Hit List

Nine

Why a thumb?

Keller, back in New York, pondered the question. He couldn’t see what a thumb had to do with murder. When you used a gun, it was your index finger that gave the trigger a squeeze. When you used a knife, you held it in your palm with your fingers curled around the handle. Your thumb might press the hilt, as a sort of guide, but a man could have no thumbs at all and still get the business end of a knife to go where he wanted it.

Did you use your thumbs when you garroted somebody? He mimed the motion, letting his hands remember, and he didn’t see where the thumbs had much of a part to play. Manual strangulation, now that was different, and you did use your thumbs, you used all of both hands, and would have a hard time otherwise.

Still, why a murderer’s thumb?

“Here’s what I don’t get,” Dot said. “You go off to some half-a-horse town at the ass end of nowhere special and you poke around for a week or two. Then you go to a vacation paradise in the middle of a New York winter and you’re back the same day. The same day!”

“I had an opening and I took it,” he said. “I wait and maybe I never get that good a shot at him again.”

“I realize that, Keller, and God knows I’m not complaining. It just seems like a shame, that’s all. Here you are, the two of you, fresh off a couple of planes from the frozen North, and before either one of you gets the chill out of your bones, you’re on a flight to New York and he’s rapidly approaching room temperature.”

“Water temperature.”

“I stand corrected.”

“And it was like a bathtub.”

“That’s nice,” she said. “He could have opened his veins in it, but after you held his head underwater for a few minutes he no longer felt the need to. But couldn’t you have waited a few days? You’d have come home with a tan and he’d have gone into the ground with one. You meet your Maker, you want to look your best.”

He glanced over at the television set, where a thin young man and a fat young woman were having a food fight. Intermittently a couple of burly men in jumpsuits restrained one or both of them, only to let them resume pelting one another with bowls of salad.

“Jerry Springer,” Dot said. “It’s sort of a combination of Family Court and WWF Wrestling.”

“How come you’ve got the sound off?”

“Believe me, it’s worse if you can hear them.”

“I can see how it would be,” he said. “But lately you’ve always got the sound off. The picture on and the sound off.”

“I know.”

“If you had it the other way around I’d say you invented the radio. This way, what? The silent film?”

“I hardly look at it, Keller. Then what’s it doing on-is that what you were going to ask?”

“I might have.”

“For years,” she said, “I only put the set on to watch something. I had my afternoon programs, and then for a while I got hooked on those home shopping channels.”

“I remember.”

“I never bought anything, but I would stare at the screen for hours. Part of it was there were no commercials to break your concentration.”

“Whole thing’s a commercial.”

“Well, no kidding,” she said. “I didn’t delude myself that I was watching PBS. Anyway, I watched QVC for a while, and then I got over it before I could spend my life savings on Diamonique.”

“Close call.”

“And then he died,” she said, with a glance at the ceiling. “And he wasn’t much company, especially toward the end, but the house all of a sudden felt empty without him. It’s not like I was getting choked up all the time. And I didn’t feel myself longing for the comfort of his presence, because when was he ever a comfort?”

“Even so.”

“Even so,” she said. “What I did, I took to keeping the radio going all the time. Just to have the sound of a human voice. Does that sound strange to you?”

“Not at all.”

“But I’ll tell you what’s the trouble with radio. You can’t mute the commercials.”

“I had the same thought myself not long ago. You can, by turning it off, but you don’t know when to turn it back on again.”

“TV spoils you. Somebody starts yammering at you, telling you their flashlight batteries keep going and going and going…”

“I kind of like that rabbit, though.”

“So do I, but I don’t want to hear about it. Watching it’s another matter. I tried NPR, but it’s not just commercials, it’s all the other crap you don’t want to hear. Traffic, weather, and please-send-us-money-so-we-won’t-have-to-keep-asking-you-for-money. So I started playing the TV all the time, muting it whenever it got on my nerves, and the commercials aren’t so bad when you can’t hear what they’re saying. Some of them, with the sound off you can’t even tell what they’re selling.”

