Hit Man

by Lawrence Block

  He weighed the coin in his palm—it didn’t weigh very much—and he gave it a toss, caught it, slapped it down on the back of his hand.

  Tails.

  He reached for the phone.

  “This time it’s iced tea,” Dot said. “Last time I promised you iced tea and gave you lemonade.”

  “It was good lemonade.”

  “Well, this is good iced tea, as far as that goes. Made with real tea.”

  “And real ice, I’ll bet.”

  “You put the tea bags in a jar of cold water,” she said, “and set the jar in the sun, and forget about them for a few hours. Then you put the jar in the fridge.”

  “You don’t boil the water at all?”

  “No, you don’t have to. For years I thought you did but it turns out I was wrong. But I lost track of what I was getting at. Iced tea. Oh, right. This time you called and said, ‘I’m on my way. Get ready to break out the lemonade.’ So you were expecting lemonade this time, and here I’m giving you iced tea. Get it, Keller? Each time you get the opposite of what you expect.”

  “As long as it’s just a question of iced tea or lemonade,” he said, “I think I can ride with it.”

  “Well, you’ve always adjusted quickly to new realities,” she said. “It’s one of your strengths.” She cocked her head and looked up at the ceiling. “Speaking of which. You were upstairs, you talked to him. What do you think?”

  “He seemed all right.”

  “His old self ?”

  “Hardly that. But he listened to what I had to say and told me I’d done well. I think he was covering. I think he was clueless as to where I’d been, and he was covering.”

  “He does that a lot lately.”

  “It’s got a real tea flavor, you know? And you don’t boil the water at all?”

  “Not unless you’re in a hurry. Keller?”

  He looked up from his glass of tea. She was sitting on the porch railing, her legs crossed, one flip-flop dangling from her toe.

  She said, “Why both of them? If you do one, we get the final payment from the other one. This way there’s nobody left to sign a check.”

  “He takes checks?”

  “Just a manner of speaking. Point is, there’s nobody left to pay up. It’s not just a case of doing the second one for nothing. It cost you money to do it.”

  “I know.”

  “So explain it to me, will you?”

  He took his time thinking about it. At length he said, “I didn’t like the process.”

  “The process?”

  “Making a choice. There was no way to choose, and tossing a coin didn’t really help. I was still choosing, because I was choosing to accept the coin’s choice, if you can follow me.”

  “The trail is faint,” she said, “but I’m on it like a bloodhound.”

  “I figured they should both get the same,” he said. “So I tossed twice, and got heads the first time and tails the second time, and I made appointments with both of them.”

  “Appointments.”

  “They were both good at setting up secret meetings. Strang told me how to get onto his property from the rear. There was an electric fence, but there was a place you could get over it.”

  “So he gave the fox the keys to the hen house.”

  “There wasn’t any hen house, but there was a toolshed.”

  “And two men went into it that fateful morning and only one came out,” Dot said. “And then you ran off to meet Moncrieff?”

  “At the Omni downtown. He was having lunch at the restaurant, which according to him is pretty good. There’s no men’s room for the restaurant, you use the one off the hotel lobby. So we could meet there without ever having been in the same public space together.”

  “Clever.”

  “They were clever men, both of them. Anyway, it worked fine, same as with Strang. I used. . . well, you don’t like to hear about that part of it.”

  “Not particularly, no.”

  He was silent for a time, sipping his iced tea, listening to the wind chimes when a breeze blew up. They had been still for a while when he said, “I was angry, Dot.”

  “I wondered about that.”

  “You know, I’m better off without that dog.”

  “Nelson.”

  “He was a good dog, and I liked him a lot, but they’re a pain in the ass. Feed them, walk them.”

  “Sure.”

  “I liked her, too, but I’m a man who lived alone all my life. Living alone is what I’m good at.”

  “It’s what you’re used to.”

  “That’s right. But even so, Dot. I’ll walk along the street looking in windows and my eyes’ll hit on a pair of earrings, and I’ll be halfway in the door to buy them for her before I remember there’s no point.”

