Hit Man

7 Keller's Choice

K eller, behind thewheel of a rented Plymouth, kept an eye on the fat man’s house. It was very grand, with columns, for heaven’s sake, and a circular driveway, and one hell of a lot of lawn. Keller, who had done his share of lawn mowing as a teenager, wondered what a kid would get for mowing a lawn like that.

Hard to say. The thing was, he had no frame of reference. He seemed to remember getting a couple of bucks way back when, but the lawns he’d mowed were tiny, postage stamps in comparison to the fat man’s rolling green envelope. Taking into consideration the disparity in lawn size, and the inexorable shrinkage of the dollar over the years, what was a lawn like this worth? Twenty dollars? Fifty dollars? More?

The non-answer, he suspected, was that people who had lawns like this one didn’t hire kids to push a mower around. Instead they had gardeners who showed up regularly with vehicles appropriate to the season, mowing in the summer, raking leaves in the fall, plowing snow in the winter. And charging so much a month, a tidy sum that actually didn’t cost the fat man anything to speak of, because he very likely billed it to his company, or took it off his taxes. Or, if his accountant was enterprising, both.

Keller, who lived in a one-bedroom apartment in midtown Manhattan, had no lawn to mow. There was a tree in front of his building, planted and diligently maintained by the Parks Department, and its leaves fell in the fall, but no one needed to rake them. The wind was pretty good about blowing them away. Snow, when it didn’t melt of its own accord, was shoveled from the sidewalk by the building’s superintendent, who kept the elevator running and replaced burned-out bulbs in the hall fixtures and dealt with minor plumbing emergencies. Keller had a low-maintenance life, really. All he had to do was pay the rent on time and everything else got taken care of by other people.

He liked it that way. Even so, when his work took him away from home he found himself wondering. His fantasies, by and large, centered on simpler and more modest lifestyles. A cute little house in a subdivision, an undemanding job. A manageable life.

The fat man’s house, in a swank suburban community north of Cincinnati, was neither cute nor little. Keller wasn’t too clear on what the fat man did, beyond the fact that it involved his playing host to a lot of visitors and spending a good deal of time in his car. He couldn’t say if the work was demanding, although he suspected it might be. Nor could he tell if the man’s life was manageable. What he did know, though, was that someone wanted to manage him right out of it.

Which, of course, was where Keller came in, and why he was sitting in an Avis car across the street from the fat man’s estate. And was it right to call it that? Where did you draw the line between a house and an estate? What was the yardstick, size or value? He thought about it, and decided it was probably some sort of combination of the two. A brownstone on East Sixty-sixth Street was just a house, not an estate, even if it was worth five or ten times as much as the fat man’s spread. On the other hand, a double-wide trailer could sit on fifteen or twenty acres of land without making the cut as an estate.

He was pondering the point when his wristwatch beeped, reminding him the security patrol was due in five minutes or so. He turned the key in the ignition, took a last wistful look at the fat man’s house (or estate) across the road, and pulled away from the curb.

In his motel room, Keller put on the television set and worked his way around the dial without leaving his chair. Lately, he’d noticed, most of the decent motels had remote controls for their TV sets. For a while there you’d get the remote bolted to the top of the bedside table, but that was only handy if you happened to be sitting up in bed watching. Otherwise it was a pain in the neck. If you had to get up and walk over to the bed to change the channel or mute the commercial, you might as well just walk over to the set.

It was to prevent theft, of course. A free-floating remote could float right into a guest’s suitcase, never to be seen again. Table lamps were bolted down in the same fashion, and television sets, too. But that was pretty much okay. You didn’t mind being unable to move the lamp around, or the TV. The remote was something else again. You might as well bolt down the towels.

He turned off the set. It might be easy to change channels now, but it was harder than ever to find anything he wanted to see. He picked up a magazine, thumbed through it. This was his fourth night at this particular motel, and he still hadn’t figured out a good way to kill the fat man. There had to be a way, there was always a way, but he hadn’t found it yet.

Suppose he had a house like the fat man’s. Generally he fantasized about houses he could afford to buy, lives he could imagine himself living. He had enough money salted away so that he could buy an unassuming house somewhere and pay cash for it, but he couldn’t even scrape up the down payment for a spread like the fat man’s. (Could you call it that-a spread? And what exactlywas a spread? How did it compare to an estate? Was the distinction geographical, with estates in the Northeast and spreads south and west?)

Still, say he had the money, not just to swing the deal but to cover the upkeep as well. Say he won the lottery, say he could afford the gardener and a live-in maid and whatever else you had to have. Would he enjoy it, walking from room to room, admiring the paintings on the walls, luxuriating in the depth of the carpets? Would he like strolling in the garden, listening to the birds, smelling the flowers?

