Gym Rat & the Murder Club

by Lawrence Block

  I stayed on it longer than I usually do. What I do, I synchronize my steps with my breathing, and I count breaths. That’s not as OCD as it sounds, because I don’t care about the numbers, and when I lose track of the count I just start over. The point is to give my mind something to do while I’m running.

  He was gone by the time I was done, and my shorts and top were soaking. I went downstairs and put in 1-1-1-1 and opened my locker. It was as I left it, except for the addition of a fanny pack. The brand was Everest, and I resisted the urge to open it and see what it held.

  I reset the combination to the four digits I’ve always used. Locked up. Had my shower, dried off, got dressed. Fastened the fanny pack around my waist, let my shirt hang down over it.

  I stopped for a meal on my way home. I used the rest room, and that gave me another opportunity to resist the urge to check the contents of the fanny pack. I was getting so good at resisting that particular urge that once I was back in my room I had to force myself to work the zipper and make like Little Jack Horner.

  Six plain white envelopes, bulging, their flaps fastened. More portraits of Benjamin Franklin, along with a smaller number of General Grant, all used and out of sequence. I counted, and it was all there. $75,000.

  And, in one of the envelopes, a key. A house key, from the look of it, but with no manufacturer’s name on it, which suggested that it was a duplicate made by a streetfront locksmith. Made recently, judging by how bright it was.

  Taped to one side of it was a thin strip of plain paper with an address hand-lettered on it: 454 Witherspoon Place.

  I added the key to my key ring, but not before I’d removed the strip of paper, rolled it into a little ball, and flipped it into the trash.

  Looked again at the stack of bills.

  I won’t say it took my breath away, but it got my attention. Now it’s real, a little voice said, but that was ridiculous. It was no more or less real than it had been before. The only difference was that now I had to figure out what to do with the money. That was August first, a Monday. On Wednesday the tenth he’d be off to Las Vegas.

  My gym’s one of a chain, and a few months back they’d opened a new branch on Twenty-third Street, no more than a block or two farther from my place than the one at Twelfth and Greenwich. I went there on Thursday, and I didn’t even need a guest pass. The girl on the desk scanned the membership fob that lives on my keychain, and it was the same as swiping in at my home gym.

  The configuration on the exercise floors was different, of course, although they had basically the same equipment. I was used to running through my routine in a particular sequence, and I changed things up a little to fit their layout.

  That wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, because you want to switch things around now and then to give your muscles something to think about. I went to Twenty-third Street again on Friday, and did my bench presses on an inclined bench instead of a flat one. I did this because the flat bench stations were a flight of stairs away from where I happened to be, but I liked the way it felt to do the inclines, liked the way it worked the upper part of the pecs.

  Saturday I was back at Greenwich and Twelfth. Sunday too. Monday morning I wasn’t sure where I was going until I’d walked to Seventh Avenue and had to pick a direction. I turned left, which was north, and walked up to Twenty-third Street.

  Back in my room, I unzipped the fanny pack and took another look at the money. I’d gotten rid of the envelopes, but hadn’t been able to think of a better home for the cash than the container it had come in, or a better place for the fanny pack itself than the bottom dresser drawer.

  Not terribly secure. Well, I’d think of something.

  Around noon I rode the subway to Penn Station. The train I took goes all the way to Hackettstown, but they call it the Morristown Line, because there’s another train that starts out on a different route and also winds up in Hackettstown. They call that one the Montclair-Boonton Line.

  There’s a town where both lines merge and head for Hackettstown, but that was three stops past where I’d be getting off. In, duh, Morristown.

  I wasn’t paying any attention, so I can’t swear the train left on time or arrived on time, but I didn’t see a lot of people checking their watches and looking upset, so I guess we were more or less on schedule.

