The Big Book of Rogues and Villains

by Otto Penzler

  “The agent in place?”

  “That’s you,” she said. “You’re the agent, and Dallas is the place. Even if you get caught red-handed, the confidentiality of the client remains uncompromised. And do you know why?”

  “Because the agent in place knows how to keep mum.”

  “Mum’s the word,” she agreed, “and there’s no question you’re the strong silent type, but even if your lip loosens you can’t sink a ship if you don’t know when it’s sailing.”

  Keller thought that over. “You lost me,” he said.

  “Yeah, it came out a little abstruse, didn’t it? Point is you can’t tell what you don’t know, Keller, which is why the agent doesn’t get to know the client’s name.”

  “Dot,” he said, trying to sound injured. “Dot, how long have you known me?”

  “Ages, Keller. Many lifetimes.”

  “Many lifetimes?”

  “We were in Atlantis together. Look, I know nobody’s going to catch you red-handed, and I know you wouldn’t blab if they did. But I can’t tell what I don’t know.”

  “Oh.”

  “Right. I think the spies call it a double cutout. The client made arrangements with somebody we know, and that person called us. But he didn’t give us the client’s name, and why should he? And, come to think of it, Keller, why do you have to know, anyway?”

  He had his answer ready. “It might not be a single,” he said.

  “Oh?”

  “The target’s always got people around him,” he said, “and the best way to do it might be a sort of group plan, if you follow me.”

  “Two for the price of one.”

  “Or three or four,” he said. “But if one of those innocent bystanders turned out to be the client, it might make things a little awkward.”

  “Well, I can see where we might have trouble collecting the final payment.”

  “If we knew for a fact that the client was fishing for trout in Montana,” he said, “it’s no problem. But if he’s here in Dallas—”

  “It would help to know his name.” She sighed. “Give me an hour or two, huh? Then call me back.”

  —

  If he knew who the client was, the client could have an accident.

  It would have to be an artful accident too. It would have to look good not only to the police but to whoever was aware of the client’s own intentions. The local go-between, the helpful fellow who’d hooked up the client to the old man in White Plains, and thus to Keller, could be expected to cast a cold eye on any suspicious death. So it would have to be a damn good accident, but Keller had managed a few of those in his day. It took a little planning, but it wasn’t brain surgery. You just figured out a method and took your best shot.

  It might take some doing. If, as he rather hoped, the client was some business rival in Houston or Denver or San Diego, he’d have to slip off to that city without anyone noting his absence. Then, having induced a quick attack of accidental death, he’d fly back to Dallas and hang around until someone called him off the case. He’d need different ID for Houston or Denver or San Diego—it wouldn’t do to overexpose Michael Soderholm—and he’d need to mask his actions from all concerned—Garrity, his homicidal rival, and, perhaps most important, Dot and the old man.

  All told, it was a great deal more complicated (if easier to stomach) than the alternative.

  Which was to carry out the assignment professionally and kill Wallace Penrose Garrity the first good chance he got.

  And he really didn’t want to do that. He’d eaten at the man’s table, he’d drunk the man’s brandy, he’d smoked the man’s cigars. He’d been offered not merely a job but a well-paid executive position with a future, and, later that night, light-headed from alcohol and nicotine, he’d had fantasies of taking Wally up on it.

  Hell, why not? He could live out his days as Michael Soderholm, doing whatever unspecified tasks Garrity was hiring him to perform. He probably lacked the requisite experience, but how hard could it be to pick up the skills he needed as he went along? Whatever he had to do, it would be easier than flying from town to town killing people. He could learn on the job. He could pull it off.

  The fantasy had about as much substance as a dream, and, like a dream, it was gone when he awoke the next morning. No one would put him on the payroll without some sort of background check, and the most cursory scan would knock him out of the box. Michael Soderholm had no more substance than the fake ID in his wallet.

