Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine 02/01/11

by Dell Magazines

  “INS,” he said.

  Her face remained expressionless, but eloquently so.

  “Green card,” he said.

  “No hablo inglés.”

  “Carta verde,” Keller said, straining his command of the language to the limit. “¿Tienes un carta verde?

  ”Una, he thought. Not un, for God’s sake. Una. An INS man would know that, right? Jesus, you couldn’t live in New York without knowing that much, let alone Texas, and—

  Un, una, what difference could it possibly make? Her shoulders slumped, and she managed somehow to become even smaller. Keller felt horrible.

  “I will be back,” he said. “I’ll go away now to have my lunch, and when I come back you can show me your green card. Your carta verde, comprendez-vous?”

  Comprendez-vous? That was French, for God’s sake, yet another language he was unable to speak. But it was clear that she comprendezed just fine.

  “You come back?”

  “In an hour,” he said, and turned away, unable to bear the sight of her expressionless face.

  He drove to the strip mall, parking this time near the Walgreens, and tossed the clipboard into a trash bin alongside the entrance. He wasn’t hungry and he couldn’t think of anything to buy, so he returned to his car and sat behind the wheel. Nothing to read, nothing to do really but let time pass. He fiddled with the radio, but couldn’t figure out how to get it to play without running the engine. There’d be a way to do it, there always was, but every car maker felt compelled to work out its own way of doing things, and when you rented cars you could never figure out how to adjust the seats or play the radio or work the air conditioning or dim the lights, and when you went to signal a left turn you generally wound up switching on the windshield wipers. The steering was always more or less the same, and so were the brakes, and it was a good thing or everybody would crash into everybody else.

  They’d have newspapers in the drugstore. Magazines, maybe even paperback books.

  No, the hell with it.

  He gave her an hour and a half, then returned to the Walmsley house and parked once again in the driveway. He walked up to the door and rang the bell, and wondered if he might have been a shade precipitous in ditching the clipboard, because what if she opened the door with Portia Walmsley on her left and some slick immigration lawyer on her right? Hang on, he’d say. Be right back, soon as I get my clipboard—No one came to the door. He rang the bell again, and listened carefully, and heard no footsteps. The car, the rented Subaru, had now become a problem, and he wished he’d left it at the strip mall and approached on foot. But that was a long way to walk in a neighborhood where everybody drove.

  He couldn’t leave the thing in the driveway. There was probably room for it in the three-car garage, since her estranged husband wouldn’t have left on foot, but Portia Walmsley would almost certainly notice his car when she parked her own beside it, and—

  He backed out of the driveway, drove fifty yards down the street, parked and walked back. Rang the bell, listened for footsteps, knocked, listened again. He tried the doorknob, because you never know, but it was locked.

  No problem.

  Keller had never been a thief, let alone a burglar. In his youth, he’d been one of several young men who’d hung around the Old Man’s place in Yonkers. The Old Man was Joseph Raggone, dear to the hearts of tabloid journalists, who wrote about him as Joey Rags. Keller had never called him that, or anything like it. In direct conversation, if he called the man anything it was Sir. To others, he’d refer to him as Mr. R. In his own mind, though, his boss was the Old Man.

  And Keller liked hanging around. The Old Man would give him errands to run, packages to pick up and deliver, messages to pass along. Eventually he sent Keller along when disciplinary actions were called for, and something he saw led him to devise assignments that, in retrospect, Keller was able to recognize as little tests. Keller, unaware he was being tested, passed with flying colors. What the Old Man managed to establish was that Keller didn’t flinch when called upon to pull the trigger. The Old Man had suspected as much, that was why he’d devised the tests, but it was all news to Keller.

  So Keller went from being an errand boy to taking people out, and at first the people he took out were men who had somehow managed to get on the Old Man’s hit list, and then the Old Man realized what a fine, dependable asset he had, and began renting Keller out to interested parties. Not many people knew Keller’s name, the Old Man saw to that, but an increasing number of people knew he was out there somewhere, at the beck and call of Joey Rags, and that he did good work. So from that point on, that was the only kind of work he was called upon to perform. There were no more packages or messages to deliver, no more errands to run.

