Hit Man

by Lawrence Block

  Why? The Crowder fortune, of course. She had Hobie Yarnell crazy about her, but he wouldn’t leave June for fear of breaking Crowder’s heart, and even if he did he’d go empty-handed. Having June killed wouldn’t work either, because she didn’t have any real money of her own. But June would inherit if the old man died, and later on something could always happen to June.

  Anyway, that’s how he figured it. If he’d wanted to know Edith’s exact reasoning he’d have had to ask her, and that had struck him as a waste of time. More to the point, the last thing he’d wanted was a chance to get to know her. That just screwed everything up, when you got to know these people.

  If you were going to ride a thousand miles to kill a man you’d never met, you were really well advised to be the tight-lipped stranger every step of the way. No point in talking to anybody, not the target, not the client, and not anybody else, either. If you had anything to say, you could whisper it to your horse.

  He got off the fourth plane of the day at Sheridan, picked up his Caprice—the name was seeming more appropriate with every passing hour—and drove back to Martingale. He kept it right around the speed limit, then slowed down along with everyone else five miles outside of Martingale. They were clearing a wreck out of the northbound lane. That shouldn’t have slowed things down in the southbound lane, but of course it did; everybody had to slow down to see what everyone else was slowing down to look at.

  Back in his room, he had his bag packed before he realized that he couldn’t go anywhere. The client was dead, but that didn’t change anything; since he had no way of knowing that she was the client or that she was dead, his mission remained unchanged. He could go home and admit an inability to get the job done, waiting for the news to seep through that there was no longer any job to be done. That would get him off the hook after the fact, but he wouldn’t have covered himself with glory, nor would he get paid. The client had almost certainly paid in advance, and if there’d been a middleman between the client and the man in White Plains he had almost certainly passed the money on, and there was very little likelihood that the man in White Plains would even consider the notion of refunding a fee to a dead client, not that anyone would raise the subject. But neither would the man in White Plains pay Keller for work he’d failed to perform. The man in White Plains would just keep everything.

  Keller thought about it. It looked to him as though his best course lay in playing a waiting game. How long could it take before a sneak thief or a chambermaid walked in on Edith Bodine? How long before news of her death found its way to White Plains?

  The more he thought about it, the longer it seemed likely to take. If there were, as sometimes happened, a whole string of intermediaries involved, the message might very well never get to Garcia.

  Maybe the simplest thing was to kill Crowder and be done with it.

  No, he thought. He’d just made a side trip of, yes, more than a thousand miles—and at his own expense, yet—solely to keep from having to kill this legendary Man He Never Met. Damned if he was going to kill him now, after all that.

  He’d wait a while, anyway. He didn’t want to drive anywhere now, and he couldn’t bear to look at another airplane, let alone get on board.

  He stretched out on the bed, closed his eyes.

  He had a frightful dream. In it he was walking at night out in the middle of the desert, lost, chilled, desperately alone. Then a horse came galloping out of nowhere, and on his back was a magnificent woman with a great mane of hair and eyes that flashed in the moonlight. She extended a hand and Keller leaped up on the horse and rode behind her. She was naked. So was Keller, although he had somehow failed to notice this before.

  They fell in love. Wordless, they told each other everything, knew one another like twin souls. And then, gazing into her eyes, Keller realized who she was. She was Edith Bodine, and she was dead, he’d killed her earlier without knowing she’d turn out to be the girl of his dreams. It was done, it could never be undone, and his heart was broken for eternity.

  Keller woke up shaking. For five minutes he paced the room, struggling to sort out what was a dream and what was real. He hadn’t been sleeping long. The sun was setting, it was still the same endless day.

  God, what a hellish dream.

  He couldn’t get caught up in TV, and he had no luck at all with the book. He put it down, picked up the phone, and dialed June’s number.

  “It’s Dale,” he said. “I was sitting here and—”

  “Oh, Dale,” she cut in, “you’re so thoughtful to call. Isn’t it terrible? Isn’t it the most awful thing?”

  “Uh,” he said.

  “I can’t talk now,” she said. “I can’t even think straight. I’ve never been so upset in my life. Thank you, Dale, for being so thoughtful.”

  She hung up and left him staring at the phone. Unless she was a better actress than he would have guessed, she sounded absolutely overcome. He was surprised that news of Edith Bodine’s death could have reached her so soon, but far more surprised that she could be taking it so hard. Was there more to all this than met the eye? Were Hobie’s wife and mistress actually close friends? Or were they—Jesus—more than just good friends?

  Things were certainly a lot simpler for Randolph Scott.

  * * *

  The same bartender was on duty at Joe’s. “I don’t guess your friend Hobie’ll be coming around tonight,” he offered. “I suppose you heard the news.”

  “Uh,” Keller said. Some Back Street affair, he thought, if the whole town was ready to comfort Hobie before the body was cold.

  “Hell of a thing,” the man went on. “Terrible loss for this town. Martingale won’t be the same without him.”

  “This news,” Keller said carefully. “I think maybe I missed it. What happened, anyway?”

