Hit Man

  “Sue Ellen? Girl, where are you hiding yourself?”

  Keller wrapped an arm around the big man’s neck, got him in a choke hold, and applied the pressure, kicking the door shut while he was at it. Wickwire struggled at first, his shoulders bucking, then sagged in Keller’s arms and slumped forward.

  Keller let him go, stepped back, and kicked him three times in the face. Then he knelt down next to the unconscious Wickwire and broke his neck. He stripped the corpse to socks and underwear, heaved him onto the bed, and spilled most of the remaining bourbon into his open mouth. He took a chair and laid it on its side, took a pillow and flung it across the room, left dresser drawers half-open. He packed up the voice-changer, along with the clothing from the drawers and closet, and remembered to fetch Wickwire’s wallet and money clip from his trousers.

  He locked the door, fastened the chain bolt. The peephole in the door didn’t afford much of a view, but he was able to see what looked like Wickwire’s Lincoln Town Car parked at the very edge of his field of vision. It was odds-on the bodyguards were in it, listening to terrible music on the radio, waiting for their boss to knock off a cutie.

  Or vice versa, Keller thought.

  He wiped the surfaces where he might have left prints, then climbed out through the bathroom window and headed for the strip mall where he’d left the car.

  Back in his own hotel, Keller packed his suitcase and checked flight schedules. There was, as far as he could tell, no point in sticking around. The job was done, and, if he said so himself, done rather neatly.

  It would look for all the world like a badger game scam gone wrong. The woman who’d called herself Sue Ellen Bates had lured Wickwire to the motel room, and her male partner had turned up to extort money from him. There’d been a scuffle, with Wickwire sustaining injuries to the face and head before he had his neck broken, accidentally or on purpose.

  Then the two con artists had had the presence of mind to try staging things, pouring bourbon on Wickwire, even though an autopsy would fail to show any of the stuff inside him. They hadn’t troubled to straighten up after themselves, however, had stuck around only long enough to rob the corpse, then fled.

  There were probably some loose ends and inconsistencies, but Keller didn’t figure anybody would lose sleep over them. All in all, it was a death that looked like a logical consequence of the life Richard Wickwire had lately led, and both the New Orleans cops and the citizenry at large were apt to conclude that it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy. Which, come to think of it, was pretty much Keller’s own view of the matter.

  He’d stuffed Sue Ellen’s clothes in one Dumpster, the telephone voice-changer in another. In the time-honored tradition of pickpockets and purse snatchers, he’d dropped Wickwire’s wallet (minus the cash and credit cards) into a mailbox. The plastic, sliced into unidentifiable fragments, went down a storm drain. Wickwire’s money clip—sterling silver, monogrammed—was identifiable, so he’d take it back to New York and manage to lose it there, where whoever found it would keep it or hock it or melt it or give it to a friend with the right initials.

  Meanwhile it was full of cash, and the cash was now Keller’s. He counted it, along with the bills from Wickwire’s wallet, and was surprised by the total, which ran to just under fifteen hundred dollars.

  He thought of Hildebrand, the man with the suspenders, and of the Austrian stamps he’d bought from him. There’d been a few more he’d have liked to buy, especially a mint copy of Austria’s first stamp, Scott #1, the one kreuzer orange. It was an error, printed on both sides, and listed in the catalog at $1450. Hildebrand had tagged it $1000 and indicated he’d take $900 for it, but that struck Keller as an awful lot to pay for a stamp that his album didn’t even have a space for. Besides, he could pick up a used copy for a tenth the price of a mint specimen.

  Still, he hadn’t been able to get the stamp out of his head. And now, with a windfall like this. . .

  And it wasn’t as if he were in that big a rush to get back to New York.

  It was about a month later when the telephone rang in Keller’s apartment. He was at his desk, working on his stamp collection. He still hadn’t finished the task of remounting everything in his new albums, but he’d made good progress, having recently knocked off Sweden and started in on Switzerland.

  He picked up the phone, and Dot said, “Keller, you work too goddam hard. I think you should take a vacation.”

  “A vacation,” he said.

  “That’s the ticket. Haul your butt out of town and stay gone for a week.”

  “A week?”

  “You know what? A week’s not long enough to unwind, the way you go at it. Better make it ten days.”

  “Where do you want me to go?”

  “Well, hell,” she said. “It’s your vacation, Keller. What do I care where you go?”

  “I thought you might have a suggestion.”

  “Anyplace nice,” she said. “So long as they’ve got a decent hotel, the kind where you’d be comfortable checking in under your own name.”

  “I see.”

  “Buy yourself a plane ticket.”

  “Under my own name,” he said.

  “Why not? Use your credit card, so you’ve got a good record for tax purposes.”

  Keller rang off and sat back, thinking. A vacation, for God’s sake. He didn’t take vacations, the kind that called for travel. His life in New York was a vacation, and when he traveled it was strictly business.

  He had a good idea what this was about, and didn’t really want to look at it too closely. Meanwhile, though, he had to pick a destination and get out of town. Where, though?

  He reached for the latest stamp weekly, turned the pages. Then he picked up the phone and called the airlines.

