“I can imagine.”
“Now you’re going to want to spend some time just looking, aren’t you? And you don’t need me watching over your shoulder, and frankly I’d just as soon not spend any more time in this room than I have to. In fact, I think I’ll go out and ride for an hour. I try to ride every day. I think it’s good for me, physically and emotionally, and I know it’s good for the horses.”
Keller voiced his agreement without being at all certain what he was agreeing with. Her words had washed over him without entirely registering. Something was evidently good for the horses, and it seemed safe to be in favor of it.
He carried the first volume of Portugal and Colonies to the desk and opened it.
At one point the door opened, although he never heard it. Then she was at his side, announcing that she’d brought him a cup of coffee. It was black, she said, but if he took cream or sugar—
He told her black was fine. She told him to let her know when he was ready for a lunch break, and he said he would.
She withdrew, leaving the coffee where he could reach it but far enough away so he’d be unlikely to knock it over. Well, she’d probably brought coffee to her husband in similar circumstances. She’d had plenty of time to work out just where to put the cup.
And coffee was just the ticket. He could use a cup of coffee, no question about it.
First, though—
By the time he reached for the coffee, it was cold.
“Are you sure you won’t have another sandwich, Mr. Edwards?”
“No, I’m fine,” he said.
She’d served him lunch at a glass-topped table on the back patio, where the view was the same as the one from the stamp room’s window. The two horses were keeping each other company in the paddock. Both were chestnut geldings, and wonderfully gentle, she’d told him, and added that she’d been out for an hour on the one with the star on his forehead. And did he ride, by any chance?
He shook his head. “Stamps keep me busy,” he said.
“They certainly kept Jeb busy,” she said, “although he was always eager to spend plenty of time in the saddle.” The double entendre was clearly unintentional, and she colored when she realized what she’d said. Keller, who’d been about to suggest she call him Nicholas, decided they’d be better off staying with Mr. Edwards and Mrs. Soderling for the time being.
He said, “About the stamps.”
“Yes.”
“Do you have any sense of what you’d like to get for them?”
“Well, as much as I can.”
“Of course.”
“I know Jeb put a good deal of money into his collections. His line of business was quite volatile, he had interests in oil and cattle and real estate, so we’d be rich one day and broke the next and rich again the day after. When there was plenty of money he’d buy stamps, and when his cash flow tightened up he’d bide his time.”
“Did he keep records of what he spent?”
“I don’t believe so. He got a lot of his income in the form of cash, so he preferred to pay for his stamps that way. Something to do with taxes, I suppose.”
And the nonpayment thereof, Keller thought.
“He said stamps were an investment, that the better ones would go up in value. But he also said it wasn’t like the stock market, that you couldn’t expect to get close to retail when you sold. And there was one time when he talked about selling.”
“Oh?”
“When the market crashed a few years ago. ‘Maybe I’ll sell the stamps,’ he said. ‘That’d keep us going a while, anyway.’ But I don’t think he was serious, and nothing ever came of it. You asked me if I had any idea what they’re worth. I don’t, not really, but I would think it would come to six figures, wouldn’t you?”
He took a moment before answering. Then he said, “I could make a phone call right now, and move some money into my checking account. And then I could write you a check for a quarter of a million dollars. I’d be running a certain risk, because there are rare stamps that haven’t been authenticated by experts, and they might or might not turn out to be genuine. It’s a chance I’m prepared to take. But I don’t think it would be the best deal for you.”
“Because it might be worth more.”
“Possibly a great deal more,” he said. “I only collect stamps up to 1940, and your husband’s collections go all the way to the present. The modern material’s out of my area of expertise. And in some of his collections, Russia in particular, there’s a ton of specialized material, imperfs and errors and other varieties.”
“He had no use for the Russians,” she said, “but he liked their stamps.”
“Well,” he said. “The point is I can make you that offer, but I’d advise you to turn it down. If this were a much smaller collection I’d take it on consignment, giving you an advance and a share in whatever I received over a certain figure. But that’s not really good, either.”
There was still some iced tea in his glass, and he took a drink of it. “Here’s what I’d propose,” he said. “I’ll act as your agent, and I’ll call the three dealers most likely to be ideal purchasers of your husband’s stamps. I’ll make appointments for them each to send a representative within the next week. Ideally we’ll have them here on three consecutive days, and we’ll get sealed bids from each of them, and the high bidder gets the collection.”
“And they’ll all be able to get someone here on the day you specify?”
“If any of them can’t,” he said, “I’ll call the next name on the list.”
“And you think one of them will pay significantly more than a quarter of a million dollars.”
“Yes.”
“As to how much more—”
“I’d be guessing.”
“I understand. But that guess would be at least a half a million?”
“Probably more.”
She thought for a moment. “And if their offers turn out to be lower than you expect—”
“That won’t happen. But if it does, yes, I’ll still pay you the quarter million.”
“And you’ll be here when they come?”
“To protect your interests. Yes.”
