Hit List

Twenty-four

Odd, Keller thought.

He’d called his astrologer, Louise Carpenter, the night he came back from Baltimore. He couldn’t remember why, something about wondering if the moon was full, and you didn’t have to call an expert to determine something like that. He supposed he’d just had the urge to talk to her, and when she didn’t answer he got over it.

Then a week or so later he called again, and it wasn’t Sunday evening this time, it was a weekday, and normal business hours, if there was such a thing for an astrologer. Middle of the afternoon, middle of the week, and no answer. No answering machine, either.

He’d frowned, puzzled, and then he’d decided she was out of town. Astrologers very likely took vacations, just like anybody else. Maybe she was on a beach somewhere, looking up at the stars.

He’d let it go, and hadn’t thought about the woman since, until the call from Dot.

He was reading a stamp magazine when she called, absorbed in a story about forged overprints on early French colonial issues. There were a lot of legitimate varieties, as well as an abundance of forgeries, and it wasn’t all that easy to tell the difference. He was wondering if he had any forgeries in his own collection, and if there was any point in finding out, when the phone rang.

“Our friend’s been busy,” she said.

“Our friend?”

“We’ve been calling him Roger.”

“You know,” he said, “he was on my mind a lot for a while there, and then he wasn’t. I couldn’t tell you when I last thought of him.”

“The big question, Keller, is whether he’s thinking of you.”

“And the answer is yes, or you wouldn’t be calling.”

“He may not be thinking of you personally,” she said, “because he doesn’t know you personally, which I’d have to say is a good thing. But it’s clear he hasn’t decided to take up golf, or anything else that might distract him from his primary purpose, and you remember what that is.”

“Narrowing the field,” he said.

“It just got narrower. There was a job I turned down, and it’s a good thing I did.”

“I guess you’d better tell me about it.”

“Tomorrow morning,” she said, “hop on a train and come see me.”

“I could come up now, Dot.”

“No,” she said, “wait until tomorrow. I’ve got some things to line up first, Keller, and then we’re going to have to make some moves. We’ve been waiting for this clown to dry up and blow away, and it’s not going to happen. Unless we make it happen.”

“How?”

“Tomorrow morning,” she said.

He hung up, and the first thing that popped into his head was the astrologer. He could call her, and she could give him some idea of just how dangerous a time this was. He tried the number, and this time the phone only rang once. Then a recording came on, informing him that the number he had called was no longer in service.

He tried it again, figuring he’d dialed wrong, and he got the same recording. No longer in service.

Odd.

Her apartment was clear across town on West End Avenue between Ninety-seventh and Ninety-eighth. While the West Indian driver clucked at the traffic, Keller sat back and wondered why he was making the trip. He got off at the corner and found the building, but couldn’t spot a buzzer with her name on it. He checked the building on either side, even though he was certain he had the right one, and he didn’t see her name there, either.

He caught another cab and went home.

There was only one person he could think of who might know where Louise Carpenter had disappeared to. That was Maggie Griscomb, and he didn’t want to call her.

He had to look up the number, and then he had to force himself to dial it. By the time it had rung twice he was ready to hang up, but then she picked up in the middle of the third ring. He could still hang up, and he considered it, and she said hello again, the irritation evident in her tone, and he said, “I’ve been trying to reach Louise.”

He hadn’t meant to blurt it out that way. Hello, hi, how are you, di dah di dah di dah, and then he could bring up the business at hand. But something had made him cut to the chase, and there was a pause, and then she said, “It’s you.”

What could you say to something like that? Keller was stumped, and before he could come up with anything, she said, “You’ve got a lot of nerve. How come you didn’t call?”

“You told me not to call. Remember?”

“Vividly. And then when you didn’t call-“

Because you told me not to, he thought.

“-I called, and I left messages, and I never heard from you.”

“I never got the messages.”

“Yeah, right.”

Had she left messages? No, of course not. He already regretted this call, and he hadn’t even gotten to the point of it yet. “I’ve been having trouble with my answering machine,” he said, “and you can believe me or not, it doesn’t matter. I’ve been trying to reach Louise, and-“

“Why?”

“The astrologer,” he said.

“That’s who. What I asked you was why.”

“Why?”

“You don’t need an astrologer,” she said, “to know which way the stars are falling. You want her number, look it up. She’s in the book.”

“But that’s just it,” he said, and then he let it go, because he was talking to himself. She had hung up on him.

