Hit List

Thirty

“Keller,” she said. “I swear to God I was sure you were dead.”

“Dead? I just talked to you on the phone.”

“Before that,” she said. “Well, don’t just stand there. Come on inside. What the hell happened to you, Keller? The last time I saw you, you were walking north on Crosby Street. Where have you been for the past four days?”

“Jacksonville,” he said.

“Jacksonville, Florida?”

“That’s the only Jacksonville I know of.”

“I’m pretty sure there’s one in North Carolina,” she said, “and there are probably others, but who cares? What the hell were you doing in Jacksonville, Florida?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“I went to the movies,” he said. “Dropped in on a few stamp dealers. Watched television in my motel room.”

“Call a realtor? Look at some houses?”

“No.”

“Well, that’s something. I don’t want to sound like your mother, Keller, but how come you didn’t call?”

He thought about it. “I was ashamed,” he said.

“Ashamed?”

“I guess that’s what it was.”

“Ashamed of what?”

“Ashamed of myself.”

She rolled her eyes. “Keller,” she said, “do I look like a dentist?”

“A dentist?”

“So why does every conversation with you have to be like pulling teeth? Of course you were ashamed of yourself. A person can’t be ashamed of somebody else. Ashamed of yourself for what?”

Why was he stalling? He drew a breath. “Ashamed of myself for what I did,” he said. “Dot, I killed a man.”

“You killed a man.”

“Yes.”

“Keller, do you want to sit down? Can I get you something to drink?”

“No, I’m fine.”

“But you killed a man.”

“In Jacksonville.”

“Keller,” she said, “that’s what you do. Remember? That’s what you’ve been doing all your life. Well, maybe not all your life, maybe not when you were a kid, but-“

“This was different, Dot.”

“What was different about it?”

“I wasn’t supposed to kill him.”

“You’re not supposed to kill anybody, according to what they teach kids in Sunday school. It’s against the rules. But you haven’t lived by those rules for a while now, Keller.”

“I broke my own rules,” he said. “I killed somebody I shouldn’t have.”

“Who?”

“I don’t even know his name.”

“Is that what bothers you? Not knowing his name?”

“Dot,” he said, “I killed our guy. I killed the man we hired. He came to New York to do a job, a job we hired him to do, and he did everything just the way he was supposed to do, and I followed him from New York to Jacksonville and murdered him in cold blood.”

“In cold blood,” she said.

“Or maybe it was hot blood. I don’t know.”

“Come on into the kitchen,” she said. “Have a seat, let me make you a cup of tea. And tell me all about it.”

“So that’s basically it,” he said, “and one reason I stayed there in Jacksonville was I wanted to figure out why I did it before I came back and told you about it.”

“And?”

“And I still haven’t figured it out. I could have stayed there for a month and I don’t think I would have worked it out.”

“You must have some idea.”

“Well, I was frustrated,” he said. “That was a part of it. How many months have we had Roger to worry about? This was supposed to smoke him out, and it did, I even got a fairly close look at him, but then he slipped away. Either he got wind of what was going on or the man who killed Maggie gave him the slip, but either way I’d missed my chance at Roger.”

“And you just had to kill somebody.”

He thought about it, shook his head. “No,” he said. “It had to be this guy.”

“Why?”

“This is crazy. I was mad at him, Dot.”

“Because he killed your girlfriend.”

“It doesn’t make any sense, does it? He pulled the trigger, except it wouldn’t have been a trigger, because he wouldn’t have used a gun, not if he was making it look like an accident. How did he do it, do you happen to know?”

“Drowning.”

“Drowning? In a fifth-floor loft in lower Manhattan?”

“In her bathtub.”

“And it looked like an accident?”

“It didn’t look much like anything else. Either she passed out or she slipped and lost her footing, hit her head on the edge of the tub on the way down. Went under the surface and took a deep breath anyhow.”

“Water in the lungs?”

“So they said.”

“He drowned her,” he said, “the dirty son of a bitch. At least she was unconscious when it happened.”

“Maybe.”

“How could he do it if he didn’t knock her out first?”

“It’s too late to ask him,” she said, “but if he knocks her out first then he has to undress her and put her in the tub, and he might leave marks that wouldn’t be consistent with the scene he’s trying to set.”

“What else could he do?”

“How would you do it, Keller?”

He frowned, thinking it through. “Hold a gun on her,” he said. “Or a knife, whatever. Make her get undressed and draw a tub, make her get in the tub.”

“And then hold her head under?”

“The easy way,” he said, “is to pick up her feet. Lift them up and the head goes under.”

“And if the person struggles?”

