Scratch that, he told himself. Because there she was in the bedroom, lying on her back with her mouth open, snoring away in a very unappealing fashion. And lying beside her and snoring twice as loud was the oaf she’d picked to be her boyfriend. He still looked familiar, and Keller figured out why. It was the moustache, identical in shape to that of Michael, his companion at breakfast.
Keller found his way to the kitchen, and came back with a knife.
“Oh, it was a lazy day,” he said. “I got to talking with a U.S. collector over breakfast, and wound up hanging out in the auction room to see how he did when his lots came up. I meant to call earlier so I could talk to Jenny before her bedtime, but I guess it’s too late now.”
His first call, when he got back to his hotel room, was on his other cell phone, the one he used only for calls to Dot. When there was no answer he put that phone away, got out the other one, and called Julia, and when he heard her voice he felt a great sense of relief.
After the phone call, after she’d told him about her day and he’d made up a day for himself, he tried to figure out what that sense of relief was all about. He hadn’t been aware of any anxiety until the sound of her voice dispelled it.
It took him a few minutes to sort it out, but what he decided was that he’d been afraid his whole new life was gone, that he’d somehow thrown it away in the Spanish-style house on Caruth Boulevard. Then he’d heard her voice and been reassured.
Now, though, he wasn’t sure how he felt.
He tried Dot again, watched a half-hour of television, tried Dot one more time, and tried to decide if he felt like getting something to eat. He hadn’t eaten since breakfast, so he ought to be hungry, but didn’t have much of an appetite. He checked the room-service menu and decided he could eat a sandwich, but when the waiter brought it he knew it was a mistake. There was coffee, and he drank that, but he left the sandwich untouched.
Years ago he’d learned how to clear his mind after a job. Very deliberately he let himself picture the master bedroom on Caruth Boulevard as he had last seen it: Portia Walmsley lay on her back, stabbed through the heart. Beside her was her unnamed lover, comatose with drink, his fingers clenched around the hilt of the murder weapon. It was the sort of image you’d want to blink away, especially if you’d had something to do with it, but Keller fixed it in his mind and brought it into focus, saw it in full color and sharp relief.
And then, as he’d learned to do, he willed the image to grow smaller and less distinct. He shrank it, as if viewing it through the wrong end of a telescope, and he washed out the bright colors, dimming the image to black and white, then fading it to gray. The details blurred, the faces became unrecognizable, and as the image disappeared, the incident itself lost its emotional charge. It had happened, there was no getting around it, but it was as if it had happened years and years ago, and to somebody else.
Keller, in line for the breakfast buffet, knew he was going to get his money’s worth. He’d put the room-service tray outside his door without taking the first bite of the sandwich, and went to bed uncertain if he’d be able to sleep on an empty stomach. The next thing he knew it was morning, and one of the first things that came to mind was an expression his mother had used now and then: My stomach thinks my throat’s been cut. Keller was shaving when the line came to him, which might have given him a turn, but he used a twin-bladed safety razor, hardly something you’d use to cut a throat, your own or anybody else’s.
He piled his plate high and looked around for an empty table, and there was his friend of yesterday morning, moustachioed Michael, wielding a fork with one hand and beckoning to Keller with the other. Keller, glad for the company, went over and joined him.
“Saw you yesterday morning,” Michael said. “If I remember correctly, you were in the room when that big block got away from me.”
“Quite a price it brought.”
“Way more than my maximum, so I wisely sat back and let it go. And guess what?”
“You’ve been kicking yourself ever since.”
“Around the block and back again. Oh, I know I was right to let it go, but when am I gonna get a shot at a piece like that again? Not until they auction off the collection of the sonofabitch who bought it, and by then it’ll probably go for three times what it brought yesterday. Nick, I’ve bought some things I shouldn’t have over the years, and I’ve paid too much for some of them, but that sort of thing never bothers me for more than a minute or two. It’s the ones that get away that drive you crazy.”
Obock J1, Keller thought.
He worked on his breakfast while Michael told him about the afternoon session, where he’d made up for the loss of the block by picking up all the covers he’d had his eye on, most of them at good prices. “But I wanted that block,” he told Keller, “and I still want it. How about yourself? What are you looking to buy today?”
Keller had a seat in the auction room and was studying his catalog when he realized he’d forgotten to call Dot. He hadn’t called Julia, either, to wish her a good morning. Should he duck out and make the calls? He thought about it, and then they started the sale and called the first lot, and he decided to stay where he was.
By the time they got to France and French Colonies, Keller had bid on ten lots and acquired six of them, letting the others go when the bidding climbed out of his range. As Michael had observed, a general collector always had plenty of things to buy, and Keller spent a few dollars and added a few stamps to his collection, issues from Albania and the Dominican Republic and Eastern Rumelia and Ecuador, none of them bringing more than a few hundred dollars. Then they got to the French section, where Keller’s collection was strongest and where the lots he needed were higher in price, and harder to find. He sat calmly in his chair, but he felt anticipation and excitement coursing through him like an electric current.
The Obock stamp was valued at $7,500 in Keller’s Scott catalog, while his Yvert & Tellier specialized catalog of France and its colonies listed the stamp at €12,000, or more than double the price in Scott.
