Keller's Fedora (Kindle Single) (3 page)

BOOK: Keller's Fedora (Kindle Single)
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“I’ll be careful,” he assured her, and gave her a smile, and went off to collect his car.

J
AMES
J. M
ILLER
had booked a ground-floor room at the Super Eight motel on the north edge of Baker’s Bluff, and by one o’clock Keller was checked in and as unpacked as he felt the need to be. He’d brought three phones, and they were lined up on the coffee table, looking virtually identical.

Well, not entirely so. One was an iPhone, and it was the phone he carried all the time, except when he forgot and left it on the bedside table. He’d used it once since he left New Orleans, calling Julia as the train was approaching Chicago, telling her where he was and that all was well. Then he’d turned it off, and could only hope that would keep it from pinging off the nearest tower, telling the world where he was. It couldn’t ping if it was turned off, could it?

Hell, how was he supposed to know what it could or couldn’t do? Maybe he should have left it home.

He put it away for now and considered the other two phones, turning them over, studying them. It wasn’t really all that hard to tell them apart, not if you really looked at them. The Pablo phone was older by several years, and looked it, with scratches on the case.

He turned it on and placed a call. It rang a couple of times, and then Dot picked up.

“Well, I’m here,” he said. “Now what?”

W
HEN HE WAS
done talking, he put on his jacket, straightened his tie. The fedora was on the bed, and wasn’t that supposed to be bad luck? Not a fedora specifically, but any hat on a bed? It seemed to him that he’d read something to that effect, and thought it might be a superstition in the world of the theater, like telling one’s friends to break a leg rather than wishing them good luck. And never saying the word
Macbeth,
but referring to it as
The Scottish Play.

There were explanations for these superstitions, and he could find out what they were and where they came from by calling up Google on his iPhone, but then it would be pinging off towers, so the hell with it.

Still, he picked up the hat and looked for a place to put it. The closet shelf? No, that would put it out of sight and thus out of mind, and all too easily left behind.

He’d worn it when he checked in, and it seemed to him that the desk clerk was more solicitous and respectful than usual. He’d put it down to Midwestern courtesy, but now he wondered if the hat might have had something to do with it.

It was on his head when he left the room.

F
ROM
D
OT HE’D
learned that the client’s name was Todd Overmont. He commuted every day to his office in Chicago, where he did something with commodities. Something profitable, Keller decided, once the Hertz car’s GPS had led him to Overmont’s house, a massive affair on Robin’s Nest Drive that might have been inspired by Mount Vernon.

Keller parked on the other side of the street, where he could keep an eye on the house and monitor activity coming or going. This was one of the things detectives did, he reminded himself. They called it being on a stakeout, and according to Jake Dagger, the hardest part was coping with boredom.

After half an hour during which there’d been no activity to monitor, coming or going, he could see the truth in Jake Dagger’s observation. Another identical half hour confirmed it, but by then he’d come to realize that coping with boredom was the second hardest part of a stakeout.

Needing to pee was worse.

He found a gas station, topped up the Subaru’s tank, bought a wide-mouthed glass jar of a fruit-flavored iced tea, and visited the restroom. After he’d done what he’d come there to do, he uncapped the iced tea, poured it down the sink, and returned to the car carrying the empty jar, ready to cope with problems that apparently never troubled Jake “Iron Bladder” Dagger.

He didn’t need the GPS to get him back to the Overmont house. He found it on his own, and as he made the turn onto Robin’s Nest Drive, he saw a car heading off to the west. That was nothing remarkable, cars did that sort of thing, although there’d been precious little traffic on Robin’s Nest Drive during the hour he’d spent staked out there. But out of the corner of his eye he caught the Overmont garage door descending the final couple of feet, and put two and two together.

There was, he realized, a little more to this stakeout business than he’d thought.

Up ahead, the car he’d seen was making a right turn. Keller clapped his fedora on his head and leaned on the gas pedal.

