Keller in Des Moines

by Lawrence Block

  When he got to the Days Inn he took a slow turn around the parking lot, looking for any sign of police activity, or indeed anyone at all taking a special interest in the place. But it looked the way it always looked, and he parked his car in its usual spot and went to his room.

  Inside, he turned on the television set. The assassination of Governor Longford was all over the dial, unless you wanted to watch QVC or the Food Channel. Keller chose CNN and heard a couple of experts trying to estimate the likelihood of riots in Cleveland. The weather, one of them pointed out, was a significant variable. Heat and humidity added up to riot weather, she said, while a cold snap and rain kept folks indoors.

  That was sort of interesting, but Keller, stuck in Des Moines, couldn’t bring himself to care about the weather in Cleveland. He hung in there while they talked the subject to death, but hit the Mute button in a hurry when they rang in a Nexium commercial.

  At least the remote had a Mute button. You couldn’t Fast Forward, you couldn’t Pause, and you couldn’t Reverse, but the one thing you could do was make the damn thing shut up, and he did.

  Should he pack?

  He wasn’t going to try leaving Des Moines, not yet. Whether all of this was coincidence or something a good deal more sinister, he’d be safer holed up than running around in the open. He hadn’t done anything, not even what he’d come here to do, but that wouldn’t matter to anybody who picked him up with bogus ID and an unregistered handgun just a matter of miles from where Longford had been shot dead.

  By two shots from a handgun—that’s what someone had been saying, just before they got the weather report from Cleveland, and it just now registered. An unknown assailant brandishing a handgun who’d fired twice at point-blank range and escaped—how, for God’s sake?—into the crowd.

  A Glock, he thought. A Glock automatic, the gun he’d been offered and turned down. The gun he’d handled.

  He could remember the way the grip had fit his hand. And how he’d turned the gun over in his hands, deliberating, before handing it back to the man with the hairy ears. He’d be willing to bet that was the gun they’d used, and that it still had his prints on it. That’s why they’d offered him two guns, and the important gun wasn’t the one he’d chosen, it was the one he’d touched and rejected.

  Well, that really iced the cupcake. All they had to do was pick him up—for anything at all, really—and he was finished. They’d match his prints to the prints on the Glock, and what could he possibly say?

  I touched the gun, but I went for the revolver instead, because automatics tend to jam, although this one evidently didn’t. And I didn’t want to shoot a governor with it, just some mope weeding his lawn, and I never did shoot anybody, so what difference does it make?

  Yeah, right.

  If his prints were on file, if he’d ever been arrested or ever held a government job, if he’d ever done any of the innumerable things that move them to ink your fingers and record your prints, he wouldn’t stand a chance. But he’d led a charmed life thus far, so any prints on the Glock would lead them nowhere for the time being. Until they got their hands on him and got his hands on an ink pad, at which point it was pretty much all over.

  Or was he getting ahead of himself here? He didn’t know it was the Glock, didn’t know that they’d recovered the gun. For all he knew the shooter had taken it away with him, in which case it hardly mattered whose prints were on it. He couldn’t be sure that wasn’t how it had happened.

  Except somehow he did know, just as he’d somehow known all along that this was a set-up. And maybe that was why he’d been so ginchy in Albuquerque, all those months ago. There had been something off about Call-Me-Al from the jump. Paying in advance for unspecified services, calling Dot from out of the blue and telling her money was on its way, then calling again to confirm it had arrived and assure her he’d be in touch. And, months later, making contact once more and sending Keller on his way to New Mexico.

  It was, he had to admit, not a bad way to hire a hit man. Nobody, not Dot and not the person who did the work, had any idea who Call-Me-Al might be, or where he lived, or anything else about him. So if things went wrong and Keller wound up in a cell, he couldn’t get himself a deal by giving up his employer. He could give up Dot, but that’s as far back as it would reach, because there was nobody for Dot to give up. Al was out of anybody’s reach.

