Kill Me

by Stephen White

  “Leave. Now, please.”

  She was begging.

  Thing is, I’ve stood at a lot of doorways in my life, stealing kisses, weaseling my way inside for one-last-drinks. I know when a woman means it when she tells me to leave. I know when a woman doesn’t.

  Lizzie didn’t really want me to leave.

  “A drink, Lizzie. A drink. Harmless.” She didn’t respond right away, so I pushed. “Come on, do I have to say everything twice?”

  That brought back a memory for her, and with the memory, a smile. A tiny smile, sure, but her veneer was cracking.

  “I can’t. You have to go.”

  “Our business is over. The contracts are signed, so to speak. What’s the harm in a friendly drink?”

  “Over? Over?” She made a sound from her throat that conveyed supreme exasperation. With me. “You know exactly …” She stumbled as she realized she couldn’t quite put her finger on what it was I was supposed to know, exactly. “This can’t be happening. This can’t … oh, Lord. Just go! Think! Think! Please, please, remember what business we’re in.”

  I wasn’t going to follow her there. If I followed her there, I knew I’d lose my resolve. “Really, though,” I said. “What do you think the odds are of us running into each other? A city this size? A neighborhood I never visit? Fate is talking. We can’t ignore that, can we?”

  “Yes,” she said, suddenly regaining her composure, and her perspective. And suddenly finding her suspicion. “What are the odds?”

  I certainly didn’t want her to go there. I wanted her off-balance, not suspicious. “I’ll do kraut,” I said, moving suddenly closer to her, close enough to kiss her, “if you’ll do kraut.”

  She glanced in the direction of my lips, sighed a deep sigh that sounded swollen with both possibility and regret, spun away from me, and began marching back toward the entrance to the Lincoln Center station, her plastic bag with the raspberries swinging back and forth at her side. When a cab pulled over to drop a well-dressed couple off at the curb, she quickly changed course and hopped into the empty backseat. I couldn’t hear the instructions she gave to the driver.

  Lizzie didn’t wave to me as she pulled away.

  After losing sight of the taxi as it headed uptown on Broadway, I followed the general path that she had taken, first strolling down the sidewalk toward the subway, then after a change of heart, over to the curb to hail a cab of my own. As I passed by the newsstand, the deaf guy selling magazines said, in a baritone as deep as the Grand Canyon, “That didn’t go too good, did it?”

  Okay, so he wasn’t deaf.

  I stepped over and stood in front of a tall stack of Maxim, reached down into my pocket, and played a hunch. I silently placed a hundred-dollar bill on his tiny scratched counter. “You know her?”

  The bill disappeared in a flash.

  He wasn’t blind either.

  “She’s a reg’lar. One of my bes’ customers. Course I do.” He used his head to gesture toward her apartment.

  “You wouldn’t happen to know the doorman in her building?”

  He hesitated as though he were calculating whether that kind of question should be included in my initial hundred-dollar investment. Then he said, “Sure. Been working this stand ’leven years. Know a lot.”

  “Reasonable man? The doorman?”

  “Depends who approaches him. Has his moments. Sometimes he sees things … sometimes, hey.”

  “Turns out I can be generous.”

  “ ’At’s one of the many things I already know ’bout you. Turns out I can be persuasive. ’At’s somethin’ you should know ’bout me. With the right incentive I could ’proach him for you. Come to an agreement. A … rapprochement, so to speak.”

  A rapprochement? “Then you may be able to help me out.”

  “Who knows ’bout that? Anything’s possible in this world. That’s what my momma used to say.”

  “Good. I think I’ll be in touch. You here every day?”

  “Every day’s a lot of days.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  He shrugged. I put another hundred dollars on his tray.

  “Bright and early. If she be working, she be out the door a little bit before nine. Never before eight-thirty.”

  “Subway or cab?”

  “Seventy one, thirty the other. Nice day? Ninety-ten. Doesn’t work every day, though. No reg’lar schedule. She travels some, too. Gone overnight. Gone a week. Never know.”

