The Best American Mystery Stories 2007

Lawrence Block Keller’s Double Dribble

From Murder at the Foul Line

Keller, his hands in his pockets, watched a dark-skinned black man with his shirt off drive for the basket. His shaved head gleamed, and the muscles of his upper back, the traps and lats, bulged as if steroidally enhanced. Another man, wearing a T-shirt but otherwise of the same shade and physique, leapt to block the shot, and the two bodies met in midair. It was a little like ballet, Keller thought, and a little like combat, and the ball kissed off the backboard and dropped through the hoop.

There was no net, just a bare hoop. The playground was at the corner of Sixth Avenue and West Third Street, in Greenwich Village, and Keller was one of a handful of spectators standing outside the high chain-link fence, watching idly as ten men, half wearing T-shirts, half bare-chested, played a fiercely competitive game of half-court basketball.

If this were a game at the Garden, the last play would have sent someone to the free-throw line. But there was no ref here to call fouls, and order was maintained in a simpler fashion: Anyone who fouled too frequently was thrown out of the game. It was, Keller felt, an interesting libertarian solution, and he thought it might be worth a try outside the basketball court, but had a feeling it would be tough to make it work.

Keller watched a few more plays, feeling his spirits sink as he did, yet finding it oddly difficult to tear himself away. He’d had a tooth drilled and filled a few blocks away, by a dentist who had himself played varsity basketball years ago at the University of Kentucky, and had been walking around waiting for the Novocain to wear off so he could grab some lunch, and the basketball game had caught his eye, and here he was. Watching, and being brought down in the process, because basketball always depressed him.

His mouth wasn’t numb anymore. He crossed the street, walked two blocks east, turned right on Sullivan Street, left on Bleecker. He considered and rejected restaurants as he walked, knowing he wanted something spicy. If basketball depressed him, highly seasoned food put him right again. He thought it odd, didn’t understand it, but knew it worked.

The restaurant he found was Indian, and Keller made sure the waiter got the message. “You tone things down for Westerners,” he told the man. “I only look like an American of European ancestry. Inside, I am a man from Sri Lanka.”

“You want spicy,” the waiter said.

“I want very spicy,” Keller said. “And then some.”

The little man beamed. “You wish to sweat.”

“I wish to suffer.”

“Leave it to me,” the little man said.

The meal was almost too hot to eat. It was nominally a lamb curry, but its ingredients might have been anything. Lamb, beef, dog, duck. Tofu, shoe leather, balsawood. Papier-mâché? Plaster of Paris? The searing heat of the cayenne obscured everything else. Keller, forcing himself to finish every bite, loved and hated every minute of it. By the time he was done he was drenched in perspiration and felt as if he’d just gone ten rounds with a worthy opponent. He felt, too, a sense of accomplishment and an abiding sense of peace with the world.

Something made him call home to check his answering machine. Two hours later he was on the front porch of the big old house on Taunton Place, sipping a glass of iced tea. Three days after that he was in Indiana.

At the Avis desk at Indy International, Keller turned in the Chevy he’d driven from New York. At the Hertz counter, he picked up the keys to the Ford he’d reserved. He carried his bag to the car, left it in short-term parking, and went back into the airport, remembering to take his bag with him. There was a fellow waiting at baggage claim, wearing the green and gold John Deere cap they’d said he’d be wearing.

“Oh, there you are,” the fellow said when Keller approached him. “The bags are just starting to come down.”

Keller brandished his carry-on, said he hadn’t checked anything.

“Then I guess you didn’t bring a nail clipper,” the man said, “or a Swiss Army knife. Never mind a bazooka.”

Keller had a Swiss Army knife in his carry-on and a nail clipper in his pocket, attached to his key ring. Since he hadn’t flown anywhere, he’d had no problem. As for the other, well, he had never minded a bazooka in his life, and saw no reason to start now.

“Now let’s get you squared away,” the man said. He was around forty, and lean, except for an incongruous potbelly, as if he’d swallowed a small watermelon. “Quick orientation, drive you around, show you where he lives. We’ll take my car, and when we’re done, you can drop me off and keep it.”

The airport was at the southwest corner of Indianapolis, and the man (who’d flipped the John Deere cap into the back-seat of his Hyundai squareback, alongside Keller’s carry-on) drove to Carmel, an upscale suburb north of the I-465 beltway. He made a few efforts at conversation, which Keller let wither on the vine, whereupon he gave up and switched on the radio. He kept it tuned to an all-talk station, and right now two opinionated fellows were arguing about the outsourcing of jobs.

Keller thought about turning it off. You’re a hit man, brought in at great expense from out of town, and some gofer picks you up and plays the radio, and you turn it off, what’s he gonna do? Be impressed and a little intimidated, he thought, but decided it wasn’t worth the trouble.

The driver killed the radio himself when they left the interstate and drove through the tree-lined streets of Carmel. Keller paid close attention now, noting street names and landmarks and taking a good look at the house that was pointed out to him. It was a Dutch Colonial with a mansard roof, he noted, and that tugged at his memory until he remembered a real estate agent in Roseburg, Oregon, who’d shown him through a similar house years ago. Keller had wanted to buy it, to move there. For a few days, anyway, until he came to his senses.

When they were done, the man asked him if there was anything else he wanted to see, and Keller said there wasn’t. “Then I’ll drive you to my house,” the man said, “and you can drop me off.”

Keller shook his head. “Drop me at the airport,” he said.

“Oh, Jesus,” the man said. “Is something wrong? Did I say the wrong thing?”

Keller looked at him.

“’Cause if you’re backing out, I’m gonna get blamed for it. They’ll have a goddamn fit. Is it the location? Because, you know, it doesn’t have to be at his house. It could be anywhere.”

Oh. Keller explained that he didn’t want to use the Hyundai, that he’d pick up a car at the airport. He preferred it that way, he said.

Driving back to the airport, the man obviously wanted to ask why Keller wanted his own car, and just as obviously was afraid to say a word. Nor did he play the radio. The silence was a heavy one, but that was okay with Keller.

When they got there, the fellow said he supposed Keller wanted to rent a car. Keller shook his head and directed him to the lot where he’d already stowed the Ford. “Keep going,” he said. “Maybe that one… no, that’s the one I want. Stop here.”