  Say you were planning an extremely high-profile assassination. You wanted a patsy, a fall guy, to give some latter-day Warren Commission a plausible explanation of what had taken place.

  Keller had never spent a lot of time on conspiracy theories, and was by no means convinced that the official explanations were wrong; it seemed entirely possible to him that Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, had shot down John F. Kennedy, and that James Earl Ray had done the same for Martin Luther King. He wasn’t going to bet the rent money that it happened like that, but he wouldn’t bet the other way, either. Both subjects seemed unlikely assassins, but was either one of them as wildly improbable as Sirhan Sirhan, the killer so witless they had to name him twice? And there was no question that he’d shot Bobbie Kennedy, because they’d caught him in the act.

  But never mind what actually happened. If you were orchestrating something like that, a fall guy was a handy thing to have. And the best sort of fall guy would be someone who did this sort of thing for a living. If you wanted to frame someone for murder, why not pick a murderer? Hire him to kill some nonentity, and time it so he’s in the right place at the right time, and then frame him for the real killing, the important killing. But don’t let him actually do it, because then he might wind up in a position to rat you out. This way, when the cops picked him up, he couldn’t say anything because he wouldn’t know anything, and the closest he could come to giving a good account of himself would be to start yammering about how he’d come here to Des Moines to kill someone else. Some poor schlump with no criminal ties and no one looking to kill him, some guy whose sole offense was overzealous lawn care.

  Wonderful. The cops would love that one. Jesus, if they did pick him up, he’d know better than to try to sell that story. Or, for that matter, any other story he could come up with just now.

  He was sitting in front of the television set, his eyes on the screen, but he was too caught up in his own train of thought for his mind to pay any real attention to what his eyes were seeing. None of it registered, until something about the image on the screen forced its way into his consciousness.

  It was a picture of a man, though why they were showing it was unclear, as the sound was still muted. Keller didn’t recognize the guy, and yet it seemed to him that there was something familiar about him. He was middle-aged, with a full head of dark hair and something furtive about him. Not the face of someone you’d be inclined to trust, and—

  He shot out a hand, groped for the remote. By the time he’d triggered the Mute button it was too late, the picture was gone, and the news itself gone with it. They played a commercial, one Keller especially hated, the one with the moth coming in to assure the sleeping woman of eight hours of restful sleep. Any woman he’d ever known, a moth came in and settled on her face, what she’d do was leap up and start screaming, then pick up a broom and chase the thing all over the house.

  He looked for a button to push to back the thing up, but this was TiVo-less TV, and you had to watch everything in real time. And he’d missed it, but who said CNN was the only game in town? He began switching channels, getting half-second glimpses of everything from a lacrosse match to a Texas Hold-’Em tournament, from a rerun of The Match Game to a hair replacement infomercial, and before he knew it he’d run the table and was back at CNN, staring once again at his own picture on the screen.

  Furtive? Is that how he’d seen himself? No he just looked a little tentative, as if he was trying to work out what he was doing there, with his face on national TV for all the world to see.

  The sound was on now, and somebody was saying something, but he couldn’t take it in;
it was all he could do to look at his own unfortunate face and the caption under it.

  The Face of a Killer, it said.

  T H E • E N D

  * * *

  KELLER IN DES MOINES is the opening section of Hit and Run, the fourth Keller book. Unlike its fellows, it’s not an episodic novel but a complete thriller with an extended story arc. Click here for the complete novel.

  About the Author

  Lawrence Block has been writing award-winning mystery and suspense fiction for half a century. He has written five books about Keller, the Urban Lonely Guy of assassins—Hit Man, Hit List, Hit Parade, Hit and Run, and Hit Me, and a Keller series for cable television is in development. “Keller,” he points out, “is a Guilty Pleasure for a lot of my readers. They like him, even though they don’t think they should.”