  A more conventional apprenticeship would have seen Keller grow into a jack-of-all-criminal-trades, with a working knowledge of various felonious enterprises. Keller, forced to improvise, had picked up what he needed to know. Without ever becoming a disciplined student of the martial arts, he’d read books and rented videos, taken the odd class here and there, and was as proficient as he had to be with the usual run of weapons, and with his bare hands. Similarly, he’d become reasonably good at breaking and entering, and it didn’t take him long to get into the Walmsley house.

  It was the sort of house that would have a burglar alarm installed, and there was a decal to that effect, along with metallic tape on the ground-floor windows. But the alarm had not been engaged when the maid opened the door to him, and he didn’t believe for a moment she’d have taken the time to set it before fleeing a house she’d never be likely to see again. If the Walmsleys had ever taken the trouble to teach her how to use it in the first place.

  No alarm, then. The front door was locked, probably because it locked of its own accord when you pulled it shut. Keller could have forced it but didn’t, nor did he force the door leading to the garage. He went around to the rear of the house, took one of the windows off its track, and let himself in.

  The maid wouldn’t be coming back. The house was a large one, and Keller went through it room by room, and it was easy to tell the maid’s room, because it was the smallest room in the house, tucked in under the back stairs and alongside the kitchen. There was a wooden crucifix hanging from a nail on one wall, and there was a week-old copy of El Diário, and that was pretty much all there was aside from the bed and dresser. She’d thrown everything else in a suitcase and now she was gone, and she wouldn’t be coming back.

  The crucifix, he decided, had been a parting gift from her mother in El Salvador. That was the name of the country, while the capital city was San Salvador, but she probably came from somewhere else. Cutuco, he decided. Puerto Cutuco was the only other city he knew in El Salvador, and he knew it because one of the stamps of the 1935 series pictured the wharf at Cutuco. Another stamp in the same series showed a volcano, and he knew its name, but couldn’t remember it.

  As if it mattered. Her mother in Cutuco had given her the crucifix, he continued, telling her to keep it with her forever and it would always protect her, and she’d dutifully mounted it on the wall, and in her haste she’d forgotten it. Terrified of the faceless Immigration and Naturalization Service (except it wasn’t so faceless now, it had Keller’s face on it) she’d abandoned the one thing she owned that tied her to her home and family. She wouldn’t come back for it, she didn’t dare, but its loss would always bother her, and—

  Jesus, get over it, he told himself. She could let go of the crucifix a lot easier than he could relinquish the fantasy he was spinning, complete with a hometown from a stamp in his collection.

  It bothered him, though. That he’d scared her the way he did. Still, what else was he supposed to do? He couldn’t snap her neck just because she was in the way. She was tiny, she’d have to stand on a box to be five feet tall. It would be like killing a little kid, and that was something Keller had never done. Once or twice someone had offered a contract on a child, and he and Dot had been entirely in accord on the su
bject. You had to draw a line, and that was where you had to draw it.

  But that was a matter of age, not size. The woman—and he found himself wishing he knew her name, now that he’d played such a role in her life—was certainly over twenty-one. Old enough to vote, old enough to drink . . . and old enough to kill? Was he being politically incorrect by giving her a pass on the basis of her height? Was he being . . . well, he wasn’t sure the word existed, but was he being a sizeist? A heightist? Was he altitudinally prejudiced?

  What he was being, he told himself, was severely neurotic, and that was the occasional consequence of breaking into an empty house with nothing to do but wait for someone to appear. He’d done this sort of thing before, but that was in an earlier life. Now he had a wife and a daughter, now he lived in a big old house in New Orleans and had a business repairing and renovating other people’s houses, and the new life suited him, and what was he doing here, anyway?

  He looked at his watch, and every ten minutes or so he looked at it again.