“What are you gonna do?”

“Borrow a car,” Keller said.

He’d added the key to his key ring, and now he stood alongside the car and made a show of flipping through keys, finally selecting the one they’d given him. He tried it in the door and, unsurprisingly, it worked. He tried it in the ignition, and it worked there, too. He switched off the ignition and went back to the Hyundai for his carry-on, where the driver, wide-eyed, asked him if he was really going to steal that car.

“I’m just borrowing it,” he said.

“But if the owner reports it—”

“I’ll be done with it by then.” He smiled. “Relax. I do this all the time.”

The fellow started to say something, then changed his mind. “Well,” he said instead. “Look, do you want a piece?”

Was the man offering him a woman? Or, God forbid, offering to supply sexual favors personally? Keller frowned and then realized the piece in question was a gun. Keller, relieved, shook his head and said he had everything he needed in his carry-on. Amazing the damage you could inflict with a Swiss Army knife and a nail clipper.

“Well,” the man said again. “Well, here’s something.” He reached into his breast pocket and came out with a pair of tickets. “To the Pacers game,” he said. “They’re playing the Knicks, so I guess you’ll be rooting for your homies, huh? Tonight, eight sharp. They’re not courtside, but they’re damn good seats. You want, I could dig up somebody to go with you, keep you company.”

Keller said he’d take care of that himself, and the man didn’t seem surprised to hear it.

“He’s a witness,” Dot had said, “but apparently nobody’s thought of sticking him in the Federal Witness Protection Program, but maybe that’s because the situation’s not federal. Do you have to be involved in a federal case in order to be protected by the federal government?”

Keller wasn’t sure, and Dot said it didn’t really matter. What mattered was that the witness wasn’t in the program, and wasn’t hidden at all, and that made it a job for Keller, because the client really didn’t want the witness to stand up and testify.

“Or sit down and testify,” she said, “which is what they usually do, at least on the television programs I watch. The lawyers stand up, and even walk around some, but the witnesses just sit there.”

“What did he witness, do you happen to know?”

“You know,” she said, “they were pretty vague on that point. The guy I talked to wasn’t a principal. He was more like a booking agent. I’ve worked with him before, when his clients were O.C. guys.”

“Huh?”

“Organized crime. So he’s connected, but this isn’t O.C., and my sense is it’s not violent.”

“But it’s going to get that way.”

“Well, you’re not going all the way to Indiana to talk sense into him, are you? What he witnessed, I think it was like corporate shenanigans. What’s the matter?”

“Shenanigans,” he said.

“It’s a perfectly good word. What’s the matter with shenanigans?”

“I just didn’t think anybody said it anymore,” he said. “That’s all.”

“Well, maybe they should. God knows they’ve got occasion to.”

“If it’s corporate fiddle-faddle,” he began, and stopped when she held up a hand.

“Fiddle-faddle? This from a man who has a problem with shenanigans?”

“If it’s that sort of thing,” he said, “then it actually could be federal, couldn’t it?”

“I suppose so.”

“But he’s not in the witness program because they don’t think he’s in danger.”

She nodded. “Stands to reason.”

“So they probably haven’t assigned people to guard him,” he said, “and he’s probably not taking precautions.”

“Probably not.”

“Should be easy.”

“It should,” she agreed. “So why are you disappointed?”

“Disappointed?”

“That’s the vibe I’m getting. Are you picking up on something? Like it’s really going to be a lot more complicated than it sounds?”

He shook his head. “I think it’s going to be easy,” he said, “and I hope it is, and I’m not picking up any vibe. And I certainly didn’t mean to sound disappointed, because I don’t feel disappointed. I can use the money, and besides that, I can use the work. I don’t want to go stale.”

“So there’s no problem.”

“No. As far as your vibe is concerned, well, I spent the morning at the dentist.”

“Say no more. That’s enough to depress anybody.”

“It wasn’t, really. But then I was watching some guys play basketball. The Indian food helped, but the mood lingered.”

“You’re just one big nonsequitur, aren’t you, Keller?” She held up a hand. “No, don’t explain. You’ll go to Indianapolis, you lucky man, and your actions will get to speak for themselves.”

Keller’s motel was a Rodeway Inn at the junction of Inter-states 465 and 69, close enough to Carmel but not too close. He signed in with a name that matched his credit card and made up a license plate number for the registration card. In his room, he ran the channels on the TV, then switched off the set. He took a shower, got dressed, turned the TV on, turned it off again.

Then he went to the car and found his way to the Conseco Fieldhouse, where the Indiana Pacers were playing host to the New York Knicks.

The stadium was in the center of the city, but the signage made it easy to get there. A man in a porkpie hat asked him in an undertone if he had any extra tickets, and Keller realized that he did. He took a good look at his tickets for the first time and saw that he had a pair of $96 seats in section 117, wherever that was. He could sell one, but wouldn’t that be awkward if the man he sold it to sat beside him? He’d probably be a talker, and Keller didn’t want that.

But a moment’s observation clarified the situation. The man in the porkpie hat — who had, Keller noted, a face straight out of an OTB parlor, a coulda-woulda-shoulda gambler’s face — was doing a little business, buying tickets from people who had too many, selling them to people who had too few. So he wouldn’t be sitting next to Keller. Someone else would, but it would be someone he hadn’t met, so it would be easy to keep an intimacy barrier in place.

Keller went up to the man in the hat, showed him one of the tickets. The man said, “Fifty bucks,” and Keller pointed out that it was a $96 ticket. The man gave him a look, and Keller took the ticket back.

“Jesus,” the man said. “What do you want for it, anyway?”

“Eighty-five,” Keller said, picking the number out of the air.

“That’s crazy.”

“The Pacers and the Knicks? Section 117? I bet I can find somebody who wants it eighty-five dollars’ worth.”

They settled on $75, and Keller pocketed the money and used his other ticket to enter the arena. Then it struck him that he could have unloaded both tickets and had $150 to show for it, and gone straight home, spared the ordeal of a basketball game. But he was already through the turnstile when the thought came to him, and by that point he no longer had a ticket to sell.

