Текст книги "Hit and Run"

Автор книги: Block Lawrence

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Текущая страница: 7 (всего у книги 18 страниц)

15

After all he’d gone through to get his hands on it, he managed to walk halfway to his car the next morning before he realized he’d left his baseball cap in his room. Fortunately he’d also forgotten to leave the room key on the dresser, so he was able to let himself in and retrieve the cap. With Homer on his forehead, rather like a Valkyrie on the prow of a Viking warship, he felt ready to face the world.

He drove a few miles, stopped to top off the gas tank for what would be the final time, drove some more. The phrase safe at home echoed in his mind like a mantra. All he needed to do was get into his own apartment and lock the door behind him and he’d be locking out his life as a fugitive and everything that went with it. And, because he was retired now, with no one last job looming in front of him, he’d be locking all of that out forever. He’d have his stamps, he’d have his enormous state-of-the-art TV, he’d have his TiVo, and he’d have all the other aspects of the life he’d arranged for himself within easy walking distance – his regular deli, his favorite restaurants, the newsstand where he bought the Times every morning, the laundry where he dropped it off dirty in the morning and picked it up clean at night. He didn’t suppose it was a terribly exciting life, centering as it did upon such sedentary and solitary pursuits as television and stamp collecting, but excitement had lost its charm for him over the years, if it had ever had any to begin with, and he found it thrilling enough to bid a few dollars on a stamp on eBay and see if some bastard pounced on it before time ran out. It was low-stakes excitement, no question, but that was plenty.

That errant thought was trying to break through again, struggling to rise to the surface. It was like something barely glimpsed out of the corner of your eye. You knew you’d catch sight of it if you turned your head, and that was all it took to keep your gaze fixed straight ahead.

His breakfast, picked up without incident at a drive-up window, consisted of two Egg McMuffins and a big cup of coffee. Just before exiting the interstate he’d seen a sign for a rest area five miles ahead, so he drove there and parked under a tree. He’d timed it just right, he was pleased to note; the coffee was cool enough to drink and the Egg McMuffins were still warm.

When he was done eating he went to the restroom, and on his way back he finally remembered to buy a paper. USA Today was seventy-five cents, and he fed in three quarters before he noticed that the coin box right next to it held that morning’s New York Times. He pressed the coin return, got his three quarters back, added a fourth quarter and bought the Times. On the way back to the car he was already planning his approach to the paper. First the local and national news, then the sports, and finally the crossword puzzle. What day was it, anyway? Thursday? The puzzles increased daily in difficulty, from Monday, not much of a challenge to a bright ten-year-old, to Saturday, which often left Keller feeling slightly retarded. Thursday was usually just about right. He could generally fill in a Thursday puzzle, all right, but it took some thought.

He settled in behind the wheel, made himself comfortable, and started in on the paper. He never did get to the crossword puzzle.

16

The paper Keller bought every morning came in four sections, but the edition the Times distributed outside of the immediate New York metropolitan area fit into just two. There was an assassination story on the front page, dealing primarily with its evolving political implications, and another story further on about the hunt for the killer, which seemed to have trailed off in several directions, none of which had thus far panned out. There was nothing about Miller Remsen, which came as no surprise to Keller; even if they’d found the body, which seemed unlikely at this stage, the only way it would interest anybody outside of Indiana would be if he’d scrawled Catch me before I kill more governors in lipstick on the mirror.

He almost missed the real story.

It was on the third page of the second section. “Arson, Murder Found in White Plains Fire,” the headline announced, and it was White Plains that caught his eye. If it had been less specific and said Westchester instead he might have skipped right past it, but he’d been to White Plains countless times, first to see the old man and then to see Dot. He’d catch the train at Grand Central and a cab from the station, and he’d sit drinking iced tea on the wraparound front porch of the big old house on Taunton Place, or in the cozy kitchen. So he read about the fire in White Plains, and knew shortly that he wouldn’t be going there again, because there was no more house, no more porch, no more kitchen. No more Dot.

Evidently there had been a story in yesterday’s paper, which of course he hadn’t seen. But earlier – Monday, he thought, though it could have been Sunday, it wasn’t all that clear – earlier, he read, a fire had broken out in the early morning hours, raging out of control before firefighters could arrive on the scene, and consuming virtually all of the century-old house right down to its foundation.

The fire had begun in the kitchen, which was where they’d found the charred body of the householder and sole resident, identified by neighbors as Dorothea Harbison. Investigators had suspected arson immediately, attributing the all-consuming fury of the blaze to the liberal use of an accelerant throughout the residence. Initially it seemed at least possible that Ms. Harbison had set the fire herself; neighbors described her as quiet and reclusive and thought she’d shown signs of depression in recent months.

