Resume Speed and Other Stories

Gym Rat

I’d seen him at the gym. He worked Mondays and Thursdays with Troy, one of the better personal trainers on staff. Most of the men and women who use trainers let it go at that, and you never see them show up on their own. But this guy was there just about every day. Right around eleven he’d come out of the locker room in black Spandex, and he’d be on the floor for an hour, sometimes longer. Machines and free weights, the elliptical trainer, sometimes ten or twenty minutes on one of the bikes.

And you’d have to say it was working for him. He had to be a few years older than me, crowding forty, say. Right around six feet tall, and if his body wasn’t one the gym would use in its ads, it was better than most. Decent musculature, pretty respectable definition. He didn’t push himself that hard, and if he used a substance to give himself a boost, it wouldn’t be anything edgier than a protein shake, and maybe a couple of caps of creatine. No way he was into ’roids.

Which is, no question, the best policy for most people. I’m a little different, I’m a fucking gym rat, and that means I’m in sweats or Spandex seven days a week, and generally for four or five hours at a time. When that’s your life, of course you’re going to experiment, see what works and what doesn’t. And some things don’t — you do a lot of juice, you’re gonna wind up with a basketball sitting on your shoulders and a pair of raisins in your nutsack, and no way that’s a good idea. But if you can keep things in proportion, well, you can put in longer hours and lift heavier weights and see real results, and someday you might wind up Governor of California. Better living through chemistry, you know?

Anyway, for a Mr. Natural in his age bracket he shaped up okay.

Then one Wednesday morning he asked me to spot him on the bench press.

You don’t have to know someone all that well to ask for a spot. What it is, the designated spotter stands right behind you, ready to lend a hand if one’s required. Well, two hands, really, to assist you in raising the bar for that final rep you’re determined to grind out, and perhaps offer an encouraging word while he’s at it. It’s a way to achieve your best performance, because you can go all the way to failure.

Plus it’s an important safety precaution. Every now and then you hear about some musclehead working out on his own, at home or in an empty gym, and he fails on the final rep and he can’t get the bar off his chest. If he’s stacked enough iron on it, it’ll crush his chest and kill him.

I took my position, hands at the ready, and he did his dozen reps at 135 and put the bar back on the rack. He could have cranked out a few more, and a potted house plant could have done as much for him as I did.

“Thanks,” he said.

I said it was no problem, or that he was welcome, or whatever I said, and he said, “We should talk.”

Oh?

“But not here.” He didn’t look at me as he spoke, and his lips weren’t moving much. I got the feeling this was a movie, and any minute now Matt Damon would race through, ready to kick ass.

“I’ve got a business proposition for you,” he said. “There’s a diner on the south side of Thirty-fourth Street a few doors west of Ninth Avenue. Do you know it?”

“I can probably find it.”

“Why don’t you find it at three o’clock this afternoon? It’s quiet then. I’ll be in a booth. Maybe you could take the booth right behind me.”

Jesus, we were still in that movie.

I said, “Um, I don’t know...”

“Just show up and listen,” he said. “I’ll pay you a hundred dollars just to hear me out. If you don’t like what you hear, that’s as far as it’ll ever go.”

He didn’t wait for an answer, got up from the bench and headed for the dumbbell rack.

The hundred dollars, I decided, was just the right amount. Much less and I think I’d have passed, much more and I’d have been even more suspicious than I already was. Fifty bucks or two hundred, I’d have walked away from it.

Or would I? Easy to say what you would have done, but hard to know for a fact. Maybe I was intrigued. Maybe I’d have wanted to see how the movie came out.

Some geography, okay? The gym’s in the Village, on the corner of West Twelfth Street and Greenwich Avenue. My room’s a few blocks away in Chelsea, in an SRO on Seventeenth Street. And you know where to find the diner, Thirty-fourth just west of Ninth. The subway’ll run you from Fourteenth to Thirty-fourth, or you can walk it in half an hour, forty minutes if you dawdle.

I took my time. I tend to be right on time, but if we were going to be playing Separate Tables I wanted him to be sitting at his when I walked in the door.

And he was, and he’d been there long enough to have a sandwich and a cup of coffee in front of him, and a bite gone from the sandwich.

I walked to his booth and past it, his eyes barely registering my presence. I sat down so we were back to back, which meant we’d miss out on eye contact but wouldn’t have to raise our voices to be heard. I pretended to look at the menu, and when the waitress shuffled over I ordered an unsweetened iced tea.

When she’d walked off I heard him say, “Reach over your shoulder.”

