Sinner Man

by Lawrence Block

  None of his clients ever came to him through Bill Radburn. But then one day his phone rang, and half an hour later he was in the man’s office on Citrus Boulevard. He’d said he’d done undercover work now and again, hadn’t he? Well, here they were looking at a local fellow who very likely knew everybody with a badge within a fifty-mile radius, and he hated to call in the staties in Tallahassee if he didn’t have to. So was he up for a little exercise in role-playing?

  And the following afternoon he was sitting in his beat-up Monte Carlo in the parking lot of the Winn-Dixie, settling into the role of a mobbed-up hit man from northern New Jersey—“Bergen County, maybe you’s heard of it”—agreeing to rid a man with the second most profitable auto dealership in Gallatin County of his business partner.

  “He won’t buy me out, he won’t let me buy him out, and I can’t stand the sight of the son of a bitch,” the man said. “So what choice do I have here?”

  “The man has a point,” Radburn said, when they listened to the recording of the conversation. They played it again for the District Attorney, Pierce Weldon, whose vision of the future was not limited to Gallatin County, and who clearly liked what he was hearing.

  “How’s a man that stupid sell so many cars?” he wondered. “Jesus, the dumb bastard lays it all out there in black and white, or it will be when it’s typed up. Though credit where it’s due, Mr. Doak.”

  “Just Doak,” Radburn said. “Last name’s Miller.”

  “My mistake, but all the same, Doak, I have to say you make a very convincing hit man. I damn near bought your act myself. I don’t suppose you ever crossed the street to do a little moonlighting, did you?”

  “If I did,” he said, “I wouldn’t say so. Be just my luck you’d be wearing a wire.”

  They all assumed he’d have to testify, but the auto dealer’s attorney listened to the tape a couple of times and convinced his client to plead guilty. After sentencing, Doak and Radburn and Weldon shook hands all around. “And another solid citizen wins himself a ticket to Raiford,” the D.A. said. “That trophy wife of his was all teary-eyed, but I don’t guess she’ll have too much trouble finding somebody to elevate her spirits. Won’t be me, I know that much, and I’d like to think it’s my high moral principles but it may just be cowardice.”

  “They do dress alike,” Radburn said, “and it can be tricky to tell them apart.”

  “And it won’t be you either, Grandfather William, because you’re just too damned comfortable with your life as it is to reinvent yourself as Foxy Grandpa. But our cop-turned-hit man might find an opening here, so to speak. You’re not married, are you, Doak?”

  “Used to be.”

  “Was that a note of bitterness there? And you live alone? No entangling alliances? But maybe your sensitive self recoils at the idea of literally doing unto the wife what you’ve already done metaphorically to the husband.”

  “I did that once,” he remembered.

  “Oh?”

  “Guy was a burglar, caught him before he could get the goods to a fence.”

  “And he had a hot wife?”

  He nodded. “I knew better, but…”

  “So many sad stories start with those four words.”

  “This wasn’t that sad because it didn’t last that long. She liked her booze, and after the third drink something in her eyes would change, and I realized I was afraid to fall asleep in her bed for fear that she’d stick a knife in me.”

  “Or go all Lorena Bobbitt on you.”

  “Jesus, there’s a name from the past. Which is probably where it should stay.”

  And he knew he wouldn’t hit on the auto dealer’s wife, either. Because he was capable of learning from experience.

  Besides, hell, she wasn’t that hot.

  THREE

  The coffee Susie poured him was fresh, though not as strong as he’d have preferred. He settled in his chair across the desk from the sheriff and asked just who it was who wanted to dissolve a partnership.

  “It’s not like that this time,” Radburn said, and stopped himself. “Except, come to think of it, it is.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Wife wants you to kill her husband,” he said. “So it’s a partnership, but of the domestic persuasion.”

  “And she wants me—”

  “Well, not specifically, since she doesn’t know you. At least I hope she doesn’t, because that would be a deal breaker, wouldn’t it? She’s expecting a dead-eyed assassin, and who shows up but her buddy Doak from the Tuesday Night Bowling League.”