Nelson might like it, he thought. Romping on a lawn like that.

He sat there for a moment, shaking his head. Then he switched chairs and reached for the phone.

He called his own number in New York, got his machine. “You. Have. Six. Messages,” it told him, and played them for him. The first five turned out to be wordless hangups. The sixth was a voice he knew.

“Hey there, E.T. Call home.”

He made the call from a pay phone a quarter-mile down the highway. Dot answered, and her voice brightened when she recognized his.

“There you are,” she said. “I called and called.”

“There was only the one message.”

“I didn’t want to leave one. I figured I’d tell What’s-her-name.”

“ Andria.”

“Right, and she’d pass the word to you when you called in. But she never picked up. She must be walking that dog of yours to the Bronx and back.”

“I guess.”

“So I left a message, and here we are, chatting away like old friends. I don’t suppose you did what you went there to do.”

“It’s not as quick and easy as it might be,” he said. “It’s taking time.”

“Other words, our friend’s still got a pulse.”

“Or else he’s learned to walk around without one.”

“Well,” she said, “I’m glad to hear it. You know what I think you should do, Keller? I think you should check out of that motel and get on a plane.”

“And come home?”

“Got it in one, Keller, but then you were always quick.”

“The client canceled?”

“Not exactly.”

“Then-”

“Fly home,” she said, “and then catch a train to White Plains, and I’ll pour you a nice glass of iced tea. And I’ll explain all.”

It wasn’t iced tea, it was lemonade. He sat in a wicker chair on the wraparound porch of the big house on Taunton Place sipping a big glass of it. Dot, wearing a blue and white housedress and a pair of white flip-flops, perched on the wooden railing.

“I just got those the day before yesterday,” she said, pointing. “Wind chimes. I was watching QVC and they caught me in a weak moment.”

“It could have been a Pocket Fisherman.”

“It might as well be,” she said, “for all the breeze we’ve been getting. But how do you like this for coincidence, Keller? There you are, off doing a job in Cincinnati, and we get a call, another client with a job just down your street.”

“Down my street?”

“Or up your alley. I think it’s a Briticism, down your street, but we’re in America, so the hell with it. It’s up your alley.”

“If you say so.”

“And you’ll never guess where this second caller lives.”

“ Cincinnati,” he said.

“Give the man a cigar.”

He frowned. “So there’s two jobs in the same metropolitan area,” he said. “That would be a reason to do them both in one trip, assuming it was possible. Save airfare, I suppose, if that matters. Save finding a room and settling in. Instead I’m back here with neither job done, which doesn’t make sense. So there’s more to it.”

“Give the man a cigar and light it for him.”

“Puff puff,” Keller said. “The jobs are connected somehow, and I’d better know all about it up front or I might step on my own whatsit.”

“And we wouldn’t want anything to happen to your whatsit.”

“Right. What’s the connection? Same client for both jobs?”

She shook her head.

“Different clients. Sametarget? Did the fat man manage to piss off two different people to the point where they both called us within days of each other?”

“Be something, wouldn’t it?”

“Well, pissing people off is like anything else,” he said. “Certain people have a knack for it. But that’s not it.”

“No.”

“Different targets.”

“I’m afraid so.”

“Different targets, different clients. Same time, same place, but everything else is different. So? Help me out on this, Dot. I’m not getting anywhere.”

“Keller,” she said, “you’re doing fine.”

“Four people, all of them different. The fat man and the guy who hired us to hit him, and target number two and client number two, and… ”

“Is day beginning to break? Is light beginning to dawn?”

“The fat man wants to hire us,” he said. “To kill our original client.”

“Give the man an exploding cigar.”

“A hires us to kill B, and B hires us to kill A.”

“That’s a little algebraic for me, but it makes the point.”

“The contracts couldn’t have come direct,” he said. “They were brokered, right? Because the fat man’s not a wise guy. He could be a little mobbed up, the way some businessmen are, but he wouldn’t know to call here.”

“He came through somebody,” Dot agreed.

“And so did the other guy. Different brokers, of course.”

“Of course.”

“And they both called here.” He raised his eyes significantly to the ceiling. “And what did he do, Dot? Say yes to both of them?”

“That’s what he did.”

“Why, for God’s sake? We’ve already got a client, we can’t take an assignment to kill him, especially from somebody we’ve already agreed to take out.”

“The ethics of the situation bother you, Keller?”

“This is good,” he said, brandishing the lemonade. “This from a mix or what?”

“Homemade. Real lemons, real sugar.”