I did, and he put a piece of paper in my hand. It had Benjamin Franklin’s picture on it, so I was now officially a hundred dollars ahead of the game, less whatever they charged me for the iced tea.

Walking uptown, I’d wondered if he was gay. He didn’t give off that kind of a vibe, though God knows not everybody does. More to the point, the hundred dollars just to hear him out was way high for a sexual overture.

Well, I was here, and I’d taken the hundred. I’d know soon enough what it was all about.

“Reach over your shoulder.”

Again? I did, and this time instead of Franklin I got a picture of a woman. She was sitting in a deck chair alongside a swimming pool, and wearing a bathing suit and dark glasses. She looked pretty enough, though the sunglasses made her face hard to read. Nice body.

“My wife,” he said.

I thought, Oh, I get it. It was sex after all. He wanted me to fuck her. While he watched? Or some tag team thing he’d picked up from online porn?

I wished I could see his face. All I got this way was disembodied words, spoken in a soft voice, and it was hard to take their measure that way.

He said, “I worry about her.”

He paused, and I waited, and he waited, evidently wanting me to say something. What I said was, “Oh?”

“I travel a lot on business. We live across the river in Jersey. A house, not an apartment. Anybody could break in. Nerissa could be the victim of a home invasion. She could be raped, killed.”

Or struck by lightning, I thought. Or drowned in a flash flood.

“If you think she needs a bodyguard,” I said, “I’m the wrong person. At a minimum you’d want someone with martial arts training, and probably firearms training as well.”

“The last thing she needs is a bodyguard.”

I didn’t need to see his face when he spoke that line.

He let it sink in. I looked again at the photo of the nice-looking woman who didn’t need a bodyguard.

“We have two children,” he said. “A boy and a girl. They’ll both be at summer camp for the entire month of August. That’s in Maine, and Nerissa and I are going up to Bar Harbor for the last two weeks of the month. Nothing there you can’t get cheaper and easier at the Jersey Shore, except for the clam rolls, but it makes a change, and then we pick up the kids and tip their counselors and drive home.”

A long speech. It didn’t seem to require a comment, so I didn’t supply one.

“The second weekend in August,” he said, “I’ve got a conference in Las Vegas. I go every year.”

Okay.

“That’s when I’m afraid it might happen.”

“The home invasion,” I said.

“Right.”

“The rape and murder.”

“The rape,” he said, “would be optional.”

How did he pick me? We’d never spoken, never had any interaction whatsoever. He must have seen me at the gym, even as I’d seen him, but what could he have spotted that let him believe I’d hire on to kill his wife? Did I flash gang signs? Sport aggressive tattoos? Glare at other gym members with murderous intensity?

No to all of that. Nor, assuming he’d done his research, could he have found anything in my résumé to make me a likely prospect. I’d never been arrested, let alone convicted of a crime. This was not to say I’d never broken the law, but any transgressions had gone unrecorded.

I led a simple life, and an inexpensive one. The rent for my furnished room was low. I didn’t drink or smoke. I wore jeans and T-shirts from Old Navy or the Gap. My biggest expense was my gym membership, and that was limited to non-peak hours and consequently discounted.

On what basis had he selected me for this astonishing offer? It scarcely needed to be said that I’d never killed anyone. If I was not a complete stranger to violence, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been in a fight. It would have had to be in high school. Fifteen years ago, at a minimum.

For God’s sake, why me?

“Seventy-five thousand dollars,” he said.

Before he got to the price, he supplied the reason. The marriage had turned sour several years ago. He wanted out. If he divorced her, she’d fight tooth and nail for the children, and almost certainly get them. And she’d move them out of the state, she’d already threatened as much.

Simpler to kill her. Cheaper, too, considering what he’d save in legal fees and alimony. And satisfying, because he’d come to hate the woman, and would be happy to see her dead.

Jesus.

I said, “Do you even know my name?”

“No,” he said, “and I don’t want to. I don’t want to know anything about you. My name is Graham Tillman, and—”

“I don’t think you should tell me.”

“You could hardly do this without knowing. How are you going to force your way into a house without knowing the name of its owner? And you already know my wife’s name.”

Nerissa, I thought. Had I ever known anyone with that name?

“Here’s what we’ll do,” he was saying. “Right now it hardly matters which way you’re leaning. You’ll want to live with the thought for awhile and see where it goes. Today’s Wednesday. Our paths may or may not cross at the gym tomorrow, but in any event we won’t speak.”

He’d be working with Troy, I thought.

“I won’t be at the gym Friday,” he said. “I have meetings throughout the day. One of them’s with you, at the same hour as today. Three p.m.”

“Here?”

