Текст книги "Hit and Run"

Автор книги: Block Lawrence

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25

“You know what I was worried about? I was afraid I wouldn’t remember how to do it.”

“I guess it all came back to you,” he said. “Been a while, has it?”

“Ages.”

“Same for me.”

“Oh, come on,” she said. “You, running around the country, having adventures everywhere?”

“The running around I’ve been doing lately, the only women who spoke to me were asking me did I want to supersize that order of fries. Imagine if they asked you that at a good restaurant. ‘Sir, would you care to supersize that coq au vin?’”

“But before Des Moines,” she said. “I’ll bet you had a girl in every port.”

“Hardly. I’m trying to remember the last time I was… with anybody. All I can tell you is it’s been a long time.”

“My daddy asked me if we were sleeping together.”

“Just now?”

“No, he never even stirred. I think Lucille let him get at the Maker’s Mark. The doctor doesn’t want him drinking, but he doesn’t want him smoking, either, and I say what difference can it possibly make? No, this was a couple of days ago. ‘You an’ that fine-looking young man sleeping together, chère?’ You’re still a young man to Daddy, even the way I got your hair fixed.”

“He asked me, too.”

“He didn’t!”

“That first time you left me alone with him. He came right out and asked me if I was sleeping with you.”

“I don’t know why I should be surprised. It’s just like him. What did you say?”

“That I wasn’t, of course. What’s so funny?”

“Well, that’s not what I told him.”

He propped himself up on an elbow, stared at her. “Why on earth would you—”

“Because I didn’t want to tell him one thing and then have to go back and tell him another. Oh, come on, don’t tell me you didn’t know this was going to happen.”

“Well, I had hopes.”

“‘Well, I had hopes.’ You must have known when you asked me out to dinner.”

“By that time,” he said, “they were high hopes.”

“I was afraid you’d make a move that first night. Inviting you to stay here, and after I did it struck me that you might think that was more of an invitation than I had in mind. And that would have been the last thing I wanted just then.”

“After what happened in the park? It was the last thing I would have suggested.”

“All I wanted,” she said, “was to do a favor for someone who had saved my life. Except—”

“Except what?”

“Well, I wasn’t thinking this consciously at the time. But looking back, I might not have dragged you home if you didn’t look real cute.”

“Cute?”

“With your full head of shaggy dark hair. Don’t worry, you’re even cuter now.” She reached to stroke his hair. “There’s only one thing. I don’t know what to call you.”

“Oh.”

“I know your name, or at least the names they put in the paper. But I haven’t called you by name, or asked what to call you, because I don’t want to say the wrong thing sometime with other people around. And you were talking about getting a new set of ID.”

“Yes, I want to get started on that.”

“Well, you don’t know what name it’ll be, do you? So I want to wait until you do and start out calling you by your new name.”

“That makes sense.”

“But it would be nice to have something to call you at intimate moments,” she said. “There was a moment before when you said my name, and I have to say it gave me a little tingle.”

“Julia,” he said.

“It works better in context. Anyway, I don’t know what to call you at moments like that. I could try cher, I suppose, but it seems sort of generic.”

“Keller,” he said. “You could call me Keller.”

In the morning he backed his car out of the garage and visited cemeteries until a tombstone inscription provided him with the name of a male child who’d died in infancy forty-five years ago. He copied down the name and date of birth, and the next day he headed downtown and asked around until he found the Bureau of Records.

“Got to replace everything,” he told the clerk. “I had this little house in St. Bernard’s Parish, so do I have to tell you what happened?”

“I’d say you lost everything,” the woman said.

“I went to Galveston first,” he said, “and then I headed up north and stayed with my sister in Altoona. That’s in Pennsylvania.”

“Seems to me I’ve heard of Altoona. Is it nice?”

“Well, I guess it’s okay,” he said, “but it’s good to be home.”

“Always good to be home,” she agreed. “Now if you could just let me have your name and date of birth – oh, you’ve got it all written down, haven’t you? That saves asking you how to spell it, not that Nicholas Edwards presents all that much of a challenge.”

He went home with a copy of Nicholas Edwards’s birth certificate, and by the end of the week he had passed a driving test and been rewarded with a Louisiana driver’s license. He counted up his cash and used half of what he had left to open a bank account, showing his new driver’s license as ID. A clerk at the main post office had passport application forms, and he filled one out and sent it, along with a money order and the requisite pair of photos, to the office in Washington.

