Hit and Run

26

The next day he showed up at the job site, on a narrow side street off Napoleon Avenue. A longtime tenant had died, leaving the upstairs flat vacant and in need of a gut rehab. “Owner says turn it into a loft, one big room with an open kitchen,” said the contractor, a rawboned blond named Donny. “You missed the fun part, ripping them walls out. Let me tell you, it gives you a feeling.”

Now they had half the place Sheetrocked, and the next step would be painting, walls and ceiling, and when that was done they’d work on the floors. How was he with a roller, and how did he feel about ladders? He was fine with ladders, he said, and he’d be okay with a roller, though he might be a little rusty at first. “You just take your time,” Donny said. “Be no time at all before it all comes back to you. I just hope ten bucks an hour is all right with you ’cause that’s what I’m paying.”

He started with the ceiling, he knew enough to do that, and he’d used a paint roller before, painting his own apartment in New York. Donny had a look from time to time, and gave him a tip now and then, mostly about how to position the ladder so he wouldn’t have to move it as often. But evidently he was doing okay, and when he took the occasional break he managed to watch the others nailing sections of Sheetrock in place and covering the seams with joint compound. It didn’t look all that tricky, not once you knew what it was you were supposed to do.

He worked seven hours that first day and left with seventy dollars more than he’d started with, and an invitation to show up at eight the next morning. His legs ached a little, from all that climbing up and down the ladder, but it was a good ache, like you’d get from a decent workout at the gym.

He stopped to pick up flowers on the way home.

“That was Patsy,” Julia told him, after hanging up the phone. Patsy Morrill, he remembered, was a high school classmate of Julia’s; her name had been Patsy Wallings before she got married, and Donny Wallings was her kid brother. Patsy had called, Julia told him, to say that Donny had called her to thank her for sending Nick his way.

“He says you don’t say much,” she reported, “but you don’t miss much, either. ‘He’s not a guy that you have to tell him something twice.’ His very words, according to Patsy.”

“I didn’t know what the hell I was doing,” he said, “but by the time we were done for the day, I guess I pretty much got the hang of it.”

The next day he did some more painting, finishing the rest of the ceiling and starting in on the walls, and the day after that there were three of them, all painting, and Donny had switched him to a brush and put him to work on the wood trim. “On account of you got a steadier hand than Luis,” he explained privately, “and you’re not in such a damn rush.”

When the paint job was finished, he showed up as instructed at eight, and there were just the two of them, him and Donny. He wouldn’t be using Luis for the next couple of days, Donny confided, because the man didn’t know dick about sanding floors.

“Actually,” Keller said, “neither do I.”

That was okay with Donny. “Least I can explain it to you in English,” he said, “and y’all’ll pick it up a damn sight faster’n Luis would.”

The whole job lasted fifteen days, and when it was done the place looked beautiful, with a new open-plan kitchen installed and a new tile floor in the bathroom. The only part he didn’t care for was sanding the wood floors, because you had to wear a mask to keep from breathing the dust, and it got in your hair and your clothes and your mouth. He wouldn’t have wanted to do it day in and day out, but a couple of days’ worth now and then was no big deal. Laying ceramic tile in the bathroom, on the other hand, was a genuine pleasure, and he was sorry when that part of the job was over, and proud of how it looked.

The owner had shown up a couple of times to see how the job was going, and when it was finished she inspected everything and pronounced herself highly satisfied. She gave him and Luis each a hundred-dollar bonus, and she told Donny she’d have another job for him to look at in a week or so.

“Donny says she’ll be able to ask fifteen hundred a month for the place,” he told Julia. “The way we’ve got it fixed up.”

“She can ask it. She might have to take a little less, but I don’t know. Rents are funny now. She might get fifteen hundred at that.”

“In New York,” he said, “you’d get five or six thousand for a space like that. And they wouldn’t expect ceramic tile in the bathroom, either.”

“I hope you didn’t mention that to Donny.”

And of course he hadn’t, because the story they’d gone with was that he was Julia’s boyfriend, which was true enough, and that he’d followed her down from Wichita, which wasn’t. Sooner or later, he thought, someone familiar with the place would ask him a question about life in Wichita, and by then he hoped he’d know something about the city beyond the fact that it was somewhere in Kansas.

A friend of Donny’s called a day or two later. He had a paint job coming up, just walls, as the ceiling was okay. Three days for sure, maybe four, and he could pay the same ten bucks an hour. Could Nick use the work?

They wrapped it up in three days, and he had the weekend and two more days free before Donny rang up to say that he’d bid on that job and got it, and could Nick come by first thing the next morning? Keller wrote down the address and said he’d be there.

“I’ll tell you,” he said to Julia, “I’m beginning to believe I can make a living this way.”

“I don’t know why not. If I can make a living teaching fourth grade—”

“But you’ve got qualifications.”

