Date: 2017-07-01 04:00:00+00:00
Publisher: LB Productions

Quotidian Keller

Lawrence Block

Copyright © 2007, Lawrence Block

All Rights Reserved

Ebook by QA Productions

A Lawrence Block Production

Quotidian Keller

“Will you look at that?” Dot said.

Keller looked, but all he could see was a chart of the price of some stock and, across the bottom of the screen, a crawl of stock symbols and numbers. The sound was off, as usual. Dot seemed to prefer TV with the sound off. Keller figured that worked okay with Animal Planet or the National Geographic channel, but it seemed less effective with CNBC. What good was a talking head if you couldn’t tell what it was talking about?

“We’re doing okay,” she said.

“We are?”

“I seem to have a knack for this,” she said, “or else I’ve been lucky, which is probably just as good. Don’t you think?”

“I suppose so. I didn’t know you were in the stock market.”

“I’m not,” she said. “I’m right here in my kitchen, sipping iced tea and talking to my partner.”

“We’re partners?”

She nodded. “Remember Indianapolis?”

“Basketball,” he said.

“Basketball and stock manipulation. We made out very nicely, and it was you who came up with the idea. We did some buying and selling, and no special prosecutor turned up to charge us with insider trading.”

“And you’re still in the market?”

“We both are, Keller. I never gave you your share.”

“You didn’t?”

She rolled her eyes. “And after the dust settled on that deal,” she said, “well, I looked around and found some other things to buy. It’s real easy, you just get on-line and click your mouse and there you are. You never have to have a conversation with a human being who might ask you what the hell you think you’re doing. We’ve been making money.”

“That’s great, Dot.”

“You want your half? Or should I keep doing what I’ve been doing?”

“If you’re making money for us,” he said, “I’d be crazy to tell you to stop.”

“That’s assuming we’ll continue to do well. I could lose it all, too.”

“What have we got at this point?”

She named a number, and it was higher than he would have guessed, considerably higher.

“That’s what our account’s worth,” she said, “so half of that is yours. I’m inclined to keep playing, because I’d have to put the money somewhere, and it might as well be where it’s making more money. But if you have a use for it, or want to add it to your retirement fund—”

“No,” he said. “You hang onto it, and keep on doing what you’ve been doing. I didn’t even know I had it, and if I drew the money I know what would happen to it.”

“Stamps.”

“Stamps,” he agreed. “It’s a good thing you didn’t give me my share of the original stock profits, because it’d probably be gone by now. Well, not gone, but—”

“But pasted in an album.”

“Mounted.”

“I stand corrected. Look at that, will you?”

He glanced at the screen, with no idea what he was supposed to be looking at. “Fascinating,” he said.

“Isn’t it? Who would have guessed?”

The stock crawl went on during the commercials, until they finally cut to some sort of mega-commercial that filled the screen. He seized the opportunity to ask her if that was why she’d asked him to come out to White Plains.

“No,” she said, “it’s something else. I got so caught up in this that I almost forgot. It’s wonderful to develop an interest late in life, you know?”

“I know.”

“You with your stamps, me with my stocks. Our stocks. Keller, when I say Detroit, what comes to mind?”

“Cars.”

“That’s right, they still make a few cars there, don’t they? What else?”

“Detroit,” he said, and thought about it. “Well, the Tigers, of course. The Lions, the Pistons. There’s a hockey team, too, but I can’t remember the name of it.”

“Could it be the Horvaths?”

“The Horvaths?”

“As in Alan Horvath.”

“Alan Horvath.”

“That ring a muted bell for you, Keller?”

“Quotidian,” Keller said.

“Huh?”

“Putative.”

She held up her hands. “I give up,” she said. “Are you just throwing words at me or did you pick up some charms from Harry Potter?”

“They were words he used,” he told her. “Alan Horvath, in Detroit. ‘I read books,’ he said. He had a stamp collection when he was a kid. At least he said he did.”

“It’d be a strange thing to lie about. He liked you, Keller.”

“He liked me?”

“Not enough to ask you to the prom, but enough to call me on the phone and tell me who he was and what he wanted. And what he wants is you.”

“I thought he was going to kill me,” he remembered. “He had me picked up at the airport, and I thought he was going to have me killed, but all he did was use some big words and send me back.”

“And you haven’t been back to Detroit since.”

He started to nod, then remembered. “Just once,” he said, and thought of a shopping mall in Farmington Hills. “That fellow I met on the plane.”

“You didn’t run into Alan Horvath on that trip, did you? Because he remembers you fondly. He wants you to do some work for him.”

“I can use the work.”

“Just what I was thinking, although I didn’t come right out and say as much to Horvath. I told him I’d have to make sure the time worked for you. Because this is one of those where time is of the essence. You don’t get to spend a whole season following a baseball player around the country. It all has to be done next weekend.”

“By next weekend? That’s not much time.”

“Not by next weekend. During next weekend. Today’s what, Tuesday?”

“Wednesday.”

“Really? So it is. I wonder what happened to Tuesday. Then again, I wonder what happened to the last five years.” She glanced at the screen, frowned, then triggered the remote. “I don’t want to get distracted,” she said, “and the damn thing’s distracting, sound or no sound. Today’s Tuesday, and the window of opportunity here is Friday through Sunday. Not this Friday through Sunday but next Friday through Sunday. What’s the matter?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“Well, nothing I can’t change. I had a trip planned, I even had my plane tickets bought.”

“Maybe you can get a refund.”

“Or maybe I can just change the flight to Detroit, if the airline goes there.”

She shook her head. “Forget Detroit,” she said. “After we got off the phone, your friend Horvath sent us something, and it wasn’t his boyhood stamp collection.”

“Money?”

“Uh-huh. Plus a photograph. It’s from a newspaper, but he cut it out so neatly there’s no caption.” She passed it to Keller. “Guy looks like he’s getting ready to accept an award.”

The man in the photo had a broad forehead, a strong jaw line, and a full head of iron-gray hair. And his facial expression—well, Keller could see what Dot meant. “He probably is,” he agreed.

“Oh? Anyway, his name is—”

“Sheridan Bingham,” Keller said. “People call him Sherry.”

Dot stared at him.

“He lives in Bloomfield Village,” he told her. “That’s a suburb of Detroit.”

“He called you himself, did he?”

“Bingham?”

“No, Horvath. He called me and worked it out, and then he called you directly. He didn’t? Then how in the hell . . . no, don’t tell me. It’ll come to me in a minute. He never said one word to me about Bloomfield Village, or even about Bingham being in the Detroit area. He just said where Bingham would be next weekend.”

“San Francisco.”

“So you talked to him after all. You just said you didn’t.”

“I didn’t.”

“But—”

“It took me a minute to recognize his name, remember?”

She nodded. “And then you said those words. Quo something.”

“Quotidian. It means everyday, ordinary.”

“Then why not just say that? Never mind. What was the other word?”

“Putative.”

“What’s that mean?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “I looked it up, but I forget what it means.”

“So the hell with it,” she said. “Okay, I give up. How do you know about San Francisco? How’d you know the guy’s name, and where he lives?”

“I recognized the picture,” he said. “Bingham’s a stamp collector.”

Keller changed his mind several times over the next week, but in the end he flew to San Francisco as originally scheduled, on a non-stop American Airlines flight that got him there early Thursday afternoon. He flew under his own name, used his own driver’s license as ID, and charged the ticket to his own credit card.

All this resulted from the fact that the weekend had started out as a pleasure trip. If it had been a business trip from the outset, he’d probably be in the front of the plane, but he’d decided to economize so he’d have more money to spend on stamps. The plane was half empty, and American gave you adequate legroom in coach, so he was comfortable enough. But he felt oddly exposed, and somehow conspicuous. He was wearing a suit and tie, he looked for all the world like any other business traveler, but he felt as though the nature of his real business was somehow evident, and that anyone who glanced in his direction would know all about him.

They used to feed you a full meal on a transcontinental flight, even though it was never very good, but this time all he got was a cup of weak coffee and a bag of pretzels. No peanuts, the flight attendant told him, because some people were allergic. He must have made a face, because the fellow nodded in sympathy. “I know,” he said. “Some people are allergic to coffee, too, and probably to pretzels, but the peanut people have a good lobby. But don’t get me started.”