“Nick,” Julia said, looking from his face to the photo on his license, then back at him again. “Or do you prefer Nicholas?”

“My friends call me Mr. Edwards.”

“I think I’ll introduce you as Nick,” she said, “because that’s what people are going to call you anyway. But I’ll be the one person that calls you Nicholas.”

“If you say so.”

“I say so,” she said, and took hold of his arm. “But when we’re upstairs,” she said, “I’ll go right on calling you Keller.”

She came upstairs with him every evening, then returned to her bed in the first-floor den in case her father needed her during the night. Both professed regret at the enforced separation, but on reflection Keller realized he was just as happy to wake up alone. He had a hunch Julia probably felt the same way.

One night, after they’d finished their lovemaking but before she slipped out of his bed, he mentioned something that had been on his mind a while. “I’m running out of money,” he said. “I’m not spending much, but there’s none coming in, and what’s left won’t last too much longer.”

She said she had a little money, and he said that wasn’t really the point. He’d always paid his own way, and wasn’t comfortable otherwise. She asked if that was why he’d mowed the front lawn the day before.

“No, I was getting something from the car” – the gun, still in the glove compartment, which he’d finally gotten around to relocating to his dresser drawer – “and I saw the mower, and earlier I’d noticed the grass needed cutting, so I went and did it. An old man with one of those aluminum walkers watched me for a few minutes and asked me what kind of money I got for a job like that. I told him they didn’t pay me a dime, but I got to sleep with the lady of the house.”

“You didn’t tell him that. Did you? You just made that whole thing up.”

“Well, not all of it. I really did mow the lawn.”

“And did Mr. Leonidas stop and watch you?”

“No, but I’ve seen him around, so I put him in the story.”

“Well, he was the perfect choice, because he’d have told his wife, and his wife would have broadcast it to half the city before you’d put the mower back in the garage. What am I going to do with you, Keller?”

“Oh, you’ll think of something,” he said.

And in the morning she poured his coffee and said, “I was thinking. I guess what you have to do is get a job.”

“I don’t know how to do that.”

“You don’t know how to get a job?”

“I’ve never actually had one.”

“You’ve never—”

“I take that back. When I was in high school I worked for this older guy, he’d get jobs cleaning out people’s attics and basements, and he’d make his real money selling what he got paid to haul away. I was his helper.”

“And since then?”

“Since then, the kind of work I’ve done and the people I’ve worked for, you don’t need a Social Security card. Nick Edwards applied for one, incidentally. It should turn up in the mail any day now.”

She thought for a moment. “There’s a lot of work in the city these days,” she said. “Could you do construction?”

“You mean like building houses?”

“Maybe something a little less ambitious. Working with a crew, renovating and remodeling. Putting up Sheetrock, spackling and painting, sanding floors.”

“Maybe,” he said. “I don’t suppose you need a graduate degree in engineering for that sort of thing, but it probably helps if you know what you’re doing.”

“You haven’t been doing it in a while, so your skills are a little rusty.”

“That sounds good.”

“And they did it a little differently where you come from.”

“That too. You’re not too bad at making up stories yourself, Miss Julia.”

“If I do a good job,” she said, “they’ll let me sleep with the gardener. I think it’s time for me to make a couple of phone calls.”

26

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

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

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

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

He stopped to pick up flowers on the way home.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“But you’ve got qualifications.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What are you talking about?”

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

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

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

“You bought the stamps in Des Moines?”

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

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

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

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

“Don’t you see?”

“See what?”

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

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

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

“Right.”

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

“Urbandale.”

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

“McCue.”

“Whatever.”

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

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

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

“And a good defense attorney—”

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

27

“It doesn’t matter. The case would never come to trial. I wouldn’t live that long.”

“The police would kill you?”

“Not the police. The cops, the FBI, they’re all the least of it. The police never caught up with Dot, they never even knew she existed, and look what happened to her.”

“Who then? Oh.”

“Right.”

“You told me his name. Al?”

“Call-Me-Al. Which only means that’s not his name, but it’ll do if we need something to call him. I wonder if he even knew what he was going to use me for when he first began setting me up. Well, that’s something else that doesn’t matter. Longford’s dead and I’m the guy everybody’s looking for, but if I turn up, I’m the fly in Al’s ointment. If he finds me, I’m dead. If the cops find me first, I’m still dead.”

