Hit Man

He had to force himself to drive over to the Pizza Hut and get something to eat. All he wanted to do was drive straight to O’Hare and grab the first plane back to New York, but he knew he had to get some food into his system. Otherwise he’d start seeing things on the road north, swing the wheel to dodge something that wasn’t there, and wind up putting the car in a ditch. Professionalism, he told himself, and ate an individual pan pizza and drank a medium Pepsi.



And placed the call again. “Toxic Shock”-and this time she was there, and picked up.



“It’s all taken care of,” he said.



“You mean-”



“I mean it’s all taken care of.”



“I can’t believe it. My God, I can’t believe it.”



You’re safe now, he wanted to say. You’ve got your life back.



Instead, cool and professional, he told her how to make the final payment. Cash, same as before, sent by Federal Express to Mary Jones, at another Mail Boxes Etc. location, this one in Peekskill.



“I can’t thank you enough,” the woman said. Keller said nothing, just smiled and rang off.



Driving north and east through Illinois, Keller went over it in his mind. He thought,Cressida says hello. Jesus, he couldn’t believe he’d said that. What did he think he was, some kind of avenging angel? A knight in shining armor?



Jesus.



Well, nothing all day but two doughnuts and a cup of coffee. That was as far as you had to look for an explanation. Got him irritable and angry, made him take it personally.



Still, he thought, after he’d turned in the car and bought his ticket, Lauderheim was unquestionably one thoroughgoing son of a bitch. No loss to anyone.



And he could still hear her saying she couldn’t thank him enough, and what was so wrong with enjoying that?



“I was thinking,” Andria said. “About looking up your name in phone books?”



“And?”



“At first I thought it was a way of looking for yourself. But then I had another idea. I think it’s a way of making sure there’s room for you.”



“Room for me?”



“Well,” she said, “if you’re not already there, then there’s room for you.”



Eight, nine days later, Dot called. Coincidentally enough, he was doing the crossword puzzle at the time.



“Keller,” she said, “guess what Mary Jones didn’t find in her mailbox?”



“That’s strange,” he said. “It’s still not here? Maybe you ought to call her. Maybe FedEx lost it and it’s in a back office somewhere.”



“I’m way ahead of you, boy. I called her.”



“And?”



“Line’s been disconnected… You still there, Keller?”



“I’m trying to think. You’re sure that-”



“I called back, got the same recording. ‘The number you have reached, blah blah blah, has been disconnected.’ Leaves no room for doubt.”



“No.”



“The money doesn’t show up, and now the line’s been disconnected. Does it begin to make you wonder?”



“Maybe they arrested her,” he said. “Before she could send the money.”



“And stuck her in a cell and left her there? A quiet lady who writes about deaf rabbits?”



“Well-”



“Let me pull out and pass a few slow-moving vehicles,” she said. “What I did, I called Information in St. Louis.”



“ St. Louis?”



“ Webster Groves is a suburb of St. Louis.”



“ Webster Groves.”



“Where Cressida Wallace lives, according to that reference book in the library.”



“But she moved,” Keller said.



“You’d think so, wouldn’t you? But the Information operator had a listing for her. So I called the number. Guess what?”



“Come on, Dot.”



“A woman answered. No answering machine, no computer-generated horseshit. ‘Hello?’ ‘Cressida Wallace, please.’ ‘This is she.’ Well, it wasn’t the voice I remembered. ‘Is this Cressida Wallace, the author?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘The author ofHow the Bunny Lost His Ears?’ ”



“And she said it was?”



“Well, how many Cressida Wallaces do you figure there are? I didn’t know what the hell to say next. I told her I was from the Muscatine paper, I wanted to know her impressions of the town. Keller, she didn’t know what I was talking about. I had to tell her what state Muscatine was in.”



“You’d think she’d have at least heard of it,” he said. “It’s not that far from St. Louis.”



“I don’t think she gets out much. I think she sits in her house and writes her stories. I found out this much. She’s lived in the same house in Webster Groves for thirty years.”



He took a deep breath. He said, “Where are you, Dot?”



“Where am I? I’m at an outdoor pay phone half a mile from the house. I’m getting rained on.”



“Go on home,” he said. “Give me an hour or so and I’ll call you back.”



* * *



“All right,” he said, closer to two hours later. “Here’s how it shapes up. Stephen Lauderheim wasn’t some creep, stalking some innocent woman.”



“We figured that.”



“He was a partner in Loud amp; Clear Software. He and a fellow named Randall Cleary started the firm. Lauderheim and Cleary, Loud amp; Clear.”



“Cute.”