  Block’s other series characters include Bernie Rhodenbarr (The Burglar Who Counted the Spoons) and Matthew Scudder, brilliantly embodied by Liam Neeson in the new film, A Walk Among The Tombstones. His non-series novella, Resume Speed, is a bestselling Kindle Single, and will soon appear as a deluxe hardcover from Subterranean Press.

  The author is also well known for his books for writers, including the classic Telling Lies For Fun & Profit and Write For Your Life, and for his writings about the mystery genre and its practitioners, The Crime Of Our Lives. In addition to prose works, he has written episodic television (Tilt!) and the Wong Kar-wai film, My Blueberry Nights. He is a modest and humble fellow, although you would never guess as much from this biographical note.

  lawrenceblock.com

  NEWSLETTER: Lawrence Block sends out an email newsletter from time to time, with updates, announcements, and special offers. It’s free, and an email to lawbloc@gmail.com with NEWSLETTER—KD in the header will get you on the list.

  Now turn the page for a bonus excerpt from Keller’s Homecoming, a captivating Keller novella exclusively eVailable on Amazon:

  E X C E R P T

  Keller’s Homecoming

  * * *

  Keller, his suitcase unpacked, found himself curiously reluctant to leave his hotel room. He turned on the TV, channel-surfed without finding anything that held his attention, threw himself down on the bed, picked himself up, test-drove every chair in the room, and finally told himself to get over it. He wasn’t sure what it was that he had to get over, but he wasn’t going to find it sitting in his room. Or lying down, or pacing the floor.

  One explanation occurred to him in the elevator. Keller, who’d lived all his life in and around New York, had never had occasion to stay at a New York hotel before. Why would he? For years he’d had a wonderfully comfortable apartment on First Avenue in the Forties, and unless he was out of town, or had been invited to spend the night in the bed of some congenial female companion, that was where he slept.

  Nowadays the only female companion in his life, congenial or otherwise, was his wife, Julia, and he lived in her house in New Orleans’ Garden District. His name in New Orleans—and, for that matter, everywhere he went—was Edwards, Nicholas Edwards. He was a partner in a construction business, doing post-Katrina residential rehabilitation, and his partner called him Nick, as did the men they worked with. Julia called him Nicholas, except in intimate moments when she sometimes called him Keller.

  But she didn’t do that so often anymore. Oh, the intimate moments were no less frequent, but she was apt to call him Nicholas then. And, he thought, why not? That was his name. Nicholas Edwards. That’s what it said on his driver’s license, issued to him by the State of Louisiana, and on his passport, issued to him by the United States of America. And that was the name on every credit card and piece of ID in his wallet, so how could you say that wasn’t who he was? And why shouldn’t his wife call him by his rightful name?

  His daughter, Jenny, called him Daddy.

  He realized that he missed them both, Jenny and Julia, and it struck him that this was ridiculous. They’d driven him to the airport that morning, so it had been only a matter of hours since he’d seen them, and he went longer than that without seeing them on any busy work day. Of course there’d been fewer busy work days lately, the economy being what it was, and that in fact had a little to do with this visit to New York, but even so…

  How you do go on, he told himself. And, shaking his head, walked through the lobby and out onto the street.

  His hotel, the Savoyard, stood at the corner of Sixth Avenue and West Fifty-third Street. He took a moment to get his bearings, then headed uptown. There was a Starbucks two blocks from his hotel, and he waited at the counter while a young woman with a snake coiled around her upper arm—well, the inked representation of a snake, not an actual living reptile—made sure the barista understood exactly what she did and didn’t want in her latte. Keller couldn’t imagine caring quite that much about the composition of a cup of coffee, but neither could he imagine getting tattooed, so he let it go. When it was finally his turn, he asked for a small black coffee.

  “That would be Tall,” said the barista, herself sporting a tattoo and a few piercings. She drew the coffee without waiting for his reply, which was just as well, because Keller didn’t have one. The tables were all taken, but there was a high counter where you could stand while your coffee cooled. He did, and when it was cool enough to drink he drank it, and when he was done he left.