“It doesn’t do any good,” he said. “He might splash a little water around, that’s all.”

“Wrong pronoun.”

“Well,” he said.

“I remember a few years ago,” she said. “A job you did, but don’t ask me where. A man drowned.”

“Salt Lake City,” he said.

“That how you did it? Hold a gun on him?”

“He was in the tub when I got there. He’d dozed off. I had a gun, I went in there to shoot him, but there he was, taking a nap in the tub.”

“So you picked up his feet?”

“I’d heard about it,” he said, “or maybe I read it somewhere, I don’t remember. I wanted to see if it would work.”

“And it did?”

“Nothing to it,” he said. “He woke up, but he couldn’t do anything. He was a big strong guy, too. I wiped up the water that got splashed out of the tub. I guess he would have done the same thing on Crosby Street, took a towel and wiped the floor.”

“He left the tub running.”

“And what, it overflowed? You couldn’t tell there was a struggle, not if the tub overflowed.”

“And?”

“And what else would it do?” He thought about it. “Well, it would make it look as though it happened while the tub was filling. She slipped getting into the tub, knocked herself out, and drowned before she could wake up.”

“Or drugs. She got in the tub while it was filling and passed out from the drugs she’d taken.”

“What drugs?”

“She was an artist, right? Lived in SoHo?”

“NoHo.”

“Huh?”

“SoHo is south of Houston,” he explained. “That’s where the name comes from. Where she lived is a couple blocks north of Houston, so they call it NoHo.”

“Thanks for the geography lesson, Keller. Look, she just went out to a bar, picked up some stud and partied with him. I’d say there’s a fair chance she provided herself with a little chemical assistance along the way. But it doesn’t matter. We’re getting off-track here. Where’d the water go?”

“The water?”

“The water. Where’d it go?”

“All over the floor,” he said.

“And then?”

“Oh.”

“Right, and the people downstairs banged on her door, and when that didn’t work they called the cops. It’s a way to let the client know the job’s been done. You don’t have to wait for the smell to tip off the neighbors. You should have thought of that in Salt Lake City.”

“It wasn’t a consideration,” he said. “Besides, it was a house in the suburbs. The tub overflows, the water winds up in the basement.”

Dot nodded. “Could run for days before anybody noticed.”

“I suppose.”

“Waste all that water. Bad enough anywhere, but in Salt Lake City? That’s the desert, isn’t it?”

“Well,” he said.

“Right,” she said. “Who cares? All water over the dam, or through the floorboards. How’d we get on this, anyway? Oh, right, you wanted to know how she died.”

“What I wanted,” he said, “was to kill the man who killed her. And that doesn’t make any sense, Dot. If you look at it in a certain way, I was the person who killed her.”

“Because if you never got involved with her…”

“It’s more direct than that. I was the client, I ordered the hit on her.”

“If you want to be technical,” she said, “I was the one who ordered it and set it up.”

“Maybe deep down I was angry at you,” he said, “and at myself, but that wasn’t how it felt. I sat there in the plane and I hated the guy, Dot. Him and his toupee and his fake mustache and his costume changes. He did just what I’d wanted him to do, what we were paying him to do, and I hated him for it.”

“I sort of get it,” she said.

“And the other one, Roger, had given us the slip. We went through all this and Roger slept through it, or whatever he did, and he’s still out there for us to worry about. Maybe he was lurking on Crosby Street when the neighbor called the cops, maybe he saw them bring her body out. I didn’t have a shot at Roger, but I had a shot at this bastard that I hated. So I took it.” He shook his head. “Roger’s home by now, cursing his luck. He doesn’t know I did his dirty work for him.”

“How’d you do it, Keller?”

“Followed him to the smoking lounge and stabbed him.”

“Stabbed him?”

“I leaned forward so he could light my cigarette, and I had a knife in my hand, and next thing you knew it was in his chest.”

“A knife.”

“Right.”

“How’d you get it through airport security?”

“It was already there.”

She looked at him.

“I had to fly first class,” he said, “and they serve you a real meal there, as if you were in a restaurant. Cloth napkin, china cup and plate, and metal utensils. When I was done eating, I put the knife in my pocket.”

“You were already planning to do it.”

“What struck me,” he said, “was this was a way to arm yourself after you had cleared the metal detector. At this point there was still a chance I’d find Roger waiting for us at Jacksonville.”

“And you could attack him with your butter knife.”

“It wasn’t a butter knife.”

“No, it was just the sort of thing Davy Crockett killed a bear with.”

“It had a serrated edge,” he said. “You could cut meat with it.”