He found his seat and sat down to watch the game.

Keller, an only child, was raised by his mother, who he had come to realize in later years was probably mentally ill. He never suspected this at the time, although he was aware that she was different from other people.

She kept a picture of Keller’s father in a frame in the living room. The photograph showed a young man in a military uniform, and Keller grew up knowing that his father had been a soldier, a casualty of the war. As a teenager, he’d been employed cleaning out a stockroom, and one of the boxes of obsolete merchandise he’d hauled out had contained picture frames, half of them containing the familiar photograph of his putative father.

It occurred to him that he ought to mention this to his mother. On further thought, he decided not to say anything. He went home and looked at the photo and wondered who his father was. A soldier, he decided, though not this one. Someone passing through, who’d fathered a son and never knew it.

And died in battle? Well, a lot of soldiers did. His father might very well have been one of them.

Growing up in a fatherless home with a mother who didn’t seem to have any friends or acquaintances was something Keller had been on the point of addressing in therapy, until a problem with his therapist put an end to that experiment. He’d had trouble deciding just how he felt about his mother, but had ultimately come to the conclusion that she was a good woman who’d done a good job of raising him, given her limitations. She was a serviceable cook if not an imaginative one, and he had a hot breakfast every morning and a hot dinner every night. She kept their house clean and taught Keller to be clean about his person. She was detached, and talked more to herself than to him — and, in the afternoons, talked to the characters in her TV soap operas.

She bought him presents at Christmas and on his birthday, usually clothing to replace garments he’d outgrown, but occasionally something more interesting. One year she bought him an Erector set, and he’d proved quite hopeless at following the diagrams in an effort to produce a flatbed railcar or, indeed, anything else. Another year’s present was a beginner’s stamp collecting kit — a stamp album, a packet of stamps, a pair of tongs to pick them up with, and a supply of hinges for mounting them in the album. The Erector set wound up in the closet, gathering dust, but the stamp album turned out to be the foundation of a lifelong hobby. He’d abandoned it after high school, of course, and the original album was long gone, but Keller had taken up the hobby again as an adult and cheerfully poured much of his spare time and extra cash into it.

Would he have become a stamp collector if not for his mother’s gift? Possibly, he thought, but probably not. It was one more reason to thank her.

The Erector set was a good thought that failed, the stamp album an inspiration. The biggest surprise, though, of all the gifts she gave him was neither of these.

That would have to be the basketball backboard.

Keller hadn’t bothered to note the seat number of the ticket he sold to the man in the porkpie hat. His own seat was 117, situated unsurprisingly enough between seats 116 and 118, both of them unoccupied when he sat down between them. Then two men came along and sat down in 115 and 116. One was substantially older than the other, and Keller found himself wondering if they were father and son, boss and employee, uncle and nephew, or gay lovers. He didn’t really care, but he couldn’t keep from wondering, and he kept changing his mind.

The game had already started by the time a man turned up and sat down in 118. He was wearing a dark suit with a subtle pinstripe and looked as though he’d come straight from the office, an office where he spent his days doing something no one, least of all the man himself, would describe as interesting.

The man in the porkpie hat had paid Keller $75 for that seat, which suggested that the man in the suit must have paid at least $100 for it, and perhaps as much as $125. But, of course, the fellow had no idea that Keller was the source of his ticket, and in fact paid no attention to Keller, devoting the full measure of his attention to the action on the court, where the Pacers had jumped off to an early lead.

Keller, with some reluctance, turned his attention to the game.

Across the street and two doors up from Keller’s house, a family named Breitbart filled a large frame house to overflowing. Mr. Breitbart owned and ran a furniture store on Euclid Avenue, and Mrs. Breitbart stayed home and, for a while at least, had a baby every year. The year Keller was born she gave birth to two — twin sons, Andrew and Randall, the names no doubt selected so that their nicknames could rhyme. The twins were the family’s only boys; the other five little Breitbarts, some older than the twins, the rest younger, were all girls.

Every afternoon, weather permitting, boys gathered in the Breitbart backyard to play basketball. Sometimes they divided into teams, and one side took off their shirts, and they played the sort of half-court game you could play with a single garage-mounted backboard. Other times, when fewer boys showed up or for some other reason, they found other ways to compete — playing Horse, say, where each player had to duplicate the particular shot of the first player. There were other games as well, but Keller, watching idly from across the street, was less clear on their rules and objectives.

One night at dinner, Keller’s mother told him he should go across the street and join the game. “You watch all the time,” she said — inaccurately, as he only occasionally let himself loll on the sidewalk watching the action in the Breitbart yard. “I bet they’d love it if you joined in. I bet you’d be good at it.”

As it turned out, she lost both bets.

Keller, a quiet boy, always felt more at ease with grown-ups than with his contemporaries. On his own, he moved with an easy grace; in group sports, self-consciousness turned him awkward and made him ill at ease. Nonetheless, later that week he crossed the street and presented himself in the Breitbart backyard. “It’s Keller,” Andy or Randy said. “From across the street.” Someone tossed him the ball, and he bounced it twice and tossed it unsuccessfully at the basket.

They chose up sides, and he, the unknown quantity, was picked last, which struck him as reasonable enough. He was on the Skins team, and shucked his shirt, which made him feel a little self-conscious, but that was nothing compared to the self-consciousness that ensued when the game began.

Because he didn’t know how to play. He was ineffectual at guarding, and more obviously inept when someone tossed him the ball and he didn’t know what to do with it. “Shoot,” someone yelled, and he shot and missed. “Here, here!” someone called out, and his pass was intercepted. He just didn’t know what he was doing, and before long his teammates figured out as much and stopped passing him the ball.

After fifteen or twenty minutes, the Shirts were a little more than halfway to the number of points that would end the game when a boy a grade ahead of Keller showed up. “Hey, it’s Lass-man,” Randy or Andy said. “Lassman, take over for Keller.”

And just like that, Lassman, suddenly shirtless, was in and Keller was out. This, too, struck him as reasonable enough. He went to the sidelines and put his shirt on, relief and disappointment settling over him in equal parts. For a few minutes, he stood there watching the others play, and relief faded while disappointment swelled. Well, I better be getting home now, he planned to say, and he rehearsed the line, rephrasing it in his mind, giving it different inflections. But nobody was paying any attention to him, so why say anything? He turned around and went home.

