Hit Man - Lawrence Block [106]
It would look for all the world like a badger game scam gone wrong. The woman who’d called herself Sue Ellen Bates had lured Wickwire to the motel room, and her male partner had turned up to extort money from him. There’d been a scuffle, with Wickwire sustaining injuries to the face and head before he had his neck broken, accidentally or on purpose.
Then the two con artists had had the presence of mind to try staging things, pouring bourbon on Wickwire, even though an autopsy would fail to show any of the stuff inside him. They hadn’t troubled to straighten up after themselves, however, had stuck around only long enough to rob the corpse, then fled.
There were probably some loose ends and inconsistencies, but Keller didn’t figure anybody would lose sleep over them. All in all, it was a death that looked like a logical consequence of the life Richard Wickwire had lately led, and both the New Orleans cops and the citizenry at large were apt to conclude that it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy. Which, come to think of it, was pretty much Keller’s own view of the matter.
He’d stuffed Sue Ellen’s clothes in one Dumpster, the telephone voice-changer in another. In the time-honored tradition of pickpockets and purse snatchers, he’d dropped Wickwire’s wallet (minus the cash and credit cards) into a mailbox. The plastic, sliced into unidentifiable fragments, went down a storm drain. Wickwire’s money clip—sterling silver, monogrammed—was identifiable, so he’d take it back to New York and manage to lose it there, where whoever found it would keep it or hock it or melt it or give it to a friend with the right initials.
Meanwhile it was full of cash, and the cash was now Keller’s. He counted it, along with the bills from Wickwire’s wallet, and was surprised by the total, which ran to just under fifteen hundred dollars.
He thought of Hildebrand, the man with the suspenders, and of the Austrian stamps he’d bought from him. There’d been a few more he’d have liked to buy, especially a mint copy of Austria’s first stamp, Scott #1, the one kreuzer orange. It was an error, printed on both sides, and listed in the catalog at $1450. Hildebrand had tagged it $1000 and indicated he’d take $900 for it, but that struck Keller as an awful lot to pay for a stamp that his album didn’t even have a space for. Besides, he could pick up a used copy for a tenth the price of a mint specimen.
Still, he hadn’t been able to get the stamp out of his head. And now, with a windfall like this. . .
And it wasn’t as if he were in that big a rush to get back to New York.
It was about a month later when the telephone rang in Keller’s apartment. He was at his desk, working on his stamp collection. He still hadn’t finished the task of remounting everything in his new albums, but he’d made good progress, having recently knocked off Sweden and started in on Switzerland.
He picked up the phone, and Dot said, “Keller, you work too goddam hard. I think you should take a vacation.”
“A vacation,” he said.
“That’s the ticket. Haul your butt out of town and stay gone for a week.”
“A week?”
“You know what? A week’s not long enough to unwind, the way you go at it. Better make it ten days.”
“Where do you want me to go?”
“Well, hell,” she said. “It’s your vacation, Keller. What do I care where you go?”
“I thought you might have a suggestion.”
“Anyplace nice,” she said. “So long as they’ve got a decent hotel, the kind where you’d be comfortable checking in under your own name.”
“I see.”
“Buy yourself a plane ticket.”
“Under my own name,” he said.
“Why not? Use your credit card, so you’ve got a good record for tax purposes.”
Keller rang off and sat back, thinking. A vacation, for God’s sake. He didn’t take vacations, the kind that called for travel. His life in New York was a vacation, and when he traveled it was strictly business.
He had a good idea what this was about, and didn’t really want to look at it too closely. Meanwhile, though, he had to pick a destination and get out of town. Where, though?
He reached for the latest stamp weekly,