“God sent her?”
“You remember how Abraham was about to sacrifice Isaac? And God sent a ram for him to sacrifice instead?”
“That story never made much sense to me,” he said.
“Well, it’s the Bible, Keller. What the hell do you want from it? All I know is I was scrambling, trying to decide where to pour gasoline, and the doorbell rang. And I went there, and there she was.”
“Selling magazine subscriptions? Taking a survey?”
“She was a Jehovah’s Witness,” she said. “You know what you get when you cross a Jehovah’s Witness with an agnostic?”
“What?”
“Someone who rings your doorbell for no apparent reason. You can figure out the rest, can’t you? I invited her in and sat her down, and then I got the gun from the silverware drawer and shot her a couple of times, and she got to be the corpse they found in the kitchen. I poured enough gas on her hands so I wouldn’t have to worry about fingerprints. Mine aren’t on file anywhere, but how did I know hers weren’t? People who turn up on your doorstep, you never know where they’ve been. Why are you frowning?”
“I read something about a positive identification based on dental records.”
“Right.”
“Well, how did you manage that?”
“That’s why I have to figure God sent her, Keller. The little darling had false teeth.”
“She had false teeth.”
“Cheap ones, too. You could just about spot ’em before she opened her mouth. First thing I did, I yanked ’em out and popped mine in.”
“Yours?”
“What’s so remarkable about that?”
“I didn’t know your teeth were false.”
“You weren’t supposed to know,” she said. “That’s why I paid ten or twenty times as much for them as Jehovah’s little godchild paid for hers, so they’d look like the original equipment. I lost all my teeth before I was thirty, Keller, and I’ll save that story for another day, if it’s all the same to you. I switched the teeth and set the fire and got the hell out.”
“I always thought—”
“That my teeth were real? See these?” She drew back her lips. “I have to say I like them even better than the ones I left in White Plains. They don’t look perfect, that’s the giveaway with so many of them, and yet they look really nice. Don’t ask what they cost.”
“I won’t,” he said, “and that’s not what I was going to say. What I always thought was that Jehovah’s Witnesses always came around in pairs.”
“Oh, right. Him.”
“Him?”
“I shot him first,” she said, “because he was bigger, and looked more like trouble, although I can’t say either one of them struck me as a dangerous customer. I shot him, and then I shot her, and I put him in the trunk of my car and dumped him where nobody would find him for a while, and then I came back and switched the teeth and set the fire, di dah di dah di dah.”
She left her car in the garage, so no one would go looking for it, and she took no more than would fit into a small overnight bag. She took a bus to the train station and a train to Albany and holed up there for six weeks in an apartment hotel catering mostly to people with political business in the state capital.
“State senators and assemblymen and the lobbyists who throw money at them,” she said. “I had plenty of cash, and credit cards in my new name, and I bought a car and picked up a laptop and did a little research. I decided Sedona looked good.”
“Sedona, Arizona.”
“I know, it rhymes, just like New York, New York. And there the resemblance ends. It’s small and upscale, and the climate’s ideal and the setting’s beautiful, and the town doubles its population every twenty minutes, so a person could drop in out of the blue without drawing attention, and after six months you’d be an old-timer. I figured I’d drive there and see some of the country on the way, and then I thought it through and decided the hell with seeing the country, so I sold the car and flew out to Phoenix and bought a new car and drove to Sedona. I picked out a two-bedroom penthouse condo for myself, and from one window I can see the golf course and from another I’ve got a great view of Bell Rock, and you probably don’t even know what that is.”
“A rock that chimes on the hour?”
“The hair’s different,” she said, “but it’s still the same old Keller underneath it, isn’t it? As soon as I was settled in, I tried to work out a way of getting in touch with you, assuming I could do that without holding a séance. I knew from the news coverage that you made it out of Des Moines, and the law never caught up with you, but if Al got to you first there wouldn’t have been anything in the papers. And if you were alive, there was only one way I could think of to reach you without attracting anybody else’s attention, so that’s what I did.”
“You placed an ad in Linn’s.”
“I ran that damn advertisement every place I could find. Who would have guessed there were so many papers and magazines for stamp collectors? Besides Linn’s there’s Global Stamp News, and Scott’s Monthly Journal, and the magazine the national stamp society sends its members—”
“The American Philatelic Society. It’s a pretty good magazine.”
“Well, that’s a load off my mind. Good or bad, my ad’s been in it, every goddamn month. Plus some others I can’t think of. McBeal’s?”
“Mekeel’s.”
“There you go. I’ve got run-until-canceled status with all of them, and every month all the charges show up on my Visa statement. And I was beginning to wonder how long I should go on running the ad, because I was starting to feel like that football team owner who always leaves a ticket at the front gate for Elvis, just in case he shows up. And he at least gets some free publicity out of it.”
“It must have cost you quite a bit.”