When his mother asked him about it, he said it had turned out okay, but he wouldn’t be going over there anymore. They had regular teams, he said, and he didn’t really fit in. She looked at him for a moment, then let it go.

A few days later he came home from school to see two workmen mounting a backboard and basket on the Keller garage. At dinner he wanted to ask her about it, but didn’t know how to start. She didn’t say anything either at first, and years later, when he heard the expression “the elephant in the living room that nobody talks about,” he thought of that basketball backboard.

But then she did talk about it. “I thought it would be good to have,” she said. “You can go out there and practice anytime you want, and the other boys will see you there and come over and play.”

She was half right. He practiced, dribbling, driving toward the basket, trying set shots and jump shots and hook shots from different angles. He paced off a foul line and practiced foul shots. If practice didn’t make perfect, it certainly didn’t hurt. He got better.

And the other boys saw him there, she was right about that, too. But nobody ever came over to play, and before long he stopped going out there himself. Then he got an after-school job, and he put the basketball in the garage and forgot about it.

The backboard stayed where it was, securely mounted on the garage. It was the elephant in the driveway that nobody talked about.

The Pacers won in overtime, in what Keller supposed was an exciting game, although it didn’t excite him much. He didn’t care who won, and found his attention drifting throughout, even at the game’s most crucial moments. The fact that the visiting team was the New York Knicks didn’t make any difference to him. He didn’t follow basketball, and his devotion to the city of New York didn’t make him a partisan follower of the city’s sports teams.

Except for the Yankees. He liked the Yankees and enjoyed it when they won. But he didn’t eat his heart out when on rare occasions they lost. As far as he was concerned, getting upset over the outcome of a sports event was like getting depressed when a movie had a sad ending. I mean, get a grip, man. It’s only a movie, it’s only a ball game.

He walked to his car, which was where he’d parked it, and drove to his motel, which was where he’d left it. He was $75 richer than he’d been a few hours ago, and his only regret was that he hadn’t thought to sell both tickets. And skip the game.

Grondahl had a backboard in his driveway.

That was the target’s name, Meredith Grondahl, and when Keller had first seen it, before Dot showed him the photograph, he’d supposed it was a woman. He’d even said, “A woman?” and Dot had asked him if he’d become a sexist overnight. “You’ve done women before,” she reminded him. “You’ve always been an equal-opportunity kind of guy. But all that’s beside the point, because this particular Meredith is a man.”

What, he’d wondered, did Meredith’s friends call him for short? Merry? Probably not, Keller decided. If he had a nickname, it was probably Bud or Mac or Bubba.

Grondahl, he figured, meant green valley in whatever Scandinavian language Meredith’s forebears had spoken. So maybe the guy’s friends called him Greenie.

Or maybe not.

The backboard, which Keller saw on a drive-by the morning after the basketball game, was freestanding, mounted on a post just a couple of feet in front of the garage. It was a two-car garage, and the post was positioned so that it didn’t block access to either side.

The garage door was closed, so Keller couldn’t tell how many cars it held at the moment. Nor was anybody shooting baskets in the driveway. Keller drove off picturing Grondahl playing a solitary game, dribbling, shooting, all the while considering how his testimony might expose corporate shenanigans, making of basketball a meditative experience.

You could get a lot of thinking done that way. Provided you were alone and didn’t have to break your concentration by interacting with somebody else.

South and east of downtown Indianapolis, tucked into a shopping mall, Keller found a stamp dealer named Hubert Haas. He’d done business with the man in the past, when he’d managed to outbid other collectors for lots Haas offered on eBay. So the name rang a bell when he came across it in the yellow pages.

He’d brought his Scott catalog, which he used as a checklist, so he could be sure he wasn’t buying stamps he already owned. Haas, a plump and owlish young man who looked as though his chief exercise consisted of driving past a health club, was happy to show Keller his stock. He did almost all of his business online, he confided, and hardly ever had a real customer in the shop, so this was a treat for him.

So why pay rent? Why not work out of his house?

“Buying,” Haas said. “I’ve got a presence in a high-traffic mall. That keeps the noncollectors aware of me. Uncle Fred dies, they inherit his stamp collection, who do they bring it to? Somebody they heard of, and they not only heard of Hubert Haas, they know he’s for real, because he’s got a store in the Glendale Mall to prove it. And then there’s the walk-in who buys a starter album for his kid, the collector who runs out of hinges or Showgard mounts or needs to replace a lost pair of tongs. Helps with the rent, but buying’s the real reason.”

Keller found a comforting quantity of stamps to buy from Haas, including an inexpensive but curiously elusive set of Venezuelan airmails. He walked out imbued with a sense of accomplishment and took a few minutes to walk around the mall, to see what further accomplishments might be there for the taking.

The mall had the sort of stores malls usually have, and he found it easy enough to scan their window displays and walk on by. Until he came to the library.

Who had ever heard of a public library in a shopping mall? But that’s what this was, occupying substantial space on the second and third levels, and complete with a turnstile and, yes, a metal detector, its purpose unapparent to Keller. Was there a problem of folks toting guns in hollowed-out books?

No matter. Keller wasn’t carrying a gun or anything metallic but a handful of coins and his car keys. He entered without raising any alarms, and ten minutes later he was scanning back issues of the Indianapolis Star, learning all manner of things about Meredith Grondahl.

“It’s pretty interesting,” he told Dot. “There’s this company called Central Indiana Finance. They buy and sell mortgages and do a lot of refinancing. The stock’s traded on Nasdaq. The symbol is CIFI, but when people talk about it, they refer to it as Indy Fi.”

“If that’s interesting,” she said, “I’d hate to hear your idea of a real yawner.”

“That’s not the interesting part.”

“No kidding.”

“The stock’s very volatile,” he said. “It pays a high dividend, which makes it attractive to investors, but it could be vulnerable to changes in interest rates, which makes it speculative, I guess. And a couple of hedge funds have shorted the stock heavily, along with a lot of private traders.

