Hit Man

  “And I’ll keep it even after I have a phone,” she said, “because I’m out walking dogs all the time, so how could you reach me if you needed me on short notice?”

  He called her beeper number and punched in his own number at the signal. She called back within five minutes.

  “I figure a few days,” he told her. “But it could run a week, maybe longer.”

  “No problem,” she assured him. “I have the key. The elevator attendant knows it’s all right to let me up, and Nelson thinks I’m his madcap aunt. If you run out of dog food I’ll buy more. What else is there?”

  “I don’t know. Do you think I should leave the TV on for him?”

  “Is that what you ordinarily do when you leave him alone?”

  The truth of the matter was that he didn’t leave Nelson alone much. More often than not lately he either took the dog along or stayed home himself. Nelson had unquestionably changed his life. He walked more than he ever used to, and he also stayed in more.

  “I guess I won’t leave it on,” he said. “He never takes any real interest in what I’m watching.”

  “He’s a pretty cultured guy,” she said. “Have you tried him on Masterpiece Theater?”

  Keller flew to Omaha, where the target was an executive of a telemarketing firm. The man’s name was Dinsmore, and he lived with his wife and children in a nicely landscaped suburban house. He would have been a cinch to take out, but someone local had tried and missed, and the man thus knew what to expect and had changed his routine accordingly. His house had a high-tech security system, and a private security guard was posted out front from dusk to dawn. Police cruisers, marked and unmarked, drove past the house at all hours.

  He had hired a personal bodyguard, too, who called for him in the morning, stayed at his side all through the day, and saw him to his door in the evening. The bodyguard was a wildly overdeveloped young man with a mane of ragged yellow hair. He looked like a professional wrestler stuffed into a business suit.

  Short of leasing a plane and dive-bombing the house, Keller couldn’t see an easy way to do it. Security was tight at the business premises, where access was limited to persons with photo ID badges. Even if you got past the guards, the blond bodyguard spent the whole day in a chair outside of Dinsmore’s office, riffling the pages of Iron Man magazine.

  The right move, he thought, was to go home. Come back in six weeks. By then the bodyguard would have walked off the job in steroid-inspired rage, or Dinsmore, chafing at his hulking presence, would have fired him. Failing that, the two would have relaxed their guard. The cops would be less attentive as well.

  Keller would look for an opening, and it wouldn’t take long to find one.

  But he couldn’t do that. Whoever wanted the man dead wasn’t willing to wait.

  “Time’s what’s short,” his contact explained. “Soldiers, firepower, that’s easy. You want a few guys in cars, somebody blocks the streets, somebody rams his car, no problem.”

  Wonderful. Omaha, meet Delta Force. Not too long ago Keller had imagined himself as a tight-lipped loner in the Old West, riding into town to kill a man he’d never met. Now he was Lee Marvin, leading a ragged band of losers on a commando raid.

  “We’ll see,” he said. “I’ll think of something.”

  * * *

  The fourth night there he went for a walk. It was a nice night and he’d driven downtown, where a man on foot didn’t arouse suspicions. But there was something wrong, and he’d been walking for fifteen minutes before he figured out what it was.

  He missed the dog.

  For years, Keller had been alone. He’d grown used to it, finding his own way, keeping his own counsel. Ever since childhood he’d been solitary and secretive by nature, and his line of work made these traits professional requirements.

  Once, in a shop in SoHo, he’d seen a British World War II poster. It showed a man winking, his mouth a thin line. The caption read, “What I know I keep to myself,” evidently the English equivalent of “Loose lips sink ships.” Keller had thought about the poster for hours and returned the following day to price it. The price had been reasonable enough, but he’d realized during the negotiations that the sight of that canny face, winking forever across the room at him, would soon become oppressive. The man on the poster, advising privacy, would himself constitute an invasion of it. How could you kiss a girl with that face looking on? How could you pick your nose?

  The sentiment, though, stayed with him. On the train to and from White Plains, on a flight to some distant city where his services were required, on the flight home with his mission accomplished, the Englishman’s motto would sound in his mind like a mantra. What he knew he kept to himself.

  In therapy he’d felt conflicted. The process wouldn’t work unless he was willing to open up. But how could he tell a West Side psychologist what he wouldn’t let slip to a stranger on a train, or a woman in bed? He’d wound up talking mostly of dreams and childhood memories, hoping all the while that what Dr. Jerrold Breen knew he’d keep to himself. In the end, of course, Breen had taken his knowledge to the grave, leaving Keller to resume his lifelong habit of silence.

  But he’d broken that habit with Nelson.

  Perhaps the best thing about dogs, it seemed to Keller, was that you could talk to them. They made much better listeners than human beings did. You didn’t have to worry that you were boring them, or that they’d heard a particular story before, or that they’d think less of you for what you were revealing about yourself. You could tell them anything, secure in the knowledge that the matter would end right there. They wouldn’t pass it on to somebody else, nor would they throw it back in your face in the course of an argument.

  Which was not to say that they didn’t listen. It was quite clear to Keller that Nelson listened. When you talked to him you didn’t have the feeling that you were talking to a wall, or to a gerbil or a goldfish. Nelson didn’t necessarily understand what you told him, but he damn well listened.