  “Wouldn’t work.”

  “Her name’s Lisa Otterbein, but her maiden name’s Yarrow, and that’s what she uses professionally. And I suspect she’ll go back to it altogether once you kill George Otterbein for her.”

  “And we know she wants me to do this because—”

  “Because three nights ago she sat down across a table from a fellow named Richard Lyle Gonson. Know him?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “If you were looking to hire a hit man, he’d be a natural to sit across the table from. Not because you think he’d take the job, but because he’d probably know somebody who would. Or somebody who’d know somebody.”

  “He’s not Reverend R. L. Gonson, the Congregationalist minister.”

  Radburn shook his head. “He’s done, as the saying goes, a little of this and a little of that. He mostly gets away with it, but he’s done a few bids, one of them federal. It’s getting on for ten years since the last time he got out.”

  “He’s behaving himself?”

  “Does the bear give up a lifelong habit of sylvan defecation? Best he can do is learn to cover it up afterward. Even so, I had him for receiving last year, right around the end of hurricane season.”

  “But you couldn’t make it stick?”

  “He had something to trade.”

  “Ah.”

  “That’s one way to cover up the pile in the woods. We got the chance to put away somebody who’d been giving us a lot more grief than Mr. Gonson ever did, and he saw the wisdom of having friends in law enforcement. So when Lisa let him know what she wanted, instead of telling her to go shit in her hat—”

  “Or in the woods.”

  “—he said he knew the very man to call.”

  “And that man turned out to be you.”

  “It did. Neither of those names ring a bell? George Otterbein? Lisa Yarrow Otterbein?”

  He shook his head.

  “George’s father started a restaurant-supply business. George inherited it and married money. Made a good thing of the business and invested some of the proceeds in local real estate. Rental properties, mostly, bringing in more money to go with the money he’s already got.”

  “I’m guessing Lisa’s a second wife.”

  “You New Yorkers, nothing gets past you. First wife was in one of those fifty-car chain pile-ups on 41. Foggy morning and one guy stops short and everybody hits him. Airbag deployed and Jo was unhurt, but somebody insisted she go to the hospital as a precaution, and while they were checking her they found something they didn’t like, and so they checked some more, and she had cancer cells in everything but her hair.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Two months later she was gone. No symptoms before the accident, and it’s hard not to think that if they hadn’t found it she’d still be alive today. Which is ridiculous, but still.”

  Nothing to say to that. Doak sipped his coffee.

  “You know the Cattle Baron? On Camp Road a mile or so north of Lee?”

  “I’ve passed it. Never stopped.”

  “That’d be the best policy if you chanced to be a vegetarian. Just hold your breath and drive on by. Steak and seafood’s what they’ve got on offer, and the steak’s dry-aged prime Angus beef. After he buried Jo, George got in the habit of taking his dinners at the Baron. He was partial to their bone-in rib eye, which I can recommend, assuming you’re not a vegetarian.”

  “I’ll have to try it.�
��

  “You might want to wait a couple of weeks. All goes well, they’ll have to find somebody new to show you to your table.”

  “Lisa’s the hostess?”

  “She showed George to his table every night, and I guess that wasn’t all she showed him, and as soon as Jo was six months in the ground they went and got married. He’d had three children with Jo, two girls and a boy, and the oldest was the same age as Lisa. Now there’s different ways kids will react to that sort of thing. Either the new wife’s an angel for offering their daddy a second chance for happiness, or she’s a gold-digging bitch. My experience, the more money’s involved, the less likely she is to get the benefit of the doubt.”

  “Figures. She kept her job after they got married?”

  Radburn shook his head. “Moved into his big house on Rumsey Road and set about being a woman of leisure. Spent some of George’s money redecorating, bought some antiques in Tampa and some art in Miami. That held her interest for the better part of two years, and then she turned up one night back at the Cattle Baron, greeting her old customers by name and showing them to their tables like she’d never left.”