“But you’ve got it mute all the time, Dot.”

“What I found out,” she said, “is that damn near everything on television is better with the sound off. And that way it doesn’t interfere with the rest of your life. You can read the paper or talk on the phone and the TV doesn’t distract you. If you don’t look at it, you get so that you forget it’s on.”

“Then why not turn it off?”

“Because it gives me the illusion that I’m not all alone in a big old barn of a house waiting for my arteries to harden. Keller, do you suppose we could change the channel? Not on the TV, on this conversation. Will you do me a big favor and change the subject?”

“Sure,” he said. “Dot, have you ever noticed anything odd about my thumb?”

“Your thumb?”

“This one. Does it look strange to you?”

“You know,” she said, “I’ve got to hand it to you, Keller. That’s the most complete change of subject I’ve ever encountered in my life. I’d be hard put to remember what we were talking about before we started talking about your thumb.”

“Well?”

“Don’t tell me you’re serious? Let me see. I’d have to say it looks like a plain old thumb to me, but you know what they say. You’ve seen one thumb…”

“But look, Dot. That’s the whole point, that they’re not identical. See how this one goes?”

“Oh, right. It’s got that little…”

“Uh-huh.”

“Are mine both the same? Like two peas in a pod, as far as I can make out. This one’s got a little scar at the base, but don’t ask me how I got it because I can’t remember. Keller, you made your point. You’ve got an unusual thumb.”

“Do you believe in destiny, Dot?”

“Whoa! Keller, you just switched channels again. I thought we were discussing thumbs.”

“I was thinking about Louisville.”

“I’m going to take the remote control away from you, Keller. It’s not safe in your hands. Louisville?”

“You remember when I went there.”

“Vividly. Kids playing basketball, guy in a garage, and, if I remember correctly, the subtle magic of carbon monoxide.”

“Right.”

“So?”

“Remember how I had a bad feeling about it, and then a couple got killed in my old room, and-“

“I remember the whole business, Keller. What about it?”

“I guess I’ve just been wondering how much of life is destined and preordained. How much choice do people really have?”

“If we had a choice,” she said, “we could be having some other conversation.”

“I never set out to be what I’ve become. It’s not like I took an aptitude test in high school and my guidance counselor took me aside and recommended a career as a killer for hire.”

“You drifted into it, didn’t you?”

“That’s what I always thought. That’s certainly what it felt like. But suppose I was just fulfilling my destiny?”

“I don’t know,” she said, cocking her head. “Shouldn’t there be music playing in the background? There always is when they have conversations like this in one of my soap operas.”

“Dot, I’ve got a murderer’s thumb.”

“Oh, for the love of God, we’re back to your thumb. How did you manage that, and what in the hell are you talking about?”

“Palmistry,” he said. “In palmistry, a thumb like mine is called a murderer’s thumb.”

“In palmistry.”

“Right.”

“I grant you it’s an unusual-looking thumb,” she said, “although I never noticed it in all the years I’ve known you, and never would have noticed it if you hadn’t pointed it out. But where does the murderer part come in? What do you do, kill people by running your thumb across their life line?”

“I don’t think you actually do anything with your thumb.”

“I don’t see what you could do, aside from hitching a ride. Or making a rude gesture.”

“All I know,” he said, “is I had a murderer’s thumb and I grew up to be a murderer.”

“ ‘His Thumb Made Him Do It.’ “

“Or was it the other way around? Maybe my thumb was normal at birth, and it changed as my character changed.”

“That sounds crazy,” she said, “but you ought to be able to clear it up, because you’ve been carrying that thumb around all your life. Was it always like that?”

“How do I know? I never paid much attention to it.”

“Keller, it’s your thumb.”

“But did I notice it was different from other thumbs? I don’t know, Dot. Maybe I should see somebody.”

“That’s not necessarily a bad idea,” she said, “but I’d think twice before I let them put me on any medication.”

“That’s not what I mean,” he said.

The astrologer was not what he’d expected.