“Makes a difference,” he said. “Ethics? What do I know about ethics? It’s just no way to do business, that’s all. What’s the broker going to think?”

“Which broker?”

“The one whose client gets killed. What’s he going to say?”

“What would you have done, Keller? If you were him, and you got the second call days after the first one.”

He thought about it. “I’d say I haven’t got anybody available at the moment, but I should have a good man in about two weeks, when he gets back from Aruba.”

“ Aruba?”

“Wherever. Then, after the fat man’s toast and I’ve been back a week, say, you call back and ask if the contract’s still open. And he says something like, ‘No, the client changed his mind.’ Even if he guesses who popped his guy, it’s all straight and clean and businesslike. Or don’t you agree?”

“No,” she said. “I agree completely.”

“But that’s not what he did,” he said, “and I’m surprised. What was his thinking? He afraid of arousing suspicions, something like that?”

She just looked at him. He met her gaze, and read something in her face, and he got it.

“Oh, no,” he said.

“I thought he was getting better,” she said. “I’m not saying there wasn’t a little denial operating, Keller. A little wishing-will-make-it-so.”

“Understandable.”

“He had that time when he gave you the wrong room number, but that worked out all right in the end.”

“For us,” Keller said. “Not for the guy who was in the room.”

“There’s that,” she allowed. “Then he went into that funk and kept turning down everybody who called. I was thinking maybe a doctor could get him on Prozac.”

“I don’t know about Prozac. In this line of work…”

“Yeah, I was wondering about that. Depressed is no good, but is mellow any better? It could be counterproductive.”

“It could be disastrous.”

“That too,” she said. “And you can’t get him to go to a doctor anyway, so what difference does it make? He’s in a funk, maybe it’s like the weather. A low-pressure front moves in, and it’s all you can do to sit on the porch with an iced tea. Then it blows over, and we get some of that good Canadian air, and it’s like old times again.”

“Old times.”

“And yesterday he was on the phone, and then he buzzed me and I took him a cup of coffee. ‘Call Keller,’ he told me. ‘I’ve got some work for him in Cincinnati.’ ”

“Déjá vu.”

“You said it, Keller. Déjá vu like never before.”

Her explanation was elaborate-what the old man said, what she thought he meant, what he really meant, di dah di dah di dah. What it boiled down to was that the original client, one Barry Moncrieff, had been elated that his problems with the fat man were soon to be over, and he’d confided as much to at least one person who couldn’t keep a secret. Word reached the fat man, whose name was Arthur Strang.

While Moncrieff may have forgotten that loose lips sink ships, Strang evidently remembered that the best defense was a good offense. He made a couple of phone calls, and eventually the phone rang in the house on Taunton Place, and the old man took the call and took the contract.

When Dot pointed out the complications-i.e., that their new client was already slated for execution, with the fee paid by the man who had just become their new target-it became evident that the old man had forgotten the original deal entirely.

“He didn’t know you were in Cincinnati,” she explained. “Didn’t have a clue he’d sent you there or anywhere else. For all he knew you were out walking the dog, assuming he remembered you had a dog.”

“But when you told him… ”

“He didn’t see the problem. I kept explaining it to him, until it hit me what I was doing. I was trying to blow out a light bulb.”

“Puff puff,” Keller said.

“You said it. He just wasn’t going to get it. ‘Keller’s a good boy,’ he said. ‘You leave it to Keller. Keller will know what to do.’ ”

“He said that, huh?”

“His very words. You look the least bit lost, Keller. Don’t tell me he was wrong.”

He thought for a moment. “The fat man knows there’s a contract out on him,” he said. “Well, that figures. It would explain why he was so hard to get close to.”

“If you’d managed,” Dot pointed out, “I’d shrug and say what’s done is done, and let it go at that. But, fortunately or unfortunately, you checked your machine in time.”

“Fortunately or unfortunately.”

“Right, and don’t ask me which is which. Easiest thing, you say the word and I call both of the middlemen and tell them we’re out. Our foremost operative broke his leg in a skiing accident and you’d better call somebody else. What’s the matter?”

“Skiing? This time of year?”

“In Chile, Keller. Use your imagination. Anyway, we’re out of it.”

“Maybe that’s best.”

“Not from a dollars-and-cents standpoint. No money for you, and refunds for both clients, who’ll either look elsewhere or be reduced to shooting each other. I hate to give money back once it’s been paid.”

“What did they do, pay half in front?”

“Uh-huh. Usual system.”

He frowned, trying to work it out. “Go home,” she said. “Pet Andria and give Nelson a kiss, or is it the other way around? Sleep on it and let me know what you decide.”