“No. I’ll never come back here, and I recommend you avoid it yourself. I’ve been unable to spot security cameras here, but even if they have them, we’d never be in the same frame. Even so, it would be the height of folly for us ever to meet twice in the same place.”

He’d thought this through. That was reassuring, and at the same time it was unsettling.

“There’s a similar establishment,” he said, “at the southwest corner of Second Avenue and Seventy-second Street. I’m hardly ever in that neighborhood.”

“Neither am I.”

“Same drill as today. I’ll be there at three. Take the adjacent booth.”

“I don’t really think—”

“That this is for you? Right now it’s not important what you think. Take forty-eight hours to live with the notion. Whatever you decide, come to the restaurant.”

“Why, if what I decide is to pass?”

“Same deal as today,” he said, “except what you get for showing up is two hundred dollars. Don’t say anything now. Get your check and go. I’ll stay here another ten or fifteen minutes.”

Tradecraft, I thought. I wonder how he knew all this stuff. Maybe we just both went to the same movies.

“You might let me have the photo back.”

“Oh, right,” I said.

The waitress had dropped off the check when she brought my iced tea. I’d only drunk half of it, but that was enough. I put some change next to my glass, carried the check to the register, paid it and left.

I just missed a bus heading down Ninth Avenue, and thought about a cab. I was a hundred dollars to the good, I could treat myself to a taxi, but wound up walking instead. And when I got to Seventeenth Street I kept on going and followed my feet back to the gym. I spent half an hour doing some lifts that hadn’t been a part of my routine earlier that day, just to spend a few minutes in my body instead of my mind. I wrapped it up with ten minutes in the sauna and a few more under the shower, grabbed a protein shake on the way out, and got home in time for the TV news.

Drought here, flooding there, wildfires in California. Always something.

I stretched out on my bed and thought about the fresh hundred dollar bill in my wallet. Money wasn’t something I spent a lot of time thinking about. I didn’t need much, and something always turned up. When I was running short, I could pick up day work with a moving company, or take some bartender’s shift behind the stick. And now and then one of my personal trainer friends would overbook himself and bring me in to pick up the slack.

And there were more marginal gigs that came my way, and sometimes I said yes and sometimes I passed. Tagging along and looking muscular when an entrepreneurial acquaintance wanted to collect a debt, or handle a transaction, or warn off a competitor.

I lay there and thought about the hundred dollars, which hadn’t affected me much beyond making me consider a taxi. Still, I was better off with it than without it, and all I’d had to do for it was walk for half an hour and drink a glass of iced tea.

Friday I could pick up twice as much, but Seventy-second and Second was too far to walk. I’d have to take two subways, or a bus and a subway — or, I suppose, two buses.

Should I have objected to the meeting place? Told him to pick some place I could walk to? Beyond the logistics of the thing, a little assertiveness might have been appropriate.

Never mind. Proceed to Seventy-second and Second, pick up two hundred dollars.

And then what? He hadn’t mentioned a city, but if he lived anywhere in New Jersey I could forget about walking there. To his house, to kill his wife.

What made him think I’d be up for something like that?

I went to bed early, slept like a dead man. I always do. Well, I don’t drink, I don’t smoke, I stay away from sugar and keep carbs down, and I’m done with my daily dose of coffee before I hit the gym. My body gets a good workout seven days a week, and there’s rarely anything on my mind to keep it humming after hours. Why wouldn’t I sleep well?

I had my coffee around the corner, walked to the gym, and stopped for breakfast across the street at the Village Den. Swiss cheese omelet, side of bacon, side of sausage. I didn’t have to tell them to skip the bread and potatoes.

I worked heavy, concentrating on pecs and delts. Moved on to the treadmill, and I set the speed low enough so that I could have kept it up all day. I let my mind wander, the way it’ll do.

Some of the members put themselves through long sessions on the cardio machines, but a lot of them are on and off in ten minutes. I was on a treadmill in a row of eight or nine treadmills, and right in front of us was a row of about as many elliptical trainers. When I started, the machine directly in front of me had the Pillsbury Doughboy on it, but he was gone before I broke a sweat. He was followed almost immediately by a woman wearing running shorts and a singlet, and beyond checking her out (nice little butt, good legs) I didn’t pay any real attention to her.

But she stayed on her machine and I stayed on mine, and somewhere along the way I found myself thinking that this was her, Nerissa Tillman. That didn’t make any sense, and there was nothing about her to implant the idea. All I’d seen of Tillman’s wife was a palm-sized photo from the front, and all I was seeing of this woman was her legs and her butt and the back of her head. She had dark hair, and so did Nerissa Tillman, but so what?

