by Ed McBain
It was, she told him, a little more complicated than that. There was no razor or concertina wire, because that made a place look like a concentration camp, but there were sensors that set up some kind of force field, and no one could begin to climb the fence without setting off all kinds of alarms. Nor were you home free once you cleared the fence, because there were dogs that patrolled the belt of noman’s-land, Dobermans, swift and silent.
“And there’s an unmarked patrol car that circles the perimeter at regular intervals twenty-four hours a day,” she said, “so if they spotted you on your way to the fence with a ladder under your arm—”
“It wouldn’t be me,” he assured her. “I like dogs okay, but I’d just as soon not meet those Dobermans you just mentioned.”
It was, he decided, a good thing he’d asked. Earlier, he’d found a place to buy an aluminum extension ladder. He could have been over the fence in a matter of seconds, just in time to keep a date with Mr. Swift and Mr. Silent.
In the Lattimore kitchen, they sat across a table topped with butcher block and Mitzi went over the fine points with him. The furniture was all included, she told him, and as he could see it was in excellent condition. He might want to make some changes, of course, as a matter of personal taste, but the place was in turnkey condition. He could buy it today and move in tomorrow.
“In a manner of speaking,” she said, and touched his arm again. “Financing takes a little time, and even if you were to pay cash it would take a few days to push the paperwork through. Were you thinking in terms of cash?”
“It’s always simpler,” he said.
“It is, but I’m sure you wouldn’t have trouble with a mortgage. The banks love to write mortgages on Sundowner properties, because the prices only go up.” Her fingers encircled his wrist. “I’m not sure I should tell you this, David, but now’s a particularly good time to make an offer.”
“Mr. Lattimore’s eager to sell?”
“Mr. Lattimore couldn’t care less,” she said. “About selling or anything else. It’s his daughter who’d like to sell. She had an offer of ten percent under the asking price, but she’d just listed the property and she turned it down, thinking the buyer’d boost it a little, but instead the buyer went and bought something else, and that woman’s been kicking herself ever since. What I would do, I’d offer fifteen percent under what she’s asking. You might not get it for that, but the worst you’d do is get it for ten percent under, and that’s a bargain in this market.”
He nodded thoughtfully, and asked what happened to Lattimore. “It was very sad,” she said, “although in another sense it wasn’t, because he died doing what he loved.”
“Playing golf,” Keller guessed.
“He hit a very nice tee shot on the thirteenth hole,” she said, “which is a par four with a dogleg to the right. ‘That’s a sweet shot,’ his partner said, and Mr. Lattimore said, ‘Well, I guess I can still hit one now and then, can’t I?’ And then he just went and dropped dead.”
“If you’ve got to go . . .”
“That’s what everyone said, David. The body was cremated, and then they had a nice nondenominational service in the clubhouse, and afterward his daughter and son-in-law rode golf carts to the sixteenth hole and put his ashes in the water hazard.” She laughed involuntarily, and let go of his wrist to cover her mouth with her hand. “Pardon me for laughing, but I was thinking what somebody said. How his balls were already there, and now he could go look for them.”
Her hand returned to his wrist. He looked at her, and her eyes were looking back at him. “Well,” he said. “My car’s at your office, so you’d better run me back there. And then I’ll want to get back to where I’m staying and freshen up, but after that I’d love to take you to dinner.”
“Oh, I wish,” she said.
“You have plans?”
“My daughter lives with me,” she said, “and I like to be home with her on school nights, and especially tonight because there’s a program on television we never miss.”
“I see.”
“So you’re on your own for dinner,” she said, “but what do you and I care about dinner, David? Why don’t you just take me into old Mr. Lattimore’s bedroom and fuck me senseless?”
She had a nice body and used it eagerly and imaginatively. Keller, his mind on his work, had been only vaguely aware of the sexual possibilities, and had in fact surprised himself by asking her to dinner. In the Lattimore bedroom he surprised himself further.
