Hit Me

Forty-One

Keller’s room was on the second floor, just to the left of the staircase. Even as the sound of Griffey’s rented car was dying in the distance, she’d said that he’d probably want to freshen up before dinner, and suggested he get his bag from the Toyota. Had he even mentioned that he’d packed and left the motel? Or had she just assumed it?

Either way, here he was in a guest room, with a large four-poster topped by a patchwork quilt. The design, squarely geometric, looked Amish to him, but he didn’t know much about quilts. Nor, he supposed, did he know much about stamps, not in comparison to a fellow like E. J. Griffey, who could flip through a few dozen albums in a matter of hours and come up with a professional assessment of their value.

On the other hand, what did E. J. Griffey know about fashioning a length of picture-hanging wire into a garrote?

After a shower and a change of clothes, Keller got his regular cell phone from his suitcase and called Julia. The brief conversation was ordinary enough, but he felt oddly detached from it. Should he mention that he’d relocated to the Soderling home? It wasn’t information she needed, he hadn’t bothered to tell her the name of his motel in the first place, but even so…

He called Dot on the Pablo phone. No answer, and after the fourth ring a male voice, computer-generated, invited him to leave a message. He rang off.

“I didn’t know what to do while the two of you were in the stamp room,” she said. “I would have gone for a ride, but somehow I felt I ought to be here, although I can’t think why. So I cooked.”

She’d prepared coq au vin. The coq, she told him, had grown up a mile and a half away, where he and his flock mates ranged free and enjoyed an organic diet. The vin was the same Pommard they were drinking. Jeb had enjoyed establishing a wine cellar, and ordered cases from a wine merchant on New York’s Madison Avenue.

She’d changed for dinner. She’d changed the blouse and slacks for a simple black dress that showed a hint of décolletage.

And she was wearing perfume. He caught the scent when she came around behind him to pour his coffee.

“That Mr. Griffey,” she said. “There was something very forbidding about that little man. I’d have been at a loss, trying to deal with him on my own. But you handled him brilliantly. You could see it in his face, that he’d been outmaneuvered and didn’t know how to respond. And he sat right down and raised his own bid.”

“Or didn’t,” Keller said. “For all we know he came back with the same envelope and never opened it.”

“Do you think that’s what he did?”

He shook his head. “I nicked the original envelope with my thumbnail,” he said, “and the envelope he came back with didn’t have the nick.”

“How on earth did you think to do that?”

“I don’t know,” he said, “and I’m not sure it made any difference, but he must have changed his bid, and he certainly wouldn’t have lowered it. I wonder how much he raised it.”

“What figure do you think he wrote down?”

“I couldn’t even guess.”

“More than a quarter of a million?”

He nodded.

“So you won’t get to buy Jeb’s stamps.”

“I’m afraid not.”

“Should we open the envelope? We could steam it open and reseal it. No one would ever know.”

“We could cut it open,” he said, “because no one but the two of us will ever see the bids anyway. And they’re your stamps, so you get to decide, but I’d rather stick to the script.”

“And open them all at once,” she said. “Like kids on Christmas? So as not to spoil the surprise?”

He thought about it. “That might be some of it,” he admitted, “but I have the sense that we’re in a stronger position if we don’t know. I can’t explain why, but—”

“No one can read our minds,” she said, “if there’s nothing in them. It’s fine with me, Nicholas. I’d rather go with your instincts than mine.”

Nicholas.

A few sentences later, almost to make a point, he managed to use her name in conversation. Mrs. Soderling.

“Denia,” she said at once. “You’re my houseguest now, and my negotiating partner. You can’t go on calling me Mrs. Soderling.”

“Denia.”

“It’s an unusual name, I know, but it’s better than the one given me at birth. Can you guess?”

He couldn’t.

“Gardenia,” she said. “Flower names are all right, but some are better than others. Rose and Iris, for instance, are less of a burden than Pansy or, I don’t know, Forsythia?”

“I don’t think I’ve ever known a Forsythia.”

“Neither have I, but I did know a girl named Dahlia, and that wasn’t too bad. My mother wore this overbearing scent called Jungle Gardenia, and evidently it had a profound visceral effect on my father, who bought it for her by the half gallon. And insisted on it for my name. I hated it, and as soon as I was old enough I had it changed legally.”

“To Denia.”

“Yes, which I like, except for the nuisance of having to explain its derivation. I have a complicated relationship with the scent. I can’t imagine wearing it, and I find it slightly sick-making, but at the same time it smells like Mommy, and that means warmth and comfort, doesn’t it?”

