“You have a job for me.”
“Well, of course,” she said. “Why else would I be calling? Just to tell you I got laid by a foxy old Jewish guy?”
He dialed the number, and when the woman answered he said, “Mrs. Soderling? This is Nicholas Edwards in New Orleans. We spoke last week.”
“Yes, Mr. Edwards.”
“I hope you still have the stamps.”
“Why, of course I do. And I hope you’re still interested. I believe I was to expect you sometime the middle of next month.”
“I was wondering if we could move it up,” he said. “I’m going to be making a trip to your part of the country early next week, and I hoped to come see you as early as this Friday, if that’s convenient.”
He listened for a few minutes, made notes, exchanged pleasantries. He found Julia in the kitchen, stirring something that smelled wonderful. “Friday’s fine,” he told her. “Her husband’s collection is still intact, and she’s happy I’m still interested.”
“And she’s in Denver?”
“Cheyenne. Well, outside of it. She gave me directions, and anyway I’m sure the rental car’ll have GPS.”
“So you’ll fly to Denver and drive up to Cheyenne.”
He shook his head. “I’ll fly to Cheyenne,” he said, “although I’ll probably have to change planes in Denver. I’ll drive from Cheyenne to Denver, and then I’ll drive back to Cheyenne, and I’ll fly home from there.”
“Even though you’ll once again have to change planes in Denver.”
“Right.”
“Because if anybody asks, you flew out to Cheyenne to buy a stamp collection and flew straight home afterward. Denver? You were only in Denver to change planes.”
“That’s the idea.”
“Is the collection worth the trip?”
“I won’t know until I see it,” he said, “but I was going to take the chance anyway.”
“Before you heard from Dot.”
He nodded. “The husband collected for years,” he said. “He subscribed to a couple of publications, and he was a life member of the American Philatelic Society, and he was sitting on the sofa reading the latest issue of Linn’s when he had a heart attack and died.”
“I suppose that’s not a bad way to go.”
“She watched it happen. That part couldn’t have been much fun. Anyway, by the time the body was in the ground she started getting letters. ‘So sorry at your hour of grief, but we’ll make sure you get the best price for your husband’s stamps.’”
“Vultures,” she said.
“When the first letter came she was pleased, because she figured she’d deal with these people and be done with it. But when all the other letters flooded in she began worrying that she’d make a mistake and deal with the wrong person. They were all in such a rush to send a buyer to her home that she got a little suspicious.”
“So she picked someone she hadn’t heard from at all.”
“Me,” he agreed. “Remember Mrs. Ricks?”
“Was that the one near Audubon Park?”
“That’s her.”
“This woman in Cheyenne is a friend of Mrs. Ricks?”
“No, never met her.”
“But she’s from New Orleans?”
“Never even visited.”
“Then—”
“You know that kids’ game, Telephone? Where a message passes all around the room, and gets garbled along the way?”
“I played it as a child,” she said. “But as I remember, it never worked out the way it was supposed to. The message didn’t get garbled. It just made its way around the room.”
“Well,” he said, “the same thing happened with Mrs. Ricks’s message, which was that there was a young man in New Orleans who bought stamps, and you could trust him all the way.”
“I remember now,” Julia said. “You bought her stamps, and then they turned out to be worth more than you thought. And you handed her an extra check out of the blue.”
“Well, it just seemed like the right thing to do,” he said. “It never occurred to me she’d run around telling everybody.”
“I know they’re very valuable,” Edith Ricks had said.
She perched on the edge of a ladder-back chair and fixed her clear blue eyes on Keller. On the coffee table between them were three stacks of albums designed to hold sheets of mint postage stamps.
There was coffee as well, in two bone china cups, and shortbread cookies on a matching plate. The coffee was strong, and flavored with chicory, and he was fairly sure she’d baked the cookies herself.
“When my husband was a young boy,” she said, “his father realized that there was a foolproof way to invest. You didn’t have to pay a commission to a broker, and your money was safe, because it was guaranteed by the government.”
Keller had seen this coming. “He bought stamps at the post office,” he said.
“Exactly! He bought full sheets, and put them in these folders with this special paper to keep them in perfect condition—”
Glassine interleaving, Keller thought.
“—and he tucked them away for safekeeping. And for quite a few years he continued his regular visits to the post office. Then he got out of the habit, but now and then he’d show me some of the stamps. They go all the way back to 1948, when his father first got started.”
That figured, Keller thought. It was in the years right after the Second World War that the whole country discovered the can’t-lose investment potential of mint U.S. postage stamps.
“And now he’s gone,” she said.
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s been almost five years since he passed,” she said. “And, you know, I’ve thought about the stamps. If we’d had children, I wouldn’t even consider selling them now. I’d pass them on.”
“That would be ideal,” Keller said.
“But I lost one baby, and then I could never have another. I have a niece and nephews, but we’re not close. And I don’t really need the money, but I’m not doing anything with the stamps, and who knows what would become of them if anything happened to me?”