Both Scott and Y&T mentioned the reprint, Scott pegging it at $200, Y&T at €350. Keller couldn’t remember what he’d paid, but thought it was around $150. Now he’d have the chance to bid on the original, and had a feeling it was going to bring a high price.
Back in New Orleans, before Dot’s phone call, Keller had already had his eye on the stamp. At the time he’d decided the stamp was worth ten thousand dollars to him, but wasn’t sure he could rationalize spending that much money. Now, with his business on Caruth Boulevard successfully concluded, the money was there to be spent. He picked up a couple of lots—an early stamp from Diego Suarez, an inverted overprint from Martinique—and when Obock J1 came up, he was ready.Moments later, the stamp was his.
There were other lots that he’d marked in his catalog, but he was no longer interested in bidding on them. He felt as though he’d just fought a prizefight, or run a marathon, and all he’d done was raise a forefinger and keep it raised until he was the only bidder left.
$16,500 was the hammer price, and he’d have to pay a fifteen percent bidder’s premium on top of that, plus whatever sales tax the state of Texas felt it deserved. Close to twenty thousand dollars for a homely little square of paper, but it was his to have and to hold, his to protect in a black-backed plastic mount, his to place in his album alongside the $200 reprint to which it looked essentially identical.
In the elevator he felt a twinge of buyer’s remorse, but by the time he was in his room it had dissipated, leaving him with a warm glow of accomplishment. He’d had to hang in there, had to keep his finger in the air while other bidders in the room gave up and dropped out, then had to hold on until the phone bidder finally gave up and let go. It was a rare stamp, and other people wanted it, but the whole point of an auction was to see who wanted something the most, and this time around it was Keller.
He called Julia from his room. “I got the stamp I wanted, and it’s a beauty. But I had to spend more
than I expected, so I’m going to skip the afternoon session and hit the road early. I’ll break the trip somewhere, and I should be home sometime tomorrow afternoon.”
She told him the latest cute thing Jenny had said, and a little gossip about the young couple who’d moved into the old Beaulieu house, and when the conversation ended he switched phones and called Dot, and this time she answered.“I tried you yesterday,” he said, “and then I was going to call first thing this morning but it slipped my mind, and I was all caught up in the drama of a stamp auction.”
“With all the pulse-pounding excitement thereof.”
“What I wanted to tell you,” he said, “is it’s all taken care of, and it couldn’t have gone better.”
“Is that so.”
“Double bonus,” he said.
“Oh?”
They were using a pair of untraceable phones, but even so he felt it best to be cryptic. “The primary is down,” he said, “and the secondary objective is fully implicated.”
“Do tell.”
He frowned. “Is something wrong?”
“From a dollars and cents standpoint,” she said, “I’d have to say there is. There’s not going to be a bonus, let alone a double bonus.”
“But—”
“As a matter of fact, we can forget about the second half of the basic fee. You know, the portion due upon completion of the assignment?”
“But the assignment was completed.”
“I’ll say.”
“Dot, what’s the matter?”
“You got up this morning, had a cup of coffee—right so far?”
“I had breakfast,” he said, mystified. “And then I went to the auction room.”
“Read the paper while you ate your breakfast?”
“No, I joined this fellow and we got to talking.”
“About stamps, I’ll bet. Good breakfast?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact, but—”
“And then you went to the auction room.”
“Right.”
“And bought some stamps, I suppose.”
“Well, yes. But—”
“The Dallas morning newspaper,” she said, “is called the Dallas Morning News, and don’t ask me how they came up with a name like that. You can’t beat Texans for imagination. Go buy the paper, Keller. You’ll find what you’re looking for right there on the front page.”
He picked up the lots he’d won, paid for them, and packed them along with his other belongings in his small suitcase. He checked out of the Lombardy and drove off with his suitcase next to him on the front seat. Traffic was light, and he didn’t have any trouble finding his way to the interstate. He headed for New Orleans, and found a country music station, but turned it off after half an hour.
He broke the trip at the same Red Roof Inn, used the same credit card. In his room he wondered if that was a good idea. But the trip was a matter of record, and one he had never attempted to conceal. Portions of it, of course, were off the record—the car rental, the visit to Caruth Boulevard—but he had no reason to hide the fact that he’d been to Dallas, and had the stamps to prove it.
He ate next-door at a Bob’s Big Boy, and it seemed to him that half the men in the room had moustaches. Like his philatelic friend Michael, and like the man whose fingers he’d curled around the hilt of Portia Walmsley’s kitchen knife.
They’d found him like that, Keller had learned on page one of the Dallas Morning News. Still in a drunken stupor, still holding the knife, and still sprawled out next to the dead body of a woman.
Reading the paper, Keller had learned why the sonofabitch looked familiar. Keller had seen him before, and not in the auction room, or around the Lombardy. He hadn’t seen the man himself, not really. He’d seen the guy’s picture—online, in some of the photos that popped up when he asked Google Images for a peek at Portia. And it was entirely natural that he be photographed at her side. After all, he was her husband.
Charles Walmsley. The client.