I told my mind Thanks for sharing, and I kicked up the pace on the treadmill, figuring if my legs had to work a little harder it might give my mind a chance to chill. But it didn’t really work, because I couldn’t take my eyes off that cute little ass of hers, and I was getting hard looking at it.

She was still going when I finished my run and quit the treadmill. I managed to get a look at her, and of course she looked nothing like the photo. Just a fairly ordinary-looking woman, and she was probably at her best when viewed from the back, but even then she was nothing special, not really.

But that was kind of beside the point, wasn’t it?

Thursday night I was supposed to meet a friend at a storefront chess club on Sullivan Street. A woman with an international ranking was scheduled to play a twenty-board exhibition, and Joel and I would be two of her opponents, paying twenty dollars each for the privilege. We figured it wouldn’t take her too long to beat us, and then the two of us would have dinner at an Italian place we both liked.

I reached him on his cell, begged off. Something I got to do, I told him. The fee was already paid, and I said he could find someone else to take my place or just let it go.

Friday morning I got to the gym earlier than usual. I boosted poundages on all my lifts, did extra sets, capped each series with a static contraction rep. It felt like I had more energy than usual, but I don’t know. I think it was more a case of having a need to use every bit of what energy I had.

Hell of a workout.

At 2:45 that afternoon I was in a small antique shop called Your Grandmother’s Closet. I was the only customer, and I hoped the shopkeeper wasn’t counting on me, because I was only there so I could look out the window. The diner where I was supposed to meet Graham Tillman was right across the street.

I took a moment to admire a pair of brass bookends, one with a bull, the other with a bear. A gift for a stockbroker, I suppose, though they’d work just as well for a person who just happened to like bronze animals. They were even heavier than they looked, and either one would put a pretty good dent in a person’s skull.

I didn’t say as much to the woman, a frail creature who was already a little bit afraid of me. A developed physique will have that effect on some people, and draw admiration or hostility from others, depending where they’re coming from.

She had, she told me, quite a few other bookends besides the ones on display, some quite modestly priced. I could have told her there were only three books in my room, and they were doing fine stacked one on top of the other, but right about then a car pulled up at the corner and my guy got out of it.

“I’m just looking,” I said. “Getting out of the heat for a minute or two. But bookends are a great gift, aren’t they? When I need to buy somebody a present, I’ll know where to come.”

I didn’t pay attention to her response. I watched Tillman do nothing at all until the light turned and the car drove off. Then he looked around guardedly, saw nothing to put him off stride, and went into the restaurant.

I’d spent enough time in the shop and went out onto the sidewalk. I stood in a patch of shade and watched him order from the menu. By the time the waiter brought him his food I’d crossed the street and entered the diner.

The booth behind him was empty, as was the one in front of him. I went straight to his booth, sat on the seat across from him.

His eyes widened.

I said, “I don’t know that James Bond would do it this way, though I suppose it’s a question of which actor was playing him. Sean Connery, now, he’d sit wherever he wanted.”

“It seemed a useful precaution.”

“Until someone notices that two men at different tables with their backs to each other are having a conversation. This way we’re just two men having a meal.”

While he thought that over the waiter came by with a menu, and I asked him to bring me an unsweetened iced tea. Did I want lemon? Sure, I said. Lemon’d be nice.

Tillman said, “Maybe you’re right. But I’m the one who’ll be in the hot seat. Something happens to a woman, they look at the husband. And they don’t just eyeball him. They look at everything. They tear his life apart.”

“You’ll be able to prove you weren’t around when it happened.”

“But can I prove I wasn’t here? When this happened?”

“In other words, they’ll figure you hired somebody.”

“And how do I set up an alibi for that?”

We kicked that around a little, and I reminded him he owed me two hundred dollars. For showing up. He gave me a pair of hundreds, and I took my time filing them away in my wallet.

He said, “I get the feeling you’re not going to do it.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because sitting at separate tables was a sensible precaution, with no added risk, and you’re bright enough to recognize that. But you’d already decided to turn me down, so there was suddenly no need for precautions. And you wanted to be able to see my face when you told me to forget it.”

He was right that I wanted to see his face.

“There’s something you probably don’t know,” he said. “It was too late for the papers, and I don’t think it would get any TV play here in the city. But where I live it made the morning newscast.”

“I think you said Jersey?”

“Morristown.”

“And something happened there?”

He shook his head. “Something happened in Denville.”

“I’ve heard of Morristown,” I said, “but not Danville.”

“Denville. With an E.”

“Whatever. That’s near where you are?”

“Ten, twelve miles away. Maybe fifteen minutes in light traffic.”