“Let me know when we get to the interesting part, will you, Keller?”

“Well, it’s all kind of interesting,” he said. “You walk around in a shopping mall, you don’t expect to find out this stuff.”

“Here I am, finding it out without even leaving the house.”

“There’s this class-action suit,” he said. “Brought on behalf of the Indy Fi stockholders, though probably ninety-nine percent of them are opposed to the whole idea of the suit. The suit charges the company’s management with irregularities and cover-ups, that sort of thing. It’s the people who shorted the stock who are behind the suit, the hedge fund guys, and their whole reason for bringing it seems to be to destroy confidence in the company and further depress the price of the stock.”

“Can they do that?”

“Anybody can sue anybody. All they risk, really, is their legal expenses and having the suit get tossed out of court. Meanwhile the company has to defend the suit, and the controversy keeps the stock price depressed, and even if the suit gets settled in the company’s favor, the short interests will have had a chance to make money.”

“I don’t really care about any of this,” Dot said, “but I have to admit you’re starting to get me interested, although I couldn’t tell you why. And our quarry’s going to testify for the people bringing the suit?”

“No.”

“No?”

“They subpoenaed him,” he said. “Meredith Grondahl. He’s an assistant to the chief financial officer, and he’s supposed to testify about irregularities in their accounting procedures, but he’s no whistle-blower. He’s more of a cheerleader. As far as he’s concerned, Indy Fi’s a great company, and his personal 401(k) is full of the company’s stock. He can’t really damage either side in the suit.”

“Then why would somebody decide to summon you to Indianapolis?”

“That’s what I’ve been wondering.”

He thought the connection might have broken, but she was just taking her time thinking it over. “Well,” she said at length, “even though this gets us interested, Keller, we’re also disinterested, if you get my drift.”

“It doesn’t change things.”

“That’s my drift, all right. We’ve got an assignment and the fee’s half paid already, so the whys and wherefores don’t make any difference. Somebody doesn’t want the guy to testify about something, and as soon as you nail that down, you can come on home and play with your stamps. You bought some today, didn’t you tell me that earlier? So come on home and you can paste them in your book. And we’ll get paid, and you can buy some more.”

The next morning, Keller got up early and drove straight to Grondahl’s house in Carmel. He parked across the street and sat behind the wheel of his rented Ford, a newspaper propped on the steering wheel. He read the national and international news, then the sports. The Pacers, he noted, had won last night, in double overtime. The local sportswriter described the game as thrilling and said the shot from half-court that fell in just as the second overtime period ran out demonstrated “the moral integrity and indomitable spirit of our guys.” Keller wished he’d taken it a small step further, claiming the ball’s unerring flight to the basket as proof of the Almighty’s clear preference for the local heroes.

Reading, he kept an eye on Grondahl’s front door, waiting for Greenie to appear. He still hadn’t done so by the time Keller was done with the sports pages. Well, it was early, he told himself, and turned to the business section. The Dow had been up, he learned, in heavy volume.

He knew what this meant — he wasn’t an idiot — but it was something he never followed because it didn’t concern him or hold interest for him. Keller earned good money when he worked, and he didn’t live high, and for years he had saved a substantial portion of the money that came into his hands. But he’d never bought stocks or mutual funds with it. He tucked some of it into a safe-deposit box and the rest into savings accounts. The money grew slowly if it grew at all, but it didn’t shrink, and there was something to be said for that.

Eventually he reached a point where retirement was an option, and realized that he’d need a hobby to fill the golden years. He took up stamp collecting again, but in a far more serious fashion this time around. He started spending serious money on stamps, and his retirement savings waned as his collection grew.

So he’d never managed to get interested in the world of stocks and bonds. This morning, for some reason, he found the business section interesting, not least because of an article on Central Indiana Finance. CIFI, which opened the day at $43.27 a share, had fluctuated wildly, up five points at its high for the day, down as much as seven, and finishing the day at $40.35. On the one hand, he learned, the shorts were scrambling to cover before the ex-dividend date, when they would be liable for the company’s substantial dividend. On the other, players were continuing to short the stock and drive the price down, encouraged by the pending class-action lawsuit.

He was thinking about the article when the door opened and Meredith Grondahl emerged.

Grondahl was dressed for the office, wearing a dark gray suit and a white shirt and a striped tie and carrying a briefcase. That was to be expected, it being a Thursday, but Keller realized he’d unconsciously been waiting for the man to show himself in shorts and a singlet, dribbling a basketball.

In the driveway, Grondahl paid no attention to the basketball backboard but triggered a button to raise the garage door. There was, Keller noted, only one car in the garage, and a slew of objects (he made out a barbecue grill and some lawn furniture) took up the space where a second car might otherwise have been parked.

Grondahl, given his position in the corporate world, could clearly have afforded a second car for his wife. Which suggested to Keller that he didn’t have a wife. The fine suburban house, on the other hand, suggested that he’d had one once upon a time, and Keller suspected she’d chosen to go away and had taken her car with her.

Poor bastard.

Keller, comfortable behind the wheel, stayed where he was while Grondahl backed his Grand Cherokee out of the driveway and drove off somewhere. He thought about following the man, but why? For that matter, why had he come here to watch him leave the house?

Of course, there were more basic questions than that. Why wasn’t he getting down to business and fulfilling his contract? Why was he watching Meredith Grondahl instead of punching the man’s ticket?

And a question that was, strictly speaking, none of his business, but no less compelling for it: Why did somebody want Meredith Grondahl dead?

Thinking, he reminded himself, was one thing. Acting was another. His mind could go where it wanted, as long as his body did what it was supposed to.

Drive back to the motel, he told himself, and find a way to use up the day. And tonight, when Meredith Grondahl comes home, be here waiting for him. Then return this car to Hertz, pick up a fresh one from somebody else, and go home.

He nodded, affirming the wisdom of that course of action. Then he started the engine, backed up a few yards, and swung the car into the Grondahl driveway. He got out, found the button Grondahl had used to raise the garage door, pressed it, got back in the car, and pulled into the spot recently vacated by the Grand Cherokee.