  Even if he somehow finessed a background check, even if the old man in White Plains let him walk out of one life and into another, he knew he couldn’t really make it work. He already had a life. Misshapen though it was, it fit him like a glove.

  Other lives made tempting fantasies. Running a print shop in Roseburg, Oregon, living in a cute little house with a mansard roof—it was something to tease yourself with while you went on being the person you had no choice but to be. This latest fantasy was just more of the same.

  He went out for a sandwich and a cup of coffee. He got back in his car and drove around for a while. Then he found a pay phone and called White Plains.

  “Do a single,” Dot said.

  “How’s that?”

  “No added extras, no free dividends. Just do what they signed on for.”

  “Because the client’s here in town,” he said. “Well, I could work around that if I knew his name. I could make sure he was out of it.”

  “Forget it,” Dot said. “The client wants a long and happy life for everybody but the designated vic. Maybe the DV’s close associates are near and dear to the client. That’s just a guess, but all that really matters is that nobody else gets hurt. Capeesh?”

  “ ‘Capeesh?’ ”

  “It’s Italian, it means—”

  “I know what it means. It just sounded odd from your lips, that’s all. But yes, I understand.” He took a breath. “Whole thing may take a little time,” he said.

  “Then here comes the good news,” she said. “Time’s not of the essence. They don’t care how long it takes, just so you get it right.”

  —

  “I understand W. P. offered you a job,” Vanessa said. “I know he hopes you’ll take him up on it.”

  “I think he was just being generous,” Keller told her. “I was in the right place at the right time, and he’d like to do me a favor, but I don’t think he really expects me to come to work for him.”

  “He’d like it if you did,” she said, “or he never would have made the offer. He’d have just given you money, or a car, or something like that. And as far as what he expects, well, W. P. generally expects to get whatever he wants. Because that’s the way things usually work out.”

  And had she been saving up her pennies to get things to work out a little differently? You had to wonder. Was she truly under Garrity’s spell, in awe of his power, as she seemed to be? Or was she only in it for the money, and was there a sharp edge of irony under her worshipful remarks?

  Hard to say. Hard to tell about any of them. Was Hank the loyal son he appeared to be, content to live in the old man’s shadow and take what got tossed his way? Or was he secretly resentful and ambitious?

  What about the son-in-law, Doak? On the surface, he looked to be delighted with the aftermath of his college football career—his work for his father-in-law consisted largely of playing golf with business associates and drinking with them afterward. But did he seethe inside, sure he was fit for greater things?

  How about Hank’s wife, Ellie? She struck Keller as an unlikely Lady Macbeth. Keller could fabricate scenarios in which she or Rhonda Sue had a reason for wanting Wally dead, but they were the sort of thing you dreamed up while watching reruns of Dallas and trying to guess who shot J.R. Maybe one of their marriages was in trouble. Maybe Garrity had put the moves on his daughter-in-law, or maybe a little too much brandy had led him into his daughter’s bedroom now and then. Maybe Doak or Hank was playing footsie with Vanessa. Maybe…

  Pointless to speculat
e, he decided. You could go around and around like that and it didn’t get you anywhere. Even if he managed to dope out which of them was the client, then what? Having saved young Timothy, and thus feeling obligated to spare his doting grandfather, what was he going to do? Kill the boy’s father? Or mother or aunt or uncle?

  Of course he could just go home. He could even explain the situation to the old man. Nobody loved it when you took yourself off a contract for personal reasons, but it wasn’t something they could talk you out of, either. If you made a habit of that sort of thing, well, that was different, but that wasn’t the case with Keller. He was a solid pro. Quirky perhaps, even whimsical, but a pro all the way. You told him what to do and he did it.

  So, if he had a personal reason to bow out, you honored it. You let him come home and sit on the porch and drink iced tea with Dot.

  And you picked up the phone and sent somebody else to Dallas.

  Because either way the job was going to be done. If a hit man had a change of heart, it would be followed in short order by a change of hit man. If Keller didn’t pull the trigger, somebody else would.

