“Anytime you want to. I probably should go with you, to make sure they don’t give you a hard time. We could fly to Albany tomorrow, if that’s what you decide you want to do.”
“I get the feeling,” he said, “that it wouldn’t be your first choice.”
“Well, I’d like to spend a few days and see New Orleans. But after that it’s your call. You’ll have your stamps back, and you’ll have two and a half million dollars just in case the construction business goes sour. You can just sit back and enjoy yourself.”
“Or?”
“Lord, did I finish that last glass of tea? I’m going to have some from your pitcher, if you don’t mind.”
“Go right ahead.”
“I’ll regret it, when I have to get up once an hour to pee, but if that’s my greatest regret I’d say I’m in good shape. Keller, I think we’re both pretty safe at this point. The cops seem to think you’re dead or in Brazil or both, which is about what I thought until my phone rang the other day. And I don’t know what our friend Al thinks, but at this point he probably has other matters that get the greater part of his attention. He knows I’m dead, and if you’re still on his list you’re way down toward the bottom of it. So there’s nothing we absolutely have to do.”
“But?”
She sighed. “Oh,” she said, “I’m sure it’s the sign of a defect of character, and there’s probably a seminar I could take to address the issue, and if there is you can bet someone’s offering it in Sedona. But what do you figure are the odds I’ll ever take that seminar?”
“Slim.”
“There you go. Keller, I can’t help it. I really would like to get even with that son of a bitch.”
“It was driving me crazy,” he said, “that he was alive and you weren’t.”
“Same with me, that he was alive and you weren’t. Now it turns out we’re both alive, and we’re both millionaires, and we should probably let it go at that, but—”
“You want to go after him.”
“You bet I do. And you?”
He drew a breath. “I think I’d better go talk to Julia,” he said.
33
“I’d like to meet her,” Julia said, and insisted Keller ask Dot to join them for dinner. They tried to decide on a restaurant, and Julia said, “No, you know what let’s do? Bring her over here, and I’ll cook.”
When he picked Dot up she wore a different suit, with a skirt instead of pants, and her hair was different. “I had to cancel my little Vietnamese girl in Sedona,” she said, “so I asked the concierge, and wound up with a local product who couldn’t stop talking. But I like what she did with my hair.”
Keller brought her into the house and introduced her to Julia, and stepped aside and waited for something to go wrong. By the time they sat down to dinner, after Dot had had the grand tour of the house and said all the appropriate things, he realized nothing terrible was going to happen. Both women were too well brought up.
Julia served pie for dessert, pecan this time, from the little bakery on Magazine Street, and they all had coffee, which Dot chose over iced tea. Throughout the evening Julia had referred to him as Nicholas, and Dot hadn’t called him anything at all, but as he was pouring her a second cup of coffee she called him Keller.
“I mean Nicholas,” she said, and looked across at Julia. “It’s a good thing I live a thousand miles from here, so you don’t have to sit around on pins and needles waiting for me to drop a brick in front of company. Have you ever done that, Julia? Called him Keller?”
When he was driving her back to the Intercontinental, she said, “That’s a real lady you found yourself, Keller. I’m sorry, I’ll be a long time getting used to any other name for you. You’ve been just plain Keller to me for a long time now.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“But why did she blush when I asked if she ever called you Keller? Jesus, Keller, now you’re the one blushing.”
“The hell I am,” he said. “Just forget it, okay?”
“Okay,” she said. “Mea fucking culpa, and consider it forgotten.”
“Do I ever forget and call you Keller? I turned red as a beet.”
“I don’t think she noticed.”
“Oh? I doubt there’s a great deal that goes unnoticed around your friend Dot. I like her. Though she’s not quite what I expected.”
“What did you expect?”
“Someone older. And, well, on the dowdy side.”
“She used to be older.”
“How’s that?”
“Well, she seemed older, and dowdy too, I guess. She never wore makeup, and she sat around in housedresses. I think that’s what you call them.”
“Watching TV and drinking iced tea.”
“Both of which she still does,” he said, “but I guess she gets out more, and she’s lost a lot of weight, and she buys nice clothes now, and gets her hair done. It’s dyed.”
“I’m shocked, darling. She’s very flippant and sarcastic, but underneath it all she’s very much the lady. When I was showing off the house, she kept pointing out things like the window seat that reminded her of her house in White Plains. She must have loved that house, and yet she was tough-minded and decisive enough to burn the place down.”
“She didn’t have much choice.”
“I realize that, but it still couldn’t have made it easy. I wonder if I could do that.”
“If you had to.”
“When all is said and done, it’s just a house. And you could always build me a new one, couldn’t you? With an open-plan kitchen and ceramic tile in the bath.”
“And central air.”
“My hero. Didn’t you say they found a body in the wreckage?”
He was ready for this. “She left her false teeth behind,” he said. “Which they could identify from dental records. I never even knew her teeth weren’t her own, so the possibility never occurred to me.”
“Oh, that explains it. Nicholas?” She put a hand on his arm. “I was afraid I’d be jealous, even if it was never that kind of relationship in the past. But her whole vibe with you is somewhere between big sister and Auntie Mame. You know what the elephant was?”
“The elephant in the living room?”
“That we walked around and didn’t mention. What you’re going to do now.”
“I don’t really have to do anything.”
“I know. You’ve got your stamps, or at least you’re going to have them, and you’re going to have a lot of money, too. And we can just go on living this life, which is exactly the life I want to be living—”
“Me, too.”
“ — and not worry about money, and just be comfortable and happy.”
“And?”
“And never really feel comfortable eating in the French Quarter. If you went after them, would you know where to look?”
“Not really.”
“Des Moines?”
“I don’t know if any of them live in Des Moines. It’s a sure bet Al doesn’t. I’ve got a Des Moines phone number, the one I called every day to find out if it was time to take out that poor mope who never did anything besides water his lawn. I wonder if he has any idea how close he came to getting his ticket punched.”
“You don’t think that phone number would lead anywhere?”
“No,” he said, “or they wouldn’t have given it to me. But as far as I can tell, it’s all we’ve got.”
“I wonder,” she said.
In the morning she drove him and Dot to the airport. Keller had thought they would take a cab, but Julia wouldn’t hear of it. Dot headed inside with her suitcase, to give them a moment, and Julia got out of the car to kiss him good-bye.
She said, “Be careful, you hear?”
“I will.”
“I’ll tell Donny you were called away. Family business, I’ll tell him.”