Keller's Homecoming

  Keller’s Homecoming

  Lawrence Block

  Copyright © 2011, Lawrence Block

  All Rights Reserved

  Publication History: Hit Me, Mulholland, 2013

  Ebook by QA Productions

  A Lawrence Block Production

  Keller’s Homecoming

  * * *

  Keller, his suitcase unpacked, found himself curiously reluctant to leave his hotel room. He turned on the TV, channel-surfed without finding anything that held his attention, threw himself down on the bed, picked himself up, test-drove every chair in the room, and finally told himself to get over it. He wasn’t sure what it was that he had to get over, but he wasn’t going to find it sitting in his room. Or lying down, or pacing the floor.

  One explanation occurred to him in the elevator. Keller, who’d lived all his life in and around New York, had never had occasion to stay at a New York hotel before. Why would he? For years he’d had a wonderfully comfortable apartment on First Avenue in the Forties, and unless he was out of town, or had been invited to spend the night in the bed of some congenial female companion, that was where he slept.

  Nowadays the only female companion in his life, congenial or otherwise, was his wife, Julia, and he lived in her house in New Orleans’ Garden District. His name in New Orleans—and, for that matter, everywhere he went—was Edwards, Nicholas Edwards. He was a partner in a construction business, doing post-Katrina residential rehabilitation, and his partner called him Nick, as did the men they worked with. Julia called him Nicholas, except in intimate moments when she sometimes called him Keller.

  But she didn’t do that so often anymore. Oh, the intimate moments were no less frequent, but she was apt to call him Nicholas then. And, he thought, why not? That was his name. Nicholas Edwards. That’s what it said on his driver’s license, issued to him by the State of Louisiana, and on his passport, issued to him by the United States of America. And that was the name on every credit card and piece of ID in his wallet, so how could you say that wasn’t who he was? And why shouldn’t his wife call him by his rightful name?

  His daughter, Jenny, called him Daddy.

  He realized that he missed them both, Jenny and Julia, and it struck him that this was ridiculous. They’d driven him to the airport that morning, so it had been only a matter of hours since he’d seen them, and he went longer than that without seeing them on any busy work day. Of course there’d been fewer busy work days lately, the economy being what it was, and that in fact had a little to do with this visit to New York, but even so . . .

  How you do go on, he told himself. And, shaking his head, walked through the lobby and out onto the street.

  His hotel, the Savoyard, stood at the corner of Sixth Avenue and West Fifty-third Street. He took a moment to get his bearings, then headed uptown. There was a Starbucks two blocks from his hotel, and he waited at the counter while a young woman with a snake coiled around her upper arm—well, the inked representation of a snake, not an actual living reptile—made sure the barista understood exactly what she did and didn’t want in her latte. Keller couldn’t imagine caring quite that much about the composition of a cup of coffee, but neither could he imagine getting tattooed, so he let it go. When it was finally his turn, he asked for a small black coffee.

  “That would be Tall,” said the barista, herself sporting a tattoo and a few piercings. She drew the coffee without waiting for his reply, which was just as well, because Keller didn’t have one. The tables were all taken, but there was a high counter where you could stand while your coffee cooled. He did, and when it was cool enough to drink he drank it, and when he was done he left.

  By then he’d come up with another explanation for his disinclination to leave his hotel room. He wasn’t used to being in a hotel in New York, and consequently he wasn’t quite prepared for what they cost. This one, decent enough but hardly palatial, was charging him close to five hundred dollars for no more space than they gave you in a Days Inn.

  Spend that much on a room, you wanted to get your money’s worth. If you never left the room, it would only be costing you $40 an hour. If, on the other hand, you used it solely to sleep and shower—

  At Fifty-sixth Street he crossed to the west side of the avenue, and at Fifty-seventh Street he turned to his left and walked about a third of a block, stopping to look into the window of a shop that sold watches and earrings. Once Keller had heard one woman tell another on QVC that you couldn’t have too many earrings, a statement that he had found every bit as baffling as the snake tattoo.

  Keller wasn’t really interested in looking at earrings, and it wasn’t long before he’d turned to gaze instead across Fifty-seventh Street. Number 119 was directly across the street, and Keller stayed where he was and tried to pay attention to the people entering and leaving the office building. People came and went, and Keller didn’t see anyone who looked familiar to him, but Fifty-seventh was one of the wide crosstown streets, so he wasn’t getting a really good look at the faces of those who were coming and going.

  It wasn’t the hotel room, he realized. The price of it, the novelty of being in a New York hotel. He hadn’t wanted to leave the room because he was afraid to be out in public in New York.

  Where there were people who used to know him as Keller, and who knew too that one fine day in Des Moines, that very Keller had assassinated a popular charismatic Midwestern governor with presidential aspirations.

  Except he didn’t. It was a frame, he was the fall guy, and it cost him his comfortable New York life and the name under which he’d lived it. When all was said and done he didn’t have any regrets, because the life he led in New Orleans was worlds better than what he’d left behind. But that hadn’t been the plan of the man who set him up.