Afterward she said, “Well, I had high expectations, but I have to say they were exceeded. Isn’t it a good thing I’m busy tonight? Otherwise it’d be a couple of hours before we even got to the restaurant, and ages before we got to bed. I mean, why waste all that time?”
He tried to think of something to say, but she didn’t seem to require comment. “For all those years,” she said, “I was the most faithful wife since Penelope. And it’s not like nobody was interested. Men used to hit on me all the time. David, I even had girls hitting on me.”
“Really.”
“But I was never interested, and if I was, if I felt a little itch, a little tickle, well, I just pushed it away and put it out of my mind. Because of a little thing called marriage. I’d made some vows, and I took them seriously.
“And then I found out the son of a bitch was cheating on me, and it turned out it was nothing new. On our wedding day? It was years before I knew it, but that son of a bitch got lucky with one of my bridesmaids. And over the years he was catting around all the time. Not just my friends, but my sister.”
“Your sister?”
“Well, my half-sister, really. My daddy died when I was little, and my mama remarried, and that’s where she came from.” She told him more than he needed to know about her childhood, and he lay there with his eyes closed and let the words wash over him. He hoped there wasn’t going to be a test, because he wasn’t paying close attention. . . .
“So I decided to make up for lost time,” she said.
He’d dozed off, and after she woke him they’d showered in separate bathrooms. Now they were dressed again, and he’d followed her into the kitchen, where she opened the refrigerator and seemed surprised to find it empty.
She closed it and turned to him and said, “When I meet someone I feel like sleeping with, well, I go ahead and do it. I mean, why wait?”
“Works for me,” he said.
“The only thing I don’t like to do,” she said, “is mix business and pleasure. So I made sure not to commit myself until I knew you weren’t going to buy this place. And you’re not, are you?”
“How did you know?”
“A feeling I got, when I said how you should make an offer. Instead of trying to think how much to offer, you were looking for a way out—or at least that was what I picked up. Which was okay with me, because by then I was more interested in getting laid than in selling a house. I didn’t have to tell you about a whole lot of tax advantages, and how easy it is to rent the place out during the time you spend somewhere else. It’s all pretty persuasive, and I could give you that whole rap now, but you don’t really want to hear it, do you?”
“I might be in the market in a little while,” he said, “but you’re right, I’m nowhere near ready to make an offer at the present time. I suppose it was wrong of me to drag you out here and waste your time, but—”
“Do you hear me complaining, David?”
“Well, I just wanted to see the place,” he said. “So I exaggerated my interest somewhat. Whether or not I’ll be interested in settling in here depends on the outcome of a couple of business matters, and it’ll be a while before I know how they’re going to turn out.”
“Sounds interesting,” she said.
“I wish I could talk about it, but you know how it is.”
“You could tell me,” she said, “but then you’d have to kill me. In that case, don’t you say a word.”
He ate dinner by himself in a Mexican restaurant that reminded him of a
nother Mexican restaurant. He was lingering over a second cup of cafe con leche before he figured it out. Years ago work had taken him to Roseburg, Oregon, and before he got out of there he’d picked out a real estate agent and spent an afternoon driving around looking at houses for sale.
He hadn’t gone to bed with the Oregon realtor, or even considered it, nor had he used her as a way to get information on an approach to his quarry. That man, whom the Witness Protection Program had imperfectly protected, had been all too easy to find, but Keller, who ordinarily knew well enough to keep his business and personal life separate, had somehow let himself befriend the poor bastard. Before he knew it he was having fantasies about moving to Roseburg himself, buying a house, getting a dog, settling down.
He’d looked at houses, but that was as far as he’d let it go. The night came when he got a grip on himself, and the next thing he got a grip on was the man who’d brought him there. He used a garrote, and what he got a grip on was on the guy’s throat, and then it was time to go back to New York.
