Keller's Fedora (Kindle Single) by Lawrence Block Read Free Book Online Page A

or their Vieux Carré equivalents, packing for a weekend of gourmet excess in Richmond. “We’ll take the train, darling! Oh, I can hardly wait to dig into that organic kale!”
    But what did he know?
    H E TRIED J ULIA again, rang off when he got a busy signal. Then it was time for lunch, and he had his second meal in the dining car, and called her from his table while he finished his coffee. “Just a couple of hours,” he said, and she told him she’d pick him up at the station, but to call her if the train was going to be late. It was on time so far, he said.
    “I did a little shopping in Chicago,” he added. “I bought Jenny a present.”
    “Who’d have guessed? You know what I’ll do? I’ll pick her up from school on my way to the station. That might get me there closer to four than three-thirty.”
    “That’s probably better anyway. I checked my bag, and that means waiting until it makes it to Baggage Claim.”
    “Oh,” she said.
    “Oh?”
    “Your phone is in your bag.”
    “No, darling,” he said patiently. “It’s in my hand. Otherwise we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
    “The other phone.”
    “Uh—”
    “Dot called a couple of hours ago. She said she couldn’t get through to you, and I said reception could be iffy on trains. She said she’d try again. But if your phone’s in your checked luggage—”
    “I could call her,” he said. “On this phone. But if it’s important enough to call her—”
    “Then it’s important enough to do it on the right phone.”
    “I’d say so, yes.”
    “Well, I’ll see you in a few hours.”
    He ended the call, pocketed the phone, and tried to figure out a way that Dot’s call could be nothing to worry about. If the client was happy, if he’d sent the rest of the money, she might call him to tell him so. But, failing to reach him, would she call Julia?
    No, she wouldn’t. So that wasn’t it.
    While anything might have led her to pick up the Pablo phone, even a simple desire to congratulate him further on a job well done, the second call meant trouble. It indicated not merely that she’d been unable to reach him but that she’d needed to reach him, and that wouldn’t have been to offer congratulations, or to pass the time of day. Something had gone wrong.
    And he’d have to wait to find out what it was. Well, that was okay. He was good at waiting. And this time at least he wouldn’t need a wide-mouthed jar.
    “T HE GOOD NEWS ,” Dot said, “is that he thinks you did a hell of a job. In that respect he couldn’t be happier.”
    “What’s the other respect?”
    “I’ll get to that, Pablo. First let’s look on the bright side, okay?”
    The bright side, he thought, was less of a pleasure to look at when you knew the dark side was coming. Still, he focused on it. He was home with his wife and daughter, both of whom seemed happy with what he’d brought them from Chicago. He’d done his work quickly and efficiently, and to the evident satisfaction of his employer. And now he was in his stamp room, talking on a safe phone with his best friend of many years standing. If there was bad news to come, he figured he could handle it.
    “What I had to do,” Dot said, “is make it clear we’d done the job without telling him the name of the guy we’d done it on.”
    “Because we didn’t know it.”
    “And because it’s safer if he doesn’t know it, either. So what I did, I gave him a play-by-play of your investigation.”
    “Oh?”
    “I left out the wide-mouthed jar,” she said, “and the fedora. I told him you parked where you could keep an eye on the house, and at such-and-such a time the garage door opened, and a white van pulled in right next to the subject’s Lexus, and—”
    “The subject?”
    “That would be his wife, Pablo. Remember her?”
    “Vividly. It was the word I was reacting to. ‘The subject.’”
    “I was reporting to a client. I figured it was more businesslike to say ‘the subject’s