  That plan had called for Keller to be arrested, or better yet killed outright, and it had taken all Keller’s resourcefulness to keep it from turning out that way. The man who’d done the planning was dead now, thanks to Keller, and so was the man who’d helped him, and that was as far as Keller saw any need to carry it. Someone somewhere had pulled the trigger and gunned down the governor, but Keller figured that faceless fellow was probably dead himself, murdered by the man who’d hired him, a loose end carefully tied off. And if not, well, the best of luck to him. He’d just been a man doing a job, and that was something Keller could relate to.

  And Keller? He had a new name and a new life. So what was he doing back in New York?

  He walked back to the corner of Sixth and Fifty-seventh, waited for the light to change, then crossed the street and walked to the entrance of 119 West Fifty-seventh. This was a building he’d entered a dozen or more times over the years, and always for the same purpose. There had been a firm called Stampazine on the second floor, and every couple of months they held a Saturday auction, and there was always some interesting and affordable material up for grabs. Keller would sit in a wooden chair with a catalog in one hand and a pen in the other, and every now and then he would raise a forefinger, and sometimes he’d wind up the high bidder. At six or six-thirty he’d pick up his lots, pay cash for them, and go home happy.

  Stampazine was gone now. Had they closed before or after he’d left New York? He couldn’t remember.

  He recognized the uniformed lobby attendant. “Peachpit,” he said, and the man nodded in recognition—not of Keller but of Keller’s purpose. “Seven,” he said, and Keller went over and waited for the elevator.

  Peachpit Auction Galleries was a cut or two above Stampazine. Keller had never visited them during his New York years, but after he was settled in New Orleans an ad in Linn’s Stamp News send him to the Peachpit website. He bid on a couple of lots—unsuccessfully, someone else outbid him—but, having registered, h
e began to receive their catalogs several times a year. They were magnificently printed, with a color photograph of every lot, and he always found an abundance of choice material.

  There was a way to bid online in real time, during the actual floor auction, and he’d planned on doing so but always seemed to be at work during their midweek auctions. Then a few months ago he’d had the day off—he and Donny had the whole week off, actually, although they’d have preferred it otherwise. And he remembered the Peachpit sale, and logged on and went through what you had to go through to bid, and he found the whole process impossibly nervewracking. An auction was anxiety-ridden anyway, but when you showed up in person you could at least see what was going on, and know that the guy with the gavel could see you in return. Online, well, he supposed a person could get the hang of it, but he hadn’t, and wasn’t inclined to try again.

  Then, a couple of weeks ago, Julia and Jenny walked into his upstairs office—Daddy’s Stamp Room—to find him shaking his head over the new Peachpit catalog. Julia asked what was the matter.

  “Oh, this,” he said, tapping the catalog. “There are some lots I’d like to buy.”

  “So?

  “Well, the sale’s in New York.”

  “Oh,” she said.

  “Daddy ’tamps,” said Jenny.

  “Yes, Daddy’s stamps,” Keller said, and picked up his daughter and set her on his lap. “See?” he said, pointing at a picture in the catalog, a German Colonial issue from Kiauchau showing the Kaiser’s yacht, Hohenzollern. “Kiauchau,” he told Jenny, “was an area of two hundred square miles in southeast China. The Germans grabbed it in 1897, and then made arrangements to lease it from China. I don’t imagine the Chinese had a lot of choice in the matter. Isn’t that a pretty stamp?”

  “Pity ’tamp,” Jenny said, and there the matter lay.

  Until the phone rang two days later. It was Dot, calling from Sedona, and the first thing she did was apologize for calling at all.

  “I told myself I’d just call to see how you’re doing,” she said, “and to find out the latest cute thing Jenny said, but you know something, Keller? I’m too damn old to start fooling myself.”

  Dot still called him Keller. And that figured, because that’s who she was calling to talk to. Not Nick Edwards, who fixed houses, but Keller. Who, in a manner of speaking, fixed people.

  “The last thing I should be doing,” she went on, “is calling you. There’s two reasons why this is a mistake. First of all, you’re not in the business anymore. I dragged you back in once, that business in Dallas, and it wasn’t your fault that it didn’t go off perfectly. But it wasn’t what you really wanted, and we both agreed it was what the British call a one-off.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “One time only, I think. What’s the difference what it means? You went to Dallas, you came back from Dallas, end of story.”

  But if it was the end of the story, what was this? A sequel?

  “That’s one reason,” she said. “There’s another.”

  “Oh?”

  “Three words,” she said. “New. York. City.”

  “Oh.”

  “What am I even thinking, Keller, calling you when I’ve got a job in your old hometown? I didn’t throw New York jobs your way when you lived there, because you lived there.”

  “I worked a couple of New York assignments.”

  “Just a couple, and they weren’t exactly what you’d call problem-free. But at least you could walk around the city without wearing a mask. Now it’s the one place in the world where it’s not safe for you to be you, where even a waitress in a coffee shop can take a second look at you and reach for a telephone, and here I am calling you with a New York assignment, and that’s as far as this is going, because I’m hanging up.”

  “Wait a minute,” Keller said.