  Keller had read somewhere that all of man’s difficulties stemmed from his inability to sit alone in a room. The line stayed with him, and awhile ago he’d Googled his way to its source. Someone named Pascal had made the observation, Blaise Pascal, and it turned out he’d said a lot of other interesting things as well, but all but the first one had slipped Keller’s mind. He thought of it now as he forced himself to sit alone in the maid’s room, waiting for Portia Walmsley to come home.

  And pictured the woman. When he was living in New York, he’d have taken the train to White Plains, where Dot would have given him the woman’s photograph, which someone would have sent to her by FedEx, in the same package with the first installment of his fee. Instead, he’d booted up his computer, clicked on Google Images, typed in Portia Walmsley, and clicked again, whereupon Google served up a banquet of pictures of the oh-so-social Mrs. Walmsley, sometimes alone, sometimes with others, but all of them showing a big-haired, full-figured blonde with what Keller had once heard called a Pepsodent smile. Or was it an Ipana smile? Keller couldn’t remember, and decided he didn’t care.

  Sitting alone in a room, with only one’s own mind and an abandoned crucifix for company, wasn’t the most fun Keller had ever had in his life. There was nothing in the room to read, in Spanish or in English, and nothing to look at but suffering Jesus, and that was the last place Keller wanted to aim his eyes.

  Which, no matter where he pointed them, he was finding it increasingly difficult to keep open. They kept closing of their own accord. He kicked off his shoes and stretched out on the bed, just for comfort, not because he intended to sleep, and—

  And the next thing he knew he was in an auction room, with one lot after another hammered down before he could get his hand in the air to bid. And a man and a woman were sitting on either side of him, talking furiously in a language he couldn’t understand, and making it impossible for him to focus on the auction. And—

  “Where is that damn girl? For what I pay her you’d think she could do what she’s supposed to. Margarita!”

  “Maybe she’s in her room.”

  “At this hour?”

  His eyes snapped open. A man and a woman, but now they were speaking English, and he could hear them on the stairs. He sprang from the bed, crossed to the door, worked the bolt. No sooner had it slid home than they had reached the door, and the woman was calling the maid’s name—Margarita, evidently—at the top of a brassy voice.

  “Give it up,” the man said. “Ain’t nobody home.”

  A hand took hold of the doorknob, turned, pushed. The bolt held.

  “She’s in there. The lazy bitch is sleeping.”

  “Oh, come on, Portsie.” Portsie? “Couldn’t nobody sleep through the racket you’re making.”

  “Then why’s the door locked?”

  “Maybe she don’t want you rummaging through her underwear.”

  “As if,” Portia said, and rattled the doorknob. “This is something new, locking the door. I don’t think you can lock it, except from inside. You slide a bolt and it goes through a little loop, but how can you do that from outside?”

  “Maybe she’s in there with a boyfriend.”

  “My God, maybe she is. Margarita! God damn you, open the door or I’ll call the INS on you.” There was a pause, and then Keller heard them moving around, and some heavy breathing.

  “Hey,” the woman said. “And what do you think you’re doing, sport?”

  “Rummaging through your underwear, Portsie.”

  “It’s distracting me.”

  “That’s the general idea.”

  “If she’s in there doing it with some pint-sized cholo—”

  “She’s not. She was in there, all by herself, and she locked the door.”

  “So where is she now?”

  “Out.”

  “Out? How’d she get out?”

  “Through the keyhole.”

  “You’re terrible, baby.”

  “C’mon,” he said. “I need a drink, and so do you. And that’s not all we need.”

  And Keller stood there while their footsteps receded.

  Once he’d had time to think about it, Keller realized he’d missed an opportunity. There they were, the target and the bonus, all ready to walk right into the room where he was waiting for them. And what had he done? He’d locked the door, as if he were not a hired assassin but the timid little chambermaid who’d been the room’s rightful, if unlawful, occupant.