A clock chimed. They were in the parlor of a substantial three-story house on Hurst Street, just east of Audubon Park. Keller could have had a look at one of the albums, but felt he ought to wait for an invitation. Besides, he was in no hurry. He knew what he would find, and what the ensuing conversation would be like.
“I know there are people who deal in postage stamps,” she said, “and I did look in the Yellow Pages once, but that’s as far as I went. Because it’s very difficult to know whom to trust.”
“Your husband never did any business with stamp dealers?”
“Oh, no. He and his father dealt only with the post office. So I really didn’t know how to avoid being cheated, and then I was talking to a friend, and she mentioned that someone had told her that the young man who married the Roussard girl had an interest in buying old stamp collections, and…”
She’d gone to school with Julia’s mother, who had herself died many years ago, but that was enough of a connection to suggest that he was the sort of person she could admit to her house, and entertain with coffee and cookies. He’d be well-mannered and soft-spoken, and wouldn’t try to cheat her out of her inheritance.
Nor would he. But he was going to have to break her heart.
Thirty-Three
The stamp business was Julia’s idea.
He’d come home from a day on a construction crew, his muscles sore from ten hours of installing Sheetrock, his head throbbing from ten hours of salsa music pouring out of one crew member’s boom box. He’d been paid in cash at the day’s end, and he put three twenties and a five on the kitchen table and stood there for a moment staring at his earnings.
“Let me draw you a bath,” Julia said. “You must be exhausted.”
The bath helped. He returned to the kitchen, where the four bills were still on the table, along with a welcome cup of coffee. “I must be out of shape,” he
told Julia. “Used to be Donny and I’d work dawn to dusk and I’d feel fine at the end of it. Tired after a long day, but not like I’d just had a beating.”
“You’re not used to it.”
“No,” he said, and thought for a moment. “And it’s different. We had a business, we were working to accomplish something. Now all I’m working for is six fifty an hour.”
“Which you don’t really need in the first place.”
“Donny got the guy to take me on. I didn’t really know how to turn it down. Donny’s doing me a favor, I can’t throw it back in his face.”
“There ought to be a way,” she said. “You don’t want to keep on doing this. Or do you?”
“I suppose my body would get used to it before too long. But what’s the point? We don’t need the money.”
“No.”
“And even if my body gets used to it, I’m not sure my head will. They’re mostly Hispanic, which is fine, except that the opportunity for conversation is limited. But the music they like, and the volume they play it at—”
“I can imagine.”
“What am I going to tell Donny? ‘Thanks all the same, but I’ve got a ton of money in an offshore account.’”
“No.”
“‘And now and then I get a phone call and…’ Well, obviously I can’t tell him that part, either.”
They talked about it, and the following afternoon Julia followed Jenny into the den while he was working with his stamps. She stood there silent while he was cutting a mount. When he looked up she said, “I was thinking.”
“Oh?”
“You need a business.”
“I do?”
“Something,” she said. “So that there’s something that you do, so it’ll make sense to Donny that you don’t need to swing a hammer.”
“That’d be nice,” he allowed. “And it’s not just Donny. There must be a lot of people who wonder just what it is I do.”
“Not so much in this town. New Orleans is full of people who don’t seem to do much of anything. But it wouldn’t hurt if you had some visible source of income.”
“I’ve had that thought myself,” he said. “But there’s nothing I know all that much about.”
“You know a lot about stamps, don’t you?”
“So I could go into the business?” He thought about it, frowned. “The dealers I know,” he said, “work all the time. And they’re constantly making little sales and filling orders and doing all this detail work. I don’t think I’d be good at it. I enjoy buying stamps, but if you’re going to make a business out of it, the part you have to enjoy is selling them.”
“If the buying part’s what you like, couldn’t you make a business out of that?”
He extended a hand, indicating first the album on the desk in front of him, then the double row of albums in the bookcase. “I’m already doing that part,” he said, “and it keeps me busy, but it’s hard to call it a business.”
“Did you ever meet my friend Celia Cutrone? She was a year behind me at Ursuline. Skinny little creature then, but she filled out. Yes, you did meet her, she was at Donny and Claudia’s cookout.”
“If you say so.”
“She brought her big old dog, and the two of you were talking about dogs.”
He remembered now, an owlish woman with a wonderfully well-behaved Great Pyrenees, and he’d found himself remembering Nelson, the Australian cattle dog he’d had for a while, until the dog walker walked off with him.
“We didn’t talk about stamps,” he said. “Did we?”
“Probably not. She’s not a stamp collector.”
“Oh.”
“She’s in the antiques business, but she doesn’t have a shop or list things on eBay. She’s what they call a picker.”
He’d heard the term. A picker went around and scooped up items at garage sales and junk shops and wholesaled them to retailers.
“I could do that,” he said. “I guess the way to get started is run standing ads in all the neighborhood papers. The ones they give away.”
“Shoppers, they call them. And you wouldn’t want to forget Craigslist.”
