Something clicked for Keller. “That’s very appealing,” he said.
Wallens suggested he start by buying a collection. He’d save money that way and get off to a flying start. Two whole shelves in the dealer’s back room held collections, general and specialized. Wallens showed him a three-volume collection, stamps of the world, 1840 to 1949. No great rarities, Wallens said as they paged through the albums, but plenty of good stamps, and the condition was decent throughout. The catalog value of the entire lot was just under $50,000, and Wallens had it priced at $5450.
“But I could trim that,” he said. “Five thousand even. It’s a pretty good deal, but on the other hand it’s a major commitment for a man who never paid more than ten or twenty cents for a stamp, or thirty-two cents if he was getting ready to mail a letter. You’ll want to take some time and think about it.”
“It’s just what I want,” Keller said.
“It’s nice, and priced very fair, but I’m not going to pretend it’s unique. There are a lot of collections like this on the market, and it wouldn’t be a bad idea for you to shop around.”
Why? “I’ll take it,” Keller said.
Keller, at his desk, lifted a stamp with his tongs, affixed a folded glassine hinge to its back, then mounted the stamp in his new album. At Wallens’s urging he had purchased a fine set of new albums and was systematically remounting all the stamps from the collection he had bought. The new albums were of much better quality, but that wasn’t the only reason for the remounting operation.
“That way you’ll come to know the stamps,” Wallens had told him, “and they’ll become yours. Otherwise you’d just be adding new stamps to another man’s collection. This way you’re creating a collection of your own.”
And Wallens was right, of course. It took time and it absorbed you utterly, and you got to know the stamps. Sometimes the previous owner had mounted a stamp in the wrong space, and Keller took great satisfaction in correcting the error. And, as he finished transferring each country to the new album, he made himself a checklist, so he could tell at a glance what stamps he owned and what ones he needed.
He was up to Belgium now, and had gotten as far as Leopold II. The stamps he was working on had little tabs attached, stating in French and Flemish, the nation’s two languages, that the letter was not to be delivered on a Sunday. (If you wanted Sunday delivery, you removed the tab before you licked the stamp and stuck it on the envelope.) A couple of Keller’s stamps lacked the Sunday tab, which made them much less desirable, and Keller decided to replace them when he got the chance. He’d prepare his checklist accordingly, he thought, and the phone rang.
“Keller,” Dot said, “I’ll just bet you’re playing with your stamps.”
“Working with them,” he said.
“I stand corrected. Speaking of work, why don’t you come out and see me?”
“Now?”
“You’re just a part-time philatelist,” she pointed out. “You haven’t retired yet. Duty calls.”
Keller flew to New Orleans and took a cab to a hotel on the edge of the French Quarter. He unpacked and sat down with a city map and a photograph. The photo showed a middle-aged man with a full head of wavy hair, a deep tan, and a thirty-two-tooth smile. He was wearing a broad-brimmed Panama hat and holding a cigar. His name was Richard Wickwire, and he had killed at least one wife, and possibly two.
Six years previously, Wickwire had married Pam Shileen, daughter of a local businessman who’d done very nicely, thank you, in sulphur and natural gas. Several years into a stormy marriage, Pam Wickwire drowned in her swimming pool. After a brief mourning period, Richard Wickwire demonstrated his continuing enthusiasm for the Shileen family by marrying Pam’s younger sister, Rachel.
The second marriage was, it seemed, also problematic. Rachel, a friend later testified, had feared for her life, and had reported that Wickwire had threatened to kill her. Straighten up and fly right, he’d told her, or he’d drown her the same as he’d drowned her sad-ass sister.
He didn’t, though. He stabbed her instead, using the carving knife from the family barbecue set and sticking it straight into her heart. That at least was the prosecution’s contention, and the evidence was pretty convincing, but the essential twelve persons were not unanimously convinced. The first trial ended in a hung jury, and on retrial the second jury voted to acquit.
So Jim Paul Shileen had a few drinks, loaded a sixgun, and went looking for his son-in-law. Found him, called him a son of a bitch, and emptied the gun at him, hitting him once in the shoulder and once in the hip, hitting a female companion of Wickwire’s in the left buttock, and missing altogether with the three remaining bullets.
Shileen turned himself in, only to be charged with assault and attempted murder, acquitted of all charges, and given a stiff warning by the judge. “In other words,” Dot had said, “ ‘You didn’t do it. Now don’t do it again.’ So he’s not going to do it again, Keller, and that’s where you come in.”
Wickwire, fully recovered from his wounds, was living in the same Garden District mansion he’d shared in turn with Pam and Rachel Shileen. He had married again, taking as his third bride not the young woman Shileen had wounded but a sweet young thing who’d been a juror, coincidentally enough, at his second trial. She’d visited him in the hospital after the shooting, and one thing led to another.
“The shooting evidently got his attention,” Dot had said, “so he’s got himself a couple of live-in bodyguards now, and you’d think they were his AmEx cards.”