Keller ate the pretzels and drank the coffee, and when the plane landed he got a cab to his hotel. He was staying at the Cumberford, where the stamp show was being held, and his room was on a high floor with a good view. He’d checked a bag, because he’d brought his Scott catalog and a few other reference books, along with a couple of changes of clothing, and he had a pair of tongs and a magnifier, and you never knew what some security person might decide was a deadly weapon. According to a sign he’d seen at the airport, you couldn’t go through security with a cigarette lighter or a book of matches, nor could you transport either in your checked luggage. Keller, who had never smoked, wondered what a smoker could do these days. You couldn’t smoke on the plane, or anywhere in the airport, and now you couldn’t even light up after you got off, unless you managed to find somebody with a match.

He unpacked, took a shower, stretched out on the bed. And studied the newspaper photo of Sheridan Bingham.

“I’ll call Horvath,” Dot had said. “I’ll tell him it’s a scheduling problem, that we have to turn it down. I hate to give back money, especially once I’ve actually got it in my hand, but I don’t see what choice we’ve got.”

“I’ll go to San Francisco,” he said, “and do the job.”

“I thought you just said you knew the guy.”

“I know who he is.”

“You’re not friends?”

“I don’t think we’ve ever spoken,” he said, “and if we did it would have been about the weather. I know I’ve been in the same room with him a couple of times. But I’ve seen his photo more than I’ve seen him in person.”

“On America’s Most Wanted ?”

“In Linn’s Stamp News. He’s an exhibitor, he enters frames from his collection in stamp shows and wins prizes, or tries to. His specialty is German States.”

“You mean like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania?”

“Like Hanover and Lubeck,” he said. “And the Mecklenburgs.”

“The Mecklenburgs? Would that be Ralph and Sheila Mecklenburg?”

“Mecklenburg-Schwerin,” he said, “and Mecklenburg-Strelitz. There were all these different states and provinces during the nineteenth century, before they united to form modern Germany.”

“And they all had stamps.”

“Well, a lot of them did. Thurn & Taxis, that was one of the first postal systems.”

“There’s nothing certain except Thurn and Taxis. Isn’t that what they say?”

“I never thought of that,” he said, “and now I’ll never be able to get it out of my head. Anyway, that’s his specialty, German States. Plus Germany, and the German Colonies, but—”

“Germany has colonies?”

“Nobody has colonies,” he said. “Not anymore. Germany had colonies up until the end of the First World War. There was German East Africa, which the British wound up with, and German Southwest Africa, which is Namibia now, and Togo and Cameroon, which the French took, and . . .”

He told her more than she may have needed to know about Germany’s long-lost empire, and when he stopped she looked at him and shook her head. “It’s really educational,” she said. “Stamp collecting.”

“Well, that’s not the point, but you do wind up picking up a lot of stuff. Useless information, I guess.”

“All information’s useless,” she said. “You collect German States yourself?”

“It’s not a major interest of mine.”

“So the two of you haven’t bumped heads when some particularly desirable stamp comes up.”

“No.”

“And you haven’t sat up together drinking Mai Tais and telling old stamp stories.”

“I’d be surprised if I’m even a familiar face to him.”

“And the fact that you’re both stamp collectors wouldn’t keep you from punching his ticket?”

“Do you think it should?”

“Well, I don’t know, Keller. Horvath used to be a stamp collector, and it’s not stopping him from putting out the contract. It all comes down to how you feel about it.”

He thought it over. “It’s not as though he was a friend,” he said, “or even an acquaintance. It’s something in common, but so’s wearing the same brand of sneakers. You know how you’ll be riding the subway, and you’re wearing New Balance sneakers, and the guy across from you is wearing New Balance too, and you feel a sort of kinship?”

“I never ride the subway,” she pointed out, “because it doesn’t reach all the way to White Plains. And I never wear sneakers. But I guess I know what you mean.”

“Well,” he said, “just because some guy happens to be wearing the same brand of sneakers, I don’t see why that should give him a free pass.”

Keller had attended stamp shows at the Javits Center that had it all over this one in terms of size. The dealers’ bourse fit neatly into the main ballroom at the Cumberford, and the exhibits were housed in a smaller room on the mezzanine. It was quality that had drawn him here, the quality of the material in the exhibits, the quality of the dealers in the bourse room, and especially the quality of the lots offered at the three-day auction, which was run by the white-shoe firm of Halliday & Okun.

Of course you didn’t have to show up at an auction in order to bid. You could bid by mail, and the auction house would bid on your behalf, going no higher than your maximum figure for each lot. Or you could bid over the phone, saying yea or nay in real time and having the option of getting carried away and spending more than you’d intended, just as if you were there in person.

But it was more exciting to be there, no question. And, sitting on your folding chair, waiting for your lot to come up, you were able to find out just how much you really wanted a particular stamp. Sometimes you wound up sitting there, never even raising your numbered bidder’s paddle, letting the lot go to somebody else for far less than you’d been willing to pay for it. Other times you sailed recklessly past your maximum bid, discovering that you wanted the material more than you’d anticipated.

Another advantage to being there was you got to see the auction lots up close and personal. The auction catalog featured photos of the more important items, but you couldn’t pick up a photo with your stamp tongs and determine just how much you liked the looks of it. Keller, taking advantage of his early arrival, went to the auction room as soon as he’d unpacked, signed in and got his bidder’s number—304—and sat down with his catalog. He went through it and called for the lots he was sufficiently interested in to examine, and one of the Halliday & Okun minions brought them to him for his inspection.

Stamp collecting, except for a few moments now and then in a heated auction, was not an exciting hobby. It didn’t provide much in the way of edge-of-the-chair suspense, and that was fine with Keller. That really wasn’t what he wanted from it. He got enough of that in his work, or in what Alan Horvath might categorize as his quotidian life.

What it did offer, and what Keller appreciated, was total absorption. Seated at his table with his albums and a selection of approvals, or sprawled on his couch with the latest issue of Linn’s, Keller’s attention was entirely occupied by something which was, all things considered, essentially trivial. Trimming a mount with his guillotine-style mount cutter, dipping a British Colonial issue in watermark detection fluid, checking another with his perforation gauge, Keller was completely caught up in the moment. Hours could fly by, with Keller quite unaware of their passage.

Over the past month, he’d spent quite a few hours with the Halliday & Okun catalog, putting a little checkmark next to those lots in which he had any interest. There were half a dozen items that interested him enough to bring him to San Francisco, high-ticket stamps, five of them from various French Colonies, one an early stamp from Great Britain. He could afford to buy two or three of the six, depending on how the bidding went, and by careful examination he managed to reduce his list from six to four. (He didn’t care for the color of the stamp from Gabon, which seemed to him to have faded as a result of exposure to sunlight, and the British issue, nicely centered and with a wing margin, had a couple of raggedy perforations. He was partial to wing margins, but he decided the perfs bothered him.)

Besides those six stamps, though, there were thirty or forty other lots, ranging in estimated value from ten to two hundred dollars. They would fill spaces in his collection, and he might or might not bid on them, depending on how they looked on close inspection and how the bidding proceeded. So he had all of those lots to look at as well, and notes to make in his catalog, and he gave himself up completely to the task at hand.

He was not the only prospective bidder in the room. There were eight chairs positioned at the bank of tables, and his was never the only one occupied. Others came and went, with Keller never more than marginally aware of their coming and going. The conversation in the room was subdued, and largely limited to men (and at least one woman) calling the lots they wanted to examine. But occasionally some small talk crept into the conversation, most of it dealing with sports or the weather, or an inquiry about a mutual acquaintance. One man talked about airport security and what a nuisance it was, and Keller expressed his agreement without looking up or having any idea whose opinion he was seconding. Or caring, because his concentration remained centered upon the stamp he was holding to the light, to determine if the paper had thinned where a previous collector’s hinge had been removed. It hadn’t, and he made a note in his catalog.

“Thurn and Taxis,” someone said. There’d been words preceding those, but Keller hadn’t noted them. His mind registered the phrase, Thurn and Taxis, and Dot’s wordplay popped into his head, and out of his mouth.