He took the train to Grand Central and walked home, rode up in the elevator, used his key in the lock. The apartment was dark and quiet, just as he’d left it. Nelson’s dish was in a corner of the kitchen. Keller looked at it and felt like a Gold Star Mother, keeping her son’s room exactly as he had left it. He knew he ought to put the dish away or chuck it out altogether, but he didn’t have the heart.

He unpacked and showered, then went around the corner for a beer and a burger. He took a walk afterward, but it wasn’t much fun. He went back to the apartment and called the airlines. Then he packed again and caught a cab to JFK.

He phoned White Plains while he waited for them to call his flight. “On my way,” he told Dot.

“You continue to surprise me, Keller,” she said. “I thought for sure you’d stay the night.”

“No reason to.”

There was a pause. Then she said, “Keller? Is something wrong?”

“ Andria left,” he said, surprising himself. He hadn’t intended to say anything. Eventually, sure, but not just yet.

“That’s too bad,” Dot said. “I thought the two of you were happy.”

“So did I.”

“Oh.”

“She has to find herself,” Keller said.

“You know, I’ve heard people say that, and I never know what the hell they’re talking about. How would you lose yourself in the first place? And how would you know where to look for yourself?”

“I wondered that myself.”

“Of course she’s awfully young, Keller.”

“Right.”

“Too young for you, some would say.”

“Some would.”

“Still, you probably miss her. Not to mention Nelson.”

“I miss them both,” he said.

“I mean you both must miss her,” Dot said. “Wait a minute. What did you just say?”

“They just called my flight,” he said, and broke the connection.

Cincinnati ’s airport was across the river in Kentucky. Keller had turned in his Avis car that morning, and thought it might seem strange if he went back to the same counter for another one. He went to Budget instead, and got a Honda.

“It’s a Japanese car,” the clerk told him, “but it’s actually produced right here in the US of A.”

“That’s a load off my mind,” Keller told him.

He checked into a motel half a mile from the previous one and called in from a restaurant pay phone. He had a batch of questions, things he needed to know about Barry Moncrieff, the fellow who was at once Client #1 and Assignment #2. Dot, instead of answering, asked him a question of her own.

“What do you mean, you miss them both? Where’s the dog?”

“I don’t know.”

“She ran off with your dog? Is that what you’re saying?”

“They went off together,” he said. “Nobody was running.”

“Fine, she walked off with your dog. I guess she figured she needed him to help her go look for herself. What did she do, skip town while you were in Cincinnati?”

“Earlier,” he said. “And she didn’t skip town. We talked about it, and she said she thought it would be best if she took Nelson with her.”

“And you agreed?”

“More or less.”

“ ‘More or less’? What does that mean?”

“I’ve often wondered myself. She said I don’t really have time for him, and I travel a lot, and… I don’t know.”

“But he was your dog long before you even met her. You hired her to walk him when you were out of town.”

“Right.”

“And one thing led to another, and she wound up living there. And the next thing you know she’s telling you it’s best if the dog goes with her.”

“Right.”

“And away they go.”

“Right.”

“And you don’t know where, and you don’t know if they’ll be back.”

“Right.”

“When did this happen, Keller?”

“About a month ago. Maybe a little longer, maybe six weeks.”

“You never said anything.”

“No.”

“I went on about how you should pet him and kiss her, whatever I said, and you didn’t say anything.”

“I would have gotten around to it sooner or later.”

They were both silent for a long moment. Then she asked him what he was going to do. About what, he asked.

“About what? About your dog and your girlfriend.”

“I thought that’s what you meant,” he said, “but you could have been talking about Moncrieff and Strang. But it’s the same answer all around. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

What it came down to was this. He had a choice to make. It was his decision as to which contract he would fulfill and which he would cancel.

And how did you decide something like that? Two people wanted his services, and only one could have them. If he were a painting, the answer would be obvious. You’d have an auction, and whoever was willing to make the highest bid would have something pretty to hang over the couch. But you couldn’t have bids in the present instance because the price had already been fixed, and both parties independently had agreed to it. Each had paid half in advance, and when the job was done one of them would pay the additional 50 percent and the other would be technically entitled to a refund, but in no position to claim it.

So in that sense the contract was potentially more lucrative than usual, paying one and a half times the standard rate. It came out the same no matter how you did it. Kill Moncrieff, and Strang would pay the rest of the money. Kill Strang, and Moncrieff would pay it.

Which would it be?

Moncrieff, he thought, had called first. The old man had made a deal with him, and a guarantee of exclusivity was implicit in such an arrangement. When you hired somebody to kill someone, you didn’t require assurance that he wouldn’t hire on to kill you as well. That went without saying.