  He called the airlines from his motel room. The next flight out of Casper wasn’t until morning. Of course, if he wanted to drive to Denver—

  He didn’t want to drive to Denver. He booked the first flight out in the morning, using the Whitlock name and the Whitlock credit card.

  No need to stick around, not with Lyman Crowder stretched out somewhere getting pumped full of embalming fluid. Dead in a car crash on I-25 North, the very accident that had slowed Keller down on his way back from Sheridan.

  He wouldn’t be around for the funeral, but should he send flowers? It was quite clear that he shouldn’t. Still, the impulse was there.

  He dialed 1-800-FLOWERS and sent a dozen roses to Mrs. Dale Whitlock in Rowayton, charging them to Whitlock’s American Express account. He asked them to enclose a card reading “Just because I love you—Dale.”

  He felt it was the least he could do.

  Two days later he was on Taunton Place in White Plains, making his report. Accidents were always good, the man told him. Accidents and natural causes, always the best. Oh, sometimes you needed a noisy hit to send a message, but the rest of the time you couldn’t beat an accident.

  “Good you could arrange it,” the man said.

  Would have taken a hell of an arranger, Keller thought. First you’d have had to arrange for Lyman Crowder to be speeding north in his pickup. Then you’d have had to get an unemployed sheepherder named Danny Vasco good and drunk and send him hurtling toward Martingale, racing his own pickup—Jesus, didn’t they drive anything but pickups?—racing it at ninety-plus miles an hour, and proceeding southbound in the northbound lane. Arrange for a few near misses. Arrange for Vasco to brush a school bus and sideswipe a minivan, and then let him ram Crowder head-on.

  Some arrangement.

  If the man in White Plains had any idea that the client was dead as well, or even who the client was, he gave no sign to Keller. On the way out, Dot asked him how Crowder pronounced his name.

  “Rhymes with chowder,” he said.

  “I knew you’d find out,” she said. “Keller, are you all right? You seem different.”

  “Just awed by the workings of Fate,” he said.

  “Well
,” she said, “that’ll do it.”

  On the train back to the city he thought about the workings of Fate. Earlier he’d tried to tell himself that his side trip to Las Vegas had been a waste of time and money and human life. All he’d had to do was wait a day for Danny Vasco to take the game off the boards.

  Never would have happened.

  Without his trip to Vegas, there would have been no wreck on the highway. One event had opened some channel that allowed the other to happen. He couldn’t explain this, couldn’t make sense out of it, but somehow he knew it was true.

  Everything had happened exactly the way it had had to happen. Encountering June in the Meet ’n’ Cheat, running into Hobie at the Burnout Bar. He could no more have avoided those meetings than he could have kept himself from buying the paperback western novel that had set the tone for everything that followed.

  He hoped Mrs. Whitlock liked the flowers.

  3

  Keller's Therapy

  “I had this dream,” Keller said. “Matter of fact I wrote it down, as you suggested.”

  “Good.”

  Before getting on the couch Keller had removed his jacket and hung it on the back of a chair. He moved from the couch to retrieve his notebook from the jacket’s inside breast pocket, then sat on the couch and found the page with the dream on it. He read through his notes rapidly, closed the book, and sat there, uncertain how to proceed.

  “As you prefer,” said Breen. “Sitting up or lying down, whichever is more comfortable.”

  “It doesn’t matter?”

  “Not to me.”

  And which was more comfortable? A seated posture seemed more natural for conversation, while lying down on the couch had the weight of tradition on its side. Keller, who felt driven to give this his best shot, decided to go with tradition. He stretched out, put his feet up.

  He said, “I’m living in a house, except it’s almost like a castle. Endless passageways and dozens of rooms.”

  “Is it your house?”

  “No, I just live here. In fact I’m a kind of servant for the family that owns the house. They’re almost like royalty.”

  “And you are a servant.”

  “Except I have very little to do, and I’m treated like an equal. I play tennis with members of the family. There’s this tennis court in back of the house.”

  “And this is your job? To play tennis with them?”

  “No, that’s an example of how they treat me as an equal. And I eat at the same table with them, instead of eating downstairs with the servants. My job is the mice.”

  “The mice?”

  The house is infested with mice. I’m having dinner with the family, I’ve got a plate piled high with good food, and a waiter in black tie comes in and presents a covered dish. I lift the cover and there’s a note on it, and it says, ‘Mice.’ ”

  “Just the single word?”

  “That’s all. I get up from the table and I follow the servant down a long hallway, and I wind up in an unfinished room in the attic. There are tiny mice all over the room, there must be twenty or thirty of them, and I have to kill them.”

  “How?”

  “By crushing them underfoot. That’s the quickest and most humane way, but it bothers me and I don’t want to do it. But the sooner I finish, the sooner I can get back to my dinner, and I’m very hungry.”

  “So you kill the mice?”

  “Yes,” Keller said. “One almost gets away but I stomp on it just as it’s getting out the door. And then I’m back at the dinner table and everybody’s eating and drinking and laughing, and my plate’s been cleared away. Then there’s a big fuss, and finally they bring my plate back from the kitchen, but it’s not the same food as before. It’s. . . ”

  “Yes?”