“The only certainties,” he said.

He spoke almost without realizing he’d done so, but the words echoed in the room, and an attention-getting silence followed them.

“Say again?”

“Oh,” Keller said. “Well, you know what they say. Nothing’s inevitable in this life besides Thurn & Taxis.”

“Well, I’m damned,” a man said. He had a shock of iron-gray hair, and wore a well-tailored suit. A wafer-thin watch contrasted with a surprisingly gaudy ring. “All the years I’ve been collecting the damned stamps, and there’s a connection I never made. Do I know you? You’re not a German States guy, are you?”

Keller shook his head. “Worldwide before 1940,” he said. “Well, through ’45, actually. British Empire through ’52.”

“To include all of George the Fifth.”

“Right.”

“Never had the urge to specialize?”

“Not really. Although there are some areas I’m more interested in than others.”

“Like?”

“Well, French Colonies.”

“Pretty interesting,” the fellow acknowledged. “And you don’t go crazy with watermarks and perf varieties. Of course you’ve got to watch out for counterfeit overprints.”

“I know.”

“Tons of counterfeits in the German States issues. And then there are all the stamps that are worth more used than mint, so you’ve got fake cancellations to worry about. It’s almost as bad as early Italy, where something like ninety-five percent of the used stamps have fake cancels.”

“I’d rather have mint anyway,” Keller said.

“If you can find them, what with all the counterfeiters buying up the mint stamps and hitting ’em with fake cancellations. But, see, I want mint and used. And cancellation varieties. And multiples, mint and used, and covers. That’s what happens when you specialize. You want everything, and there’s just no end to it.”

Keller just nodded. He should never have piped up in the first place, he thought, and now if he just let the conversation die maybe he could get out of this.

No such luck.

“Say, can I buy you a drink? Seems like the least I can do, since you were kind enough to point out the inevitability of Thurn & Taxis.”

And that wasn’t all that was inevitable, Keller thought, and raised his eyes to meet those of the man in the newspaper photograph.

At least the hotel bar was dimly lit, and the table he shared with Bingham was off to the side. Even so, it was a terrible idea for the two of them to be sitting together. Anything that connected them would give the authorities a reason to talk to Keller after Bingham’s death, and the last thing Keller wanted was to draw the attention of the police. His edge professionally lay in his professionalism. When his job was done, there was nothing to tie him to the deceased.

If that was the last thing Keller wanted, getting to know the man he had come to kill was a close runner-up. When he got to know somebody, the person became a human being instead of an impersonal target, and that made for complications. There was a time when Keller had worried that he might be a sociopath, and now it struck him that there were certain advantages to sociopathy. A true sociopath could befriend a potential victim without being conflicted. He could enjoy the man’s company and then enjoy killing him; he wouldn’t have to perform mental gymnastics in order to depersonalize the man.

What Keller hoped, raising his glass in acknowledgement of Bingham’s toast—“To philately, the king of hobbies and the hobby of kings!”—was that the man would turn out to be loutish and obnoxious. A passion for postage stamps, he knew, was no guarantee of a noble character or a congenial personality, and with any luck at all Sheridan Bingham would turn out to be a greedy and purse-proud type, gobbling up German States issues like a glutton gorging himself at a buffet.

“You ever exhibit at these clambakes, Jackie?”

Call me Sherry, Bingham had urged, which more or less compelled Keller to invite Bingham to call him by name. His name was John, but nobody ever called him that. Virtually everyone called him Keller, but Call me Keller seemed an inadequate response to Call me Sherry.

His name was John, he’d told Bingham, and started to say what everybody called him, and veered in midsentence, claiming that everybody called him Jack. As far as Keller could recall, no one had ever called him Jack. Nor did Sheridan Bingham, who immediately converted Jack to Jackie.

He shook his head. “Never even considered it,” he said. “When you’re a general collector, you don’t wind up with anything exhibit-worthy. Except . . .”

“Except what?”

“Well, my collection of Martinique is complete, and I’ve been adding minor varieties when I run across them.”

“Sounds as though you’re specializing in spite of yourself.”

“Well . . .”

“And aren’t there a couple of high-ticket items from Martinique? One or two genuine rarities? My friend, you could exhibit if you wanted to.”

“I suppose I could. I never thought of it.”

“And now that you think of it?”

“I don’t think it’s my style,” he said. “Not that I don’t like to look at what other collectors exhibit.”

“You been to the exhibit room yet?”

“No, I went straight to the auction room.”

“Well, when you get there, you’ll see a couple of frames of my stuff.” Keller said he looked forward to it, and Bingham made a dismissing gesture. “Nothing to make a special trip for,” he said. “Decent material, and well displayed, if I say so myself. And why shouldn’t I? It’s not as though I had anything to do with it.”

“How’s that?”

“There’s a fellow who prepares my exhibits for me. Does the layout and lettering, decides what should or shouldn’t go on display. You ever raise show dogs, Jackie?”

Dogs? How did dogs get into this?

“Never,” he said.

“Well, neither have I, but a cousin of mine wins prizes more often than not at the Westminster Kennel Club show. Got a wall full of blue ribbons. He’s got a guy who tells him what dogs to buy, and a woman who grooms the animals and gets them in peak condition for each show, and a handler who parades around the ring with the dog and makes sure the judges are properly impressed. My cousin’s involvement is pretty much limited to writing a bunch of checks every month, which is something he does reasonably well. And in return he gets the ribbons and the trophies, and he’s so proud of them you’d think he was the one who taught the dog to raise his leg when he needs to pee.”

“I thought it was instinctive.”

“You’d think so, wouldn’t you? Anyway, I do pretty much the same thing as my cousin, with stamps instead of dogs. I write the checks and I take home the ribbons. I don’t know why the hell I bother.”

“It’s a contribution to the hobby.”

“You think so? I think it’s a contribution to my own ego and that’s about all. My glass is empty, Jackie, and my throat’s still dry. You’ve hardly touched yours.”

“You go ahead,” Keller said. “One’s my limit, this early in the day.”

Bingham caught the waiter’s eye, motioned for another round. “Easier this way,” he told Keller. “Just leave it on the table if you don’t want to drink it. You know what I’m beginning to do? I’m beginning to relax.”

“Well, that’s what the drinks are for.”

“That’s what stamps are for,” Bingham said. “They take you out of where you are and put you in a nice peaceful place. Lately it hasn’t been working.”

“You’re losing interest in your collection?”

“No, but it’s harder to get away from what’s on my mind.” He fell silent while the waiter brought the drinks, then picked up his glass and stared into it. “I didn’t begin to relax,” he said, “until I got on the plane this morning. I had a shorter flight than you, flew nonstop on Northwest from Detroit, and I started to unwind when we pulled away from the gate.” He took a sip from the new drink. “And this helps the process along. If your limit’s one, well, my limit’s going to be two, because I don’t want to get sloshed. I just want to reach that state where I know everything’s going to be okay.” He managed a twisted smile. “Because,” he said, “it’s not.”

Don’t tell me about it, Keller thought. Stick to stamps, will you? Tell me all about the pressing problem of fake cancellations.

And, mercifully, the man did just that.

Keller ordered dinner from room service.

Which was ridiculous, in a city with such a wealth of restaurants. All he had to do was walk a block in any direction and he’d stumble on a restaurant with food that was better, cheaper, and more interesting than he could expect to get from the hotel kitchen. But for some reason he didn’t want to leave his room, and after the waiter wheeled in the cart and lifted the metal lids off the various dishes, he realized what the reason was. He was afraid of running into Sheridan Bingham again.

Silly.

Still, after he’d eaten, he stayed in the room and watched television until it was time to go to bed.

“Well, good morning yourself,” Dot said. “Although it’s afternoon here. What time does the auction start?”

“It started almost an hour ago,” he said. “But there’s nothing in today’s session that I’m interested in. It’s all U.S.”

“As in America the Beautiful? What’s the matter with the United States, Keller?”

“I collect worldwide.”

“Oh? And what’s America, stuck on some other planet?”

“No, but—”

“I thought you were a patriot, Keller. Dishing out quiche to the rescue workers at the Trade Center. And now you don’t even think enough of your country to collect its stamps?”

