Hell of a line, he’d thought at the time. And he still thought so, but the one on Call Him Jake wasn’t bad, either.
When you took a roomette, you were in the care of a porter, and Keller’s introduced himself shortly after the train left the station. He said, “Mr. Edwards? My name is Ainslie, and I’ll be with you all the way to Chicago,” and went on to tell him about the diner and the café car, and that he’d make up the bed for him when he was ready to retire.
“So I don’t forget you in the morning,” Keller said, and palmed him a twenty. He’d taken enough trains in recent years to get in the habit of giving out his tips early on, so they could do him some good.
Keller spent some of his time with the book, but more of it looking out the window and letting his mind wander. He’d never minded flying, but what you had to go through at airports was a pain in the neck, and meant showing ID and turning up in no end of official records.
That didn’t matter much if he was looking to make some widow an offer for her husband’s stamp collection, but even then it was a nuisance. This trip, though, was a return to an earlier life, and he was literally riding a thousand miles (albeit more comfortably than if he were on horseback) to kill a man he’d never met — a man, in fact, whose name he didn’t even know yet.
And learning that man’s name, and other things about the fellow, would be the first order of business. He’d have to play private detective, and at this point the only thing he had going for him in that department was his hat.
And so, although there was nothing particularly gripping about Call Him Jake, he found himself dipping back into the book from time to time. Not for the promise of booze or babes or bullets, none of which held any real appeal for him. But on the chance that he might pick up some tradecraft.
Sunday he’d taken Jenny to the zoo in Audubon Park. “We can’t see Spots,” she said.
“No, we can’t.”
“Because Spots is dead,” she said.
Spots had been the zoo’s astonishingly rare white alligator, one of a clutch of seventeen blue-eyed hatchlings discovered in 1987. Spots had survived for twenty-eight years, which sounded like a long time for an alligator irrespective of its color, but Keller couldn’t be sure of that. What he did know for certain was that Spots had died in September, and his passing had evidently impressed itself upon Jenny, because she’d taken note of it on every zoo visit since then.
“We had a wonderful time,” he told Julia on their return. “Saw some old friends and met some new ones, including an Indonesian babirusa. It’s like a wild pig-dog, with these tusks that curve up and back, and if it doesn’t keep them filed down they’ll grow into its skull and kill it.”
“And not a moment too soon, I would think.”
“Jenny thought it was terrific. She kept saying babirusa over and over, which is how I happen to remember its name.”
“And Spots is still dead.”
“I’m afraid so. I don’t know that she’s upset, but she’s never failed to remark on it.”
“Part of figuring out what death is, I guess.”
“I guess. She wants to know if there’s a stamp with a babirusa on it. I’ll have to do some research.”
“There must be,” she said. “There’s a stamp for everything, isn’t there? Oh, before I forget. Dot called.”
“Don’t tell me she’s in town.”
“No, she called from Sedona. She was sorry to miss you, but even sorrier to miss a chance to talk to Jenny. There was something else she said.”
“Oh?”
“She’s been doing Pilates. And she was trying to find something to collect, but everything’s too easy now that there’s eBay. You don’t get the thrill of the chase. But that’s not what I’m supposed to tell you.”
“Though it’s true enough,” he said, “but—”
“I remember. She said she’d been trying to reach your friend Pablo, and wondered if you knew how to get ahold of him. By the time I remembered who Pablo was, the conversation was over.”
“Well,” he said.
He went upstairs and found the Pablo phone in the back of his sock drawer. A while ago, he and Dot had each bought a burner phone, an unregistered prepaid device which they’d sworn to use only to call each other. Along the way she’d taken to calling him Pablo during conversations on that dedicated line, for no reason he could think of, and while that didn’t last, the instrument itself would forever be the Pablo phone.
And, of course, it was every bit as dead as Spots the Alligator. He hooked it up to a charger, and after dinner he called the only number in its memory.
Halfway through the third ring, Dot picked up. “Ah,” she said. “Pablo!”
“Here’s the thing,” she said. “I know you’re not doing work anymore, and I actually think that’s great. You’ve got a wife and a kid, you’ve got the stamp business, and did Julia tell me you and your buddy are back in the business of flipping houses?”
“In a small way,” he said. “The economy put us out of business, and then it turned around and let us back in.”
“But between the stamps and the houses, and all that dough in the Caymans, you’re in decent shape.”
“That’s right.”
“That’s what I thought, and I’m glad to hear it. I only called you because there’s nobody else I can call, but so what? I’ll tell him to find somebody else. I’m okay for dough myself, and just because I always want more doesn’t mean I need more, you know?”
“Well.”
“No reason to waste your time telling you about it. What’s the point? Better for you to tell me something cute that Jenny said.”
“Spots is dead.”
“Well, I’m sorry to hear that, although I don’t know that I’d call it cute. Poignant, maybe. Do I know who he is?”
“The white alligator.”
“The white alligator. At the zoo?”
“Not anymore.”
“No, I guess you can’t keep the dead ones around. Look, I’ll hang up, and you can put the Pablo phone away for another couple of years. I bet you had to charge it just now, didn’t you?”
“It was dead.”
“Same as mine. Dead as a white alligator, I’d have to say. So we can both forget what I called to tell you, and our next conversation can be on an open line.”
Yes, I think that would be best. That was the sentence he heard in his mind. But what he said, to their mutual surprise, was, “Wait a minute.”
It was, as she explained it, pretty straightforward. Until it wasn’t.
“You’ve probably never heard of it,” she said, “but there’s a town in Illinois called Baker’s Bluff.”
“South and west of Chicago,” he said.
“Don’t tell me you’ve been there.”
“I haven’t.”
“There’s a stamp dealer there.”
“Not that I know of.”
“I give up.”
“It was the birthplace of a man named Bronson Pettiford, who did something important in the early days of aviation. He was sometimes referred to as the third Wright Brother.”
“Wilbur, Orville, and Bronson.”
“Something like that,” he allowed. “There was a stamp with his picture on it, standing next to an airplane no one in his right mind would set foot in, and they held the First Day ceremony at Baker’s Bluff.”
“An American stamp.”
“Well, it would have to be, wouldn’t it? The rest of the world never heard of Bronson Pettiford.”
“As opposed to here in the good old U S of A, where the son of a bitch is a household word. But you don’t collect American stamps, do you? I’ll tell you, Keller, if I didn’t know better it would make me doubt your patriotism, but I know you have your reasons.”