  Keller had been to Kansas City several times over the years. His work had always gone smoothly, and his memories of the town were good ones. They were crazy about fountains, he remembered. Every time you turned around you ran across another fountain. If a city had to have a theme, he supposed you could do a lot worse than fountains. They gladdened the heart a lot more than, say, nuclear reactor cones.

  It was an unusual experience for him to travel under his own name and use his own credit cards. He sort of liked it, but felt exposed and vulnerable. Signing in at the restored downtown hotel, he wrote down not only his own name but his own address as well. Who ever heard of such a thing?

  Of course, as a retiree he’d be doing that all the time. No reason not to. Assuming he ever went anyplace.

  He unpacked and took a shower, then put on a tie and jacket and went to the third-floor suite to pick up an auction catalog.

  There were half a dozen men in the room, two of them employees of the firm conducting the sale, the others potential bidders who’d come for an advance look at the lots that interested them. They sat at card tables, using tongs to extract stamps from glassine envelopes, squinting at them through pocket magnifiers, checking the perforations, jotting down notes in the margins of their catalogs.

  Keller took the catalog to his room. He’d brought his checklists, a whole sheaf of them, and he sat down and got to work. The following day they were still offering lots for inspection, so he went down there again and examined some of the lots he’d checked off in the catalog. He had his own pair of tongs to lift the stamps with, his own pocket magnifier to squint through.

  He got to talking with a fellow a few years older than himself, a man named McEwell who’d driven over from St. Louis for the sale. McEwell was interested exclusively in Germany and German states and colonies, and it seemed unlikely that the two of them would be butting heads during the sale, so they felt comfortable getting acquainted. Over dinner at a steakhouse they talked stamps far into the night, and Keller picked up some good pointers on auction strategy. He felt grateful, and tried to grab the check, but McEwell insisted on splitting it. “It’s a three-day auction,” he told Keller, “and you’re a general collector with a ton of lots in there to tempt you.
You save your money for the stamps.”

  It was indeed a three-day sale, and Keller was in his chair for all three days. The first session was all U.S., so there was nothing for him to bid on, but the whole process was fascinating all the same. There were mail bids for all the lots, and floor action on the majority of them, and the auction moved along at a surprisingly brisk pace. It was good to have a session where he was just an observer; it gave him the chance to get the hang of it.

  The next two days, he was a player.

  He’d brought a lot of cash, more than he’d planned on spending, and he got more in the form of a cash advance on his Visa card. When it was all over he sat in his hotel room with his purchases on the desk in front of him, pleased with what he’d acquired and the bargain prices he’d paid, but a little bit anxious at having spent so much money.

  He had dinner again that night with McEwell, and confided some of what he was feeling. “I know what you mean,” McEwell said, “and I’ve been there myself. I remember the first time I paid over a thousand dollars for a single stamp.”

  “It’s a milestone.”

  “Well, it was for me. And I said to the dealer, ‘You know, that’s a lot of money.’ And he said, ‘Well, it is, but you’re only going to buy that stamp once.’ ”

  “I never thought of it that way,” Keller said.

  He stayed on at the hotel after the sale was over, and every morning at breakfast he read the New York Times. On Thursday he found the article he’d been more or less waiting for. He read it several times through, and he would have liked to pick up a phone but decided he’d better not.

  He stayed in Kansas City that day, and the next day, too. He walked around an art museum for a couple of hours without paying much attention to what he saw. He dropped in on a couple of stamp dealers, one of whom he’d seen at the auction, and he spent a few dollars, but his heart wasn’t really in it.

  The next day he packed his bag and flew back to New York. First thing the following morning he got on a train to White Plains.

  In the kitchen, Dot poured him a glass of iced tea and muted the television set. How many times had he been here, sitting like this? But there was a difference. This time the two of them were all alone in the big old house.

  “It’s hard to believe he’s gone,” he said.

  “Tell me about it,” Dot said. “I keep thinking I should be bringing him his breakfast on a tray, taking the paper up to him. Then I remind myself I’ll never get to do that again. He’s gone.”

  “So many years . . .”

  “For you and me both, Keller.”

  “The paper just said natural causes,” he said. “It didn’t go into detail.”

  “No.”

  “But I don’t suppose it could have been all that natural. Or you wouldn’t have sent me to Kansas City.”

  “That’s where you went? Kansas City?”

  He nodded. “Nice enough town.”

  “But you wouldn’t want to live there.”

  “I’m a New Yorker,” he said. “Remember?”

  “Vividly.”

  “Natural causes,” he prompted.

  “Well, what could be more natural? You live too long, you got a mind that’s starting to turn to pablum, you become erratic and unreliable, what’s the natural thing for someone to do?”

  “It was that bad, huh?”

  “Keller,” she said, “three weeks ago this reporter showed up. A kid barely old enough to shave, working his first job on the local paper. I’ll tell you, I thought he was there to sell me a subscription, but no, he came to interview the old man.”

  “You’d think the editor would have sent somebody more experienced.”

  “It wasn’t the editor’s idea,” she said, “or the kid’s either, God help him. And who does that leave?”