“I could explain,” he said, “but I don’t think that’s what either of us wants.”

“Well, you’re not going to get an argument from me on that score. Did you, uh, establish that our friend made the trip?”

“Oh, he’s here, all right.”

“That sounds ominous somehow.”

“We had drinks yesterday afternoon,” he said, and told her briefly what had happened.

“Not great,” she said.

“I know.”

“Are you going to be able to do what you’re supposed to do?”

“I think so. In one respect it’s easier this way.”

“Because he won’t be suspicious of his new best friend.”

“Something like that.”

“But in another respect,” she said, “it’s got to be harder.”

“Remember when you called me a sociopath?”

“How could I forget? I also remember how upset you got.”

“There are times,” he said, “when being a sociopath would make things a lot easier.”

“What you need to do,” she said, “is meditate.”

“Meditate?”

“Get into a place of quiet stillness and peace,” she said, “and try to get in touch with your inner sociopath.”

He thought about that while he checked out the exhibits. They were more interesting than usual, and, while the overall quality was high, he didn’t think that explained it. He had a different perspective on exhibits as a result of the conversation he’d had with Bingham.

The exhibits were anonymous, presumably to avoid prejudicing the judges, but Keller was sure those worthies were well aware of the identities of most of the exhibitors. He himself could put names on several of the displays, having seen the material before, and of course he had no trouble spotting Bingham’s entry, which he’d already had described to him by the man himself. Three frames showed material from the three German colonies of islands in the Pacific—the Marshalls, the Marianas, and the Carolines. There were mint and used specimens of all the stamps, including minor varieties, and there were envelopes—covers, collectors called them—and blocks of four and six, and, well, a wealth of material, all artistically arranged and professionally written up. You could see the work of the pro who’d prepared the exhibit, but you could also see the hand of the collector, Sheridan Bingham, who’d tracked down the material in the first place and paid what he’d needed to for it.

Would he want to do anything like this himself? He thought about it and decided he wouldn’t. His hobby was private, and he wanted to keep it that way.

But what he might do, he thought, was expand his interest in Martinique to include covers and multiples. They’d look good, even if no one else ever saw them.

And no one ever would. He was no artist, and layout and lettering were way beyond him. Like Bingham, he’d have to hire someone.

No thanks. He’d had a dog once, and he’d hired a young woman to walk the animal in his absence, and before he knew it he had a live-in girlfriend. And the next thing he knew, she disappeared, walking herself and his dog clear out of his life.

You didn’t have to take a stamp collection for a walk. You had to feed it—it ate money, and its appetite was bottomless—but it could go as long as it had to between meals. And if you had to go somewhere, you just locked the door on it and the albums sat on their shelves without complaining.

He took another tour around the exhibit room, admiring what he saw, weighing the relative merits of the different displays. Very nice, he decided, but it was like the way he’d come to feel about dogs. He liked to look at them, but he wouldn’t want to own one.

“Thought I might find you here.”

A hand fastened on the edge of the table where Keller was seated, and the overhead light of the bourse room glinted off the blue stone of the high school class ring.

Keller was in the dealers’ bourse room, where he’d sifted through several shoeboxes full of covers without finding anything he had any reason to buy. It was interesting, though, because he’d never bothered with covers, and looking at them gave him some sense of his own response to them.

“I was looking at covers,” he told Bingham.

“From Martinique?”

“From all over. I didn’t see anything from Martinique. I’m trying to decide how I feel about covers.”

“It’s a Pandora’s box,” Bingham said. “No two covers are identical, so you never know when to stop buying them. Or what’s a good price. So you wind up buying everything, even though you’re not sure you want it, and when you pass something up you wind up thinking about it for years, wishing you hadn’t missed your chance.”

“Maybe I shouldn’t get started.”

Bingham looked at him, then shook his head. “My guess,” he said, “is you’re not going to be able to resist. But go ahead and hold out as long as you can. Meanwhile, what do you say we get some lunch?”

It was a long, leisurely lunch, in a restaurant that was all red leather and hand-rubbed wood and well-polished brass. The clientele was mostly male, and they were all wearing suits and ties, with the occasional blue blazer for Casual Friday. Lawyers and stockbrokers, Keller guessed, starting with martinis and finishing up with brandy, and pausing en route to take on a load of prime beef and fresh seafood.

“My party,” Bingham had announced when they ordered their drinks, and waved away Keller’s insistence that they split the check. “You can grab the dinner check tonight, if you want. But this is gonna be on me. You’ve never been here before, Jackie? Well, outside of a place I know in Dallas, they serve the best steak I ever had.”

Keller hadn’t been sure he wanted a steak that early in the day, but the first bite he took convinced him. Conversation during the meal was light—the food demanded their full attention—and when they did talk it was about stamps.

The coffee was what you’d expect—dark, rich, and perfectly brewed—and when Bingham ordered an elderly Armagnac to keep it company, Keller went along with him. He was no big fan of brandy, it usually gave him heartburn, but he went along anyway.

What the hell, he thought. What the hell.

And he found himself wondering if a mistake might have been made. Suppose someone back in Detroit had clipped the wrong photo. Suppose it wasn’t Sheridan Bingham but some other resident of the Motor City who had incurred Alan Horvath’s displeasure. Because, really, how could anyone want this perfectly pleasant gentleman killed?

But somebody did.

“. . . Glad we ran into each other,” Bingham was saying. “Except I have a confession to make. I was looking for you.”

“Oh?”

“I didn’t want to have lunch alone. Didn’t want to be alone, to tell you the truth.”

“You must know a lot of other collectors.”

“In a casual way,” Bingham said. “The other exhibitors, there’s a competitive element that keeps you at arm’s length. The other German specialists, well, we can’t get too close because we’re competing for the same material. And I’ll tell you something. It’s not my nature to get close to another person. I’m a sort of a standoffish guy.”

“You could have fooled me, Sherry.”

“Well, we seem to have hit it off, Jackie.” He pursed his lips, let out a toneless whistle. “Monday morning I fly back to Detroit. I’m not looking forward to it.”

“Today’s only Friday.”

“Monday’ll be here soon enough. Tomorrow’s the auction, or at least the part of it I’m interested in, and I’ve got lots coming up in Sunday’s section as well.”

“So do I.”

“So that’ll fill some time, and give me something to think about. And then there’s the judging of the exhibits, and maybe I’ll win something and maybe I won’t. But whatever happens, Monday I go back home.”

“And you don’t want to?”

“My life’s very different back there.”

“Oh?”

Bingham lowered his eyes. “In Detroit,” he said, “I don’t go anywhere without bodyguards, and even with them I rarely leave the house. I’ve got a safe room—you know what that is?”

“Sort of like a vault with food and water?”

“And air conditioning,” Bingham said, “and a sofa, so that a rich man can hide in there in the event of a home invasion. I pretty much live in my safe room, Jackie. I moved my stamp collection in there months ago.”

“You’re afraid somebody’ll steal your stamps?”

“The hell with the stamps,” Bingham said. “They’re my chief interest, but I’m not the kind of fool who’ll tell you that stamps are his life. My life is my life, and that’s what I’m in fear of. There are people back home who want me dead, Jackie, and sooner or later they’re going to get their wish.”

“Isn’t there anything you can do?”

“I’ve got a safe room and a team of bodyguards. That’s about as much as I can think of. But if somebody really wants to kill you, how can you stop them? They could buy the house across the street, dig a tunnel into my basement, plant explosives, and blow the safe room to hell and me along with it.”

“You really think—”

“What I really think,” he said, “is that they could come up with something simpler and more efficient than that, and sooner or later they will. No, there’s nothing I can do, Jackie. I wish there were.”

“I don’t mean for protection,” he said. “I mean to change their minds, to get them to call it off.”

“Not a chance.” Bingham picked up his glass of brandy, put it down untasted, and took a sip of coffee instead. “I did something that some people are never going to forgive. I can’t buy their forgiveness, and there’s no other way I can get it, either. They’re not about to let me off the hook.”

“You seem awfully calm about it.”

“It’s like having a terminal illness,” Bingham said, and this time he drank the brandy. “Once you accept it, well, you learn to live with it. And for the next few days it’s in remission. I’m safe here.”