  He was half asleep, and unprepared, and that’s why he’d been so quick to lock the door. Alert and prepared, he’d have flung it open and yanked them inside, and in no time at all he’d have been around the block and out of the neighborhood, and they’d be working their way toward room temperature.

  Now, because he hadn’t been clever enough to let them burst in on him, he’d have to do the bursting.

  It wasn’t hard to find them. From the hallway outside Margarita’s room, he could hear them—laughing, grunting, sounding for all the world like a pair of drunken lovers. He made his way to the door of the master bedroom, which they had not troubled to close, and there they were, doing the dirty deed. One glance established as much for Keller, and he quickly averted his eyes.

  The woman was Portia Walmsley, Keller had glimpsed more than enough of her to match her with her pictures. Not that he’d been in much doubt, with her companion calling her Portsie. And he looked vaguely familiar as well, though Keller couldn’t think why. Had he seen him in the auction room? Jesus, was the sonofabitch a stamp collector?

  He could take another look, but he didn’t really want to. Keller had never regarded lovemaking as a spectator sport. When he was in high school a classmate had brought some dirty pictures to class, and Keller had looked at them, and found them erotic enough. But he wasn’t in high school anymore.

  Even without watching them, he could tell they were pretty well wrapped up in each other, and unlikely to offer much resistance if he went in there and did what he was supposed to do. He rehearsed it in his mind, visualized himself moving purposefully into the room, taking the lover out of play with a judo chop to the side of the neck, grabbing the woman and breaking her neck, then doing the same for the immobilized man. It would all be over before they knew it, almost before he knew it.

  Go on, he thought. Don’t just stand there. You know what you’re supposed to do. So why aren’t you doing it?

  Maybe there was a better way.

  If he just went in there and got the job done, he’d have earned his fee—plus a bonus for the boyfriend. But he’d also be leaving the kind of mess that would make headlines, and the cops would be all over their client. It was his responsibility to make sure he had an alibi, and he’d probably provide himself with a good one, but would he have the sense to lawyer up right away and keep his mouth shut? Or would he fall apart when it became clear that he was the sole suspect?

  Not Keller’s worry. Walmsley could hang himself by talking, but he didn’t know enough
to hang anybody else.

  Still, what if Keller left the Dallas cops a case they could close as soon as they opened it? He could see a way to do it, and earn a double bonus in the process.

  It would take time, though. So he went back to Margarita’s room to wait.

  Was it the same crucifix? He could swear it was larger than he remembered.

  He left the door open. He didn’t really want to hear the two of them—though that wasn’t nearly as bad as seeing them. But he wanted to know when they fell silent.

  And, while he waited, he ran an amended scenario through his mind. He liked it, he thought it would work, but there was still one question he couldn’t answer.

  Could he do it?

  For a couple of years now he’d been leading a very different life, and it struck him as possible he’d become a different person in the process. He had a wife, he had a daughter, he had a house, he had a business. He might cross the street against the light, and he and Donny managed to keep their cash receipts a secret from the tax man, but all in all he was a law-abiding individual, a reasonably solid citizen. He’d always had a potential for civic responsibility; he’d served on a jury when called, and volunteered at Ground Zero in the aftermath of 9/11. But all along he’d had this dark side, this other life, and he’d left that part of himself behind when he settled in New Orleans.

  So maybe that was what had led him to throw the bolt and lock himself in the maid’s room. And maybe he wasn’t waiting now for a better opportunity. Maybe he was stalling, and waiting for a chance to pull the plug on the whole operation.

  He mulled it over, running various possibilities through his mind. And then it struck him that he couldn’t hear them anymore, and in fact hadn’t heard them for a while now.

  How long? Could they have put their clothes on and gone out? If so, he decided, then he was going to say the hell with it. He’d climb out the window and drive away, and leave Portia Walmsley to work out for herself what had happened to her maid and her window, one having jumped the track and the other having disappeared altogether. But she’d get to stay alive, at least until her husband hired somebody else, and she’d never know what a close call she’d had.