Hit Man

10 Keller in Retirement

“R etiring? You, Keller?”Dot looked at him, frowned, shook her head. “Shy, maybe. But retiring? I don’t think so.”

“I’m thinking about it,” he said.

“You’re a city boy, Keller. What are you going to do, scoot off to Roseburg, Oregon? Buy yourself a little cabin of clay and wattles made?”

“Wattles?”

“Never mind.”

“It was a nice enough town,” he said. “ Roseburg. But you’re right, I’m a New Yorker. I’d stay right here.”

“But you’d be retired.”

He nodded. “I ran the numbers,” he said. “I can afford it. I’ve squirreled some money away over the years, and my rent’s reasonable. And I was never one to live high, Dot.”

“You’ve had expenses, though. All the earrings you bought for that girl.”

“ Andria.”

“I remember her name, Keller. I didn’t want to say it because I thought it might be a sore point.”

He shook his head. “She walked into my life,” he said, “and she walked my dog, and she walked out.”

“And took your dog along with her.”

“Well, he pretty much walked in himself,” he said, “so it figured he would walk out one day. For a while I missed both of them, and now I don’t miss either of them, so I’d have to say I came out of it okay.”

“Sounds like it.”

“And I never spent serious money on earrings. What do earrings have to do with anything, anyway?”

“Beats me. More tea, Keller?”

He nodded and she filled both their cups. They were in a Chinese restaurant in White Plains, half a mile from the big old house on Taunton Place where she lived with the old man. Keller had suggested they meet for lunch, and she’d suggested this place, and the meal had been about what he’d expected. The food looked Chinese enough, but it tasted suburban.

“He’s been slipping,” he said. “He has his good days and his bad days.”

“Not too many good days lately,” Dot said.

“I know. And we’ve talked about it, how sooner or later we have to do something. And I got to thinking, and it seems to me allI have to do is retire.”

“Throw in the towel,” Dot said. “Cash in your chips. Walk away from the table.”

“Something like that.”

“And?”

“And what?”

“You’re a young man, Keller. What are you going to do with the rest of your life?”

“The same as I do now,” he said, “but without leaving town on a job eight or ten times a year. Except for those little interruptions, you could say I’ve been retired for years. I go to the movies, I read a book, I work out at the gym, I take a long walk, I see a play, I have the occasional beer, I meet the occasional lady… ”

“Who takes your occasional dog for an occasional walk.”

He gave her a look. “Point is,” he said, “I keep on doing what I’ve been doing all along, except I don’t take contracts anymore.”

“Because you’re retired.”

“Right. What’s wrong with that?”

She thought about it. “It almost works,” she said.

“Almost? Why almost?”

“These things you do,” she said, “aren’t things you do.”

“Huh?”

“What they are, they’re things you keep busy with while you’re waiting for the phone to ring. They’re things you do between jobs. But if there weren’t any jobs, if you finally got used to the idea that the phone wasn’t going to ring, all that other stuff would have to be your whole life. And there’s not enough there, Keller. You’d go nuts.”

“You really think so?”

“Absolutely.”

“I sort of see what you mean,” he admitted. “The work is an interruption, and I’m usually irritated when the phone rings. But if it stopped ringing altogether… ”

“Right.”

“Well,hell, ” he said. “People retire all the time, some of them men who loved their work and put in sixty-hour weeks. What have they got that I don’t?”

She answered without hesitation. “A hobby,” she said.

“A hobby?”

“Something to be completely wrapped up in,” she said, “and it doesn’t much matter what it is. Whether you’re scuba diving or fly-fishing or playing golf or making things out of macramé.” She frowned. “Do you make stuff out of macramé?”

“I don’t.”

“I mean, what exactlyis macramé, do you happen to know? It’s not like papier-máche, is it?”

“You’re asking the wrong person, Dot.”

“Or is it that crap you make by tying knots? You’re right about me asking the wrong person, because whatever the hell macramé is, it’s notyour hobby. If it was you could make a cabin out of it, along with the clay and the wattles.”

“We’re back to wattles,” he said, “and I still don’t know what they are. The hell with them. If I had some sort of a hobby-”

“Any hobby, as long as you can really get caught up in it. Building model airplanes, racing slot cars, keeping bees… ”

“The landlord would love that.”

“Well, anything. Collecting stuff-coins, buttons, first editions. There are people who collect different kinds of barbed wire, can you believe it? Who even knew therewere different kinds of barbed wire?”

“I had a stamp collection when I was a kid,” Keller remembered. “I wonder whatever happened to it.”

“I collected stamps when I was a boy,” Keller told the stamp dealer. “I wonder whatever became of my collection.”

“Might as well wonder where the years went,” the man said. “You’d be about as likely to see them again.”

“You’re right about that. Still, I have to wonder what it would be worth, after all these years.”

“Well, I can tell you that,” the man said.

“You can?”

He nodded. “Be essentially worthless,” he said. “Say five or ten dollars, album included.”

Keller took a good look at the man. He was around seventy, with a full head of hair and unclouded blue eyes. He wore a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and a couple of pens shared his shirt pocket with some philatelic implements Keller recognized from decades ago-a pair of stamp tongs, a magnifier, a perforation gauge.

He said, “How do I know? Well, let’s say I’ve seen a lot of boyhood stamp collections, and they don’t vary much. You weren’t a rich kid by any chance, were you?”

“Hardly.”

“Didn’t get a thousand dollars a month allowance and spend half of that on stamps? I’ve known a few like that. Spoiled little bastards, but they put together some nice collections. How did you get your stamps?”

“A friend of my mother’s brought me stamps from the overseas mail that came to his office,” Keller said, remembering the man, picturing him suddenly for what must have been the first time in twenty-five years. “And I bought some stamps, and I got some by trading my duplicates with other kids.”

“What’s the most you ever paid for a stamp?”

“I don’t know.”

“A dollar?”

“For one stamp? Probably less than that.”

“Probably a lot less,” the man agreed. “Most of the stamps you bought probably didn’t run you more than a few cents apiece. That’s all they were worth then, and that’s all they’d be worth now.”

“Even after all these years? I guess stamps aren’t such a good investment, are they?”