  “Mice,” Keller said. “They’re skinned and cooked, but it’s a plateful of mice.”

  “And you eat them?”

  “That’s when I woke up,” Keller said. “And not a moment too soon, I’d have to say.”

  “Ah,” Breen said. He was a tall man, long-limbed and gawky, wearing chinos and a dark green shirt and a brown corduroy jacket. He looked to Keller like someone who had been a nerd in high school, and who now managed to look distinguished, in an eccentric sort of way. He said “Ah” again, and folded his hands, and asked Keller what he thought the dream meant.

  “You’re the doctor,” Keller said.

  “You think it means that I am the doctor?”

  “No, I think you’re the one who can say what it means. Maybe it just means I shouldn’t eat Rocky Road ice cream right before I go to bed.”

  “Tell me what you think the dream might mean.”

  “Maybe I see myself as a cat.”

  “Or as an exterminator?” Keller didn’t say anything.

  “Let us work with this dream on a very superficial level,” Breen said. “You’re employed as a corporate troubleshooter, except that you used another word for it.”

  “They tend to call us expediters,” Keller said, “but troubleshooter is what it amounts to.”

  “Most of the time there is nothing for you to do. You have considerable opportunity for recreation, for living the good life. For tennis, as it were, and for nourishing yourself at the table of the rich and powerful. Then mice are discovered, and it is at once clear that you are a servant with a job to do.”

  “I get it,” Keller said.

  “Go on, then. Explain it to me.”

  “Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it? There’s a problem and I’m called in and I have to drop what I’m doing and go and deal with it. I have to take abrupt arbitrary action, and that can involve firing people and closing out whole departments. I have to do it, but it’s like stepping on mice. And when I’m back at the table and I want my food—I suppose that’s my salary?”

  “Your compensation, yes.”

  “And I get a plate of mice.” He made a face. “In other words, what? My compensation comes from the destruction of the people I have to cut adrift. My sustenance comes at their expense. So it’s a guilt dream?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I think it’s guilt. My profit derives from the misfortunes of others, from the grief I bring to others. That’s it, isn’t it?”

  “On the surface, yes. When we go deeper, perhaps we will begin to discover other connections. With your having chosen this job in the first place, perhaps, and with some aspects of your childhood.” He interlaced his fingers and sat back in his chair. “Everything is of a piece, you know. Nothing exists alone and nothing is accidental. Even your name.”

  “My name?”

  “Peter Stone. Think about it, why don’t you, between now and our next session.”

  “Think about my name?”

  “About your name and how it suits you. And”—a reflexive glance at his wristwatch—“I’m afraid our hour is up.”

  * * *

  Jerrold Breen’s office was on Central Park West at Ninety-fourth Street. Keller walked to Columbus Avenue, rode a bus five blocks, crossed the street, and hailed a taxi. He had the driver go through Central Park, and by the time he got out of the cab at Fiftieth Street he was reasonably certain he hadn’t been followed. He bought coffee in a deli and stood on the sidewalk, keeping an eye open while he drank it. Then he walked to the building where he lived, on First Avenue between Forty-eighth and Forty-ninth. It was a prewar high-rise, with an Art Deco lobby and an attended elevator. “Ah, Mr. Keller,” the attendant said. “A beautiful day, yes?”

  “Beautiful,” Keller agreed.

  Keller had a one-bedroom apartment on the nineteenth floor. He could look out his window and see the UN building, the East River, the borough of Queens. On the first Sunday in November he could watch the runners streaming across the Queensboro Bridge, just a couple of miles past the midpoint of the New York marathon.

  It was a spectacle Keller tried not to miss. He would sit at his window for hours while thousands of them passed through his field of vision, first
the world-class runners, then the middle-of-the-pack plodders, and finally the slowest of the slow, some walking, some hobbling. They started in Staten Island and finished in Central Park, and all he saw was a few hundred yards of their ordeal as they made their way over the bridge into Manhattan. Sooner or later the sight always moved him to tears, although he could not have said why.

  Maybe it was something to talk about with Breen.

  It was a woman who had led him to the therapist’s couch, an aerobics instructor named Donna. Keller had met her at the gym. They’d had a couple of dates, and had been to bed a couple of times, enough to establish their sexual incompatibility. Keller still went to the same gym two or three times a week to raise and lower heavy metal objects, and when he ran into her they were friendly.

  One time, just back from a trip somewhere, he must have rattled on about what a nice town it was. “Keller,” she said, “if there was ever a born New Yorker, you’re it. You know that, don’t you?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “But you’ve always got this fantasy, living the good life in Elephant, Montana. Every place you go, you dream up a whole life to go with it.”

  “Is that bad?”

  “Who’s saying it’s bad? But I bet you could have fun with it in therapy.”

  “You think I need to be in therapy?”

  “I think you’d get a lot out of therapy,” she said. “Look, you come here, right? You climb the Stair Monster, you use the Nautilus.”

  “Mostly free weights.”

  “Whatever. You don’t do this because you’re a physical wreck.”

  “I do it to stay in shape.”

  “And because it makes you feel good.”