Hit Man

by Lawrence Block

  He didn’t, though. He stabbed her instead, using the carving knife from the family barbecue set and sticking it straight into her heart. That at least was the prosecution’s contention, and the evidence was pretty convincing, but the essential twelve persons were not unanimously convinced. The first trial ended in a hung jury, and on retrial the second jury voted to acquit.

  So Jim Paul Shileen had a few drinks, loaded a sixgun, and went looking for his son-in-law. Found him, called him a son of a bitch, and emptied the gun at him, hitting him once in the shoulder and once in the hip, hitting a female companion of Wickwire’s in the left buttock, and missing altogether with the three remaining bullets.

  Shileen turned himself in, only to be charged with assault and attempted murder, acquitted of all charges, and given a stiff warning by the judge. “In other words,” Dot had said, “ ‘You didn’t do it. Now don’t do it again.’ So he’s not going to do it again, Keller, and that’s where you come in.”

  Wickwire, fully recovered from his wounds, was living in the same Garden District mansion he’d shared in turn with Pam and Rachel Shileen. He had married again, taking as his third bride not the young woman Shileen had wounded but a sweet young thing who’d been a juror, coincidentally enough, at his second trial. She’d visited him in the hospital after the shooting, and one thing led to another.

  “The shooting evidently got his attention,” Dot had said, “so he’s got himself a couple of live-in bodyguards now, and you’d think they were his AmEx cards.”

  “Because he never leaves home without them.”

  “Apparently not. The client thought an explosive device might do the trick, and for all he cares the new wife and the bodyguards can come to the party, too. I figured you might not care for that.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Too high tech, too noisy, and too much heat. Of course you’ll do it your own way, Keller. You’ve got two weeks. The client wants to be out of the country when it happens, and that’s how long he’ll be gone. I figure if you can do it at all you can do it in two weeks.”

  Generally the case, he said. And what did the old man upstairs think about it?

  “Unless he’s telepathic,” Dot said, “he’s got no opinion. I took the call myself and headed the play on my own.”

  “I guess he was having a bad day.”

  “Actually,” she said, “it was one of his better days, but I shortstopped the phone call anyway, and I figured, why give him a chance to screw this one up? You think I did the wrong thing?”

  “Not at all,” he said. “I’ve got no problem with that. My only problem is Wickwire.”

  “And you’ve got two weeks to solve him. Or until he murders wife number three, whichever comes first.”

  Keller studied the map, studied the photo. Wickwire’s address looked to be within walking distance, and he felt capable of finding his way. And the weather was fine, and it would do him good to get out and stretch his legs.

  He walked to Wickwire’s residence and stopped across the street for a look at the house. He was shooting for inconspicuous, but a woman pruning roses noted his interest and said, “That’s where he lives. The wife-killer.”

  “Uh,” he said.

  “Just a matter of time before he goes for the hat trick,” the woman said, savaging the air with her pruning shears. “That new wife’s just playing moth to his flame, isn’t she? Any girl that stupid, now you hate to see her hurt, but you wouldn’t want her to produce young ones, either.”

  Keller said she had a point.

  “The father-in-law? Not the dumbbell’s daddy, I’m talking about Mr. Shileen. Now he’s a gentleman, but he got excited and that’s what threw his aim off.”

  “Maybe he’ll do better next time,” Keller said recklessly.

  “What I hear,” the woman said, “he’s come to see there’s things you can’t do all by yourself. He went and hired some professional, flew him down here from Chicago to take care of things Mob-style.”

  Oh boy, Keller thought.

  Keller had enjoyed walking to Wickwire’s house, but enough was enough. He returned to his hotel on the St. Charles Avenue streetcar, and made his next visit to the Garden District the next morning in a rented Pontiac. He spent the better part of three days—or the worst part, if you asked him—trailing along after Wickwire’s Lincoln. One of the bodyguards drove, the other rode shotgun, and Wickwire sat by himself in the rear seat.