“Not the ones you can buy for pennies apiece. See, it doesn’t matter how old a stamp is. A common stamp is always common and a cheap stamp is always cheap. Rare stamps, on the other hand, stay rare, and valuable stamps become more valuable. A stamp that cost a dollar twenty or thirty years ago might be worth two or three times as much today. A five-dollar stamp might go for twenty or thirty or even fifty dollars. And a thousand-dollar stamp back then could change hands for ten or twenty thousand today, or even more.”

“That’s very interesting,” Keller said.

“Is it? Because I’m an old fart who loves to talk, and I might be telling you more than you want to know.”

“Not at all,” Keller said, planting his elbows on the counter. “I’m definitely interested.”

“Now if you want to collect,” Wallens said, “there are a lot of ways to go about it. There are about as many ways to collect stamps as there are stamp collectors.”

Douglas Wallens was the dealer’s name, and his store was one of the last street-level stamp shops in New York, occupying the ground floor of a narrow three-story brick building on Twenty-eighth Street just east of Fifth Avenue. He could remember, Wallens said, when there were stamp stores on just about every block of midtown Manhattan, and when Nassau Street, way downtown, wasall stamp dealers.

“The only reason I’m still here is I own the building,” he said. “Otherwise I couldn’t afford the rent. I do okay, don’t get me wrong, but nowadays it’s all mail-order. As for the walk-in trade, well, you can see for yourself. There’s none to speak of.”

But philately remained a wonderful pastime, the king of hobbies and the hobby of kings. Kids still mounted stamps in their beginner albums-though fewer of them, in this age of computers. And grown men, young and old, well-off and not so well-off, still devoted a substantial portion of their free time and discretionary income to the pursuit.

And there were innumerable ways to collect.

“Topical’s very popular,” Wallens said. “Animals on stamps, birds on stamps, flowers on stamps. Insects-there’s series after series of butterflies, for example. Instead of running around with a net, you collect your butterflies on stamps.” He thumbed a box of Pliofilm-fronted packets, pulling out examples. “Very attractive stamps, some of these. Railroads on stamps, cars on stamps, paintings on stamps-you can start your own little gallery, keep it in an album. Coins on stamps, evenstamps on stamps. See? Modern stamps with pictures of classic nineteenth-century stamps on them. Nice-looking, aren’t they?”

“And you just pick a category?”

“Or a topic, which is what they generally call it. And there’s checklists available for the popular topics, and clubs you can join. You can design your own album, too, and you can even invent your own topic, like stamps relating to your own line of work.”

Assassins on stamps, Keller thought. Murderers on stamps.

“Dogs,” he said.

Wallens nodded. “Very popular topic,” he said. “Dogs on stamps. All the different breeds, as you can imagine… Here we go, twenty-four different dogs on stamps for eight dollars plus tax. You don’t want to buy this.”

“I don’t?”

“This is for a kid’s Christmas stocking. A serious collector wouldn’t want it. Some of the stamps are the low values from complete sets, and sooner or later you’d have to buy the whole set anyway. And a lot of these packet stamps are garbage, from a philatelic point of view. Every country’s issuing ridiculous stamps nowadays, printing up tons of colorful wallpaper to sell to collectors. But you’ve got certain countries, they probably don’t mail a hundred letters a month from the damn place, and they’re issuing hundreds of different stamps every year. The stamps are printed and sold here in the U.S., and they’ve never even seen the light of day in Dubai or Saint Vincent or Equatorial Guinea or whatever half-assed country authorized the issue in return for a cut of the profits…”

By the time Keller got out of there his head was buzzing. Wallens had talked more or less nonstop for two full hours, and Keller had found himself hanging on every word. It was impossible to remember it all, but the funny thing was that he’dwanted to remember it all. It was interesting.

No, it was more than that. It was fascinating.

He hadn’t parted with a penny, either, but he’d gone home with an armful of reading matter-three recent issues of a weekly stamp newspaper, two back numbers of a monthly magazine, along with a couple of catalogs for stamp auctions held in recent months.

In his apartment, Keller made a pot of coffee, poured himself a cup, and sat down with one of the weeklies. A front-page article discussed the proper method for mounting the new self-adhesive stamps. On the “Letters to the Editor” page, several collectors vented their anger at postal clerks who ruined collectible stamps by canceling them with pen and ink instead of a proper postmark.

When he took a sip of his coffee, it was cold. He looked at his watch and found out why. He’d been reading without pause for three straight hours.

“It’s funny,” he told Dot. “I don’t remember spending that much time with my stamps when I was a kid. It seems to me I was outside a lot, and anyway, I had the kind of attention span a kid has.”

“About the same as a fruit fly’s.”

“But I must have spent more time than I thought, and paid more attention. I keep seeing stamps I recognize. I’ll look at a black-and-white photo of a stamp and right away I know what the real color is. Because I remember it.”

“Good for you, Keller.”

“I learned a lot from stamps, you know. I can name the presidents of the United States in order.”

“In order to what?”

“There was this series,” he said. “George Washington was our first president, and he was on the one-cent stamp. It was green. John Adams was on the pink two-cent stamp, and Thomas Jefferson was on the three-cent violet, and so on.”

“Who was nineteenth, Keller?”

“Rutherford B. Hayes,” he said without hesitation. “And I think the stamp was reddish-brown, but I can’t swear to it.”

“Well, you probably won’t have to,” Dot told him. “I’ll be damned, Keller. It sounds for all the world as though you’ve got yourself a hobby. You’re a whatchamacallit, a philatelist.”

“It looks that way.”

“I think that’s great,” she said. “How many stamps have you got in your collection so far?”

“None,” he said.

“How’s that?”

“You have to buy them,” he said, “and before you do that you have to decide exactly what it is you want to buy. And I haven’t done that yet.”

“Oh,” she said. “Well, all the same, it certainly sounds like you’re off to a good start.”

“I was thinking about collecting a topic,” he told Wallens.

“You mentioned dogs, if I remember correctly.”

“I thought about dogs,” he said, “because I’ve always liked dogs. I had a dog named Soldier around the same time I had my stamp collection. And I thought about some other topics as well. But somehow topical collecting strikes me as a little, oh, what’s the word I want?”

