He said as much to Julia, after Jenny was bedded down for the night. “For me,” he said, “it’s about as good as it gets, sitting with her and pointing at stamps and telling her stuff. And she seems to enjoy it, but I’m damned if I can figure out why.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“Not at all. She gets to hear a lot of blather about stuff that happened ages before anybody she knows was born, in places nobody ever heard of. Sometimes there’ll be animals on the stamps, or scenery, but most of the stamps have nothing to look at but the occasional dead king.”
“You show her where the countries are,” she said. “On the globe.”
“Well, sure.”
“And she gets to cuddle up on her daddy’s lap, and be talked to like a grown-up. And she gets to learn things, which as you may have noticed is very important to her.”
“Yes, she does.”
“She gets that from her mother. So tell me what happened in Baker’s Bluff.”
He told her about the Wet Spot and the Spotted Tiger, and how he’d blown the whole mission trying to find out what rhymed with El Paso.
“Once we were all three at that table together,” he said, “drinking our beer straight out of the bottle, well, it was time for me to pack up and come home. What makes my job possible, what allows me to do what I do and not be looking over my shoulder all the time, is that there’s no connection between me and the, uh—”
“Dead guy on the floor.”
“Uh, right. Nobody can put me with the client or the dead guy, so nobody looks at me twice. But if I’m seen hanging out in public with someone—”
“I understand.”
“But then I got to thinking,” he said. And he told her about the rest of the conversation in the Spotted Tiger.
“You set up a threesome for them.”
“I may have nudged the conversation in that direction.”
“Why? Because it was a way to do something kinky but from a distance?”
“No.”
“Not that there’s anything wrong with that,” she said. “But it doesn’t sound like you.”
“Dot hates to give money back,” he said.
“Well, there’s a surprise. I mean, doesn’t everybody?”
“It bothers her more than most people. But she said fine, come home, I’ll send the money back and get us out of it. And I thought maybe there’s a way to keep the money.”
“What if she just forgets to send a refund? It’s not like he can take her to court.”
He shook his head. “Word gets around,” he said. “It’s bad policy, and simpler to give it back. And here I was, knowing exactly what time Cowboy Roy and Pistol Pete were going to be two points on a triangle on Robin’s Nest Drive.”
The penny dropped. “You made a phone call.”
“Isn’t there something about if you show a gun in Act One it has to get fired before the final curtain comes down?”
“Chekhov, but what was the gun?”
“My third phone, the burner. Purchased for the sole purpose of calling the client if I had to, and there was never a time when I had to.”
“But you still had the phone.”
“Right.”
“And knew what number to call. What did you tell him? Hurry home and you can watch your wife make the beast with three backs?”
“That she’d be expecting not one but two gentleman guests, and that what she didn’t know was that they had an agenda. That once they’d tired of having sex with her, their plan was to kill her and rob the house.”
“And he believed all of this, of course.”
“If it had been the first of April,” he said, “he might have suspected something. But why wouldn’t he buy the whole package? I helped him see how it was his chance to be a hero. Get there right around four, walk in with a gun, and do what needs to be done. He’d be saving her life, he’d be a romantic figure in her eyes, and—”
“And they’d live happily ever after. You can almost hear the movie soundtrack, can’t you?”
“Just about.”
“Did he know who was calling him?”
“I said I was somebody who didn’t know him at all, just a well-meaning stranger who wanted to do the right thing.”
“Well, all of that was true enough.”
“When he pressed a little, I let on that I was a friend of one of the pair, that I’d done time with him in Joliet.”
“Oh, were they criminals?”
“Not that I know of, but I figured the more I made them sound like desperate characters, the less likely he’d be to show up without a gun.”
She nodded, thinking about it. “And then you ended the call and went to Chicago and—”
“No, I was already in Chicago. I called him from Chicago.”
“And that was that. There was nothing more for you to do. It would play out one way or the other, and Dot would keep the money or give it back, and either way you washed your hands of it.”
“Literally,” he said. “Because I ditched the burner in the men’s room, and on my way out I washed my hands.”
“And I guess Dot doesn’t have to give the money back.”
“No.”
“What happened?”
“Dot gave me a pretty sketchy summary,” he said, “but we can probably watch it in a month or two.”
“We can watch it?”
“On Dateline.”
“They had their party, and the husband crashed it.”
“I don’t know what time Roy and Pete showed up, but it wouldn’t have been much after 3:15, as eager as they were. Four o’clock’s what I told Todd, and it wouldn’t have mattered if he was fifteen minutes early or fifteen minutes late. I guess he walked right in, and I guess they were too busy doing things to listen for doors opening and closing.”
“Doing things.”
“Well. Hard to know exactly what happened, who said what and who did what, but he must have walked in with a gun in his hand and he couldn’t have waited too long before he started using it.”
“And Roy had a gun, didn’t he?”
“In the Spotted Tiger, unless he was just patting himself on the butt. No, I think the report Dot found mentioned an exchange of gunfire, so maybe Roy or Pete had time to get a couple of shots off.”
“So to speak. Oh.”
“Oh?”
“They’re all dead, aren’t they?”
He nodded.
“If there was a survivor,” she said, “it wouldn’t be so hard to know the sequence of events.”
“Overmont survived long enough to call 911. Even if he caught a bullet along the way, it couldn’t have been enough to stop him from getting the call through.”
“What did he say?”
“Gave his name and address, said he’d just killed two men who were raping his wife. And then there was another gunshot, and nothing after that.”
“He shot himself.”
“Or maybe what they heard on the 911 call was him shooting Melania, and then he rang off and decided he didn’t really want to hang around and wait for the cops to get there. By the time they did, he’d stuck a gun in his mouth and cheated some defense attorney out of a good fee.”
“And the cops walked in on a bedroom full of dead people. Naked dead people, I suppose.”
“Except for Overmont.”
She was silent for a moment, then raised her hand to her face to cover a yawn. “I’m tired,” she said, “and you must be exhausted. I know you slept on the train, but it’s not the same, is it?”
And a little later, in their bed, she stretched like a cat. “Oh, I feel much better now,” she said. “I really missed you. I’m glad you’re back.”
“Me too.”
“When they asked you if you’d ever done — what did they call it, a tag team? And you said you hadn’t.”
“Right.”
“Was that true? Or did you ever hook up with two girls?”