Dutch Blue Error (3 page)

“Obviously it’s reduced.”

“Reduced! Ha! It’s destroyed. Annihilated, Brady. So therefore, by the same logic, what is the value of the duplicate of my stamp on the open market?”

“Not much, I guess.”

“Good. Right. But for whom
does
it have value?”

“You?”

“Me. Right. Of course. This fellow knows that. He knows that I will pay what the open market will not pay, because the stamp is worth infinitely more to me than to anyone else. I want that stamp, Brady. I will pay the man his price.”

“A quarter of a million dollars? Jesus, Ollie.”

“That is what the man says here. For two hundred and fifty thousand I will own the stamp, protect my investment, and purchase this man’s sworn secrecy. I know he understands all of that.”

I thought about it for a moment. “Why doesn’t this guy sell his stamp as if it were the one you own? You know, as if
it
were the unique Dutch Blue Error?”

“Only a fair question, my friend. Not a good one. First, I doubt he has papers of authentication—that trace the various sales and so forth of the stamp, along with the appraisal of a recognized authority that the stamp isn’t a fake, that it is what it purports to be. Without those papers, his stamp, no matter how genuine it may actually be, could never be passed off as
my
stamp. At best it would be accepted as a duplicate, a second Blue Error. More likely, philatelists would assume it was a fake, and he could never prove otherwise. He’d need my stamp for comparison—which, of course, he’d be unlikely to get. No reputable authority would bother trying to authenticate his stamp without mine beside it. This man understands all that.”

“Sounds like it’s worthless to him, then. Why are you willing to pay so much?”

Ollie sighed. “It’s not worth the risk to call his bluff. Maybe he’s got some kind of papers. Hell, even if he had forged papers, I’d have to go public to prove it. I can’t take that chance. The safest thing to do is to buy the damn thing from him. It’s insurance, part of the investment. I can afford it. Hell, I can’t afford not to.”

I sat back on the sofa. My cigar butt was cold, my brandy snifter empty. I patted my shirt pocket and extracted a Winston, lit it, and said, “And you’ll pay his price. And the stamp-collecting world will be none the wiser. Right?”

Ollie smiled thinly. “Right, Counselor.”

“One question, then.”

“Shoot.”

“Why are you telling
me
all this?”

“Why, Brady. I’m surprised. You are my trusted attorney. You are bound by the ethic of absolute confidentiality. You are discreet. I
trust
you. And I pay you well for it.”

“So?”

“So you will be my go-between?”

“Me? Hell, Ollie. Why me?”

“Who else?” Ollie thumped his withered thighs. “You have legs. You
can
go.”

“But why…?”

“Ah. Why not Perry? Listen. He’s my son, it’s true. But he’s also neither particularly bright nor particularly brave. You, having a generous endowment of both qualities, surely have observed that.”

“Ah, he’s not that bad.”

“It’s true. Listen. This transaction will be tricky. It needs a lawyer’s mind. It needs an experienced hand. Not a boy.”

“He’s twenty-three years old.”

“A boy. A baby.”

“You don’t do him justice, Ollie.”

He smiled. “I don’t trust him. Let’s leave it at that, okay?”

I shrugged. “Okay. So what’s next, then?”

“I have placed the notice in the newspaper, as our friend has instructed. Now we wait. We’ll do as he says. For a quarter of a million dollars cash money we’ll buy the stamp and the man’s commitment of secrecy.”

“I have one question,” I said.

“What is it?”

“How did this guy know you owned the stamp?”

Ollie stared at me.

“Perry?”

“Not Perry,” he said firmly. “Perry knows that it wouldn’t be in his interest. One thing Perry is smart about is his own interest.”

“Then who?”

Ollie spread his hands. “I don’t know. It’s a piece of information that I would consider very valuable. If you follow me. Counselor.”

I nodded. I followed him.

C
HARLIE MCDEVITT, ONE LEG
waving in the air, bent to inject the tee into the ground, leaning on his driver for balance. He looked like a big pastel heron in his mint-green and baby-pink golfing togs. He fit right into the orange and gold splendor of the late September woodlands that bordered the fairway.

“So this guy goes to his doctor for his annual physical,” said Charlie, standing up to the ball and gazing down the fairway. “C’mon, ball. Right down the old pipe, now,” he muttered. He cocked his right knee, pushed his hands forward a bit, then began his long, slow backswing. When he brought the driver forward, Charlie’s hips jerked, his head snapped up, and his right foot left the ground in a graceless pirouette. He said “Umph!” as his club contacted the ball, and then “Ah, shit!” as it sliced toward the rough that lined the right of the fairway.