“My God,” Dot said. “And they let just anybody have these lethal weapons? You’d think they’d fingerprint you before they passed them out.”

“Well, it worked just fine,” he said. “Went between the ribs and into the heart, and he wouldn’t have died any faster if I’d used a twelve-inch Bowie. There were a couple of women yakking away at the other end of the smoking lounge, and they didn’t notice a thing.”

“And you got rid of the knife.”

“And the cigarettes.”

“And spent a few days in Jacksonville, thinking about it.”

“That’s right.”

“Didn’t pick up a phone.”

“I thought about it.”

“Well, that’s the next best thing, isn’t it? If thoughts had wings, I could have heard them flapping. Instead I figured you were dead.”

“I’m sorry, Dot.”

“I figured Roger got you and the hitter both. Figured the bastard turned the hat trick.”

“The hat trick is three,” he said.

“I know that, Keller. The old man was a hockey fan, remember? Knew the names of all the Rangers back to the first year of the franchise. I used to watch hockey matches with him.”

“I didn’t know you were a fan.”

“I wasn’t. I hated it. But I know what a hat trick is. Three goals in one game, all scored by the same player.”

“Right.”

“So I figured Roger got the hat trick.”

“Roger got shut out,” he said. “Roger sat in the doorway with his thumb up his ass while I took out the hitter for him. But even the way you figured it, it wouldn’t have been the hat trick. If he killed me and the hitter, that’s two. Who’s the third?”

“Your girlfriend.”

“My-you mean Maggie?”

“That’s right, I wasn’t supposed to call her your girlfriend. I keep forgetting.”

“Roger didn’t kill her.”

“You sure about that, Keller?”

He stared at her, tried to read her face. He said, “Dot, we saw what happened. She brought a guy home and he left and our hitter went up, and he left, and a little while later the painter on the fourth floor had water coming through the ceiling.”

“Right.”

“The guy she brought home,” he said. “If that was Roger… but it couldn’t have been, because we saw him. And she was still alive when he left, remember? He forgot his keys, and she threw them down to him.”

“His wallet.”

“Whatever. Roger didn’t do anything except lurk in a doorway and eat at a lunch counter, and that’s the one good thing to come out of all this, Dot. Because I got a good look at him. I didn’t know who was who at the time, but I do now, and I can recognize him when I see him again.”

“The man in the cap and windbreaker.”

“Right, Roger.”

“You’d know him if you saw him again.”

“Absolutely.”

“Maybe you would,” she said, “but we’ll never know. Because you’ll never see him again.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Keller,” she said, “you’d better sit down.”

“I am sitting down. I’ve been sitting down for the past twenty minutes.”

“So you are,” she said. “And it’s a good thing. And don’t get up now, Keller. Stay right where you are.”

It was just as well that he was sitting. He didn’t know that what she told him would have knocked him off his feet, but he didn’t know that it wouldn’t, either. One thing he could say was that it was hard to take it all in.

“He was Roger,” he said.

“Right.”

“The guy in the hat and muffler. The guy who sat upstairs across the street, smoking one cigarette after another.”

“Most smokers do it that way, Keller. They smoke them in turn, rather than all at once.”

“The guy who went upstairs to Maggie’s loft. If he was Roger, why would he kill Maggie? He wasn’t getting paid for it. He turned down the assignment, remember? And came in on the sly so he could have a chance to kill off the competition.”

“That’s right.”

“So he was watching the building, waiting for the hitter to make his move. Did he think the guy she brought home was the hitter? No, he would have seen what we saw, her throwing his wallet down to him. He knew she was alive when he went up there.”

“And he knew she was dead when he left.”

“Thus depriving himself of the chance to draw a bead on the man who had a contract on her. So he threw away his hat and went home.”

“With you in hot pursuit.”

“Why would he leave New York without killing the man he came to kill? And why do the hitter’s work for him? What was he trying to do, make him lose face and kill himself? That might work in Japan, but-“

“He already did it, Keller.”

“Did what?”

“Hit the hitter. And we can stop calling him that, incidentally. His name was Marcus Allenby, or at least that’s the name he was registered under.”

“Registered where?”

“The Woodleigh,” she said. “And he had a couple different names on the ID in his wallet, and Allenby wasn’t one of them, and he’d hanged himself with a sheet from the bed, and it was all dramatic enough to get his picture in the Post. The picture didn’t show the cap or the windbreaker, but it was the same guy.”

“Roger drowned Maggie,” Keller said, working it out. “And then he went to the Woodleigh, went to Allenby’s room-Allenby?”

“Got to call him something.”