They had dinner at a Thai place, mostly empty, with prints in bamboo frames on the walls and a lot of paper lanterns. The food was fiery hot, and they ate a lot of it and washed it down with Mexican beer. They began by talking stamps, almost ritualistically, and then the conversation shifted.

“I won’t ask how it happened,” Keller said, “but I have to say you don’t seem like the kind of guy who’d make anybody that mad at him.”

“From where you sit, Jackie, I’m a stamp collector. That’s the great thing about a hobby. You get to be a nice guy. My life in Detroit is a little different.”

“I guess it would have to be.”

“All you and I really know about each other is what we collect. For all you know, I could be an axe murderer or a predatory pedophile. I’m not, I’d be safer if I were, but the point is I could be. And you could be, hmm, I don’t know. Nothing violent, you’re too gentle for that, but you could be a stock swindler or a confidence man, something like that.”

“I could?”

“Well, no, I don’t really think you could, but you see what I mean. When we’re collecting stamps, we’re none of those other things, no matter what we are in real life.”

Keller nodded, and asked a question that had occupied him much of the afternoon. “Did you bring bodyguards with you? I guess it’s not the sort of thing I would notice, but—”

“I don’t need them here, Jackie. They’re back in Detroit, guarding an empty house.”

“I would think you’d bring one or two along just as a precaution.”

The man shook his head. “I’m safer without them. See, nobody knows I’m here.”

“Oh?”

“I’ve got a friend with access to his company’s Gulfstream. I hitched a ride out here, and I’ll fly back the same way on Monday. My bodyguards think I’m holed up in the safe room.”

“You don’t trust them?”

“Up to a point, but they can’t tell what they don’t know, can they? I’m registered at the hotel under a false name, so that’s not going to set off any bells and whistles. And if my exhibit pulls in the top prize, even if they put my picture on the front page of Linn’s, well, somehow I don’t think the boys in Detroit are subscribers. If they are, it won’t do them any good, because I’ll be home before the story runs.”

So there wouldn’t be any bodyguards to worry about. Keller, who’d been looking, hadn’t spotted anyone suspicious, but he figured he’d ask. You couldn’t be too careful.

It was difficult to decide what he thought of Sheridan Bingham.

Because he kept flipping back and forth. On the one hand, the man was very close to being a friend, and Keller had warm feelings toward him. At the same time, Bingham was a job that had to be done, a problem that had to be solved, and Keller couldn’t help resenting him. Some people in his line of work, he knew, worked up a genuine hatred for their targets, in order to make the work easier to stomach. Keller had never felt the need to do that, but he was beginning to understand why some people did.

In the auction room Saturday morning, he sat halfway back on the center aisle with his auction catalog and his numbered paddle and his pen, waiting for his lots to come up. He tried to concentrate on the auction, and he managed reasonably well, but he still found his mind wandering now and then.

You could be a stock swindler, Bingham had said. Or a confidence man. And he thought about con men, and how their victims were often less wounded by the financial loss they’d sustained than by the betrayal itself. I thought he was my friend, they’d say, and he betrayed me.

Even as he would be betraying Bingham.

“And now the New Britain issues,” the auctioneer said. “Lot 402. I have sixty, will you go sixty-five? I have sixty-five, will you go seventy? I have seventy in the back of the room, will you go seventy-five? I have seventy once, I have seventy twice, sold to Bidder Number 214.”

The same bidder bought all of the New Britain issues, and Keller didn’t have to turn around to know who it was. New Britain, he knew, was an island in the Bismarck Archipelago, named New Pomerania by the Germans who discovered it back in 1700, and administered as part of German New Guinea. When it changed hands during the war, the British changed the island’s name to New Britain and applied the name to all of the occupied territory in the immediate region, overprinting some German colonial stamps while they were at it.

Keller had a few of the New Britain issues, but not that many. He might have bid on one or two of the lots in the sale, but he couldn’t go against his new friend. He could plan on killing him, but he couldn’t compete with him at a stamp auction.

But it wasn’t really betrayal, was it? It would be different, he thought, if he and Bingham had been friends before Horvath gave him the contract. If that had been the case he’d have turned it down, and even found a way to warn his friend.

That wasn’t the way it had happened. The contract came first, and he would never have gotten to know Bingham if he hadn’t already accepted the job of killing him.

Still, there was something about the whole business . . .

It would be a lot easier if you were a sociopath. A shame there wasn’t a school you could go to. Earn a degree, become a licensed sociopathic personality. Job placement guaranteed.

“Lot 721. I have twenty dollars, will you go twenty-two? I have twenty-two, will you go twenty-four? I have twenty-two on the aisle, will you go twenty-four? Are you all through at twenty-four? I have twenty-four once, I have twenty-four twice, sold to Bidder Number 304.”

Keller lowered his paddle, circled the lot number, noted the price, and looked to see what was coming up next.

That night they went back to the steakhouse. “Quiet on Saturdays,” Bingham observed. “The businessmen are either home with their wives or in bed with their girlfriends. Not that it’s ever noisy here, but we’ve practically got the place to ourselves tonight. You make out okay this afternoon? Seems to me I saw a few lots hammered down to you.”

“I picked up a couple of bargains,” Keller said. “The lots I’m really interested in come up tomorrow.”

“I bought quite a bit today, and I’ll do the same tomorrow. Though sometimes I wonder why I bother.”

“Well, a stamp collection’s like a shark,” Keller said.

“Huh?”

“A shark has to keep swimming forward all the time,” he explained, “or it dies. At least that’s what I heard somewhere.”

“It does sound like the sort of thing a person would hear somewhere.”

“Well, whether it’s true or not for sharks, it works that way with a stamp collection. If you’re not adding to it, there’s not much pleasure in having it.”

“Absolutely true,” Bingham said. “I was always interested in Germany, but when I started out I collected Vatican City. Don’t ask me why. I’m not Catholic, but then I’m not German, either. It didn’t take me long to complete the collection, varieties and all, and it sat there in an album, and I never looked at it. I haven’t sold it, though I probably should, for all the pleasure I get out of it. Like a shark, eh? I never thought of it quite that way, but I like it, because I can picture a collection swimming along, devouring everything in its path.”

A little later he said, “You have a family, Jackie? No? Well, I’ve got a few stray cousins myself, but nobody I’ve had any contact with in years. Way my will’s drawn, I’m leaving everything to Wayne State University.”

“Is that where you want to college?”

“No, but they gave me an honorary degree a few years ago. You could call me Dr. Bingham, but don’t you dare. That degree’s going to turn out to be bread upon the waters, and they might as well have the money as anyone else. God knows what they’ll do with the stamps.”

“You could require that they keep the collection and display it.”

“What the hell for? Let ’em auction it off, so some other collectors can grab up chunks of it and have some fun with it.”

“Well,” Keller said, “that’s not going to happen anytime soon.”

Bingham just looked at him.

“I was thinking natural causes,” he told Dot the following day.

“And why not? One of your subspecialties, Keller. You’re about as natural a cause of death as I’ve ever known.”

“Cyanide’s always good,” he said, “and I don’t think it would be hard to get my hands on some. It looks like a heart attack.”

“And it’s every bit as funny, too.”

“But you find it,” he said, “if you look for it. In a tox screen. And they’d look for it. The local cops might not know who he is, but they’d find out, and when the full story came back from Detroit they’d order a full work-up, and they’d find it. Or anything else I can think of.”

“And if they look at it, they’re looking at you.”

“Whatever happens to him,” he said, “they’re going to be looking at me. We’ve been hanging our all over the place. I made sure I paid cash for our dinner last night, but I might as well have used a credit card, because what difference does it make?”

“You want to come home, Keller?”

“I’ve thought about it.”

“We can give back the money. You’re out the cost of your flight, but you were going there anyway, weren’t you? So we’ll just write it off and let somebody else figure out how to kill the son of a bitch.”

“He’s actually a pretty nice guy.”

“Oh, terrific. Just what I wanted to hear.”

“Out here, that is. He may not be such a nice guy in Detroit.”

“So do you want to follow him to Detroit and kill him there? Along with all his bodyguards?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Well, I’m glad to hear it. What do you think, Keller? Should I make a phone call, and you can just write off the airfare?”