  I checked out the cars in the train station lot and spotted a blue Kia squareback that looked familiar. The house on Witherspoon Place was within a mile of the station, an easy fifteen-minute walk, and if he walked to and from the station every morning he could put in less time on the elliptical trainer, but people are funny that way. My gym has an elevator, mainly for the Salvadoran women who have to move carts full of towels from one floor to another, but a lot of the clients use it, too. They’ll let it lift them up a couple of flights, then hop onto the StairMaster and work up a sweat.

  Funny.

  I walked to his house, remembering the route from eight days ago when I’d taken the same train ride and gotten off at the same station. That was before I’d collected the money, so I hadn’t had a shiny brass key to his front door, but I’d learned his address by looking him up online, and Google Maps had shown me how to get there.

  Well, the house was still there. Good-sized two-story house. Driveway running alongside it on the right, with a detached two-car garage in back. On Sunday the garage door had been raised, and I’d seen the Kia and a big Lexus SUV. Today it was closed.

  I stood and watched the house for a while, and might have seen something if there’d been something to see, but there wasn’t. I walked the length of the driveway. You needed a remote control to raise the garage door, but there was a people-sized door on the side of the garage, and I went and tried it.

  It was locked, and what was the point of locking a door with a window? Break the glass and you’re in.

  Seemed more trouble than it was worth. I did try the key he’d given me, on the off-chance that it would open the garage, but didn’t really expect it to work. The garage was dark inside, but there was enough light so that I could see that the SUV was there and the little squareback wasn’t. That suggested two things: the car at the station was probably his, and she was probably home.

  I put the key back in my pocket, walked around to the front of the house, and rang the doorbell.

  A little while later I was back at the train station. The blue Kia was where I’d last seen it, and I figured there was even less chance he’d left it unlocked than that his house key would fit his garage door, but I checked anyway. No luck.

  Locked cars are easy enough to open, but you need a Slim-Jim, and I didn’t have one. I decided that was probably just as well, as it was a warm day and the Kia was parked in the sun, and who knew how long a wait I’d have? Ten minutes was more time that I really wanted to spend in a hot car, and it might be two or three hours before he showed up.

  As it turned out, it was more like forty-five minutes.

  I spent the time on a bench up on the platform, and I had the bench and most of the platform to myself, as there weren’t all that many people waiting to board the train from Morristown to Hackettstown. The platform would fill up when a train came in and some homebound commuters got off, and then they would abandon me and head for the stairs.

  This happened three times while I was on my bench, once a few minutes after I settled in, a second time twenty minutes later, and again at twenty minutes past six. Each time I scanned the passengers departing the train, and the third time was the charm. There he was, dressed in khakis and a seersucker blazer, and paying more attention to his cell phone than to where he was going.

  I don’t think he’d have spotted me anyway. I stayed where I was and waited until he was a couple of steps past me before getting to my feet. I stayed just behind him, followed him down the stairs and through the station to the parking lot, where he had to look around before he spotted the Kia, as if he’d forgotten where he parked it. He headed for it, and I approached it from a slightly different angle, and got
there just as he was keying the lock.

  I put a hand on his shoulder, and he was shocked that someone was touching him, shocked again when he saw who it was.

  “Easy,” I said. “We’ve got to talk.”

  “What’s the matter? Jesus, you didn’t do it already, did you? You’re supposed to wait until I’m in Vegas.”

  “I didn’t do anything,” I said.

  “Well, that’s a relief. But—”

  I told him to get in the car, and to open the passenger door for me. I walked around the car, got in, and we both fastened our seatbelts.

  I said, “We’ve got to talk, and I don’t want to do it here. I was checking, and no one paid any attention to the two of us, but we don’t want to risk being spotted together. Is there a mall nearby?”

  “A mall?”

  “Like a shopping mall. Some place with parking for a couple of thousand cars.”

  I had a place picked out, but managed to get him to think of it himself, and he drove to it. On the way he wanted to know what the problem was, and I slowed the conversation by turning around to make sure no one was following us.

  Then I said, “Remember that guy? Over in Danville?”

  “I don’t even know where that is.”