  “You mean. . . ”

  “He’d decided it was time to write his memoirs. Time to tell all the untold stories, time to tell where the bodies were buried. And I do mean bodies, Keller, and I do mean buried.”

  “Jesus.”

  “He saw this kid’s byline on some high school basketball roundup and decided he was the perfect person to collaborate with.”

  “For God’s sake.”

  “Need I say more? I’d already reached the point where I made sure all incoming calls got routed downstairs. Now I had to worry about the calls he made on his own. Keller, it’s the hardest decision I ever had to make in my life.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “But what choice did I have? It had to be done.”

  “Sounds that way.” He picked up his tea, put it down untasted. “Who’d you get for it, Dot?”

  “Who do you think, Keller? You know the story about the little red hen?”

  “No.”

  “Well, I’m not about to tell it to you, but she couldn’t find anyone to help her, so she did it all herself.”

  “You . . .”

  “Right.”

  “Dot, for God’s sake. I would have done it.”

  “I didn’t even want you within five hundred miles, Keller. I wanted you to have an alibi that nobody could crack. Just in case somebody knew about the connection and decided to shake the box and see what fell out.”

  “I understand,” he said, “but under the circumstances. . . ”

  “No,” she said. “And I have to say it was easy for me, Keller. The hardest decision, but the easiest thing in the world. Something in his cocoa to make him sleep, and a pillow over his face to keep him from waking up.”

  “That’s the kind of thing that shows up in an autopsy.”

  “Only if they hold one,” she said. “His age, and then his regular doctor came over and signed the death certificate, and that’s all you need. I had him cremated. It was his last wish.”

  “It was?”

  “How do I know? I said it was, and they gave me the ashes in a tin can, and if some joker wants to do an autopsy now I’d say he’s got his work cut out for him. I don’t know what the hell to do with the ashes. Well, I’m sure I’ll think of something. There’s no hurry.”

  “No.”

  “It was something I never thought I’d have to do, something I never even figured I’d be capable of doing. Well, you never know, do you?”

  “No.”

  “It’s on my mind a lot, but I guess I’ll get over that. This too shall pass, right?”

  “You’ll be fine,” he said.

  “I know. I’m fine now, as far as that goes. Now all I have to do is figure out what I’m going to do with the rest of my life.”

  “I was going to ask you about that.”

  She frowned. “What I suppose I’ll do,” she said, “is retire. I can afford it. I’ve put money aside myself, and he left me the house. I can sell it.”

  “Probably bring a good price.”

  “You would think so. And there’s the cash on hand, which he didn’t specifically leave me, but since I’m the only one who knows about it. . . ”

  “That makes it yours.”

  “You bet. So it’s enough to live on. I can even afford to travel some. Go on cruises, put my feet up, see the world from the deck of a ship.”

  “You don’t actually sound that enthusiastic, Dot.”

  “Well,” she said, “it’s probably because I’m not. What I’d rather do is keep on keeping on.”

  “Stay here, you mean?”

  “Why not? And stay in the business. You know, I’m the one who’s been pretty much running things lately.”

  “I know.”

  “But with you deciding to pack it in, it would mean finding other people to work with, and the ones I have access to are not people I’m crazy about. So I don’t know.”

  “You can’t work with people unless you feel a hundred percent about them.”

  “I know it. Look, I’m better off hanging it up. All I have to do is follow the same advice I gave you.”

  “And get a hobby.”

  “There you go. It really worked for
you, didn’t it?You’re a full-fledged philatelist, and don’t ask me to say that three times.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of it. But that’s me, all right.”

  “I’ll bet you even found a stamp dealer in Kansas City. To pass the time while you were there.”

  “Actually,” he said, “that’s how I picked Kansas City.” And he told her a little about the auction. “It’s pretty amazing,” he said. “You’ll be sitting next to some rube in baggy pants and a dirty T-shirt, and he’ll raise his index finger a few times and spend fifty or a hundred thousand dollars on postmasters’ provisionals.”

  “Whatever they are,” she said. “No, don’t tell me. I have a feeling stamp collecting’s not going to be my hobby, Keller, but I think it’s great that it’s yours. I guess we can say you’re retired, can’t we? And fully prepared to enjoy the Golden Years.”

  “Well,” he said.

  “Well what?”

  “Well, not exactly.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Well, it’s an expensive hobby,” he said. “It doesn’t have to be, you can buy thousands of stamps for two and three cents apiece, but if you really get serious about it. . . ”

  “It runs into money.”

  “It does,” he agreed. “I’m afraid I’ve been dipping into my retirement fund the last month or so. I’ve spent more money than I expected to.”

  “No kidding.”

  “And the thing is I’m really enjoying it,” he said, “and learning more and more about it as I go along. I’d like to keep on spending serious money on stamps.”

  She gave him a thoughtful look. “It doesn’t sound as though you’re quite ready to retire after all.”

  “I’m not in a position to,” he said. “Not anymore. And I don’t really want to, either. In fact I’d like to get as much work as I can, because I can use the money.”

  “To buy stamps.”

  “It sounds silly, I know, but. . . ”

  “No it doesn’t,” she said. “It sounds like the answer to a maiden’s prayer. We always worked well together, didn’t we, Keller?”