So their initial commitment was to Moncrieff, and any arrangements made with Strang ought to be null and void. Money from Strang wasn’t really a retainer, it came more under the heading of windfall profits, and needn’t weigh in the balance. You could even argue that taking Strang’s advance payment was a perfectly legitimate tactical move, designed to lull the quarry into a feeling of false security, thus making him easier to get to.

On the other hand…

On the other hand, if Moncrieff had just kept his damned mouth shut, Strang wouldn’t have been forewarned, and consequently forearmed. It was Moncrieff, running his mouth about his plans to do the fat man in, that had induced Strang to call somebody, who called somebody else, who wound up talking to the old man in White Plains.

And it was Moncrieff’s blabbing that had made Strang such an elusive target. Otherwise it would have been easy to get to the fat man, and by now Keller would have long since completed the assignment. Instead of sitting all by himself in a motel on the outskirts of Cincinnati, he could be sitting all by himself in an apartment on First Avenue.

Moncrieff, loose of lip, had sunk his own ship. Moncrieff, unable to keep a secret, had sabotaged the very contract he had been so quick to arrange. Couldn’t you argue that his actions, with their unfortunate results, had served to nullify the contract? In which case the old man was more than justified in retaining his deposit while accepting a counterproposal from another interested party.

Which meant that the thing to do was regard the fat man as the bona fide client and Moncrieff (fat or lean, tall or short, Keller didn’t know which) as the proper quarry.

On the other hand…

Moncrieff had a penthouse apartment atop a high-rise not far from Riverfront Stadium. The Reds were in town for a home stand, and Keller bought a ticket and an inexpensive pair of field glasses and went to watch them. His seat was out in right field, remote enough that he wasn’t the only one with binoculars. Near him sat a father and son, both of whom had brought gloves in the hope of catching a foul ball. Neither pitcher had his stuff, and both teams hit a lot of long balls, but the kid and his father only got excited when somebody hit a long foul to right.

Keller wondered about that. If what they wanted was a baseball, wouldn’t they be better off buying one at a sporting goods store? If they wanted the thrill of the chase, well, they could get the clerk to throw it up in the air, and the kid could catch it when it came down.

During breaks in the action, Keller trained the binoculars on a window of what he was pretty sure was Moncrieff ’s apartment. He found himself wondering whether Moncrieff was a baseball fan, and if he took advantage of his location and watched the ball games from his window. You’d need a lot more magnification than Keller was carrying, but if Moncrieff could afford the penthouse he could swing a powerful telescope as well. If he got the kind of gizmo that let you count the rings of Saturn, you ought to be able to tell whether the pitcher’s curveball was breaking.

Made about as much sense as taking a glove to the game, he decided. If a man like Moncrieff wanted to watch a game, he could afford a box seat behind the Reds’ dugout. Of course these days he might prefer to stay home and watch the game on television if not through a telescope, because he might figure it was safer.

And, as far as Keller could tell, Barry Moncrieff wasn’t taking a lot of risks. If he hadn’t guessed that the fat man might retaliate and put out a contract of his own, then he looked to be a naturally cautious man. He lived in a secure building, and he rarely left it. When he did, he never seemed to go anywhere alone.

Keller, unable to pick a target on the basis of an ethical distinction, had opted for pragmatism. His line of work, after all, was different from crapshooting. You didn’t get a bonus for making your point the hard way. So, if you had to take out one of two men, why not pick the man who was easier to kill?

By the time he left the ballpark, with the Reds having lost to the Phillies in extra innings after leaving the bases loaded in the bottom of the ninth, he’d spent three full days on the question. What he’d managed to determine was that neither man was easy to kill. They both lived in fortresses, one high up in the air, the other way out in the sticks. Neither one would be impossible to hit-nobody was impossible to hit-but neither would be easy.

He’d managed to get a look at Moncrieff, managed to be in the lobby showing a misaddressed package to a concierge who was as puzzled as Keller was pretending to be, when Moncrieff entered, flanked by two young men with big shoulders and bulges under their jackets. Moncrieff was fiftyish and balding, with a downturned mouth and jowls like a basset hound.

He was fat, too. Keller might have thought of him as the fat man if he hadn’t already assigned that label to Arthur Strang. Moncrieff wasn’t fat the way Strang was fat-few people were-but that still left him a long way from being a borderline anorexic. Keller guessed he was seventy-five to a hundred pounds lighter than Strang. Strang waddled, while Moncrieff strutted like a pigeon.

Back in his motel, Keller found himself watching a newscast and looking at highlights from the game he’d just watched. He turned off the set, picked up the binoculars, and wondered why he’d bothered to buy them, and what he was going to do with them now. He caught himself thinking that Andria might enjoy using them to watch birds in Central Park. He told himself to stop that, and he went and took a shower.