“It’s not just the airfare.”

“And the hotel, I suppose. But you were in for the airfare and the hotel anyway, weren’t you? You already had the room and the flight booked, if I remember correctly.”

“Besides the hotel.”

“What, a couple of meals? I don’t see how . . . oh, I get it, Keller. Stamps. But weren’t you going to buy stamps anyway?”

“Up to a point,” he said.

“And you sailed right past that point, didn’t you? Because you had the money from Detroit, burning a hole in your pocket.”

“I didn’t lose control,” he assured her. “I spent pretty much what I intended to spend. I had all this money coming in, so I figured I could afford for some of it to go out. But if I have to give it back . . .”

“There’s a reason why giving money back goes against the grain. Once I’ve got it in my hand, it’s my money. And giving it back is like spending it, and what am I getting for it?” She sighed. “Other hand, anything happens to him and somebody with a badge is going to want to talk to you. And you’ve made a very good career out of so arranging your life that you never have to talk to anybody with a badge.”

“There ought to be a way.”

“How old is the guy, Keller? Sixty, sixty-five?”

“Sixty-seven.”

“Even better. Maybe you’ll catch a break. He’s up there in years, he’s under a lot of stress and strain. Maybe nature’ll help you out. It wouldn’t be the first time.”

“He seems pretty healthy, Dot.”

“Never sick a day in his life, and then pow! The old ticker blows out, and next thing you know he’s approaching room temperature. Who’s to say it couldn’t happen?”

“It would have to happen within the next twenty-four hours.”

“Makes it a little less likely, doesn’t it? Suppose he wins one of those blue ribbons? Maybe the excitement’ll do it.”

“He’s got a whole wall full of them back home. I don’t think it would be all that exciting.”

“Well, maybe he’ll lose, and he’ll be so disappointed he’ll kill himself . . . Keller? Where’d you go?”

“I’m here,” he said. “But I’d better get back to the auction room. I’ve got a couple of lots coming up.”

The last lot he bid on was from St. Pierre & Miquelon, a couple of French islands off the coast of Newfoundland. He had strong competition from a determined telephone bidder, and went higher than he’d planned, but that was all right. He had cash to pay for it, and he wasn’t going to have to give it back.

He went to his room, picked up the phone, then changed his mind and went downstairs to use the house phone in the lobby.

“It’s Jackie,” he said, the name sounding strange to him. But it evidently sounded fine to Bingham, who said he’d just gotten out of the shower, and had he lost track of the time? Because he didn’t think they were meeting for dinner for another hour and a half.

“No, this is something else,” he said. “Are you alone? Can I come to your room?”

“I’m always alone. And yes, give me five minutes to put some clothes on and come up.”

Bingham supplied the room number, and seven or eight minutes later Keller was knocking on the door of 617. Which was fine, he’d decided. 1217 would have been better, but 617 would have to do.

And it was certainly spacious enough. Keller’s room three floors down was comfortable enough, if a little on the small side, but Bingham had a suite. “More space than I’ve got any use for,” he told Keller, “but when you spend a little more you get treated a little better. And if I fart in one room I can go in the other until the air clears. You want a drink?”

He didn’t, but said he did. Because that way Bingham would take a drink—although his breath already held the bouquet of good whiskey.

Bingham poured, and they touched glasses, and Keller wet his lips while Bingham drank deeply. “Just as well you came up here,” he said. “I’ve got something for you, and I was going to bring it along to dinner, but who’s to say I wouldn’t forget? I’ll give it to you now and you can leave it in your room before we go out.”

The clear plastic sheet held a cover, postmarked 1891 in Martinique’s capital city of Fort-de-France, and backstamped in Paris and surcharged here and there, bearing several different stamps from the island colony’s first issue.

“It’s a beauty,” Keller said. “What do I owe you for it?”

“It’s a present.”

“Oh, come on,” he said. “You’ve got to let me pay for it.”

“Nope. You can’t buy it, Jackie. It’s not for sale. It’s a gift.”

“But—”

“It’ll cost you plenty in the long run,” Bingham told him, and paused to top up his own drink. “All the covers you’ll buy. But you’ve got to feed the shark, don’t you?”

“Well, I’m very happy to have it. I wish I had something for you in return. And maybe I do.”

“Oh?”

“The reason I came up here,” Keller said. “You really expect to be killed, don’t you?”

“Sooner or later. When someone with money and power is determined to kill you, you don’t stand much of a chance.”

“Sherry, I think I know a way to get you off the hook.”

“I don’t think there is any such way. But I’d be a fool not to hear you out.”

“Well,” Keller said. “You know, the other day you were talking about how people don’t know that much about each other. And you said for all you knew I could be a stock swindler, or a confidence man.”

“It wasn’t meant as an insult.”

“I know that, but it hit a little close to the bone. I’m neither of those things, not exactly, but I haven’t lived my whole life inside the law, either.”

“You know, I had the sense you were a man of the world, Jackie.”

“I wouldn’t have the collection I do,” he said, “if it weren’t for insurance fraud.”

“Reporting your own stamps as stolen? I wouldn’t think—”

“When it comes to stamps, I’ve always been completely on the up-and-up.”

“Same here. That’s the thing about hobbies.”

“I’m talking about life insurance fraud. A couple of times over the years I’ve faked my own death. So I know a little about the mechanics of it. Sherry, you’ve got somebody back home who wants to kill you. You can’t buy him off or scare him off, and he won’t let up as long as you’re alive. But if he doesn’t think you’re alive . . .”

Bingham had a ton of questions. Where would you get a body? What about DNA? Dental forensics?

“Have another drink,” Keller suggested, “and I’ll explain what I have in mind.”

“It just might work,” Bingham said. “You want to know something? It’s scarier than dying. I was pretty much used to the idea of that, but this . . .”

“I know what you mean.”

“And at the same time it’s exciting as hell. Because it’s a whole new life. I’d be starting over with next to nothing. Wayne State’ll get my stamps and everything else I own. I’ve got a little cash tucked away in secret accounts, and I can get that, so I’ll never have to wonder where my next meal is coming from. But where will I live, and how’ll I keep from running into somebody who can recognize me.” He ran a hand through his hair. “I suppose I could dye this. Or cut it real short. You shave it and people start wondering how you look with hair.”

“There are a lot of tricks,” Keller said, figuring there must be. “And I can help you come up with them.”

“And you can find a body that’ll pass for mine. Jackie, I’m not going to ask how.”

“Nobody’s going to get killed,” he assured Bingham, and talked vaguely about cooperative funeral parlors. Even as he spoke, the whole prospect sounded dubious to him, and he was glad Bingham’s intake of whiskey was increasing its credibility.

“Now here’s what’s crucial,” he said. “First of all, it has to happen here, in San Francisco. Where nobody knows you, and where the police will have every reason to wrap it up in a hurry and ship the body back to Detroit. Where nobody will bother with an autopsy, because San Francisco already held one.”

“Stands to reason.”

“Number one,” he said, “is that ring of yours. It’s distinctive.”

“My high school ring. I’m not even sure I can get it off. Let me try some soap.”

He returned from the bathroom with the ring in hand. “There,” he said, presenting it to Keller. “And number two?”

“Your suicide note. You’ll want a sheet of Cumberford letterhead.”

“In the desk drawer.”

“Could you get it? We’ll want to have your fingerprints on it, and nobody else’s.”

“Good thinking. Now what should I write?”

Keller frowned in thought. “Let’s see,” he said. “‘To Whom It May Concern. I suppose I’m taking the easy way out, but I have no choice.’” He went on, and Bingham said he had the sense of it, and how would it be if he phrased it more in his own words? Keller told him it would be ideal.

By the time he’d finished, he’d filled the whole sheet of hotel stationery. “‘I would advise my heirs at Wayne State University to sell my entire collection of stamps,’” he read aloud, “‘and recommend the San Francisco firm of Halliday & Okun for this purpose.’ You know, I spent close to fifty thousand this weekend. I might not have bothered if I’d had any idea I was only going to own the stamps for a matter of hours.”

“You could take them along.”