  I began to walk away. Stopped. “Did your momma really used to say that? That anything’s possible in this world?”

  “I never even knew my momma.”

  As I climbed into a taxi I was thinking of Connie.

  There are worse things, he’d tell me. Worse things.

  FORTY

  One of the pleasures of fine hotels is room service.

  A half-dozen perfect, fresh strawberries in a silver bowl? Eighteen dollars. Why so much? Why not? Add the six-dollar “service fee.” Why the service fee? It’s nothing more than a way for the hotel to avoid the embarrassing reality that what they really want to charge for that simple bowl of strawberries is twenty-four dollars, not eighteen dollars. The price they wish to collect is not an exorbitant three bucks a berry, but instead a ridiculously exorbitant four bucks a berry. And that doesn’t include the seventeen percent tip that’s necessary to compensate some poor waiter for the dual traumas of not only having to endure an elevator ride but also then being forced to look at some rich guy in a bathrobe.

  Or maybe a rich guy wearing less than a bathrobe, much less.

  Hey, why not?

  Room service isn’t about dining; it’s about indulgence. Six dollars on top of indulgence is still indulgence. Seventeen percent more than indulgence is still just indulgence, isn’t it?

  I needed some indulgence.

  I’d convinced myself—blindly, arrogantly, perhaps, yes, even optimistically—that my faux-surprise encounter with Lizzie would conclude with us sitting side by side in some New York City saloon sharing small plates of better-than-average food and drinking from the same bottle of good wine. A nice Auslese is what I’d been thinking. I’d believed that she’d set aside her misgivings and accept the ruse that my ambush was serendipity and that she would listen with compassion to my tale of woe and would generously agree to intervene with her Death Angel compatriots to bend the rules just the slightest bit to accommodate the peculiar circumstances I was facing regarding my son.

  My son, Adam.

  I had to find him. Soothe him. Convince him.

  Love him.

  A few months’ delay, maybe, in the threshold. Six months, tops. That’s all I needed.

  I’d charmed enough women out of their underwear in my youth that I was supremely confident I could charm Lizzie out of a few months’ delay in carrying out the Death Angel mandate.

  Obviously, I’d been a little wrong.

  To partially compensate for my disappointment on the Upper West Side, I ordered too much food from too many categories on the room-service menu. The young woman who took my phone order greeted me by name as though we’d been acquainted for years—or more accurately, as though I’d known her parents for years—and informed me that my meal would be delivered in about thirty-five minutes. She never sounded even the slightest bit perplexed that I’d ordered well over a hundred dollars’ worth of food and had asked for only one place setting.

  She sounded, I thought, French. Southern French, pleasant. Not Parisian French, unpleasant. I thanked her. She told me it was her pleasure.

  We both knew it wasn’t. Her pleasure, that is. But the illusion of a good hotel accomplishes the same magic for me as does a good book, or a compelling movie: I gladly suspend disbelief in order to be coddled in the experience of other, of elsewhere.

  While I waited for the food to arrive, I took a quick shower and selected from the pay-per-view menu a movie that Thea had refused to see with me in the theater. The knock on the door came about five minutes early.


  A fine hotel always strives to exceed expectations.

  I opened the door. A black man in his twenties stood behind a husky stainless steel cart topped with linen. He asked permission to enter. I asked him to leave the food on the cart, said I’d pick at it at my leisure. I moved to the other side of the room and gazed past the tower of the Pierre at the dark shadows of the park while he fumbled with the trays.

  “Sir?” he said a moment later.

  I turned, ready to sign his chit, prepared to add a few bucks to the seventeen percent he was getting already.

  More indulgence.

  He was wearing white gloves. Had the guy who delivered my breakfast that morning been wearing white gloves? I didn’t think so.

  But the guy who had delivered the note to join the comic in the lounge had. I remembered him.

  This was that guy. I glanced at his lapel. No name tag.