“Lauderheim was married, father of two, bowled in a league, belonged to Rotary and the Jaycees.”



“Hardly the type to kidnap a dog and torture it to death.”



“You wouldn’t think so.”



“Who set him up? The wife?”



“I figure the partner. Company was doing great and one of the big Silicon Valley firms was looking to buy them out. My guess is one of them wanted to sell and the other didn’t. Or there was some kind of partnership insurance in place. One partner dies, the other buys him out at a prearranged price, pays off the widow with the proceeds of the partnership insurance policy. Of course the company’s now worth about twenty times what they agreed to.”



“How’d you get all this, Keller?”



“Called the city room at the Muscatine paper, said I was covering the death for a computer magazine and could they fax me the obit and anything they’d run on the killing.”



“You’ve got a fax?”



“The candy store around the corner’s got one. All the guy in Muscatine could tell from the number I gave him was it was in New York.”



“Nice.”



“After the fax came in, the stuff he sent gave me some ideas for other calls to make. I could sit on the phone for another hour and find out more, but I figure that’s enough.”



“More than enough,” she said. “Keller, the little shit foxed us. And then she stiffed us in the bargain.”



“That’s what I don’t get,” he said. “Why stiff us? All he had to do was send the money and I’d never have thought of Iowa again unless I was flying over it. He was home free. All he had to do was pay what he owed.”



“Cheap son of a bitch,” Dot said.



“But where’s the sense? He paid out half the money without even knowing who he was sending it to. If he could afford to do that on the come, you can imagine what kind of money was at stake here.”



“It paid off.”



“It paid off but he didn’t. Stupid.”



“Very stupid.”



“I’ll tell you what I think,” he said. “I think the money was the least of it. I think he wanted to feel superior to us. I mean, why go through all this Cressida Wallace crap in the first place? Does he figure I’m a Boy Scout, doing my good deed for the day?”



“He figured we were amateurs, Keller. And needed to be motivated.”



“Yeah, well, he figured wrong,” he said. “I have to pack, I’ve got a flight in an hour and a half and I have to call Andria. We’re getting paid, Dot. Don’t worry.”



“I wasn’t worried,” she said.



Which one, he wondered, was Cleary? The plump one who’d gone to lunch with Lauderheim? Or the nerd in the lab coat who’d walked out to the parking lot with him?



Or someone else, someone he hadn’t even seen. Cleary might well have been out of town that day, providing himself with an alibi.



Didn’t matter. You didn’t need to know what a man looked like to get him on the phone.



Cleary, like his late partner, had an unlisted home phone number. But the firm, Loud amp; Clear, had a listing. Keller called from his motel room-this time he was staying at the one with HBO. He used the electronic novelty item he’d picked up at Abercrombie amp; Fitch, and when a woman answered he said he wanted to speak to Randall Cleary.



“Whom shall I say is calling?”



Whom, he noted. Not bad for Muscatine, Iowa.



“Cressida Wallace,” he said.



She put him on hold, but he did not languish there for long. Moments later he heard a male voice, one he could not recognize. “Cleary,” the man said. “Who is this?”



“Ah, Mr. Cleary,” he said. “This is Miss Cressida Wallace.”



“No, it’s not.”



“It is,” Keller said, “and I understand you’ve been using my name, and I’m frightfully upset.”



Silence from Cleary. Keller unhooked the device that had altered the pitch of his voice. “Toxic Shock,” he said in his own voice. “You stupid son of a bitch.”



“There was a problem,” Cleary said. “I’m going to send you the money.”



“Why didn’t you get in touch?”



“I was going to. You can’t believe how busy we’ve been around here.”



“Why’d you disconnect your phone?”



“I thought, you know, security reasons.”



“Right,” Keller said.



“I’m going to pay.”



“No question about it,” Keller said. “Today. You’re going to FedEx the money today. Overnight delivery, Mary Jones gets it tomorrow. Are we clear on that?”



“Absolutely.”



“And the price went up. Remember what you were supposed to send?”



“Yes.”



“Well, double it.”



There was a silence. “That’s impossible. It’s extortion, for God’s sake.”



“Look,” Keller said, “do yourself a favor. Think it through.”



Another silence, but shorter. “All right,” Cleary said.



“In cash, and it gets there tomorrow. Agreed?”



“Agreed.”



He called Dot from a pay phone, had dinner, and went back to his room. This motel had HBO, so of course there was nothing on that he wanted to watch. It figured.



In the morning he skipped the diner and had a big breakfast at a Denny’s on the highway. He drove up to Davenport and made two stops, at a sporting goods store and a hardware store. He went back to his motel, and around two in the afternoon he called White Plains.