“He would be able to make that happen?”

He nodded. “Nothing to it. He’s pretty resourceful, that’s clear enough. And it’s not all that difficult to arrange for something to happen to someone in custody.”

“It doesn’t seem—”

“Fair?”

“That’s what I was going to say. But who ever said life was fair?”

“Somebody must have,” he said. “At one time or another. But it wasn’t me.”

A little later she said, “Suppose… no, it’s silly.”

“What?”

“Oh, it’s straight out of TV. A man’s framed and the only way out is to solve the crime.”

“Like O.J.,” he said, “searching all the golf courses in Florida for the real killer.”

“I told you it was silly. Would you even know where to start?”

“Maybe a graveyard.”

“You think he’s dead?”

“I think Al’s a believer in playing it safe, and that would be the safest way to play it. He used me as the fall guy, because he knew there was no trail that could lead back from me to him. But the actual shooter would know somebody, Al or somebody who worked for Al, so there’d be some linkage there.”

“But no one would be looking for it because everybody would think you were the real shooter.”

“Right. And meanwhile, just to guard against the possibility of anybody finding out what really happened, or the chance the shooter would brag about what he’d done, because he was drunk or to increase his chances of getting laid—”

“Would that work?”

“I suppose it might, with a certain sort of woman. The point is, once the governor was dead, the shooter made the jump from asset to liability. If I had to guess, I’d say he took his last breath within forty-eight hours of the assassination.”

“So he’s not playing golf with O.J.”

“Not a chance. But he might be sharing peanut butter and banana sandwiches with Elvis.”

That Thursday they ran into a plumbing problem at work. It demanded a higher level of expertise than Donny’s, so they knocked off early and left the field to a master plumber from Metairie. Keller came straight home so he could tell Lucille to take the rest of the day off, but found Julia on the front porch. He could tell she’d been crying.

The first thing she said was that there was coffee in the kitchen, and he went there and filled two cups to give her a minute to compose herself. He brought them to the porch, and by then she’d freshened up a little.

“He almost died this morning,” she said. “Lucille’s not an RN but she’s had some training. His heart stopped, and either it started up again on its own or she got it going. She called the school where I was working and I came home, and by then she’d called the doctor, and he was here when I got here.”

“You said almost died. He’s all right?”

“He’s alive. Is that what you meant?”

“I guess so.”

“He had a small stroke. It affected his speech, but it’s not too bad. He’s just a little harder to understand, but he made himself very clear when the doctor wanted to take him to a hospital.”

“He didn’t want that?”

“He said he’d rather die first, and the doctor’s a crusty old bastard himself, and said that’s what it would probably come to. Daddy shot back that he was going to die anyway, and so was the damn doctor, and what was so bad about dying? Then the doctor gave him a shot so he could get some rest, but I think maybe it was just to shut him up, and then he told me that the thing to do now was get him to the hospital.”

“What did you say?”

“That my father was a grown man who had the right to decide what bed he was going to die in. Oh, he didn’t want to hear that from me, and he laid such a good guilt trip on me that he could teach a course on the subject, if they were to add it to the med school curriculum. Assuming it’s not already there.”

“You held your ground?”

“I did,” she said, “and it may have been the hardest thing I’ve ever done, and do you know what was the hardest part?”

“Questioning your own judgment?”

“Yes! Standing firm and arguing, and all the while a little voice in my own head is yammering away. Where do I come off thinking I know more than the doctors, and am I just doing this because I want him to die, and am I being brave with the doctor because I haven’t got the courage to stand up to my own father? There was a whole committee holding a meeting in my head, all of them pounding the table and hollering.”

“He’s resting now?”

“Asleep, last I looked. Are you going in there? If he’s awake, he may not know you. The doctor told me to expect some gaps in his memory.”

“I won’t take it personally.”

“And there’ll be more strokes, he told me that, too. They’d have him on blood thinners if it wasn’t for the cancer. Of course, if he was in the damn hospital they could monitor the blood thinners, balancing the level every hour so he wouldn’t bleed out or stroke out, and – Nicholas, did I do the right thing?”

“You honored the man’s wishes,” he said. “What’s more important than that?”