“And what about your own interest, Mr. Edwards? You’ll be stuck in Cheyenne for a week, and of course you’ll be entitled to a portion of the price I receive, but do you have a figure in mind?”
Thirty-Seven
Getting from Cheyenne to Denver was simple enough. You got on I-25 and drove south for a hundred miles, and if it took you more than an hour and a half you weren’t keeping up with the light Saturday morning traffic. He held the Toyota steady at four or five miles over the posted speed limit, thus inviting neither the attention of a highway patrolman nor the scorn of his fellow motorists.
He’d programmed the GPS with the address from the pink index card, and its soothing ladylike voice didn’t have much to say for most of the way on the interstate. She perked up as they got close to Denver, and guided him southwest on I-76 to where that highway ran into I-70. There he let her talk him through a complicated cloverleaf (“Prepare to keep to the left,” followed by a “keep to the left…”) that left him heading south on Wadsworth Boulevard.
He went on doing as instructed, until he made a turn into Otis Drive and she told him, not without a measure of self-satisfaction, “You have arrived.”
He hadn’t quite, though. Not yet, because the street number of the house to his right, conveniently painted on the curb, was 4101, and the number he’d punched into the GPS was 4132. That would put it halfway up the block and on the left-hand side.
Where there were a couple of cars parked, two of them with flashing lights mounted on their roofs. And where all those people were standing.
And where the house, on the other hand, was not.
“You hear about houses burning to the ground,” he told Dot, “but I always thought it was a figure of speech, because they never do. They burn, all right, and the property winds up being a total loss, but you sti
ll have walls standing.”
“But not this time?”
“Burned to the foundation,” he said, “which extended maybe a foot and a half above the ground, but that’s it. Don’t ask me how it happened.”
“Keller, who else am I gonna ask?”
He and Dot had cell phones that they used only to call each other, and even then only when it was important that no record of the call exist. He’d had that phone with him, but waited until he’d driven a mile or so from what used to be 4132 Otis Drive. He pulled into a strip mall and parked in front of a furniture store that had closed for the night, if not forever, and he called the one number the phone was programmed to call, and she picked up midway through the second ring.
And now he held the phone in his hand and stared at it.
“Keller? Where’d you go?”
“You thought I did it,” he said.
“Well, sure. I gave you a name and an address.”
“And a picture and a phone number.”
“Let’s just stick to the name and the address, okay? I gave them to you, and sometime last night the address ceased to exist and the name wound up in the hospital.”
“And you assumed I was responsible.”
“Put yourself in my place, Keller. What would you have thought?”
“But to burn down a whole house?”
“I know, it’s like that essay everybody had to read in high school, burning down the house to roast the pig. I forget who wrote it.”
“Charles Lamb.”
“Now how would you happen to know that, Keller? Don’t tell me, I’ll bet he’s on a stamp. Do you suppose there’s an alternate universe where Charles Pigg wrote a famous essay about lamb chops?”
“Uh…”
“Never mind. I thought it was pretty heavy-handed for you, not your usual style. Collateral damage and all that. Though the collateral damage could have been a lot worse. Two kids, and thank God it was Friday.”
“Friday?”
“No school on Saturday, so they were both away from the house on sleepovers. Keller, you’re right there in Denver and I’m filling you in from what I skimmed off the Internet. Here’s a radical idea. Why don’t you pick up a newspaper and call me back when you’re up to speed?”
He bought the Denver Post from a convenience store clerk who seemed anxious that Keller was about to hold her up, and relieved when he didn’t. The story wasn’t hard to find, and he read it through twice and called Dot.
“Severe injuries,” he said. “But he’s expected to live.”
“For now,” Dot said.
“He had fish tanks,” he said. “Aquariums, except I guess the plural is aquaria.”
“Thanks for pointing that out.”
“All destroyed, of course. His wife was away when it happened.”
“That’d be Joanne.”
“Joanne Hudepohl, right. She’s described as distraught.”
“There’s a surprise. Your house is gone, fish tanks and all, and your husband’s in the hospital with tubes coming out of his toes. Wouldn’t you be distraught?”
“I suppose.”
“Unless she did it,” Dot said. “That’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it? And it’s what I’d have been thinking myself if I hadn’t pretty much taken it for granted that you were the one who did it. She was out chauffeuring the kids to their sleepovers, wasn’t she?”
“She dropped off her son first,” he said, “and when she delivered her daughter, the other mommy invited her in. And there were two other mommies on hand, as it was a four-girl sleepover.”
“How old were the daughters?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “What difference does it make?”
“None,” she said, “only it’s beginning to sound like a movie they were showing on cable the other night. Except those girls were college age, and they should have been ashamed of themselves. What did the four mommies do, break out the gin bottle?”
“I think it was wine. At some point she called her husband, and he told her to stay as long as she wanted because he was busy with his fish.”
“I suppose he was pasting them in an album,” she said, “like you and your stamps.”
