Lawrence Block - Enough Rope

“Not exactly,” Keller said, and fished out a ticket.

“A hundred bucks to win! Man, when you get a hunch you really back it, don’t you?”

Keller didn’t say anything. He had nineteen other tickets just like it in his pocket, but the little man didn’t have to know about them. If the photo of the two horses crossing the finish line showed Dudley in front, his tickets would be worth $58,000.

If not, well, Alvie Jurado would be worth almost as much.

“I got to hand it to you,” the little man said. “All that dough on the line, and you’re calm as a cucumber.”

Ten days later,Keller sat at his dining room table. He was holding a pair of stainless steel stamp tongs, and they in turn were holding a little piece of paper worth—

Well, it was hard to say just how much it was worth. The stamp was Martinique #2, and Keller had wound up bidding $18,500 for it. The lot had opened at $9000, and there was a bidder in the third row on the right who dropped out around the $12,000 mark, and then there was a phone bidder who hung on like grim death. When the auctioneer pounded the gavel and said, “Sold for eighteen five to JPK,” Keller’s heart was pounding harder than the gavel.

It was still racing eight lots later when the second stamp, Martinique #17, went on the block. It had a lower Scott value than #2, and was estimated lower in the Bulger & Calthorpe sales catalog, and the starting bid was lower, too, at an even $6000.

And then, remarkably, it had wound up sailing all the way to $21,250 before Keller prevailed over another phone bidder. (Or the same one, irritated at having lost #2 and unwilling to miss out on #17.) That was too much, it was three times the Scott value, but what could you do? He wanted the stamp, and he could afford it, and when would he get a chance at another one like it?

With buyer’s commission, the two lots had cost him $43,725.

He admired the stamp through his magnifier. It looked beautiful to him, although he couldn’t say why; aesthetically, it wasn’t discernibly different from other Martinique overprints worth less than twenty dollars. Carefully, he cut a mount to size, slipped the stamp into it, and secured it in his album.

Not for the first time, he thought of the little man at the OTB parlor. Keller hadn’t seen him since that afternoon, and doubted he’d ever cross paths with him again. He remembered the fellow’s excitement, and how impressed he’d been by Keller’s own coolness.

Cool? Naturally he’d been cool. Either way he won. If he didn’t cash the winning tickets on Kissimmee Dudley, he’d do just about as well when he punched Alvie Jurado’s ticket. It was interesting, waiting to see how the photo came out, but he couldn’t say it was all that nerve-wracking.

Not when you compared it to sitting in a hotel suite in Omaha, waiting for hours while lot after lot was auctioned off, until finally the stamps you’d been waiting for came up for bids. And then sitting there with your pencil lifted to indicate you were bidding, sitting there while the price climbed higher and higher, not knowing where it would stop, not knowing if you had enough cash in the belt around your waist. How high would you have to go for the first lot? And would you have enough left for the other one? And what was the matter with that phone bidder? Would the man never quit?

Now that was excitement, he thought, as he cut a second mount for Martinique #17. That was true edge-of-the-chair tension, unlike anything those Jerry Orbach lookalikes in the OTB parlor would ever know.

He felt sorry for them.

What difference did it make, really, how the photo-finish turned out? What did he care who won the race? If Kissimmee Dudley held on to win by a nose or a nose hair, it was up to Keller to work out a tax-free way to cash twenty $100 tickets. If Steward’s Folly made it home first, Alvie Jurado moved to the top of Keller’s list of Things to Make and Do. Whichever chore Keller wound up with, he had to pull it off in a hurry; he had to have his money in hand — or, more accurately, in belt — when his flight took off for Omaha.

And now it was over, and he’d done what he had to, so did it matter what it was he’d done?

Hell, no. He had the stamps.

There was nothingspecial about her last day. She seemed a little jittery, preoccupied with something or with nothing at all. But this was nothing new for Paula.

She was never much of a waitress in the three months she spent at Armstrong’s. She’d forget some orders and mix up others, and when you wanted the check or another round of drinks you could go crazy trying to attract her attention. There were days when she walked through her shift like a ghost through walls, and it was as though she had perfected some arcane technique of astral projection, sending her mind out for a walk while her long lean body went on serving food and drinks and wiping down empty tables.

She did make an effort, though. She damn well tried. She could always manage a smile. Sometimes it was the brave smile of the walking wounded and other times it was a tight-jawed, brittle grin with a couple tabs of amphetamine behind it, but you take what you can to get through the days and any smile is better than none at all. She knew most of Armstrong’s regulars by name and her greeting always made you feel as though you’d come home. When that’s all the home you have, you tend to appreciate that sort of thing.

And if the career wasn’t perfect for her, well, it certainly hadn’t been what she’d had in mind when she came to New York in the first place. You no more set out to be a waitress in a Ninth Avenue gin mill than you intentionally become an ex-cop coasting through the months on bourbon and coffee. We have that sort of greatness thrust upon us. When you’re as young as Paula Wittlauer you hang in there, knowing things are going to get better. When you’re my age you just hope they don’t get too much worse.

She worked the early shift, noon to eight, Tuesday through Saturday. Trina came on at six so there were two girls on the floor during the dinner rush. At eight Paula would go wherever she went and Trina would keep on bringing cups of coffee and glasses of bourbon for another six hours or so.

Paula’s last day was a Thursday in late September. The heat of the summer was starting to break up. There was a cooling rain that morning and the sun never did show its face. I wandered in around four in the afternoon with a copy of the Post and read through it while I had my first drink of the day. At eight o’clock I was talking with a couple of nurses from Roosevelt Hospital who wanted to grouse about a resident surgeon with a Messiah complex. I was making sympathetic noises when Paula swept past our table and told me to have a good evening.

I said, “You too, kid.” Did I look up? Did we smile at each other? Hell, I don’t remember.

“See you tomorrow, Matt.”

“Right,” I said. “God willing.”

But He evidently wasn’t. Around three Justin closed up and I went around the block to my hotel. It didn’t take long for the coffee and bourbon to cancel each other out. I got into bed and slept.

My hotel is on Fifty-seventh Street between Eighth and Ninth. It’s on the uptown side of the block and my window is on the street side looking south. I can see the World Trade Center at the tip of Manhattan from my window.

I can also see Paula’s building. It’s on the other side of Fifty-seventh Street a hundred yards or so to the east, a towering high-rise that, had it been directly across from me, would have blocked my view of the trade center.

She lived on the seventeenth floor. Sometime after four she went out a high window. She swung out past the sidewalk and landed in the street a few feet from the curb, touching down between a couple of parked cars.