Keller 05 - Hit Me (3 page)

And took another plate, as the sign advised him to. “I don’t get it,” he said to a fellow diner, a heavyset man with an oversize mustache. “Why does the state of Texas forbid me to pile new food onto an old plate?”

“Health regulation, isn’t it?”

“I guess, but why? I mean, what am I going to do, pass germs to myself?”

“Good point.”

“And this way they’ve got an extra plate to wash.”

“Even more,” the man said, “if you make enough return trips, and that smoked salmon is worth a try, believe me. They feed you a hell of a breakfast here at the Venetia. But maybe there’s another reason for fresh plates. Maybe it’s like putting new wine in old bottles.”

“Well, that’s something else I’ve wondered about,” Keller said. “I know it’s a metaphor, but what are you supposed to do with old bottles? Just throw them in a landfill?”

He went back to his table and ate everything on his plate, but didn’t even consider going back for thirds. Instead he let the waitress pour him more coffee, signed his check, and carried the coffee over to the table where the mustachioed gentleman was working on his smoked salmon.

Keller put a hand on an unoccupied chair, and the man nodded, and Keller sat down. “You’re here for the auction,” he said.

“I have that look, do I?”

He shook his head. “The hotel,” he said. “You called it the Venetia.”

“I did? Well, that’s a giveaway, isn’t it? A very philatelic slip of the tongue. Or should that be slip of the tongs?”

Because he collected stamps, Keller knew that in the mid-nineteenth century Lombardy-Venetia had been a kingdom in the north of Italy forming part of the Austrian Empire. Starting in 1850, Austria produced stamps for Lombardy-Venetia, essentially identical to regular Austrian issues but denominated in centesimi and lire and, after 1858, in soldi and florins. Then in 1859 Lombardy was annexed to Sardinia, and seven years later Venetia became a part of the kingdom of Italy.

“But for philately,” the fellow said, “I might never have heard of Lombardy or Venetia, let alone know to link the two of them with a hyphen.”

“I haven’t done much with Lombardy-Venetia,” Keller admitted. “All those reprints, and so much counterfeiting. It’s confusing, so I always find it easier to buy something else.”

“Your Lombardy-Venetia’s probably well ahead of mine, considering that I don’t own a single stamp from the benighted place. Nothing but U.S. for me, I’m afraid.”

“And that’s the one thing I don’t collect,” Keller said. “I’m worldwide, to 1940.”

“That way there’s always something for you to buy. Which is a blessing or a curse, depending how you look at it. I don’t even collect all of my own country. I did, but then I sold everything after 1900, and then I narrowed that down to the 1869 issue. I don’t know if you know the stamps…”

Keller knew them well enough to hold up his end of the conversation. By the time they left the table they were Nicholas and Michael, sharing the comfortable camaraderie of fellow hobbyists who wouldn’t be competing with one another in the auction room. In fact they wouldn’t even be occupying the room at the same time, with U.S. on the block today and the rest of the world waiting its turn.

“Stamps in the morning, covers in the afternoon,” Michael said. “There’s a block of Scott 119, the fifteen-cent type two, that I wouldn’t mind having. And this afternoon, well, this wouldn’t mean much to a nonspecialist, but…”

Keller heard him out, wished him luck.

“Ah, but what’s luck, Nick? I’m too old to chase ’em nowadays, but when I used to go out looking to pick up a woman, I’d tell myself maybe I’d get lucky. But you reach a point where getting lucky means going home alone. You know, you ought to drop by when the 1869 lots come up. Share in the drama without having a stake in the outcome. All the excitement and none of the risk—like watching a murder mystery on television.”

Keller slipped into the auction room a half hour after the start of the morning session. The first several dozen lots were nothing too exciting, job lots and accumulations, and then the first of the Postmasters’ Provisionals came up and the proceedings got more interesting. Sort of like watching a mystery on television, come to think of it.

He stayed longer than he’d planned, waiting for the large block of number 119 to be offered, and watched as his new friend hung in gamely while bidding climbed to four times the estimated value. Then Keller’s friend dropped out, and the block was knocked down to a telephone bidder.