“Little Nicklaus fade, there,” I said. “It’ll play.”

“Nuts,” declared Charlie. “Banana ball. Anyhow, this guy sees his doctor and has the usual examination. EKG. Blood pressure. Rectal invasion. All the blood work, urine tests. Doctor listens to his ticker, takes his pulse, looks at his eyes and ears, pokes around in his mouth, fondles his private parts, raps his knees and wrists and heels with his little rubber mallet. Go ahead and hit.”

“Okay,” I said. Slow and easy, I told myself. It’s all rhythm. Let the club do the work. I remembered all that right up until the last foot of the forward arc of the club, when the old baseball swing reasserted itself and my wrists flipped. The ball started out straight, a low line drive, before the hook took over, pulling the ball down and to the left. Into the pond.

“In the pond,” said Charlie.

“I know.”

“Tough break. That’s a lateral water hazard. You can drop where it went in. Cost you a stroke.”

“I know that, too.”

“Hey, don’t get snippy with me. I didn’t hit your ball in the water.” Charlie shouldered his bag. “Looks like you buy Cokes.”

“I know, I know.”

We started down the ninth fairway. “So, anyhow,” said Charlie, “after the exam is over the guy gets dressed and walks across the hall to the doctor’s office. The doc’s sitting behind his desk glancing through the guy’s files, and the guy, he sits in the chair there, and the doctor says, ‘Well, your blood pressure’s fine, EKG perfectly normal, reflexes nice, your bowel and colon are clean as a clarinet, all the tests negative.’ And the guy says, ‘Good. That sounds real good.’ And the doctor peers over his glasses and says to the guy, ‘Look. I don’t know how to tell you this, but, well, you’ve got this rare condition.’ ‘Rare condition?’ says the guy. ‘Yes,’ says the doctor. ‘You’re gonna be dead by tomorrow. You better get yourself prepared.’”

Charlie headed over toward his ball, and I turned left toward the pond which had swallowed mine. I dropped a new ball over my right shoulder, then whacked a big four iron into the trap behind the green. Charlie caught some grass in the rough and dribbled up fifty yards short of the green.

“I’ve still got a chance,” I told him as we met again in the fairway. “I get up and down in two, I’ve got my bogie. You’ve got to get par, or else we halve the hole and end up even for the nine. Meaning we buy our own Cokes.”

“Watch me,” said Charlie. He popped a little wedge to within a foot and a half of the hole.

“I concede,” I said. “Nice par.”

I did not get up and down in two, anyway. We left our clubs by the tenth tee and walked back toward the clubhouse.

“So the guy goes home,” continued Charlie, “and his wife says to him, ‘So how was the exam? Everything okay?’ And the guy says, ‘Well, my heart’s fine, blood pressure good, the whole GI nice and clean. All the tests were negative.’ ‘That’s nice,’ says his wife. ‘Yeah,’ says the guy, ‘but the thing is, I’m gonna die sometime before tomorrow.’ ‘That’s terrible,’ says his wife. ‘That’s just awful. So how do you want to spend your last few hours?’ ‘Well,’ the guy says, ‘I’ve given it a lot of thought, and I decided what I really want to do is to spend the whole night with you making love.’ And his wife looks at him and says, ‘Easy for you to say. You don’t have to get up in the morning.’”

I groaned as we pushed into the clubhouse. We went to the counter, I bought us our Cokes, and we took them to a table far from the television, which was showing a rerun of “Get Smart.” Typical afternoon fare on the Boston UHF channels.

Tommy Porter, one of the owners of the Green Acres Country Club, yelled from across the room, “Hey, Coyne. Call your office. Your, ah, secretary said it’s urgent.”

My “ah, secretary,” as Tommy calls him, is a young law school graduate named Xerxes Garrett. Zerk, as he’s called, is temporarily replacing my regular secretary, Julie, who’s taking a six-month maternity leave. Zerk is handsome, bright, big and black, and studying, after a fashion, for the Massachusetts bar exam. He’s got his pick of the classy old firms, and some day he’ll make a million bucks if he decides he wants to. In the meantime, he says he’s in no hurry to “get into the hassle” as he puts it. He answered my ad for a legal secretary and persuaded me, in a classic summation, that he was exactly what I was looking for.

He can make a typewriter sound like all the machine guns on the Western Front. “Quickest hands in Akron,” he likes to boast, and although I somehow doubt he acquired that reputation from his secretarial skills, I have declined to ask.