Keller wanted to argue with them, whoever they were. Reclusive? She didn’t suffer fools or share her personal business with the world, but that didn’t make her some goddam cat lady, wearing the same old flannel nightgown until it fell apart. Signs of depression? What signs of depression? She didn’t go around giggling, but he’d never known her to be genuinely depressed, and she was about as suicidal as Mary Fucking Poppins.

But there was no longer a question of suicide, the story continued, because a medical examination revealed that the woman had been shot twice in the head with a small-caliber handgun. The wounds were not consistent with suicide – no kidding, thought Keller – nor was the handgun found at the scene, which led investigators to conclude that the woman had been shot to death and the fire set to conceal the crime.

“But it didn’t work, did it?” Keller said out loud. “Fucking idiots.”

He forced himself to read the rest of it. The motive for the murder was obscure, according to the Times, although police were not ready to rule out robbery. An unnamed police source was able to identify Dorothea Harbison as the former companion and caretaker of the late Giuseppe Ragone, aka Joe the Dragon, during the long years of his retirement from the world of organized crime.

As far as Keller knew, no one outside of the tabloid press had ever called the old man Joe the Dragon. There were people who referred to him, though never to his face, as Joey Rags, or the Ragman, because of the coincidence of his surname combined with his one-time involvement with a Garment District trucking local. Keller himself never thought of him or referred to him as anything other than the old man.

And the old man had never retired. He’d let go of a lot of his interests toward the end, but he was still brokering jobs and sending Keller out to take care of them right up to the very end.

“As Joe the Dragon’s live-in companion and presumed confidante,” the unnamed source went on, “Harbison would have been privy to a lot of O.C. information. Maybe someone was afraid she’d tell what she knew. Ragone’s been gone a long time, but what is it they say? Sooner or later the chickens come home to roost.”

It was as pointless as anything he might have done, but he couldn’t help himself. He dropped coins in a pay phone and dialed Dot’s number.

Coo-wheeeet!

Not a working number. Well, that was the truth, wasn’t it? Burn a house to the ground and you had to expect an interruption in telephone service.

He got his quarters back and used them to call his own phone number, half expecting the same coo-wheeeet and the same recording. Instead he got a ring. His machine was set to pick up after two rings if he had messages and after four if he didn’t, so that he could retrieve them from a distance while avoiding the toll if there were none to retrieve. He was surprised when it rang a third time, he’d expected messages after this long an absence, and he was even more surprised when the phone went on to ring a fourth and a fifth and a sixth time, and might have gone on ringing forever if he hadn’t ended the connection.

Why would it do that? He didn’t have call-waiting, so it couldn’t be that the machine was already handling a call. If that happened he’d just get a busy signal.

He wondered why he was even bothering to dig his quarters out of the coin return chute. Who would he ever have occasion to call?

It was over, he saw now. That’s what he’d been on the verge of realizing, that was the nasty little thought he’d kept at bay. And the pipe dream that had sustained him all the way back from Iowa, the mad fantasy that everything would be peaches and cream the minute he got back to his own apartment, was now so clearly impossible he wondered how he’d ever been dim enough to entertain it, let alone take it as gospel.

He’d somehow managed to regard New York as a haven, safe and sacrosanct. For years he’d made it a rule never to accept assignments in the city, and while he’d had to break the rule on a couple of occasions, most of the time he’d adhered to it. The rest of the country, and he’d covered a great deal of it at one time or another, was where he went to do his work. New York, his home, was where he came when the work was done.

But, however much people both in and out of the city might prefer to think otherwise, New York was part of America. New Yorkers watched the same newscasts and read the same newspaper stories. They might be better than most people at minding their own business, and it was not uncommon for an apartment dweller to be unable to identify people in his own building by name, but that hardly meant they turned a deaf ear and a blind eye to everything around them.

His picture had been all over TV and in every newspaper with the possible exception of Linn’s Stamp News. (And it might even turn up there, if James McCue had managed to figure out just who it was who’d bought those Swedish reprints from him.) How many people lived within a block or two of Keller? How many knew him from the building, or had run into him at the deli, or at the gym, or anywhere in that unassuming life he’d been idealizing just minutes ago?

That life to which he could never return.

He went through the paper again, more carefully this time, and in a story he’d skimmed earlier he found evidence that at least one of Keller’s neighbors had noticed his resemblance to the furtive chap in the photograph. Commenting on the multiple sightings of the fugitive, the journalist alluded to an unnamed Turtle Bay resident who’d become a person of interest to the police “only because of some apparent uncertainty as to the nature of his occupation, and his frequent trips out of town.”