Hard to say just what he’d been expecting. Someone with a lot of eye makeup, say, and long hair bound up in a scarf, and big hoop earrings-some sort of cross between a Gypsy fortune-teller and a hippie chick. What he got in Louise Carpenter was a pleasant woman in her forties who had long since thrown in the towel in the battle to maintain her figure. She had big blue-green eyes and a low-maintenance haircut, and she lived in an apartment on West End Avenue full of comfortable furniture, and she wore loose clothing and read romance novels and ate chocolate, all of which seemed to agree with her.

“It would help,” she told Keller, “if we knew the precise time of your birth.”

“I don’t think there’s any way to find out.”

“Your mother has passed?”

Passed. It might be more accurate, he thought, to say that she’d failed. He said, “She died a long time ago.”

“And your father…”

“Died before I was born,” Keller said, wondering if it was true. “You asked me over the phone if there was anyone who might remember. I’m the only one who’s still around, and I don’t remember a thing.”

“There are ways to recover a lot of early memory,” she said, and popped a chocolate into her mouth. “All the way back to birth, in some instances, and I’ve known people who claim they can remember their own conception. But I don’t know how much to credit all of that. Is it memory or is it Memorex? Besides, you probably weren’t wearing a watch at the time.”

“I’ve been thinking,” he said. “I don’t know the doctor’s name, and he might be dead himself by this time, but I’ve got a copy of my birth certificate. It doesn’t have the time of birth, just the date, but do you suppose the Bureau of Vital Statistics would have the information on file somewhere?”

“Possibly,” she said, “but don’t worry about it. I can check it.”

“On the Internet? Something like that?”

She laughed. “No, not that. You said your mother mentioned getting up early in the morning to go to the hospital.”

“That’s what she said.”

“And you were a fairly easy birth.”

“Once her labor started, I came right out.”

“You wanted to be here. Now you happen to be a Gemini, John, and… shall I call you John?”

“If you want.”

“Well, what do people generally call you?”

“Keller.”

“Very well, Mr. Keller. I’m comfortable keeping it formal if you prefer it that way, and-“

“Not Mr. Keller,” he said. “Just plain Keller.”

“Oh.”

“That’s what people generally call me.”

“I see. Well, Keller… no, I don’t think that’s going to work. I’m going to have to call you John.”

“Okay.”

“In high school kids used to call each other by their last names. It was a way to feel grown up. ‘Hey, Carpenter, you finish the algebra homework?’ I can’t call you Keller.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“I’m being neurotic, I realize that, but-“

“John is fine.”

“Well then,” she said, and rearranged herself in the chair. “You’re a Gemini, John, as I’m sure you know. A late Gemini, June nineteenth, which puts you right on the cusp of Cancer.”

“Is that good?”

“Nothing’s necessarily good or bad in astrology, John. But it’s good in that I enjoy working with Geminis. I find it to be an extremely interesting sign.”

“How so?”

“The duality. Gemini is the sign of the twins, you see.” She went on talking about the properties of the sign, and he nodded, agreeing but not really taking it all in. And then she was saying, “I suppose the most interesting thing about Geminis is their relationship to the truth. Geminis are naturally duplicitous, yet they have an inner reverence for the truth that echoes their opposite number across the Zodiac. That’s Sagittarius, of course, and your typical Sadge couldn’t tell a lie to save his soul. Gemini can lie without a second thought, while being occasionally capable of this startling Sagittarean candor.”

“I see.”

He was influenced as well by Cancer, she continued, having his sun on its cusp, along with a couple of planets in that sign. And he had a Taurus moon, she told him, and that was the best possible place for the moon to be. “The moon is exalted in Taurus,” she said. “Have you noticed in the course of your life how things generally turn out all right for you, even when they don’t? And don’t you have an inner core, a sort of bedrock stability that lets you always know who you are?”

“I don’t know about that last part,” he said. “I’m here, aren’t I?”

