“Still?”
He shook his head. “There’s the feeling that you’ve got the job done, that’s all. If it was difficult, well, you’ve accomplished something. If there are other things you’d rather be doing, well, now you can go home and do them.”
“Buy stamps, see a movie.”
“Right.”
“You just pretended it didn’t bother you,” she said, “and then one day it didn’t.”
“And it was easy to pretend, because it never bothered me all that much. But yes, I just kept on doing it, and then I didn’t have to pretend. This place where I stayed in Scottsdale, there were all these masks on the walls. Tribal stuff, I guess they were. And I thought about how I started out wearing a mask, and before long it wasn’t a mask, it was my own face.”
“I guess I follow you.”
“It’s just a way of looking at it,” he said. “Anyway, how I got here’s not the point. Where do I go from here? That’s the question.”
“You had a lot of time to think up an answer.”
“Too much time.”
“I guess, with all the stops in Nashville and Coffee Pot.”
“ Coffeyville.”
“Whatever. What did you come up with, Keller?”
“Well,” he said, and drew a breath. “One, I’m ready to stop doing this. The business is different, with the airline security and people living behind stockade fences. And I’m different. I’m older, and I’ve been doing this for too many years.”
“Okay.”
“Two, I can’t retire. I need the money, and I don’t have any other way to earn what I need to live on.”
“I hope there’s a three, Keller, because one and two don’t leave you much room to swing.”
“What I had to do,” he said, “was figure out how much money I need.”
“To retire on.”
He nodded. “The figure I came up with,” he said, “is a million dollars.”
“A nice round sum.”
“That’s more than I had when I was thinking about retirement the last time. I think this is a more realistic figure. Invested right, I could probably get a return of around fifty thousand dollars a year.”
“And you can live on that?”
“I don’t want that much,” he said. “I’m not thinking in terms of around-the-world cruises and expensive restaurants. I don’t spend a lot on clothes, and when I buy something I wear it until it’s worn out.”
“Or even longer.”
“If I had a million in cash,” he said, “plus what I could get for the apartment, which is probably another half million.”
“Where would you move?”
“I don’t know. Someplace warm, I suppose.”
“Sundowner Estates?”
“Too expensive. And I wouldn’t care to be walled in, and I don’t play golf.”
“You might, just to have something to do.”
He shook his head. “Some of those guys loved golf,” he said, “but others, you had the feeling they had to keep selling themselves on the idea, telling one another how crazy they were about the game. ‘What time?’”
“How’s that?”
“It’s the punch line of a joke. It’s not important. No, I wouldn’t want to live there. But there are these little towns in New Mexico north of Albuquerque, up in the high desert, and you could buy a shack there or just pick up a mobile home and find a place to park it.”
“And you think you could stand it? Out in the boonies like that?”
“I don’t know. The thing is, say I netted half a million from the apartment, plus the million I saved. Say five percent, comes to seventy-five thousand a year, and yes, I could live fine on that.”
“And your apartment’s worth half a million?”
“Something like that.”
“So all you need is a million dollars, Keller. Now I’d lend it to you myself, but I’m a little short this month. What are you going to do, sell your stamps?”
“They’re not worth anything like that. I don’t know what I’ve spent on the collection, but it certainly doesn’t come to a million dollars, and you can’t get back what you put into them, anyway.”
“I thought they were supposed to be a good investment.”
“They’re better than spending the money on caviar and champagne,” he said, “because you get something back when you sell them, but dealers have to make a profit, too, and if you get half your money back you’re doing well. Anyway, I wouldn’t want to sell them.”
“You want to keep them. And keep on collecting?”
“If I had seventy-five thousand a year coming in,” he said, “and if I lived in some little town in the desert, I could afford to spend ten or fifteen thousand a year on stamps.”
“I bet northern New Mexico ’s full of people doing just that.”
“Maybe not,” he said, “but I don’t see why I couldn’t do it.”
“You could be the first, Keller. Now all you need is a million dollars.”
“That’s what I was thinking.”
“Okay, I’ll bite. How’re you going to get it?”
“Well,” he said, “that pretty much answers itself, doesn’t it? I mean, there’s only one thing I know how to do.”
19
“I think I get it,” Dot said. “You can’t do this anymore, so you’ve got to do it with a vengeance. You have to depopulate half the country in order to get out of the business of killing people.”
“When you put it that way…”
“Well, there’s a certain irony operating, wouldn’t you say? But there’s a certain logic there, too. You want to grab every high-ticket job that comes along, so that you can salt away enough cash to get out of the business once and for all. You know what it reminds me of?”
“What?”
“Cops,” she said. “Their pensions are based on what they make the last year they work, so they grab all the overtime they can get their hands on, and then when they retire they can live in style. Usually we sit back and pick and choose, and you take time off between jobs, but that’s not what you want to do now, is it? You want to do a job, come home, catch your breath, then turn around and do another one.”
“Right.”
“Until you can cash in at an even million.”
“That’s the idea.”
“Or maybe a few dollars more, to allow for inflation.”
“Maybe.”
“A little more iced tea, Keller?”
“No, I’m fine.”
“Would you rather have coffee? I could make coffee.”
“No thanks.”
“You sure?”
“Positive.”
“You took a lot of time in Scottsdale. Did he really look just like the man in Monopoly?”
“In the photo. Less so in real life.”
“He didn’t give you any trouble?”
He shook his head. “By the time he had a clue what was happening, it was pretty much over.”
“He wasn’t on his guard at all, then.”
“No. I wonder why he got on somebody’s list.”
“An impatient heir would be my guess. Did it bother you much, Keller? Before, during, or after?”
He thought about it, shook his head.
“And then you took your time getting out of there.”
“I thought it made sense to hang around a few days. One more day and I could have gone to the funeral.”
“So you left the day they buried him?”
“Except they didn’t,” he said. “He had the same kind of funeral as Mr. Lattimore.”
“Am I supposed to know who that is?”
“He had a house I could have bought. He was cremated, and after a nondenominational service his ashes were placed in the water hazard.”
“Just a five-iron shot from his front door.”
“Well,” Keller said. “Anyway, yes, I took my time getting home.”
“All those museums.”
“I had to think it all through,” he said. “Figuring out what I want to do with the rest of my life.”