“What, a teaching certificate? You’ve got qualifications, too. You’re sober, you show up on time, you do what you’re told, you speak English, and you don’t think you’re too good for the job. I’m proud of you, Nicholas.”

He was used to Donny and the others calling him Nick, and he was getting used to being called Nicholas by Julia. She still called him Keller in bed, but he could sense that would change, and that was okay. He’d been lucky, he realized, in that the name he’d found in St. Patrick’s Cemetery was one he could live with. That hadn’t been a consideration when he was squinting at weathered headstones, all he’d cared about was that the dates worked, but he saw now that he could have been saddled with a far less acceptable name than Nick Edwards.

He’d taken to giving her half his pay for his share of the rent and household expenses. She’d protested at first that it was too much, but he insisted, and she didn’t fight too hard. And what did he need money for, aside from buying gas for the car? (Although it might not be a bad idea to save up for a new car, or at least a new used car, because he was fine until somebody asked to see his registration.)

After dinner, they took their coffee out on the front porch. It was pleasant out there, watching people walk by, watching the day fade into twilight. He saw what she meant about the shrubbery, though. It had been allowed to grow a little too tall, and cut off a little too much of the light and the view.

He could probably work out how to trim it. As soon as he had a day off, he’d see what he could do.

One night, after they had made love, she broke the silence to point out that she’d called him Nicholas. What was really interesting was that he hadn’t even noticed. It seemed appropriate for her to call him that, in bed as well as out of it, because that seemed to be his name.

That was what it said on his Social Security card and his passport, both of which had turned up in the mail. The same day’s mail that brought the passport also contained an invitation to apply for a credit card. He’d been preapproved, he was told, and he wondered just what criteria had been used to preapprove him. He had a mailing address and a pulse, and evidently that was all they required of him.

Now, under the slow-moving blades of the ceiling fan, he said, “I guess I might not have to sell those stamps after all.”

“What are you talking about?”

She seemed alarmed, and he couldn’t imagine why.

“I thought you lost them,” she said. “I thought you said your whole collection was stolen.”

“It was, but I bought five rare stamps in Des Moines, before everything went to hell. They’d be tough to unload, but they’re still the closest thing I’ve got to a negotiable asset. The car’s worth more and there’s a bigger market for it, but you have to have clear title, and I don’t.”

“You bought the stamps in Des Moines?”

He got the stamps from his top dresser drawer, managed to find his tongs, and switched on the bedside lamp to show her the five little squares of paper. She asked a few questions — how old were they, what were they worth — and he wound up telling her all about them, and the circumstances of their purchase.

“I would have had plenty of cash for the trip back to New York,” he said, “if I hadn’t shelled out six hundred dollars for these. That left me with less than two hundred. But at the time that looked like more than enough, because I’d be charging everything, including my flight home. I had the stamps all paid for when the announcement came over the radio.”

“You mean you hadn’t heard about the assassination?”

“Nobody had, not when I was talking myself into buying the stamps. The best I can make out, Longford was eating rubber chicken with the Rotarians right around the time I was parking my car in Mr. McCue’s driveway. I didn’t grasp the significance right away, I thought it was coincidence, me being in Des Moines the same time a major political figure was assassinated. I had a completely different job to do, at least I thought I did, and, well — what’s the matter?”

“Don’t you see?”

“See what?”

“You didn’t kill the man. Governor Longford. You didn’t kill him.”

“Well, no kidding. It seems to me I told you that a long time ago.”

“No, you don’t get it. You know you didn’t do it, and I know you didn’t do it, but what you and I know is not enough to stop all those policemen from looking for you.”

“Right.”

“But if you were sitting in some stamp shop in — where did you say?”

“Urbandale.”

“Some stamp shop in Urbandale, Iowa. If you were sitting there at the very moment the governor was shot, and if Mr. McWhatsit was sitting across from you—”

“McCue.”

“Whatever.”

“His name used to be McWhatsit,” he said, “but his girlfriend said she wouldn’t marry him unless he changed it.”

“Shut up, for God’s sake, and let me get this out. This is important. If you were there and he was there, and he’ll remember because of the announcement on the radio, then doesn’t that prove you weren’t downtown shooting the governor? It doesn’t? Why not?”

“They went on making that announcement all day,” he said. “McCue will remember the sale, and he might even remember that it happened right around the time he heard about the assassination. But he won’t be able to swear exactly when that was, and even if he did a prosecutor could make him look like an idiot on the witness stand.”

“And a good defense attorney—”

But she stopped when she saw the way he was shaking his head. “No,” he said gently. “There’s something you don’t understand. Let’s say I could prove my innocence. Let’s say McCue could offer testimony that would absolutely get me off the hook, and while we’re at it let’s say that some other witness, some rock-solid pillar of the community, could come along to corroborate his testimony. It doesn’t matter.”