Murder at the Foul Line Read online

  If they came into the dining room, he’d have to do something about it. If they took a different tack, he’d have to slip out of the door as soon as the opportunity presented itself. And hide in the garage, waiting for them to emerge from the house and drive away, so that he could drive away, too.

  “I think the den,” one voice said. “House like this, guy living alone, he’s gotta have a den, don’t you think?”

  “Or a home office,” the other voice offered.

  “A den, a home office, what the hell’s the difference?”

  “One’s deductible.”

  “But it’s the same room, isn’t it? No matter what you call it?”

  “I suppose, but for tax purposes—”

  “Jesus,” the first voice said. It was, Keller noted, vaguely familiar, but maybe that was just because the speaker had a Hoosier accent. “I’m not planning to audit his fucking tax returns,” the man said. “I just want to plant an envelope in his desk.”

  Out the door, Keller told himself. Let them plant whatever they wanted in whatever they decided to call the room with the desk in it. He’d be gone, and they’d never know he’d been there in the first place.

  But when he left the dining room, something led him not to the door but away from it. He tagged along after the two men and caught a glimpse of them as he rounded a corner into the living room. He saw them from the back, and only for a moment, but that was time enough to note that they were both of average height and medium build and that one was bald as an egg. The other might or might not have hair; you couldn’t tell at a glance, because he was wearing a cap.

  A green cap with gold piping, and when had Keller seen a cap like that? Oh, right. Same place he’d heard that voice. It was a John Deere cap, and the man wearing it had met him at the airport and given him tickets to that goddamn basketball game. Depressed the hell out of him, ruined his first evening in Indianapolis, and thanks a lot for that, you son of a bitch.

  Keller, oddly irritated, padded silently after the two of them and lurked around a corner while they stationed themselves at Meredith Grondahl’s desk. “Definitely a home office,” the bald man said. “You got your filing cabinets, you got your desk and your computer, you got your Canon desktop copier, you got your printer and your fax machine—”

  “You also got a big-screen TV and a La-Z-Boy recliner, which shouts den to me,” the man in the Deere cap said. “Look at this, will you? The drawer’s locked.”

  “This one ain’t. Neither’s this one. You got seven drawers, for chrissake, who cares if one of ’em’s locked?”

  “This is incriminating evidence, right? Dangerous stuff?”

  “So?”

  “You got a desk with a locked drawer, don’t you think that’s the drawer you’re gonna keep the shit in?”

  “The cops in this town,” the bald man said, “they find a locked drawer, they might just decide it’s too much trouble to open it.”

  “Point.”

  Keller, out of sight in the adjoining room, heard a drawer open and close.

  “There,” the Deere cap said. “Right where they’ll find it.”

  “And if Grondahl finds it first?”

  “I figure that’s in the next day or two, because he’s not gonna wait that long.”

  “The shooter.”

  “A real piece of work.”

  “You told me.”

  “I tell you how he walks up to a car in the airport lot and drives off with it? Has a master key on his ring, pops the lock like it was made for it. ‘I’ll just borrow it,’ he tells me.”

  “Casual son of a bitch.”

  “But how long is he gonna drive around in a stolen vehicle? I’m surprised he hasn’t made his move already.”

  “Maybe he has. Maybe we go to the bedroom, we find Grondahl sleeping with the fishes.”

  “That’d be in the river, wouldn’t it? You don’t find fishes sleeping in beds.”

  Oysters, Keller thought. In oyster beds. He retreated a few steps, because there was no longer any reason to stick around. These two worked for the client, and they were just planting evidence to support the same end as Grondahl’s removal. They could have let him plant the stuff himself, all part of the service, but they hadn’t thought of that, or hadn’t trusted him, so—

  The bald guy said, “It’s not really finished until he’s dead, you know.”

  “Grondahl.”

  “Well, that, obviously. No, I mean the shooter. He’s killed, and he’s the one took out Grondahl, and he’s tied to Indy Fi’s management. Then you got them good.”

  Jesus, Keller thought. And he’d almost walked away from this. They were moving, the two of them, and he moved, as well, so that he could wind up behind them when they headed for the door.

  “All part of the plan,” Deere Cap said.

  “But if he just goes and steals another car and flies back to wherever he came from—”

  “Portland, I think somebody said.”

  “Which Portland?”

  “Who cares? He ain’t making it back. What I did, I stuck a bug on the underside of his back bumper while he was showing me how slick his key worked. He went to that basketball game, incidentally. Guy loves basketball.”

  “Who won the game?”

  “You’d have to ask him. That Global Positioning shit is wonderful. He’s at the Rodeway Inn near the I-69 exit. That’s our next stop. What we’ll do, I got a pair of tickets for tomorrow night’s game, and we’ll leave ’em at the motel desk for him. What I figure—”

  It might have been interesting to learn how the basketball tickets were part of the man’s plan, but they were almost at the door at this point, and that was as far as Keller could let them get. Following them, he’d paused long enough to snatch a brass candlestick off a tabletop, and he closed the distance between him and them and swung the candlestick in a sweeping arc that ended at a patch of gold braid on the green John Deere cap. It caught the man in midstride and midsentence, and he never finished either. He dropped in his tracks, and the bald man was just beginning to take it in, just beginning to react, when Keller backhanded him with the candlestick, striking him right across his endless forehead. The scalp split and blood spurted, and the man let out a cry and clapped a hand to the spot, and Keller swung the candlestick a third time, like a woodsman with an ax, and brought it down authoritatively on the back of the bald man’s neck.