  “Danville, a couple of towns over. Where that nut job killed the woman in the garden apartment.”

  “Denville,” he said, coming down hard on the first syllable. “Not Danville. Denville.”

  And he rolled his eyes. I really liked that. Genius couldn’t remember where he parked his car that morning, but I’m the asshole for screwing up the name of some Jersey shithole with two stop signs.

  “My mistake. I keep thinking Danville because of the song.”

  He didn’t ask what song, meaning either he knew or he didn’t care. Then I guess he got past the Denville/Danville snag and wanted to know what had happened. “Shit,” he said. “What did they do, catch the guy?”

  “Is that what you heard?”

  “Huh? I didn’t hear anything, for Christ’s sake. You’re the one who brought him up.”

  “As far as I know,” I said, “he’s still at large.”

  “Well, that’s good. For us, I mean.”

  “You think?”

  “Well, isn’t it? If he’s still on the loose, there’s a good chance they’ll think he’s to blame when Nerissa gets what’s coming to her. Isn’t that what we talked about?”

  “This right here is perfect,” I said, pointing. “And they’ve got one of those twelve-screen movie houses at the far end, and their lot’s pretty close to empty at this hour. Park there, why don’t you? But, you know, not too close to the entrance.”

  Driving there.

  “So what did he do?”

  “Who?”

  “The nut job. Who else have we been talking about?”

  “There’s a good spot,” I said.

  “He did it again,” he said. “That’s got to be it. Another housewife? Still in Denville?”

  He put it in park, cut the ignition.

  I said, “Denville? I thought it was Danville.”

  Sweet.

  A few minutes later I said, “Here’s the thing. You came at me from absolutely out of nowhere. ‘Hey, you, kill my wife.’ Something you sensed, and I’ll never know how you sensed it, but one way or another you knew that A—I could do it and B—I would do it.

  “Now how in the hell could you know something like that, when I didn’t know it myself? And could it possibly be true?

  “I didn’t see how it could. I’d never had any thoughts in that direction. But now you got me thinking, and one day the thought got to me. I started getting excited. Let the fantasy run through my head, and couldn’t believe my own reaction.

  “Next thing I know, I’m checking Craig’s List, looking for someone selling something. It could have been anywhere, but maybe I wanted to have the dress rehearsal close to where the real thing would go down. I don’t remember thinking that, but it’s possible I had it in mind. What do you think?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Well, whatever. This was Thursday, the day after you got me to spot you on the bench press. I made a few calls, and one of them was to a woman who was looking to sell a free-standing air conditioner. Instead of having to mount it in a window or cut a hole in the wall, you just stand it up on the floor and plug it in. Anyway, she had one, and she said it worked fine, but the apartment complex was putting in through-the-wall units for everybody, so she thought she’d put Old Faithful up for sale.

  “She said she lived in Denville, and when I said I’d be coming by train she offered to pick me up. She was so nice about it that I thought, well, I’m not gonna be able to do this, so I’ll just go and look at the unit and tell her it won’t really work for me, and the next time I see you I’ll tell you to shit in your hat, or do your own killing, or whatever.

  “So I got on the train, and realized that I didn’t have to see her in person to tell her I didn’t want her air conditioner. I could have called back and found something to say, or saved the phone call and just failed to show up. But I was on the train, and I knew I wanted to do it.

  “Perfectly nice woman, a little bit Chatty Cathy, but pleasant. Pretty in a bland way, nothing special. She picked me up at the station and drove me a couple of miles to her apartment development, and I kept thinking we’d run into somebody on the way, some witness, or there’d be somebody at her apartment, and that would be the end of that, and I might not buy her air conditioner but she’d still have a pulse when I got back on my train and went home.

  “Nobody in the parking lot, nobody in the halls, nobody in her apartment. And once we’re inside and the door’s shut, there’s no fucking way to keep the rest of it from unfolding. Be easier to stop a train.