“You think so? No, it’s got to be more convincing to leave them behind. And it’s not as though I’m going to resume collecting German States in my new life, or anything else in the world of stamps. Handwriting’s a little shaky.”

“Well, you’re about to kill yourself. That might make a man the least bit unsteady.”

“I think the scotch may have had something to do with it. Just let me sign this. Signature looks okay, doesn’t it?”

“It looks fine.”

“So. What happens next?”

“Pretty slick,” Dot said. “Got him to write a note, got him to take off his ring, and then gave him a helping hand out the window. I know people who drown themselves tend to leave their clothes all folded up on the beach, but do many jumpers do it naked?”

“It happens,” he said. “What I figured was that nobody undresses a guy before shoving him out a window, so it would make it look that much more like suicide.”

“But you said he was dressed when you went upstairs. So you had to undress him.”

“When I phoned him,” he recalled, “he said he’d just got out of the shower. I should have told him to just put on a robe.”

“I think he did enough, Keller. How’d you get him unconscious?”

“Rabbit punch.”

“Always a popular favorite.”

“At first I thought I’d killed him. I figured it was better to hit him too hard than not hard enough. Because I didn’t want him to know what was happening.”

“But the blow didn’t kill him.”

“No, he was alive when he went out the window.”

“But not for long. Six stories?”

“Six stories.”

“With no overhangs or canopies to break his fall.”

“That was the pavement’s job,” he said.

“And the cops? Were you in town long enough for them to get around to you?”

“I went to them myself,” he said.

“Jesus, that’s a first.”

“As soon as I heard about Bingham’s death, and that didn’t take long. I told them how I’d spent some time with him over the weekend, and that it’d be my guess that he’d received bad news from his doctor, because he would say things like why was he buying these stamps when he couldn’t look forward to owning them for very long. And he’d sort of hinted at suicide, talking about meeting Fate head-on instead of waiting for it to come up on him from behind.”

“How’d this go over?”

“Well, the detective I talked to wrote everything down, but it just seemed to be confirming what he’d already decided. It was pretty much open and shut, Dot.”

“The window was open,” she said, “and the door was shut.”

“That’s about it. A very candid suicide note in his own hand, signed and dated, and weighted down with his class ring. And, alongside it, all the stamps he’d bought over the weekend, plus a wallet full of cash.”

“That’s enough to fool just about anybody,” she allowed. “Except for Alan Horvath, who thinks you’re the greatest thing since Google. He said he can’t wait until somebody pisses him off so he can use you again.”

“He actually said that?”

“No, of course not. But he’s a happy man, and he sent us the cash to prove it. I have to say he’s not the only one you managed to impress, Keller. Getting him to write the note, that’s kind of rich.”

“You gave me the idea.”

“How do you figure that?”

“You said maybe he’d kill himself. Out of disappointment at losing the blue ribbon.”

“I said that? I don’t even remember, but I’ll take your word for it. Did he lose the blue ribbon?”

“No, he won.”

“But he found something else to be disappointed about. That’s what gave you the idea? My idle remark?”

“Plus an idle remark of Bingham’s, saying I could be a confidence man or a stock swindler. And I realized that I felt like a con man, pretending to be his friend while I was getting ready to take him out, and then I thought, well, what would a con man do?” He frowned. “It was interesting, manipulating things, making it all work out, but I wouldn’t want to be a con man full time. I really did like him, you know.”

“But you didn’t let that stop you.”

“Well, no. And if I did, then what? It only meant Horvath would bite the bullet and find a way to do the job in Detroit. Tunnel under Bingham’s house and blow him up, like Bingham suggested. Or send in a private army to overwhelm the bodyguards. Bingham knew it was all over. He didn’t want to go back to Detroit.”

“And you fixed it so he didn’t have to.”

“Well,” he said.

“I’ve got a bundle of cash for you. Horvath was quick and so was FedEx. I’d tell you to buy some stamps, but you already did that.” She pointed at an envelope. “So you can put this toward your retirement fund.”

He glanced at the soundless television set, where stock symbols and prices crawled across the screen beneath two men holding a furious silent argument. “How’re we doing?” he asked.

“In the market? We have good days and we have bad days, but lately the good days are running ahead of the bad ones.”

“What are you going to do with your share?”

“I might just stick it in the market,” she said, “and see if I can fatten it up a little.”

He pushed the envelope across the table. “Do the same with mine,” he said. “Otherwise I’ll spend it.”

“If you’re sure. I was thinking we should diversify into some overseas companies. India and Korea are booming.”

“Whatever you say.”

She put a hand on the envelope, drew it closer to her. She said, “Keller? Those stamps he bought at auction, that you just left on the table with the suicide note. Weren’t you tempted?”

“No, not at all.”

“Because it’s your hobby.”

“That’s right.”

“I guess I get it,” she said. “The envelope he gave you, except you called it something else.”

“The cover.”

“There you go. From Martinique, right? What did it cost him?”

“It’s worth somewhere between eight and ten thousand. I don’t know if he paid that much.”

“And you’re keeping it.”

“Well, sure. It was a present.”

“I see.”

“And something to remember him by.”

“I guess,” she said. “But don’t you usually try to forget them as quickly and completely as possible? Don’t you do that mental exercise, fading their image to black and white and then graying it out? Letting it get smaller and smaller until it disappears?”

“Usually.”

“Oh. Are you all right, Keller?”

“I think so,” he said.

T H E • E N D

About the Author

Lawrence Block has been writing award-winning mystery and suspense fiction for half a century. He has written five books about Keller, the Urban Lonely Guy of assassins—Hit Man, Hit List, Hit Parade, Hit and Run, and Hit Me, and a Keller series for cable television is in development. “Keller,” he points out, “is a Guilty Pleasure for a lot of my readers. They like him, even though they don’t think they should.”

Block’s other series characters include Bernie Rhodenbarr (The Burglar Who Counted the Spoons) and Matthew Scudder, brilliantly embodied by Liam Neeson in the new film, A Walk Among The Tombstones. His non-series novella, Resume Speed, is a bestselling Kindle Single, and will soon appear as a deluxe hardcover from Subterranean Press.

The author is also well known for his books for writers, including the classic Telling Lies For Fun & Profit and Write For Your Life, and for his writings about the mystery genre and its practitioners, The Crime Of Our Lives. In addition to prose works, he has written episodic television (Tilt!) and the Wong Kar-wai film, My Blueberry Nights. He is a modest and humble fellow, although you would never guess as much from this biographical note.

lawrenceblock.com

NEWSLETTER: Lawrence Block sends out an email newsletter from time to time, with updates, announcements, and special offers. It’s free, and an email to lawbloc@gmail.com with NEWSLETTER—KF in the header will get you on the list.

Now turn the page for a bonus excerpt from Keller on the Spot, an Edgar Award-winning story exclusively eVailable on Amazon:

E X C E R P T

Keller on the Spot

Keller, drink in hand, agreed with the woman in the pink dress that it was a lovely evening. He threaded his way through a crowd of young marrieds on what he supposed you would call the patio. A waitress passed carrying a tray of drinks in stemmed glasses and he traded in his own for a fresh one. He sipped as he walked along, wondering what he was drinking. Some sort of vodka sour, he decided, and decided as well that he didn’t need to narrow it down any further than that. He figured he’d have this one and one more, but he could have ten more if he wanted, because he wasn’t working tonight. He could relax and cut back and have a good time.

Well, almost. He couldn’t relax completely, couldn’t cut back altogether. Because, while this might not be work, neither was it entirely recreational. The garden party this evening was a heaven-sent opportunity for reconnaissance, and he would use it to get a close look at his quarry. He had been handed a picture in the old man’s study back in White Plains, and he had brought that picture with him to Dallas, but even the best photo wasn’t the same as a glimpse of the fellow in the flesh, and in his native habitat.

And a lush habitat it was. Keller hadn’t been inside the house yet, but it was clearly immense, a sprawling multi-level affair of innumerable large rooms. The grounds sprawled as well, covering an acre or two, with enough plants and shrubbery to stock an arboretum. Keller didn’t know anything about flowers, but five minutes in a garden like this one had him thinking he ought to know more about the subject. Maybe they had evening classes at Hunter or NYU, maybe they’d take you on field trips to the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens. Maybe his life would be richer if he knew the names of the flowers, and whether they were annuals or perennials, and whatever else there was to know about them. Their soil requirements, say, and what bug killer to spray on their leaves, or what fertilizer to spread at their roots.

