drove off somewhere. He thought about following the man, but why? For that matter, why had he come here to watch him leave the house?

  Of course, there were more basic questions than that. Why wasn’t he getting down to business and fulfilling his contract? Why was he watching Meredith Grondahl instead of punching the man’s ticket?

  And a question that was, strictly speaking, none of his business, but no less compelling for it: Why did somebody want Meredith Grondahl dead?

  Thinking, he reminded himself, was one thing. Acting was another. His mind could go where it wanted, as long as his body did what it was supposed to.

  Drive back to the motel, he told himself, and find a way to use up the day. And tonight, when Meredith Grondahl comes home, be here waiting for him. Then return this car to Hertz, pick up a fresh one from somebody else, and go home.

  He nodded, affirming the wisdom of that course of action. Then he started the engine, backed up a few yards, and swung the car into the Grondahl driveway. He got out, found the button Grondahl had used to raise the garage door, pressed it, got back in the car, and pulled into the spot recently vacated by the Grand Cherokee.

  There was a small boulder the size of a bowling ball standing just to the right of Grondahl’s front door. It might have been residue from a local avalanche, but Keller thought that unlikely. It looked to him like something to hide a spare house key under, and he was right about that. He picked up the key, opened the door, and let himself in.

  There was a chance, of course, that there was still a Mrs. Grondahl and that she was home. Maybe she didn’t drive, maybe she was an agoraphobe who never left the house. Keller thought this was unlikely, and it didn’t take him long to rule it out. The house was antiseptically clean, but that didn’t necessarily signal a woman’s presence; Grondahl might be neat by nature, or he might have someone who cleaned for him once or twice a week.

  There were no women’s clothes in the closets or dressers, and that was a tip-off. And there were two dressers, a highboy and a low triple dresser with a vanity mirror, and the low dresser’s drawers were empty, except for one which Grondahl had begun to use for suspenders and cuff links and such. So there had indeed been a Mrs. Grondahl, and now there wasn’t.

  Keller, having established this much, wandered around the two-story house trying to see what else he could learn. Except he wasn’t trying very hard, because he wasn’t really looking for anything, or if he was, he didn’t know what it might be. It was more as if he was trying to get the feel of the man, and that didn’t make any sense, but then what sense was there in letting yourself into the house of the man you were planning to kill?

  Maybe the best course of action was to settle in and wait. Sooner or later Grondahl would return to the house, and he’d probably be alone when he did, since he was beginning to strike Keller as your typical lonely guy.

  Your typical lonely guy. The phrase resonated oddly for Keller, because he couldn’t help identifying with it. He was, face it, a lonely guy himself, although he didn’t suppose you could call him typical. Did this resonance get in the way of what he was supposed to do? He thought it over and decided it did and it didn’t. It made him sympathize with Meredith Grondahl, and thus disinclined to kill him; on the other hand, wouldn’t he be doing the poor bastard a favor?

  He frowned, found a chair to sit in. When Grondahl came home, he’d be alone. And he’d be relieved to return to the safe harbor of his empty house. So he’d be unguarded, and getting taken from behind by a man with a club or a knife or a garrote—Keller hadn’t decided yet—w
as the last thing he’d worry about.

  It’d be the last thing, all right.

  The problem, of course, was to figure out what to do with the day. If he just holed up here, it looked to be a minimum of eight hours before Grondahl returned, and the wait might well stretch to twelve or more. He could read, if he could find something he felt like reading, or watch TV with the sound off, or—

  Hell. His car was parked in Grondahl’s garage. That assured that the neighbors wouldn’t see it and grow suspicious, but what happened when Grondahl came home and found his parking spot taken?

  No good at all. Keller would have to move the car, and the sooner the better, because for all he knew, Grondahl might feel the need to come home for lunch. So what should he do? Drive it around the block, leave it in front of some stranger’s house? And then he’d have to return on foot, hoping no one noticed him, because nobody walked anywhere in the suburbs and a pedestrian was suspicious by definition.

  Maybe waiting for Grondahl was a bad idea altogether. Maybe he should just get the hell out and go back to his motel.

  He was on his way to the door when he heard a key in the lock.

  Funny how decisions had a way of making themselves. Grondahl, who had returned for something he’d forgotten, was insisting on being put out of his misery. Keller backed out of the entrance hall and waited around the corner in the dining room.

  The door opened, and Keller heard steps, a lot of them. And a voice called out, “Hello? Anybody home?”

  Keller’s first thought was that it was an odd thing for Grondahl to do. Then another voice, pitched lower, said, “You better hope you don’t get an answer to that one.”

  Had Grondahl brought a friend? No, of course not, he realized. It wasn’t Grondahl, who was almost certainly doing something corporate at his office. It was someone else, a pair of somebody elses, and they’d let themselves in with a key and wanted the house to be empty.