Hit Man

by Lawrence Block

  “It’s just an expression, for God’s sake.”

  “Give me the letter again,” he said, and read it through rapidly. “Most of the time,” he said, “the people who hire these things, there’s other things they could do. They may think otherwise, but there’s usually another way out.”

  “So?”

  “So what choice has she got?”

  “Nelson,” Dot said, “you know what I just did? I watched your master talk himself into something.”

  “Muscatine,” he said. “Do planes go there?”

  “Not if they can help it.”

  “What do I do, go there and call her up? ‘Toxic Waste,’ and then I wait for her to pick up?”

  “It’s ‘Toxic Shock’ now,” she said. “I changed the password for security reasons.”

  “Thank God for that,” he said. “You can’t be too careful.”

  Back at his apartment, he called Andria and made arrangements for her to care for Nelson in his absence. Then he found Muscatine on the map. You could probably fly there, or at least to Davenport, but Chicago wasn’t that far. United had hourly non-stops to Chicago, and O’Hare was a nice anonymous place to rent a car.

  He flew out in the morning, had a Hertz car waiting, and was in Muscatine and settled in a chain motel on the edge of the city by dinnertime. He ate right down the road at a Pizza Hut, came back and sat on the edge of his bed. He had used false identification to rent the car at O’Hare, and had registered at the motel under a different name and paid cash in advance for a week’s stay. Even so, he didn’t want to call the client from the motel. He was dealing with an amateur, and there were two principles to observe in dealing with amateurs. The first was to be ultra-professional yourself. The second, alas, was never to deal with an amateur.

  There was a pay phone just next door; he’d noticed it coming back from the Pizza Hut. He spent a quarter and dialed the number, and after two rings the machine answered and a computer-generated voice repeated the last four numbers of the number and invited him to leave his message at the tone.

  “Toxic Shock,” he said.

  Nothing happened. He stayed on the line for fifteen seconds and hung up.

  But was that long enough? Suppose she was washing her hands, or in the kitchen making coffee. He dug out another quarter, tried again. Same story. “Toxic Shock,” he said a second time, and waited for thirty seconds before hanging up.

  “Great system,” he said aloud, and went back to the motel.

  Back at the motel, he put on the television set and watched the last half of a movie about a wife who gets her lover to kill her husband. You didn’t have to have watched the first half to know what was going on, nor did you need to be a genius to know that everything was going to go wrong for them. Amateurs, he thought.

  He went out and tried the number again. “Toxic Shock.” Nothing.

  Hell.

  On the desk in his room, along with carry-out menus from half a dozen nearby fast-food outlets and a handout from the local Board of Realtors on the joys of settling in Muscatine, there was a flyer inviting him to try his luck gambling on a Mississippi riverboat. It looked appealing at first. You pictured an old paddle wheeler chunking along, heading down the river to New Orleans, with women in hoop skirts and men in frock coats and string ties, but he knew it wouldn’t be anything like that. The boat wouldn’t move, for one thing. It would stand at anchor, and boarding it would be like crossing the threshold of a hotel in Atlantic City.

  No thanks.

  Unpacking, he found the morning paper he’d read on the flight to Chicago. He hadn’t finished it, and did so now, saving the crossword puzzle for last. There was a step-quote, a saying of some sort running like a flight of stairs from the upper-left to lower-right corner. He liked those, because you had the sense that solving the crossword led to a greater solution. Sometimes, too, the step-quote itself was a pearl of wisdom of the sort you found in a fortune cookie.

  Often, though, the puzzles with step-quotes in them proved difficult, and this particular puzzle was one of those. There were a couple of areas he had trouble with, and they formed important parts of the step-quote, and he couldn’t work it out.

  There was a 900 number you could call. They printed it with the puzzle every morning, and for seventy-five cents they’d give you any three answers. You’d punch in 3-7-D on your touch-tone phone, and you’d get the answer to 37 down. He figured they used a computer. They couldn’t waste an actual human being’s time on that sort of thing.