He walked along a brick path, smiling at this stranger, nodding at that one, and wound up standing alongside the swimming pool. Some twelve or fifteen people sat at poolside tables, talking and drinking, the volume of their conversation rising as they drank. In the enormous pool, a young boy swam back and forth, back and forth.

Keller felt a curious kinship with the kid. He was standing instead of swimming, but he felt as distant as the kid from everybody else around. There were two parties going on, he decided. There was the hearty social whirl of everybody else, and there was the solitude he felt in the midst of it all, identical to the solitude of the swimming boy.

Huge pool. The boy was swimming its width, but that dimension was still greater than the length of your typical backyard pool. Keller didn’t know that this was an Olympic pool, he wasn’t quite sure how big that would have to be, but he figured you could just call it enormous and let it go at that.

Ages ago he’d heard about some college-boy stunt, filling a swimming pool with Jell-O, and he’d wondered how many little boxes of the gelatin dessert it would have required, and how the college boys could have afforded it. It would cost a fortune, he decided, and to fill this pool with Jell-O—but if you could afford the pool in the first place, he supposed the Jell-O would be the least of your worries.

There were cut flowers on all of the tables, and the blooms looked like ones Keller had seen in the garden. It stood to reason. If you grew all these flowers, you wouldn’t have to order from the florist. You could cut your own.

What good would it do, he wondered, to know the names of all the shrubs and flowers? Wouldn’t it just leave you wanting to dig in the soil and grow your own? And he didn’t want to get into all that, for God’s sake. He lived in a one-bedroom apartment on First Avenue in the Forties. It was all he needed or wanted, but it was no place for a garden. He hadn’t even tried growing an avocado pit there, and he didn’t intend to. He was the only living thing in the apartment, and that was the way he wanted it. The day that changed was the day he’d call the exterminator.

So maybe he’d just forget about evening classes at Hunter, and field trips to Brooklyn. If he wanted to get close to nature he could walk in Central Park, and if he didn’t know the names of the flowers he would just hold off on introducing himself to them. And if—

Where was the kid?

The boy, the swimmer. Keller’s companion in solitude. Where the hell did he go?

The pool was empty, its surface still. Keller saw a ripple toward the far end, saw a brace of bubbles break the surface.

He didn’t react without thinking. That was how he’d always heard that sort of thing described, but that wasn’t what happened, because the thoughts were there, loud and clear. He’s down there. He’s in trouble. He’s drowning. And, echoing in his head in a voice that might have been Dot’s, sour with exasperation: Keller, for Christ’s sake, do something!

He set his glass on a table, shucked his coat, kicked off his shoes, dropped his pants and stepped out of them. Ages ago he’d earned a Red Cross lifesaving certificate, and the first thing they taught you was to strip before you hit the water. The six or seven seconds you spent peeling off your clothes would be repaid many times over in quickness and mobility.

But the strip show did not go unnoticed. Everybody at poolside had a comment, one more hilarious than the next. He barely heard them. In no time at all he was down to his underwear, and then he was out of range of their cleverness, hitting the water’s surface in a flat racing dive, churning the water till he reached the spot where he’d seen the bubbles, then diving, eyes wide, barely noticing the burn of the chlorine.

Searching for the boy. Groping, searching, then finding him, reaching to grab hold of him. And pushing off against the bottom, lungs bursting, racing to reach the surface.

People were saying things to Keller, thanking him, congratulating him, but it wasn’t really registering. A man clapped him on the back, a woman handed him a glass of brandy. He heard the word “hero” and realized people were saying it all over the place, and applying it to him.

Hell of a note.

Keller sipped the brandy. It gave him heartburn, which assured him of its quality; good cognac always gave him heartburn. He turned to look at the boy. He was just a little fellow, twelve or thirteen years old, his hair lightened and his skin lightly bronzed by the summer sun. He was sitting up now, Keller saw, and looking none the worse for his near-death experience.

“Timothy,” a woman said, “this is the man who saved your life. Do you have something to say to him?”

“Thanks,” Timothy said, predictably.

“Is that all you have to say, young man?”

“It’s enough,” Keller said, and smiled. To the boy he said, “There’s something I’ve always wondered. Did your whole life actually flash before your eyes?”

Timothy shook his head. “I got this cramp,” he said, “and it was like my whole body turned into one big knot, and there wasn’t anything I could do to untie it. And I didn’t even think about drowning. I was just fighting the cramp, ’cause it hurt, and just about the next thing I knew I was up here coughing and puking up water.” He made a face. “I must have swallowed half the pool. All I have to do is think about it and I can taste vomit and chlorine.”

“Timothy,” the woman said, and rolled her eyes.

“Something to be said for plain speech,” an older man said. He had a mane of white hair and a pair of prominent white eyebrows, and his eyes were a vivid blue. He was holding a glass of brandy in one hand and a bottle in the other, and he reached with the bottle to fill Keller’s glass to the brim. “ ‘Claret for boys, port for men,’ ” he said, “ ‘but he who would be a hero must drink brandy.’ That’s Samuel Johnson, although I may have gotten a word wrong.”

The young woman patted his hand. “If you did, Daddy, I’m sure you just improved Mr. Johnson’s wording.”

“Dr. Johnson,” he said, “and one could hardly do that. Improve the man’s wording, that is. ‘Being in a ship is like being in jail, with the added hazard of being drowned.’ He said that as well, and I defy anyone to comment more trenchantly on the experience, or to say it better.” He beamed at Keller. “I owe you more than a glass of brandy and a well-turned Johnsonian phrase. This little rascal whose life you’ve saved is my grandson, and the apple—nay, sir, the very nectarine—of my eye. And we’d have all stood around drinking and laughing while he drowned. You observed, and you acted, and God bless you for it.”

What did you say to that, Keller wondered. It was nothing? Well, shucks? There had to be an apt phrase, and maybe Samuel Johnson could have found it, but he couldn’t. So he said nothing, and just tried not to look po-faced.

“I don’t even know your name,” the white-haired man went on. “That’s not remarkable in and of itself. I don’t know half the people here, and I’m content to remain in my ignorance. But I ought to know your name, wouldn’t you agree?”

Keller might have picked a name out of the air, but the one that leaped to mind was Boswell, and he couldn’t say that to a man who quoted Samuel Johnson. So he supplied the name he’d traveled under, the one he’d signed when he checked into the hotel, the one on the driver’s license and credit cards in his wallet.

“It’s Michael Soderholm,” he said, “and I can’t even tell you the name of the fellow who brought me here. We met over drinks in the hotel bar and he said he was going to a party and it would be perfectly all right if I came along. I felt a little funny about it, but—”

“Please,” the man said. “You can’t possibly propose to apologize for your presence here. It’s kept my grandson from a watery if chlorinated grave. And I’ve just told you I don’t know half my guests, but that doesn’t make them any the less welcome.” He took a deep drink of his brandy and topped up both glasses. “Michael Soderholm,” he said. “Swedish?”

“A mixture of everything,” Keller said, improvising. “My great-grandfather Soderholm came over from Sweden, but my other ancestors came from all over Europe, plus I’m something like a sixteenth American Indian.”

“Oh? Which tribe?”

“Cherokee,” Keller said, thinking of the jazz tune.

“I’m an eighth Comanche,” the man said. “So I’m afraid we’re not tribal bloodbrothers. The rest’s British Isles, a mix of Scots and Irish and English. Old Texas stock. But you’re not Texan yourself.”

“No.”

“Well, it can’t be helped, as the saying goes. Unless you decide to move here, and who’s to say that you won’t? It’s a fine place for a man to live.”

“Daddy thinks everybody should love Texas the way he does,” the woman said.

“Everybody should,” her father said. “The only thing wrong with Texans is we’re a longwinded lot. Look at the time it’s taking me to introduce myself! Mr. Soderholm, Mr. Michael Soderholm, my name’s Garrity, Wallace Penrose Garrity, and I’m your grateful host this evening.”

No kidding, thought Keller.

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