Gym Rat & the Murder Club

by Lawrence Block

  I reached him on his cell, begged off. Something I got to do, I told him. The fee was already paid, and I said he could find someone else to take my place or just let it go. Friday morning I got to the gym earlier than usual. I boosted poundages on all my lifts, did extra sets, capped each series with a static contraction rep. It felt like I had more energy than usual, but I don’t know. I think it was more a case of having a need to use every bit of what energy I had.

  Hell of a workout.

  At 2:45 that afternoon I was in a small antique shop called Your Grandmother’s Closet. I was the only customer, and I hoped the shopkeeper wasn’t counting on me, because I was only there so I could look out the window. The diner where I was supposed to meet Graham Tillman was right across the street.

  I took a moment to admire a pair of brass bookends, one with a bull, the other with a bear. A gift for a stockbroker, I suppose, though they’d work just as well for a person who just happened to like bronze animals. They were even heavier than they looked, and either one would put a pretty good dent in a person’s skull.

  I didn’t say as much to the woman, a frail creature who was already a little bit afraid of me. A developed physique will have that effect on some people, and draw admiration or hostility from others, depending where they’re coming from.

  She had, she told me, quite a few other bookends besides the ones on display, some quite modestly priced. I could have told her there were only three books in my room, and they were doing fine stacked one on top of the other, but right about then a car pulled up at the corner and my guy got out of it.

  “I’m just looking,” I said. “Getting out of the heat for a minute or two. But bookends are a great gift, aren’t they? When I need to buy somebody a present, I’ll know where to come.”

  I didn’t pay attention to her response. I watched Tillman do nothing at all until the light turned and the car drove off. Then he looked around guardedly, saw nothing to put him off stride, and went into the restaurant.

  I’d spent enough time in the shop and went out onto the sidewalk. I stood in a patch of shade and watched him order from the menu. By the time the waiter brought him his food I’d crossed the street and entered the diner.

  The booth behind him was empty, as was the one in front of him. I went straight to his booth, sat on the seat across from him.

  His eyes widened.

  I said, “I don’t know that James Bond would do it this way, though I suppose it’s a question of which actor was playing him. Sean Connery, now, he’d sit wherever he wanted.”

  “It seemed a useful precaution.”

  “Until someone notices that two men at different tables with their backs to each other are having a conversation. This way we’re just two men having a meal.”

  While he thought that over the waiter came by with a menu, and I asked him to bring me an unsweetened iced tea. Did I want lemon? Sure, I said. Lemon’d be nice.

  Tillman said, “Maybe you’re right. But I’m the one who’ll be in the hot seat. Something happens to a woman, they look at the husband. And they don’t just eyeball him. They look at everything. They tear his life apart.”

  “You’ll be able to prove you weren’t around when it happened.”

  “But can I prove I wasn’t here? When this happened?”

  “In other words, they’ll figure you hired somebody.”

  “And how do I set up an alibi for that?”

  We kicked that around a little, and I reminded him he owed me two hundred dollars. For showing up. He gave me a pair of hundreds, and I took my time filing them away in my wallet.

  He said, “I get the feeling you’re not going to do it.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because sitting at separate tables was a sensible precaution, with no added risk, and you’re bright enough to recognize that. But you’d already decided to turn me down, so there was suddenly no need for precautions. And you wanted to be able to see my face when you told me to forget it.”

  He was right that I wanted to see his face.

  “There’s something you probably don’t know,” he said. “It was too late for the papers, and I don’t think it would get any TV play here in the city. But where I live it made the morning newscast.”

  “I think you said Jersey?”

  “Morristown.”

  “And something happened there?”

  He shook his head. “Something happened in Denville.”

  “I’ve heard of Morristown,” I said, “but not Danville.”

  “Denville. With an E.”

  “Whatever. That’s near where you are?”

  “Ten, twelve miles away. Maybe fifteen minutes in light traffic.”

  He paused, waiting for me to ask what had happened in Denville. I figured he’d get there on his own.

  “A woman was raped there,” he said. “And murdered. A woman in a garden apartment, somebody broke in and did what he did.”

  “They catch the guy?”

  “Not yet.”

  “They probably will,” I said. “Sooner rather than later, would be my guess. A guy like that, he’ll leave his DNA all over the place, get his fingerprints on every surface that’ll take them. Then he shows up for work with scratches on his face and a story about his neighbor’s hostile cat.”

  “Maybe they’ll catch him.”

  “Maybe? Of course they will, and the sooner the better. You don’t want assholes like that running free.”

  He gave me a look that was hard to read.

  I said, “What?”

  “Maybe it’ll take them a while,” he said. “Maybe they won’t catch up with him until something else happens.”

  It was good being face to face with him, not back to back in separate booths. I had a chance to watch the play of expressions on his face, and after a moment I said, “Oh.”

  “Right.”

  I drank some of my iced tea. I said, “Same thing happens to another woman, they’ve got to think it might be the same guy.”

  “Opens things up, doesn’t it?”

  “They’ll still grill you up and down,” I said.