“It seems to me,” Dot said, “that we’ve got two choices. We can wait passively for the situation to resolve itself, or we can take a proactive approach.”

“That’s a word you never used to hear,” Keller said, “and now you hear it all the time. I know what it means, but what’s the point of it? Why not just say active?”

“It sounds better.”

“It does?”

“Sure. Proactive, like you’re really getting off your ass and doing something, and being professional about it, too. And I would have to say it’s about time. We’ve been taking precautions, but all that means is that Roger’s been killing other people. It would be nice if one of them caught on and turned the tables on him, but he’s a pro and he’s active and he takes them by surprise, so what chance have they got? He just keeps on doing what he does best, and we’re turning down jobs and looking over our shoulders when we do take one, and it’s about time we turned that around.”

“And hunted him down,” he said.

“And left him with a stake through his heart, because with a guy like that you want to make sure.”

“But how, Dot? How would you find him? Where would you start?”

“He has to come to us.”

He nodded. “We set a trap,” he said, “and draw him right into it.”

“There you go.”

“How? Offer him a job? He won’t take it. Unless-“

“What?”

“Well,” he said, “if the job was to hit a hit man, wouldn’t he make an exception? I mean, he’s been doing that for free, and if he was going to get paid for it-“

“I’d call him with a contract for a hit man.”

“Right.”

“And not just any hit man. I presume we’re talking about you.”

“Right.”

“So I give him your name and your address and a reasonably flattering photograph of you, while you sit home in front of the TV and listen for footsteps. Do I have to explain why that’s a bad idea?”

“No.”

“I’ve been working on this for a while,” she said, “so why don’t I lay it out for you? What I do, I call Roger and leave word, and he picks up the message and calls back on some hi-tech untraceable line, and I run down a contract I want to give him. I give him the name and address, and he mulls it over and turns it down.”

“And?”

“And I give it to somebody else.”

“Me? No, that wouldn’t make sense. Who would you give it to?”

“Some other pro. What I’d probably do is call another contractor and let him find somebody. Not that there are a hell of a lot of people left to be found, but whoever he picked wouldn’t have to be all that slick. Once he was on the case, I’d call Roger and tell him not to worry, that I managed to get somebody else. You beginning to get the picture?”

“I think so.”

“You stake out the mark’s house and wait for the two of them to show up. One of them’ll be a guy looking to do what he was hired to do. The other’ll be Roger.”

“How do I know which is which?”

“You could just kill ’em both,” she said, “and let God sort ’em out, like it says on the T-shirt. But I don’t think so. What you’d do is wait for one of them to take out the mark. Whoever does that, the other one is Roger.”

Keller was nodding. “And once the hit’s been made,” he said, “he’ll be ready to take out the hitter. So I follow the hitter and keep an eye out for Roger.”

“When he’s ready to make his move,” she said, “that’s when you make yours. If you can nail him before he does his thing, so much the better. If not, well, you tried. Either way, Roger’s off the board.”

“With a stake through his heart.” He frowned. “I’d want to get him in time. Be a shame to let some innocent guy get killed for nothing.”

“Innocent’s a stretch, since he’d have just finished taking out the mark. But I know what you mean.”

“The mark,” Keller said. “I hadn’t even thought of him. He was sort of hypothetical, because you don’t really have a job for Roger, or for Mr. Second Choice, either. That’s just a trap, but a trap has to have bait in it, doesn’t it?”

“It does if you expect to catch anything.”

“So who’s the bait? If it’s not me, who is it? Do you just pick some poor mope at random?”

“That’d be a way to do it. Keller, you look unhappy.”

“The bait probably gets killed, right?”

“Since the bait wouldn’t have any reason to suspect a thing, and since there’d be not one but two world-class hit men on the case, I’d have to say the bait’s chances are less than average.”

“Chances of surviving, you mean.”

“Right. On the other hand, if you want to look on the bright side, the bait’s chances of getting killed are not at all bad.”

“See,” he said, “that’s the part I don’t like. Throwing darts at a phone book.”

“Keller, you don’t throw darts at a phone book. You throw darts at a map.”

“How would that work?”

“It wouldn’t, unless you were looking for a place to go. You throw a dart and it lands on Wichita Falls, Texas, and you go there. Eat at a nice little Mexican restaurant, buy some stamps for your collection. Maybe get some real estate lady to show you houses.”