“Forced his way in, strung the guy up, and left.”

“I think he went to the Woodleigh first. Followed Allenby there, got into the room by posing as a cop or a hotel employee. That part wouldn’t be hard. Then he caught Allenby off guard.”

“And killed him? Then why did he come back after he killed Maggie?”

“Maybe he left Allenby trussed up,” she said. “And then, after he’d killed her and left the tub running to establish the time of death, he went back to the Woodleigh, took the Do Not Disturb sign off the knob, let himself in with the key he’d taken from Allenby on his first visit, hanged the poor bastard with a sheet from his own bed, and wrote out the note.”

“What note?”

“Didn’t I mention that? A note on hotel letterhead. ‘I can’t do this anymore. God forgive me.’ “

“Allenby’s handwriting?”

“How would anybody know?”

He nodded. “The drowning looks like an accident,” he said, “but the client who ordered the job-“

“Which is to say us.”

“-knows it’s a hit, and figures it was one job too many for Allenby, and the guy’s conscience tortured him into ending it all. Either he left Allenby alive while he went down and did Maggie-“

“Risky.”

“-or he killed him the first time, figuring nobody was going to discover the body, and so what if they did? But by coming back he could make a phone call from the dead man’s room, and the phone records would establish time of death regardless of the forensic evidence.”

Keller frowned. “It’s too tricky,” he said. “Too many things could go wrong.”

“Well, he was a tricky guy.”

“Speaking of tricky, didn’t you say he hanged him with a bed sheet? That’s what guys do in prison, but would you hang yourself with a sheet if you had other things to choose from?”

“I wouldn’t hang myself at all, Keller.”

“But a sheet,” he said. “Why not a belt?”

“Maybe Allenby wore suspenders. Or maybe it was part of the game Roger was playing.”

“He liked playing games,” he agreed. “The whole thing was a game, wasn’t it? I mean, chasing around the country to murder other people in the same line of work as yourself. The idea is you increase your income that way, but do you? What you really do is use up a lot of time and spend a ton of money on airfare.”

“Not a good career move, you’re saying.”

“But it made him feel smarter than the rest of us. Smarter than everybody. Switching clothes, pasting on a mustache and peeling it off. All that phony crap. You’d expect it from some jerk in the CIA, but would a pro waste his time like that?”

“He wasn’t perfect, Keller. He killed the couple in Louisville that wound up in your old motel room, and he popped the guy in Boston who stole your coat.”

“I was lucky.”

“And he was a little too cute for his own good. I guess he spotted Allenby easily enough. Well, so did we. Allenby wasn’t worried about being spotted by anybody but the designated victim. And then I guess he got tired of waiting. Well, I can understand that. We were getting pretty sick of it ourselves, as I recall. You even said something about killing them both and getting it over with.”

“I remember.”

“Once he spotted Allenby, why wait? He could just follow him home and take him out, and he did, in his hotel room.”

“He didn’t have to kill Maggie,” Keller said.

“But the contract was always carried out, remember? That was Roger’s trademark, he bided his time until the hitter got the job done, and then he did a job of his own on the hitter. This time the hitter was out of the picture early, so Roger felt it was up to him to do the job. Maybe he thought it was part of being a pro.”

“Maybe.”

“And it got him killed.”

He sat there for a while. She went on talking, going over it, and he let the words wash over him without taking in everything she was saying. He’d avenged Maggie, which had seemed important at the time, for reasons that made no sense at all now. He tried to picture her, and realized that her image was already fading, getting smaller, losing color and definition. Fading into the past, fading the way everything faded.

And Roger was gone. He’d been looking over his shoulder for months, stalked by a faceless killer, and now that threat had been removed. And he’d done it himself. He hadn’t known that was what he was doing, but he’d done it anyway.

“If I’d done the right thing,” he said, “he would have gotten away.”

“Roger.”

“Uh-huh. I’d have turned around and gone home, convinced that Roger wasn’t going to show. And I’d have been letting the real Roger off the hook, and we wouldn’t know anything more about him. Not his name or where he lived. We wouldn’t know any of those things.”

“We still don’t,” she pointed out.

“But now we don’t need to.”

“No.”

“The broker who found Allenby for us says we owe the balance.”

“What did he get, half in advance?”

“And the rest due on completion, and the guy’s point is the job was completed. Woman’s dead and it goes in the books as an accident, so we should be satisfied, right? If Allenby gets pangs of conscience afterward and decides to kill himself, well, what does that have to do with us? He offed himself without blowing the Crosby Street hit, so we got what we ordered.”

“What did you tell him?”