“Why don’t you get a beeper?” said Charlie. “All these important clients with all this emergency business.”

“Aw, lay off, will you? It’s part of my job, you know that.”

“Yeah, bowing and scraping and tugging your forelock to all those rich old crones. Somebody’s chauffeur probably got a scratch on the El Dorado, huh?”

“Probably,” I said. “Look, I’ll be right back.”

“I thought you were gonna argue civil liberties cases in front of the Supreme Court, and look at you,” Charlie went on. “Can’t even take a quiet Thursday afternoon on the links. Next thing you know, you’ll be chasing ambulances.”

“I thought I was going to be arguing civil liberties cases before you,” I said.

“Touché,” said Charlie, with a smart little salute. Charlie’s law school dream had been to become a Supreme Court Justice. So far, he had made a career in the Justice Department’s Boston office, prosecuting pension frauds and cocaine smugglers. “Difference is,” he continued, “I’m on my way. Making contacts. Building bridges. I’ll get there.”

“And I won’t,” I finished for him. “You’re probably right. Look, I gotta go to the phone.”

The pay phone hung on the wall near the television. I punched in my credit card number, and a moment later Zerk said, “Brady L. Coyne, Attorney.”

“At Law,” I said. “You’ve gotta remember the At Law part.”

“Brady L. Coyne, Attorney at the Golf Course,” he said.

“So what is it that you had to interrupt the superhuman concentration of the young Sam Snead?”

“Or is it the old Calvin Peete?” said Zerk.

“Calvin who?”

“Peete. Golf pro. Damn good one, too. Black. You probably never heard of him.”

“Lots of people I never heard of, black, green, and purple,” I said. “What’s up?”

“Kentucky Fried Weston called.”

“Don’t be so goddam militant, Zerk. It sounds forced.”

“Yassah, boss.”

“What’d Ollie want?”

“To talk to you: I said you were unavailable. He said, ‘Playing golf, eh?’ I told him you were out on business, and he said, ‘Playing golf with a client, then.’ I told him you were conferring with someone from the Justice Department, and he said he hoped you’d cured your hook. Have you?”

“Have I what?”

“Cured your hook?”

“No, for Christ’s sake. Look, Zerk, we’re gonna lose our place at the tenth tee if you don’t tell me what Ollie wanted.”

“I don’t know. Wouldn’t tell me. He just said for you to call him, that he got the call. Those were his words. ‘Tell Brady I got the call, and for him to call me immediately.’”

“And you said?”

“I said I’d leave word at the clubhouse, but that you probably wouldn’t get it until you finished your round.”

“You know I always stop in for a Coke between nines.”

“Sure. But I didn’t tell him that.”

“Good man. I’ll call him when I’m done.”

“I figured that’s what you’d do.”

Charlie was standing when I returned to our table. “We better hustle, we don’t want to miss our place,” he said. As we pushed out of the dark, air-conditioned cool of the clubhouse into the fall sunshine, Charlie said, “So what’s the big emergency?”

“What do you know about philately?”

“Stamp collecting, right?”

“Not that much, huh? Well, did you know that the one-cent black and magenta British Guyana provisional of 1856 was bought at auction in the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City on April 5, 1980, for eight hundred and fifty thousand?”

“Funny how these important facts elude me,” said Charlie. “So what about this black stamp?”

“Nothing about that one. Just that rare stamps are a big business. Some of my clients are big businessmen. That’s all.”

“You’re really into some heavy law, aren’t you?” said Charlie as we arrived at the tenth tee.

“It’s a living,” I muttered. “It’s your honor, Your Honor.”

“He’s going to call here again at nine tonight,” said Ollie Weston when I called him from the clubhouse pay phone. “I want you to talk to him.”

“Can’t I call him?”

Ollie gave me that deep chuckle of his. “Hardly. He’s very cautious. Wouldn’t tell me anything—no name, no phone number, nothing. Just wanted to negotiate, and when I told him that you’d be doing my negotiating for me, he said he’d call again, and hung up on me. How’d you do, anyway?”

“How’d I do what?”

“Golf. How’d you hit?”

“Erratic. As usual. Okay. I’ll be there by nine.”

“Come earlier. Have a drink.”

“Fine. Sometime around eight, then.”

When I went back to where Charlie and I were having our beers, he had already ordered the second round. “Why don’t you come out to the house and take potluck with us tonight?” he said. “Jenny keeps asking after you. She’s worried you’re not taking good care of yourself, since you and Gloria…”