  The man with the gloves was between me and the door. The room-service cart sat between us like a stainless steel fort.

  He said, “I’ve been instructed to order you not to make any further contact with anyone in the organization.”

  My heart was pounding. I was thinking, These guys are good. And nimble? My God.

  Then, Did he say “order” ?

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. If you’re done here, please leave before I call security.”

  “I would suggest, respectfully, that you not trifle with us. Our resources will surprise you.”

  “Please leave my room.” With forced nonchalance, I lifted the phone off the nearby desk.

  No dial tone.

  “It’s been temporarily disconnected, sir. Service will resume shortly, after I exit with your assurances in this matter.”

  “What are you going to do if I don’t offer my assurances? Kill me?”

  He seemed to be gazing at me with some pity.

  That really pissed me off.

  He said, “I’m here in good faith, sir. Everything we do, we do in good faith. We ask the same of our clients. Is that so unreasonable?”

  He’d chosen patronizing. Wrong strategy with me. They should have known that.

  “I need a few months,” I said.

  “Perhaps fate will make those months available to you. We don’t control fate. We never pretend to. But we keep our commitments once fate has shown her cards. That’s all—nothing more, nothing less.”

  “Well, I’m freeing you of your commitments. I’ll sign whatever you want. Keep my money. I don’t care.”

  “As you well know, sir, once the threshold event has occurred, canceling the contract is not permitted. Now that you’ve been diagnosed with a life-threatening illness, and the threshold event has come, the line cannot be redrawn.”

  “Can’t you see what I’m saying? I don’t want out. I need a few fucking months. Then you can go ahead and kill me, goddamn it.”

  In response to my profanity, his face became a mask. He retreated to his opening line: “I’ve been asked to instruct you not to make any further contact with anyone in our organization.”

  “Last time you said ‘ordered.’ ”

  “Ordered, then, sir. Ordered.”

  “Get out of here. Get the fuck out of here.”

  He didn’t budge. “Consider this, sir: How would you feel if we suddenly decided to abrogate a portion of the contract. For instance, the part about keeping your wishes secret from your loved ones. We understand, for instance, that your wife—Thea? Is that her name? What if—”

  “Enough,” I said.

  “Or your daughter, the older one? Berkeley. I suspect she is old enough to understand that—”

  “Enough,” I said again, but without the same fervor. I sat down on an upholstered chair and stared out at the park. My back was to the well-spoken man wearing the white gloves. I was in a perfect position for a well-executed maneuver with a garrote, were he so inclined.

  “Sir, I wish you would reconsider—”

  “Enough,” I said again. “I heard you the first time. I heard you the second time. Go.”

  A few seconds later I heard the door open and then close.

  He’d come to deliver a threat. He was a competent man; he’d certainly delivered it clearly. If I continued to break the rules the Death Angels would inform Thea—or worse, Cal, or, Jesus Christ, Adam—about all the money I’d spent to ensure that I would be provided with a quick exit if things got tough for me.

  The room-service tray was still hogging the passageway at the end of the bed. After a while I stood up and checked the cart, not because my hunger had returned, but rather out of curiosity. I was beyond surprise when I discovered that beneath the silver warming lids on top of the cart was no food. Nothing.

  In the warming oven below? Nothing.

  So much for my indulgence.

  I sat on the bed and picked up the phone. The dial tone had returned. I touched the button to connect with room service. The woman who answered the phone wasn’t French, neither pleasant French nor unpleasant French. I thought Nebraska perhaps.

  Pleasant Nebraska. The only kind. She addressed me by name. I wished her a good evening and asked her where my order was.

  She said she had no record of an order from my room since breakfast. If I would like to order something, though, she would be delighted to assist me.

  FORTY-ONE

  I waited until almost midnight so that Mary and her cousin would have time to grab coffee or dessert and get back to Brooklyn after the final curtain of the play they were attending.

  Mary answered her mobile phone after half a ring.

