Keller's Fedora (Kindle Single) (7 page)

At a stoplight, he reached over and rested a hand on the hammer.

His only tool, he thought. Now to go find himself a nail.

S
OMETHING MADE HIM
drive by the Overmont house. He didn’t park, and barely slowed down, and all he saw was the house itself. The garage door was closed, as it always seemed to be unless someone was on the way in or out, and there were no cars parked in the driveway or on the street nearby.

He drove off, wondering what he had hoped to see. “I told him what he ought to do was get out of town,” Dot had reported earlier. “Take his wife, fly off for a few fun-filled days in Las Vegas or Cancún or, hell, I don’t know. Where do people like that go?”

“People like what?”

“Nymphomaniacs,” she said, “and the morons who love them. I’d love to get them both out of town, but I’m not counting on it.”

“Just so he quits playing detective.”

“Oh, there’ll be no more of that,” she said. “No more leaving the office early, no more surprise visits.”

That was something.

T
HERE WERE TWO
white vans parked at the Wet Spot, and his first thought was that they were both here, Cowboy Hat and Tom Cruise. The vans weren’t parked side by side, and he saw right away that both were parked much nearer to the building than the original group of three had been, but it took a closer look than that to establish that these weren’t the vehicles he was looking for.

Both bore lettering on their doors, one proclaiming itself the property of a boiler repair firm, the other showing a pink pig wearing a top hat and carrying a cane. It might have been interesting to speculate as to what the Pig About Town was selling, and there was a phone number under the logo that he could have called, but they weren’t the vans he was looking for, and that was really as much as he needed to know.

What was the other place?

The Spotted Tiger, and he couldn’t remember what street it was on. He could go into the Wet Spot and ask, and somebody would be sure to know, but maybe the GPS would tell him.

He tried, and it did. Spotted Tiger Restaurant, 3304 Quincy Avenue. The sounded right, Quincy, and anyway, how right did it have to sound? I mean, how many Spotted Tigers were there likely to be?

F
ROM THE OUTSIDE
, the Spotted Tiger looked a lot like the Wet Spot. No white vans, though, which surprised Keller. You’d think they’d have one or two parked there, even if they weren’t the one he was looking for.

He went inside, just to make sure, and it was the right kind of crowd, too, a roomful of rednecks raising their voices to make themselves heard over a jukebox on which Marty Robbins was singing about the West Texas town of El Paso. Keller ordered a beer and looked around the room, while his mind tried to think of words to rhyme with El Paso. He right away came up with lasso, and that was as far as he got.

He saw a lot of men wearing boots, and even a Stetson or two, but he didn’t see Tom Cruise’s stunt double, and neither did he see the Marlboro Man’s near-twin.

He had a sip of beer. Well, he’d confirmed it. Their vans weren’t here and neither were they, and one sip was as much beer as he wanted to put in his system. He’d put a twenty on the bar, and now he scooped up enough of his change to leave an appropriate tip, and realized that he was thinking about eels, and how he’d read somewhere that all the eels in the world were born in the same spot, and they then went their separate ways, returning to wherever their parents had come from, and then when their lives had run their natural course, they somehow knew to swim back halfway across the world to where they’d been hatched. Where they would spawn and, with what Keller imagined was a great sense of relief, expire.

Was that even true? Never mind how he knew it, because he didn’t really
know
it, he’d just heard it or read it somewhere. Was it really every eel, or just a particular species? And how could anyone know for sure? Even if they tagged the mama and papa eels, so they knew they’d all gone to the same place, how would they know which little elvers had which parents?

But that, he realized, was the least of it. What was baffling was why this particular thought came to his mind just now, when he had no reason to think of eels or elvers or their ancestral home in the Sargasso Sea.

Oh.

El Paso, lasso, and Sargasso.

He’d thought he’d forgotten all about Marty Robbins and the damn song, but evidently he hadn’t, and there it was, running around in his mind even when his mind was turned off. The song had long since ended, he’d only heard the last half-minute of it, and a couple of songs had played since to which he’d paid no attention. Well, no conscious attention, because God knows what his mind was capable of when he wasn’t tuned in. A couple of songs, and he didn’t even know what they were, and right now Johnny Cash was telling everybody how he walked the line, and all of a sudden it seemed important to find out what the songwriter had rhymed with El Paso. It couldn’t be Sargasso, could it? Lasso was possible, in that kind of Old West song, but—

Oh, hell. He’d left his coins on the bar, along with a couple of singles, but he picked up a couple of quarters and found his way over to the jukebox. There it was, B-17, Marty Robbins, “El Paso.” He paid fifty cents to play it, which struck him as silly, considering that YouTube would happily let him hear it for free in the privacy of his own home.