Wallens let him think about it.

“Frivolous,” he said at length, pleased with the word and wondering if he’d ever had occasion to use it before. Not only did you learn the presidents in order, you wound up expanding your working vocabulary.

“I’ve known some topical collectors who were dedicated, serious philatelists,” Wallens said. “Quite sophisticated, too. But all the same I have to say I agree with you. When you collect topically, you’re not collecting stamps. You’re collecting what they portray.”

“That’s it,” Keller said.

“And there’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s not what you’re interested in.”

“No, it’s not.”

“So you probably want to collect a country, or a group of countries. Is there one in particular you’re drawn to?”

“I’m open to suggestions,” Keller said.

“Suggestions. Well, Western Europe ’s always good. France and colonies, Germany and German states. Benelux-that’s Belgium, Netherlands, and Luxembourg.”

“I know.”

“ British Empire ’s good-or at least it was when there was such a thing. Now all the former colonies are independent, and some of them are among the worst offenders when it comes to issuing meaningless stamps by the carload. Our own country’s getting bad itself, printing stamps to honor dead rock stars, for God’s sake.”

“Reading the magazines,” Keller said, “it made me want to collect everything, but most of the newer stamps… ”

“Wallpaper.”

“I mean, stamps with Walt Disney characters?”

“Say no more,” said Wallens, rolling his eyes. He drummed the counter. “You know,” he said, “I think I know where you’re coming from, and I could tell you what I would do in your position.”

“Please do.”

“I’d collect worldwide,” Wallens said, warming to the topic. “But with a cutoff.”

“A cutoff?”

“They issued more stamps worldwide in the past three years than they did in the first hundred. Well, collect the first hundred years. Stamps of the world, 1840 to 1940. Those are your classic issues. They’re real stamps, every one of them. They aren’t pretty in a flashy way, they’re engraved instead of photo-printed, and they’re most of them a single color. But they’re real stamps and not wallpaper.”

“The first hundred years,” Keller said.

“You know,” Wallens said, “I’d be inclined to stretch that a dozen years. 1840 to 1952, and that way you’re including the George the Sixth issues and stopping short of Elizabeth, which was about the time the British Empire quit amounting to anything. And that way you’re also including all the wartime and postwar issues, all very interesting philatelically and a lot of fun to collect. A hundred years sounds like a nice round number, but 1952’s really a better spot to draw the line.”

Something clicked for Keller. “That’s very appealing,” he said.

Wallens suggested he start by buying a collection. He’d save money that way and get off to a flying start. Two whole shelves in the dealer’s back room held collections, general and specialized. Wallens showed him a three-volume collection, stamps of the world, 1840 to 1949. No great rarities, Wallens said as they paged through the albums, but plenty of good stamps, and the condition was decent throughout. The catalog value of the entire lot was just under $50,000, and Wallens had it priced at $5450.

“But I could trim that,” he said. “Five thousand even. It’s a pretty good deal, but on the other hand it’s a major commitment for a man who never paid more than ten or twenty cents for a stamp, or thirty-two cents if he was getting ready to mail a letter. You’ll want to take some time and think about it.”

“It’s just what I want,” Keller said.

“It’s nice, and priced very fair, but I’m not going to pretend it’s unique. There are a lot of collections like this on the market, and it wouldn’t be a bad idea for you to shop around.”

Why? “I’ll take it,” Keller said.

Keller, at his desk, lifted a stamp with his tongs, affixed a folded glassine hinge to its back, then mounted the stamp in his new album. At Wallens’s urging he had purchased a fine set of new albums and was systematically remounting all the stamps from the collection he had bought. The new albums were of much better quality, but that wasn’t the only reason for the remounting operation.

“That way you’ll come to know the stamps,” Wallens had told him, “and they’ll become yours. Otherwise you’d just be adding new stamps to another man’s collection. This way you’re creating a collection of your own.”

And Wallens was right, of course. It took time and it absorbed you utterly, and you got to know the stamps. Sometimes the previous owner had mounted a stamp in the wrong space, and Keller took great satisfaction in correcting the error. And, as he finished transferring each country to the new album, he made himself a checklist, so he could tell at a glance what stamps he owned and what ones he needed.

He was up to Belgium now, and had gotten as far as Leopold II. The stamps he was working on had little tabs attached, stating in French and Flemish, the nation’s two languages, that the letter was not to be delivered on a Sunday. (If you wanted Sunday delivery, you removed the tab before you licked the stamp and stuck it on the envelope.) A couple of Keller’s stamps lacked the Sunday tab, which made them much less desirable, and Keller decided to replace them when he got the chance. He’d prepare his checklist accordingly, he thought, and the phone rang.

“Keller,” Dot said, “I’ll just bet you’re playing with your stamps.”

“Working with them,” he said.

“I stand corrected. Speaking of work, why don’t you come out and see me?”

“Now?”

“You’re just a part-time philatelist,” she pointed out. “You haven’t retired yet. Duty calls.”

Keller flew to New Orleans and took a cab to a hotel on the edge of the French Quarter. He unpacked and sat down with a city map and a photograph. The photo showed a middle-aged man with a full head of wavy hair, a deep tan, and a thirty-two-tooth smile. He was wearing a broad-brimmed Panama hat and holding a cigar. His name was Richard Wickwire, and he had killed at least one wife, and possibly two.

Six years previously, Wickwire had married Pam Shileen, daughter of a local businessman who’d done very nicely, thank you, in sulphur and natural gas. Several years into a stormy marriage, Pam Wickwire drowned in her swimming pool. After a brief mourning period, Richard Wickwire demonstrated his continuing enthusiasm for the Shileen family by marrying Pam’s younger sister, Rachel.

The second marriage was, it seemed, also problematic. Rachel, a friend later testified, had feared for her life, and had reported that Wickwire had threatened to kill her. Straighten up and fly right, he’d told her, or he’d drown her the same as he’d drowned her sad-ass sister.

He didn’t, though. He stabbed her instead, using the carving knife from the family barbecue set and sticking it straight into her heart. That at least was the prosecution’s contention, and the evidence was pretty convincing, but the essential twelve persons were not unanimously convinced. The first trial ended in a hung jury, and on retrial the second jury voted to acquit.