“Because he never leaves home without them.”
“Apparently not. The client thought an explosive device might do the trick, and for all he cares the new wife and the bodyguards can come to the party, too. I figured you might not care for that.”
“I don’t.”
“Too high tech, too noisy, and too much heat. Of course you’ll do it your own way, Keller. You’ve got two weeks. The client wants to be out of the country when it happens, and that’s how long he’ll be gone. I figure if you can do it at all you can do it in two weeks.”
Generally the case, he said. And what did the old man upstairs think about it?
“Unless he’s telepathic,” Dot said, “he’s got no opinion. I took the call myself and headed the play on my own.”
“I guess he was having a bad day.”
“Actually,” she said, “it was one of his better days, but I shortstopped the phone call anyway, and I figured, why give him a chance to screw this one up? You think I did the wrong thing?”
“Not at all,” he said. “I’ve got no problem with that. My only problem is Wickwire.”
“And you’ve got two weeks to solve him. Or until he murders wife number three, whichever comes first.”
Keller studied the map, studied the photo. Wickwire’s address looked to be within walking distance, and he felt capable of finding his way. And the weather was fine, and it would do him good to get out and stretch his legs.
He walked to Wickwire’s residence and stopped across the street for a look at the house. He was shooting for inconspicuous, but a woman pruning roses noted his interest and said, “That’s where he lives. The wife-killer.”
“Uh,” he said.
“Just a matter of time before he goes for the hat trick,” the woman said, savaging the air with her pruning shears. “That new wife’s just playing moth to his flame, isn’t she? Any girl that stupid, now you hate to see her hurt, but you wouldn’t want her to produce young ones, either.”
Keller said she had a point.
“The father-in-law? Not the dumbbell’s daddy, I’m talking about Mr. Shileen. Now he’s a gentleman, but he got excited and that’s what threw his aim off.”
“Maybe he’ll do better next time,” Keller said recklessly.
“What I hear,” the woman said, “he’s come to see there’s things you can’t do all by yourself. He went and hired some professional, flew him down here from Chicago to take care of things Mob-style.”
Oh boy, Keller thought.
Keller had enjoyed walking to Wickwire’s house, but enough was enough. He returned to his hotel on the St. Charles Avenue streetcar, and made his next visit to the Garden District the next morning in a rented Pontiac. He spent the better part of three days-or the worst part, if you asked him-trailing along after Wickwire’s Lincoln. One of the bodyguards drove, the other rode shotgun, and Wickwire sat by himself in the rear seat.
If you were in fact from Chicago, Keller thought, there was an obvious Mob-style way to take care of things. All you had to do was pull up alongside the Lincoln, zip your window down, and let go with a burst of auto fire at the rear side window. It was unlikely that Wickwire’s car sported reinforced side panels and bulletproof glass, so that ought to do the trick. You could probably manage to spray the two bozos in the front seat while you were at it. Pow! Take that! Now you know how we handle things in the city with the big shoulders!
Not his style, Keller thought. He supposed it wouldn’t be impossible to find someone local who could sell him the tools for the job, the gun and the ammunition, but it still wasn’t his way of doing things. He was, after all, a New Yorker. He was inclined to be a little less obvious, a little more sophisticated.
Besides, no matter how airtight an alibi the client put together, the cops would figure he’d put out a contract. So the less professional the whole affair looked, the better it was for Jim Paul Shileen.
Keller walked around the Quarter. He passed bars offering genuine New Orleans jazz and restaurants boasting genuine New Orleans cuisine. If they had to keep insisting it was authentic, he thought, it probably wasn’t. When a strip-club barker began his pitch, Keller waved him off; he didn’t want to hear about genuine girls with genuine breasts.
Next thing he knew he was standing in front of an antique shop, studying the earrings in the window. He turned away, got his bearings, and headed for his hotel.
In his room he found himself changing channels as if determined to wear out the remote. He turned off the TV, picked up a magazine, flipped the pages, tossed it aside.
The thing was, he didn’t want to be here. He wanted to be back in his own apartment, working on his stamps.
So what he had to do was figure out the right approach to Richard Wickwire and go ahead and do it and go home. Get out of New Orleans and get back to Belgium.
Let’s see. Wickwire got out of the house a lot, and the bodyguards always went with him. But the new wife, for the most part, stayed home. So Keller could pay a call in Wickwire’s absence.
Once inside the house, he could stuff the new wife in a coat closet and lay doggo, waiting for Wickwire to return, taking out him and his bodyguards before they had a clue. But that was heavy-handed, that was as Chicago as deep-dish pizza. There ought to be a subtler way… and just like that it came to him.
Get into the house. Arrange an accident for wife number three. Take her out back and drown her in the pool, say. Or break her neck and leave her at the foot of the stairs, as if she’d taken a header down the staircase. There was no end of ways to kill her, and how hard could any of them be? The woman obviously had the self-preservation instincts of a lemming.