“I wasn’t about to explain what really happened.”

“No, of course not.”

“He thought I had booked this on behalf of a client, and that the client should pay. And I told him I agreed, but on the other hand we both knew the money wasn’t going to Allenby, because Allenby wasn’t alive to collect it.”

“The broker would keep it.”

“Of course. So I said, ‘Look, your guy killed himself, and that’s a shame because he did good work.’ “

“All he did was stand in a doorway.”

“Let me finish, will you? ‘He did good work,’ I said, ‘but he’s dead, and you’re not gonna pay him, and I’m not gonna give my client a refund. So what do you say we split it?’ And I sent him half of the half we owed.”

“That sounds fair.”

“I’m not sure fairness has anything to do with it, but I could live with it and so could he. Keller, we’re out of the woods. The loose ends are tied off and Roger’s dead and gone. You take all that in yet?”

“Just about.”

“You did the absolute right thing,” she said, “for the wrong reason. That’s a whole lot better than the other way around.”

“I guess so.”

“It wasn’t that girl, you know. That’s not why you wanted to kill him. That’s what you told yourself, but that wasn’t it.”

“It wasn’t?”

“No. Be honest, Keller. You don’t care about her, do you?”

“Not now.”

“You never did.”

“Maybe not.”

“You sensed something about that guy. You didn’t know he was Roger, you really thought he was our guy, but you picked up some vibration. And you didn’t like him.”

“I hated the bastard.”

“And how do you feel about him now?”

“Now?” He thought about it. “He’s gone,” he said. “There’s nothing to feel.”

“Same as always, right?”

“Pretty much.”

“Maybe it’s your thumb.”

“Huh?”

“Your murderer’s thumb, Keller. Maybe it gives you good instincts, or maybe it’s just good luck. Either way, I think you should keep it.”

He looked at his thumb. When he’d first become aware of its special quality, he’d gotten so he didn’t like to look at it. It had looked weird to him.

Now it looked just right. Not like everybody else’s thumb, maybe. Not even like his other thumb, for that matter. But it looked as though it belonged on his hand. It looked right for him.

“You buy some stamps in Jacksonville, Keller?”

“Some.”

“Paste them in your album yet?”

“You don’t paste them,” he said. “You’d ruin them if you pasted them.”

“You told me once what it is you do. You mount them, right?”

“Right.”

“Like you’d mount a horse,” she said, “except different. Did you mount these yet?”

“No, I didn’t have a chance.”

“So you’ve got stamps waiting to be mounted. And there’s probably mail that came while you were gone, too.”

“The usual.”

“Magazines and catalogs, I’ll bet. And what do you call it when they send you stamps and you get to pick and choose?”

“Approvals.”

“Any of those come?”

“There was a shipment, yes. From a woman in Maine.”

“She’s going to stay in Maine, right? And you’re not going to run up there for a visit.”

“Of course not.”

“So you can go home and work on your stamps.”

“I could,” he said. “I guess that’s what I’ll do.”

“I think that’s a good idea,” she said. “And take good care of your thumb, okay? Dress it warm and keep it out of drafts. Because Allenby’s dead, and so is Roger, and so are all the people good old Roger put out of business. Which means there are fewer people than ever doing what you do, Keller, and I can’t see the volume of work shrinking.”

“No,” he said, and touched his thumb. “No, I don’t think that’s anything we have to worry about.”

Please turn the pagefor an early look atHOPE TO DIE by Lawrence BlockAvailable now in hardcover fromWilliam Morrow and Company

It was a perfect summer evening, the last Monday in July. The Hollanders arrived at Lincoln Center sometime between six and six-thirty. They may have met somewhere-in the plaza by the fountain, say, or in the lobby-and gone upstairs together. Byrne Hollander was a lawyer, a partner in a firm with offices in the Empire State Building, and he might have come directly from the office. Most of the men were wearing business suits, so he wouldn’t have had to change.

He left his office around five, and their house was on West Seventy-fourth Street between Columbus and Amsterdam, so he had time to go home first to collect his wife. They may have walked to Lincoln Center-it’s half a mile, no more than a ten-minute walk. That’s how Elaine and I got there, walking up from our apartment at Ninth and Fifty-seventh, but the Hollanders lived a little further away, and may not have felt like walking. They could have taken a cab, or a bus down Columbus.

However they got there, they’d have arrived in time for drinks before dinner. He was a tall man, two inches over six feet, two years past fifty, with a strong jaw and a high forehead. He’d been athletic in his youth and still worked out regularly at a midtown gym, but he’d thickened some through the middle; if he’d looked hungry as a young man, now he looked prosperous. His dark hair was graying at the temples, and his brown eyes were the sort people described as watchful, perhaps because he spent more time listening than talking.