O
NCE HE’D CAUGHT
up with her, following Melania Overmont turned out to be surprisingly easy. She was driving a big silver Lexus, not a hard car to distinguish from its fellows, and if she took her marriage vows as seriously as she took the Baker’s Bluff traffic regulations, then the client had nothing to worry about. She kept the Lexus well under the posted speed limit, came to a full stop at stop signs, and did all this without giving any indication that she’d noticed a white Subaru in her rearview mirror.

Piece of cake, Keller thought.

If it was Melania Overmont. He got close enough to determine that the driver was a woman with shoulder-length blonde hair, but Dot hadn’t provided a description, and for all he knew he might be following a cleaning woman, dispatched on an errand for her employer.

That seemed a little more likely when the Lexus braked at the entrance to a strip mall, waited courteously for an oncoming car to pass, and then turned left into the mall, pulling into a space in front of Pioneer Super Food Mart. Keller waited for a break in traffic, then followed her in and eased the Subaru into a space three slots to the left of the Lexus.

He killed the engine and waited for her to get out of the car. Instead she backed out of her spot.

He’d been made, he thought. She’d pulled in just to see if he’d follow her, and when he did she’d identified him, and now she’d shake him the way nobody shook Jake Dagger, and—

Instead, she maneuvered the car to and fro, and tucked it into the parking space immediately next to his.

Huh?

Why on earth would she do that? Because she’d spotted him? No, that didn’t make any sense at all. She’d parked her car in a perfectly good space, and now she’d forsaken it for this space, the only distinguishing characteristic of which was that it was right next to Keller’s Subaru. What could she possibly—

Oh.

The first space, he saw, was reserved for handicapped parking. You could get a ticket if you parked there without the requisite sticker.

If Keller had brought a newspaper along he’d pretend to read it, but he didn’t have anything, not even the Jake Dagger book. He sat very still and watched out of the corner of his eye as she got out of the Lexus. She never looked in his direction, and once she’d closed her door and headed for the market entrance he gave her his full attention.

Well, she wasn’t a cleaning woman, unless she’d somehow reported to work in tight white jeans and a scoop-necked blue blouse, with rings on her fingers and, for all he knew, bells on her toes. She was a good-looking woman, no question, and you could see why Todd Overmont might think she was cheating on him, because there was something about her that suggested she’d be capable of it.

Nothing he could define, really. Nothing he could put his finger on…

He sat behind the wheel, took his hat off, put his hat back on again. Should he enter the market and confirm that she was there? It’s not as though he’ll be expected to file a report:
2:38 pm. Subject entered Pioneer Super Food Mart. 2:41 pm. Subject took two boxes of breakfast cereal from shelf, compared ingredients, put one box back and added other to cart. 2:45 pm. Subject opened egg carton to make sure all of its contents were unbroken…

He stayed where he was, wondering why it was taking so long, and found out when she finally emerged, trailing a gawky teenager who was pushing a cart. He followed her to the car, and Keller watched as she opened the lid of the trunk and stood aside to let the boy stow bag after bag of groceries in it.

Couldn’t be more innocent, he thought. Woman’s a housewife doing what housewives do.

And now the last bag was in the trunk, and the lid closed, and Mrs. Overmont was reaching into her purse. She drew out a dollar, hesitated for a moment, then added another dollar.

Was that a generous tip? A skimpy one? Keller, who carried his own groceries whenever he did the shopping, had no real frame of reference. The kid hadn’t had to carry anything, all he’d done was push a cart twenty or thirty yards from the door to where she’d parked her car. Moving her groceries a bag at a time from the cart to the trunk was hardly heavy labor, and the total time involved was what, five minutes? It seemed to Keller that a single dollar would have been plenty, but then you had to weigh in the fact that she was a rich woman driving an expensive car, and maybe that was enough to bump the tip to the two-dollar level.

As if it mattered. Keller shook his head, marveling at his own propensity to overthink everything, and then Melania Overmont did something unusual. She looked around, to the left and to the right, as if to assure herself that she was not being observed.

If she’d turned all the way around she’d have seen Keller. But she didn’t, and he went on watching her, because that little move of hers was definitively furtive, and he had to wonder why. All she was doing was tipping the kid, and what did she care who saw her give him a couple of bucks?

And he watched, playing close attention, as she held out the two dollars in her left hand. The boy held out a hand to take the money, and Melania extended her other hand, her right hand, and reached for the boy’s crotch.