“Not really. Small ads at low rates, and they get even lower on a long-term basis. The real cost was emotional wear and tear, because every time I got my credit card statement that was one more month without word from you, and it was that much more likely that I’d never hear from you again. You at least had closure, Keller. You knew for sure that I was dead, but I had to sit around wondering.”
“I wonder which was worse.”
“You could probably make a good case either way,” she said, “but either way we’re both alive, so the hell with it. You saw the ad and called the number—”
“After I finally figured out that it was a number.”
“Well, if I made it too obvious the phone would have been ringing off the hook. And I knew you’d work it out once you put your mind to it. But what I still can’t understand is why it took you so long. Not to work it out but to pay attention to it in the first place. How many times do you suppose you saw that ad before it rang any kind of a bell?”
“Just once.”
“Just once? How is that possible, Keller? I don’t suppose you could have had the post office forward your mail, but that ad ran in all the places I mentioned and one or two I forgot. How hard is it to find a copy of Linn’s? Or send in and get a new subscription?”
“Not hard at all,” he said, “but why would I bother? What would be the point? Dot, I saw the ad because Julia picked up a copy of Linn’s and brought it home with her. She wasn’t sure she should give it to me, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to look at it.”
“But you did.”
“Obviously.”
“What’s not obvious,” she said, “is why you weren’t sure you wanted to, and why you didn’t have a subscription anymore. I’m missing something, Keller. Help me out.”
“I don’t have a subscription,” he said, “because it’s for stamp collectors, and it’s hard to be a stamp collector when you don’t have a collection.”
She stared at him. “You don’t know,” she said.
“I don’t know what?”
“Of course you don’t. How could you? You sort of glossed over that part, going to your apartment, or maybe I wasn’t paying attenti
on, but—”
“I may not have mentioned it. It’s one part I don’t like to think about. I went to my apartment—”
“And the stamps were gone.”
“Gone, all ten albums. I don’t know who took them, the cops or Al’s guys, but whoever it was—”
“Neither of them.”
He looked at her.
“Oh, God,” she said. “I should have told you right away. Somehow it never entered my mind that you didn’t know, but how could you? Keller, it was me. I took your stamps.”
The first thing she’d done in Albany, after she’d found a place to stay, was buy a car. And the first thing she did with the car was drive it to New York City.
“To get your stamps,” she said. “Remember that time you got a case of the whim-whams and gave me elaborate instructions of what to do if you wound up dead? How I should go straight to your apartment and take your stamps home with me, and what dealers I should call and how to negotiate the best price for your collection?”
He remembered.
“Well, I wasn’t going to sell them, not so long as there was a chance on earth you were alive. But as far as getting them out of your apartment, I took care of that as soon as I possibly could, because I didn’t know how much of a window I had before the police came calling. I showed your doorman the letter I had authorizing me to act on your behalf and giving me full access to your apartment and its contents, and—”
“You know, I have absolutely no recollection of writing that letter.”
“Well, don’t go getting tested for Alzheimer’s just yet, Keller. I wrote it out myself on a computer at Kinko’s. I designed a nice letterhead for you, if I say so myself, and I didn’t sweat the signature, because how familiar would your doorman be with your handwriting? He didn’t have to let me in because I had the key you gave me.”
“How’d you manage to get them all out of there? Those books are heavy.”
“No kidding they’re heavy. I found a bag in the closet that held six of them” — his wheeled duffel, he thought — “and I got the doorman to give me a hand, and he brought a luggage cart they keep in the basement, and between us we got everything into the trunk of my car. Oh, and I took your computer, too, but you’re not getting that back. Unless you want to look for it at the bottom of the Hudson.”
“Between the two of us,” he said, “we’re hard on rivers.” He picked up his iced tea and took a long drink of it. “This is all tough for me to take in,” he admitted. “Let me make sure I’ve got it straight. The stamps—”
“Are in a climate-controlled storage locker in Albany, New York. Well, actually, it’s in Latham, but you probably don’t know where that is.”
“Albany’s close enough. And everything’s there? My whole stamp collection is intact, and I can go there and pick it up?”
“Anytime you want to. I probably should go with you, to make sure they don’t give you a hard time. We could fly to Albany tomorrow, if that’s what you decide you want to do.”
“I get the feeling,” he said, “that it wouldn’t be your first choice.”
“Well, I’d like to spend a few days and see New Orleans. But after that it’s your call. You’ll have your stamps back, and you’ll have two and a half million dollars just in case the construction business goes sour. You can just sit back and enjoy yourself.”
“Or?”
“Lord, did I finish that last glass of tea? I’m going to have some from your pitcher, if you don’t mind.”
“Go right ahead.”
“I’ll regret it, when I have to get up once an hour to pee, but if that’s my greatest regret I’d say I’m in good shape. Keller, I think we’re both pretty safe at this point. The cops seem to think you’re dead or in Brazil or both, which is about what I thought until my phone rang the other day. And I don’t know what our friend Al thinks, but at this point he probably has other matters that get the greater part of his attention. He knows I’m dead, and if you’re still on his list you’re way down toward the bottom of it. So there’s nothing we absolutely have to do.”