  If you were in fact from Chicago, Keller thought, there was an obvious Mob-style way to take care of things. All you had to do was pull up alongside the Lincoln, zip your window down, and let go with a burst of auto fire at the rear side window. It was unlikely that Wickwire’s car sported reinforced side panels and bulletproof glass, so that ought to do the trick. You could probably manage to spray the two bozos in the front seat while you were at it. Pow! Take that! Now you know how we handle things in the city with the big shoulders!

  Not his style, Keller thought. He supposed it wouldn’t be impossible to find someone local who could sell him the tools for the job, the gun and the ammunition, but it still wasn’t his way of doing things. He was, after all, a New Yorker. He was inclined to be a little less obvious, a little more sophisticated.

  Besides, no matter how airtight an alibi the client put together, the cops would figure he’d put out a contract. So the less professional the whole affair looked, the better it was for Jim Paul Shileen.

  Keller walked around the Quarter. He passed bars offering genuine New Orleans jazz and restaurants boasting genuine New Orleans cuisine. If they had to keep insisting it was authentic, he thought, it probably wasn’t. When a strip-club barker began his pitch, Keller waved him off; he didn’t want to hear about genuine girls with genuine breasts.

  Next thing he knew he was standing in front of an antique shop, studying the earrings in the window. He turned away, got his bearings, and headed for his hotel.

  In his room he found himself changing channels as if determined to wear out the remote. He turned off the TV, picked up a magazine, flipped the pages, tossed it aside.

  The thing was, he didn’t want to be here. He wanted to be back in his own apartment, working on his stamps.

  So what he had to do was figure out the right approach to Richard Wickwire and go ahead and do it and go home. Get out of New Orleans and get back to Belgium.

  Let’s see. Wickwire got out of the house a lot, and the bodyguards always went with him. But the new wife, for the most part, stayed home. So Keller could pay a call in Wickwire’s absence.

  Once inside the house, he could stuff the new wife in a coat closet and lay doggo, waiting for Wickwire to return, taking out him and his bodyguards before they had a clue. But that was heavy-handed, that was as Chicago as deep-dish pizza. There ought to be a subtler way . . . and just like that it came to him.

  Get into the house. Arrange an accident for wife number three. Take her out back and drown her in the pool, say. Or break her neck and leave her at the foot of the stairs, as if she’d taken a header down the staircase. There was no end of ways to kill her, and how hard could any of them be? The woman obviously had the self-preservation instincts of a lemming.

  Then let Wickwire explain.

  It was poetic, and that part appealed to him. Wickwire, having murdered two wives with impunity, would get one of the state of Louisiana’s special flu shots for a murder he hadn’t committed, a wife he hadn’t killed. Neat.

  He went out and got something to eat, and by the time he got back to the room he had abandoned the scheme. There were a couple of things wrong with it, chief among them being the uncertainty of the enterprise. If they hadn’t been able to convict him before, when everybody but the jury flat-out knew he was guilty, who was to say they could do it now? The bastard’s luck might hold. You couldn’t be positive it wouldn’t.

  Besides, the client had paid to have Wickwire killed, not framed. The client was getting on in years, and he didn’t have all the time in the world. If Wickwire
finally wound up convicted, and if he did indeed draw a sentence of death by lethal injection, he still had enough money to stretch out the appeal process for years on end. Revenge, Keller had heard, was a dish best enjoyed cold, but you didn’t want it with mold growing on it. How sweet could it be if your victim outlived you?

  Think of something else, Keller told himself, and let your subconscious take care of it. He picked up the stamp weekly he’d brought along—the current issue, he was a subscriber now—and flipped the pages until a story about precancels caught his eye. He read it, and half of another story. Then he straightened up in his chair and put the paper aside.

  Gotcha, he thought.

  He turned the idea over in his mind, and this time he couldn’t find anything wrong with it. It would take special equipment, but nothing that would be too hard to come by. He’d obtained the same item once before, in a small city in the American heartland, and if you could find it in Muscatine, Iowa, how hard would it be to lay hands on it a few hundred miles downriver?