  “And the marriage?”

  “I guess the honeymoon was over. If Lisa was working evenings, that had to cut into their together time. Far as anyone knew, they were comfortable enough with the new arrangement.”

  “Until a couple of nights ago.”

  “Until a couple of nights ago, when Rich Gonson and two other fellows came by to eat some meat and drink some whiskey. When Lisa brought the check to the table, she told him to stick around.”

  “And he did.”

  “Thought he was about to get lucky, according to him, but after his friends left and she sat down at his table, our girl was all business. ‘Of course I don’t know anybody in that line of work,’ he told me—”

  “Meaning he does.”

  “Wouldn’t surprise me. What he told Lisa was he’d have to make a few phone calls, and the first call he made was to me. So last night I told Mary Beth she was about due for dinner out, and we had us a couple of shrimp cocktails and split the big rib eye, and I paid the tab myself instead of expensing it to Gallatin County.”

  “What a guy.”

  “Left a good tip, too. And took a picture when no one was paying attention.” He found the photo on his iPhone, handed it across the desk. “Lisa Yarrow Otterbein.”

  “Very nice.”

  “She had long hair when she married George. I don’t know when she got it cut, but it was short like that by the time she was back working at the Baron. I understand a woman’s trying to tell you something when she cuts her hair, but they never gave me the code book. You ever seen her before? That you remember?”

  He shook his head. “I’d remember,” he said.

  “Then she’s probably never met you, either, so there’s no reason she won’t believe you’re Frankie from New Jersey. Of course, the accent may give you away. You’re starting to talk Southern.”

  “I am?”

  “On the phone this morning. ‘Have y’all got coffee?’ That how they’d say it in Jersey?”

  “Maybe South Jersey.” He took another look at Lisa Otterbein’s picture. Lisa Otterbein, Lisa Yarrow, whatever she called herself. The haircut, he decided, was probably a good idea, whatever the psychological motivation behind it. The short hair drew attention to her facial features, and it was a face you wanted to study. Beautiful, but that was almost beside the point.

  “Give me your email, why don’t you, and I’ll send you the photo. Otherwise I get the feeling I’ll never get my phone back.”

  FOUR

  Back at his house, he set up a folding chair on the dock and sat there looking out through the mangroves. He hadn’t bought a boat, hadn’t even considered it, but one afternoon he’d stopped at a tackle shop and let the kid sell him enough basic gear so that he could bait a hook and drop a line in the water.

  He’d tried that once, spent an hour or two on his dock, and whatever disappointment he’d felt in failing to haul in a fish was outweighed by his relief at not having to clean and cook his catch. The rod and reel were in his garage, along with the tackle box, and he’d never had the urge to repeat the experiment. But the dock was a nice place to hang out, as long as you didn’t screw it up with a boat or a fishing rod.

  He’d brought a magazine out onto the dock with him, but paid little attention to it. When he wasn’t gazing off into the middle distance, letting his mind wander, he was looking at the photo the sheriff had sent him. Lisa, with her face framed by feather-cut dark hair.

  A full-lipped mouth, but not overly so. Visible cheekbones, a pointy chin that just missed being sharp. Big eyes, accented with mascara, and what color were they, anyway? It was a good picture, but you couldn’t tell the color of her eyes.

  He could feel the fantasy, hovering out there on the edge of thought.

  When had it first come to him? Maybe four, five years into his marriage. By then he’d already let go of his marriage vows, or at least the one about forsaking all others. He didn’t go out chasing other women, but when the opportunity came along and the chemistry was right, he let it happen.

  It wasn’t the worst marriage in the world, but it never should have happened in the first place. He’d tried college and when that didn’t work for him he went into the service. It was the peacetime army, and he’d finished his hitch and come home well before Operation Desert Storm and the Gulf War. A buddy was going to take the exam to get on the cops, so he went with him and passed, and went through the academy and came out with a gun and a badge and a stick.