Not quite like a murder mystery on television, because it didn’t end the way you wanted it to.

Keller slipped out of the auction room, left the hotel, and picked up his rental car. He’d brought his map along, but never took it out of his breast pocket. He had no trouble remembering the route to the house on Caruth Boulevard.

He drove past the house, taking a quick look at it, and all he really managed to establish was that it was still there. He couldn’t stake the place out and watch the comings and goings, not in this neighborhood, where a man lurking in a parked car would be reported to the police in no time at all. Nor could he park a few blocks away and approach on foot, because if there was a single pedestrian over the age of six anywhere in the area, he’d managed to keep out of Keller’s field of vision.

The right way, he thought, was to take a week or two, but the hell with that. This wasn’t some well-guarded mafioso in a walled castle, with a moat full of bent-nosed alligators. This was a woman who had no idea just how much her husband wanted to be rid of her, and no reason to fear a stranger at her door.

Keller went back to a strip mall he’d passed earlier, with a Walgreens at one end and an Office Depot at the other. Park near one and walk to the other? No, he told himself. Why bother? Nobody was going to look at his license plate, and what difference did it make if they did?

He parked in front of the Office Depot and was in and out of it in ten minutes, paying cash for the clipboard and the pad of yellow paper. Duct tape? No, not necessary. He was going to buy a pen, then remembered that he already had one of his own.

What else? A box cutter, a letter opener, something sharp and pointed? No. He had his hands, and there would be knives in the kitchen if he felt the need.

He drove back to the Walmsley house and parked in the driveway, where anyone walking by could see his car and take note of the license plate. Fat chance, he thought, and walked up to the door and rang the bell.

Nothing.

Maid’s day off, he thought. Getting lucky, he told himself, was when you rang a doorbell and nobody answered. That was even better than going home alone, and—

Footsteps, approaching the door. He waited for it to open, and when it didn’t he poked the bell again, and this time the door opened immediately, and he found himself looking at his own reflection in the mirror that faced the door. Just for an instant, albeit a disconcerting one; then he lowered his eyes and looked down at the Salvadoran maid.

“Ah, good morning,” he said. “Mrs. Walmsley?”

“No,” the maid said, in Spanish or English, it was impossible to tell. “Her no
aquí,
” she said, in a combination of the two.

“And Mr. Walmsley?”

“Him not
vive aquí
.”

A shake of the head, good enough in either language.

“Is anyone else at home?”

Another head shake. The simple thing to do, Keller realized, was kill the woman, stuff her in a closet—or a laundry hamper, or a big hatbox. She was innocent, but then so was Portia Walmsley, for all he knew.

But Jesus, she was so tiny.

The client, he recalled, didn’t care one way or the other about the woman. He wasn’t paying a bonus for some illegal immigrant, and—

Bingo.

He brandished the clipboard, gave her a look at it. He hadn’t thought to write anything on the top sheet of paper, but it didn’t matter.

“INS,” he said.

Her face remained expressionless, but eloquently so.

“Green card,” he said.

“No hablo inglés.”

“Carta verde,”
Keller said, straining his command of the language to the limit.
“¿Tienes un carta verde?”

Una,
he thought. Not
un,
for God’s sake.
Una
. An INS man would know that, right? Jesus, you couldn’t live in New York without knowing that much, let alone Texas, and—

Un, una,
what difference could it possibly make? Her shoulders slumped, and she managed somehow to become even smaller. Keller felt horrible.

“I will be back,” he said. “I’ll go away now to have my lunch, and when I come back you can show me your green card. Your
carta verde, comprenez-vous?
”

Comprenez-vous?
That was French, for God’s sake, yet another language he was unable to speak. But it was clear that she
comprenezed
just fine.

“You come back?”

“In an hour,” he said, and turned away, unable to bear the sight of her expressionless face.

