“Thing is,” Dot said, “they paid half in advance. I hate to send money back once I’ve got it in hand. It’s the same money, but it feels different.”

“I know what you mean. Dot, they’re not in a hurry on this, are they?”

“Well, who knows? They didn’t say so, but they also said natural causes and gave you a gun so you could get close to nature. To answer your question, no, I don’t see why you can’t take your time. Been to any stamp dealers, Keller?”

“I just got here.”

“But you checked, right? In the Yellow Pages?”

“It passes the time,” he said. “I don’t think I’ve ever been in Louisville before.”

“Well, make the most of it. Take the elevator up to the top of the Empire State Building, catch a Broadway show. Ride the cable cars, take a boat ride on the Seine. Do all the usual tourist things. Because who knows when you’ll get back there again.”

“I’ll have a look around.”

“Do that,” she said. “But don’t even think about moving there, Keller. The pace, the traffic, the noise, the sheer human energy-it’d drive you nuts.”

It was late afternoon when he spoke to Dot, and twilight by the time he followed the map to Winding Acres Drive, in Norbourne Estates. The street was every bit as suburban as it sounded, with good-sized one- and two-story homes set on spacious landscaped lots. The street had been developed long enough ago for the foundation plantings to have filled in and the trees to have gained some size. If you were going to raise a family, Keller thought, this was probably not a bad place to do it.

Hirschhorn’s house was a two-story center-hall colonial with the front door flanked by a symmetrical planting of what looked to Keller like rhododendron. There was a clump of weeping birch on the left, a driveway on the right leading to a garage with a basketball hoop and backboard centered over the door. It was, he noted, a two-and-a-half-car garage. Which was handy, he thought, if you happened to have two and a half cars.