  Jack be nimble, he thought.

  It took Keller a moment to catch his breath, but only a moment. He stood there still holding on to the candlestick and looked down at the two men lying a couple of feet apart on the patterned area rug. They both looked dead. He checked, and the bald man was every bit as dead as he looked, but the guy in the cap still had a pulse.

  Keller, waiting for him to regain consciousness, did what he could to clean up. He washed and wiped the candlestick and put it back where he’d found it. He wasn’t going to be able to do anything about the blood on the rug, and couldn’t even make an attempt while the two of them were lying on it.

  He stationed himself alongside them and waited. Eventually the Deere cap guy came to, and Keller asked him a couple of questions. The man didn’t want to answer them, but eventually he did, and then there was no need to keep him alive anymore.

  The hardest part, really, was getting the two bodies out of the house and into their car, which turned out to be the same Hyundai squareback that had picked him up at the airport. It was parked in the driveway, and the keys were in the Deere cap guy’s pocket.

  He could see how it was all going to work out.

  “Like we don’t have enough to contend with,” Dot said. “You do everything right and then you get killed by the client. This business isn’t the bed of roses people think it is.”

  “Is that what people think?”

  “Who knows what people think, Keller? I know what I think. I think you better come home.”

  “Not just yet.”

  “Oh?”

  “One
of the fellows gave me a name.”

  “Probably his very last words.”

  “Just about.”

  “And you want to get together with this fellow?”

  “I probably won’t be able to,” he said. “My guess is he’ll be overcome by fear or remorse.”

  “And he’ll take his own life?”

  “It wouldn’t surprise me.”

  “And it wouldn’t start me crying, I have to tell you that. All right, sure, why not? We can’t let people get away with that crap. Do what you have to do and then come home. We got half in front, and I don’t suppose there’s any way to collect the back half, so—”

  “Don’t be too sure of that,” Keller said. “I’ve been thinking, and why don’t you see how this sounds to you?”

  When Meredith Grondahl pulled into his driveway around five-thirty, Keller was parked halfway down the block at the curb. He got out of the car and stood where he could watch the Grondahl driveway, and after five minutes Grondahl emerged from the house. He’d changed from a suit and tie to sneakers and sweats, and he was dribbling a basketball. He took a shot, missed, took the ball as it came off the backboard, and drove for a layup.

  Keller headed up the driveway. Grondahl turned, saw him, and tossed him the ball. Keller shot, missed.

  They played for a few minutes, just taking turns trying shots, most of which failed to make it through the hoop. Then Keller sank a fade-away jump shot, surprising both of them, and Grondahl said, “Nice.”

  “Luck,” Keller said. “Listen, we should talk.”

  “Huh?”

  “You had a couple of visitors earlier today. They got into an argument, and they bled all over your rug.”

  “My rug.”

  “That area rug with the geometric pattern, right when you come into the house.”

  “That’s what was different,” Grondahl said. “The rug wasn’t there. I knew there was something, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.”

  “Or your foot.”

  “You said there was blood on it?”

  “Their blood, and you don’t want that. Anyway, you get a lot of blood on a rug and it’s never the same. So the rug’s not there anymore.”

  “And the two men?”

  “They’re not there anymore, either.”

  Grondahl had been holding the basketball, and now he turned and flipped it at the basket. It hit the rim and bounced away, and neither man made any move toward it.

  Grondahl said, “These men. They came into my house?”

  “Right through the door over there. They had a key—not the one you keep under the fake rock, either.”

  “And then, inside my house, they got into an argument and… killed each other?”

  “That’s close enough,” Keller said.

  Grondahl thought about it. “I think I get the picture,” he said.

  “You probably get as much of the picture as you need to get.”

  “That’s what it sounds like. Why did they come here in the first place?”

  “They were going to leave an envelope.”

  “An envelope.”

  “In a desk drawer.”

  “And the envelope contained…”

  “A motive for a murder.”

  “My murder?”

  Keller nodded.

  “They were going to kill me?”

  “Their employer,” Keller said, “had already hired someone else for that job.”

  “Who?”

  “Some stranger,” Keller said. “Some faceless assassin flown in from out of town.”

  Grondahl looked thoughtfully at him, the way one might look at a putative faceless assassin. “But he’s not going to do it,” he said. “At least I don’t think he is.”

  “He’s not.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he happened to learn that once his job was done, they were planning to kill him.”

  “And pin everything on the Indy Fi management,” Grondahl said. “I was killed to keep me from giving testimony I never had any thought of giving in the first place. Jesus, it might have worked. I can imagine what must have been in the envelope. Is it still around? The envelope. Or did it disappear along with the two men?”