Neither one would be the least bit easy to kill, he thought, but he could already see a couple of approaches to either man. The degree of difficulty, as an Olympic diver would say, was about the same. So, as far as he could tell, was the degree of risk.

A thought struck him. Maybe one of them deserved it.

“Arthur Strang,” the woman said. “You know, he was fat when I met him. I think he was born fat. But he was nothing like he is now. He was just, you know, heavy.”

Her name was Marie, and she was a tall woman with unconvincing red hair. Early thirties, Keller figured. Big lips, big eyes. Nice shape to her, too, but Keller’s opinion, since she brought it up, was she could stand to lose five pounds. Not that he was going to mention it.

“When I met him he was heavy,” she said, “but he wore these well-tailored Italian suits, and he looked okay, you know? Of course, naked, forget it.”

“It’s forgotten.”

“Huh?” She looked confused, but a sip of her drink put her at ease. “Before we were married,” she said, “he actually lost weight, believe it or not. Then we jumped over the broomstick together and he started eating with both hands. That’s just an expression.”

“He only ate with one hand?”

“No, silly! ‘Jumped over the broomstick.’ We had a regular wedding in a church. Anyway, I don’t think Arthur would have been too good at jumping over anything, not even if you laid the broomstick flat on the floor. I was married to him for three years, and I’ll bet he put on twenty or thirty pounds a year. Then we broke up three years ago, and have you seen him lately? He’s as big as a house.”

As big as a double-wide, maybe, Keller thought. But nowhere near as big as an estate.

“You know, Kevin,” she said, laying a hand on Keller’s arm, “it’s awful smoky in here. They passed a law against it but people smoke anyway, and what are you going to do, arrest them?”

“Maybe we should get some air,” he suggested, and she beamed at the notion.

Back at her place, she said, “He had preferences, Kevin.”

Keller nodded encouragingly, wondering if he’d ever been called Kevin before. He sort of liked the way she said it.

“As a matter of fact,” she said darkly, “he was sexually aberrant.”

“Really?”

“He wanted me to do things,” she said, rubbing his leg. “You wouldn’t believe the things he wanted.”

“Oh?”

She told him. “I thought it was disgusting,” she said, “but he insisted, and it was part of what broke us up. But do you want to know something weird?”

“Sure.”

“After the divorce,” she said, “I sort of became more broad-minded on the subject. You might find this hard to believe, Kevin, but I’m pretty kinky.”

“No kidding.”

“In fact, what I just told you about Arthur? The really disgusting thing? Well, I have to admit it no longer disgusts me. In fact… ”

“Yes?”

“Oh, Kevin,” she said.

She was kinky, all right, and spirited, and afterward he decided he’d been wrong about the five pounds. She was fine just the way she was.

“I was wondering,” he said on his way out the door. “Your ex-husband? How did he feel about dogs?”

“Oh, Kevin,” she said. “And here I thought I was the kinky one. You’re too much. Dogs?”

“I didn’t mean it that way.”

“I’ll bet you didn’t. Kevin, honey, if you don’t get out of here this minute I may not let you go at all. Dogs!”

“Just as pets,” he said. “Does he, you know, like dogs? Or hate them?”

“As far as I know,” Marie said, “Arthur Strang has no opinion one way or the other about dogs. The subject never came up.”

Laurel Moncrieff, the second of three women with whom Barry had jumped over the broomstick, had nothing to report on the ups and downs of her ex-husband’s weight, or what he did or didn’t like to do when the shades were drawn. She’d worked as Moncrieff’s secretary, won him away from his first wife, and made sure he had a male secretary afterward.

“Then the son of a bitch joined a gym,” she said, “and he wound up leaving me for his personal trainer. He wadded me up and threw me away like a used Kleenex.”

She didn’t look like the sort of person you’d blow your nose on. She was a slender, dark-haired woman, and she had been no harder to get acquainted with than Marie Strang, and about as easy to wind up in the hay with. She hadn’t disclosed any interesting aberrations, her own or her ex-husband’s, but Keller found himself with no cause to complain.

“Ah, Kevin,” she said.

Maybe it was the name, he thought. Maybe he should use it more often, maybe it brought him luck.

“Living alone the way you do,” he said. “You ever think about getting a dog?”

“I’m away too much,” she said. “It’d be no good for me and no good for the dog.”

“That’s true for a lot of people,” he said, “but they’re used to having one around the house and they don’t want to give it up.”

“Whatever works,” she said. “I never got used to it, and you know what they say. You don’t miss what you never had.”

“I guess your ex didn’t have a dog.”