  “Yes,” she said. She knew who it was.

  “That errand you’ve been doing for me? It turns out that I need some more of the same stuff that you picked up at that place on Park Avenue. You know the one? Can you do that?”

  Mary didn’t need a road map. “Of course,” she said. “What I picked up already wasn’t … enough? Satisfactory? What?”

  “No, no, it was great. But it turns out I didn’t use it well. It may have spoiled. My fault, entirely. I’m hoping that I’ll do better with another batch.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “Yes, first thing. The people at the store will probably have guessed that you’ll be stopping by.”

  “Okay. Shouldn’t be a problem, as long as I know.”

  I sighed. “How was the play?”

  “We had a lovely time. It was even funnier than I expected, if that’s possible. Can’t thank you enough. I’ll take care of the errands tomorrow and be back in touch.”

  We said good-bye and I closed the phone. I reopened it and speed-dialed Thea in Colorado.

  “Hey,” I said. “Miss you.”

  She was sleepy. We talked kids and dogs and my health for a while. She hadn’t heard from Adam. I told her I had at least another day of meetings. She took it in stride. I told her I loved her and asked her to kiss the girls for me. She told me to take care of myself.

  It all seemed so normal.

  FORTY-TWO

  The next morning I ordered room service again—this time for real—and ate eggs and bacon and rye toast with the curtains wide open to the park, and with Matt and Katie telling me their version of the news. Dessert was that elusive silver bowl of fresh strawberries.

  I thought I’d end up regretting my indulgence. My stomach hadn’t successfully processed that much food in weeks. I had to distract myself from imagining the vomit I’d produce with bacon and strawberries.

  One news story caught my eye. A story from home. A man had been shot on Interstate 70 on the west side of the Denver metropolitan area the previous night shortly before eleven o’clock. Given evidence at the scene, the authorities were investigating the possibility that he was the victim of a sniper. The Today Show was using a local feed of a familiar Denver reporter standing high on a stepped mesa that rose above another bluff that was roped off with crime-scene tape. Far over the reporter’s shoulder I could see the wide ribbon of highway that led from the risin
g plains into the mountains.

  It was one of the highways that led from my Denver home to my Ridgway home.

  The victim was a forty-two-year-old father of three. He’d been driving a white Honda Odyssey in the slow lane heading westbound just beyond Ward Road.

  I sometimes drove that route on my way from Ridgway to Denver’s suburbs, or back.

  Huh. I adjusted the time of the crime to account for the Eastern time zone and realized that the sniper had killed his victim about an hour after I’d sent the faux room-service waiter on his way without the promise he’d demanded.

  On my way out of the hotel one of the front-desk clerks replenished my supply of pocket cash. I suspected I was going to need a good-sized wad.

  I took a taxi back to the Upper West Side and had the cabbie drop me off a block before we got to Lizzie’s building. I bought a cup of coffee at a Starbucks, snuck a look to confirm that the newsstand was open for business, and found a deserted stoop with a good vantage of the canopied door to her building.

  I parked my butt on the stoop, sipped coffee, and read the Times, one eye on the sidewalk.

  It was eight-thirty. I wanted to be early in case she was early.

  My caution hadn’t been necessary. Eight forty-five came and went. So did nine o’clock. No Lizzie.

  Nine-fifteen, nine-thirty. Ditto.

  My coffee was gone and I had to pee. I stood up to try to see if that would relieve the pressure on my bladder. If not, I was looking at a quick jaunt to Starbucks for a toilet break.

  “Boss? She be gone.”

  I looked behind me and saw the man from the newsstand, the one whom I’d originally thought was deaf. His presence surprised me, spooked me even. So did the fact that he was about five foot four.

  He noticed my eyes take in his height. “I stand on a Coke crate when I’m working,” he said. “It’s an antique.”

  An antique? I nodded. “Good morning. What do you mean, she’s gone?”

  His hands were in his pockets. His dark eyes danced. They were as convivial as could be.