“But?”
She sighed. “Oh,” she said, “I’m sure it’s the sign of a defect of character, and there’s probably a seminar I could take to address the issue, and if there is you can bet someone’s offering it in Sedona. But what do you figure are the odds I’ll ever take that seminar?”
“Slim.”
“There you go. Keller, I can’t help it. I really would like to get even with that son of a bitch.”
“It was driving me crazy,” he said, “that he was alive and you weren’t.”
“Same with me, that he was alive and you weren’t. Now it turns out we’re both alive, and we’re both millionaires, and we should probably let it go at that, but—”
“You want to go after him.”
“You bet I do. And you?”
He drew a breath. “I think I’d better go talk to Julia,” he said.
33
“I’d like to meet her,” Julia said, and insisted Keller ask Dot to join them for dinner. They tried to decide on a restaurant, and Julia said, “No, you know what let’s do? Bring her over here, and I’ll cook.”
When he picked Dot up she wore a different suit, with a skirt instead of pants, and her hair was different. “I had to cancel my little Vietnamese girl in Sedona,” she said, “so I asked the concierge, and wound up with a local product who couldn’t stop talking. But I like what she did with my hair.”
Keller brought her into the house and introduced her to Julia, and stepped aside and waited for something to go wrong. By the time they sat down to dinner, after Dot had had the grand tour of the house and said all the appropriate things, he realized nothing terrible was going to happen. Both women were too well brought up.
Julia served pie for dessert, pecan this time, from the little bakery on Magazine Street, and they all had coffee, which Dot chose over iced tea. Throughout the evening Julia had referred to him as Nicholas, and Dot hadn’t called him anything at all, but as he was pouring her a second cup of coffee she called him Keller.
“I mean Nicholas,” she said, and looked across at Julia. “It’s a good thing I live a thousand miles from here, so you don’t have to sit around on pins and needles waiting for me to drop a brick in front of company. Have you ever done that, Julia? Called him Keller?”
When he was driving her back to the Intercontinental, she said, “That’s a real lady you found yourself, Keller. I’m sorry, I’ll be a long time getting used to any other name for you. You’ve been just plain Keller to me for a long time now.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“But why did she blush when I asked if she ever called you Keller? Jesus, Keller, now you’re the one blushing.”
“The hell I am,” he said. “Just forget it, okay?”
“Okay,” she said. “Mea fucking culpa, and consider it forgotten.”
“Do I ever forget and call you Keller? I turned red as a beet.”
“I don’t think she noticed.”
“Oh? I doubt there’s a great deal that goes unnoticed around your friend Dot. I like her. Though she’s not quite what I expected.”
“What did you expect?”
“Someone older. And, well, on the dowdy side.”
“She used to be older.”
“How’s that?”
“Well, she seemed older, and dowdy too, I guess. She never wore makeup, and she sat around in housedresses. I think that’s what you call them.”
“Watching TV and drinking iced tea.”
“Both of which she still does,” he said, “but I guess she gets out more, and she’s lost a lot of weight, and she buys nice clothes now, and gets her hair done. It’s dyed.”
“I’m shocked, darling. She’s very flippant and sarcastic, but underneath it all she’s very much the lady. When I was showing off the house, she kept pointing out things like the window seat that reminded her of her house in White Plains. She must have loved that hou
se, and yet she was tough-minded and decisive enough to burn the place down.”
“She didn’t have much choice.”
“I realize that, but it still couldn’t have made it easy. I wonder if I could do that.”
“If you had to.”
“When all is said and done, it’s just a house. And you could always build me a new one, couldn’t you? With an open-plan kitchen and ceramic tile in the bath.”
“And central air.”
“My hero. Didn’t you say they found a body in the wreckage?”
He was ready for this. “She left her false teeth behind,” he said. “Which they could identify from dental records. I never even knew her teeth weren’t her own, so the possibility never occurred to me.”
“Oh, that explains it. Nicholas?” She put a hand on his arm. “I was afraid I’d be jealous, even if it was never that kind of relationship in the past. But her whole vibe with you is somewhere between big sister and Auntie Mame. You know what the elephant was?”
“The elephant in the living room?”
“That we walked around and didn’t mention. What you’re going to do now.”
“I don’t really have to do anything.”
“I know. You’ve got your stamps, or at least you’re going to have them, and you’re going to have a lot of money, too. And we can just go on living this life, which is exactly the life I want to be living—”
“Me, too.”
“ — and not worry about money, and just be comfortable and happy.”
“And?”
“And never really feel comfortable eating in the French Quarter. If you went after them, would you know where to look?”
“Not really.”
“Des Moines?”
“I don’t know if any of them live in Des Moines. It’s a sure bet Al doesn’t. I’ve got a Des Moines phone number, the one I called every day to find out if it was time to take out that poor mope who never did anything besides water his lawn. I wonder if he has any idea how close he came to getting his ticket punched.”
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