  “All the earrings you bought for that girl.”

  “She liked getting them,” he said, “and I liked buying them, so it worked out.” He took a breath. “Anyway, I started getting angry, and I kept getting angry.”

  “At her.”

  “No, she did the right thing. I’ve got no reason to be angry at her.” He pointed upward. “I got angry at him.”

  “For sending you to Cincinnati in the first place.”

  He shook his head. “Not him upstairs. A higher authority, the old man in the sky who flips all the coins.”

  “Oh, Him.”

  “Of course,” he said, “by the time I did it, I wasn’t angry. I was the way I always am. I just do what I’m there to do.”

  “You’re a professional.”

  “I guess so.”

  “And you give value.”

  “Do I ever.”

  “Special summer rates,” she said. “Murder on twofers.”

  Keller listened to the wind chimes, then to the silence. Eventually he would have to go back to his apartment and figure out what to do with the dog’s dish. Eventually he and Dot would have to figure out what to do about the old man. For now, though, he just wanted to stay right where he was, sipping his glass of tea.

  8

  Keller on the Spot

  Keller, drink in hand, agreed with the woman in the pink dress that it was a lovely evening. He threaded his way through a crowd of young marrieds on what he supposed you would call the patio. A waitress passed carrying a tray of drinks in stemmed glasses and he traded in his own for a fresh one. He sipped as he walked along, wondering what he was drinking. Some sort of vodka sour, he decided, and decided as well that he didn’t need to narrow it down any further than that. He figured he’d have this one and one more, but he could have ten more if he wanted, because he wasn’t working tonight. He could relax and cut back and have a good time.

  Well, almost. He couldn’t relax completely, couldn’t cut back altogether. Because, while this might not be work, neither was it entirely recreational. The garden party this evening was a heaven-sent opportunity for reconnaissance, and he would use it to get a close look at his quarry. He had been handed a picture in the old man’s study back in White Plains, and he had brought that picture with him to Dallas, but even the best photo wasn’t the same as a glimpse of the fellow in the flesh, and in his native habitat.

  And a lush habitat it was. Keller hadn’t been inside the house yet, but it was clearly immense, a sprawling multilevel affair of innumerable large rooms. The grounds sprawled as well, covering an acre or two, with enough plants and shrubbery to stock an arboretum. Keller didn’t know anything about flowers, but five minutes in a garden like this one had him thinking he ought to know more about the subject. Maybe they had evening classes at Hunter or NYU, maybe they’d take you on field trips to the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens. Maybe his life would be richer if he knew the names of the flowers, and whether they were annuals or perennials, and whatever else there was to know about them. Their soil requirements, say, and what bug killer to spray on their leaves, or what fertilizer to spread at their roots.

  He walked along a brick path, smiling at this stranger, nodding at that o
ne, and wound up standing alongside the swimming pool. Some twelve or fifteen people sat at poolside tables, talking and drinking, the volume of their conversation rising as they drank. In the enormous pool, a young boy swam back and forth, back and forth.

  Keller felt a curious kinship with the kid. He was standing instead of swimming, but he felt as distant as the kid from everybody else around. There were two parties going on, he decided. There was the hearty social whirl of everybody else, and there was the solitude he felt in the midst of it all, identical to the solitude of the swimming boy.

  Huge pool. The boy was swimming its width, but that dimension was still greater than the length of your typical backyard pool. Keller didn’t know whether this was an Olympic pool, he wasn’t quite sure how big that would have to be, but he figured you could just call it enormous and let it go at that.

  Ages ago he’d heard about some college-boy stunt, filling a swimming pool with Jell-O, and he’d wondered how many little boxes of the gelatin dessert it would have required, and how the college boys could have afforded it. It would cost a fortune, he decided, to fill this pool with Jell-O—but if you could afford the pool in the first place, he supposed the Jell-O would be the least of your worries.

  There were cut flowers on all the tables, and the blooms looked like ones Keller had seen in the garden. It stood to reason. If you grew all these flowers, you wouldn’t have to order from the florist. You could cut your own.