A reconciliation, Dot had explained. Charles Walmsley had gone over to his wife’s house, perhaps in the hope of one last look at her before he got to see her in her coffin. And evidently the old magic was still there, and, well, one thing led to another. And somewhere along the way, he remembered that he’d better call off the hit.
So he made a phone call and figured that was that. A single phone call had put the operation in motion, so wouldn’t a second phone call nip it in the bud?
Absolutely. But the person Walmsley called had to make a call of his own, and the person he called had to call Dot, and the new directive took its time working its way through the system. By the time Dot got the word, it was already too late.
Back home, Keller held his daughter high in the air. “Tummy!” she demanded, and he put his lips to her stomach and blew, making an indelicate sound. Jenny laughed with delight and insisted he do it again.
It was good to be home.
Later that evening, Keller went upstairs and settled in with his stamps. After he’d mounted the Obock J1, he called Julia in and showed it to her, and she admired it extravagantly.
“It’s like when somebody shows you their new baby,” Keller said. “You have to say it’s beautiful, because what else are you going to say?”
“All babies are beautiful.”
“And all stamps, I suppose. That’s the original on the right and the reprint next to it. They look the same, don’t they?”
“I bet their mother could tell the difference,” she said.
Two days later, Keller bought a new phone and called Dot. “Take down this number,” he said, and read it off to her. She read it back and asked what was wrong with the old number. “It’s no good anymore,” he said, “because I smashed the phone and threw the pieces down a storm drain.”
“I smashed a pay phone once,” she said, “when it flat-out refused to give me my quarter back. What did this phone do to piss you off?”
“I figured it would be safer to get a new phone.”
“And I figure you’re probably right. You okay, Keller? Last time we talked you were a little shaky.”
“I’m all right.”
“Because you didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Our client fell in love with his wife all over again,” he said, “and I killed her and framed him for it. If I’d known what was going on, you can bet I’d have handled it differently.”
“Keller, if you’d known, you wouldn’t have handled it at all. You’d have bought some stamps and come home.”
“Well, that’s true,” he allowed. “Obviously. But I still wish I hadn’t made the phone call.”
“To me?”
“To the cops, after I got out of there. I wanted to make sure they showed up before he could come to his senses and head for the hills.”
“They’d be hard to find,” she said, “in that part of the country. Look, don’t worry about it. You had no way of knowing he was the client, or that he’d canceled the contract. One way to look at it, he’s a lucky man.”
“Lucky?”
“You wanted the double bonus, right? That’s why you left him with the knife in his hand.”
“So?”
“So otherwise you’d have killed them both. This way at least he’s alive.”
“What a lucky guy.”
“Well, yes and no. See, he’s consumed with guilt.”
“Because he didn’t call it off soon enough?”
“Because he got drunk and killed his wife. He doesn’t actually remember doing it, but then he can’t remember much of anything after the third drink, and what’s a man supposed to think when he comes out of a blackout with a knife in his hand and a dead woman next to him? He figures he must have done it, and he’ll plead guilty, and that’s the end of it. ”
“And now he’s got to live with the guilt.”
“Keller,” she said, “everybody’s got to live with something.”
Copyright © 2009 by Lawrence Block; serialized in American
Stamp Dealer and Collector.
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Fiction
DEAR MURDERER
by Susan Breen
Susan Breen’s debut novel, The Fiction Class, published by Plume/ Penguin in 2008, was praised by Booklist as a “poignant yet amusing tale of family relationships.” A writing instructor who lives in upstate New York, the author has also had short stories published in a number of literary magazines. One of her stories made the 2009 volume of The Best American Nonrequired Reading (Houghton-Mifflin). This is her first mystery story, and, we hope, not her last.
We called my brother Sunny because when he smiled the sun came out. Big grin, curly blond hair, every girl’s dream. But he was kind, too. His kindness was what made him special. One day, toward the end of tenth grade, Jared Reiss was having trouble with his gym lock and my brother helped him twist it open. At the time, of course, there was no hint that Jared Reiss would torture and murder fifteen women. At the time, all you could say of him was that he was a strange kid, picked on by bullies, an average student, and no one spoke to him. Except for my brother.
“What they did to him wasn’t right,” my brother said the night Reiss was finally sentenced. Or maybe it was the night he was charged. We were still young then, each of us newly married, my brother trying to make a go of it in business, me pregnant with my first child. We were having dinner at my brother’s house and my sister-in-law, Wendy, was serving chicken stuffed with spinach and cheddar cheese. Wendy loved strange combinations. She couldn’t serve meat without adding something to it: chicken stuffed with cheese, hamburger stuffed with mushrooms, steak stuffed with spinach. Everything with Wendy needed to be supplemented.
“That’s ridiculous,” Wendy said. “Reiss would have been a monster whether he’d been bullied or not.”
My sister-in-law was always looking for a fight. Even when she and my brother were first married. No matter what he said, she said otherwise, though he never got mad about it. Liked her fire, he’d say. I didn’t. I tried, because I loved my brother so much, but Wendy wore me down. She was beautiful, but in the way an ice sculpture is: cold, hard, and finely drawn.
Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine 02/01/11 Page 4