That would be enough to warrant a visit. Would they turn up anything incriminating in his apartment?

He couldn’t think of anything. They’d find his laptop computer, and they’d turn his hard drive inside and out, but back when he bought the thing he’d known that email had a half-life longer than uranium’s, and that a couple of sentences wafting through the ether would leave a trail that could outlive the sender. He and Dot had never sent each other an email, and vowed they never would.

Well, that would be an easy promise to keep, wouldn’t it?

He’d used his computer mostly in connection with his hobby – corresponding with dealers, surfing for information, buying stamps on eBay, bidding in auctions. He’d checked airline websites before his flight to Des Moines, but he hadn’t bought his ticket online because he was going to be flying as Holden Blankenship. So he’d made the reservation over the phone, and there wouldn’t be any record of it on his computer.

Could they tell what sites he’d visited, and when? He wasn’t sure, but figured the guiding principle – that when it came to technology, anybody could do anything – probably applied. One thing he was pretty sure they could do was pull up his phone records and establish that he’d called an airline a day or two before Blankenship flew to Des Moines, but at this point it didn’t matter, at this point none of it mattered, because he’d finally managed to attract their attention, and that was all it took. He’d come as far as he had in life by staying out of the spotlight, and now he was in it, and that was the end of it.

The end of John Paul Keller. If he stayed alive, which seemed very iffy indeed, it would have to be somewhere else, and under some other name. He wouldn’t miss the first two names; hardly anyone had ever used them, and he’d been called Keller by just about everybody since boyhood. That was who he was, and when he filled something out with his initials he sometimes thought they stood for Just Plain Keller.

He couldn’t be Keller anymore. Keller was over and done with – and, when he thought about it, he realized that everything in Keller’s life was already gone, so what difference could it make if the name vanished along with it?

The money, for one thing. He’d had, at last report, something in excess of two and a half million dollars in stocks and bonds, all of it in an Ameritrade online account set up and managed by Dot. The money would still be there, it wouldn’t vanish with her death, but it might as well be gone for all the good it would do him. He had no idea what name she’d used on the account or how a person might go about accessing it.

Of course he had bank accounts, savings and checking. Maybe as much as fifteen thousand in his savings account, plus a thousand or so in checking. By now they’d have frozen his accounts, and they’d be just waiting for him to get his picture taken trying to use his ATM card. He couldn’t use it now, anyway, because he hadn’t brought it with him, so they’d probably confiscated it by now.

No money, then. And no apartment, either. He’d lived for years in an apartment on First Avenue that he’d bought at the very reasonable insider’s price back when the Art Deco building went co-op, and the monthly maintenance charges didn’t come to much, and he’d known he’d spend the rest of his days there until they carried him out feet first. It had always been his refuge, and now he didn’t even dare go back there. It was out of his reach forever, along with his big-screen TV with TiVo and his comfortable chair and his bathroom with the pulsing showerhead and the desk he worked at and—

Oh, God. His stamps.

17

Keller crossed the Hudson on the lower level of the George Washington Bridge, took the Harlem River Drive to the FDR, and got off it a few blocks from his apartment. He’d spent the afternoon in a movie theater at a shopping mall outside of East Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania. It called itself a quadruplex, which sounded to Keller like someone who’d stepped on a landmine and lived to tell the tale, but only meant it could show four movies at once. Keller saw two of them, but only paid for one; rather than call attention to himself by going out and buying another ticket, he went from one theater to the men’s room, then slipped into another theater to watch the second movie.

And if the usher had spotted him? What was he going to do, shoot his way out of it? Not likely, he’d stashed the SIG automatic in the glove compartment, and he was surprised to discover how vulnerable he felt without it. He’d only been carrying a gun for a few days, and it would be hard to imagine a less perilous venue than a darkened movie house on a weekday afternoon, with fewer than two dozen people in attendance and their median age somewhere around seventy-seven. He should have felt reasonably secure in such a setting, but it was beginning to dawn on him that he was never going to feel secure again, no matter where he went.

When the second feature ended, it was time to go. Head down, Homer Simpson leading the way, he returned to his car, and the first thing he did, before he fastened his seat belt or put the key in the ignition, was restore the gun to its place beneath his waistband. The pressure in the small of his back, he’d discovered, had become comforting.

