Hit Parade (Keller #3)

Hit Parade (Keller #3) Page 39

Don’t tell me about it, Keller thought. Stick to stamps, will you? Tell me all about the pressing problem of fake cancellations.

And, mercifully, the man did just that.

Keller ordered dinner from room service.

Which was ridiculous, in a city with such a wealth of restaurants. All he had to do was walk a block in any direction and he’d stumble on a restaurant with food that was better, cheaper, and more interesting than he could expect to get from the hotel kitchen. But for some reason he didn’t want to leave his room, and after the waiter wheeled in the cart and lifted the metal lids off the various dishes, he realized what the reason was. He was afraid of running into Sheridan Bingham again.

Silly.

Still, after he’d eaten, he stayed in the room and watched television until it was time to go to bed.

“Well, good morning yourself,” Dot said. “Although it’s afternoon here. What time does the auction start?”

“It started almost an hour ago,” he said. “But there’s nothing in today’s session that I’m interested in. It’s all U.S. ”

“As in America the Beautiful? What’s the matter with the United States, Keller?”

“I collect worldwide.”

“Oh? And what’s America, stuck on some other planet?”

“No, but-”

“I thought you were a patriot, Keller. Dishing out quiche to the rescue workers at the Trade Center. And now you don’t even think enough of your country to collect its stamps?”

“I could explain,” he said, “but I don’t think that’s what either of us wants.”

“Well, you’re not going to get an argument from me on that score. Did you, uh, establish that our friend made the trip?”

“Oh, he’s here, all right.”

“That sounds ominous somehow.”

“We had drinks yesterday afternoon,” he said, and told her briefly what had happened.

“Not great,” she said.

“I know.”

“Are you going to be able to do what you’re supposed to do?”

“I think so. In one respect it’s easier this way.”

“Because he won’t be suspicious of his new best friend.”

“Something like that.”

“But in another respect,” she said, “it’s got to be harder.”

“Remember when you called me a sociopath?”

“How could I forget? I also remember how upset you got.”

“There are times,” he said, “when being a sociopath would make things a lot easier.”

“What you need to do,” she said, “is meditate.”

“Meditate?”

“Get into a place of quiet stillness and peace,” she said, “and try to get in touch with your inner sociopath.”

He thought about that while he checked out the exhibits. They were more interesting than usual, and, while the overall quality was high, he didn’t think that explained it. He had a different perspective on exhibits as a result of the conversation he’d had with Bingham.

The exhibits were anonymous, presumably to avoid prejudicing the judges, but Keller was sure those worthies were well aware of the identities of most of the exhibitors. He himself could put names on several of the displays, having seen the material before, and of course he had no trouble spotting Bingham’s entry, which he’d already had described to him by the man himself. Three frames showed material from the three German island colonies in the Pacific-the Marshalls, the Marianas, and the Carolines. There were mint and used specimens of all the stamps, including minor varieties, and there were envelopes-covers, collectors called them-and blocks of four and six, and, well, a wealth of material, all artistically arranged and professionally written up. You could see the work of the pro who’d prepared the exhibit, but you could also see the hand of the collector, Sheridan Bingham, who’d tracked down the material in the first place and paid what he’d needed to for it.

Would he want to do anything like this himself? He thought about it and decided he wouldn’t. His hobby was private, and he wanted to keep it that way.

But what he might do, he thought, was expand his interest in Martinique to include covers and multiples. They’d look good, even if no one else ever saw them.

And no one ever would. He was no artist, and layout and lettering were way beyond him. Like Bingham, he’d have to hire someone.

No thanks. He’d had a dog once, and he’d hired a young woman to walk the animal in his absence, and before he knew it he had a live-in girlfriend. And the next thing he knew, she disappeared, walking herself and his dog clear out of his life.

You didn’t have to take a stamp collection for a walk. You had to feed it-it ate money, and its appetite was bottomless-but it could go as long as it had to between meals. And if you had to go somewhere, you just locked the door on it and the albums sat on their shelves without complaining.

He took another tour around the exhibit room, admiring what he saw, weighing the relative merits of the different displays. Very nice, he decided, but it was like the way he’d come to feel about dogs and girlfriends. He liked to look at them, but he wouldn’t want to own one.

45

“Thought I might find you here.”

A hand fastened on the edge of the table where Keller was seated, and the overhead light of the bourse room glinted off the blue stone of the high school class ring.

Keller was in the dealers’ bourse room, where he’d sifted through several shoe boxes full of covers without finding anything he had any reason to buy. It was interesting, though, because he’d never bothered with covers, and looking at them gave him some sense of his own response to them.

“I was looking at covers,” he told Bingham.

“From Martinique?”

“From all over. I didn’t see anything from Martinique. I’m trying to decide how I feel about covers.”

“It’s a Pandora’s box,” Bingham said. “No two covers are identical, so you never know when to stop buying them. Or what’s a good price. So you wind up buying everything, even though you’re not sure you want it, and when you pass something up you wind up thinking about it for years, wishing you hadn’t missed your chance.”

“Maybe I shouldn’t get started.”

Bingham looked at him, then shook his head. “My guess,” he said, “is you’re not going to be able to resist. But go ahead and hold out as long as you can. Meanwhile, what do you say we get some lunch?”

It was a long, leisurely lunch, in a restaurant that was all red leather and hand-rubbed wood and well-polished brass. The clientele was mostly male, and they were all wearing suits and ties, with the occasional blue blazer for Casual Friday. Lawyers and stockbrokers, Keller guessed, starting with martinis and finishing up with brandy, and pausing en route to take on a load of prime beef and fresh seafood.

“My party,” Bingham had announced when they ordered their drinks, and waved away Keller’s insistence that they split the check. “You can grab the dinner check tonight, if you want. But this is gonna be on me. You’ve never been here before, Jackie? Well, outside of a place I know in Dallas, they serve the best steak I ever had.”

Keller hadn’t been sure he wanted a steak that early in the day, but the first bite he took convinced him. Conversation during the meal was light-the food demanded their full attention-and when they did talk it was about stamps.

The coffee was what you’d expect-dark, rich, and perfectly brewed-and when Bingham ordered an elderly Armagnac to keep it company, Keller went along with him. He was no big fan of brandy, it usually gave him heartburn, but he went along anyway.

What the hell, he thought. What the hell.

And he found himself wondering if a mistake might have been made. Suppose someone back in Detroit had clipped the wrong photo. Suppose it wasn’t Sheridan Bingham but some other resident of the Motor City who had incurred Len Horvath’s displeasure. Because, really, how could anyone want this perfectly pleasant gentleman killed?

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 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.”