He paused, waiting for me to ask what had happened in Denville. I figured he’d get there on his own.

“A woman was raped there,” he said. “And murdered. A woman in a garden apartment, somebody broke in and did what he did.”

“They catch the guy?”

“Not yet.”

“They probably will,” I said. “Sooner rather than later, would be my guess. A guy like that, he’ll leave his DNA all over the place, get his fingerprints on every surface that’ll take them. Then he shows up for work with scratches on his face and a story about his neighbor’s hostile cat.”

“Maybe they’ll catch him.”

“Maybe? Of course they will, and the sooner the better. You don’t want assholes like that running free.”

He gave me a look that was hard to read.

I said, “What?”

“Maybe it’ll take them a while,” he said. “Maybe they won’t catch up with him until something else happens.”

It was good being face to face with him, not back to back in separate booths. I had a chance to watch the play of expressions on his face, and after a moment I said, “Oh.”

“Right.”

I drank some of my iced tea. I said, “Same thing happens to another woman, they’ve got to think it might be the same guy.”

“Opens things up, doesn’t it?”

“They’ll still grill you up and down,” I said.

“Because it’s always the husband.”

“But you’re in Vegas when it happens, and it’s a fact that you could have hired it done, and the mope you hired could have decided to imitate a killing that just happened—”

“But it starts getting far-fetched, doesn’t it? As opposed to the simple explanation that the same nut job raped and killed both women. In fact, who’s to say he’ll stop? Maybe he does another one, or even two or three, and then they catch him, and they hang every dead girl in the state around his neck before they ship him off to Rahway.”

We batted it back and forth. I pointed out that the cops would hold back specifics of the Denville killing. Right now we didn’t know what he’d used, a gun or a knife or his own two hands, and that might come out in follow-up stories, but there’d almost certainly be other things that wouldn’t.

“If he left prints in Denville,” I said, “they’re not going to turn up in Morristown.”

“So who says he can’t learn from experience? He’s more careful the second time around. Same thing with his DNA. I don’t know if he used a condom in Denville, but my guess is he’ll definitely use one with, um, the woman in Morristown.”

Didn’t want to say her name. Interesting.

“The big question is timing,” he said. “Today is what, the twenty-second?”

Was it? That sounded about right. It was a Friday, it was in July, and it had been July for a while. The twenty-second was a reasonable date for it to be.

“A week from Sunday,” he said, “camp starts.”

“In Maine, I think you said.”

“On the tenth, I fly out to Vegas. I’m there Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights. I fly back here on Sunday, that’d be the fourteenth, and Monday morning we’re supposed to drive up to Bar Harbor.”

Bah Hahbuh, that was how he said it, exaggerating the regional accent.

“If all goes well,” I said.

“If all goes well,” he said, “Bah Hahbuh can go fuck itself. You see the window we’ve got, don’t you? Those four nights.”

“The tenth through the thirteenth.”

“If that nut job in Denville can stay out of custody between now and then—” He drew a breath, let it out. “Make it all a lot easier,” he said.

I thought about it, nodded. Hard to see anything wrong with his reasoning.

“So he’s got three weeks to stay away from the cops, and you’ve got three weeks to get ready.”

“I never said I’d do it.”

He wasn’t expecting that, and his face showed it. I could see him replaying our conversation, confirming my failure to commit. “I jumped to a conclusion,” he said. “You took the money—”

“The two hundred dollars. For showing up.”

“Yes, of course. But the way you were talking, speculating about the lunatic in Denville — well, as I said, I jumped to a conclusion.”

“There’s something I need to know first.”

“Oh?”

“Why me? You don’t know me at all. The only time either of us said a word to the other was when you asked me to spot you on the bench press, and by then you’d already picked me out for the job, hadn’t you?”

He thought it over, nodded.

“Who else did you ask?”

“Nobody.”

“Are you sure of that? It’s important, if you sounded out anybody else I really have to know.”

“I’m absolutely certain. You were the only one.”

I knew he was telling the truth, even as I’d known that would be his answer.

What I didn’t know was why.

And how could I, when he didn’t know himself? “I just had a feeling,” he said.

“A feeling?”

“A sense, an impression, I don’t know what else to call it. I had my eye on you for about a week.”

“A week.”

“Maybe ten days. I didn’t stare, I was discreet, but I’d look for you every time I went to the gym. You were usually there.”

“I’m there a lot.”

“I didn’t know anything about you,” he said, “and I still don’t. I don’t suppose it would have been hard to find out your name, but I made a point of not doing so. A little voice in my head kept telling me you were the guy.”

“The guy.”

“The answer to my problem.”