She was quiet, too, a pretty girl whom age had turned into a handsome woman. Her hair, dark with red highlights, was shoulder-length, and she wore it back off her face. She was six years younger than her husband and as many inches shorter, although her high heels made up some of the difference. She’d put on a few pounds in the twenty-some years they’d been married, but she’d been fashion-model thin back then, and looked good now.

I can picture them, standing around on the second floor at Avery Fisher Hall, holding a glass of white wine, picking up an hors d’oeuvre from a tray. As far as that goes, it’s entirely possible I saw them, perhaps exchanging a nod and a smile with him, perhaps noticing her as one notices an attractive woman. We were there, and so were they, along with a few hundred other people. Later, when I saw their photographs, I thought they looked faintly familiar. But that doesn’t mean I saw them that night. I could have seen either or both of them on other nights at Lincoln Center or Carnegie Hall, or walking in the neighborhood. We lived, after all, less than a mile apart. I could have laid eyes on them dozens of times, and never really noticed them, just as I very possibly did that night.

I did see other people I knew. Elaine and I talked briefly with Ray and Michelle Gruliow. Elaine introduced me to a woman she knew from a class she’d taken several years ago at the Metropolitan, and to a terribly earnest couple who’d been customers at her shop. I introduced her to Avery Davis, the real estate mogul, whom I knew from the Club of Thirty-one, and to one of the fellows passing the hors d’oeuvres trays, whom I knew from my AA home group at St. Paul’s. His name was Felix, and I didn’t know his last name, and don’t suppose he knew mine.

And we saw some people we recognized but didn’t know, including Barbara Walters and Beverly Sills. The occasion was the opening of New York’s summer music festival, Mostly Mozart, and the cocktails and dinner were the festival’s thank-you to its patrons, who had achieved that status by contributing $2500 or more to the festival’s operating fund.

During her working years, Elaine made a habit of saving her money and investing it in rental property around town. New York real estate has been a can’t-lose area even for people who do everything wrong, and she did most things right, and has done very well for herself. She was able to buy our apartment at the Parc Vendome, and there’s enough income generated by her apartment houses in Queens so that, as far as money is concerned, neither of us needs to work. I have my work as a detective, of course, and she has her shop a few blocks south of us on Ninth Avenue, and we enjoy the work and can always find a use for the money it brings in. But if nobody hired me or bought paintings and antiques from her, we wouldn’t wind up missing any meals.

We both like the idea of giving away a certain amount of what comes in. Years ago I got in the habit of stuffing ten percent of my earnings into whatever church poor box came along. I’ve grown a little more sophisticated in my giving since then, but I still find a way to get rid of it.

Elaine likes to support the arts. She gets to more operas and gallery openings and museum shows than I do (and fewer ball games and prizefights) but we both like music, classical and jazz. The jazz joints don’t hit you up for contributions, they just call it a cover charge and let it go at that, but every year we write out a lot of checks to Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall. They like to encourage us with perks of one sort or another, and this evening was one of them-drinks, a sit-down dinner, and complimentary orchestra seats to the opening concert.

Around six-thirty we went to our assigned table, where we were joined by three other couples, with whom we exchanged names and chatted amiably throughout the meal. If pressed, I could probably recall the names of most if not all of our table mates, but what’s the point? We haven’t seen them since, and they don’t figure in the story. Byrne and Susan Hollander were not among them.

They were at another table, which I later learned was on the other side of the room from us. While I might have seen them earlier, it’s unlikely that I laid eyes on them during dinner. Their seats for the concert were just two rows in front of ours, but at the extreme right of the center section, while we were toward the left. So, unless we bumped into each other on the way to the rest room during intermission, I don’t suppose we would have seen them at all.

The meal was pretty good, the company at dinner pleasant enough. The concert was very enjoyable, and, true to its stated theme, leaned toward Mozart, including one of his piano concertos and the Prague Symphony. There was an orchestral suite of Antonín Dvořák’s as well, and the program notes drew some connection between him and Mozart, or perhaps between him and Prague, Dvořák being a Czech. Whatever it was, I didn’t pay too much attention to it. I just sat there and enjoyed the music, and when it was done we walked home.

Did the Hollanders walk home? It’s hard to know one way or the other. No cab driver came forward to report driving them, but neither did anyone recall seeing them on the street. They could have taken a bus, but no one reported witnessing that, either.