“Not until I left and he married the bitch with the magic fingers.”

“She had a dog?”

“Shewas a dog, honey. She had a face like a Rottweiler. But she’s out of the picture now, and she hasn’t been replaced. Serves her right, if you ask me.”

“So you don’t know how Barry Moncrieff felt about dogs.”

“Of the canine variety, you mean? I don’t think he cared much one way or the other. Hey, how’d we get on this silly subject, anyhow? Why don’t you lie down and kiss me, Kevin, honey?”

They both gave money to local charities. Strang tended to support the arts, while Moncrieff donated to fight diseases and feed the homeless. They both had a reputation for ruthlessness in business. Both were childless, and presently unmarried. Neither one had a dog, or had ever had a dog, as far as he could determine. Neither had any strong prodog or antidog feelings. It would have been helpful to discover that Strang was a heavy contributor to the ASPCA and the Anti-Vivisection League, or that Moncrieff liked to go to a basement in Kentucky and watch a couple of pit bulls fight to the death, betting substantial sums on the outcome.

But he came across nothing of the sort, and the more he thought about it the less legitimate a criterion it seemed to him. Why should a matter of life and death hinge upon how a man felt about dogs? And who was Keller to care anyway? It was not as if he were a dog owner himself. Not anymore.

“Neither one’s Albert Schweitzer,” he told Dot, “and neither one’s Hitler. They both fall somewhere in between, so making a decision on moral grounds is impossible. I’ll tell you, this is murder.”

“It’s not,” she said. “That’s the whole trouble, Keller. You’re in Cincinnati and the clock’s running.”

“I know.”

“Moral decisions. This is the wrong business for moral decisions.”

“You’re right,” he said. “And who am I to be making that kind of decision, anyway?”

“Spare me the humility,” she said. “Listen, I’m as crazy as you are. I had this idea, call both brokers, have them get in touch with their clients. Explain that due to the exigencies of this particular situation, di dah di dah di dah, we need full payment in advance.”

“You think they’d go for it?”

“If one of them went for it,” she said, “that’d make the decision, wouldn’t it? Knock him off and the other guy’s left alive to pay in full, a satisfied customer.”

“That’s brilliant,” he said, and thought a moment. “Except…”

“Ah, you spotted it, didn’t you? The guy who cooperates, the guy who goes the extra mile to be a really good client, he’s the one who gets rewarded by getting killed. I like ironic as much as the next person, Keller, but I decided that’s a little too much for me.”

“Besides,” he said, “with our luck they’d both pay.”

“And we’d be back where we started. Keller?”

“What?”

“All said and done, there’s only one answer. You got a quarter?”

“Probably. Why?”

“Toss it,” she said. “Heads or tails.”

Heads.

Keller picked up the quarter he’d tossed, dropped it into the slot. He dialed a number, and while it rang he wondered at the wisdom of making such a decision on the basis of a coin toss. It seemed awfully arbitrary to him, but then again maybe it was the way of the world. Maybe somewhere up above the clouds there was an old man with a beard making life-and-death decisions in the very same way, tossing coins, shrugging, and passing out train wrecks and heart attacks.

“Let me talk to Mr. Strang,” he told the person who answered. “Just tell him it’s in reference to a recent contract.”

There was a long pause, and Keller dug out another quarter in case the phone needed feeding. Then Strang came on the line. It seemed to Keller that he recognized the voice even though he had never heard it before. The voice was resonant, like an opera singer’s, though hardly musical.

“I don’t know who you are,” Strang said without preamble, “and I don’t discuss business over the phone with people I don’t know.”

Fat, Keller thought. The man sounded fat.

“Very wise,” Keller told him. “Well, we’ve got business to discuss, and I agree it shouldn’t be over the phone. We ought to meet, but nobody should see us together, or even know we’re having the meeting.” He listened for a moment. “You’re the client,” he said. “I was hoping you could suggest a time and a place.” He listened some more. “Good,” he said. “I’ll be there.”

“But it seems irregular,” Strang said, with a whine in his voice that you would never have heard from Pavarotti. “I don’t see the need for this, I really don’t.”

“You will,” Keller told him. “I can promise you that.”

He broke the connection, then opened his hand and looked at the quarter he was holding. He thought for a moment-about the old man in White Plains, and then about the old man up in the sky. The one with the long white beard, the one who tossed coins of his own and ran the universe accordingly. He thought about the turns in his own life, and the way people could walk in and out of it.

He weighed the coin in his palm-it didn’t weigh very much-and he gave it a toss, caught it, slapped it down on the back of his hand.

Tails.

He reached for the phone.