It was dark when he left the movie theater, which had been pretty much the point of the visit. It was close to midnight by the time he was circling the blocks in his own neighborhood, trying to figure out what to do with the car. While his fantasy was still functioning, before the Times had come along to kick holes in it, he’d known just how to dispose of the Sentra. He’d drive it to some still-disreputable part of Brooklyn or the Bronx, and there he’d park it with the doors unlocked and the key in the ignition. He’d take the license plates off first, but he didn’t think their absence would dissuade some neighborhood youth from taking the car out for a spin. Where it wound up after that, in the NYPD impound lot or some chop shop in Bensonhurst, was of no concern to Keller. He’d be back home, living the good life, and taking a cab for any distance too far to walk.

Right.

Now that New York had become about as safe for him as Des Moines, he was going to need a car to get out of it. So he’d have to stow this car, and he’d have to put it where it wouldn’t get towed. That probably meant a parking lot, which in turn meant giving one more person a look at his face, and would probably entail passing a security camera or two. But it was hell finding a legal spot in his neighborhood, and even the illegal parking spaces were hard to come by. The U.N. Building was just a couple of blocks away, and cars immunized by their DPL plates against towing and ticketing slouched arrogantly alongside each bus stop and fire hydrant.

He passed one, a gleaming Lincoln Town Car, three times. It was blocking a hydrant, and it was doing all it could to block traffic at the same time, because the diplomat who’d parked it had been undiplomatic enough to leave it a full three feet from the curb. The third time around, Keller double-parked next to it, opened his trunk, rummaged around in his tool kit, and found what he needed.

Minutes later he was rounding the corner, and on the next block he found a space that left the Sentra sticking far enough into a bus stop to warrant a ticket, or possibly a tow. But it wouldn’t get either, not with the DPL tags covering his own plates.

Bring the suitcase along? No, what for?

He left it and started walking toward his building. And, with a little luck, his stamp collection.

Keller and his stamps had a complicated history.

He’d collected as a boy, which was hardly remarkable. Many boys of his generation had childhood stamp collections, especially quiet introspective types like Keller. A neighbor whose business involved a lot of correspondence with firms in Latin America had brought him a batch to get him started, and Keller had learned to soak them from their paper backing, dry them between sheets of paper towel, and mount them with hinges in the album his mother had bought him at Lamston’s. He’d eventually found other sources of stamps, buying mixtures and packets at Gimbel’s stamp department, and getting inexpensive stamps on approval from a dealer halfway across the country, picking out what he wanted, returning the rest along with his payment, and waiting for the dealer to send the next selection. He’d kept this up for a few years, never spending more than a dollar or two a week, and sometimes forgetting to return the approvals for weeks on end because other pursuits intruded. Eventually he lost interest in the collection, and eventually his mother sold it, or gave it away, as there wasn’t enough there to interest a dealer.

He was dismayed when he eventually found out it was gone, but not devastated, and he forgot about it and went on to other things, some of them more suspenseful than stamp collecting, though less socially acceptable. And time passed and the world changed. Keller’s mother was long gone, and so were Gimbel’s and Lamston’s.

For decades, he rarely thought of his stamp collection unless his memory was triggered by some bit of knowledge he owed to those childhood hours with tongs and hinges. There were times when it seemed to him that the greater portion of the information stored in his head had got there as a direct result of his hobby. He could, without any great difficulty, name all of the presidents of the United States in order, and he owed this ability to the series of presidential stamps issued in 1938, with each president’s head on the stamp with a value corresponding to his place in the procession. Washington was on the one-cent stamp, and Lincoln on the sixteen-cent stamp. He remembered this, even as he remembered that the one-cent stamp was green and the sixteen-cent stamp black, while the twenty-one-cent stamp, picturing New York’s own Chester Alan Arthur, was a dull blue.

He knew that Idaho had been admitted to the union in 1890, because the fiftieth anniversary had been commemorated by a stamp in 1940. He knew that a group of Swedes and Finns had settled at Wilmington, Delaware, in 1638, and that General Tadeusz Kosciuszko, the Polish general who served in the American Revolution, had been granted American citizenship in 1783. He might not know how to pronounce the man’s name, let alone spell it, but he knew what he did about him because of a blue five-cent stamp issued in 1933.

Occasionally a memory might turn him wistful, wishing he still had that essentially worthless collection that had filled so much of his time and turned his head into such a wonderland of trivia. But it never occurred to him to try to recapture those days. They were part of his youth, and they were gone.

Then, when the old man started slipping mentally, and when it was becoming clear that he was beginning to lose it big-time, Keller found himself contemplating retirement. He had some money saved up, and while it had amounted to less than 10 percent of what he’d eventually have in Dot’s online account, he’d managed to sell himself on the notion that it was enough.