Keller stared.

And went on staring, because this wasn’t going to be a quick grope and goodbye. She’d stepped closer to the kid, so that he couldn’t see what she was doing with her hand, but it didn’t take a genius to figure it out. All he had to do was watch the boy’s face, as it ran the gamut of emotions from surprise to shock to excitement to what could only be satisfaction.

“A
HAND JOB
, Pablo?”

“I guess that’s the term.”

“In a strip mall? In front of a supermarket? In the middle of Illinois?”

“And then she put the two dollars in his hand,” he said, “and closed his fingers around it. And kissed her own fingers, and patted him on the check.”

“And got in her car and drove away. I trust you followed her.”

“Straight back to her house. She had to put away her groceries.”

“And wash her hands,” Dot said. “And she’s there now?”

“She’d have to be. She hasn’t gone anywhere. She left the garage door up while she dealt with her bags of groceries, but it’s down now, and as far as I can tell she’s still in the house.”

“And you’re parked across the street. Well, I guess the thing to do is sit tight.”

“For as long as it takes,” he said. “I’ve got the jar, so I’ll be fine.”

“I have no idea what that means.”

“It’s not important. Dot, am I supposed to do anything about the kid?”

“The kid? What kid? Oh, you mean the grocery boy?”

“Right. I mean, he’s a big kid, he’s got to be eighteen or nineteen.”

“He could be a college graduate,” she said. “An English major, working away at the only job he could get.”

“That’d make him what, twenty-one? Twenty-two?”

“More, if he went to grad school.”

“I don’t think—”

“Pablo, what difference does it make?”

“Just that it’s not Buffalo all over again.”

“He’s not a little kid with a stamp collection.”

“No.”

“In other words, he’s old enough to stop getting older.”

“From an ethical standpoint,” he said, “I don’t see it as a problem. But is this what the client wants?”

“Pablo, do you figure the Hand Job Kid is her steady squeeze?”

“Well—”

“So to speak. You did say he looked surprised, didn’t you?”

“Astonished. She was driving away and he was standing there with his mouth hanging open, like he couldn’t believe what just happened to him.”

“I’d say he gets to live another day, Pablo.”

“That’s what I thought, but—”

“But the possibility had to be raised. I agree with you there. But this was just her way of saying thank you. ‘Here’s two bucks and a hand job, young man, because I’m not the type to blow you off with a mere dollar.’”

“So to speak,” he said.

“Fair enough. She’s a piece of work, our Mrs. Overmont. I can’t wait to see what she comes up with next.”

“Oh,” he said.

“You say something, Pablo?”

“The garage door’s going up,” he reported.

“In a minute she’ll be on her way.”

“I don’t see her. Oh, there she is, at the front door. She’s standing on the stoop.”

“Clutching a small bottle of hand lotion.”

“No,” he said.

“On her way to the car.”

“I don’t think so, because she’s not carrying her purse. Would she go out without it? Oh.”

“Oh?”

“A white car turning into the driveway,” he said. “Except it’s more of a van. There’s a man driving, has a sort of Marlboro Man look to him.”

“That’s going back a ways, the Marlboro Man. Didn’t they all die of lung cancer?”

“She’s waving. I think she’s glad to see him.”

“You don’t figure that’s a gun in her pocket?”

“And now she’s back inside the house. She just closed the door.”

“You know, this is wonderful, Pablo. Getting a play-by-play like this, it’s almost like I’m watching it with my own two eyes. Why’d you stop?”

“Because nothing’s happening,” he said. “Oh, there you go.”

“What?”

“The garage door’s closing. I guess she walked over and pressed the button. The garage is attached, he can go in straight from there, the way she did with the groceries.”

“So it’s closed and his van’s in there.”

“Right.”

“He could be the gardener,” she said, “or the electrician, or the guy who takes care of the pool. The pool guy, I guess you call him.”

“Is there a pool?”

“How would I know? You’re the one who’s sitting there. If you can’t see whether or not there’s a pool in the backyard—”

BOOK: Keller's Fedora (Kindle Single)
2.23Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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