“It sounds complicated.”

“It might be,” she said, “but how often do I encounter it? Not once a year, I wouldn’t think. Generally speaking, I find things don’t have to be all that complicated, Nicholas.”

Oh?

“Some more wine? We really ought to finish the bottle.”

He covered his glass. “I’m already having trouble keeping my eyes open. It was oddly exhausting, sitting across the table from Mr. E. J. Griffey.”

“I can imagine.”

“And there’s a call I have to make before I turn in.”

“To New Orleans?”

To Sedona, but she didn’t need to know that. “I spoke to her earlier,” he said, “but I like to check in before I call it a day.”

“He was having an affair,” Dot said. “Why won’t you boys learn to keep it in your pants?”

Keller, sitting on the edge of the bed in the guest room, felt the rush of blood to his face.

“Pablo? You there?”

“I’m here.”

“Can you talk?”

“I’m the one who called,” he reminded her. “I’m in the client’s house, but I’m alone.”

“You’re in the client’s—oh, the stamp lady. Not the client client.”

“Who doesn’t have a house in the first place.”

“Not anymore. Well, he was having an affair, he had a tootsie on the side, and he wanted a divorce. And he was talking about a custody fight, and bringing up a lot of dirt on her, because she’d had an affair of her own a few years ago, which she regretted and thought they’d gotten past, and now he threw it in her face, and she just wanted him dead, the son of a bitch, and she remembered the man her father introduced her to, and—well, the rest is pretty much the way we figured it.”

“Jesus,” he said. “You got all this from the broker? From one of the cutout men?”

“No, of course not. She wouldn’t spew all of this to some guy, and if she did he’d never pass it on to me.”

“Then—”

“She told me. But can we cut to the chase, Pablo? She wants to call it off.”

“The client.”

“Right.”

“Wants to call off—”

“The contract. She wanted us to do something, remember? And now she’s changed her mind.”

“When did this happen?”

“In his hospital room, seeing him all helpless there with tubes coming out of him. Do you want to know exactly what passed through her mind?”

“Uh—”

“Okay, she’s in his room, he’s unconscious, nobody’s around, and it occurs to her that she can finish the job and no one will be the wiser. Pinch a tube shut, pull one out, pour something in his IV—there’s a dozen ways to do it, and she realizes she loves him and she wants him to pull through. I’ll spare you the emotional part, that comes under the heading of girl talk, but the bottom line is she loves him again and just wants him to live and be hers.”

“Dot—”

“You know, same reason you’re Pablo, I ought to be somebody else. You’re not as addicted to saying names as I am, but now and then it slips out. How’s Hilda?”

“Hilda?”

“If you have to call me something, Pablo, well, Hilda’ll do. No, come to think of it, it won’t. It’s too close to my official name these days. Make it Flora, okay?”

“If you say so. How did she get in touch with you?”

“She didn’t, Pablo. I got in touch with her. How? I picked up the phone and called her.”

“Who gave out her number?”

“Nobody, but how many Joanne Hudepohls are there? Her cell phone’s listed, so I dialed it, and she answered on the first ring. You’d have thought she was waiting for my call.”

“What phone did you—”

“Easy there, Pablo. A new phone, bought for cash and unregistered. Same as this one, but just for her. And I got her number via a Google search, and I used a computer in a Kinko’s in Flagstaff. There won’t be any trail, paper or electronic, and as soon as all of this is over the Joanne phone goes in a storm drain.”

“Maybe you should ditch it now.”

“I might need to talk to her some more.”

He frowned. “Why, for God’s sake?”

“Once she got that we didn’t burn her house down—”

“She knew somebody else did. And she only made that one call to her father’s buddy.”

“Right.”

“So she knows about the other guy, and that somebody else hired him.” He thought for a moment. “The girlfriend?”

“Gotta be. Or the girlfriend’s jealous husband.”

“The girlfriend’s married?”

“That I couldn’t tell you. But the girlfriend has to be the connection.”

“And the girlfriend, and thus the other guy, might not feel the game is over.”

“Right. They might try again. She’s hired people from a security agency to protect her husband in the hospital, and she’ll keep them on after he’s released.”

“Assuming he pulls through,” he said. “But why do we care?”

“Pablo, that sounds so cold. ‘Why do we care?’ A man’s life hangs in the balance, and his wife is in peril, and you ask a question like that.”

“And if I wait long enough,” he said, “maybe you’ll answer it.”

“Opportunity,” she said. “I hear it knocking. Pablo, get some rest. I’ll get back to you.”