  His mistake, Keller thought savagely, was to jump in the goddam pool in the first place. All he’d had to do was look the other way and let the little bastard drown. A few days later he could have taken Garrity out, possibly making it look like suicide, a natural consequence of despondency over the boy’s tragic accident.

  But no, he thought, glaring at himself in the mirror. No, you had to go and get involved. You had to be a hero, for God’s sake. Had to strip down to your skivvies and prove you deserved that junior lifesaving certificate the Red Cross gave you all those years ago.

  He wondered whatever happened to that certificate.

  It was gone, of course, like everything he’d ever owned in his childhood and youth. Gone like his high school diploma, like his Boy Scout merit badge sash, like his stamp collection and his sack of marbles and his stack of baseball cards. He didn’t mind that these things were gone, didn’t waste time wishing he had them any more than he wanted those years back.

  But he wondered what physically became of them. The lifesaving certificate, for instance. Someone might have thrown out his baseball cards, or sold his stamp collection to a dealer. A certificate, though, wasn’t something you threw out, nor was it something anyone else would want.

  Maybe it was buried in a landfill, or in a stack of paper ephemera in the back of some thrift shop. Maybe some pack rat had rescued it, and maybe it was now part of an extensive collection of junior lifesaving certificates, housed in an album and cherished as living history, the pride and joy of a collector ten times as quirky and whimsical as Keller could ever dream of being.

  He wondered how he felt about that. His certificate, his small achievement, living on in some eccentric’s collection. On the one hand, it was a kind of immortality, wasn’t it? On the other hand, well, whose certificate was it, anyway? He’d been the one to earn it, breaking the instructor’s choke hold, spinning him and grabbing him in a cross-chest carry, towing the big lug to the side of the pool. It was his accomplishment and it had his name on it, so didn’t it belong on his own wall or nowhere?

  All in all, he couldn’t say he felt strongly either way. The certificate, when all was said and done, was only a piece of paper. What was important was the skill itself, and what was truly remarkable was that he’d retained it.

  Because of it, Timothy Butler was alive and well. Which was all well and good for the boy, and a great big headache for Keller.

  —

  Later, sitting with a cup of coffee, Keller thought some more about Wallace Penrose Garrity, a man who increasingly seemed to have not an enemy in the world.

  Suppose Keller had let the kid drown. Suppose he just plain hadn’t noticed the boy’s disappearance beneath the water, just as everyone else had failed to notice it. Garrity would have been despondent. It was his party, his pool, his failure to provide supervision. He’d probably have blamed himself for the boy’s death.

  When Keller took him out, it would have been the kindest thing he could have done for him.

  He caught the waiter’s eye and signaled for more coffee. He’d just given himself something to think about.

  —

  “Mike,” Garrity said, coming toward him with a hand outstretched. “Sorry to keep you waiting. Had a phone call from a fellow with a hankering to buy a little five-acre lot of mine on the south edge of town. Thing is, I don’t want to sell it to him.”

  “I see.”

  “But there’s ten acres on the other side of town I’d be perfectly happy to sell to him, but he’ll only want it if he thinks of it himself. So that left me on the phone longer than I would have liked. Now what would you say to a glass of brandy?”

  “Maybe a small one.”

  Garrity led the way to the den, poured drinks for both of them. “You should have come earlier,” he said. “In time for dinner. I hope you know you don’t need an invitation. There’ll always be a place for you at our table.”

  “Well,” Keller said.

  “I know you can’t talk about it,” Garrity said, “but I hope your project here in town is shaping up nicely.”

  “Slow but sure,” Keller said.

  “Some things can’t be hurried,” Garrity allowed, and sipped brandy, and winced. If Keller hadn’t been looking for it, he might have missed the shadow that crossed his host’s face.

  Gently he said, “Is the pain bad, Wally?”

  “How’s that, Mike?”

  Keller put his glass on the table. “I spoke to Dr. Jacklin,” he said. “I know what you’re going through.”