“She called home before she left,” he said, “but when he didn’t answer she assumed he was asleep. Then she drove home in time to watch the firemen at work. They’d taken him to the hospital by then.”
“So her alibi’s solid.”
“It looks that way.”
“Just good luck that she wasn’t home herself when everything went pear-shaped.”
“Pear-shaped?”
“I’ve been watching English mysteries on the BBC,” she said. “And once in a while an expression creeps into my speech. She wasn’t home, and neither were the kids. Just her husband.”
“And the fish.”
“Collateral damage,” she said. “Innocent byswimmers. It’s awfully damn convenient for her, isn’t it?”
“It does look that way.”
“Not that she did it, but that she had it done. I suppose the same possibility might occur to the cops.”
“You’d think so.”
“And they’ll ask her a couple of questions, and she’ll fall apart.”
“Amateurs generally do.”
“Is she our client, Dot?”
“I think she’s got to be somebody’s client,” she said, “but I don’t know if she’s ours or not. The job came from a broker who got it from a cutout, and there are too many levels for anybody to get through. There’s no way she can implicate us, in case that’s what you were wondering.”
“The question did come to mind.”
“We’re clear,” she said, “and why shouldn’t we be? You didn’t do it.”
“No.”
“So what you can do now,” she said, “is catch the next plane back to Julia and Jenny. If the Fish Whisperer recovers, I’ll tell my guy that we’re keeping the advance payment and washing our hands of the whole business.”
“And if he dies?”
“Then I ask for the second payment. Why not? Who’s gonna prove you didn’t do it, or sub it out to somebody?”
“So there’s nothing I have to do?”
“Like what? Put on a white coat and hang a stethoscope around your neck? And sneak past hospital security so you can punch the guy’s ticket? He ceased to be our problem when his house went up in flames.”
“I guess you’re right.”
“Of course I’m right. Go home, Keller.”
“Well,” he said, “I can’t. Not for a while.”
Back in his room at La Quinta, Keller took a long hot shower. When he was done drying off, he tossed his towel on the floor of the shower stall.
That’s what the little card told you to do, but it was hard for Keller to get used to it. If you returned your towels to the rack, that meant you wanted to use them again. If you felt fresh towels might be a good idea, you were supposed to throw them on the floor. This would save water, the management explained, and fight global warming, so Keller figured it was the least he could do.
But he couldn’t throw a towel on the floor without imagining the look on his mother’s face.
He got into bed, letting his mind conjure up a conversation with his long-gone mother. They hadn’t had many conversations during her lifetime, and Keller had since wondered if the woman might not have been suffering from some degree of mental illness or impairment, but on balance she’d certainly been a good mother to him, and there were times when he regretted the talks they hadn’t had. So he had them now occasionally, when he waited for sleep to overtake him.
They began by talking about the towel, and why he’d thrown it on the floor. Well, if that’s what they want you to do, she said, that’s a different story. But I didn’t bring you up that way.
And then they were talking about Denia Soderling and her husband’s stamps. He’d be in Cheyenne for most of the week, he told his mother, because he’d booked appointments with three
dealers who’d be sending buyers to the Soderling home on three successive days, starting Monday. That gave him all day tomorrow to go through the albums and pick out the stamps he wanted as his commission.
My stars, Johnny. You’ve gone clear across the country to spend a week in the middle of nowhere, and all you’re getting for your trouble is some stamps?
He tried to explain, but his mother wasn’t having any. If I sent you to town to sell our cow, she said, I swear you’d come home with a handful of magic beans. You remember that story? You used to love that story, and I used to love telling it to you, but I never for a moment thought you’d take it as gospel.
It had struck Denia Soderling as a perfectly reasonable solution, and it even seemed to make sense to Dot, although she’d have been just as happy to see him back home in Louisiana. But why couldn’t his mother seem to grasp it? He marshaled his facts and restated his arguments, and the next thing he knew it was morning.
Thirty-Eight
Denia Soderling must have heard him pull into the drive, because she met him at the front door with a cup of coffee. “I know you want to get right to work on the stamps,” she told him.
He set himself up in the stamp room, with a pad and pencil close at hand, along with his tongs and a box of small glassine envelopes. And he’d brought his own Scott Classic catalog along; he used it not only as a price guide but as a checklist, circling the number of each new acquisition, so that it served as a full inventory of his collection.
The bookcase full of albums was daunting, but you had to start somewhere, and he began with Italy and Colonies. He opened it to the Italian Aegean Islands. But for stamp collecting, Keller figured he wouldn’t know a thing about the Turco-Italian War of 1911–12, which ended with Italy in control of three provinces in Libya and thirteen islands in the Aegean Sea. The largest island was Rhodes, which he figured most people had probably heard of, though they might have trouble finding it on a map. The others were Calchi, Calino, Caso, and Coo, Lero, Lisso, and Nisiro, Patmo and Piscopi, and Scarpanto, Simi, and Stampalia, and it had taken many hours at his desk to enable Keller to reel them off like that.