“This time it’s iced tea,” Dot said. “Last time I promised you iced tea and gave you lemonade.”

“It was good lemonade.”

“Well, this is good iced tea, as far as that goes. Made with real tea.”

“And real ice, I’ll bet.”

“You put the tea bags in a jar of cold water,” she said, “and set the jar in the sun, and forget about them for a few hours. Then you put the jar in the fridge.”

“You don’t boil the water at all?”

“No, you don’t have to. For years I thought you did but it turns out I was wrong. But I lost track of what I was getting at. Iced tea. Oh, right. This time you called and said, ‘I’m on my way. Get ready to break out the lemonade.’ So you were expecting lemonade this time, and here I’m giving you iced tea. Get it, Keller? Each time you get the opposite of what you expect.”

“As long as it’s just a question of iced tea or lemonade,” he said, “I think I can ride with it.”

“Well, you’ve always adjusted quickly to new realities,” she said. “It’s one of your strengths.” She cocked her head and looked up at the ceiling. “Speaking of which. You were upstairs, you talked to him. What do you think?”

“He seemed all right.”

“His old self?”

“Hardly that. But he listened to what I had to say and told me I’d done well. I think he was covering. I think he was clueless as to where I’d been, and he was covering.”

“He does that a lot lately.”

“It’s got a real tea flavor, you know? And you don’t boil the water at all?”

“Not unless you’re in a hurry. Keller?”

He looked up from his glass of tea. She was sitting on the porch railing, her legs crossed, one flip-flop dangling from her toe.

She said, “Why both of them? If you do one, we get the final payment from the other one. This way there’s nobody left to sign a check.”

“He takes checks?”

“Just a manner of speaking. Point is, there’s nobody left to pay up. It’s not just a case of doing the second one for nothing. It cost you money to do it.”

“I know.”

“So explain it to me, will you?”

He took his time thinking about it. At length he said, “I didn’t like the process.”

“The process?”

“Making a choice. There was no way to choose, and tossing a coin didn’t really help. I was still choosing, because I was choosing to accept the coin’s choice, if you can follow me.”

“The trail is faint,” she said, “but I’m on it like a bloodhound.”

“I figured they should both get the same,” he said. “So I tossed twice, and got heads the first time and tails the second time, and I made appointments with both of them.”

“Appointments.”

“They were both good at setting up secret meetings. Strang told me how to get onto his property from the rear. There was an electric fence, but there was a place you could get over it.”

“So he gave the fox the keys to the hen house.”

“There wasn’t any hen house, but there was a toolshed.”

“And two men went into it that fateful morning and only one came out,” Dot said. “And then you ran off to meet Moncrieff?”

“At the Omni downtown. He was having lunch at the restaurant, which according to him is pretty good. There’s no men’s room for the restaurant, you use the one off the hotel lobby. So we could meet there without ever having been in the same public space together.”

“Clever.”

“They were clever men, both of them. Anyway, it worked fine, same as with Strang. I used… well, you don’t like to hear about that part of it.”

“Not particularly, no.”

He was silent for a time, sipping his iced tea, listening to the wind chimes when a breeze blew up. They had been still for a while when he said, “I was angry, Dot.”

“I wondered about that.”

“You know, I’m better off without that dog.”

“Nelson.”

“He was a good dog, and I liked him a lot, but they’re a pain in the ass. Feed them, walk them.”

“Sure.”

“I liked her, too, but I’m a man who lived alone all my life. Living alone is what I’m good at.”

“It’s what you’re used to.”

“That’s right. But even so, Dot. I’ll walk along the street looking in windows and my eyes’ll hit on a pair of earrings, and I’ll be halfway in the door to buy them for her before I remember there’s no point.”

“All the earrings you bought for that girl.”

“She liked getting them,” he said, “and I liked buying them, so it worked out.” He took a breath. “Anyway, I started getting angry, and I kept getting angry.”

“At her.”

“No, she did the right thing. I’ve got no reason to be angry at her.” He pointed upward. “I got angry at him.”

“For sending you to Cincinnati in the first place.”

He shook his head. “Not him upstairs. A higher authority, the old man in the sky who flips all the coins.”

“Oh, Him.”

“Of course,” he said, “by the time I did it, I wasn’t angry. I was the way I always am. I just do what I’m there to do.”

“You’re a professional.”

“I guess so.”

“And you give value.”

“Do I ever.”

“Special summer rates,” she said. “Murder on twofers.”

Keller listened to the wind chimes, then to the silence. Eventually he would have to go back to his apartment and figure out what to do with the dog’s dish. Eventually he and Dot would have to figure out what to do about the old man. For now, though, he just wanted to stay right where he was, sipping his glass of tea.