But what would he do with his time? Play golf? Take up needlepoint? Start hanging out at the senior center? Dot pointed out that he would need a hobby, and a bunch of childhood memories popped into his head, and the first thing he did was buy a worldwide collection, 1840-to-1940, just to get himself started, and before he knew it he had a shelf full of albums and a subscription to Linn’s and dealers all over the country sending him price lists and approvals. And he’d also spent a surprisingly substantial portion of his retirement fund, so it was just as well when the old man was out of the picture entirely and he could go on working directly with Dot.

When he thought objectively about his stamps, he couldn’t avoid concluding that the whole enterprise was nuts. He was spending the greater portion of his discretionary income on little pieces of paper that were worth nothing except what he and other like-minded screwballs were willing to pay for them. And he was devoting the greater portion of his free time to acquiring those pieces of paper, and, having done so, to mounting them neatly and systematically in albums created for that purpose. He put a lot of effort into getting them to look just right on the page, this in spite of the fact that he never intended for any eyes but his to see them. He didn’t want to display his stamps at a show, or invite another collector over to have a look at them. He wanted them right there on the shelves in his apartment, where he and only he could look at them.

All of which, he had to admit, was at the very least irrational.

On the other hand, when he was working with his stamps, he was always entirely absorbed in what he was doing. He was expending considerable concentration on what was essentially an unimportant task, and that seemed to be something his spirit required. When he was in a bad mood, his stamps got him out of it. When he was anxious or irritable, his stamps took him to another realm where the anxiety or irritation ceased to matter. When the world seemed mad and out of control, his stamps provided a more orderly sphere where serenity ruled and logic prevailed.

If he wasn’t in the mood, the stamps could wait; if he was called out of town, he knew they’d be there when he got back. They weren’t pets that had to be fed and walked on a regular schedule, or plants that needed to be watered. They demanded his entire and absolute attention, but only when he had it to give.

He wondered sometimes if he was spending too much money on his collection, and perhaps he was, but his bills were always paid and he wasn’t carrying any debt, and he’d somehow managed to accumulate two and a half million dollars in investments, so why shouldn’t he spend what he wanted to on stamps?

Besides, decent philatelic material always increased in value over time. You couldn’t buy it one day and sell it the next and expect to come out ahead, but after you’d owned it awhile it would have appreciated enough to cover the dealer’s markup. And what other pastime worked that way? If you owned a boat, if you raced cars, if you went on safari, how much of what you spent could you expect to get back? What, for that matter, was your net return on bottles of Cristal and lines of cocaine?

And so he’d returned to New York for his stamps. There was nothing else to come back for, and ample reason to stay away. If he was a person of interest to the police, in addition to entering his apartment and sealing his bank accounts, they might very well have posted somebody to watch the place on the slim chance that he’d be fool enough to return.

If the cops weren’t waiting for him, what about Call-Me-Al? The people who’d pulled the strings in Des Moines weren’t willing to sit back and let nature take its course. They’d proved that in White Plains, because it wasn’t the old man’s chickens that had come home to roost, it was the turkeys on Al’s team who’d shot Dot dead and burned the place down around her.

They might have already known his name, and where he lived. If not, they’d have asked Dot, and he could only hope she’d answered right away, and that two quick bullets in the brain were all the punishment she’d been forced to endure. Because she’d have talked sooner or later, anyone would, and in this case sooner was better than later.

But maybe nobody had the place staked out, not the cops and not Al’s boys, either. Maybe all he had to do was figure out a way in and out without being spotted by the doorman.

It would probably take more than one trip, though. His collection was housed in ten good-sized albums, and the best plan he could come up with, sitting in the movie house in East Stroudsburg with his eyes on the screen, was to load up the oversize wheeled duffel that he’d bought on QVC a few years ago. He had never used it, it held far more stuff than he ever wanted to drag on any trip, business or pleasure, but the pitchman on the shopping channel had caught him at just the right moment, and before he knew what was happening he’d picked up the phone and bought the damn thing.

You could get four albums in it for sure, and possibly five, and the handle and wheels would enable him to get it to the car. Dump the albums in the trunk, go back for another load – two trips might do it, or three at the most.

There was some cash in the house, too, unless someone had found it by now. Not a fortune, just an emergency fund of somewhere between one and two thousand dollars. If this didn’t constitute an emergency he didn’t know what did, and he could definitely use the cash, but it wouldn’t have been enough to draw him back to the city, not if it had been ten or twenty times as much as it was.

The stamp collection was something else. He’d lost his first collection all those years ago. He didn’t want to lose this one.