Hit List

Twelve

Nothing to it, really.

The keys worked. He didn’t run into anybody in the entryway or on the stairs. He listened at the door of the second-floor apartment, heard music playing and water running, and let himself in.

He put down his umbrella, took off his coat, slipped off his shoes, and made his way in silence through the living room and along a hallway to the bedroom door. That was where the music was coming from, and it was where the woman, a slender dishwater blonde with translucent white skin, was sitting cross-legged on the edge of an unmade bed, smoking a cigarette.

She looked frighteningly vulnerable, and Keller hoped he wouldn’t have to hurt her. If he could get Thurnauer alone, if he could do the man and get out without being seen, then he could let her live. If she saw him, well, then all bets were off.

The shower stopped running, and a moment later the bathroom door opened. A man emerged with a dark green towel around his waist. The guy was completely bald, and Keller wondered how the hell he’d managed to wind up in the wrong apartment. Then he realized it was Thurnauer after all. The guy had taken off his hair before he got in the shower.

Thurnauer walked over to the bed, made a face, and reached to take the cigarette away from the girl, stubbing it out in an ashtray. “I wish to God you’d quit,” he said.

“And I wish you’d quit wishing I would quit,” she said. “I’ve tried. I can’t quit, all right? Not everybody’s got your goddam willpower.”

“There’s the gum,” he said.

“I started smoking to get out of the habit of chewing gum. I hate how it looks, grown women chewing gum, like a herd of cows.”

“Or the patch,” he said. “Why can’t you wear a patch?”

“That was my last cigarette,” she said.

“You know, you’ve said that before, and much as I’d like to believe it-“

“No, you moron,” she snapped. “It was the last one I’ve got with me, not the last one I’m ever going to smoke. If you had to play the stern daddy and take a cigarette away from me, did it have to be my last one?”

“You can buy more.”

“No kidding,” she said. “You’re damn right I can buy more.”

“Go take a shower,” Thurnauer said.

“I don’t want to take a shower.”

“You’ll cool off and feel better.”

“You mean I’ll cool off and you’ll feel better. Anyway, you just took a shower and you came out grumpy as a bear with a sore foot. The hell with taking a shower.”

“Take one.”

“Why? What’s the matter, do I stink? Or do you just want to get me out of the room so you can make a phone call?”

“Mavis, for Christ’s sake…”

“You can call some other girl who doesn’t smoke and doesn’t sweat and-“

“Mavis-“

“Oh, go to hell,” Mavis said. “I’m gonna go take a shower. And put your hair on, will you? You look like a damn cue ball.”

The shower was running and Thurnauer was hunched over her makeup mirror, adjusting his hairpiece, when Keller got a hand over his mouth and plunged the letter opener into his back, fitting it deftly between two ribs and driving it home into his heart. The big man had no time to struggle; by the time he knew what was happening, it had already happened. His body convulsed once, then went slack, and Keller lowered him to the floor.

The shower was still running. Keller could be out the door before she was out of the shower. But as soon as she did come out she would see Thurnauer, and she’d know at a glance that he was dead, and she’d scream and yell and carry on and call 911, and who needed that?

Besides, the pity he’d felt for her had dried up during her argument with her lover. He’d responded to a sense of her vulnerability, a fragile quality that he’d since decided was conveyed by that see-through skin of hers. She was actually a whining, sniping, carping nag of a woman, and about as fragile as an army boot.

So, when she stepped out of the bathroom, he took her from behind and broke her neck. He left her where she fell, just as he’d left Thurnauer on the bedroom floor. You could try to set a scene, make it look as though she had stabbed him and then broke her neck in a fall, but it would never fool anybody, so why bother? The client had merely stipulated that the man be dead, and that’s what Keller had delivered.

It was sort of a shame about the girl, but it wasn’t all that much of a shame. She was no Mother Teresa. And you couldn’t let sentiment get in the way. That was always a bad idea, and especially on a high-risk day.