And then he went back to his bar stool and waited while other people’s selections got played ahead of his. Loretta Lynn and Bobby Bare and Crystal Gayle, and a few he didn’t recognize, and he was beginning to understand how every once in a while you read about somebody in a place like this who took out a gun and started blasting away at the juke box. He’d always figured it was because they couldn’t stand the song that was playing, but maybe they couldn’t stand the song that
wasn’t
playing.

Ah, finally!
Down in the West Texas town of El Paso…

Without thinking, he’d picked up his beer and taken an unintended sip of it.

Not that a sip of beer would hurt him any. Still, it was bothersome that he’d done it after deciding not to. And he couldn’t afford to think about it, not now, because his song was playing, and he had to listen closely to find out what rhymed with El Paso.

Nothing, as it turned out.

The name of the song was El Paso, and it turned up in the lyrics a couple of times, and always at the end of a line. So you couldn’t think of the song without thinking of the town, but that didn’t mean that there was anything in there to rhyme with it. It came at the end of the first line in a stanza, and the rhymes were the words at the ends of lines two and four. So what rhymed with El Paso?

“Not a goddamned thing,” he said.

“Pardner,” a voice said at his elbow, “I have to say you got that right.”

A
ND, OF COURSE
, the man standing just to his right, the man who’d agreed with him without knowing what it was he was agreeing with, was big and tall and broad in the shoulders. And, no surprise, he was wearing boots. And, duh, a cowboy hat.

Keller, who hadn’t realized he’d spoken out loud, now had the opportunity to wish he hadn’t. While he was at it, he wished he’d saved fifty cents and ten or twelve minutes and left the Spotted Tiger while he had the chance.

“Um,” he said. “I don’t think we know each other.”

“Hell, I know you,” Cowboy Hat said. He turned to the shorter fellow on his right, who unsurprisingly turned out to be Tom Cruise. “Hey, Pete,” he said. “Remember this fellow?”

“Can’t say I do,” said Tom Cruise, whose name was evidently Pete.

“I can believe it, drunk as you was.” He shook his head, turned to Keller. “Last week,” he said. “We was right here, and you was right there. Except we was all three of us in the Wet Spot, not here in the Tiger. But you, you didn’t say a word, just drank your beer like a gentleman, and one minute you was there and the next minute you was gone.”

“Well,” Keller said.

“Is it coming back to you now, Pete?”

“Nope.”

“See, that’s the difference between you and me. I’m a man never forgets a face.”

“Can’t say the same,” Pete admitted. “Now I got a memory for vehicles. Show me a car, I’ll say, ‘Damn, I seen that car before.’ Unless I didn’t, in which case I won’t.”

“You and your cars,” Cowboy Hat said. “How about hats, little buddy? You got any kind of a memory for hats?”

“I remember yours,” Pete said. “I ought to, I see that ugly thing enough times.”

“Last time you saw this here gentleman, that you can’t remember ever seeing before, he was wearing one of the nicest looking hats you’ll ever hope to see.” He laid a hand on Keller’s shoulder. “What happened to that hat, pardner?”

“Uh,” Keller said.

“Nice gray felt hat, had a little turned-down brim, little crease right here—” he ran an illustrative forefinger along the top of Keller’s head “—and dimples here—” he used his thumb and forefinger to give a light pinch to Keller’s forehead. “There’s a name for that kind of hat, but I disremember what it is.”

“A fedora,” Keller murmured.

“Say again? Couldn’t quite hear you, what with all the noise in this place.”

“A fedora.”

“Yep, that’s it. Had it right on the tip of my tongue. A fedora.” He heaved a sigh, stuck out his hand. “Roy Savage,” he said.

“Jim,” Keller said, and shook Roy’s hand.

“And this here’s Pete, though it’s a waste of time introducing you, on account of he won’t remember.”

Another solemn handshake, with Pete assuring his new friend Jim that he’d sure remember him. “And your car, too,” he added.