So Jim Paul Shileen had a few drinks, loaded a sixgun, and went looking for his son-in-law. Found him, called him a son of a bitch, and emptied the gun at him, hitting him once in the shoulder and once in the hip, hitting a female companion of Wickwire’s in the left buttock, and missing altogether with the three remaining bullets.

Shileen turned himself in, only to be charged with assault and attempted murder, acquitted of all charges, and given a stiff warning by the judge. “In other words,” Dot had said, “ ‘You didn’t do it. Now don’t do it again.’ So he’s not going to do it again, Keller, and that’s where you come in.”

Wickwire, fully recovered from his wounds, was living in the same Garden District mansion he’d shared in turn with Pam and Rachel Shileen. He had married again, taking as his third bride not the young woman Shileen had wounded but a sweet young thing who’d been a juror, coincidentally enough, at his second trial. She’d visited him in the hospital after the shooting, and one thing led to another.

“The shooting evidently got his attention,” Dot had said, “so he’s got himself a couple of live-in bodyguards now, and you’d think they were his AmEx cards.”

“Because he never leaves home without them.”

“Apparently not. The client thought an explosive device might do the trick, and for all he cares the new wife and the bodyguards can come to the party, too. I figured you might not care for that.”

“I don’t.”

“Too high tech, too noisy, and too much heat. Of course you’ll do it your own way, Keller. You’ve got two weeks. The client wants to be out of the country when it happens, and that’s how long he’ll be gone. I figure if you can do it at all you can do it in two weeks.”

Generally the case, he said. And what did the old man upstairs think about it?

“Unless he’s telepathic,” Dot said, “he’s got no opinion. I took the call myself and headed the play on my own.”

“I guess he was having a bad day.”

“Actually,” she said, “it was one of his better days, but I shortstopped the phone call anyway, and I figured, why give him a chance to screw this one up? You think I did the wrong thing?”

“Not at all,” he said. “I’ve got no problem with that. My only problem is Wickwire.”

“And you’ve got two weeks to solve him. Or until he murders wife number three, whichever comes first.”

Keller studied the map, studied the photo. Wickwire’s address looked to be within walking distance, and he felt capable of finding his way. And the weather was fine, and it would do him good to get out and stretch his legs.

He walked to Wickwire’s residence and stopped across the street for a look at the house. He was shooting for inconspicuous, but a woman pruning roses noted his interest and said, “That’s where he lives. The wife-killer.”

“Uh,” he said.

“Just a matter of time before he goes for the hat trick,” the woman said, savaging the air with her pruning shears. “That new wife’s just playing moth to his flame, isn’t she? Any girl that stupid, now you hate to see her hurt, but you wouldn’t want her to produce young ones, either.”

Keller said she had a point.

“The father-in-law? Not the dumbbell’s daddy, I’m talking about Mr. Shileen. Now he’s a gentleman, but he got excited and that’s what threw his aim off.”

“Maybe he’ll do better next time,” Keller said recklessly.

“What I hear,” the woman said, “he’s come to see there’s things you can’t do all by yourself. He went and hired some professional, flew him down here from Chicago to take care of things Mob-style.”

Oh boy, Keller thought.

Keller had enjoyed walking to Wickwire’s house, but enough was enough. He returned to his hotel on the St. Charles Avenue streetcar, and made his next visit to the Garden District the next morning in a rented Pontiac. He spent the better part of three days-or the worst part, if you asked him-trailing along after Wickwire’s Lincoln. One of the bodyguards drove, the other rode shotgun, and Wickwire sat by himself in the rear seat.

If you were in fact from Chicago, Keller thought, there was an obvious Mob-style way to take care of things. All you had to do was pull up alongside the Lincoln, zip your window down, and let go with a burst of auto fire at the rear side window. It was unlikely that Wickwire’s car sported reinforced side panels and bulletproof glass, so that ought to do the trick. You could probably manage to spray the two bozos in the front seat while you were at it. Pow! Take that! Now you know how we handle things in the city with the big shoulders!

Not his style, Keller thought. He supposed it wouldn’t be impossible to find someone local who could sell him the tools for the job, the gun and the ammunition, but it still wasn’t his way of doing things. He was, after all, a New Yorker. He was inclined to be a little less obvious, a little more sophisticated.

Besides, no matter how airtight an alibi the client put together, the cops would figure he’d put out a contract. So the less professional the whole affair looked, the better it was for Jim Paul Shileen.

Keller walked around the Quarter. He passed bars offering genuine New Orleans jazz and restaurants boasting genuine New Orleans cuisine. If they had to keep insisting it was authentic, he thought, it probably wasn’t. When a strip-club barker began his pitch, Keller waved him off; he didn’t want to hear about genuine girls with genuine breasts.

Next thing he knew he was standing in front of an antique shop, studying the earrings in the window. He turned away, got his bearings, and headed for his hotel.

In his room he found himself changing channels as if determined to wear out the remote. He turned off the TV, picked up a magazine, flipped the pages, tossed it aside.

The thing was, he didn’t want to be here. He wanted to be back in his own apartment, working on his stamps.

So what he had to do was figure out the right approach to Richard Wickwire and go ahead and do it and go home. Get out of New Orleans and get back to Belgium.

Let’s see. Wickwire got out of the house a lot, and the bodyguards always went with him. But the new wife, for the most part, stayed home. So Keller could pay a call in Wickwire’s absence.

Once inside the house, he could stuff the new wife in a coat closet and lay doggo, waiting for Wickwire to return, taking out him and his bodyguards before they had a clue. But that was heavy-handed, that was as Chicago as deep-dish pizza. There ought to be a subtler way… and just like that it came to him.

Get into the house. Arrange an accident for wife number three. Take her out back and drown her in the pool, say. Or break her neck and leave her at the foot of the stairs, as if she’d taken a header down the staircase. There was no end of ways to kill her, and how hard could any of them be? The woman obviously had the self-preservation instincts of a lemming.

Then let Wickwire explain.

It was poetic, and that part appealed to him. Wickwire, having murdered two wives with impunity, would get one of the state of Louisiana ’s special flu shots for a murder he hadn’t committed, a wife he hadn’t killed. Neat.