I think they probably walked. She was wearing heels, which might have lessened her enthusiasm for a half-mile hike, but they were both in good shape, and it was a perfect night for a leisurely walk home, not too warm, not too humid. There are always a lot of cabs after a concert, but there are even more people trying to flag one, even when the weather’s good. It certainly would have been simpler for them to walk, but there’s no way to say with certainty just how they got home.

When the concert ended, when the conductor had taken his last bow and the musicians walked off the stage, Byrne and Susan Hollander had something like an hour and a half to live.

Though, as I said, I can’t know this, in my imagination they are walking home. They talk some-about the music they’ve heard, about something outrageous one of their dinner companions said, about the pleasures of walking on a night like this in a city like theirs. But they are silent much of the time, and the silences are companionable, of the sort known to long-married couples. They have been close enough for long enough so that a shared silence is as intimate as a shared thought.

Crossing the avenue, he takes her hand, even as she is reaching for his. They hold hands most of the way home.

Their house is a brownstone on the downtown side of Seventy-fourth Street, near the middle of the block. They own the house, and occupy the upper three floors; the ground floor and basement are leased to an upscale antique dealer. When they bought the place twenty-six years ago with the proceeds of an inheritance, it cost them a little over a quarter of a million dollars, and the antique shop rent was enough to cover their taxes and running costs. Now the property is worth at least ten times what they paid for it, and the store rent is currently $7500 a month, and covers a whole lot more than their tax bill.

If they didn’t already own the house, they are fond of saying, they couldn’t possibly afford it. His earnings as a lawyer are substantial-he was able to put their daughter through four years at a private college without taking out a loan, or even dipping into savings-but he couldn’t go out and buy a three-million-dollar house.

Nor would they need that much space. She was pregnant when they bought the house. She lost the baby in the fifth month, got pregnant again within the year, and gave birth to a daughter, Kristin. Two years later their son, Sean, was born, and when he was eleven years old he was killed playing Little League baseball, hit in the head accidentally with a bat. It was a senseless death, and it stunned both of them. His drinking increased over the next year, and she had an affair with a friend’s husband, but time passed and the wound healed and his drinking normalized and she ended the affair. That was the first real strain on their marriage, and the last.

She is a writer, with two novels and two dozen short stories published. Her writing is not profitable; she writes slowly, and her stories wind up in magazines that pay in prestige and contributor’s copies instead of dollars, and her two novels, respectfully reviewed, had modest sales and are now out of print. But the work is satisfying beyond the rewards it brings, and she is at her desk five or six mornings a week, frowning in concentration, reaching for the right word.

She has an office/studio on the top floor where she does her writing. Their bedroom is on the third floor, along with Kristin’s bedroom and Byrne’s home office. Kristin, twenty-three, resumed living with them after she graduated from Wellesley. She moved in with a boyfriend after a year, then came back when the relationship ended. She often stays out overnight, and talks about getting a place of her own, but rents are sky-high and decent places hard to find, and her room is comfortable, convenient, familiar. They’re happy to have her there.

The lowest of the floors they occupy, the second floor, is what brownstone residents know as the parlor floor, with larger rooms and higher ceilings than the rest of the dwelling. The Hollander house has a large eat-in kitchen, and a formal dining room that they have converted into a library and music/TV room. And there’s the living room, with a large oriental carpet on the floor, Arts and Crafts furniture that’s more comfortable than it looks, and a working fireplace flanked by floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. The living room faces out on West Seventy-fourth, and the heavy drapes are drawn.

Behind those drapes, one in a large oak frame chair upholstered in tobacco-brown leather, the other pacing back and forth in front of the fireplace, the two men are waiting.

The men have been in the house for over an hour. They entered just about the time Byrne and Susan Hollander were reclaiming their seats after the intermission, and they’d finished going through the house by the time the concert ended. They were looking for things to steal, and didn’t care how much of a mess they made in the process, spilling drawers, overturning tables, pulling books off shelves. They found jewelry in a dresser drawer and a vanity, cash in a locked desk drawer and on a closet shelf, silver tableware in a chest in the kitchen, and objects of some value throughout the house. They filled a couple of pillowcases with what they’d selected, and these are in the living room now. They could have shouldered them and left before the Hollanders came home, and now, as one sits and the other paces, I can imagine them thinking of doing just that. They’ve already done a good night’s work. They could go home now.

But no, it’s too late now. The Hollanders have arrived, they’re climbing the half-flight of marble steps to their front door. Do they sense an alien presence within? It’s possible that they do. Susan Hollander is a creative person, artistic, intuitive. Her husband is more traditionally practical, trained to deal in facts and logic, but his professional experience has taught him to trust his intuition.