He went into the sitting room, and the sickroom smell was worse than usual, or maybe it was his imagination. At first he couldn’t detect the old man’s breathing, and thought the end had come, but then the breathing resumed. He stood there, wondering how to feel, what to think.

The old man’s eyes opened, fixed on Keller. “Oh, it’s you,” he said, his voice thickened but otherwise clear as a bell. Then his eyes closed and he was gone again.

When Keller got to work the next morning, he took Donny aside and handed him a ten-dollar bill. “You gave me too much yesterday,” he said. “Sixty dollars, and we only worked five hours.”

Donny pushed the bill back at him. “Gave you a raise,” he said. “Twelve dollars an hour. I didn’t want to say anything in front of the others.” Meaning Luis and a fourth man, Dwayne. “You’re worth it, buddy. Don’t want you looking for the grass to be greener somewhere else.” He winked. “Nice to know you’re an honest man, though.”

He waited until after dinner to tell Julia, and accepted her congratulations. “But I’m not surprised,” she said. “Patsy’s mother didn’t have any stupid children. He’s right about that, you’re worth it, and he’s smart not to chance losing you.”

“Next thing I know,” he said, “you’ll be telling me I’ve got a future in this business.”

“It may not look like it. I don’t suppose the pay amounts to much, compared to what you used to get.”

“I used to spend most of my time waiting for the phone to ring. When I worked I got paid okay, but you can’t compare it. It was a different life.”

“I can imagine. Or maybe I can’t. Do you miss it?”

“God, no. Why would I?”

“I don’t know. I just thought this might be boring, after the life you were used to.”

He thought about it. “What was interesting,” he said, “and not all the time, but sometimes, was the aspect of having a problem and solving it. You rip out a dropped ceiling and you’ll find all the problems any man can ask for, and you can solve them without anybody getting hurt.”

She was silent for a long moment, and then she said, “I think we’d better see about getting you a new car. What’s so funny?”

“Dot used to complain that I’d go off on tangents. Master of the Non Sequitur, she called me.”

“So you want to know how I got there?”

“It’s not important. It just struck me funny, that’s all.”

“How I got there,” she said, “is I was thinking it sounds as if you might want to hang around for a while. And the one thing that could screw things up is that car of yours. The license tags may be a dead end, but if you got pulled over and they asked to see the registration—”

“I’d have the papers that were in the glove box when I switched plates at the airport. I thought of doctoring them, substituting my name and address for what’s on there.”

“Would that work?”

“It might get past a quick glance, but not a long hard look. And it’s an Iowa registration for a car with Tennessee tags being driven by a damn fool with a Louisiana license. So no, I’d have to say it wouldn’t work. That’s why I haven’t bothered to try.”

“You could stay under the speed limit,” she said, “and obey every traffic regulation, and never even risk another parking ticket. And then some drunk rear-ends you, and the next thing you know you’ve got cops asking questions.”

“Or some cop could come back from a vacation at Graceland and wonder why my Tennessee plate doesn’t look much like the ones he saw up there. I know, there are all kinds of things that could go wrong. I’m putting money aside, and when I’ve got enough saved—”

“I’ll give you the money.”

“I don’t want you to do that.”

“You can pay me back. It won’t take long, you’re making an extra two dollars an hour.”

“Let me think about it.”

“I’m all for that,” she said. “Think all you want, Nicholas. Saturday morning we’ll go car shopping.”

There wasn’t much shopping involved. The next time he saw Donny, he mentioned he was going to be looking for a car. You get yourself a truck, Donny said, and you’ll never be happy with a plain old car again. Donny knew somebody with a Chevy half-ton pickup, not much on looks but mechanically sound. It would have to be all cash, Donny said, but he could probably find somebody to take the Sentra off Nick’s hands. Keller said he already had somebody lined up.

The truck’s owner was an older woman who looked like a librarian, and it turned out that’s just what she was, at what she described as the big branch library in Jefferson Parish. Keller couldn’t guess how she’d wound up owning the truck, and her air suggested she was somewhat baffled herself. But the papers looked okay, and when he asked the price she sighed and said she’d been hoping to get five thousand dollars, which made it pretty clear she didn’t expect to. Keller offered four, figuring to meet her somewhere in the middle, and felt almost guilty when she sighed again and nodded her agreement.