Quotidian Keller Read online

  But somebody did.

  “. . . Glad we ran into each other,” Bingham was saying. “Except I have a confession to make. I was looking for you.”

  “Oh?”

  “I didn’t want to have lunch alone. Didn’t want to be alone, to tell you the truth.”

  “You must know a lot of other collectors.”

  “In a casual way,” Bingham said. “The other exhibitors, there’s a competitive element that keeps you at arm’s length. The other German specialists, well, we can’t get too close because we’re competing for the same material. And I’ll tell you something. It’s not my nature to get close to another person. I’m a sort of a standoffish guy.”

  “You could have fooled me, Sherry.”

  “Well, we seem to have hit it off, Jackie.” He pursed his lips, let out a toneless whistle. “Monday morning I fly back to Detroit. I’m not looking forward to it.”

  “Today’s only Friday.”

  “Monday’ll be here soon enough. Tomorrow’s the auction, or at least the part of it I’m interested in, and I’ve got lots coming up in Sunday’s section as well.”

  “So do I.”

  “So that’ll fill some time, and give me something to think about. And then there’s the judging of the exhibits, and maybe I’ll win something and maybe I won’t. But whatever happens, Monday I go back home.”

  “And you don’t want to?”

  “My life’s very different back there.”

  “Oh?”

  Bingham lowered his eyes. “In Detroit,” he said, “I don’t go anywhere without bodyguards, and even with them I rarely leave the house. I’ve got a safe room—you know what that is?”

  “Sort of like a vault with food and water?”

  “And air conditioning,” Bingham said, “and a sofa, so that a rich man can hide in there in the event of a home invasion. I pretty much live in my safe room, Jackie. I moved my stamp collection in there months ago.”

  “You’re afraid somebody’ll steal your stamps?”

  “The hell with the stamps,” Bingham said. “They’re my chief interest, but I’m not the kind of fool who’ll tell you that stamps are his life. My life is my life, and that’s what I’m in fear of. There are people back home who want me dead, Jackie, and sooner or later they’re going to get their wish.”

  “Isn’t there anything you can do?”

  “I’ve got a safe room and a team of bodyguards. That’s about as much as I can think of. But if somebody really wants to kill you, how can you stop them? They could buy the house across the street, dig a tunnel into my basement, plant explosives, and blow the safe room to hell and me along with it.”

  “You really think—”

  “What I really think,” he said, “is that they could come up with something simpler and more efficient than that, and sooner or later they will. No, there’s nothing I can do, Jackie. I wish there were.”

  “I don’t mean for protection,” he said. “I mean to change their minds, to get them to call it off.”

  “Not a chance.” Bingham picked up his glass of brandy, put it down untasted, and took a sip of coffee instead. “I did something that some people are never going to forgive. I can’t buy their forgiveness, and there’s no other way I can get it, either. They’re not about to let me off the hook.”

  “You seem awfully calm about it.”

  “It’s like having a terminal illness,” Bingham said, and this time he drank the brandy. “Once you accept it, well, you learn to live with it. And for the next few days it’s in remission. I’m safe here.”

  They had dinner at a Thai place, mostly empty, with prints in bamboo frames on the walls and a lot of paper lanterns. The food was fiery hot, and they ate a lot of it and washed it down with Mexican beer. They began by talking stamps, almost ritualistically, and then the conversation shifted.

  “I won’t ask how it happened,” Keller said, “but I have to say you don’t seem like the kind of guy who’d make anybody that mad at him.”

  “From where you sit, Jackie, I’m a stamp collector. That’s the great thing about a hobby. You get to be a nice guy. My life in Detroit is a little different.”

  “I guess it would have to be.”

  “All you and I really know about each other is what we collect. For all you know, I could be an axe murderer or a predatory pedophile. I’m not, I’d be safer if I were, but the point is I could be. And you could be, hmm, I don’t know. Nothing violent, you’re too gentle for that, but you could be a stock swindler or a confidence man, something like that.”

  “I could?”

  “Well, no, I don’t really think you could, but you see what I mean. When we’re collecting stamps, we’re none of those other things, no matter what we are in real life.”

  Keller nodded, and asked a question that had occupied him much of the afternoon. “Did you bring bodyguards with you? I guess it’s not the sort of thing I would notice, but—”

  “I don’t need them here, Jackie. They’re back in Detroit, guarding an empty house.”

  “I would think you’d bring one or two along just as a precaution.”

  The man shook his head. “I’m safer without them. See, nobody knows I’m here.”

  “Oh?”

  “I’ve got a friend with access to his company’s Gulfstream. I hitched a ride out here, and I’ll fly back the same way on Monday. My bodyguards think I’m holed up in the safe room.”

  “You don’t trust them?”

  “Up to a point, but they can’t tell what they don’t know, can they? I’m registered at the hotel under a false name, so that’s not going to set off any bells and whistles. And if my exhibit pulls in the top prize, even if they put my picture on the front page of Linn’s, well, somehow I don’t think the boys in Detroit are subscribers. If they are, it won’t do them any good, because I’ll be home before the story runs.”