There were good restaurants in Boston, and Keller thought about going to Locke-Ober’s, say, and treating himself to a really good meal. But the timing was wrong. It was just after three, too late for lunch and too early for dinner. If he went someplace decent they would just stare at him.

He could kill a couple of hours. He hadn’t brought his catalog, so there was no point making the rounds of the stamp shops, but he could see a movie, or go to a museum. It couldn’t be that hard to find a way to get through an afternoon, not in a city like Boston, for God’s sake.

On a nicer day he’d have been happy enough just walking around Back Bay or Beacon Hill. Boston was a good city for walking, not as good as New York, but better than most cities. With the rain still coming down, though, walking was no pleasure, and cabs were hard to come by.

Keller, back on Newbury Street, walked until he found an upscale coffee shop that looked okay. It wasn’t going to remind anybody of Locke-Ober, but it was here and they would serve him now, and he was too hungry to wait.

The waitress wanted to know what the problem was. “It’s my coat,” Keller told her.

“What happened to your coat?”

“Well, that’s the problem,” he said. “I hung it on the hook over there, and it’s gone.”

“You sure it’s not there?”

“Positive.”

“Because coats tend to look alike, and there’s coats hanging there, and-“

“Mine is green.”

“Green green? Or more like an olive green?”

What difference did it make? There were three coats over there, all of them shades of beige, none at all like his. “The salesman called it olive,” he said, “but it was pretty green. And it’s not here.”

“Are you sure you had it when you came in?”

Keller pointed at the window. “It’s been like that all day,” he said. “What kind of an idiot would go out without a coat?”

“Maybe you left it somewhere else.”

Was it possible? He’d shucked the coat in the Exeter Street living room. Could he have left it there?

No, not a chance. He remembered putting it on, remembered opening his umbrella when he hit the street, remembered hanging both coat and umbrella on the peg before he slid into the booth and reached for the menu. And where was the umbrella? Gone, just like the coat.

“I didn’t leave it anywhere else,” he said firmly. “I was wearing the coat when I came in, and I hung it up right there, and it’s not there now. And neither is my umbrella.”

“Somebody must of taken it by mistake.”

“How? It’s green.”

“Maybe they’re color-blind,” she suggested. “Or they got a green coat at home, and they forgot they were wearing the tan one today, so they took yours by mistake. When they bring it back-“

“Nobody’s going to bring it back. Somebody stole my coat.”

“Why would anybody steal a coat?”

“Probably because he didn’t have a coat of his own,” Keller said patiently, “and it’s pouring out there, and he didn’t want to get wet any more than I do. The three coats on the wall belong to your three other customers, and I’m not going to steal a coat from one of them, and the guy who stole my coat’s not going to bring it back, so what am I supposed to do?”

“We’re not responsible,” she said, and pointed to a sign that agreed with her. Keller wasn’t convinced the sign was enough to get the restaurant off the hook, but it didn’t matter. He wasn’t about to sue them.

“If you want me to call the police so you can report it…”

“I just want to get out of here,” he said. “I need a cab, but I could drown out there waiting for an empty one to come along.”

She brightened, able at last to suggest something. “Right over there,” she said. “The hotel? There’s a canopy’ll keep you dry, and there’s cabs pulling up and dropping people off all day long. And you know what? I’ll bet Angela at the register’s got an umbrella you can take. People leave them here all the time, and unless it’s raining they never think to come back for them.”

The girl at the cash register supplied a black folding umbrella, flimsy but serviceable. “I remember that coat,” she said. “Green. I saw it come in and I saw it go out, but I never realized it was two different people coming and going. It was what you would call a very distinctive garment. Do you think you’ll be able to replace it?”

“It won’t be easy,” he said.

“You didn’t want to do this one,” Dot said, “and I couldn’t figure out why. It looked like a walk in the park, and it turns out that’s exactly what it was.”

“A walk in the rain,” he said. “I had my coat stolen.”