Wonderful, just wonderful.

T
HE LAST THING
Keller ever wanted to do was get acquainted with the subject of an assignment. All he liked to have, really, was enough information so he could make a positive identification of the intended target. That often entailed knowing his name, but it was even better if he didn’t. It might not have made it more difficult to swing a hammer into the temple of the Marlboro Man if he’d known his name was Harold, but neither would it have made it easier.

It was Cowboy Hat—no, dammit, make that Roy—who supplied the name. Harold Garber, he said, after they’d all moved from the bar to a table, where Roy said they’d be able to hear better. Keller didn’t want to hear better, he didn’t want to hear anything at all, but he couldn’t figure out a way to leave that wouldn’t be even more memorable than if he were to stay.

Hell.

“Old Harold,” he said. “Man couldn’t ask for a better friend.”

“And look what you done,” Pete said.

“What?”

“Before Harold was even in the ground,” he said, “you was hitting on the widow.”

“Widow? Harold wasn’t married.”

“No, but
she
was,” Pete said. “Jim, you remember when we was in here that night? You was wearing your hat. And I remember that hat, matter of fact. Remember it perfectly well.”

Well, that was a comfort.

“I don’t remember all that much myself,” Keller volunteered.

“Harold couldn’t stop talking about this babe he spent the afternoon with,” Pete said. “And then the next thing we heard was Harold was dead. Killed right there in the parking lot at the Wet Spot, found dead in his truck with his head bashed in.”

Keller said that was terrible.

“With his own hammer,” Roy said, “which they called a crime of opportunity. You all of a sudden decide to kill a man, you look around for something, and there’s his hammer. Wham, and it’s done.”

“And Roy here was so shocked,” Pete said, “that the first chance he gets he’s over at the house on Robin’s Nest Road comforting the widow.”

“You are so wrong.”

“Oh yeah?”

“First of all, it’s Robin’s Nest Drive, not Road.”

“You look up Same Fucking Difference in the dictionary, what do you suppose you’re gonna see?”

“And on top of that, she wasn’t anybody’s widow, on account of her husband’s still alive. And that’s why I went there, you moron.”

“Because you’re a hound is why.”

“I was being considerate,” he said, and turned to Keller for support. “You’d do the same thing, right?”

“Uh—”

“Okay, bringing you up to speed. Harold had this girlfriend, rich lady, husband, old story. Saw her and didn’t exactly keep it to hisself.”

“‘Smell my finger,’” Pete said.

“Liked to boast a bit,” Roy said, “but who’s he hurting? None of us knows the woman.”

“One of us does now.”

“Pete, shut up, okay? Point is Harold died sudden.”

“On account of somebody killed him.”

“Followed him out the door and back to his van,” Roy said. “That’s what happened, most likely. There’s Harold, boasting the way he’d do, and there’s a roomful of men can’t help overhearing him—”

“On account of he’d raise his voice to make damn sure they heard him.”

“Well, that was Harold, all right. And I’m a little fuzzy on the details, I had a few beers myself, but we all of us decided to get out of there and come to the Tiger instead.”

“Too many tattoos,” Pete said.

“Anyway, Pete here took off.”

“Drove from there to here,” Pete said. “Nothing to it.”

“And I figured to let Harold go next, and I’d bring up the rear, but what happened was he was waiting for me to go, so it was like the two Frenchies. What’s their damn names, Pete?”

“Frenchies?”

“You know. ‘After you, my friend.’ ‘No, after you!’ Couple of Froggies, and what are their damn names?”

“Only Frenchman I know is that guy Giuseppe, and he’s Italian.”

“You’re a big help, Pete.”

Alphonse and Gaston, Keller thought, but kept it to himself.

“Pierre,” Roy said, “and Lucky Pierre. That’s not it, but it’ll do. So I headed for the Tiger, and Pete was already here when I pulled in.”

“Took you long enough,” Pete said.

“And we waited for Harold, and when we got tired of waiting we went in and had a couple of beers. And it wasn’t until the next day that we heard what happened to Harold.”

“He got hammered,” Pete offered.

“We all got hammered,” Roy said, “but with Harold it wasn’t just an expression. Guy followed him out, had to be a case of Harold got it on with somebody’s wife or girlfriend—”