“Maybe it’s your Taurus moon that got you here.” She reached for another chocolate. “Your time of birth determines your rising sign, and that’s important in any number of ways, but in the absence of available information I’m willing to make the determination intuitively. My discipline is astrology, John, but it’s not the only tool I use. I’m psychic, I sense things. My intuition tells me you have Cancer rising.”

“If you say so.”

“And I prepared a chart for you on that basis. I could tell you a lot of technical things about your chart, but I can’t believe you’re interested in all that, are you?”

“You’re psychic, all right.”

“So instead of nattering on about trines and squares and oppositions, let me just say it’s an interesting chart. You’re an extremely gentle person, John.”

Oh?

“But there’s so much violence in your life.”

Oh.

“That’s the famous Gemini duality,” she was saying. “On the one hand, you’re thoughtful and sensitive and calm, exceedingly calm. John, do you ever get angry?”

“Not very often.”

“No, and I don’t think you stifle your anger, either. I get that it’s just not a part of the equation. But there’s violence all around you, isn’t there?”

“It’s a violent world we live in.”

“There’s been violence swirling around you all your life. You’re very much a part of it, and yet you’re somehow untouched by it.” She tapped the sheet of paper, with his stars and planets all marked out. “You don’t have an easy chart,” she said.

“I don’t?”

“Actually, that’s something to be grateful for. I’ve seen charts of people who came into the world with no serious oppositions, no difficult aspects. And they wind up with lives where nothing much happens. They’re never challenged, they never have to draw upon inner resources, and so they wind up leading reasonably comfortable lives and holding secure jobs and raising their kids in a nice safe clean suburb. And they never make anything terribly interesting of themselves.”

“I haven’t made much of myself,” he said. “I’ve never married or fathered a child. Or started a business, or run for office, or planted a garden, or written a play, or… or…”

“Yes?”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I never expected to get…”

“Emotional?”

“Yes.”

“It happens all the time.”

“It does?”

“Just the other day I told a woman she’s got Jupiter squaring her sun, but that her Jupiter and Mars are trined, and she burst into tears.”

“I don’t even know what that means.”

“Neither did she.”

“Oh.”

“I see so much in your chart, John. This is a difficult time for you, isn’t it?”

“I guess it must be.”

“Not financially. Your Jupiter-well, you’re not rich, and you’re never going to be rich, but the money always seems to be there when you need it, doesn’t it?”

“It’s never been a problem.”

“No, and it won’t be. You’ve found ways to spend it in the past couple of years”-stamps, he thought-“and that’s good, because now you’re getting some pleasure out of your money. But you won’t overspend, and you’ll always be able to get more.”

“That’s good.”

“But you didn’t come here because you were concerned about money.”

“No.”

“You don’t care that much about it. You always liked to get it and now you like to spend it, but you never cared deeply about it.”

“No.”

“I’ve prepared a solar return,” she said, “to give you an idea what to expect in the next twelve months. Some astrologers are very specific-‘July seventeenth is the perfect time to start a new project, and don’t even think about being on water on the fifth of September.’ My approach is more general, and… John? Why are you holding your right hand like that?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“With the thumb tucked inside. Is there something about your thumb that bothers you?”

“Not really.”

“I’ve already seen your thumb, John.”

“Oh.”

“Did someone once tell you something about your thumb?”

“Yes.”

“That it’s a murderer’s thumb?” She rolled her eyes. “Palmistry,” she said heavily.

“You don’t believe in it?”

“Of course I believe in it, but it does lend itself to some gross oversimplification.” She reached out and took his hand in both of hers. Hers were soft, he noted, and pudgy, but not unpleasantly so. She ran a fingertip over his thumb, his homicidal thumb.

“To take a single anatomical characteristic,” she said, “and fasten such a dramatic name to it. No one’s thumb ever made him kill a fellow human being.”

“Then why do they call it that?”

“I’m afraid I haven’t studied the history of palmistry. I suppose someone spotted the peculiarity in a few notorious murderers and spread the word. I’m not even certain it’s statistically more common among murderers than the general population. I doubt anyone really knows. John, it’s an insignificant phenomenon and not worth noticing.”