  By then he’d come up with another explanation for his disinclination to leave his hotel room. He wasn’t used to being in a hotel in New York, and consequently he wasn’t quite prepared for what they cost. This one, decent enough but hardly palatial, was charging him close to five hundred dollars for no more space than they gave you in a Days Inn.

  Spend that much on a room, you wanted to get your money’s worth. If you never left the room, it would only be costing you $40 an hour. If, on the other hand, you used it solely to sleep and shower—

  At Fifty-sixth Street he crossed to the west side of the avenue, and at Fifty-seventh Street he turned to his left and walked about a third of a block, stopping to look into the window of a shop that sold watches and earrings. Once Keller had heard one woman tell another on QVC that you couldn’t have too many earrings, a statement that he had found every bit as baffling as the snake tattoo.

  Keller wasn’t really interested in looking at earrings, and it wasn’t long before he’d turned to gaze instead across Fifty-seventh Street. Number 119 was directly across the street, and Keller stayed where he was and tried to pay attention to the people entering and leaving the office building. People came and went, and Keller didn’t see anyone who looked familiar to him, but Fifty-seventh was one of the wide crosstown streets, so he wasn’t getting a really good look at the faces of those who were coming and going.

  It wasn’t the hotel room, he realized. The price of it, the novelty of being in a New York hotel. He hadn’t wanted to leave the room because he was afraid to be out in public in New York.

  Where there were people who used to know him as Keller, and who knew too that one fine day in Des Moines, that very Keller had assassinated a popular charismatic Midwestern governor with presidential aspirations.

  Except he didn’t. It was a frame, he was the fall guy, and it cost him his comfortable New York life and the name under which he’d lived it. When all was said and done he didn’t have any regrets, because the life he led in New Orleans was worlds better than what he’d left behind. But that hadn’t been the plan of the man who set him up.

  That plan had called for Keller to be arrested, or better yet killed outright, and it had taken all Keller’s resourcefulness to keep it from turning out that way. The man who’d done the planning was dead now, thanks to Keller, and so was the man who’d helped him, and that was as far as Keller saw any need to carry it. Someone somewhere had pulled the trigger and gunned down the governor, but Keller figured that faceless fellow was probably dead himself, murdered by the man who’d hired him, a loose end carefully tied off. And if not, well, the best of luck to him. He’d just been a man doing a job,
and that was something Keller could relate to.

  And Keller? He had a new name and a new life. So what was he doing back in New York?

  He walked back to the corner of Sixth and Fifty-seventh, waited for the light to change, then crossed the street and walked to the entrance of 119 West Fifty-seventh. This was a building he’d entered a dozen or more times over the years, and always for the same purpose. There had been a firm called Stampazine on the second floor, and every couple of months they held a Saturday auction, and there was always some interesting and affordable material up for grabs. Keller would sit in a wooden chair with a catalog in one hand and a pen in the other, and every now and then he would raise a forefinger, and sometimes he’d wind up the high bidder. At six or six-thirty he’d pick up his lots, pay cash for them, and go home happy.

  Stampazine was gone now. Had they closed before or after he’d left New York? He couldn’t remember.

  He recognized the uniformed lobby attendant. “Peachpit,” he said, and the man nodded in recognition—not of Keller but of Keller’s purpose. “Seven,” he said, and Keller went over and waited for the elevator.

  Peachpit Auction Galleries was a cut or two above Stampazine. Keller had never visited them during his New York years, but after he was settled in New Orleans an ad in Linn’s Stamp News sent him to the Peachpit website. He bid on a couple of lots—unsuccessfully, someone else outbid him—but, having registered, he began to receive their catalogs several times a year. They were magnificently printed, with a color photograph of every lot, and he always found an abundance of choice material.