  What good would it do, he wondered, to know the names of all the shrubs and flowers? Wouldn’t it just leave you wanting to dig in the soil and grow your own? And he didn’t want to get into all that, for God’s sake. His apartment was all he needed or wanted, and it was no place for a garden. He hadn’t even tried growing an avocado pit there, and he didn’t intend to. He was the only living thing in the apartment, and that was the way he wanted to keep it. The day that changed was the day he’d call the exterminator.

  So maybe he’d just forget about evening classes at Hunter, and field trips to Brooklyn. If he wanted to get close to nature he could walk in Central Park, and if he didn’t know the names of the flowers he would just hold off on introducing himself to them. And if—Where was the kid?

  The boy, the swimmer. Keller’s companion in solitude. Where the hell did he go?

  The pool was empty, its surface still. Keller saw a ripple toward the far end, saw a brace of bubbles break the surface.

  He didn’t react without thinking. That was how he’d always heard that sort of thing described, but that wasn’t what happened, because the thoughts were there, loud and clear. He’s down there. He’s in trouble. He’s drowning. And, echoing in his head in a voice that might have been Dot’s, sour with exasperation: Keller, for Christ’s sake, do something!

  He set his glass on a table, shucked his coat, kicked off his shoes, dropped his pants and stepped out of them. Ages ago he’d earned a Red Cross lifesaving certificate, and the first thing they taught you was to strip before you hit the water. The six or seven seconds you spent peeling off your clothes would be repaid many times over in quickness and mobility.

  But the strip show did not go unnoticed. Everybody at poolside had a comment, one more hilarious than the next. He barely heard them. In no time at all he was down to his underwear, and then he was out of range of their cleverness, hitting the water’s surface in a flat racing dive, churning the water till he reached the spot where he’d seen the bubbles, then diving, eyes wide, barely noticing the burn of the chlorine.

  Searching for the boy. Groping, searching, then finding him, reaching to grab hold of him. And pushing off against the bottom, lungs bursting, racing to reach the surface.

  People were saying things to Keller, thanking him, congratulating him, but it wasn’t really registering. A man clapped him on the back, a woman handed him a glass of brandy. He heard the word “hero” and realized that people were saying it all over the place, and applying it to him.

  Hell of a note.

  Keller sipped the brandy. It gave him heartburn, which assured him of its quality; good cognac always gave him heartburn. He turned to look at the boy. He was just a little fellow, twelve or thirteen years old, his hair lightened and his skin lightly bronzed by the summer sun. He was sitting up now, Keller saw, and looking none the worse for his near-death experience.

  “Timothy,” a woman said, “this is the man who saved your life. Do you have something to say to him?”

  “Thanks,” Timothy said, predictably.

  “Is that all you have to say, young man?”

  “It’s enough,” Keller said, and smiled. To the boy he said, “There’s something I’ve always wondered. Did your whole life actually flash before your eyes?”

  Timothy shook his head. “I got this cramp,” he said, “and it was like my whole body turned into one big knot, and there wasn’t anything I could do to untie it. And I didn’t even think about drowning. I was just fighting the cramp, ’cause it hurt, and just about the next thing I knew I was up here coughing and puking up water.” He made a face. “I must have swallowed half the pool. All I have to do is think about it and I can taste vomit and chlorine.”

  “Timothy,” the woman said, and rolled her eyes.

  “Something to be said for plain speech,” an older man said. He had a mane of white hair and a pair of prominent white eyebrows, and his eyes were a vivid blue. He was holding a glass of brandy in one hand and a bottle in the other, and he reached with the bottle to fill Keller’s glass to the brim. “ ‘Claret for boys, port for men,’ ” he said, “ ‘but he who would be a hero must drink brandy.’ That’s Samuel Johnson, although I may have gotten a word wrong.”

  The young woman patted his hand. “If you did, Daddy, I’m sure you just improved Mr. Johnson’s wording.”