He remembered the Mexican cafe in Roseburg now. The food had been good, though he didn’t suppose it was all that special, and he’d had a mild crush on the waitress, about as realistic as the whole idea of moving there. He thought of the man he’d killed, an accountant who’d become the proprietor of a quick-print shop.
You could learn the business in a couple of hours, the man had said of his new career. You could buy the place and move in the same day, Mitzi had said of the Lattimore house.
Patterns . . .
You could tell me, she’d said, thinking she was joking, but then you’d have to kill me. Oddly, in the languor that followed their lovemaking, he’d had the impulse to confide in her, to tell her what had brought him to Scottsdale.
Yeah, right.
He drove around for a while, then found his way back to his motel and surfed the TV channels without finding anything that caught his interest. He turned off the set and sat there in the dark.
He thought of calling Dot. There were things he could talk about with her, but others he couldn’t, and anyway he didn’t want to do any talking on a cell phone, not even an untraceable one.
He found himself thinking about the guy in Roseburg. He tried to picture him and couldn’t. Early on he’d worked out a way to keep people from the past from flooding the present with their faces. You worked with their images in your mind, leached the color out of them, made the features grow dimmer, shrank the picture as if viewing it through the wrong end of a telescope. You made them grow smaller and darker and hazier until they disappeared, and if you did it correctly you forgot everything but the barest of facts about them. There was no emotional charge, no weight to them, and they became more and more difficult to recall to mind.
But now he’d bridged a gap and closed a circuit, and the man’s face was there in his memory, the face of an aging chipmunk. Jesus, Keller thought, get out of my memory, will you? You’ve been dead for years. Leave me the hell alone.
If you were here, he told the face, I could talk to you. And you’d listen, because what the hell else could you do? You couldn’t talk back, you couldn’t judge me, you couldn’t tell me to shut up. You’re dead, so you couldn’t say a goddam word.
He went outside, walked around for a while, came back in and sat on the edge of the bed. Very deliberately he set about getting rid of the man’s face, washing it of color, pushing it farther and farther away, making it disappear. The process was more difficult than it had been in years, but it worked, finally, and the little man was gone to wherever the washed-out faces of dead people went. Wherever it was, Keller prayed he’d stay there.
He took a long hot shower and went to bed.
In the morning he found someplace new to have breakfast. He read the paper and had a second cup of coffee, then drove pointlessly around the perimeter of Sundowner Estates.
Back at the motel, he called Dot on his cell phone. “Here’s what I’ve been able to come up with,” he said. “I park where I can watch the entrance. Then, when some resident drives out, I follow them.”
“Them?”
“Well, him or her, depending which it is. Or them, if there’s more than one in the car. Sooner or later, they stop somewhere and get out of the car.”
“And you take them out, and you keep doing this, and sooner or later it’s the right guy.”
“They get out of the car,” he said, “and I hang around until nobody’s watching, and I get in the trunk.”
“The trunk of their car.”
“If I wanted to get in the trunk of my own car,” he said, “I could go do that right now. Yes, the trunk of their car.”
“I get it,” she said. “Their car morphs into the Trojan Chrysler. They sail back into the walled city, and you’re in there, and hoping they’ll open the trunk eventually and let you out.”
“Car trunks have a release mechanism built in these days,” he said. “So kidnap victims can escape.”
“You’re kidding,” she said. “The auto makers added something for the benefit of the eight people a year who get stuffed into car trunks?”
“I think it’s probably more than eight a year,” he said, “and then there are the people, kids mostly, who get locked in accidentally. Anyway, it’s no problem getting out.”
“How about getting in? You real clever with auto locks?”
“That might be a problem,” he admitted. “Does everybody lock their car nowadays?”
“I bet the ones who live in gated communities do. Not when they’re home safe, but when they’re out and about in a dangerous place like the suburbs of Phoenix. How crazy are you about this plan, Keller?”
“Not too,” he admitted.