There was a small boulder the size of a bowling ball standing just to the right of Grondahl’s front door. It might have been residue from a local avalanche, but Keller thought that unlikely. It looked to him like something to hide a spare house key under, and he was right about that. He picked up the key, opened the door, and let himself in.

There was a chance, of course, that there was still a Mrs. Grondahl and that she was home. Maybe she didn’t drive, maybe she was an agoraphobe who never left the house. Keller thought this was unlikely, and it didn’t take him long to rule it out. The house was antiseptically clean, but that didn’t necessarily signal a woman’s presence; Grondahl might be neat by nature, or he might have someone who cleaned for him once or twice a week.

There were no women’s clothes in the closets or dressers, and that was a tip-off. And there were two dressers, a highboy and a low triple dresser with a vanity mirror, and the low dresser’s drawers were empty, except for one which Grondahl had begun to use for suspenders and cuff links and such. So there had indeed been a Mrs. Grondahl, and now there wasn’t.

Keller, having established this much, wandered around the two-story house trying to see what else he could learn. Except he wasn’t trying very hard, because he wasn’t really looking for anything, or if he was, he didn’t know what it might be. It was more as if he was trying to get the feel of the man, and that didn’t make any sense, but then what sense was there in letting yourself into the house of the man you were planning to kill?

Maybe the best course of action was to settle in and wait. Sooner or later Grondahl would return to the house, and he’d probably be alone when he did, since he was beginning to strike Keller as your typical lonely guy.

Your typical lonely guy. The phrase resonated oddly for Keller, because he couldn’t help identifying with it. He was, face it, a lonely guy himself, although he didn’t suppose you could call him typical. Did this resonance get in the way of what he was supposed to do? He thought it over and decided it did and it didn’t. It made him sympathize with Meredith Grondahl, and thus disinclined to kill him; on the other hand, wouldn’t he be doing the poor bastard a favor?

He frowned, found a chair to sit in. When Grondahl came home, he’d be alone. And he’d be relieved to return to the safe harbor of his empty house. So he’d be unguarded, and getting taken from behind by a man with a club or a knife or a garrote — Keller hadn’t decided yet — was the last thing he’d worry about.

It’d be the last thing, all right.

The problem, of course, was to figure out what to do with the day. If he just holed up here, it looked to be a minimum of eight hours before Grondahl returned, and the wait might well stretch to twelve or more. He could read, if he could find something he felt like reading, or watch TV with the sound off, or—

Hell. His car was parked in Grondahl’s garage. That assured that the neighbors wouldn’t see it and grow suspicious, but what happened when Grondahl came home and found his parking spot taken?

No good at all. Keller would have to move the car, and the sooner the better, because for all he knew, Grondahl might feel the need to come home for lunch. So what should he do? Drive it around the block, leave it in front of some stranger’s house? And then he’d have to return on foot, hoping no one noticed him, because nobody walked anywhere in the suburbs and a pedestrian was suspicious by definition.

Maybe waiting for Grondahl was a bad idea altogether. Maybe he should just get the hell out and go back to his motel.

He was on his way to the door when he heard a key in the lock.

Funny how decisions had a way of making themselves. Grondahl, who had returned for something he’d forgotten, was insisting on being put out of his misery. Keller backed out of the entrance hall and waited around the corner in the dining room.

The door opened, and Keller heard steps, a lot of them. And a voice called out, “Hello? Anybody home?”

Keller’s first thought was that it was an odd thing for Grondahl to do. Then another voice, pitched lower, said, “You better hope you don’t get an answer to that one.”

Had Grondahl brought a friend? No, of course not, he realized. It wasn’t Grondahl, who was almost certainly doing something corporate at his office. It was someone else, a pair of somebody elses, and they’d let themselves in with a key and wanted the house to be empty.

If they came into the dining room, he’d have to do something about it. If they took a different tack, he’d have to slip out of the door as soon as the opportunity presented itself. And hide in the garage, waiting for them to emerge from the house and drive away, so that he could drive away, too.

“I think the den,” one voice said. “House like this, guy living alone, he’s gotta have a den, don’t you think?”

“Or a home office,” the other voice offered.

“A den, a home office, what the hell’s the difference?”

“One’s deductible.”

“But it’s the same room, isn’t it? No matter what you call it?”

“I suppose, but for tax purposes—”

“Jesus,” the first voice said. It was, Keller noted, vaguely familiar, but maybe that was just because the speaker had a Hoosier accent. “I’m not planning to audit his fucking tax returns,” the man said. “I just want to plant an envelope in his desk.”

Out the door, Keller told himself. Let them plant whatever they wanted in whatever they decided to call the room with the desk in it. He’d be gone, and they’d never know he’d been there in the first place.

But when he left the dining room, something led him not to the door but away from it. He tagged along after the two men and caught a glimpse of them as he rounded a corner into the living room. He saw them from the back, and only for a moment, but that was time enough to note that they were both of average height and medium build and that one was bald as an egg. The other might or might not have hair; you couldn’t tell at a glance, because he was wearing a cap.

A green cap with gold piping, and when had Keller seen a cap like that? Oh, right. Same place he’d heard that voice. It was a John Deere cap, and the man wearing it had met him at the airport and given him tickets to that goddamn basketball game. Depressed the hell out of him, ruined his first evening in Indianapolis, and thanks a lot for that, you son of a bitch.

Keller, oddly irritated, padded silently after the two of them and lurked around a corner while they stationed themselves at Meredith Grondahl’s desk. “Definitely a home office,” the bald man said. “You got your filing cabinets, you got your desk and your computer, you got your Canon desktop copier, you got your printer and your fax machine—”

“You also got a big-screen TV and a La-Z-Boy recliner, which shouts den to me,” the man in the Deere cap said. “Look at this, will you? The drawer’s locked.”

“This one ain’t. Neither’s this one. You got seven drawers, for chrissake, who cares if one of ’em’s locked?”

“This is incriminating evidence, right? Dangerous stuff?”

“So?”

“You got a desk with a locked drawer, don’t you think that’s the drawer you’re gonna keep the shit in?”

“The cops in this town,” the bald man said, “they find a locked drawer, they might just decide it’s too much trouble to open it.”

“Point.”