  “The men will turn up eventually,” Keller said. “The envelope is gone forever.”

  Grondahl nodded, retrieved the basketball, bounced it a few times. Keller could almost see the wheels turning in the man’s head. He was bright, Keller was pleased to note. You didn’t have to spell things out for him, you gave him the first paragraph and he got the rest of the page on his own.

  “I owe you,” Grondahl said.

  Keller shrugged.

  “I mean it. You saved my life.”

  “I was saving my own at the time,” Keller pointed out.

  “When the two of them, uh, had their accident, I’ll concede that was in your own self-interest. But you could have just walked away. And you certainly didn’t have to show up here and fill me in. Which leads to a question.”

  “Why am I here?”

  “If you don’t mind my asking.”

  “Well, actually,” Keller said, “I have a couple of questions of my own.”

  “I think I get it,” Dot said. “This is a new thing for me, Keller. I wrote it down, and I’m going to read it back to you, to make sure I’ve got it all straight.”

  She did, and he told her she had it right.

  “That’s a miracle,” she said, “because it was a little like taking dictation in a foreign language. I’ll take care of it tomorrow. Can I do it all in a day?”

  “Probably.”

  “Then I will. And you’ll be…”

  “Biding my time in Indianapolis. I switched motels, by the way.”

  “Good.”

  “And found the bug they put on my bumper, and switched it to the bumper of another Ford the same color as mine.”

  “That should muddy the waters nicely.”

  “I thought so. So I’ll do what I have to do, and then I’ll be a couple of days driving home.”

  “Not to worry,” she said. “I’ll leave the porch light on for you.”

  It was a full week later when Keller drove his rented Toyota through the Lincoln Tunnel and found his way to the National garage, where he turned it in. He went home, unpacked his bag, and spent two full hours working on his stamp collection before he picked up the phone and called White Plains.

  “Come right on up,” Dot said, “so I can turn the light off. It’s attracting moths.”

  In the kitchen of the house on Taunton Place, Dot poured him a big glass of iced tea and told him they’d done very well indeed. “I was wondering at first,” she said, “because I bought a big chunk of Indy Fi, and the first thing it did was go down a couple of points. But then it turned around and went back up again, and the last I checked it’s up better than ten points from when I bought it. I bought options, too, for increased leverage. I don’t understand how they work exactly, but I was able to buy them, and this morning I sold them, and do you want to know exactly how much we made on them?”

  “It doesn’t have to be exact.”

  She told him, down to the last decimal point, and it was a satisfying number.

  “We’re about that much ahead on the actual stock we bought,” she said, “but I haven’t sold that yet, because I kind of like owning it, especially the way it’s going up. Maybe we can sell half and let the rest ride, something like that, but I figured I’d wait and see what you want to do.”

  “We’ll work it out.”

  “My thought exactly.” She sat forward, rubbed her hands together. “What really kick-started things,” she said, “was when Clocker killed himself. His hedge fund had been shorting Indy Fi’s stock all along, and he was behind the lawsuit they were going through, and when he was out of the picture, and in a way that put the cloud right over his own head, well, the price of Indy Fi’s stock could go back where it belonged. And the price of his hedge fund…”

  “San
k?”

  “Like a stone,” she said. “And we sold it short and covered our shorts very cheaply and made a killing. It’s nice to make a killing without having to drive anywhere. How did you know how to do all this?”

  “I had advice,” he said. “From a fellow who couldn’t do any of this himself because it would be insider trading. But you and I aren’t insiders, so there’s no problem.”

  “Well, I’ve got no problem with it myself, Keller. That’s for sure. You know, this isn’t the first time you’ve wound up killing a client of ours.”

  “I know.”

  “This one brought it on himself, no question. But usually it costs us money, and this time we came out way ahead. You’re going to be able to buy a veritable shitload of stamps.”

  “I was thinking about that.”

  “And we’re a giant stride closer to being able to retire, when the time comes.”

  “I was thinking about that, too.”

  “And you bonded with what’s-his-name.”

  “Meredith Grondahl.”

  “What do his friends call him, did you happen to find out?”

  “It never came up. I’m not sure he’s got any friends.”

  “Oh.”

  “I was thinking I ought to send him something, Dot. I had an idea of how to make money in the market, but he spelled the whole thing out for me. I didn’t know a thing about options, and I never would have thought of shorting the hedge fund.”

  “How big a share do you want to send him?”

  “Not a share. He’s pretty straight-arrow, and even if he weren’t, the last thing he wants is cash he can’t explain. No, I was thinking more of a present. A token, really, but something he’d like to have and probably wouldn’t ever buy for himself.”

  “Like?”

  “Season tickets to the Pacers home games. He loves basketball, and a pair of courtside season tickets should really do it for the guy.”

  “What’s it cost?” Before he could answer, she waived the question away. “Not enough to matter, not the way we just made out. That’s a great idea, Keller. And who knows? Next time you’re in Indianapolis, maybe the two of you can take in a game.”