“And your umbrella. Well, there are some unscrupulous people out there, Keller, even in a decent town like Boston. You can buy a new coat.”

“I never should have bought that one in the first place.”

“It was green, you said.”

“Too green.”

“What were you doing, waiting for it to ripen?”

“It’s somebody else’s problem now,” he said. “The next one’s going to be beige.”

“You can’t go wrong with beige,” she said. “Not too light, though, or it shows everything. My advice would be to lean toward the Desert Sand end of the spectrum.”

“Whatever.” He looked at her television set. “I wonder what they’re talking about.”

“Nothing as interesting as raincoats, would be my guess. I could unmute the thing, but I think we’re better off wondering.”

“You’re probably right. I wonder if that was it. Losing the raincoat, I mean.”

“You wonder if what was what?”

“The feeling I had.”

“You did have a feeling about Boston, didn’t you? It wasn’t a stamp auction. You didn’t want to take the job.”

“I took it, didn’t I?”

“But you didn’t want to. Tell me more about this feeling, Keller.”

“It was just a feeling,” he said. He wasn’t ready to tell her about his horoscope. He could imagine how she’d react, and he didn’t want to hear it.

“You had a feeling another time,” she said. “In Louisville.”

“That was a little different.”

“And both times the jobs went fine.”

“That’s true.”

“So where do you suppose these feelings are coming from? Any idea?”

“Not really. It wasn’t that strong a feeling this time, anyway. And I took the job, and I did it.”

“And it went smooth as silk.”

“More or less,” he said.

“More or less?”

“I used a letter opener.”

“What for? Sorry, dumb question. What did you do, pick it up off his desk?”

“Bought it on the way there.”

“In Boston?”

“Well, I didn’t want to take it through the metals detector. I bought it in Boston, and I took it with me when I left.”

“Naturally. And chucked it in a Dumpster or down a sewer. Except you didn’t or you wouldn’t have brought up the subject. Oh, for Christ’s sake, Keller. The coat pocket?”

“Along with the keys.”

“What keys? Oh, hell, the keys to the apartment. A set of keys and a murder weapon and you’re carrying them around in your coat pocket.”

“They were going down a storm drain before I went to the airport,” he said, “but first I wanted to get something to eat, and the next thing I knew my coat was gone.”

“And the thief got more than just a coat.”

“And an umbrella.”

“Forget the umbrella, will you? Besides the coat he got keys and a letter opener. There’s no little tag on the keys, tells the address, or is there?”

“Just two keys on a plain wire ring.”

“And I hope you didn’t let them engrave your initials on the letter opener.”

“No, and I wiped it clean,” he said. “But still.”

“Nothing to lead to you.”

“No.”

“But still,” she said.

“That’s what I said. ‘But still.’ “

Back in the city, Keller picked up the Boston papers. Both covered the murder in detail. Alvin Thurnauer, it turned out, was a prominent local businessman with connections to local political interests and, the papers hinted, to less savory elements as well. That he’d died violently in a Back Bay love nest, along with a blonde to whom he was not married, did nothing to diminish the news value of his death.

Both papers assured him that the police were pursuing various leads. Keller, reading between the lines, concluded that they didn’t have a clue. They might guess that someone had contracted to have Thurnauer hit, and they might be able to guess who that someone was, but they wouldn’t be able to go anywhere with it. There were no witnesses, no useful physical evidence.

He almost missed the second murder.

The Globe didn’t have it. But there it was in the Herald, a small story on a back page, a man found dead on Boston Common, shot twice in the head with a small-calibre weapon.

Keller could picture the poor bastard, lying facedown on the grass, the rain washing relentlessly down on him. He could picture the dead man’s coat, too. The Herald didn’t say anything about a coat, but that didn’t matter. Keller could picture it all the same.

He went home and made some phone calls. The next morning he went out first thing and bought the Globe and the Herald and read them both over breakfast. Then he made one more phone call and caught a train.