  He checked the Yellow Pages and found a likely source within walking distance. He called, and they had what he wanted. He broke the connection and looked up motels in the Yellow Pages, then thought of another listing to check.

  The dealer was a pudgy, round-shouldered fellow in his fifties. He wore a pale blue corduroy shirt with a button-down collar he hadn’t troubled to button down. His suspenders had Roman coins on them, but the shop itself was exclusively devoted to stamps; there was a sign in the window, professionally lettered, asserting, WE DO NOT BUY OR SELL COINS.

  “Nothing against them,” said the man, whose name was Hildebrand. “But I don’t happen to buy or sell chewing gum, either. Only difference is I don’t have to put a sign in the window to keep the gum chewers away. I don’t know anything about coins, I don’t understand coins, I don’t have a feel for coins, so why should I presume to traffic in the damned things?”

  Keller’s eyes went involuntarily to the suspenders. Hildebrand noticed, and rolled his eyes. “Women,” he said.

  That seemed to call for a reply, but Keller was stumped.

  “My wife wanted to buy me suspenders,” Hildebrand said, “and she thought suspenders with stamps would be nice, seeing that I’ve been a collector all my life, and a dealer most of my life. She bought me a tie with stamps on it a few years ago—U.S. classics, the Black Jack, the Jenny invert, the one-dollar Trans-Mississippi. Nice stamps, and it’s a nice tie, and I wear it when I have to wear a necktie, which isn’t often.”

  “I see,” Keller said.

  “So she couldn’t find suspenders with stamps,” Hildebrand said, “so she bought these, with coins on them, because according to her they amounted to the same thing. Can you imagine?”

  “Wow,” Keller said.

  “All those years, and she thinks stamps and coins amount to the same thing. Well, what are you going to do, do you know what I mean?”

  “Perfectly.”

  “Other hand, where would we be without ’em? Women, I mean. Or coins, for that matter, but—” He brought himself up short. “Enough of that. What can I do for you?”

  “I’m in town on business,” Keller said, “and I’ve got a little time to spare, and I thought I could look at some stamps.”

  “I’d say you came to the right place. What do you collect, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “Worldwide. Before 1952.”

  “Oh, the good stuff,” Hildebrand said, with what sounded like appreciation and respect. “The classics. Well, I’ve got plenty of stuff for you to look at. Any particular countries you’d like to see?”

  “How about Austria? That’s one of the checklists I happen to have with me.”

  “Austria,” said Hildebrand. “You have a seat right here, why don’t you? I’ve got a nice stock, mint and used. Including some of those early semipostals that get tougher to find every time you look for them. Do they have to be Never Hinged?”

  “No,” Keller said. “I hinge my stamps.”

  “Man after my own heart. You just make yourself comfortable. Here’s a pair of tongs you can use, unless you brought your own?”

  “I didn’t think to pack them.”

  “What some folks do,” Hildebrand said, “is keep an extra pair in their suitcase, and that way they’ve always got tongs with ’em. Here’s a stock book—Austria—and here’s a box of glassines, also Austria. Enjoy yourself, and just give a holler if I can help you with anything.”

  “Mr. Wickwire? My name is Sue Ellen? Sue Ellen Bates?”

  “Yes?”

  “I guess you don’t remember. In the restaurant? I brought you your cocktails, and you smiled at me?”

  “Rings a bell,” Wickwire said.

  “I said how I knew all along you were innocent, and next time I came to the table you gave me a slip of paper? With your name and number on it?”

  “I did, did I? When was this, Sue Ellen?”

  “Oh, it was a while ago. It took me this long to get up my courage, and then I was out of town for a while. I just got back, I’m staying at a motel until I get my own place.”

  “Is that a fact?”

  “And now you don’t even remember me. Shoot, I knew I should of called earlier!”

  “Who says I don’t remember you? Refresh my memory, girl. What-all do you look like?”

  “Well, I’m blond.”

  “You know, I kind of thought you might be.”

  “And I’m slim, except I’m what you call fullfigured.”

  “I think I’m beginning to remember you, child.”