He went out and got something to eat, and by the time he got back to the room he had abandoned the scheme. There were a couple of things wrong with it, chief among them being the uncertainty of the enterprise. If they hadn’t been able to convict him before, when everybody but the jury flat-out knew he was guilty, who was to say they could do it now? The bastard’s luck might hold. You couldn’t be positive it wouldn’t.

Besides, the client had paid to have Wickwire killed, not framed. The client was getting on in years, and he didn’t have all the time in the world. If Wickwire finally wound up convicted, and if he did indeed draw a sentence of death by lethal injection, he still had enough money to stretch out the appeal process for years on end. Revenge, Keller had heard, was a dish best enjoyed cold, but you didn’t want it with mold growing on it. How sweet could it be if your victim outlived you?

Think of something else, Keller told himself, and let your subconscious take care of it. He picked up the stamp weekly he’d brought along-the current issue, he was a subscriber now-and flipped the pages until a story about precancels caught his eye. He read it, and half of another story. Then he straightened up in his chair and put the paper aside.

Gotcha, he thought.

He turned the idea over in his mind, and this time he couldn’t find anything wrong with it. It would take special equipment, but nothing that would be too hard to come by. He’d obtained the same item once before, in a small city in the American heartland, and if you could find it in Muscatine, Iowa, how hard would it be to lay hands on it a few hundred miles downriver?

He checked the Yellow Pages and found a likely source within walking distance. He called, and they had what he wanted. He broke the connection and looked up motels in the Yellow Pages, then thought of another listing to check.

The dealer was a pudgy, round-shouldered fellow in his fifties. He wore a pale blue corduroy shirt with a button-down collar he hadn’t troubled to button down. His suspenders had Roman coins on them, but the shop itself was exclusively devoted to stamps; there was a sign in the window, professionally lettered, asserting,WE DO NOT BUY OR SELL COINS.

“Nothing against them,” said the man, whose name was Hildebrand. “But I don’t happen to buy or sell chewing gum, either. Only difference is I don’t have to put a sign in the window to keep the gum chewers away. I don’tknow anything about coins, I don’tunderstand coins, I don’t have afeel for coins, so why should I presume to traffic in the damned things?”

Keller’s eyes went involuntarily to the suspenders. Hildebrand noticed, and rolled his eyes. “Women,” he said.

That seemed to call for a reply, but Keller was stumped.

“My wife wanted to buy me suspenders,” Hildebrand said, “and she thought suspenders with stamps would be nice, seeing that I’ve been a collector all my life, and a dealermost of my life. She bought me a tie with stamps on it a few years ago- U.S. classics, the Black Jack, the Jenny invert, the one-dollar Trans-Mississippi. Nice stamps, and it’s a nice tie, and I wear it when I have to wear a necktie, which isn’t often.”

“I see,” Keller said.

“So she couldn’tfind suspenders with stamps,” Hildebrand said, “so she bought these, withcoins on them, because according to her they amounted to the same thing. Can you imagine?”

“Wow,” Keller said.

“All those years, and she thinks stamps and coins amount to the same thing. Well, what are you going to do, do you know what I mean?”

“Perfectly.”

“Other hand, where would we be without ’em? Women, I mean. Or coins, for that matter, but-” He brought himself up short. “Enough of that. What can I do for you?”

“I’m in town on business,” Keller said, “and I’ve got a little time to spare, and I thought I could look at some stamps.”

“I’d say you came to the right place. What do you collect, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“Worldwide. Before 1952.”

“Oh, the good stuff,” Hildebrand said, with what sounded like appreciation and respect. “The classics. Well, I’ve got plenty of stuff for you to look at. Any particular countries you’d like to see?”

“How about Austria? That’s one of the checklists I happen to have with me.”

“ Austria,” said Hildebrand. “You have a seat right here, why don’t you? I’ve got a nice stock, mint and used. Including some of those early semipostals that get tougher to find every time you look for them. Do they have to be Never Hinged?”

“No,” Keller said. “I hinge my stamps.”

“Man after my own heart. You just make yourself comfortable. Here’s a pair of tongs you can use, unless you brought your own?”

“I didn’t think to pack them.”

“What some folks do,” Hildebrand said, “is keep an extra pair in their suitcase, and that way they’ve always got tongs with ’em. Here’s a stock book- Austria -and here’s a box of glassines, also Austria. Enjoy yourself, and just give a holler if I can help you with anything.”

“Mr. Wickwire? My name is Sue Ellen? Sue Ellen Bates?”

“Yes?”

“I guess you don’t remember. In the restaurant? I brought you your cocktails, and you smiled at me?”

“Rings a bell,” Wickwire said.

“I said how I knew all along you were innocent, and next time I came to the table you gave me a slip of paper? With your name and number on it?”

“I did, did I? When was this, Sue Ellen?”

“Oh, it was a while ago. It took me this long to get up my courage, and then I was out of town for a while. I just got back, I’m staying at a motel until I get my own place.”

“Is that a fact?”

“And now you don’t even remember me. Shoot, I knew I should of called earlier!”

“Who says I don’t remember you? Refresh my memory, girl. What-all do you look like?”

“Well, I’m blond.”

“You know, I kind of thought you might be.”

“And I’m slim, except I’m what you call fullfigured.”

“I think I’m beginning to remember you, child.”

“And I’m twenty-four years old, and I stand five foot seven, and my eyes are blue.”

“Any tattoos or piercings I should know about?”

“No, I think they’re tacky. Plus my mom’d about kill me.”

“Well, you sound good enough to eat.”

“Why, Mr. Wickwire!”

“Just an expression. You know what’d be good? If I could meet you, that’d be the best way ever to refresh a man’s memory.”

“You want to meet me at a restaurant or something?”

“That’s a little public, Sue Ellen. And in my position…”

“Oh, I see what you mean.”

“Did you say you were staying at a motel, Sue Ellen? Where’s it at?”

“Hello, this is Sue Ellen Bates calling?”

“Come again?”

“My name is like Sue Ellen Bates? I’m blond, and my eyes are like blue?”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Dot said. “Keller, when are you going to grow up?”

“I’ve wondered that myself.”