“Dot…”

“But if what you’re looking for is a person, you don’t use darts. You take a phone book and flip it open at random and jab with your finger.”

“That’s what I meant.”

“You said darts.”

“I know, but-“

“Never mind, Keller. I knew what you meant. I’m stalling, see, because this is the part I don’t like.”

“That’s my point,” he said. “Playing God, choosing somebody at random…”

“Not at random.”

He looked at her. “ ‘Flip it open at random,’ you just said. What do you mean, Dot? It’s all karma? Written in the stars? Whatever seemingly random choices we make, they’re all in tune with the purposeful design of the Universe?”

“I suppose that makes as much sense as anything else,” she said, “which isn’t saying much for it. Keller, I already picked somebody.”

He considered this. After a moment he said, “Not at random.”

“Not at random, no. No darts, no phone books.”

“Some guy you know?”

“No and no.”

“Huh?”

“Nobody I know,” she said, “and not a guy.”

“A woman?”

“What are you, a sexist?”

“No, but-“

“Chivalry is dead, Keller. A woman has as much right to get killed as anybody else. You’ve had jobs where the mark was a woman. You went and did what you were supposed to do.”

“Well, sure.”

“It’s an equal-opportunity world,” she said. “I’ve even heard of women hit men, except I suppose the term would be hit women, but I don’t like the way that sounds. Female hit persons?”

“You hear stories,” he said, “but I don’t know if there really are any. Outside of the movies.”

“Then it’s a waste of time figuring out what to call them.”

He said, “No and no, you said. Not a guy and what? Not someone you know?”

“Right.”

“If it’s not someone you know,” he said, “then how come it’s not random?”

“Give it a minute, Keller. It’ll come to you.”

“It’s someone I know.”

“What did I tell you? It came to you.”

“Some woman I know…”

She sighed, reached for the pitcher of iced tea, filled both their glasses. “Keller,” she said, “maybe it’s this business with Roger, the stress of it, or maybe you’ve just been doing this for a long time. But lately you’ve been running risks and leaving loose ends.”

“I have?”

“I didn’t want to say anything,” she said, “because your life is your life.”

“Wait a minute,” he said. “Be specific, will you? What risks? What loose ends?”

She extended a forefinger and touched the tip of his thumb.

“My thumb’s a loose end? What am I supposed to do, cut it off?”

“I don’t see that your thumb’s the problem,” she said. “You lived with it all your life, and it was fine and so were you, and then some dame tells you it’s a murderer’s thumb and you go rushing off to another dame and she tells you you’re a Gemini with your temperature rising and your moon over Miami.”

“Cancer rising,” he said, “and my moon is in Taurus. The moon is exalted in Taurus.”

“And they probably don’t have to worry about hurricanes there, either. Keller, she told you all that crap, and you told her what you do for a living.”

“I didn’t exactly tell her.”

“She knew just by looking at your thumb.”

“And my chart. And I guess she more or less intuited it.” He sat up straight. “She’s the one you picked? Louise?”

“Keller-“

“Because they’re going to have a hard time finding her. She moved, and she must have left the area altogether, because her phone’s been disconnected. I suppose it’s possible she left a forwarding address, and there are other ways to track a person, but you wanted to bait the trap here in New York, didn’t you? If so, you can forget about Louise Carpenter.”

She didn’t say anything. He looked across the table at her and it dawned on him.

“No forwarding address,” he said.

“No.”

“She’s dead, isn’t she?”

“Either she’s one with the Universe,” Dot said, “or she’s been reincarnated as a butterfly. That’s how Louise herself would look at it, and who are we to argue?”

“But,” he stammered. “What… when? How?”

“Keller,” she said, “you sound like a training manual for newspaper reporters. Do you really want to know? Wouldn’t you be happier just figuring it was in the stars and letting it go at that?”

“I want to know.”

“You were on jury duty,” she said.

“And you got someone to-“

“No. Suppose you just let me tell it.”

“All right.”

She drank some iced tea. “I was thinking about this for a while,” she said. “Here’s a woman who knows something she’s not supposed to know, and how long before she says something to the wrong person? No, don’t interrupt. You were going to say it’s unethical for her to talk about her clients, weren’t you? That occurred to me, but what people are supposed to do and what they do aren’t always the same thing, or we’d both be in some other business.

“So what I did,” she went on, “is I called her up and made an appointment with her.”

“While I was on jury duty.”

