Lawrence Block: Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 137, No. 2. Whole No. 834, February 2011

According to the Scott catalog, Obock J1 was worth seven thousand dollars. In their catalog, Whistler & Welles had estimated the lot conservatively at $6,500. The actual price, Keller knew, would depend on the bidders, those in the room and those participating by mail or phone, or via the Internet, and the hammer price wouldn’t tell the whole story; to that you’d have to add a fifteen percent bidder’s premium and whatever sales tax the state of Texas saw fit to pile on. Keller, who wanted the stamp more than ever now that he’d had a look at it, figured he might have to bid twelve thousand to get it, and the check he’d write out would be uncomfortably close to fifteen thousand.

Would he go that high?

Well, that’s why they had auctions, and why bidders showed up in person. You sat in your chair, and you’d decided in advance just how high you’d go and when you’d drop out, and then they got to the lot you were waiting for and you discovered how you really felt. Maybe you did exactly what you planned on doing, but maybe not. Maybe you found out your enthusiasm wasn’t as great as you’d thought, and wound up dropping out of the bidding early on. Or maybe you found yourself hanging in far beyond your predetermined limit, spending considerably more than your maximum.

No way to guess how it would be this time. It was Thursday, and tomorrow’s morning and afternoon sessions would both be devoted to U.S. issues, and thus of no interest to Keller. He wouldn’t need to be in the auction room until Saturday morning, and the French Colonial issues, including Obock J1, wouldn’t come up until early Saturday afternoon.

He went downstairs, walked outside. It was cool, but not unpleasantly so. Football weather, you’d call it, if the calendar didn’t insist that it was March. Cool, crisp — a perfect October day.

He walked a couple of blocks to another hotel, where there was a queue of waiting cabs. He went to the first one in line, settled into the backseat, and told the driver to take him to the airport.

He’d been working on his stamps when the phone rang. He was alone in the house, Julia had left to pick up Jenny at day care, and he almost let the machine answer it because calls were almost invariably for Julia. But there was always a chance it was Donny, so he went and picked it up half a ring ahead of the machine, and it turned out to be Dot.

Not that she bothered to identify herself. Without preamble she said, “Remember that cell phone you had?” And she broke the connection before he could respond.

He remembered the phone, an untraceable prepaid one, and even remembered where he’d left it, in his sock drawer. The battery had long since run down, and while it was charging Julia and Jenny came home, so it was a good half-hour before he was back in his den with the phone.

For years he’d lived in New York, a few blocks from the United Nations, and Dot had lived north of the city in White Plains, in a big old house with a wraparound porch. That house was gone now, burned to the ground, and the same wind that had blown him to New Orleans had picked up Dot and deposited her in Sedona, Arizona. Her name was Wilma Corder now, even as his was Nicholas Edwards, and she had a new life of her own. Back in the day, she had arranged the contract killings he had performed, but that was then and this was now.

Even so, he closed the door before he made the call.

“I’ll just plunge right in,” she said. “I’m back in business.”

“And the business is—”

“Holding its own. Not booming, but a long way from flatlining, which seems to be what everybody else’s business is doing.”

“What I meant—”

“I know what you meant. You want to know what business I’m in, but do you have to ask? Same old.”

“Oh.”

“You’re surprised? You’re not the only one. See, there’s this thing I joined, Athena International.”

“It sounds like an insurance company.”

“It does? It’s what they call a service club, like Rotary or Kiwanis. Except it’s exclusively for women.”

“Can’t women join Rotary?”

“Of course, because it would be sexist to keep them out. But men can’t join Athena.”

“That doesn’t seem fair.”

“Keller, if it bothers you, you can put on a dress and a wig and I’ll drag you along to a meeting. If you’re still awake at the end of it, I’ll buy you a pair of high heels.”

“But you enjoy it.”

“The hell I do. I must have been brain-dead when I joined. We do things like pick up trash once a month around Bell Rock, and I approve of that, since I’ve got a view of the damned thing from my bedroom window and it looks better without the beer bottles and gum wrappers. I’m not crazy about walking around in the hot sun hunting for other people’s garbage, but I go once in a while. And we raise money to give some deserving girl a scholarship to college, and if I’m not out there running a table at the bake sale, or, God forbid, baking something, at least I’ll write out a check. But I mostly pass on the monthly meetings. I’ve never been a meeting person. Endless talking, and then the damn song.”

“What song?”

“The Athenian song, and no, I’m not about to sing it for you. But that’s how we close the meeting. We all stand in a circle and cross our arms over our chests and clasp hands and sing this Mickey Mouse song.”

“Minnie Mouse,” he suggested.

“I stand corrected. The thing is, most of the members have careers of one sort or another, and we don’t just pick up garbage. We network, which means we take in each other’s laundry.”

“Huh?”

“Beth’s a travel agent, Alison’s a Realtor, Lindsay does Tupperware parties.”

“So you’ve been buying Tupperware,” he suggested. “And houses.”

“No houses. But when I went to Hawaii for a week I let Beth make the booking,” she said, “and one of our members is a lawyer, and when I need a lawyer she’s the one I go to. And of course I bought the Tupperware. You go to the party, you buy the Tupperware.”

“And drink the Kool-Aid. I’m sorry, go on.”

“Anyway,” she said, “there they all were with their careers, and there I was, with all the money I needed, and it couldn’t help me from feeling time was passing me by.”

“That’s what time does.”

“I know. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that I ought to be doing something. But what? Volunteer at a hospital? Help out at a soup kitchen?”

“Doesn’t sound like you.”

“So I picked up the phone,” she said, “and made a few calls.”

“How’d that go? I mean, officially, aren’t you dead?”

“As a doornail,” she agreed. “Shot in the head and burned up in a fire. You Google Dorothea Harbison and that’s what you’ll find out. But the people who would call me to arrange a booking, they never heard of Dorothea Harbison. A few of them knew me as Dot, but most of them didn’t even have that much. I was a phone number, and a voice on the phone, and a mail drop where they sent payments. And that was as much as anybody needed to know.”

“And how much did you know about them?”

“My customers? Next to nothing. But I did have a couple of phone numbers.”

And one day she drove to Flagstaff and rented a private mailbox at a franchise operation on South Milton Road, a block from the Embassy Suites hotel. On her way home she picked up a prepaid and presumably untraceable phone, and over the next few days she made a couple of calls. “I wondered what happened to you,” the first man said. “I tried your number, but it was disconnected.”

“I got married,” she told him, “and don’t bother congratulating me, because it didn’t work out.”

“That was quick.”