  But did people really call in? Obviously they did, or the service wouldn’t exist. Keller found this baffling. He could see doing a crossword puzzle, it gave your mind a light workout and passed the time, but when he’d gone as far as he could he tossed the paper aside and got on with his life.

  Anyway, if you were dying of curiosity, all you had to do was wait a day. They printed a filled-in version of the previous day’s crossword in every paper. Why spend seventy-five cents for three answers when you could wait a few hours and get the whole thing for half a dollar?

  They were immature, he decided. He’d read that the true measure of human maturity was the ability to postpone gratification.

  Keller, ready to go out and try the number again, decided to postpone gratification. He took a hot shower and went to bed.

  In the morning he drove into downtown Muscatine and had breakfast at a diner. The crowd was almost exclusively male and most of the men wore suits. Keller, in a suit himself, read the local paper while he ate his breakfast. There was a crossword puzzle, but he took one look at it and gave it a pass. The longest word in it was six letters: Our northern neighbor. The way Keller figured it, when it came to crossword puzzles it was the Times or nothing.

  There was a pay phone at the diner, but he didn’t want his conversation overheard by the movers and shakers of Greater Muscatine. Even if no one answered, he didn’t want anyone to hear him say “Toxic Shock.” He left the diner and found an outdoor pay phone at a gas station. He placed the call, said his two words, and in no time at all a woman cut in to say, “Hello? Hello?”

  Tinny phone, he thought. Rinky-dink local phone company, what could you expect. But it was better than the computer-generated phone message. At least you knew you were talking to a person.

  “It’s all right,” he said. “I’m here.”

  “I’m sorry I missed your call last night. I was out, I had to—”

  “Let’s not get into that,” he said. “Let’s not spend any more time on the phone than we have to.”

  “I’m sorry. Of course you’re right.”

  “I need to know some things. The name of the person I’m supposed to meet with, first of all.”

  There was a pause. Then, tentatively, she said, “My understanding was that there wasn’t to be a meeting.”

  “The other person,” he said, “that I’m supposed to meet with, so to speak.”

  “Oh. I didn’t . . . I’m sorry. I’m not used to this.” No kidding, he thought.

  “His name is Stephen Lauderheim,” she said.

  “How do I find him? I don’t suppose you know his address.”

  “No, I’m afraid not. I know the license number of his car.”

  He copied it down, along with the information that the car was a two-year-old white Subaru squareback. That was useful, he told her, but he couldn’t cruise around town looking for a white Subaru. Where did he park this car?

  “Across the street from my house,” she said, “more often than I’d like.”

  “I don’t suppose he’s there now.”

  “No, I don’t think so. Let me look. . . . No, he’s not. There was a message from him last night. In between your messages. Nasty, vile.”

  “I wish I had a photo of him,” he said. “That would help. I don’t suppose—”

  No photo, but she could certainly describe him. Tall, slender, light brown hair, late thirties, long face, square jaw, big white horse teeth. Oh, and he had a Kirk Douglas dimple in his
chin. Oh, and she knew where he worked. At least he’d been working there the last time the police had been involved. Would that help?

  Keller rolled his eyes. “It might,” he said.

  “The name of the firm is Loud & Clear Software,” she said. “On Tyler Boulevard just beyond Five Mile Road. He’s a computer programmer or technician, something like that.”

  “That’s how he keeps getting your phone number,” Keller said.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “He doesn’t need a confederate at the phone company. If he knows his way around computers, he can hack his way into the phone company system and get unlisted numbers that way.”

  “It’s possible to do that?”

  “So they tell me.”

  “Well, I’m hopelessly old-fashioned,” she said. “I still do all my writing on a typewriter. But it’s an electric typewriter, at least.” He had the name, the address, the car, and a precise description. Did he need anything else? He couldn’t think of anything.