He drove to the strip mall, parking this time near the Walgreens, and tossed the clipboard into a trash bin alongside the entrance. He wasn’t hungry and he couldn’t think of anything to buy, so he returned to his car and sat behind the wheel. Nothing to read, nothing to do, really, but let time pass. He fiddled with the radio, but couldn’t figure out how to get it to play without running the engine. There’d be a way to do it, there always was, but every car maker felt compelled to work out its own way of doing things, and when you rented cars you could never figure out how to adjust the seats or play the radio or work the air-conditioning or dim the lights, and when you went to signal a left turn you generally wound up switching on the windshield wipers. The steering was always more or less the same, and so were the brakes, and it was a good thing or everybody would crash into everybody else.

They’d have newspapers in the drugstore. Magazines, maybe even paperback books.

No, the hell with it.

He gave her an hour and a half, then returned to the Walmsley house and parked once again in the driveway. He walked up to the door and rang the bell, and wondered if he might have been a shade precipitous in ditching the clipboard, because what if she opened the door with Portia Walmsley on her left and some slick immigration lawyer on her right?
Hang on,
he’d say.
Be right back, soon as I get my clipboard—

No one came to the door. He rang the bell again, and listened carefully, and heard no footsteps. The car, the rented Subaru, had now become a problem, and he wished he’d left it at the strip mall and approached on foot. But that was a long way to walk in a neighborhood where everybody drove.

He couldn’t leave the thing in the driveway. There was probably room for it in the three-car garage, since the estranged husband wouldn’t have left on foot, but Portia Walmsley would almost certainly notice his car when she parked her own beside it, and—

He backed out of the driveway, drove fifty yards down the street, parked, and walked back. Rang the bell, listened for footsteps, knocked, listened again. He tried the doorknob, because you never know, but it was locked.

No problem.

Five

K
eller had never been a thief, let alone a burglar. In his youth he’d been one of several young men who’d hung around the Old Man’s place in Yonkers. The Old Man was Giuseppe Ragone, dear to the hearts of tabloid journalists, who wrote about him as Joey Rags. Keller had never called him that, or anything like it. In direct conversation, if he called the man anything it was Sir. To others, he’d refer to him as Mr. R. In his own mind, though, his boss was the Old Man.

And Keller liked hanging around. The Old Man would give him errands to run, packages to pick up and deliver, messages to pass along. Eventually he sent Keller along when disciplinary actions were called for, and something he saw led him to devise assignments that, in retrospect, Keller was able to recognize as little tests. Keller, unaware he was being tested, passed with flying colors. What the Old Man managed to establish was that Keller didn’t flinch when called upon to pull the trigger. The Old Man had suspected as much, that was why he’d devised the tests, but it was all news to Keller.

So Keller went from being an errand boy to taking people out, and at first the people he took out were men who had somehow managed to get on the Old Man’s hit list, and then the Old Man realized what a fine, dependable asset he had, and began renting Keller out to interested parties. Not many people knew Keller’s name, the Old Man saw to that, but an increasing number of people knew he was out there somewhere, at the beck and call of Joey Rags, and that he did good work. So from that point on that was the only kind of work he was called upon to perform. There were no more packages or messages to deliver, no more errands to run.

A more conventional apprenticeship would have seen Keller grow into a jack-of-all-criminal-trades, with a working knowledge of various felonious enterprises. But Keller, forced to improvise, had picked up what he needed to know. Without ever becoming a disciplined student of the martial arts, he’d read books and rented videos, taken the odd class here and there, and was as proficient as he had to be with the usual run of weapons, and with his bare hands. Similarly, he’d become reasonably good at breaking and entering, and it didn’t take him long to get into the Walmsley house.

It was the sort of house that would have a burglar alarm installed, and there was a decal to that effect, along with metallic tape on the ground-floor windows. But the alarm had not been engaged when the maid opened the door to him, and he didn’t believe for a moment she’d have taken the time to set it before fleeing a house she’d never be likely to see again. If the Walmsleys had ever taken the trouble to teach her how to set it in the first place.

No alarm, then. The front door was locked, probably because it locked of its own accord when you pulled it shut. Keller could have forced it but didn’t, nor did he force the door leading to the garage. He went around to the rear of the house, took one of the windows off its track, and let himself in.