  And a uniform, in which he felt terribly self-conscious. But everybody did at first, and everybody got over it.

  He met Doreen at a party. She had a cop for a brother, but nobody he knew. They started keeping company, and he was beginning to think it was time to break up with her when she told him she was pregnant. “Look, it’s not the end of the world,” she said. “I mean, we love each other, right? So we’d be getting married sooner or later anyway, wouldn’t we?”

  No, he thought, and no. He didn’t love her and they wouldn’t be getting married anyway. But what he said was, “Yeah, I guess you’re right. When you look at it that way.”

  And it wasn’t horrible. There were things he liked about being married. And he loved his son when he was born, and the daughter who followed a year and a half later.

  Or did he? He figured he must, because you were supposed to.

  So he cheated, when something came along, but he didn’t chase, and it seemed to him that the cheating made it easier to stay married. Made life a little more interesting. The job was interesting, and the uniform no longer made him feel self-conscious, and anyway he was on track for a move into plainclothes. If the marriage wasn’t interesting, well, the occasional vacation from it made it more tolerable.

  The fantasy: He meets this woman, and their eyes lock, and they connect in a way that neither of them has ever before connected with another human being.

  And that’s just it, because they walk out of their separate lives and into a life together. Not a word to anybody, not a wasted moment to pack a bag or quit a job. They look at each other, and they connect, and they’re in a car riding off together, or on a bus or a train or an airplane, and it’s crazy and they know it’s crazy but they don’t care.

  Of course it never happened. He met women, and now and then there was a connection, and sometimes it led as far as a bedroom, but it was never the magic mystical connection of the fantasy. Once or twice he thought he might be in love, and maybe he was, for a little while. And then he wasn’t.

  There was one woman—Cathy, her name was—and he imagined being married to her instead of Doreen. He could see her in that role, and he thought about it, and then one day he realized that he was able to envision her taking Doreen’s place because she was in fact very like Doreen. And if the two of them wound up together, they’d just recreate the marriage he already had with Doreen
. He’d be in the same place, and in short order he’d be cheating on Cathy, too, and the only difference would be the checks he’d be writing every month for alimony and child support.

  There was no alimony in the fantasy, no child support either. That was because there was no past in the fantasy, no tin cans tied to the bumper of whatever vehicle whisked them away, him and his fantasy partner, into a wholly desirable if equally unimaginable future.

  Well, that was fantasy for you.

  Instead, he was stuck with the reality of a marriage that limped along. He was used to it, and he assumed Doreen was used to it, too, and then he went through a rough patch on the job, and that was working itself out, more or less, and Doreen surprised him by filing for divorce.

  Nasty divorce, too. The boy was in college and the girl in her last year in high school, and they were young enough to think they had to take sides, and it was no contest, the side they took was their mother’s.

  Well, okay.

  He could have retired when he had twenty years in, that was what a lot of guys did, but he’d always liked the job more than he’d disliked it, and your pension was better if you hung around for twenty-five. So he’d planned on doing that, and then Doreen did what she did, and all he wanted was to kiss everything goodbye.

  It was like the fantasy, sort of, except there was nobody sharing it. Just his own middle-aged self and two mismatched suitcases, getting on a plane at JFK, getting off in Tampa. A night in a chain motel at the airport, then a cab to a used-car lot, where he’d paid cash for the Chevy Monte Carlo he was still driving. It would pass, as they said, everything but a gas station, but he led a low-mileage life and didn’t mind what he spent on gas.

  Then he’d pointed the car north. He’d been to Florida a few times over the years, mostly with Doreen. He wasn’t sure where he wanted to be, but Tampa was too far south and the Panhandle was too far north, and when he got as far as Perry, in Taylor County, he thought it felt about right. He had dinner at Mindy’s Barbecue and bedded down at the Ramada, and two nights later he moved to the Gulf Mirage to save a few bucks.