“You could stay under the speed limit,” she said, “and obey every traffic regulation, and never even risk another parking ticket. And then some drunk rear-ends you, and the next thing you know you’ve got cops asking questions.”
“Or some cop could come back from a vacation at Graceland and wonder why my Tennessee plate doesn’t look much like the ones he saw up there. I know, there are all kinds of things that could go wrong. I’m putting money aside, and when I’ve got enough saved—”
“I’ll give you the money.”
“I don’t want you to do that.”
“You can pay me back. It won’t take long, you’re making an extra two dollars an hour.”
“Let me think about it.”
“I’m all for that,” she said. “Think all you want, Nicholas. Saturday morning we’ll go car shopping.”
There wasn’t much shopping involved. The next time he saw Donny, he mentioned he was going to be looking for a car. You get yourself a truck, Donny said, and you’ll never be happy with a plain old car again. Donny knew somebody with a Chevy half-ton pickup, not much on looks but mechanically sound. It would have to be all cash, Donny said, but he could probably find somebody to take the Sentra off Nick’s hands. Keller said he already had somebody lined up.
The truck’s owner was an older woman who looked like a librarian, and it turned out that’s just what she was, at what she described as the big branch library in Jefferson Parish. Keller couldn’t guess how she’d wound up owning the truck, and her air suggested she was somewhat baffled herself. But the papers looked okay, and when he asked the price she sighed and said she’d been hoping to get five thousand dollars, which made it pretty clear she didn’t expect to. Keller offered four, figuring to meet her somewhere in the middle, and felt almost guilty when she sighed again and nodded her agreement.
Julia had driven him to the woman’s house in the Taurus, and he followed her back and parked out in front on the street. He told her how he’d wanted to raise his own bid when the woman said yes to four thousand, and she told him not to be silly. “It’s not her truck,” she said.
“Not anymore. It’s ours.”
“It was never hers. Some man owned it, her son or her boyfriend or I don’t know who, and one way or another she wound up with it, and believe me, the truck’s not the saddest part of the story. What?”
“I was just thinking,” he said. “You realize you’re not more than a handful of notes away from a country song?”
The Sentra wound up in the Mississippi. If he’d felt guilty lowballing the librarian, he felt worse deep-sixing a car that had given him trouble-free performance for months. He’d eaten in it, he’d slept in it, he’d driven it all over the country, and now he was showing his gratitude by dumping it in the river.
But nothing else he could come up with struck him as one hundred percent safe. If he left it to be stolen, he’d sever his own connection with it. But it would provoke official attention sooner or later, and when it did it would still be the vehicle Governor Longford’s assassin had rented in Des Moines, and whoever ran the engine serial number would learn that much readily enough. And anyone with a strong interest in finding him would have a reason to start looking in New Orleans.
It was a good bet to stay in the river forever, he told Julia, and if it ever did get hauled out, nobody was going to bother looking for the serial number.
Back in the city, he took her for a ride in his truck.
28
Her father seemed at first to be recovering from his stroke. Then he must have had another one, because when Julia went in there one morning he had taken a sharp turn for the worse. His speech was impossible to make out, and he didn’t seem able to move his legs. Earlier, he’d had to use a bed pan; now Keller found himself called to help when Julia changed her father’s diapers.
The doctor came and hooked up an IV. “Otherwise he’ll starve,” he told Julia, “and even so we can’t monitor him the way we should. He can’t change his mind now, you know, so it’s up to you to let us hospitalize him.”
Later she said, “I don’t know what to do. Whatever I decide is going to be wrong. I just wish—”
“You wish what?”
“Never mind,” she said. “I don’t want to say it.”
It was pretty clear how she’d have finished the sentence. She wished the man would die and get it over with.
Keller went in and watched the old man sleep and wondered how anyone could wish otherwise. Left to his own devices, Roussard would likely turn his face to the wall, refuse food and drink, and be gone in a day or two. But through a miracle of medical science he’d been hooked up to an IV, and Julia had been instructed how to replenish the liquids that dripped into his body, and so he’d go on, until another of his failing systems found a way to shut down.
Keller stood by his bedside and thought of another old man, Giuseppe Ragone or Joey Rags or, God help us, Joe the Dragon. Keller had never thought of him as anything but the old man, and had never actually called him anything to his face. Or had he called him Sir early on? It was possible. He couldn’t remember.
That old man was in decent shape physically until right up to the end, but it was always something, wasn’t it, and in his case it was the mind that didn’t hold up. He started making mistakes and losing track of details, and one time he sent Keller to St. Louis to take care of business, and the business was in a particular hotel room, the number of which the old man wrote down for Keller. Except he didn’t write down the room number, he wrote down 3-1-4, which was nothing like the room number, and all Keller could figure out later was that it was the area code for St. Louis. Keller, sent to the wrong room, did what he was supposed to do, but not to the person he was supposed to do it to. There was a woman in the room, too, so two people died for no reason at all, and what kind of a way was that to run a business?
There were other incidents, enough of them to cut through Dot’s denial, and the capper was when the old man recruited some kid from the high school newspaper to help him write his memoirs. Dot managed to nip that in the bud, and told Keller to take a trip. He was collecting stamps by then, preparing for his retirement, and she urged him to go to a stamp show and register under his own name and use his own credit card for everything.
In other words, be someplace else when it happened.
She’d put a sedative in the old man’s bedtime cup of cocoa, so he’d be sound asleep when she held a pillow over his face. And that was that. Sweet dreams, and a gentler exit than the old man had provided for no end of people over the years.
“I can’t say it’s what he’d have wanted,” Dot told him later, “because he never said, but I’ll tell you this much. It’s what I’d want. So if I ever get like that, Keller, and you’re around, I hope you’ll know what to do.”
He agreed, and she’d rolled her eyes. “Easy to say now,” she said, “but when the time comes, you’ll say to yourself, ‘Let’s see now, wasn’t there something I was supposed to do for Dot? I can’t seem to remember what the hell it was.’”
“I was looking in on your father,” he told Julia. “You know, if there’s anything you want to say to him while you’ve got the chance, this might be a good time.”
“You don’t think—”
“It’s nothing I can put my finger on,” he said, “but for some reason I don’t think it’s going to be more than another day or two.”
She nodded, got to her feet, and went to the sickroom.
Later that night she went upstairs with him. They didn’t make love, but lay together in the dark. She talked about when she was a girl, along with family history that went back before she was born. He didn’t say much but mostly just listened, and thought his own thoughts.