She has a feeling, and she takes his arm. He turns, looks at her, can almost read the thought written on her face. But all of us get feelings all the time, premonitions, vaguely disquieting intimations. Most of them turn out to be nothing, and we learn to ignore them, to override our personal early warning systems. At Chernobyl, you may recall, the gauges indicated a problem; the men who read the gauges decided they were faulty, and ignored them.

He has his key out, and slips it into the lock. Inside, the two men hear the key in the lock. The seated man gets to his feet, the pacer moves toward the door. Byrne Hollander turns the key, pushes the door open, lets his wife enter first, follows her inside.

Then they catch sight of the two men, but by now it’s too late.

I could tell you what they did, what they said. How the Hollanders begged and tried to bargain, and how the two men did what they’d already decided to do. How they shot Byrne Hollander three times with a silenced.22 automatic, twice in the heart and once in the temple. How one of them, the pacer, raped Susan Hollander fore and aft, ejaculating into her anus, and then thrust the fireplace poker into her vagina, before the other man, the one who had been sitting patiently earlier, out of mercy or the urge to get out of there, grabbed her by her long hair, yanked her head back forcefully enough to separate some hairs from her scalp, and cut her throat with a knife he’d found in the kitchen. It was of carbon steel, with a serrated edge, and the manufacturer swore it would slice through bone.

I would be imagining all of this, just as I imagined them holding hands as they crossed the street, even as I imagined the two men waiting for them, one sitting in the tobacco-brown chair, the other pacing before the fireplace. I have let my imagination work with the facts, never contradicting them but filling in where they leave off. I don’t know, for example, that some inner prompting warned either or both of the Hollanders that danger waited within their house. I don’t know that the rapist and the knife-wielder were different men. Maybe the same man raped her as killed her. Maybe he killed her while he was inside of her, maybe that increased his pleasure. Or maybe he tried it out, thinking it might heighten his climax, and maybe it did, or maybe it didn’t.

Susan Hollander, sitting at her desk on the top floor of her brownstone, used her imagination to write her stories. I have read some of them, and they are dense, tightly crafted constructions, some set in New York, some in the American West, at least one set in an unnamed European country. Her characters are at once introspective and, often, thoughtless and impulsive. They are, to my mind, not much fun to be around, but they are convincingly real, and they are clearly creatures of her imagination. She imagined them, and brought them to life upon the page.

One expects writers to use their imaginations, but that portion of the mind, of the self, is as much a part of the equipment of a policeman. A cop would be better off without a gun or a notebook than without an imagination. For all that detectives, private and public, deal in and count on facts, it is our capacity to reflect, to imagine, that points us to solutions. When two cops discuss a case they’re working on, they talk less about what they know for a fact than what they imagine. They construct scenarios of what might have happened, and then look for facts that will support or knock down their constructions.

And so I have imagined the final moments of Byrne and Susan Hollander. Of course I have gone much farther in my imagination than I have felt it necessary to recount here. The facts themselves go farther than I’ve gone here-the blood spatters, the semen traces, the physical evidence painstakingly gathered and recorded and assessed by the forensic technicians. Even so, there are questions the evidence doesn’t answer unequivocally. For example, which of the Hollanders died first? I’ve suggested that they shot Byrne Hollander before they raped his wife, but it could have been the other way around; the physical evidence allows for either scenario. Perhaps he had to watch her violation and hear her screams until the first bullet mercifully blinded and deafened him. Perhaps she saw her husband killed before she was seized and stripped and taken. I can imagine it either way, and have in fact imagined it every possible way.

Here is how I prefer to imagine it: Almost as soon as they are inside the house and the door is kicked shut, one of the men shoots Byrne Hollander three times, and he is dead before the third bullet enters his body, dead before he hits the floor. The shock alone is enough to induce an out-of-body experience in his wife, and Susan Hollander, disembodied, hovers somewhere near the ceiling and watches, emotionally and physically disconnected, while her body is abused on the floor below her. Then, when they cut her throat, that body dies, and the part of her that has been watching is drawn down that long tunnel that seems to be a part of all near-death experiences. There’s a white light, and she’s drawn into the light, and there she finds the people who loved her and are waiting for her. Her grandparents, of course, and her father, who died when she was a child. Her mother, who died just two years ago, and her son, of course, Sean. There’s never been a day that she hasn’t thought of Sean, and he’s there now, waiting for her.

And her husband’s there, too. They were only apart for a few minutes, really, and now they’ll be together forever.

Well, that’s how I prefer to imagine it. And it’s my imagination. I guess I can do as I please with it.