  The receptionist at Peachpit told him to have a seat, and he leafed through an old auction catalog while he waited. Then a stoop-shouldered man with his sleeves rolled up and his tie loosened came to show him inside and seat him in a stackable white plastic chair at a long table. He had already prepared a slip of paper with the numbers of the lots he wanted to inspect, and he looked them over carefully when they were brought to him.

  The stamps were tucked into individual two-inch square pockets of a chemically inert plastic, each plastic pocket stapled to its own sheet of paper bearing the lot number, estimated value, and opening bid. Keller had brought a pair of tongs, and could have taken out a stamp for closer inspection, but there was no need, and the tongs remained in his breast pocket. Given that the catalog had already shown him clear color photos of all of these stamps, it probably wasn’t necessary that he look at them in the first place. But he’d learned that actually looking at a stamp, up close and personal, helped him decide just how much he really wanted to own it.

  He’d requested a dozen lots, all of them stamps he needed, all of them stamps he genuinely wanted—and he didn’t want them any less now that he was getting a look at them. But he wasn’t going to buy them all, and this would help him decide which ones to buy only if they went cheap, and which ones deserved a firmer commitment. And, finally, which he’d go all out to get, hanging on like grim death, and—

  “Hello there! Haven’t seen you in a while, have I?”

  Keller froze in his white plastic chair.

  “She loves watching you work with your stamps,” Julia said. “‘Daddy tamps,’ she says. She has a little trouble with the S-T combination.”

  “I suppose philately is out of the question.”

  “For now. But before you know it she’ll be the only kid in her class who knows where Obock is.”

  “Just now I was telling her about Kiauchau.”

  “I know. But see, I know how to pronounce Obock.”

  He was silent for a moment. Then he said, “There’s something we have to talk about.”

  They sat at the kitchen table with cups of coffee and he said, “I’ve been keeping something from you, and I can’t do that. Ever since we found each other I’ve been able to say whatever’s been on my mind, and now I can’t, and I don’t like the way it feels.”

  “You met someone in Dallas.”

  He looked at her.

  “A woman,” she said.

  “Oh God,” he said. “It’s not what you think.”

  “It’s not?”

  If he had to kill this man, how would he do it? He was close to sixty, and he looked soft and pudgy, so you couldn’t call him a hard target. The closest thing Keller had to a weapon was the pair of stamp tongs in his breast pocket, but he’d made do often enough with nothing but his bare hands, and—

  “I guess you don’t recognize me,” the fellow was saying. “Been a few years, and it’s safe to say I put on a few pounds. It’s a rare year when I don’t. And the last time we saw each other the two of us were on a lower floor.”

  Keller looked at him.

  “Or am I wrong? Stampazine? I never missed their auctions, and I’d swear I saw you there a few times. I don’t know if we ever talked, and if I ever heard your name I’ve long since forgotten it, but I’m pretty good with faces. Faces and watermarks, they both tend to stick in my mind.” He stuck out a hand. “Irv,” he said. “Irv Feldspar.”

  “Nicholas Edwards.”

  “A damn shame Stampazine’s gone,” Feldspar said. “Bert Taub’s health was bad for years, and finally he closed up shop, and then the word got around that he missed the business and wanted to get back into it, and the next thing we knew he was dead.”

  “A hell of a thing,” Keller said, figuring something along those lines was expected of him.

  “Plenty of other auctions in this city,” Feldspar said, “but you could just show up at Stampazine and there’d be plenty of low-priced material to bid on. No fancy catalogs, no internet or phone bidders. I don’t think you and I ever bumped heads, did we? I’m strictly U.S. myself.”

  “Everything but U.S.,” Keller said. “Worldwide t
o 1940.”

  “So I was never bidding against you, so why would you remember me?”

  “I didn’t come all that often,” Keller said. “I live out of town, so—”

  “What, Jersey? Connecticut?”

  “New Orleans, so—”

  “You didn’t come in special for Bert’s auctions.”

  “Hardly. I just showed up when I happened to be in town.”

  “On business? What kind of business are you in, if I may ask?”

  Keller, letting a trace of the South find its way into his speech, explained that he was retired, and then answered the inevitable Katrina questions, until he cleared his throat and said he really wanted to focus on the lots he was examining. And Irv Feldspar apologized, said his wife told him he never knew when he was boring people, and that she was convinced he was suffering from Ass-Backward Syndrome.

  Keller nodded, concentrated on the stamps.

  Julia said, “I knew there was something. Something’s been different ever since you got back from Dallas, and I couldn’t say what it was, so I had to think it was another woman. And you’re a man, for heaven’s sake, and you were on the other side of the state line, and things happen. I know that. And I could stand that, if that’s what it was, and if what happened in Dallas stayed in Dallas. If it was going to be an ongoing thing, if she was important to you, well, maybe I could stand that and maybe I couldn’t.”

  “That wasn’t it.”

  “No, it wasn’t, was it?” She reached to lay her hand on top of his. “What a relief. My husband wasn’t fooling around with another woman. He was killing her.”

  “I don’t know what to say.”

  “Do you remember the night we met?”

  “Of course.”