Hit and Run

17

Keller crossed the Hudson on the lower level of the George Washington Bridge, took the Harlem River Drive to the FDR, and got off it a few blocks from his apartment. He’d spent the afternoon in a movie theater at a shopping mall outside of East Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania. It called itself a quadruplex, which sounded to Keller like someone who’d stepped on a landmine and lived to tell the tale, but only meant it could show four movies at once. Keller saw two of them, but only paid for one; rather than call attention to himself by going out and buying another ticket, he went from one theater to the men’s room, then slipped into another theater to watch the second movie.

And if the usher had spotted him? What was he going to do, shoot his way out of it? Not likely, he’d stashed the SIG automatic in the glove compartment, and he was surprised to discover how vulnerable he felt without it. He’d only been carrying a gun for a few days, and it would be hard to imagine a less perilous venue than a darkened movie house on a weekday afternoon, with fewer than two dozen people in attendance and their median age somewhere around seventy-seven. He should have felt reasonably secure in such a setting, but it was beginning to dawn on him that he was never going to feel secure again, no matter where he went.

When the second feature ended, it was time to go. Head down, Homer Simpson leading the way, he returned to his car, and the first thing he did, before he fastened his seat belt or put the key in the ignition, was restore the gun to its place beneath his waistband. The pressure in the small of his back, he’d discovered, had become comforting.

It was dark when he left the movie theater, which had been pretty much the point of the visit. It was close to midnight by the time he was circling the blocks in his own neighborhood, trying to figure out what to do with the car. While his fantasy was still functioning, before the Times had come along to kick holes in it, he’d known just how to dispose of the Sentra. He’d drive it to some still-disreputable part of Brooklyn or the Bronx, and there he’d park it with the doors unlocked and the key in the ignition. He’d take the license plates off first, but he didn’t think their absence would dissuade some neighborhood youth from taking the car out for a spin. Where it wound up after that, in the NYPD impound lot or some chop shop in Bensonhurst, was of no concern to Keller. He’d be back home, living the good life, and taking a cab for any distance too far to walk.

Right.

Now that New York had become about as safe for him as Des Moines, he was going to need a car to get out of it. So he’d have to stow this car, and he’d have to put it where it wouldn’t get towed. That probably meant a parking lot, which in turn meant giving one more person a look at his face, and would probably entail passing a security camera or two. But it was hell finding a legal spot in his neighborhood, and even the illegal parking spaces were hard to come by. The U.N. Building was just a couple of blocks away, and cars immunized by their DPL plates against towing and ticketing slouched arrogantly alongside each bus stop and fire hydrant.

He passed one, a gleaming Lincoln Town Car, three times. It was blocking a hydrant, and it was doing all it could to block traffic at the same time, because the diplomat who’d parked it had been undiplomatic enough to leave it a full three feet from the curb. The third time around, Keller double-parked next to it, opened his trunk, rummaged around in his tool kit, and found what he needed.

Minutes later he was rounding the corner, and on the next block he found a space that left the Sentra sticking far enough into a bus stop to warrant a ticket, or possibly a tow. But it wouldn’t get either, not with the DPL tags covering his own plates.

Bring the suitcase along? No, what for?

He left it and started walking toward his building. And, with a little luck, his stamp collection.

Keller and his stamps had a complicated history.

He’d collected as a boy, which was hardly remarkable. Many boys of his generation had childhood stamp collections, especially quiet introspective types like Keller. A neighbor whose business involved a lot of correspondence with firms in Latin America had brought him a batch to get him started, and Keller had learned to soak them from their paper backing, dry them between sheets of paper towel, and mount them with hinges in the album his mother had bought him at Lamston’s. He’d eventually found other sources of stamps, buying mixtures and packets at Gimbel’s stamp department, and getting inexpensive stamps on approval from a dealer halfway across the country, picking out what he wanted, returning the rest along with his payment, and waiting for the dealer to send the next selection. He’d kept this up for a few years, never spending more than a dollar or two a week, and sometimes forgetting to return the approvals for weeks on end because other pursuits intruded. Eventually he lost interest in the collection, and eventually his mother sold it, or gave it away, as there wasn’t enough there to interest a dealer.

He was dismayed when he eventually found out it was gone, but not devastated, and he forgot about it and went on to other things, some of them more suspenseful than stamp collecting, though less socially acceptable. And time passed and the world changed. Keller’s mother was long gone, and so were Gimbel’s and Lamston’s.

For decades, he rarely thought of his stamp collection unless his memory was triggered by some bit of knowledge he owed to those childhood hours with tongs and hinges. There were times when it seemed to him that the greater portion of the information stored in his head had got there as a direct result of his hobby. He could, without any great difficulty, name all of the presidents of the United States in order, and he owed this ability to the series of presidential stamps issued in 1938, with each president’s head on the stamp with a value corresponding to his place in the procession. Washington was on the one-cent stamp, and Lincoln on the sixteen-cent stamp. He remembered this, even as he remembered that the one-cent stamp was green and the sixteen-cent stamp black, while the twenty-one-cent stamp, picturing New York’s own Chester Alan Arthur, was a dull blue.