“You’re using one of those telephone voice-changers, and I wish to God you’d disconnect it. You sound like a girl, and a stupid one at that.”

“I don’t know how you can say such a thing?”

“It’s making every sentence sound like a question that does it,” she said. “That’s a nice touch, I’ve got to give you that. It makes you sound just like one of those teenage morons at the mall who can’t remember where she parked her mother’s car.”

“Well,” Keller said, “helikes me.”

“Who? Oh, I get it.”

“I’m meeting him the day after tomorrow. At my place.”

“Not until then?”

“It’s tough for him to get away.”

“It’s going to get even tougher. Well, at least you’re in a town with plenty to do. You shouldn’t have trouble amusing yourself for the next couple of days.”

“You’re right about that,” Keller said.

“ Australia,” the dealer said. He was a generation younger than Hildebrand, and his shop was on the second floor of an office building on Rampart Street.

“I’ve got a good run of the early Kangaroos, if you’d like to see them. How about Australian States, while we’re in that part of the world? Queensland, Victoria, Tasmania, New South Wales…”

“I haven’t got my lists for those.”

“Another time,” the fellow said. “Here’s tongs, here’s a gauge if you want to check perfs. Let me know if there’s anything else you need.”

“I’ll do that,” Keller said.

The motel was in Metairie. Before his conversation with Richard Wickwire, Keller had called the motel and tried out the voice-changer on them, booking a room as Sue Ellen Bates. Then he drove over there, paid cash for a week in advance, and picked up the key. He let himself into the room, stowed some women’s garments in the dresser and closet, and messed up the bed.

He didn’t pay another visit to the room until an hour before Sue Ellen’s date with Wickwire. He left the Pontiac a block away in a strip-mall parking lot, let himself into the room, and cracked the seal on a pint of bourbon. He poured an ounce of bourbon into each of two motel tumblers, made a lipstick mark on one of them, and placed them on the bedside table. He spilled a little bourbon on the rug, a little more on the chair, and left the pint standing open on the dresser.

Then he unlocked the door and left it very slightly ajar. He switched on the TV, tuned it to a talk show, lowered the volume. Next came the hard part-sitting and waiting. He should have brought the stamp weekly along. He’d read everything in it, but he could have read it again. You always picked up something you’d missed the first time.

Wickwire was due at two o’clock. At one-fifty, the phone on the bedside table rang. Keller frowned at it, then picked it up and said hello.

“Sue Ellen?”

“Mr. Wickwire?”

“I might be five or ten minutes late, sugar. Just wanted to let you know.”

“I’ll be waiting,” Keller said. “You just come right on in.”

He hung up and disconnected the voice-changer, wondering what he’d have done if he hadn’t thought to hook it up earlier. Well, no sense trembling over unspilled milk.

At 2:10 Wickwire still hadn’t shown. At 2:15 there was a knock at the door. “Sue Ellen?” Keller didn’t say anything.

“You here, Sue Ellen?”

Wickwire edged the door open. Keller, waiting behind it, let him get all the way inside. No telling who might be watching.

“Sue Ellen? Girl, where are you hiding yourself?”

Keller wrapped an arm around the big man’s neck, got him in a choke hold, and applied the pressure, kicking the door shut while he was at it. Wickwire struggled at first, his shoulders bucking, then sagged in Keller’s arms and slumped forward.

Keller let him go, stepped back, and kicked him three times in the face. Then he knelt down next to the unconscious Wickwire and broke his neck. He stripped the corpse to socks and underwear, heaved him onto the bed, and spilled most of the remaining bourbon into his open mouth. He took a chair and laid it on its side, took a pillow and flung it across the room, left dresser drawers half-open. He packed up the voice-changer, along with the clothing from the drawers and closet, and remembered to fetch Wickwire’s wallet and money clip from his trousers.

He locked the door, fastened the chain bolt. The peephole in the door didn’t afford much of a view, but he was able to see what looked like Wickwire’s Lincoln Town Car parked at the very edge of his field of vision. It was odds-on the bodyguards were in it, listening to terrible music on the radio, waiting for their boss to knock off a cutie.

Or vice versa, Keller thought.

He wiped the surfaces where he might have left prints, then climbed out through the bathroom window and headed for the strip mall where he’d left the car.

Back in his own hotel, Keller packed his suitcase and checked flight schedules. There was, as far as he could tell, no point in sticking around. The job was done, and, if he said so himself, done rather neatly.

It would look for all the world like a badger game scam gone wrong. The woman who’d called herself Sue Ellen Bates had lured Wickwire to the motel room, and her male partner had turned up to extort money from him. There’d been a scuffle, with Wickwire sustaining injuries to the face and head before he had his neck broken, accidentally or on purpose.

Then the two con artists had had the presence of mind to try staging things, pouring bourbon on Wickwire, even though an autopsy would fail to show any of the stuff inside him. They hadn’t troubled to straighten up after themselves, however, had stuck around only long enough to rob the corpse, then fled.

There were probably some loose ends and inconsistencies, but Keller didn’t figure anybody would lose sleep over them. All in all, it was a death that looked like a logical consequence of the life Richard Wickwire had lately led, and both the New Orleans cops and the citizenry at large were apt to conclude that it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy. Which, come to think of it, was pretty much Keller’s own view of the matter.

He’d stuffed Sue Ellen’s clothes in one Dumpster, the telephone voice-changer in another. In the time-honored tradition of pickpockets and purse snatchers, he’d dropped Wickwire’s wallet (minus the cash and credit cards) into a mailbox. The plastic, sliced into unidentifiable fragments, went down a storm drain. Wickwire’s money clip-sterling silver, monogrammed-was identifiable, so he’d take it back to New York and manage to lose it there, where whoever found it would keep it or hock it or melt it or give it to a friend with the right initials.

Meanwhile it was full of cash, and the cash was now Keller’s. He counted it, along with the bills from Wickwire’s wallet, and was surprised by the total, which ran to just under fifteen hundred dollars.