“But you noticed it,” he said.

“I happened to see it.”

“And you recognized it. You didn’t say anything until you noticed me hiding it in my fist. That was unconscious, I didn’t even know I was doing it.”

“I see.”

“So it must mean something,” he said, “or why would it stay in your mind?”

She was still holding his hand. Keller had noticed that this was one of the ways a woman let you know she was interested in you. Women touched you a lot in completely innocent ways, on the hand or the arm or the shoulder, or held your hand longer than they had to. If a man did that it was sexual harassment, but it was a woman’s way of letting you know she wouldn’t mind being harassed herself.

But this was different. There was no sexual charge with this woman. If he’d been made of chocolate he might have had something to worry about, but mere flesh and blood was safe in her presence.

“John,” she said gently, “I was looking for it.”

“For…”

“The thumb. Or anything else that might confirm what I already knew about you.”

She was gazing into his eyes as she spoke, and he wondered how much shock registered in them. He tried not to react, but how did you keep what you felt from showing up in your eyes?

“And what’s that, Louise?”

“That I know about you?”

He nodded.

“That your life has been filled with violence, but I think I already mentioned that.”

“You said I was gentle and not full of anger.”

“But you’ve had to kill people, John.”

“Who told you that?” She was no longer holding his hand. Had she released it? Or had he taken it away from her?

“Who told me?”

Maggie, he thought. Who else could it have been? Maggie was the only person they knew in common. But how did Maggie know? In her eyes he was a corporate suburbanite, even if he lived alone in the heart of the city.

“Actually,” she was saying, “I had several informants.”

His heart was hammering. What was she saying? How could it be true?

“Let me see, John. There was Saturn, and Mars, and we don’t want to forget Mercury.” Her tone was soft, her gaze so gentle. “John,” she said, “it’s in your chart.”

“My chart.”

“I picked up on it right away. I got a very strong hit while I was working on your chart, and when you rang the bell I knew I would be opening the door to a man who had done a great deal of killing.”

“I’m surprised you didn’t cancel the appointment.”

“I considered it. Something told me not to.”

“A little bird?”

“An inner prompting. Or maybe it was curiosity. I wanted to see what you looked like.”

“And?”

“Well, I knew right away I hadn’t made a mistake with your chart.”

“Because of my thumb?”

“No, though it was interesting to have that extra bit of confirmation. And the most revealing thing about your thumb was the effort you made to conceal it. But the vibration I picked up from you was far more revealing than anything about your thumb.”

“The vibration.”

“I don’t know a better way to put it. Sometimes the intuitive part of the mind picks up things the five senses are blind and deaf to. Sometimes a person just knows something.”

“Yes.”

“I knew you were…”

“A killer,” he supplied.

“Well, a man who has killed. And in a very dispassionate way, too. It’s not personal for you, is it, John?”

“Sometimes a personal element comes into it.”

“But not often.”

“No.”

“It’s business.”

“Yes.”

“John? You don’t have to be afraid of me.”

Could she read his mind? He hoped not. Because what came to him now was that he was not afraid of her, but of what he might have to do to her.

And he didn’t want to. She was a nice woman, and he sensed she would be able to tell him things it would be good for him to hear.

“You don’t have to fear that I’ll do anything, or say anything to anyone. You don’t even need to fear my disapproval.”

“Oh?”

“I don’t make many moral judgments, John. The more I see, the less I’m sure I know what’s right and what’s wrong. Once I accepted myself”-she reached, grinning, for a chocolate-“I found it easier to accept other people. Thumbs and all.”

He looked at his thumb, then raised his eyes to meet hers.

“Besides,” she said, very gently, “I think you’ve done wonderfully in life, John.” She tapped his chart. “I know what you started with. I think you’ve turned out just fine.”

He tried to say something, but the words got stuck in his throat.

“It’s all right,” she said. “Go right ahead and cry. Never be ashamed to cry, John. It’s all right.”

And she drew his head to her breast and held him while, astonished, he sobbed his heart out.