  “This probably won’t take long,” he said.

  He found Tyler Boulevard, found Five Mile Road, found Loud & Clear Software. The company occupied a squat concrete-block building with its own little parking lot. There were ten or a dozen cars in the lot, many of them Japanese, two of them white. No white Subaru squareback, no plate number to match the one Cressida Wallace had given him.

  If Stephen Lauderheim wasn’t working today, maybe he was stalking. Keller drove back into town and got directions to Fairview Avenue. He found it in a pleasant neighborhood of prewar houses and big shade trees. Driving slowly past number 411, he looked around unsuccessfully for a white Subaru, then circled the block and parked just down the street from Cressida Wallace’s house. It was a sprawling structure, three stories tall, with overgrown shrubbery obscuring the lower half of the first-floor windows. A light burned in a window on the third floor, and Keller decided that was where Cressida was, typing up happy and instructive tales of woodland creatures on her electric typewriter.

  He had lunch and drove back to Loud & Clear. No white Subaru. He hung around for a while, found his way to Fairview Avenue again. No white Subaru, and no light on the third floor. He returned to his motel.

  That night there was a movie he wanted to see on HBO, but the channel wasn’t available on his motel TV. He was irritated, and thought about moving to another motel a few hundred yards down the road, where the signboard promised HBO, as well as waterbeds in selected units. He decided that was ridiculous, and that he was mature enough to postpone gratification in this area, even as he had to postpone the gratification of dispatching Stephen Lauderheim and getting the hell out of Muscatine.

  He leafed through the phone book, looking for Lauderheim. There was no listing, which didn’t surprise him. He tried Cressida Wallace, knowing she wouldn’t be listed. There were several Wallaces, but none on Fairview and none named Cressida.

  There were Kellers, one of them with the initial J, another with the initials JD. Either one could be John.

  He did that sometimes. Looked up his name in the phone books of strange cities, as if he might actually find himself there. Not another person with the same name, that happened often enough, his was not an uncommon name. But find himself, his actual self, living an altogether different life in some other city.

  It was just a thought, really. He wasn’t schizophrenic, he knew it couldn’t happen. He wondered, though, what that psychotherapist would have made of it. He’d had his problems with his therapist, especially toward the end, but give the devil his due; the man had guided him to some useful insights. Looking for himself in Muscatine, Iowa—Dr. Breen would have had a field day with that one.

  He went out to the pay phone, fed in a slew of quarters, and called his apartment in New York. Andria answered.

  “I should be home tomorrow or the next day,” he said, “but it’s hard to tell.”

  “It’s a shame they never let you know exactly how long you’ll be.”

  “Well, it’s the nature of the business.”

  “And it must be very gratifying,” she said. “Flying in, straightening everything out, turning chaos into order.”

  He’d told her initially that he was a corporate expediter, sent in to put things right when the local boys were stymied. Then one night it became clear that she knew what he did, and could live with it as long as he didn’t do it to her. But now you’d think she’d forgotten the whole thing.

  “Well, take all the time you want,” she said. “Nelson and I are having a great old time.”

  “You know what I did?” he said abruptly. “I looked up my name in the local phone book.”

  “Did you find it?”

  “No. But what do you figure it means?”

  “Let me think about that,” she said. “Okay?”

  “Sure,” he said. “Take all the time you want.”

  The next morning Keller had breakfast at the diner, swung past the house on Fairview Avenue, then drove out to the software company. This time the white Subaru was parked in the lot, and the license plate had the right letters and numbers on it. Keller parked where he could keep an eye on it and waited.

  At noon, several men and women left the building and walked to their cars and drove off. None fit Stephen Lauderheim’s description, and none got into the white Subaru.

  At twelve-thirty, two men emerged from the building and walked along together, deep in conversation. Both wore khaki trousers and faded denim shirts and running shoes, but in other respects they looked completely different. One was short and pudgy, with dark hair combed flat across his skull. The other, well, the other just had to be Lauderheim. He fit Cressida Wallace’s description to a T.

