Hit Me

Thirty-Nine

Keller, back at La Quinta, heard the phone ring once as he emerged from the shower. When it didn’t ring a second time, he reached for a towel and dried off, then found his cell phone on the dresser. It was turned off, so he turned it on to find out who’d called. There weren’t any calls, and even if there had been, how could he have heard the ring if the phone was turned off?

He picked up the room phone and rang the front desk, where a man who sounded as though he had better things to do informed him there had been no calls to his room. Keller hung up and worked on the puzzle for a moment before he remembered he had another phone, the one he used only for conversations with Dot.

But that phone often went unused for weeks on end, and he kept it turned off unless he was expecting a call or had one to make. Where was it, anyway?

He couldn’t seem to find it, and decided that was ridiculous, because he knew it was here, in this small room. Hadn’t he just heard it ring?

If it rang once, it could ring again, and couldn’t he make that happen? All he had to do was use his other phone to call his own number.

But he couldn’t do that, he realized when he had his regular phone in hand, his thumb poised over the numbers. Because, of course, he didn’t know his own number, and had never added it to his speed dial. Why would he? He never had occasion to call it himself, or to give it out to others. Only Dot used it, and only for calls that had to be kept private.

So much for that shortcut. He had a phone he couldn’t locate, and it was somewhere within earshot, but he couldn’t make the damn thing ring. All he could do was keep looking for it, knowing it was there, drawing precious little joy from the knowledge, and wishing it would ring.

It rang.

And, of course, there it was on the desk, invisible beneath a complimentary copy of Cheyenne This Week, which he’d picked up and paged through and tossed aside earlier. Evidently he’d tossed it right on top of his phone, but it had landed in such a way that it looked to be lying flat, an illusion that the ringtone instantly dispelled.

“Hello,” he said.

“Well, hello yourself,” Dot said. “Are you all right? You sound as though you just ran up three flights of stairs.”

“I’m fine.”

“Whatever you say, Pablo.”

Pablo?

“You’re still there, right? Counting stamps?”

“I’m here, but I’m not counting anything.”

“Not even your blessings? Well, whatever you do with stamps. I don’t suppose you lick them, but then neither does anybody else these days, not since the Post Office switched from lick-and-stick to whatever they call the new ones.”

“Self-adhesive.”

“Catchy. When’s the last time you actually licked a stamp, Pablo?”

He did so whenever he had a letter to mail, but Dot didn’t need to hear about discount postage. “It’s been a while,” he said, “but why are you calling me Pablo?”

“To keep from calling you by name.”

“Oh.”

“It’s reflexive,” she said. “I have this habit of calling you by name, using your name the way other people use commas. Not your new name. The old one, the one that’s one silly little vowel away from your occupation.”

Huh?

“I guess there’s nobody who calls you that anymore, is there?”

Julia did, sometimes. She’d known him before he’d picked the name Nicholas Edwards off a child’s tombstone, and like everyone else she’d called him by his last name, Keller. She never slipped and called him Keller in front of other people, and he didn’t think Jenny had ever heard the name spoken, but when they were making love, or when she was in the mood to make love, all at once he was Keller again.

But less so lately. Subtly, gradually, Nicholas was displacing Keller in the romance department, edging him out in the bedroom…

“Hence Pablo,” Dot said. “If you hate it I can probably come up with something else. I just always liked the name.”

“Pablo.”

“You hate it, don’t you?”

“It’s fine. Is that why you called? To see if I liked being called Pablo?”

“No, I just wanted to check in. I guess you’ve been keeping busy with stamps.”

“Pretty much.”

“Well, it’s not as though you missed anything. Richard Hudepohl’s still got a pulse, and nobody knows who burned his house down with him in it.”

“The wife hasn’t talked?”

“She hasn’t,” Dot said, “and I have to say I don’t blame her. I’ve been thinking about her.”

“Oh?”

“I think she’s our client.”

“Isn’t that what we said the other day?”

“Not exactly, because at the time I thought she’d set it all up. Took the kids, left the house, and made sure she stayed away until the deed was done.”

“Makes sense.”

“It does,” she said, “except it doesn’t. Pablo, she hasn’t got a thing to wear.”

“Huh?”

“What woman gets someone to burn down her house with all her clothes in it? That might seem like a good idea to Charles Lamb, but I bet Mrs. Lamb would see it differently. Mrs. Hudepohl, the good news is that your husband is dead. The bad news is your fifty pairs of shoes are history.”

“She had fifty pairs of shoes?”

“If she did, Pablo, she doesn’t anymore. And her husband’s not even dead.”

He thought about it. “All right,” he said. “She hired us, but while I was taking my time, somebody else went ahead and did the job. Who?”

“Suppose we just call him the other guy.”

“Okay. Who hired the other guy?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I know the wife didn’t, and she’s pissed.”

“Pissed.”

“Royally. I got a call from somebody who got a call from somebody who got a call from her. I know, it sounds like a bad song. The way she sees it, whoever burned her house down has to be the stupidest, craziest, most amateurish moron in the business.”

“Well,” Keller said, “I have to say I agree with her on that one.”

“It’s a pretty good description of our friend the other guy, isn’t it? I passed the word that it wasn’t us, so either one of the sub-brokers made more than one phone call—”

“Or someone else had the same idea she did. Are we sure she didn’t make arrangements with some joker she met in a bar, then call in a pro when she figured he wouldn’t go through with it?”

Dot was silent.

“And he went through with it after all? Except burning down the house that way called for some expert knowledge, wouldn’t you say? I certainly wouldn’t have known how to do it.”

“You wouldn’t have done it in the first place.”

“Well, there’s that. Still, does it sound like the work of some tattooed joker that you’d find on the Internet and meet in a bar?”

“Or find in a bar,” she said, “and meet on the Internet. I’ve got some calls in, Pablo, and I think I might make a few more. On the one hand, what do we care? Nobody’s asking us to give back the first payment, and there’s no way to earn the balance, so for us the war is over. Even so…”

“It’d be good to know.”

“It would,” she agreed. “I’ll be in touch. You’re with the Stamp Widow tomorrow? Keep your phone handy.”