He thought of Hildebrand, the man with the suspenders, and of the Austrian stamps he’d bought from him. There’d been a few more he’d have liked to buy, especially a mint copy of Austria ’s first stamp, Scott #1, the one kreuzer orange. It was an error, printed on both sides, and listed in the catalog at $1450. Hildebrand had tagged it $1000 and indicated he’d take $900 for it, but that struck Keller as an awful lot to pay for a stamp that his album didn’t even have a space for. Besides, he could pick up a used copy for a tenth the price of a mint specimen.

Still, he hadn’t been able to get the stamp out of his head. And now, with a windfall like this…

And it wasn’t as if he were in that big a rush to get back to New York.

It was about a month later when the telephone rang in Keller’s apartment. He was at his desk, working on his stamp collection. He still hadn’t finished the task of remounting everything in his new albums, but he’d made good progress, having recently knocked off Sweden and started in on Switzerland.

He picked up the phone, and Dot said, “Keller, you work too goddam hard. I think you should take a vacation.”

“A vacation,” he said.

“That’s the ticket. Haul your butt out of town and stay gone for a week.”

“A week?”

“You know what? A week’s not long enough to unwind, the way you go at it. Better make it ten days.”

“Where do you want me to go?”

“Well, hell,” she said. “It’s your vacation, Keller. What do I care where you go?”

“I thought you might have a suggestion.”

“Anyplace nice,” she said. “So long as they’ve got a decent hotel, the kind where you’d be comfortable checking in under your own name.”

“I see.”

“Buy yourself a plane ticket.”

“Under my own name,” he said.

“Why not? Use your credit card, so you’ve got a good record for tax purposes.”

Keller rang off and sat back, thinking. A vacation, for God’s sake. He didn’t take vacations, the kind that called for travel. His life in New York was a vacation, and when he traveled it was strictly business.

He had a good idea what this was about, and didn’t really want to look at it too closely. Meanwhile, though, he had to pick a destination and get out of town. Where, though?

He reached for the latest stamp weekly, turned the pages. Then he picked up the phone and called the airlines.

Keller had been to Kansas City several times over the years. His work had always gone smoothly, and his memories of the town were good ones. They were crazy about fountains, he remembered. Every time you turned around you ran across another fountain. If a city had to have a theme, he supposed you could do a lot worse than fountains. They gladdened the heart a lot more than, say, nuclear reactor cones.

It was an unusual experience for him to travel under his own name and use his own credit cards. He sort of liked it, but felt exposed and vulnerable. Signing in at the restored downtown hotel, he wrote down not only his own name but his own address as well. Who ever heard of such a thing?

Of course, as a retiree he’d be doing that all the time. No reason not to. Assuming he ever went anyplace.

He unpacked and took a shower, then put on a tie and jacket and went to the third-floor suite to pick up an auction catalog.

There were half a dozen men in the room, two of them employees of the firm conducting the sale, the others potential bidders who’d come for an advance look at the lots that interested them. They sat at card tables, using tongs to extract stamps from glassine envelopes, squinting at them through pocket magnifiers, checking the perforations, jotting down notes in the margins of their catalogs.

Keller took the catalog to his room. He’d brought his checklists, a whole sheaf of them, and he sat down and got to work. The following day they were still offering lots for inspection, so he went down there again and examined some of the lots he’d checked off in the catalog. He had his own pair of tongs to lift the stamps with, his own pocket magnifier to squint through.

He got to talking with a fellow a few years older than himself, a man named McEwell who’d driven over from St. Louis for the sale. McEwell was interested exclusively in Germany and German states and colonies, and it seemed unlikely that the two of them would be butting heads during the sale, so they felt comfortable getting acquainted. Over dinner at a steakhouse they talked stamps far into the night, and Keller picked up some good pointers on auction strategy. He felt grateful, and tried to grab the check, but McEwell insisted on splitting it. “It’s a three-day auction,” he told Keller, “and you’re a general collector with a ton of lots in there to tempt you. You save your money for the stamps.”

It was indeed a three-day sale, and Keller was in his chair for all three days. The first session was all U.S., so there was nothing for him to bid on, but the whole process was fascinating all the same. There were mail bids for all the lots, and floor action on the majority of them, and the auction moved along at a surprisingly brisk pace. It was good to have a session where he was just an observer; it gave him the chance to get the hang of it.

The next two days, he was a player.

He’d brought a lot of cash, more than he’d planned on spending, and he got more in the form of a cash advance on his Visa card. When it was all over he sat in his hotel room with his purchases on the desk in front of him, pleased with what he’d acquired and the bargain prices he’d paid, but a little bit anxious at having spent so much money.

He had dinner again that night with McEwell, and confided some of what he was feeling. “I know what you mean,” McEwell said, “and I’ve been there myself. I remember the first time I paid over a thousand dollars for a single stamp.”

“It’s a milestone.”

“Well, it was for me. And I said to the dealer, ‘You know, that’s a lot of money.’ And he said, ‘Well, it is, but you’re only going to buy that stamp once.’ ”

“I never thought of it that way,” Keller said.

He stayed on at the hotel after the sale was over, and every morning at breakfast he read theNew York Times. On Thursday he found the article he’d been more or less waiting for. He read it several times through, and he would have liked to pick up a phone but decided he’d better not.

He stayed in Kansas City that day, and the next day, too. He walked around an art museum for a couple of hours without paying much attention to what he saw. He dropped in on a couple of stamp dealers, one of whom he’d seen at the auction, and he spent a few dollars, but his heart wasn’t really in it.

The next day he packed his bag and flew back to New York. First thing the following morning he got on a train to White Plains.

In the kitchen, Dot poured him a glass of iced tea and muted the television set. How many times had he been here, sitting like this? But there was a difference. This time the two of them were all alone in the big old house.

“It’s hard to believe he’s gone,” he said.

“Tell me about it,” Dot said. “I keep thinking I should be bringing him his breakfast on a tray, taking the paper up to him. Then I remind myself I’ll never get to do that again. He’s gone.”

“So many years…”

“For you and me both, Keller.”

“The paper just said natural causes,” he said. “It didn’t go into detail.”

“No.”

“But I don’t suppose it could have been all that natural. Or you wouldn’t have sent me to Kansas City.”

“That’s where you went? Kansas City?”

He nodded. “Nice enough town.”

“But you wouldn’t want to live there.”