“No, long before that. I don’t know where you were. At home in New York, probably, working on your stamp collection. I called her up and made an appointment, gave a phony name and date of birth, and took a train in and a cab to where she lived. Nice, if you like drapes and beaded curtains and overstuffed furniture. She sat me down with a cup of tea and we went over my chart.”

“But it wasn’t your chart.”

“Because I made up the date of birth. You know, I realized that, but by then I was stuck. I had to sit there pretending to be impressed by how accurate she was, and it wasn’t accurate, but then why should it be? It may have been right on the mark for somebody who happened to be born on the twenty-third of September. All in all, I was probably better off with a phony birthday, because it kept me from getting sidetracked by the chart, because I knew it was a lot of hooey. So I could focus on drawing her out.”

“About what?”

“About you. I talked about how I went to a palmist once, and she said she knew a little about palmistry and looked at my hand, and I told her about a girlfriend of mine in high school who had an unusual thumb, and before I knew it I was hearing all about a client of hers who had a murderer’s thumb.”

“She talked about my thumb?”

“It doesn’t necessarily mean anything,” she said, “but in this instance the client with the murderer’s thumb did in fact have a very real dark side. I didn’t dig too deeply, but I had the feeling I could have walked out of there with your name and address if I’d really wanted to.”

“That’s a surprise,” he said. “I thought she’d be discreet.”

“She probably thought she was being discreet. She mentioned some things about your chart, but don’t ask me what they were. Your Saturn squares Uranus, ooga booga dooga. You know how they talk. Keller, the woman was a loose end. She had a client who killed people for a living, and she knew it, and it didn’t take a lot to get her talking about it.”

“You should have said something.”

“To you?”

“Of course to me. I would have…”

“What? Taken care of it?”

“Sure.”

“You liked the woman, Keller. You talked about how maternal she was.”

“I don’t remember saying that.”

“Well, I remember. Maybe you could have gone ahead and done it anyway, but it would have been tough for you, and it would have been a bad idea to begin with. You were a client of hers, there’s a connection, so if anything’s going to happen to her it should happen when you’re out of town.”

“So you’d have to bring somebody in,” he said, thinking out loud. “And while you’re at it, why not bring in Roger, too? Tie off a loose end and bait a trap for Roger, both at the same time. It makes sense.” He looked up, frowning. “But it’s too late for that, because she’s already dead.”

“I wasn’t thinking about baiting traps at the time. And I wanted to leave you completely out of it, and I didn’t want to wait too long, because loose lips sink ships, and who knows how long it would be before the fat lady sang to the wrong person?”

“But you waited a while after all.”

“That wasn’t my idea,” she said. “Remember that string of jobs you had where you were back the next day? They called it off or the guy killed himself or somebody else closed the sale for you? You kept coming back before I could set things up.”

“You wanted me out of town when she got taken out.”

“Of course.”

“So I’d have an alibi. Of course, if anybody wanted to know what exactly I was doing in Albuquerque or St. Louis or wherever…”

“I know, it’s not much of an alibi. ‘Your Honor, I couldn’t have killed her because I was in Sausalito killing him.’ I guess I had other reasons for wanting you out of town. I guess I didn’t want you to know about it because I knew you wouldn’t like it.”

“You were right.”

“You still don’t like it, do you?”

He thought about it. “You had to do it,” he said. “I would have tried to talk you out of it, or find another way, but it’s over now, and I have to admit you were right. Who’d you use?”

“What’s the difference?”

“No difference, I guess. When the Baltimore job came in, you figured I’d be out of town, so you booked the guy to do Louise. And then you found out I had jury duty, but that’s an even better alibi than being out of town, so you let it go according to schedule. Whoever he was, he did good work. ‘Death Was in the Stars’-it’s a story the papers would have played up, an astrologer getting murdered. But I didn’t see anything. You use this guy before?”

“Once. And there was nothing in the papers then, either.”

“His trademark, I guess.”

“Hers.”

“Pardon?”

“Her trademark.”

“The hitter was a woman? We just said there weren’t any outside of the movies.”

“You’re the one said that, Keller. I didn’t say anything.”

He replayed the conversation in his head, shrugged. “Whatever,” he said. “A woman, huh? And you used her before?”

Dot nodded, then raised a hand and pointed at the ceiling. Keller looked up, saw nothing remarkable but a light fixture with one of its bulbs burned out. Then he got it and his jaw dropped.