  So there wouldn’t be any bodyguards to worry about. Keller, who’d been looking, hadn’t spotted anyone suspicious, but he figured he’d ask. You couldn’t be too careful.

  It was difficult to decide what he thought of Sheridan Bingham.

  Because he kept flipping back and forth. On the one hand, the man was very close to being a friend, and Keller had warm feelings toward him. At the same time, Bingham was a job that had to be done, a problem that had to be solved, and Keller couldn’t help resenting him. Some people in his line of work, he knew, worked up a genuine hatred for their targets, in order to make the work easier to stomach. Keller had never felt the need to do that, but he was beginning to understand why some people did.

  In the auction room Saturday morning, he sat halfway back on the center aisle with his auction catalog and his numbered paddle and his pen, waiting for his lots to come up. He tried to concentrate on the auction, and he managed reasonably well, but he still found his mind wandering now and then.

  You could be a stock swindler, Bingham had said. Or a confidence man. And he thought about con men, and how their victims were often less wounded by the financial loss they’d sustained than by the betrayal itself. I thought he was my friend, they’d say, and he betrayed me.

  Even as he would be betraying Bingham.

  “And now the New Britain issues,” the auctioneer said. “Lot 402. I have sixty, will you go sixty-five? I have sixty-five, will you go seventy? I have seventy in the back of the room, will you go seventy-five? I have seventy once, I have seventy twice, sold to Bidder Number 214.”

  The same bidder bought all of the New Britain issues, and Keller didn’t have to turn around to know who it was. New Britain, he knew, was an island in the Bismarck Archipelago, named New Pomerania by the Germans who discovered it back in 1700, and administered as part of German New Guinea. When it changed hands during the war, the British changed the island’s name to New Britain and applied the name to all of the occupied territory in the immediate region, overprinting some German colonial stamps while they were at it.

  Keller had a few of the New Br
itain issues, but not that many. He might have bid on one or two of the lots in the sale, but he couldn’t go against his new friend. He could plan on killing him, but he couldn’t compete with him at a stamp auction.

  But it wasn’t really betrayal, was it? It would be different, he thought, if he and Bingham had been friends before Horvath gave him the contract. If that had been the case he’d have turned it down, and even found a way to warn his friend.

  That wasn’t the way it had happened. The contract came first, and he would never have gotten to know Bingham if he hadn’t already accepted the job of killing him.

  Still, there was something about the whole business . . .

  It would be a lot easier if you were a sociopath. A shame there wasn’t a school you could go to. Earn a degree, become a licensed sociopathic personality. Job placement guaranteed.

  “Lot 721. I have twenty dollars, will you go twenty-two? I have twenty-two, will you go twenty-four? I have twenty-two on the aisle, will you go twenty-four? Are you all through at twenty-four? I have twenty-four once, I have twenty-four twice, sold to Bidder Number 304.”

  Keller lowered his paddle, circled the lot number, noted the price, and looked to see what was coming up next.

  That night they went back to the steakhouse. “Quiet on Saturdays,” Bingham observed. “The businessmen are either home with their wives or in bed with their girlfriends. Not that it’s ever noisy here, but we’ve practically got the place to ourselves tonight. You make out okay this afternoon? Seems to me I saw a few lots hammered down to you.”

  “I picked up a couple of bargains,” Keller said. “The lots I’m really interested in come up tomorrow.”

  “I bought quite a bit today, and I’ll do the same tomorrow. Though sometimes I wonder why I bother.”

  “Well, a stamp collection’s like a shark,” Keller said.

  “Huh?”

  “A shark has to keep swimming forward all the time,” he explained, “or it dies. At least that’s what I heard somewhere.”

  “It does sound like the sort of thing a person would hear somewhere.”

  “Well, whether it’s true or not for sharks, it works that way with a stamp collection. If you’re not adding to it, there’s not much pleasure in having it.”

  “Absolutely true,” Bingham said. “I was always interested in Germany, but when I started out I collected Vatican City. Don’t ask me why. I’m not Catholic, but then I’m not German, either. It didn’t take me long to complete the collection, varieties and all, and it sat there in an album, and I never looked at it. I haven’t sold it, though I probably should, for all the pleasure I get out of it. Like a shark, eh? I never thought of it quite that way, but I like it, because I can picture a collection swimming along, devouring everything in its path.”

  A little later he said, “You have a family, Jackie? No? Well, I’ve got a few stray cousins myself, but nobody I’ve had any contact with in years. Way my will’s drawn, I’m leaving everything to Wayne State University.”

  “Is that where you want to college?”

  “No, but they gave me an honorary degree a few years ago. You could call me Dr. Bingham, but don’t you dare. That degree’s going to turn out to be bread upon the waters, and they might as well have the money as anyone else. God knows what they’ll do with the stamps.”

  “You could require that they keep the collection and display it.”

  “What the hell for? Let ’em auction it off, so some other collectors can grab up chunks of it and have some fun with it.”

  “Well,” Keller said, “that’s not going to happen anytime soon.”

  Bingham just looked at him.

  “I was thinking natural causes,” he told Dot the following day.