  And Keller told him everything. The longings that had begun to stir during therapy—to open up, to divulge old secrets, to reveal oneself to oneself—now found full expression on the long walks he took with Nelson and the long evenings they spent at home.

  “I never set out to do this for a living,” he told Nelson one afternoon in the park. “And for a while, you know, it was just something I’d done a couple of times. It wasn’t who I was.

  “Except it got so it was who I was, and I didn’t realize it. How I found out, see, I’d meet somebody who’d heard of me, and he’d show something that would surprise me, whether it was fear or respect, whatever it was. He’d be reacting to a killer, and that would puzzle me, because I didn’t know that’s what I was.

  “I remember in high school how they did all this career counseling, showing you how to figure out what you wanted to do in life and then take steps in that direction. I think I told you how those years were sort of a blur for me. I went through them like somebody with a light concussion, I saw everything through a veil. But when they got on this career stuff I just didn’t have a clue. There was this test, questions like would you rather pull weeds or sell cabbages or teach needlepoint, and I couldn’t finish the test. Every question was utterly baffling.

  “And then I woke up one day and realized I had a career, and it consisted of taking people out. I never had any interest in it or any aptitude for it, but it turns out you don’t need any. All you need is to be able to do it. I did it once because somebody told me to, and I did it a second time because somebody told me to, and before I knew it it was what I did. Then, once I’d defined myself, I started to learn the technical aspects. Guns, other tools, unarmed techniques. How to get around people. Stuff you ought to know.

  “The thing is, there’s not all that much you have to know. It’s not like the careers they told you about in high school. You don’t prepare for it. Maybe there are things that happen to you along the way that prepare you for it, but that’s not something you choose.
/>
  “What do you think? Do you want to split a hot-dog? Or should we head on home?”

  * * *

  Back from his solitary walk, Keller looked at the phone and wished there was a way he could call Nelson. He’d avoided getting an answering machine, seeing great potential for disaster in such a device, but it would be useful now. He could call up and talk, and Nelson would be able to hear him.

  And, if he really opened up and spoke his mind, it would all be there on the tape, where anybody could retrieve it. No, he decided, it was just as well he didn’t have a machine.

  At noon the following day he was in his rented car when Dinsmore and his bodyguard drove downtown and parked in front of a restaurant in the Old Market district. Keller waited outside for a few minutes, then found a parking space and went in after them. The hostess seated Keller just two tables away from Dinsmore. Keller ordered shrimp scampi and watched Dinsmore and the wrestler each put away an enormous steak.

  A couple of hours later he called Dot in White Plains. “Guy’s forty pounds overweight and here I just saw him tuck into a porterhouse the size of a manhole cover,” he said. “Put half a shaker of salt on it first. How much of a rush are these people in? Because they shouldn’t have to wait too long before a stroke or a coronary closes the account.”

  “There’s no cause like a natural cause,” Dot said. “But you know what they say about time, Keller.”

  “It’s of the essence?”

  “Yabba dabba do,” Dot said.

  The next day Dinsmore and his bodyguard had the same table at the same restaurant. This time a third man accompanied them. He looked to be a business associate of Dinsmore’s. Keller couldn’t overhear the conversation, he was seated a little farther away this time, but he could see that Dinsmore and the third man were doing the talking, while the bodyguard divided his attention between the food on his plate and the other diners in the room. Keller had brought a newspaper along and managed to have his eyes on it when the bodyguard glanced his way.

  At one point Dinsmore got to his feet, and Keller’s pulse quickened. Before he could react, the bodyguard was also standing, and both men walked off to the men’s room. Keller stayed where he was and ate his spaghetti carbonara.

  He was watching out of the corner of his eye when the two men returned to their table. The bodyguard took a moment to scan the room, while Dinsmore sat down at once and shook some more salt onto his half-eaten steak.

  Almost without thinking, Keller reached out and let his hand close around his own salt cellar. It was made of glass, and fit his fist like a roll of nickels. If he were to hit someone now, the salt cellar would lend considerable authority to the blow.

  Damn thing was lethal.

  That night Keller had a couple of drinks after dinner. He still felt them when he got back to his motel. He walked around the block to sober up, and when he got back to his room he picked up the phone and called Nelson.

  He wasn’t drunk enough to expect the dog to answer. But it seemed to him that this was a way to make a minimal sort of contact. The phone would ring. The dog would hear it ring. While he could not be expected to recognize it as his master’s voice, Keller would have reached out and touched him, as they said in the phone company ads.

  No, of course it didn’t make sense. Dialing the number, he knew it didn’t make sense. But it wouldn’t cost anything, and there wouldn’t be a record of the call, so what harm could it do?

  The line was busy.

  His first reaction—and it was extremely brief, just momentary—was one of jealous paranoia. The dog was on the phone with someone else, and they were talking about Keller.

  The thought came and went in an instant, leaving Keller to shake his head in wonder at the mysteries of his own mind. A flood of other explanations came to him, each of them far more probable than that first thought.