  “Dr. Johnson,” he said, “and one could hardly do that. Improve the man’s wording, that is. ‘Being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned.’ He said that as well, and I defy anyone to comment more trenchantly on the experience, or to say it better.” He beamed at Keller. “I owe you more than a glass of brandy and a well-turned Johnsonian phrase. This little rascal whose life you’ve saved is my grandson, and the apple—nay, sir, the very nectarine—of my eye. And we’d have all stood around drinking and laughing while he drowned. You observed, and you acted, and God bless you for it.”

  What did you say to that? Keller wondered. It was nothing? Well, shucks? There had to be an apt phrase, and maybe Samuel Johnson could have found it, but he couldn’t. So he said nothing, and just tried not to look po-faced.

  “I don’t even know your name,” the white-haired man went on. “That’s not remarkable in and of itself. I don’t know half the people here, and I’m content to remain in my ignorance. But I ought to know your name, wouldn’t you agree?”

  Keller might have picked a name out of the air, but the one that leaped to mind was Boswell, and he couldn’t say that to a man who quoted Samuel Johnson. So he supplied the name he’d traveled under, the one he’d signed when he checked into the hotel, the one on the driver’s license and credit cards in his wallet.

  “It’s Michael Soderholm,” he said, “and I can’t even tell you the name of the fellow who brought me here. We met over drinks in the hotel bar and he said he was going to a party and it would be perfectly all right if I came along. I felt a little funny about it, but—”

  “Please,” the man said. “You can’t possibly propose to apologize for your presence here. It’s kept my grandson from a watery if chlorinated grave. And I’ve just told you I don’t know half my guests, but that doesn’t make them any the less welcome.” He took a deep drink of his brandy and topped up both glasses. “Michael Soderholm,” he said. “Swedish?”

  “A mixture of everything,” Keller said, improvising. “My great-grandfather Soderholm came over from Sweden, but my other ancestors came from all over Europe, plus I’m something like a sixteenth American Indian.”

  “Oh? Which tribe?”
/>   “Cherokee,” Keller said, thinking of the jazz tune.

  “I’m an eighth Comanche,” the man said. “So I’m afraid we’re not tribal bloodbrothers. The rest’s British Isles, a mix of Scots and Irish and English. Old Texas stock. But you’re not Texan yourself.”

  “No.”

  “Well, it can’t be helped, as the saying goes. Unless you decide to move here, and who’s to say that you won’t? It’s a fine place for a man to live.”

  “Daddy thinks everybody should love Texas the way he does,” the woman said.

  “Everybody should,” her father said. “The only thing wrong with Texans is we’re a long-winded lot. Look at the time it’s taking me to introduce myself! Mr. Soderholm, Mr. Michael Soderholm, my name’s Garrity, Wallace Penrose Garrity, and I’m your grateful host this evening.”

  No kidding, thought Keller.

  The party, lifesaving and all, took place on Saturday night. The next day Keller sat in his hotel room and watched the Cowboys beat the Vikings with a field goal in the last three minutes of double overtime. The game had seesawed back and forth, with interceptions and runbacks, and the announcers kept telling each other what a great game it was.

  Keller supposed they were right. It had all the ingredients, and it wasn’t the players’ fault that he himself was entirely unmoved by their performance. He could watch sports, and often did, but he almost never got caught up in it. He had occasionally wondered if his work might have something to do with it. On one level, when your job involved dealing regularly with life and death, how could you care if some overpaid steroid abuser had a touchdown run called back? And, on another level, you saw unorthodox solutions to a team’s problems on the field. When Emmitt Smith kept crashing through the Minnesota line, Keller found himself wondering why they didn’t deputize someone to shoot the son of a bitch in the back of the neck, right below his star-covered helmet.

  Still, it was better than watching golf, say, which in turn had to be better than playing golf. And he couldn’t get out and work, because there was nothing for him to do. Last night’s reconnaissance mission had been both better and worse than he could have hoped, and what was he supposed to do now, park his rented Ford across the street from the Garrity mansion and clock the comings and goings?