  “Because it’s always the husband.”

  “But you’re in Vegas when it happens, and it’s a fact that you could have hired it done, and the mope you hired could have decided to imitate a killing that just happened—”

  “But it starts getting far–fetched, doesn’t it? As opposed to the simple explanation that the same nut job raped and killed both women. In fact, who’s to say he’ll stop? Maybe he does another one, or even two or three, and then they catch him, and they hang every dead girl in the state around his neck before they ship him off to Rahway.”

  We batted it back and forth. I pointed out that the cops would hold back specifics of the Denville killing. Right now we didn’t know what he’d used, a gun or a knife or his own two hands, and that might come out in follow–up stories, but there’d almost certainly be other things that wouldn’t.

  “If he left prints in Denville,” I said, “they’re not going to turn up in Morristown.”

  “So who says he can’t learn from experience? He’s more careful the second time around. Same thing with his DNA. I don’t know if he used a condom in Denville, but my guess is he’ll definitely use one with, um, the woman in Morristown.”

  Didn’t want to say her name. Interesting.

  “The big question is timing,” he said. “Today is what, the twenty–second?”

  Was it? That sounded about right. It was a Friday, it was in July, and it had been July for a while. The twenty–second was a reasonable date for it to be.

  “A week from Sunday,” he said, “camp starts.”

  “In Maine, I think you said.”

  “On the tenth, I fly out to Vegas. I’m there Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights. I fly back here on Sunday, that’d be the fourteenth, and Monday morning we’re supposed to drive up to Bar Harbor.”

  Bah Hahbuh, that was how he said it, exaggerating
the regional accent.

  “If all goes well,” I said.

  “If all goes well,” he said, “Bah Hahbuh can go fuck itself. You see the window we’ve got, don’t you? Those four nights.”

  “The tenth through the thirteenth.”

  “If that nut job in Denville can stay out of custody between now and then—” He drew a breath, let it out. “Make it all a lot easier,” he said.

  I thought about it, nodded. Hard to see anything wrong with his reasoning.

  “So he’s got three weeks to stay away from the cops, and you’ve got three weeks to get ready.”

  “I never said I’d do it.”

  He wasn’t expecting that, and his face showed it. I could see him replaying our conversation, confirming my failure to commit. “I jumped to a conclusion,” he said. “You took the money—”

  “The two hundred dollars. For showing up.”

  “Yes, of course. But the way you were talking, speculating about the lunatic in Denville—well, as I said, I jumped to a conclusion.”

  “There’s something I need to know first.”

  “Oh?”

  “Why me? You don’t know me at all. The only time either of us said a word to the other was when you asked me to spot you on the bench press, and by then you’d already picked me out for the job, hadn’t you?”

  He thought it over, nodded.

  “Who else did you ask?”

  “Nobody.”

  “Are you sure of that? It’s important, if you sounded out anybody else I really have to know.”

  “I’m absolutely certain. You were the only one.”

  I knew he was telling the truth, even as I’d know that would be his answer.

  What I didn’t know was why.

  And how could I, when he didn’t know himself? “I just had a feeling,” he said.

  “A feeling?”

  “A sense, an impression, I don’t know what else to call it. I had my eye on you for about a week.”

  “A week.”

  “Maybe ten days. I didn’t stare, I was discreet, but I’d look for you every time I went to the gym. You were usually there.”

  “I’m there a lot.”

  “I didn’t know anything about you,” he said, “and I still don’t. I don’t suppose it would have been hard to find out your name, but I made a point of not doing so. A little voice in my head kept telling me you were the guy.”

  “The guy.”

  “The answer to my problem.”

  “And this just came to you.”

  “I don’t know any better way to explain it.”

  And would I do it? The unspoken question hung in the air. He’d had two bites of his sandwich and hadn’t touched it since I sat down. I’d had one small sip of my iced tea when the waiter brought it, and since then I’d wrapped my hand around the glass a few times but never picked it up.

  “You looked at me,” I said, “and a voice in your head told you I’d hire on to kill your wife.”

  “I know it sounds crazy.”

  “Here’s something crazier,” I said. “I’ll do it.”

  I wound up walking all the way home.

  One of the car services had brought him, and he used a cell phone to call for a pickup. Five minutes, he told me, and did I want him to drop me off somewhere? I gave him a look, and I guess he realized that wasn’t such a good idea.

  I could have told him that coming and going by car service wasn’t such a good idea either. He was shaping up to be a curious combination of supercautious and nonchalant, starting out at separate tables and winding up sharing a cab. I decided he had enough to remember, and left him to pay the check.

  I’d figured on a bus down Second Avenue. I could transfer to another bus across Fourteenth Street, or I could get off at Seventeenth and walk west for half a mile. But I reached the sidewalk just in time to see my bus pull away, and I decided it was a nice afternoon and I could walk through the park and then catch a bus the rest of the way. Or a subway, whatever.

  But I didn’t. I left the park at its southwest corner, Fifty-ninth and Central Park West, and remembered there was a good place for smoothies on the west side of Eighth Avenue somewhere around Fiftieth Street. It was actually between Forty-eighth and Forty-ninth, and I ordered their Protein Bonanza with an extra shot of wheat grass.