Keller, out of sight in the adjoining room, heard a drawer open and close.

“There,” the Deere cap said. “Right where they’ll find it.”

“And if Grondahl finds it first?”

“I figure that’s in the next day or two, because he’s not gonna wait that long.”

“The shooter.”

“A real piece of work.”

“You told me.”

“I tell you how he walks up to a car in the airport lot and drives off with it? Has a master key on his ring, pops the lock like it was made for it. ‘I’ll just borrow it,’ he tells me.”

“Casual son of a bitch.”

“But how long is he gonna drive around in a stolen vehicle? I’m surprised he hasn’t made his move already.”

“Maybe he has. Maybe we go to the bedroom, we find Grondahl sleeping with the fishes.”

“That’d be in the river, wouldn’t it? You don’t find fishes sleeping in beds.”

Oysters, Keller thought. In oyster beds. He retreated a few steps, because there was no longer any reason to stick around. These two worked for the client, and they were just planting evidence to support the same end as Grondahl’s removal. They could have let him plant the stuff himself, all part of the service, but they hadn’t thought of that, or hadn’t trusted him, so—

The bald guy said, “It’s not really finished until he’s dead, you know.”

“Grondahl.”

“Well, that, obviously. No, I mean the shooter. He’s killed, and he’s the one took out Grondahl, and he’s tied to Indy Fi’s management. Then you got them good.”

Jesus, Keller thought. And he’d almost walked away from this. They were moving, the two of them, and he moved, as well, so that he could wind up behind them when they headed for the door.

“All part of the plan,” Deere Cap said.

“But if he just goes and steals another car and flies back to wherever he came from—”

“Portland, I think somebody said.”

“Which Portland?”

“Who cares? He ain’t making it back. What I did, I stuck a bug on the underside of his back bumper while he was showing me how slick his key worked. He went to that basketball game, incidentally. Guy loves basketball.”

“Who won the game?”

“You’d have to ask him. That Global Positioning shit is wonderful. He’s at the Rodeway Inn near the I-69 exit. That’s our next stop. What we’ll do, I got a pair of tickets for tomorrow night’s game, and we’ll leave ’em at the motel desk for him. What I figure—”

It might have been interesting to learn how the basketball tickets were part of the man’s plan, but they were almost at the door at this point, and that was as far as Keller could let them get. Following them, he’d paused long enough to snatch a brass candlestick off a tabletop, and he closed the distance between him and them and swung the candlestick in a sweeping arc that ended at a patch of gold braid on the green John Deere cap. It caught the man in mid-stride and mid-sentence, and he never finished either. He dropped in his tracks, and the bald man was just beginning to take it in, just beginning to react, when Keller backhanded him with the candlestick, striking him right across his endless forehead. The scalp split and blood spurted, and the man let out a cry and clapped a hand to the spot, and Keller swung the candlestick a third time, like a woodsman with an ax, and brought it down authoritatively on the back of the bald man’s neck.

Jack be nimble, he thought.

It took Keller a moment to catch his breath, but only a moment. He stood there still holding on to the candlestick and looked down at the two men lying a couple of feet apart on the patterned area rug. They both looked dead. He checked, and the bald man was every bit as dead as he looked, but the guy in the cap still had a pulse.

Keller, waiting for him to regain consciousness, did what he could to clean up. He washed and wiped the candlestick and put it back where he’d found it. He wasn’t going to be able to do anything about the blood on the rug, and couldn’t even make an attempt while the two of them were lying on it.

He stationed himself alongside them and waited. Eventually the Deere cap guy came to, and Keller asked him a couple of questions. The man didn’t want to answer them, but eventually he did, and then there was no need to keep him alive anymore.

The hardest part, really, was getting the two bodies out of the house and into their car, which turned out to be the same Hyundai squareback that had picked him up at the airport. It was parked in the driveway, and the keys were in the Deere cap guy’s pocket.

He could see how it was all going to work out.

“Like we don’t have enough to contend with,” Dot said. “You do everything right and then you get killed by the client. This business isn’t the bed of roses people think it is.”

“Is that what people think?”

“Who knows what people think, Keller? I know what I think. I think you better come home.”

“Not just yet.”

“Oh?”

“One of the fellows gave me a name.”

“Probably his very last words.”

“Just about.”

“And you want to get together with this fellow?”

“I probably won’t be able to,” he said. “My guess is he’ll be overcome by fear or remorse.”

“And he’ll take his own life?”

“It wouldn’t surprise me.”

“And it wouldn’t start me crying, I have to tell you that. All right, sure, why not? We can’t let people get away with that crap. Do what you have to do and then come home. We got half in front, and I don’t suppose there’s any way to collect the back half, so—”

“Don’t be too sure of that,” Keller said. “I’ve been thinking, and why don’t you see how this sounds to you?”

When Meredith Grondahl pulled into his driveway around five-thirty, Keller was parked halfway down the block at the curb. He got out of the car and stood where he could watch the Grondahl driveway, and after five minutes Grondahl emerged from the house. He’d changed from a suit and tie to sneakers and sweats, and he was dribbling a basketball. He took a shot, missed, took the ball as it came off the backboard, and drove for a layup.

Keller headed up the driveway. Grondahl turned, saw him, and tossed him the ball. Keller shot, missed.

They played for a few minutes, just taking turns trying shots, most of which failed to make it through the hoop. Then Keller sank a fade-away jump shot, surprising both of them, and Grondahl said, “Nice.”

“Luck,” Keller said. “Listen, we should talk.”

“Huh?”

“You had a couple of visitors earlier today. They got into an argument, and they bled all over your rug.”

“My rug.”

“That area rug with the geometric pattern, right when you come into the house.”

“That’s what was different,” Grondahl said. “The rug wasn’t there. I knew there was something, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.”

“Or your foot.”

“You said there was blood on it?”

“Their blood, and you don’t want that. Anyway, you get a lot of blood on a rug and it’s never the same. So the rug’s not there anymore.”

“And the two men?”

“They’re not there anymore, either.”

Grondahl had been holding the basketball, and now he turned and flipped it at the basket. It hit the rim and bounced away, and neither man made any move toward it.