  “And I’m twenty-four years old, and I stand five foot seven, and my eyes are blue.”

  “Any tattoos or piercings I should know about?”

  “No, I think they’re tacky. Plus my mom’d about kill me.”

  “Well, you sound good enough to eat.”

  “Why, Mr. Wickwire!”

  “Just an expression. You know what’d be good? If I could meet you, that’d be the best way ever to refresh a man’s memory.”

  “You want to meet me at a restaurant or something?”

  “That’s a little public, Sue Ellen. And in my position . . .”

  “Oh, I see what you mean.”

  “Did you say you were staying at a motel, Sue Ellen? Where’s it at?”

  “Hello, this is Sue Ellen Bates calling?”

  “Come again?”

  “My name is like Sue Ellen Bates? I’m blond, and my eyes are like blue?”

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” Dot said. “Keller, when are you going to grow up?”

  “I’ve wondered that myself.”

  “You’re using one of those telephone voice-changers, and I wish to God you’d disconnect it. You sound like a girl, and a stupid one at that.”

  “I don’t know how you can say such a thing?”

  “It’s making every sentence sound like a question that does it,” she said. “That’s a nice touch, I’ve got to give you that. It makes you sound just like one of those teenage morons at the mall who can’t remember where she parked her mother’s car.”

  “Well,” Keller said, “he likes me.”

  “Who? Oh, I get it.”

  “I’m meeting him the day after tomorrow. At my place.”

  “Not until then?”

  “It’s tough for him to get away.”

  “It’s going to get even tougher. Well, at least you’re in a town with plenty to do. You shouldn’t have trouble amusing yourself for the next couple of days.”

  “You’re right about that,” Keller said.

  “Australia,” the dealer said. He was a generation younger than Hildebrand, and his shop was on the second floor of an office building on Rampart Street.

  “I’ve got a good run of the early Kangaroos, if you’d like to see them. How about Australian States, while we’re in that part of the world? Queensland, Victoria, Tasmania, New South Wales . . .”

  “I haven’t got my lists for those.”

  “Ano
ther time,” the fellow said. “Here’s tongs, here’s a gauge if you want to check perfs. Let me know if there’s anything else you need.”

  “I’ll do that,” Keller said.

  The motel was in Metairie. Before his conversation with Richard Wickwire, Keller had called the motel and tried out the voice-changer on them, booking a room as Sue Ellen Bates. Then he drove over there, paid cash for a week in advance, and picked up the key. He let himself into the room, stowed some women’s garments in the dresser and closet, and messed up the bed.

  He didn’t pay another visit to the room until an hour before Sue Ellen’s date with Wickwire. He left the Pontiac a block away in a strip-mall parking lot, let himself into the room, and cracked the seal on a pint of bourbon. He poured an ounce of bourbon into each of two motel tumblers, made a lipstick mark on one of them, and placed them on the bedside table. He spilled a little bourbon on the rug, a little more on the chair, and left the pint standing open on the dresser.

  Then he unlocked the door and left it very slightly ajar. He switched on the TV, tuned it to a talk show, lowered the volume. Next came the hard part—sitting and waiting. He should have brought the stamp weekly along. He’d read everything in it, but he could have read it again. You always picked up something you’d missed the first time.

  Wickwire was due at two o’clock. At one-fifty, the phone on the bedside table rang. Keller frowned at it, then picked it up and said hello.

  “Sue Ellen?”

  “Mr. Wickwire?”

  “I might be five or ten minutes late, sugar. Just wanted to let you know.”

  “I’ll be waiting,” Keller said. “You just come right on in.”

  He hung up and disconnected the voice-changer, wondering what he’d have done if he hadn’t thought to hook it up earlier. Well, no sense trembling over unspilled milk.

  At 2:10 Wickwire still hadn’t shown. At 2:15 there was a knock at the door. “Sue Ellen?” Keller didn’t say anything.

  “You here, Sue Ellen?”

  Wickwire edged the door open. Keller, waiting behind it, let him get all the way inside. No telling who might be watching.