“Because how would you even know they were going back? Your luck, they’re on their way to spend two weeks in Las Vegas.”
“I didn’t think of that.”
“Of course you’d know right away,” she said, “when you tried to get in the trunk and it was full of suitcases and copies of Beat the Dealer.”
“It’s not a great plan,” he allowed, “but you wouldn’t believe the security. The only other thing I can think of is to buy a place.”
“Buy a house there, you mean. I don’t think the budget would cover it.”
“I could keep it as an investment,” he said, “and rent it out when I wasn’t using it.”
“Which would be what, fifty-two weeks a year?”
“But if I could afford to do all that,” he said, “I could also afford to tell the client to go roll his hoop, which I’m thinking I might have to go and do anyway.”
“Because it’s looking difficult.”
“It’s looking impossible,” he said, “and then on top of everything else . . .”
“Yes? Keller? Where’d you go? Hello?”
“Never mind,” he said. “I just figured out how to do it.”
“As you can see,” Mitzi Prentice said, “the view’s nowhere near as nice as the Lattimore house. And there’s just two bedrooms instead of three, and the furnishing’s a little on the generic side. But compared to spending the next two weeks in a motel—”
“It’s a whole lot more comfortable,” he said.
“And more secure,” she said, “just in case you’ve got your stamp collection with you.”
“I don’t,” he said, “but a little security never hurt anybody. I’d like to take it.”
“I don’t blame you, it’s a real good deal, and nice income for Mr. and Mrs. Sundstrom, who’re in the Galapagos Islands looking at blue-footed boobies. That’s where all the crap on their walls comes from. Not the Galapagos, but other places they go to on their travels.”
“I was wondering.”
“Well, they could tell you about each precious piece, but they’re not here, and if they were then their place wouldn’t be available, would it? We’ll go to the office and fill out the paperwork, and then you can give me a check and I’ll give you a set of keys and some ID to get you past the guard a
t the gate. And a pass to the clubhouse, and information on greens fees and all. I hope you’ll have some time for golf.”
“Oh, I should be able to fit in a few rounds.”
“No telling what you’ll be able to fit in,” she said. “Speaking of which, let’s fit in a quick stop at the Lattimore house before we start filling out lease agreements. And no, silly, I’m not trying to get you to buy that place. I just want you to take me into that bedroom again. I mean, you don’t expect me to do it in Cynthia Sundstrom’s bed, do you? With all those weird masks on the wall? It’d give me the jimjams for sure. I’d feel like primitive tribes were watching me.”
The Sundstrom house was a good deal more comfortable than his motel, and he found he didn’t mind being surrounded by souvenirs of the couple’s travels. The second bedroom, which evidently served as Harvey Sundstrom’s den, had a collection of edged weapons hanging on the walls, knives and daggers and what he supposed were battle-axes, and there was no end of carved masks and tapestries in the other rooms. Some of the masks looked godawful, he supposed, but they weren’t the sort of things to give him the jimjams, whatever the jimjams might be, and he got in the habit of acknowledging one of them, a West African mask with teeth like tombstones and a lot of rope fringe for hair. He found himself giving it a nod when he passed it, even raising a hand in a salute.
Pretty soon, he thought, he’d be talking to it.
Because it was becoming clear to him that he felt the need to talk to someone. It was, he supposed, a need he’d had all his life, but for years he’d led an existence that didn’t much lend itself to sharing confidences. He’d spent virtually all his adult life as a paid assassin, and it was no line of work for a man given to telling his business to strangers—or to friends, for that matter. You did what they paid you to do and you kept your mouth shut, and that was about it. You didn’t talk about your work, and it got so you didn’t talk about much of anything else, either. You could go to a sports bar and talk about the game with the fellow on the next barstool, you could gripe about the weather to the woman standing alongside you at the bus stop, you could complain about the mayor to the waitress at the corner coffee shop, but if you wanted a conversation with a little more substance to it, well, you were pretty much out of luck.