  “That son of a bitch,” Garrity said, “was supposed to keep his mouth shut.”

  “Well, he thought it was all right to talk to me,” Keller said. “He thought I was Dr. Edward Fishman from the Mayo Clinic.”

  “Calling for a consultation.”

  “Something like that.”

  “I did go to Mayo,” Garrity said, “but they didn’t need to call Harold Jacklin to double-check their results. They just confirmed his diagnosis and told me not to buy any long-playing records.” He looked to one side. “They said they couldn’t say for sure how much time I had left, but that the pain would be manageable for a while. And then it wouldn’t.”

  “I see.”

  “And I’d have all my faculties for a while,” he said. “And then I wouldn’t.”

  Keller didn’t say anything.

  “Well, hell,” Garrity said. “A man wants to take the bull by the horns, doesn’t he? I decided I’d go out for a walk with a shotgun and have a little hunting accident. Or I’d be cleaning a handgun here at my desk and have it go off. But it turned out I just couldn’t tolerate the idea of killing myself. Don’t know why, can’t explain it, but that seems to be the way I’m made.”

  He picked up his glass and looked at the brandy. “Funny how we hang on to life,” he said. “Something else Sam Johnson said, said there wasn’t a week of his life he’d voluntarily live through again. I’ve had more good times than bad, Mike, and even the bad times haven’t been that godawful, but I think I know what he was getting at. I wouldn’t want to repeat any of it, but that doesn’t mean there’s a minute of it I’d have been willing to miss. I don’t want to miss whatever’s coming next, either, and I don’t guess Dr. Johnson did either. That’s what keeps us going, isn’t it? Wanting to find out what’s around the next bend in the river.”

  “I guess so.”

  “I thought that would make the end easier to face,” he said. “Not knowing when it was coming, or how or where. And I recalled that years ago a fellow told me to let him know if I ever needed to have somebody killed. ‘You just let me know,’ he said, and I laughed, and that was the last said on the subject. A month or so ago I looked up his number and called him, and he gave me another number to call.”

  “And you put out a contract.”

  “Is that the expression? Then that’s what I did.”
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  “Suicide by proxy,” Keller said.

  “And I guess you’re holding my proxy,” Garrity said, and drank some brandy. “You know, the thought flashed across my mind that first night, talking with you after you pulled my grandson out of the pool. I got this little glimmer, but I told myself I was being ridiculous. A hired killer doesn’t turn up and save somebody’s life.”

  “It’s out of character,” Keller agreed.

  “Besides, what would you be doing at the party in the first place? Wouldn’t you stay out of sight and wait until you could get me alone?”

  “If I’d been thinking straight,” Keller said. “I told myself it wouldn’t hurt to have a look around. And this joker from the hotel bar assured me I had nothing to worry about. ‘Half the town’ll be at Wally’s tonight,’ he said.”

  “Half the town was. You wouldn’t have tried anything that night, would you?”

  “God, no.”

  “I remember thinking, I hope he’s not here. I hope it’s not tonight. Because I was enjoying the party and I didn’t want to miss anything. But you were there, and a good thing, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Saved the boy from drowning. According to the Chinese, you save somebody’s life, you’re responsible for him for the rest of your life. Because you’ve interfered with the natural order of things. That make sense to you?”

  “Not really.”

  “Or me either. You can’t beat them for whipping up a meal or laundering a shirt, but they’ve got some queer ideas on other subjects. Of course they’d probably say the same for some of my notions.”

  “Probably.”

  Garrity looked at his glass. “You called my doctor,” he said. “Must have been to confirm a suspicion you already had. What tipped you off? Is it starting to show in my face, or the way I move around?”

  Keller shook his head. “I couldn’t find anybody else with a motive,” he said, “or a grudge against you. You were the only one left. And then I remembered seeing you wince once or twice, and try to hide it. I barely noticed it at the time, but then I started to think about it.”