He knew that Idaho had been admitted to the union in 1890, because the fiftieth anniversary had been commemorated by a stamp in 1940. He knew that a group of Swedes and Finns had settled at Wilmington, Delaware, in 1638, and that General Tadeusz Kosciuszko, the Polish general who served in the American Revolution, had been granted American citizenship in 1783. He might not know how to pronounce the man’s name, let alone spell it, but he knew what he did about him because of a blue five-cent stamp issued in 1933.

Occasionally a memory might turn him wistful, wishing he still had that essentially worthless collection that had filled so much of his time and turned his head into such a wonderland of trivia. But it never occurred to him to try to recapture those days. They were part of his youth, and they were gone.

Then, when the old man started slipping mentally, and when it was becoming clear that he was beginning to lose it big-time, Keller found himself contemplating retirement. He had some money saved up, and while it had amounted to less than 10 percent of what he’d eventually have in Dot’s online account, he’d managed to sell himself on the notion that it was enough.

But what would he do with his time? Play golf? Take up needlepoint? Start hanging out at the senior center? Dot pointed out that he would need a hobby, and a bunch of childhood memories popped into his head, and the first thing he did was buy a worldwide collection, 1840-to-1940, just to get himself started, and before he knew it he had a shelf full of albums and a subscription to Linn’s and dealers all over the country sending him price lists and approvals. And he’d also spent a surprisingly substantial portion of his retirement fund, so it was just as well when the old man was out of the picture entirely and he could go on working directly with Dot.

When he thought objectively about his stamps, he couldn’t avoid concluding that the whole enterprise was nuts. He was spending the greater portion of his discretionary income on little pieces of paper that were worth nothing except what he and other like-minded screwballs were willing to pay for them. And he was devoting the greater portion of his free time to acquiring those pieces of paper, and, having done so, to mounting them neatly and systematically in albums created for that purpose. He put a lot of effort into getting them to look just right on the page, this in spite of the fact that he never intended for any eyes but his to see them. He didn’t want to display his stamps at a show, or invite another collector over to have a look at them. He wanted them right there on the shelves in his apartment, where he and only he could look at them.

All of which, he had to admit, was at the very least irrational.

On the other hand, when he was working with his stamps, he was always entirely absorbed in what he was doing. He was expending considerable concentration on what was essentially an unimportant task, and that seemed to be something his spirit required. When he was in a bad mood, his stamps got him out of it. When he was anxious or irritable, his stamps took him to another realm where the anxiety or irritation ceased to matter. When the world seemed mad and out of control, his stamps provided a more orderly sphere where serenity ruled and logic prevailed.

If he wasn’t in the mood, the stamps could wait; if he was called out of town, he knew they’d be there when he got back. They weren’t pets that had to be fed and walked on a regular schedule, or plants that needed to be watered. They demanded his entire and absolute attention, but only when he had it to give.

He wondered sometimes if he was spending too much money on his collection, and perhaps he was, but his bills were always paid and he wasn’t carrying any debt, and he’d somehow managed to accumulate two and a half million dollars in investments, so why shouldn’t he spend what he wanted to on stamps?

Besides, decent philatelic material always increased in value over time. You couldn’t buy it one day and sell it the next and expect to come out ahead, but after you’d owned it awhile it would have appreciated enough to cover the dealer’s markup. And what other pastime worked that way? If you owned a boat, if you raced cars, if you went on safari, how much of what you spent could you expect to get back? What, for that matter, was your net return on bottles of Cristal and lines of cocaine?

And so he’d returned to New York for his stamps. There was nothing else to come back for, and ample reason to stay away. If he was a person of interest to the police, in addition to entering his apartment and sealing his bank accounts, they might very well have posted somebody to watch the place on the slim chance that he’d be fool enough to return.

If the cops weren’t waiting for him, what about Call-Me-Al? The people who’d pulled the strings in Des Moines weren’t willing to sit back and let nature take its course. They’d proved that in White Plains, because it wasn’t the old man’s chickens that had come home to roost, it was the turkeys on Al’s team who’d shot Dot dead and burned the place down around her.

They might have already known his name, and where he lived. If not, they’d have asked Dot, and he could only hope she’d answered right away, and that two quick bullets in the brain were all the punishment she’d been forced to endure. Because she’d have talked sooner or later, anyone would, and in this case sooner was better than later.

But maybe nobody had the place staked out, not the cops and not Al’s boys, either. Maybe all he had to do was figure out a way in and out without being spotted by the doorman.

It would probably take more than one trip, though. His collection was housed in ten good-sized albums, and the best plan he could come up with, sitting in the movie house in East Stroudsburg with his eyes on the screen, was to load up the oversize wheeled duffel that he’d bought on QVC a few years ago. He had never used it, it held far more stuff than he ever wanted to drag on any trip, business or pleasure, but the pitchman on the shopping channel had caught him at just the right moment, and before he knew what was happening he’d picked up the phone and bought the damn thing.

You could get four albums in it for sure, and possibly five, and the handle and wheels would enable him to get it to the car. Dump the albums in the trunk, go back for another load — two trips might do it, or three at the most.

There was some cash in the house, too, unless someone had found it by now. Not a fortune, just an emergency fund of somewhere between one and two thousand dollars. If this didn’t constitute an emergency he didn’t know what did, and he could definitely use the cash, but it wouldn’t have been enough to draw him back to the city, not if it had been ten or twenty times as much as it was.

The stamp collection was something else. He’d lost his first collection all those years ago. He didn’t want to lose this one.