“And this just came to you.”

“I don’t know any better way to explain it.”

And would I do it? The unspoken question hung in the air. He’d had two bites of his sandwich and hadn’t touched it since I sat down. I’d had one small sip of my iced tea when the waiter brought it, and since then I’d wrapped my hand around the glass a few times but never picked it up.

“You looked at me,” I said, “and a voice in your head told you I’d hire on to kill your wife.”

“I know it sounds crazy.”

“Here’s something crazier,” I said. “I’ll do it.”

I wound up walking all the way home.

One of the car services had brought him, and he used a cell phone to call for a pickup. Five minutes, he told me, and did I want him to drop me off somewhere? I gave him a look, and I guess he realized that wasn’t such a good idea.

I could have told him that coming and going by car service wasn’t such a good idea either. He was shaping up to be a curious combination of super cautious and nonchalant, starting out at separate tables and winding up sharing a cab. I decided he had enough to remember, and left him to pay the check.

I’d figured on a bus down Second Avenue. I could transfer to another bus across Fourteenth Street, or I could get off at Seventeenth and walk west for half a mile. But I reached the sidewalk just in time to see my bus pull away, and I decided it was a nice afternoon and I could walk through the park and then catch a bus the rest of the way. Or a subway, whatever.

But I didn’t. I left the park at its southwest corner, Fifty-ninth and Central Park West, and remembered there was a good place for smoothies on the west side of Eighth Avenue somewhere around Fiftieth Street. It was actually between Forty-eighth and Forty-ninth, and I ordered their Protein Bonanza with an extra shot of wheat grass.

Figured I could afford it. Two hundred dollars for sitting at a table for half an hour. That would pay for a lot of wheat grass.

Pay for some cabs, too, but at that hour it was nicer to walk than be stuck in traffic. I was halfway home and might as well walk the rest of the way.

Might give my mind a chance to work a few things out.

Where I live there’s a bathroom down the hall, with everybody on the floor sharing it. Aside from the toilet, I don’t use it much, as I’d rather shower at the gym.

There’s a sink in my room, with a mirror over it, and when I got home I checked the mirror to see if I needed a shave. I didn’t, but I stood there anyway, studying the face in the mirror.

I tried to see it with his eyes. What was it that looked like a killer? The eyes? The mouth? The set of the jaw? Or just the way they all went together?

How could he have sensed what I hadn’t known myself?

Before I left him at the table, we talked about money.

“It’s not enough,” I told him.

I said it sounded cut-rate. Seventy-five thousand, like he knew the price ought to be a hundred and was angling for a bargain. When he denied this, I asked him how he’d come up with the number.

He said it was the most cash he could put his hands on without leaving a trail.

“I like round numbers,” I said, which wasn’t true but I figured it sounded reasonable. We kicked it around, and I decided I could do it for his price, but of course it would all have to be in advance.

He’d thought half in advance, half on completion. Wasn’t that how these things were generally done?

“Think it through,” I suggested. “Do you really want to have to get money to me when the police have you in their sights? I know I won’t be up for another coffee shop rendezvous. Once the job’s done, I’ll go somewhere for a couple of weeks, and when I get back I’ll switch to another gym. Any luck at all we’ll never set eyes on each other again.”

“If I pay you the whole sum in advance—”

“If you don’t,” I said, “we can forget the whole thing.”

“I see your point. But what recourse would I have if—”

“If what? If I didn’t do what I said I’d do?”

“Well?”

“Think it through,” I said once again. “Do you really think I’m a person who’s about to leave loose ends?”

That was Friday afternoon. Over the weekend I went to a movie — nothing special — and Tuesday evening I met my chess buddy at the club on Sullivan Street. We played three games and he won them all, and at dinner afterward he told me about the game he’d played on Thursday.

“She offered two guys draws,” he said, “and they both accepted. It looked to me as though one of them had a winning position, but some things are hard to turn down.”

Tell me about it, I thought.

“I opened Ruy Lopez, and we just pushed the pieces around, and all of a sudden I was a pawn down, and the next thing I knew she was killing me with a queen-side attack. She got my rook for one of her knights, and that was enough of that. I tipped my king over and she thanked me for a good game, which was generous of her, because a good game was way more than I gave her.”

“I wouldn’t have done any better.”

“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe you’d have displayed hitherto undisclosed brilliance and wiped her off the board. But probably not.” He sighed. “I’ll say this. She’s got a really great pair of tits for a chess player.”

That was Tuesday. Two days later I caught a glimpse of Tillman at the gym. He was working out with Troy, and I avoided catching his eye, not wanting to spark a conversation. The next day he was on his own and this time I made a point of catching his eye, and he frowned and shook his head.