“Craigslist is free, isn’t it? Running ads in it, I mean. And ads in the shoppers can’t cost the earth.”
“And then there’d be word of mouth,” she said. “‘You know those old stamps Henry had all those years? Well, the nicest young man came over and paid me decent money for them.’”
“‘The one who married the Roussard girl, and he’s surprisingly polite for a Yankee.’”
“Word of mouth,” she said, “New Orleans–style. You can run all the ads you want, but once you get them talking about you, you’re in business.”
He thought about it. Low start-up costs, nothing like opening a store. Even so…
“I don’t know,” he said.
“Whether you’d enjoy it?”
“Oh, I’d like it well enough. What I don’t know is if there’s any way to do it and come out ahead. I wouldn’t want to cheat anybody, and I wouldn’t get big prices from the dealers I sold to, and I could see myself putting in a lot of hours and barely breaking even.”
“Hours doing what?”
“Well, driving around and looking at people’s stamps,” he said. “And then looking at them some more afterward, and figuring out just what I bought and what it’s worth and who’s the best buyer for it.”
“And you might spend hours doing these things and make chump change for your troubles.”
“Chump change,” he said.
“Isn’t that the expression?”
“It sounded funny,” he said, “coming out of your mouth. But yes, that’s the expression, and it’s probably what I could expect to earn.”
“So?”
He looked up at her, and got it.
“I don’t have to make money,” he said. “Do I?”
“No. We’ve got plenty of money. And every once in a while you get a call from Dot, and we get more money.”
“All I need,” he said, “is something that looks like a business. I need a sideline, but it doesn’t have to be a profitable one. It could even lose money and that would be all right. In fact, we could declare a net profit whether we actually earned one or not. Pay a few dollars in taxes and keep everybody happy.”
“You’ve got that quick Yankee mind,” she said. “I do admire that in a man.”
Thirty-Four
Keller, in the parlor of the house on Hurst Street, spent as much time as he could leafing through the stack of mint sheet albums. The contents were what he’d anticipated, panes of commemorative stamps ranging from 1948 to sometime in the early 1960s, when James Houghton Ricks had stopped paying regular visits to the post office.
That was the collector’s name, Keller had discovered, even as he’d learned that his hostess’s name was Edith Vass Ricks, and that her husband was actually James Houghton Ricks, Jr., and was called Houghty to distinguish him from his father, although there was nothing remotely haughty about Houghty.
Mrs. Ricks spoke softly and expressively, and Keller found her words soothing without having to pay very much attention to them. All these stamps, he thought. All commemoratives, all three-centers for years, until the first-class rate went up to four cents.
“The condition’s good,” he said.
“They were placed in those books,” she said, “and never touched.”
That was no guarantee, Keller knew, not in the New Orleans climate. Mold and mildew could find their way into a sealed trunk, and even between the glassine interleaving of a mint sheet album.
“It must have seemed like such a good idea at the time,” he said gently. He kept his eyes on the panes of stamps. “But there was something people didn’t realize.”
“Oh?”
“You can’t sell stamps back to the post office,” he said. “They’re not like money. All you can do with them is mail letters.”
He glanced at her, and she did not look happy, but neither did she appear t
o be taken entirely by surprise. He explained, not for the first time, how it worked. A stamp, while indeed issued by the government, was not currency. It represented the government’s obligation to provide a service, and in that respect it never expired. The stamp you bought in 1948 was still valid as postage sixty-some years later.
“Of course there’s inflation,” he said. “Postal rates go up.”
“Every year, it seems like.”
It wasn’t quite that often, but Keller agreed that it did seem that way. He pointed to a sheet of red stamps showing a young man’s face with a flag on either side, one with only a scattering of stars, the other with considerably more.
“Francis Scott Key,” he said. “The flag on the left flew over Fort McHenry during the War of 1812, and when it survived the bombardment, he’s the one who wrote a song about it.”
“‘The Star-Spangled Banner,’” she said.
“It only had fifteen stars,” he said, “because we only had fifteen states at the time. And this other flag has forty-eight, because Alaska and Hawaii weren’t admitted to the union until 1959. I suppose that’s another sort of inflation. But when this three-cent stamp came out it would carry a letter, and now it would take fifteen of them to do that job.”
“That many?”
Well, fourteen, Keller thought, plus a two-cent stamp to make up the deficit. But her question didn’t seem to require an answer.
“You’d cover both sides of the envelope,” she said. “And all those stamps would add weight, and you’d wind up needing another stamp, wouldn’t you?”
“You might.”
She’d been to the post office, she told Keller, just to establish a baseline value for the stamps, and the postal clerk had told her essentially the same thing. But he’d been brusque with her, and she’d thought he might be shading the truth in order to keep the line moving. She’d taken it as an article of faith that, if all else failed, the post office would buy the stamps back from you.
But if that wasn’t true, and she could see now that it wasn’t, and if the stamps were too common for collectors to be interested in them, then what was she going to do with them?