  Nelson could have lurched into the end table on which the phone sat, knocking it off the hook. Andria, using the phone before or after their walk, could have replaced the receiver incorrectly. Or, most probably, the long-distance circuits were overloaded, and any call to New York would be rewarded with a busy signal.

  A few minutes later he tried again and got a busy signal again.

  He walked back and forth, fighting the impulse to call the operator and have her check the line. Eventually he picked up the phone and tried the number a third time, and this time it rang. He let it ring four times, and as it rang he imagined the dog’s reaction—the ears pricking up, the alert gleam in the eyes.

  “Good boy, Nelson,” he said aloud. “I’ll be home soon.”

  * * *

  The next day, Friday, he spent the morning in his motel room. Around eleven he called the restaurant in the Old Market. Dinsmore had arrived at the restaurant at 12:30 on both of his previous visits. Keller booked a table for one at 12:15.

  He arrived on time and ordered a cranberry juice spritzer. He looked across at Dinsmore’s table, now set for two. If this went well, he thought, he could be home in time to take Nelson for a walk before bedtime.

  At 12:30, Dinsmore’s table remained empty. Ten minutes later a pair of businesswomen were seated at it. Keller ate his food without tasting it, drank a cup of coffee, paid the check, and left.

  Saturday he went to a movie. Sunday he went to another movie and walked around the Old Market district. Sunday night he sat in his room and looked at the phone. He had already called home twice, letting the phone ring, trying to tell himself he was establishing some kind of psychic contact with his dog. He hadn’t had anything to drink and he knew what he was doing didn’t make any sense, but he’d gone ahead and done it anyhow.

  He reached for the phone, started to dial a different number, then caught himself and left the room. He made the call from a pay phone, dialing Andria’s beeper number, punching in the pay phone number after the tone sounded. He didn’t know if it would work, didn’t know if her beeper would receive more than a seven-number signal, didn’t know if she’d be inclined to return a long-distance call. And she might be walking a dog, Nelson or some other client’s, and did he really want to stand next to this phone for an hour waiting for her to call back? He couldn’t call from his room, because then her call would have to come through the switchboard, and she wouldn’t know whom to ask for. Even if she guessed it was him, the name Keller would mean nothing to the motel switchboard, and it was a name he didn’t want anyone in Omaha to hear, anyway. So—

  The phone rang almost immediately. He grabbed it and said hello, and she said, “Mr. Keller?”

  “Andria,” he said, and then couldn’t think what to say next. He asked about the dog and she assured him that the dog was fine.

  “But I think he misses you,” she said. “He’ll be glad when you’re home.”

  “So will I,” Keller said. “That’s why I called. I had hoped to be back the day before yesterday, but things are taking longer than I thought. I’ll be a few more days, maybe longer.”

  “No problem.”

  “Well, just so you know,” he said. “Listen, I appreciate your calling me back. I may call again if this drags on. I’ll reimburse you for the call.”

  “You’re already paying for this one,” she said. “I’m calling from your apartment. I hope that’s all right?”

  “Of course,” he said. “But—”

  “See, I was here when the beeper went off, and I figured who else would be calling me from out of town? So I figured it would be all right to use your phone, since it was probably you I’d be calling.”

  “Sure.”

  “As a matter of fact,” she said, “I’ve been spending a lot of time here. It’s nice and quiet, and Nelson seems to like the company. His ears pricked up just now when I said his name. I think he knows who I’m talking to. Do you want to say hello to him?”

  “Well—”

  Feeling like an idiot, he said hello to the dog and told him he was a good boy and that he’d see him soon. “He got all excited,” Andria assured
him. “He didn’t bark, he hardly ever barks—”

  “It’s the dingo in him.”

  “—but he did a lot of panting and pawing the floor. He misses you. We’re doing fine here, me and Nelson, but he’ll be glad to see you.”

  Keller got to the restaurant at 12:15 Monday. The hostess recognized him and led him directly to the same table he’d had Friday. He looked over at Dinsmore’s table and saw that it was set for four, and that there was a RESERVED card on it.

  At 12:30, two men in suits were seated at Dinsmore’s table. Keller didn’t recognize either of them, and began to despair of his entire plan. Then Dinsmore arrived, accompanied by the wrestler.

  Keller watched them while he ate his meal. Three men, drinking their drinks and wolfing their steaks, talking heartily, gesturing volubly. While the fourth man, the bodyguard, sat like a coiled spring.

  Too many people, Keller thought. Give it another day.

  The next day he arrived at the same time and the hostess led him to the table he’d reserved. Dinsmore’s table had two places set, and a RESERVED sign in place. Keller got to his feet and went to the men’s room, where he locked himself in a stall.

  A few minutes later he left the men’s room and threaded his way through the maze of tables, passing close to the Dinsmore table on his way, bumping into it, reaching out to steady himself.

  As far as he could tell, nobody paid him any attention.

  He returned to his own table, sat down, waited. At 12:30 Dinsmore’s table was still unoccupied. What would he do if they gave it to somebody else? He couldn’t try to undo what he’d just done, could he? He didn’t see how, not with people sitting at the table.