Keller's Fedora (Kindle Single)

by Lawrence Block

  “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.”

  “SO 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.”

  “IT’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.”

  THE 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.

  THAT 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.

  IN 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.

  “I’ll be careful,” he assured her, and gave her a smile, and went off to collect his car.

  JAMES J. MILLER had booked a ground-floor room at the Super Eight motel on the north edge of Baker’s Bluff, and by one o’clock Keller was checked in and as unpacked as he felt the need to be. He’d brought three phones, and they were lined up on the coffee table, looking virtually identical.

  Well, not entirely so. One was an iPhone, and it was the phone he carried all the time, except when he forgot and left it on the bedside table. He’d used it once since he left New Orleans, calling Julia as the train was approaching Chicago, telling her where he was and that all was well. Then he’d turned it off, and could only hope that would keep it from pinging off the nearest tower, telling the world where he was. It couldn’t ping if it was turned off, could it?

  Hell, how was he supposed to know what it could or couldn’t do? Maybe he should have left it home.

  He put it away for now and considered the other two phones, turning them over, studying them. It wasn’t really all that hard to tell them apart, not if you really looked at them. The Pablo phone was older by several years, and looked it, with scratches on the case.

  He turned it on and placed a call. It rang a couple of times, and then Dot picked up.

  “Well, I’m here,” he said. “Now what?”

  WHEN HE WAS done talking, he put on his jacket, straightened his tie. The fedora was on the bed, and wasn’t that supposed to be bad luck? Not a fedora specifically, but any hat on a bed? It seemed to him that he’d read something to that effect, and thought it might be a superstition in the world of the theater, like telling one’s friends to break a leg rather than wishing them good luck. And never saying the word Macbeth, but referring to it as The Scottish Play.

  There were explanations for these superstitions, and he could find out what they were and where they came from by calling up Google on his iPhone, but then it would be pinging off towers, so the hell with it.

  Still, he picked up the hat and looked for a place to put it. The closet shelf? No, that would put it out of sight and thus out of mind, and all too easily left behind.

  He’d worn it when he checked in, and it seemed to him that the desk clerk was more solicitous and respectful than usual. He’d put it down to Midwestern courtesy, but now he wondered if the hat might have had something to do with it.

  It was on his head when he left the room.

  FROM DOT HE’D learned that the client’s name was Todd Overmont. He commuted every day to his office in Chicago, where he did something with commodities. Something profitable, Keller decided, once the Hertz car’s GPS had led him to Overmont’s house, a massive affair on Robin’s Nest Drive that might have been inspired by Mount Vernon.

  Keller parked on the other side of the street, where he could keep an eye on the house and monitor activity coming or going. This was one of the things detectives did, he reminded himself. They called it being on a stakeout, and according to Jake Dagger, the hardest part was coping with boredom.

  After half an hour during which there’d been no activity to monitor, coming or going, he could see the truth in Jake Dagger’s observation. Another identical half hour confirmed it, but by then he’d come to realize that coping with boredom was the second hardest part of a stakeout.

  Needing to pee was worse.

  He found a gas station, topped up the Subaru’s tank, bought a wide-mouthed glass jar of a fruit-flavored iced tea, and visited the restroom. After he’d done what he’d come there to do, he uncapped the iced tea, poured it down the sink, and returned to the car carrying the empty jar, ready to cope with problems that apparently never troubled Jake “Iron Bladder” Dagger.

  He didn’t need the GPS to get him back to the Overmont house. He found it on his own, and as he made the turn onto Robin’s Nest Drive, he saw a car heading off to the west. That was nothing remarkable, cars did that sort of thing, although there’d been precious little traffic on Robin’s Nest Drive during the hour he’d spent staked out there. But out of the corner of his eye he caught the Overmont garage door descending the final couple of feet, and put two and two together.

  There was, he realized, a little more to this stakeout business than he’d thought.

  Up ahead, the car he’d seen was making a right turn. Keller clapped his fedora on his head and leaned on the gas pedal.

  ONCE HE’D CAUGHT up with her, following Melania Overmont turned out to be surprisingly easy. She was driving a big silver Lexus, not a hard car to distinguish from its fellows, and if she took her marriage vows as seriously as she took the Baker’s Bluff traffic regulations, then the client had nothing to worry about. She kept the Lexus well under the posted speed limit, came to a full stop at stop signs, and did all this without giving any indication that she’d noticed a white Subaru in her rearview mirror.

  Piece of cake, Keller thought.

  If it was Melania Overmont. He got close enough to determine that the driver was a woman with shoulder-length blonde hair, but Dot hadn’t provided a description, and for all he knew he might be following a cleaning woman, dispatched on an errand for her employer.

  That seemed a little more likely when the Lexus braked at the entrance to a strip mall, waited courteously for an oncoming car to pass, and then turned left into the mall, pulling into a space in front of Pioneer Super Food Mart. Keller waited for a break in traffic, then followed her in and eased the Subaru into a space three slots to the left of the Lexus.

  He killed the engine and waited for her to get out of the car. Instead she backed out of her spot.

  He’d been made, he thought. She’d pulled in just to see if he’d follow her, and when he did she’d identified him, and now she’d shake him the wa
y nobody shook Jake Dagger, and—

  Instead, she maneuvered the car to and fro, and tucked it into the parking space immediately next to his.

  Huh?

  Why on earth would she do that? Because she’d spotted him? No, that didn’t make any sense at all. She’d parked her car in a perfectly good space, and now she’d forsaken it for this space, the only distinguishing characteristic of which was that it was right next to Keller’s Subaru. What could she possibly—

  Oh.

  The first space, he saw, was reserved for handicapped parking. You could get a ticket if you parked there without the requisite sticker.

  If Keller had brought a newspaper along he’d pretend to read it, but he didn’t have anything, not even the Jake Dagger book. He sat very still and watched out of the corner of his eye as she got out of the Lexus. She never looked in his direction, and once she’d closed her door and headed for the market entrance he gave her his full attention.

  Well, she wasn’t a cleaning woman, unless she’d somehow reported to work in tight white jeans and a scoop-necked blue blouse, with rings on her fingers and, for all he knew, bells on her toes. She was a good-looking woman, no question, and you could see why Todd Overmont might think she was cheating on him, because there was something about her that suggested she’d be capable of it.

  Nothing he could define, really. Nothing he could put his finger on…

  He sat behind the wheel, took his hat off, put his hat back on again. Should he enter the market and confirm that she was there? It’s not as though he’ll be expected to file a report: 2:38 pm. Subject entered Pioneer Super Food Mart. 2:41 pm. Subject took two boxes of breakfast cereal from shelf, compared ingredients, put one box back and added other to cart. 2:45 pm. Subject opened egg carton to make sure all of its contents were unbroken…

  He stayed where he was, wondering why it was taking so long, and found out when she finally emerged, trailing a gawky teenager who was pushing a cart. He followed her to the car, and Keller watched as she opened the lid of the trunk and stood aside to let the boy stow bag after bag of groceries in it.

  Couldn’t be more innocent, he thought. Woman’s a housewife doing what housewives do.