“I’m a New Yorker,” he said. “Remember?”

“Vividly.”

“Natural causes,” he prompted.

“Well, what could be more natural? You live too long, you got a mind that’s starting to turn to pablum, you become erratic and unreliable, what’s the natural thing for someone to do?”

“It was that bad, huh?”

“Keller,” she said, “three weeks ago this reporter showed up. A kid barely old enough to shave, working his first job on the local paper. I’ll tell you, I thought he was there to sell me a subscription, but no, he came to interview the old man.”

“You’d think the editor would have sent somebody more experienced.”

“It wasn’t the editor’s idea,” she said, “or the kid’s either, God help him. And who does that leave?”

“You mean… ”

“He’d decided it was time to write his memoirs. Time to tell all the untold stories, time to tell where the bodies were buried. And I do mean bodies, Keller, and I do mean buried.”

“Jesus.”

“He saw this kid’s byline on some high school basketball roundup and decided he was the perfect person to collaborate with.”

“For God’s sake.”

“Need I say more? I’d already reached the point where I made sure all incoming calls got routed downstairs. Now I had to worry about the calls he made on his own. Keller, it’s the hardest decision I ever had to make in my life.”

“I can imagine.”

“But what choice did I have? It had to be done.”

“Sounds that way.” He picked up his tea, put it down untasted. “Who’d you get for it, Dot?”

“Who do you think, Keller? You know the story about the little red hen?”

“No.”

“Well, I’m not about to tell it to you, but she couldn’t find anyone to help her, so she did it all herself.”

“You…”

“Right.”

“Dot, for God’s sake. I would have done it.”

“I didn’t even want you within five hundred miles, Keller. I wanted you to have an alibi that nobody could crack. Just in case somebody knew about the connection and decided to shake the box and see what fell out.”

“I understand,” he said, “but under the circumstances… ”

“No,” she said. “And I have to say it was easy for me, Keller. The hardest decision, but the easiest thing in the world. Something in his cocoa to make him sleep, and a pillow over his face to keep him from waking up.”

“That’s the kind of thing that shows up in an autopsy.”

“Only if they hold one,” she said. “His age, and then his regular doctor came over and signed the death certificate, and that’s all you need. I had him cremated. It was his last wish.”

“It was?”

“How do I know? I said it was, and they gave me the ashes in a tin can, and if some joker wants to do an autopsy now I’d say he’s got his work cut out for him. I don’t know what the hell to do with the ashes. Well, I’m sure I’ll think of something. There’s no hurry.”

“No.”

“It was something I never thought I’d have to do, something I never even figured I’d be capable of doing. Well, you never know, do you?”

“No.”

“It’s on my mind a lot, but I guess I’ll get over that. This too shall pass, right?”

“You’ll be fine,” he said.

“I know. I’m fine now, as far as that goes. Now all I have to do is figure out what I’m going to do with the rest of my life.”

“I was going to ask you about that.”

She frowned. “What I suppose I’ll do,” she said, “is retire. I can afford it. I’ve put money aside myself, and he left me the house. I can sell it.”

“Probably bring a good price.”

“You would think so. And there’s the cash on hand, which he didn’t specifically leave me, but since I’m the only one who knows about it… ”

“That makes it yours.”

“You bet. So it’s enough to live on. I can even afford to travel some. Go on cruises, put my feet up, see the world from the deck of a ship.”

“You don’t actually sound that enthusiastic, Dot.”

“Well,” she said, “it’s probably because I’m not. What I’d rather do is keep on keeping on.”

“Stay here, you mean?”

“Why not? And stay in the business. You know, I’m the one who’s been pretty much running things lately.”

“I know.”

“But with you deciding to pack it in, it would mean finding other people to work with, and the ones I have access to are not people I’m crazy about. So I don’t know.”

“You can’t work with people unless you feel a hundred percent about them.”

“I know it. Look, I’m better off hanging it up. All I have to do is follow the same advice I gave you.”

“And get a hobby.”

“There you go. It really worked for you, didn’t it?You’re a full-fledged philatelist, and don’t ask me to say that three times.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it. But that’s me, all right.”

“I’ll bet you even found a stamp dealer in Kansas City. To pass the time while you were there.”

“Actually,” he said, “that’s how I picked Kansas City.” And he told her a little about the auction. “It’s pretty amazing,” he said. “You’ll be sitting next to some rube in baggy pants and a dirty T-shirt, and he’ll raise his index finger a few times and spend fifty or a hundred thousand dollars on postmasters’ provisionals.”

“Whatever they are,” she said. “No, don’t tell me. I have a feeling stamp collecting’s not going to be my hobby, Keller, but I think it’s great that it’s yours. I guess we can say you’re retired, can’t we? And fully prepared to enjoy the Golden Years.”

“Well,” he said.

“Well what?”

“Well, not exactly.”

“What’s the matter?”

“Well, it’s an expensive hobby,” he said. “It doesn’t have to be, you can buy thousands of stamps for two and three cents apiece, but if you really get serious about it… ”

“It runs into money.”

“It does,” he agreed. “I’m afraid I’ve been dipping into my retirement fund the last month or so. I’ve spent more money than I expected to.”

“No kidding.”

“And the thing is I’m really enjoying it,” he said, “and learning more and more about it as I go along. I’d like to keep on spending serious money on stamps.”

She gave him a thoughtful look. “It doesn’t sound as though you’re quite ready to retire after all.”

“I’m not in a position to,” he said. “Not anymore. And I don’t really want to, either. In fact I’d like to get as much work as I can, because I can use the money.”

“To buy stamps.”

“It sounds silly, I know, but… ”

“No it doesn’t,” she said. “It sounds like the answer to a maiden’s prayer. We always worked well together, didn’t we, Keller?”

“Always.”

“Some of the other jokers I was considering, I think they might have a hard time coming to terms with the idea of working for a woman. But I don’t see that as a problem for you and me.”

“Certainly not.”

“Well,” she said. “Thank God for stamp collecting is all that I can say. How about another glass of iced tea, Keller? And you can even tell me about postmasters’ promotionals, if it makes you happy.”

“Provisionals,” he said. “And you don’t have to hear about them. I’m happy already.”