Grondahl said, “These men. They came into my house?”

“Right through the door over there. They had a key — not the one you keep under the fake rock, either.”

“And then, inside my house, they got into an argument and… killed each other?”

“That’s close enough,” Keller said.

Grondahl thought about it. “I think I get the picture,” he said.

“You probably get as much of the picture as you need to get.”

“That’s what it sounds like. Why did they come here in the first place?”

“They were going to leave an envelope.”

“An envelope.”

“In a desk drawer.”

“And the envelope contained…”

“A motive for a murder.”

“My murder?”

Keller nodded.

“They were going to kill me?”

“Their employer,” Keller said, “had already hired someone else for that job.”

“Who?”

“Some stranger,” Keller said. “Some faceless assassin flown in from out of town.”

Grondahl looked thoughtfully at him, the way one might look at a putative faceless assassin. “But he’s not going to do it,” he said. “At least I don’t think he is.”

“He’s not.”

“Why?”

“Because he happened to learn that once his job was done, they were planning to kill him.”

“And pin everything on the Indy Fi management,” Grondahl said. “I was killed to keep me from giving testimony I never had any thought of giving in the first place. Jesus, it might have worked. I can imagine what must have been in the envelope. Is it still around? The envelope. Or did it disappear along with the two men?”

“The men will turn up eventually,” Keller said. “The envelope is gone forever.”

Grondahl nodded, retrieved the basketball, bounced it a few times. Keller could almost see the wheels turning in the man’s head. He was bright, Keller was pleased to note. You didn’t have to spell things out for him, you gave him the first paragraph and he got the rest of the page on his own.

“I owe you,” Grondahl said.

Keller shrugged.

“I mean it. You saved my life.”

“I was saving my own at the time,” Keller pointed out.

“When the two of them, uh, had their accident, I’ll concede that was in your own self-interest. But you could have just walked away. And you certainly didn’t have to show up here and fill me in. Which leads to a question.”

“Why am I here?”

“If you don’t mind my asking.”

“Well, actually,” Keller said, “I have a couple of questions of my own.”

“I think I get it,” Dot said. “This is a new thing for me, Keller. I wrote it down, and I’m going to read it back to you, to make sure I’ve got it all straight.”

She did, and he told her she had it right.

“That’s a miracle,” she said, “because it was a little like taking dictation in a foreign language. I’ll take care of it tomorrow. Can I do it all in a day?”

“Probably.”

“Then I will. And you’ll be…”

“Biding my time in Indianapolis. I switched motels, by the way.”

“Good.”

“And found the bug they put on my bumper, and switched it to the bumper of another Ford the same color as mine.”

“That should muddy the waters nicely.”

“I thought so. So I’ll do what I have to do, and then I’ll be a couple of days driving home.”

“Not to worry,” she said. “I’ll leave the porch light on for you.”

It was a full week later when Keller drove his rented Toyota through the Lincoln Tunnel and found his way to the National garage, where he turned it in. He went home, unpacked his bag, and spent two full hours working on his stamp collection before he picked up the phone and called White Plains.

“Come right on up,” Dot said, “so I can turn the light off. It’s attracting moths.”

In the kitchen of the house on Taunton Place, Dot poured him a big glass of iced tea and told him they’d done very well indeed. “I was wondering at first,” she said, “because I bought a big chunk of Indy Fi, and the first thing it did was go down a couple of points. But then it turned around and went back up again, and the last I checked it’s up better than ten points from when I bought it. I bought options, too, for increased leverage. I don’t understand how they work exactly, but I was able to buy them, and this morning I sold them, and do you want to know exactly how much we made on them?”

“It doesn’t have to be exact.”

She told him, down to the last decimal point, and it was a satisfying number.

“We’re about that much ahead on the actual stock we bought,” she said, “but I haven’t sold that yet, because I kind of like owning it, especially the way it’s going up. Maybe we can sell half and let the rest ride, something like that, but I figured I’d wait and see what you want to do.”

“We’ll work it out.”

“My thought exactly.” She sat forward, rubbed her hands together. “What really kick-started things,” she said, “was when Clocker killed himself. His hedge fund had been shorting Indy Fi’s stock all along, and he was behind the lawsuit they were going through, and when he was out of the picture, and in a way that put the cloud right over his own head, well, the price of Indy Fi’s stock could go back where it belonged. And the price of his hedge fund…”

“Sank?”

“Like a stone,” she said. “And we sold it short and covered our shorts very cheaply and made a killing. It’s nice to make a killing without having to drive anywhere. How did you know how to do all this?”

“I had advice,” he said. “From a fellow who couldn’t do any of this himself because it would be insider trading. But you and I aren’t insiders, so there’s no problem.”

“Well, I’ve got no problem with it myself, Keller. That’s for sure. You know, this isn’t the first time you’ve wound up killing a client of ours.”

“I know.”

“This one brought it on himself, no question. But usually it costs us money, and this time we came out way ahead. You’re going to be able to buy a veritable shitload of stamps.”

“I was thinking about that.”

“And we’re a giant stride closer to being able to retire, when the time comes.”

“I was thinking about that, too.”

“And you bonded with what’s-his-name.”

“Meredith Grondahl.”

“What do his friends call him, did you happen to find out?”

“It never came up. I’m not sure he’s got any friends.”

“Oh.”

“I was thinking I ought to send him something, Dot. I had an idea of how to make money in the market, but he spelled the whole thing out for me. I didn’t know a thing about options, and I never would have thought of shorting the hedge fund.”

“How big a share do you want to send him?”

“Not a share. He’s pretty straight-arrow, and even if he weren’t, the last thing he wants is cash he can’t explain. No, I was thinking more of a present. A token, really, but something he’d like to have and probably wouldn’t ever buy for himself.”

“Like?”

“Season tickets to the Pacers home games. He loves basketball, and a pair of courtside season tickets should really do it for the guy.”

“What’s it cost?” Before he could answer, she waived the question away. “Not enough to matter, not the way we just made out. That’s a great idea, Keller. And who knows? Next time you’re in Indianapolis, maybe the two of you can take in a game.”

He shook his head. “No,” he said. “Leave me out of it. I hate basketball.”