I nodded toward the restrooms, and walked across the floor to enter one of them. I closed the door and stood next to it, and a few minutes later someone tried it and found it locked, and then I heard him say, “Monday morning.”

I said, just as softly, “It’s locker number three-eleven.”

“I know.”

“And the combination is all ones. Eleven-eleven.”

“I remember.”

I waited until I heard his footsteps. Then I got out of there and settled in on the leg press machine.

Sunday I got in an early workout, then went over to Penn Station and spent a little over an hour on a train. I got off and walked around and caught another train back to the city.

Kind of a nothing day. I might as well have stayed home.

They have two kinds of lockers at the gym. Most of them are first-come-first-served, available free of charge to all members. They have combination locks built in, and you set the combination before you lock up. At closing time one of the employees throws a switch to unlock all the lockers, and anything left in them goes straight to Lost and Found.

The other lockers, and there’s only one wall of them, are smaller, and they’re not free. You can rent one for fifty dollars a month. You set the combination, same as with the public lockers, but you’re the only one who gets to open it, and you can keep your gear there permanently. I’ve had #311 for almost as long as I’ve been a member, and Monday morning I went to it and unlocked it, using the same four-digit combination I’d been using all that time.

Nothing much in there. Fingerless gloves, a spare pair of sneakers. A pair of shorts, a singlet.

I reset the combination to 1-1-1-1 and locked up, went upstairs and got to work on the lat machine. Did a set, upped the weight, did another set, added some more weight, and did a third set to failure. Felt the effects of it, and it was a good feeling.

It was Monday, so that meant he was working with Troy. When I caught his eye all I did was nod, and all he did was nod back, and that was enough. I climbed a flight of stairs and picked out a treadmill.

I stayed on it longer than I usually do. What I do, I synchronize my steps with my breathing, and I count breaths. That’s not as OCD as it sounds, because I don’t care about the numbers, and when I lose track of the count I just start over. The point is to give my mind something to do while I’m running.

He was gone by the time I was done, and my shorts and top were soaking. I went downstairs and put in 1-1-1-1 and opened my locker. It was as I left it, except for the addition of a fanny pack. The brand was Everest, and I resisted the urge to open it and see what it held.

I reset the combination to the four digits I’ve always used. Locked up. Had my shower, dried off, got dressed. Fastened the fanny pack around my waist, let my shirt hang down over it.

I stopped for a meal on my way home. I used the restroom, and that gave me another opportunity to resist the urge to check the contents of the fanny pack. I was getting so good at resisting that particular urge that once I was back in my room I had to force myself to work the zipper and make like Little Jack Horner.

Six plain white envelopes, bulging, their flaps fastened. More portraits of Benjamin Franklin, along with a smaller number of General Grant, all used and out of sequence. I counted, and it was all there. $75,000.

And, in one of the envelopes, a key. A house key, from the look of it, but with no manufacturer’s name on it, which suggested that it was a duplicate made by a street-front locksmith. Made recently, judging by how bright it was.

Taped to one side of it was a thin strip of plain paper with an address hand-lettered on it: 454 Witherspoon Place.

I added the key to my key ring, but not before I’d removed the strip of paper, rolled it into a little ball, and flipped it into the trash.

Looked again at the stack of bills.

I won’t say it took my breath away, but it got my attention. Now it’s real, a little voice said, but that was ridiculous. It was no more or less real than it had been before. The only difference was that now I had to figure out what to do with the money.

That was August first, a Monday. On Wednesday the tenth he’d be off to Las Vegas.

My gym’s one of a chain, and a few months back they’d opened a new branch on Twenty-third Street, no more than a block or two farther from my place than the one at Twelfth and Greenwich. I went there on Thursday, and I didn’t even need a guest pass. The girl on the desk scanned the membership fob that lives on my keychain, and it was the same as swiping in at my home gym.

The configuration on the exercise floors was different, of course, although they had basically the same equipment. I was used to running through my routine in a particular sequence, and I changed things up a little to fit their layout.

That wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, because you want to switch things around now and then to give your muscles something to think about. I went to Twenty-third Street again on Friday, and did my bench presses on an inclined bench instead of a flat one. I did this because the flat bench stations were a flight of stairs away from where I happened to be, but I liked the way it felt to do the inclines, liked the way it worked the upper part of the pecs.

Saturday I was back at Greenwich and Twelfth. Sunday too. Monday morning I wasn’t sure where I was going until I’d walked to Seventh Avenue and had to pick a direction. I turned left, which was north, and walked up to Twenty-third Street.