  “And why not? One of your subspecialties, Keller. You’re about as natural a cause of death as I’ve ever known.”

  “Cyanide’s always good,” he said, “and I don’t think it would be hard to get my hands on some. It looks like a heart attack.”

  “And it’s every bit as funny, too.”

  “But you find it,” he said, “if you look for it. In a tox screen. And they’d look for it. The local cops might not know who he is, but they’d find out, and when the full story came back from Detroit they’d order a full work-up, and they’d find it. Or anything else I can think of.”

  “And if they look at it, they’re looking at you.”

  “Whatever happens to him,” he said, “they’re going to be looking at me. We’ve been hanging our all over the place. I made sure I paid cash for our dinner last night, but I might as well have used a credit card, because what difference does it make?”

  “You want to come home, Keller?”

  “I’ve thought about it.”

  “We can give back the money. You’re out the cost of your flight, but you were going there anyway, weren’t you? So we’ll just write it off and let somebody else figure out how to kill the son of a bitch.”

  “He’s actually a pretty nice guy.”

  “Oh, terrific. Just what I wanted to hear.”

  “Out here, that is. He may not be such a nice guy in Detroit.”

  “So do you want to follow him to Detroit and kill him there? Along with all his bodyguards?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Well, I’m glad to hear it. What do you think, Keller? Should I make a phone call, and you can just write off the airfare?”

  “It’s not just the airfare.”

  “And the hotel, I suppose. But you were in for the airfare and the hotel anyway, weren’t you? You already had the room and the flight booked, if I remember correctly.”

  “Besides the hotel.”

  “What, a couple of meals? I don’t see how . . . oh, I get it, Keller. Stamps. But weren’t you going to buy stamps anyway?”

  “Up to a point,” he said.

  “And you sailed right past that point, didn’t you? Because you had the money from Detroit, burning a hole in your pocket.”

  “I didn’t lose control,” he assured her. “I spent pretty much what I intended to spend. I had all this money coming in, so I figured I could afford for some of it to go out. But if I have to give it back . . .”

  “There’s a reason why giving money back goes against the grain. Once I’ve got it in my hand, it’s my money. And giving it back is like spending it, and what am I getting for it?” She sighed. “Other hand, anything happens to him and somebody with a badge is going to want to talk to you. And you’ve made a very good career out of so arranging your life that you never have to talk to anybody with a badge.”

  “There ought to be a way.”

  “How old is the guy, Keller? Sixty, sixty-five?”

  “Sixty-seven.”

  “Even better. Maybe you’ll catch a break. He’s up there in years, he’s under a lot of stress and strain. Maybe nature’ll help you out. It wouldn’t be the first time.”

  “He seems pretty healthy, Dot.”

  “Never sick a day in his life, and then pow! The old ticker blows out, and next thing you know he’s approaching room temperature. Who’s to say it couldn’t happen?”

  “It would have to happen within the next twenty-four hours.”

  “Makes it a little less likely, doesn’t it? Suppose he wins one of those blue ribbons? Maybe the excitement’ll do it.”

  “He’s got a whole wall full of them back home. I don’t think it would be all that exciting.”

  “Well, maybe he’ll lose, and he’ll be so disappointed he’ll kill himself . . . Keller? Where’d you go?”

  “I’m here,” he said. “But I’d better get back to the auction room. I’ve got a couple of lots coming up.”

  The last lot he bid on was from St. Pierre & Miquelon, a couple of French islands off the coast of Newfoundland. He had strong competition from a determined telephone bidder, and went higher than he’d planned, but that was all right. He had cash to pay for it, and he wasn’t going to have to give it back.

  He w
ent to his room, picked up the phone, then changed his mind and went downstairs to use the house phone in the lobby.

  “It’s Jackie,” he said, the name sounding strange to him. But it evidently sounded fine to Bingham, who said he’d just gotten out of the shower, and had he lost track of the time? Because he didn’t think they were meeting for dinner for another hour and a half.

  “No, this is something else,” he said. “Are you alone? Can I come to your room?”

  “I’m always alone. And yes, give me five minutes to put some clothes on and come up.”

  Bingham supplied the room number, and seven or eight minutes later Keller was knocking on the door of 617. Which was fine, he’d decided. 1217 would have been better, but 617 would have to do.

  And it was certainly spacious enough. Keller’s room three floors down was comfortable enough, if a little on the small side, but Bingham had a suite. “More space than I’ve got any use for,” he told Keller, “but when you spend a little more you get treated a little better. And if I fart in one room I can go in the other until the air clears. You want a drink?”

  He didn’t, but said he did. Because that way Bingham would take a drink—although his breath already held the bouquet of good whiskey.

  Bingham poured, and they touched glasses, and Keller wet his lips while Bingham drank deeply. “Just as well you came up here,” he said. “I’ve got something for you, and I was going to bring it along to dinner, but who’s to say I wouldn’t forget? I’ll give it to you now and you can leave it in your room before we go out.”

  The clear plastic sheet held a cover, postmarked 1891 in Martinique’s capital city of Fort-de-France, and backstamped in Paris and surcharged here and there, bearing several different stamps from the island colony’s first issue.