  They walked together to Lauderheim’s Subaru. Keller followed them to an Italian restaurant, one of a national chain. Then he drove back to Loud & Clear and parked in his old spot.

  At a quarter to two, the Subaru returned and both men went back into the building. Keller drove off and found a supermarket, where he purchased a one-pound box of granulated sugar and a funnel. At a hardware store on the same small shopping plaza he bought a large screwdriver, a hammer, and a six-foot extension cord. He drove back to Loud & Clear and went to work.

  The Subaru had a hatch over the gas cap. You needed a key to unlock it. He braced the screwdriver against the lock and struck it one sharp blow with the hammer, and the hatch popped. He removed the gas cap, inserted the funnel, poured in the sugar, replaced the cap, closed the hatch and wedged it shut, and went back to his own car and got behind the wheel.

  Employees began to trickle out of Loud & Clear shortly after five. By six o’clock, only three cars remained in the lot. At six-twenty, Lauderheim’s lunch companion came out, got into a brown Buick Century, and drove off. That left two cars, one of them the white Subaru, and they were both still there at seven.

  Keller sat behind the wheel, deferring gratification. His breakfast had been light, two doughnuts and a cup of coffee, and he’d missed lunch. He was going to grab something to eat while he was in the supermarket, but it had slipped his mind. Now he was missing dinner.

  Hunger made him irritable. Two cars in the lot, probably two people inside, say three at the most. They’d already stayed two hours past quitting time, and might stay until morning for all he knew. Maybe Lauderheim was waiting until the office was empty so that he could make an undisturbed phone call to Cressida.

  Suppose he just went in there and did them both? Element of surprise, they’d never know what hit them. Two for the price of one, do it and let’s get the hell out of here. Cops would just figure a disgruntled employee went berserk. That sort of thing happened everywhere these days, not just in post offices.

  Maturity, he told himself. Maturity, deferred gratification. Above all, professionalism.

  By seven-thirty he was ready to rethink his commitment to professionalism. He no longer felt hungry, but was seething with anger, all of it focused on Stephen Lauderheim.

  The son of a bi
tch.

  Why in the hell would he stalk some poor woman who spent her life in an attic writing about kitty cats and bunny rabbits? Kidnapping her dog, for God’s sake, and then torturing it and killing it, and playing her a tape of the animal’s death throes. Killing, Keller thought, was almost too good for the son of a bitch. Ought to stick that funnel in his mouth and pour oven cleaner down his throat.

  Speak of the devil.

  There he was, Stephen Fucking Lauderheim, holding the door open for a nerdy fellow wearing a lab coat and a wispy mustache. Not heading for the same car, please God? No, separate cars, with Lauderheim pausing after unlocking the Subaru to exchange a final pleasantry with the nerd in the lab coat.

  Good he hadn’t counted on waylaying him in the parking lot.

  The nerd drove off first. Keller sat, glaring at the Subaru, until Lauderheim started it up, pulled out of the parking lot, and headed back toward town.

  Keller gave him a two-block lead, then took off after him.

  * * *

  Just the other side of Four Mile Road, Keller pulled up right behind the disabled Subaru. Lauderheim already had the hood up and was frowning at the engine.

  Keller got out of the car and trotted over to him.

  “Heard the sound you were making,” he said. “I think I know what’s wrong.”

  “It’s got to be the engine,” Lauderheim said, “but I don’t understand it. It never did anything like this before.”

  “I can fix it.”

  “Seriously? You mean it?”

  “You got a tire iron?”

  “Yeah, I suppose so,” Lauderheim said, and went around to open the rear of the squareback. He found the tire iron, extended it to Keller, then drew it back. “There’s nothing wrong with the tires,” he said.

  “No kidding,” Keller said. “Give me the tire iron, will you?”