  Figured I could afford it. Two hundred dollars for sitting at a table for half an hour. That would pay for a lot of wheat grass.

  Pay for some cabs, too, but at that hour it was nicer to walk than be stuck in traffic. I was halfway home and might as well walk the rest of the way.

  Might give my mind a chance to work a few things out.

  Where I live there’s a bathroom down the hall, with everybody on the floor sharing it. Aside from the toilet, I don’t use it much, as I’d rather shower at the gym.

  There’s a sink in my room, with a mirror over it, and when I got home I checked the mirror to see if I needed a shave. I didn’t, but I stood there anyway, studying the face in the mirror.

  I tried to see it with his eyes. What was it that looked like a killer? The eyes? The mouth? The set of the jaw? Or just the way they all went together?

  How could he have sensed what I hadn’t known myself?

  Before I left him at the table, we talked about money.

  “It’s not enough,” I told him.

  I said it sounded cut-rate. Seventy-five thousand, like he knew the price ought to be a hundred and was angling for a bargain. When he denied this, I asked him how he’d come up with the number.

  He said it was the most cash he could put his hands on without leaving a trail.

  “I like round numbers,” I said, which wasn’t true but I figured it sounded reasonable. We kicked it around, and I decided I could do it for his price, but of course it would all have to be in advance.

  He’d thought half in advance, half on completion. Wasn’t that how these things were generally done?

  “Think it through,” I suggested. “Do you really want to have to get money to me when the police have you in their sights? I know I won’t be up for another coffee shop rendezvous. Once the job’s done, I’ll go somewhere for a couple of weeks, and when I get back I’ll switch to another gym. Any luck at all we’ll never set eyes on each other again.”

  “If I pay you the whole sum in advance—”

  “If you don’t,” I said, “we can forget the whole thing.”

  “I see your point. But what recourse would I have if—”

  “If what? If I didn’t do what I said I’d do?”

  “Well?”

  “Think it through,” I said once again. “Do you really think I’m a person who’s about to leave loose ends?”

  That was Friday afternoon. Over the weekend I went to a movie—nothing special—and Tuesday evening I met my chess buddy at the club on Sullivan Street. We played three games and he won them all, and at dinner afterward he told me about the game he’d played on Thursday.

  “She offered two guys draws,” he said, “and they both accepted. It looked to me as though one of them had a winning position, but some things are hard to turn down.”

  Tell me about it, I thought.

  “I opened Ruy Lopez, and we just pushed the pieces around, and all of a sudden I was a pawn down, and the next thing I knew she was killing me with a queen-side attack. She got my rook for one of her knights, and that was enough of that. I tipped my king over and she thanked me for a good game, which was generous of her, because a good game was way more than I gave her.”

  “I wouldn’t have done any better.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe you’d have displayed hitherto undisclosed brilliance and wiped her off the board. But probably not.” He sighed. “I’ll say this. She’s got a really great pair of tits for a chessplayer.”

  That was Tuesday. Two days later I caught a glimpse of Tillman at the gym. He was working out with Troy, and I avoided catching his eye, not wanting to spark a conversation. The next day he wa
s on his own and this time I made a point of catching his eye, and he frowned and shook his head.

  I nodded toward the rest rooms, and walked across the floor to enter one of them. I closed the door and stood next to it, and a few minutes later someone tried it and found it locked, and then I heard him say, “Monday morning.”

  I said, just as softly, “It’s locker number three-eleven.”

  “I know.”

  “And the combination is all ones. Eleven-eleven.”

  “I remember.”

  I waited until I heard his footsteps. Then I got out of there and settled in on the leg press machine.

  Sunday I got in an early workout, then went over to Penn Station and spent a little over an hour on a train. I got off and walked around and caught another train back to the city.

  Kind of a nothing day. I might as well have stayed home.

  They have two kinds of lockers at the gym. Most of them are first-come-first-served, available free of charge to all members. They have combination locks built in, and you set the combination before you lock up. At closing time one of the employees throws a switch to unlock all the lockers, and anything left in them goes straight to Lost and Found.

  The other lockers, and there’s only one wall of them, are smaller, and they’re not free. You can rent one for fifty dollars a month. You set the combination, same as with the public lockers, but you’re the only one who gets to open it, and you can keep your gear there permanently. I’ve had #311 for almost as long as I’ve been a member, and Monday morning I went to it and unlocked it, using the same four-digit combination I’d been using all that time.

  Nothing much in there. Fingerless gloves, a spare pair of sneakers. A pair of shorts, a singlet.

  I reset the combination to 1-1-1-1 and locked up, went upstairs and got to work on the lat machine. Did a set, upped the weight, did another set, added some more weight, and did a third set to failure. Felt the effects of it, and it was a good feeling.

  It was Monday, so that meant he was working with Troy. When I caught his eye all I did was nod, and all he did was nod back, and that was enough. I climbed a flight of stairs and picked out a treadmill.