  “She demonstrated how the unit worked, and how cold the air was that came out of it, and I said, ‘I’m really sorry about this.’ She was trying to figure out what I meant when I hit her.

  “And then you know, I did what I did.”

  I stopped there, and let myself remember the way it had felt. I’d been two people at once, one of them doing what I did, the other observing. I suppose it was the observer half who made sure I used a condom, made sure I left no prints or obvious trace evidence. Still, I did wind up walking all the way back to the train station. Anyone could have seen me, but evidently no one did.

  “Just dumb luck,” I said now. “I had a long wait for the train, and I kept listening for sirens and waiting for the long arm of the law to take me by the shoulder, but by the time my train came I knew none of that was going to happen. I’d killed a woman for no reason at all, and if they hadn’t gotten me right away they weren’t going to get me at all. Even if I’d left DNA behind, they couldn’t match it to me unless I came up on their radar.

  “Train pulled out of Denville and passed through Mount Tabor and Morris Plains and then Morristown. I knew that’s where you and Nerissa lived, I’d checked you out before I got to Craig’s List. And I damn well knew it was Denville and not Danville. First time I said it wrong it was to avoid sounding too familiar with the place, because I didn’t want you guessing I’d been there, but after that it just got to be fun. Jerking on your chain, you know?”

  No response from him.

  I said, “Anyway, I’d answered part of my question. Could I do something like this? Well, yes, I could. That was pretty well established, in that I’d just done it.

  “And I knew the answer to the second part, too. Would I do it—do it for you, do it to your wife, and do it to earn seventy-five thousand dollars?

  “You know, it took me a little time to be sure of my answer. Because I can’t say I didn’t get any pleasure out of what I did in Denville. I can’t explain it, but there was something exciting about it. Afterward it left me feeling empty, and sorry I’d done it. I don’t know whether or not to call it remorse, but there’s no question I felt a certain amount of regret.

  “Would I want to do it again? I
gather that’s what happens with people who make a habit of this sort of thing. They get something out of it that makes them do it again. And again, and again. I had to live with the whole thing for a while before I could rule it out, but the days passed and I knew I wasn’t going to find some other innocent like the Denville girl, and I wasn’t going after Nerissa Tillman, either.

  “But I kind of wanted the money. I hadn’t thought about large sums of money before, anymore than I’d thought about killing anybody, but the idea got in my head and I decided I wanted it, even if I didn’t know what I wanted it for. I knew I didn’t want to kill your wife, but I thought maybe I should go ahead and do it anyway, just because I wanted the money.

  “Except I’d get caught.

  “I mean, face it, man. No matter how much I made it look like the Denville killing, no matter how they might want to believe both acts were the work of the same man, they just had to look long and hard at you, you know? You’re the husband, you had a reason to want her dead, and they always look first and longest and hardest at the husband, because he almost always either did it or hired it done.

  “And you’d crack like a fucking egg.

  “You would, you know. They’d want to talk to you, and you’d know you ought to lawyer up right away, but how would that look? A man’s wife’s dead, the probable victim of a serial killer, and a couple of sympathetic cops come to talk to him, and the first words out of his mouth are ‘I want a lawyer.’ Is that the way an innocent man would react?

  “So you wouldn’t do that, not right away. You’d start out all earnest and cooperative, and by the time you realized your mistake you’d have told them more than you meant to. If nothing else, they’d come out of that interview room knowing you were their guy, and all they had to do was find out who you’d hired.

  “And, one way or another, you’d tell them. ‘Mr. Tillman, we figure you just wanted him to scare her a little. That was your deal, and it was just bad luck that you picked a homicidal maniac, or maybe she fought back and he lost control, but he’s the one who did the killing and he’s the one we want, and if you cooperate and come up with a name—’ A couple of smart cops who do this sort of thing all the time, and you’re the textbook definition of an amateur, and do you want to tell me you’d have been able to hold out? Go ahead, let’s hear you say it.”