Back in my room, I unzipped the fanny pack and took another look at the money. I’d gotten rid of the envelopes, but hadn’t been able to think of a better home for the cash than the container it had come in, or a better place for the fanny pack itself than the bottom dresser drawer.

Not terribly secure. Well, I’d think of something.

Around noon I rode the subway to Penn Station. The train I took goes all the way to Hackettstown, but they call it the Morristown Line, because there’s another train that starts out on a different route and also winds up in Hackettstown. They call that one the Montclair-Boonton Line.

There’s a town where both lines merge and head for Hackettstown, but that was three stops past where I’d be getting off. In, duh, Morristown.

I wasn’t paying any attention, so I can’t swear the train left on time or arrived on time, but I didn’t see a lot of people checking their watches and looking upset, so I guess we were more or less on schedule.

I checked out the cars in the train station lot and spotted a blue Kia squareback that looked familiar. The house on Witherspoon Place was within a mile of the station, an easy fifteen-minute walk, and if he walked to and from the station every morning he could put in less time on the elliptical trainer, but people are funny that way. My gym has an elevator, mainly for the Salvadoran women who have to move carts full of towels from one floor to another, but a lot of the clients use it, too. They’ll let it lift them up a couple of flights, then hop onto the StairMaster and work up a sweat.

Funny.

I walked to his house, remembering the route from eight days ago when I’d taken the same train ride and gotten off at the same station. That was before I’d collected the money, so I hadn’t had a shiny brass key to his front door, but I’d learned his address by looking him up online, and Google Maps had shown me how to get there.

Well, the house was still there. Good-sized two-story house. Driveway running alongside it on the right, with a detached two-car garage in back. On Sunday the garage door had been raised, and I’d seen the Kia and a big Lexus SUV. Today it was closed.

I stood and watched the house for a while, and might have seen something if there’d been something to see, but there wasn’t. I walked the length of the driveway. You needed a remote control to raise the garage door, but there was a people-sized door on the side of the garage, and I went and tried it.

It was locked, and what was the point of locking a door with a window? Break the glass and you’re in.

Seemed more trouble than it was worth. I did try the key he’d given me, on the off-chance that it would open the garage, but didn’t really expect it to work. The garage was dark inside, but there was enough light so that I could see that the SUV was there and the little squareback wasn’t. That suggested two things: the car at the station was probably his, and she was probably home.

I put the key back in my pocket, walked around to the front of the house, and rang the doorbell.

A little while later I was back at the train station. The blue Kia was where I’d last seen it, and I figured there was even less chance he’d left it unlocked than that his house key would fit his garage door, but I checked anyway. No luck.

Locked cars are easy enough to open, but you need a Slim-Jim, and I didn’t have one. I decided that was probably just as well, as it was a warm day and the Kia was parked in the sun, and who knew how long a wait I’d have? Ten minutes was more time that I really wanted to spend in a hot car, and it might be two or three hours before he showed up.

As it turned out, it was more like forty-five minutes.

I spent the time on a bench up on the platform, and I had the bench and most of the platform to myself, as there weren’t all that many people waiting to board the train from Morristown to Hackettstown. The platform would fill up when a train came in and some homebound commuters got off, and then they would abandon me and head for the stairs.

This happened three times while I was on my bench, once a few minutes after I settled in, a second time twenty minutes later, and again at twenty minutes past six. Each time I scanned the passengers departing the train, and the third time was the charm. There he was, dressed in khakis and a seersucker blazer, and paying more attention to his cell phone than to where he was going.

I don’t think he’d have spotted me anyway. I stayed where I was and waited until he was a couple of steps past me before getting to my feet. I stayed just behind him, followed him down the stairs and through the station to the parking lot, where he had to look around before he spotted the Kia, as if he’d forgotten where he parked it. He headed for it, and I approached it from a slightly different angle, and got there just as he was keying the lock.

I put a hand on his shoulder, and he was shocked that someone was touching him, shocked again when he saw who it was.

“Easy,” I said. “We’ve got to talk.”

“What’s the matter? Jesus, you didn’t do it already, did you? You’re supposed to wait until I’m in Vegas.”

“I didn’t do anything,” I said.

“Well, that’s a relief. But—”

I told him to get in the car, and to open the passenger door for me. I walked around the car, got in, and we both fastened our seatbelts.

I said, “We’ve got to talk, and I don’t want to do it here. I was checking, and no one paid any attention to the two of us, but we don’t want to risk being spotted together. Is there a mall nearby?”

“A mall?”

“Like a shopping mall. Some place with parking for a couple of thousand cars.”

I had a place picked out, but managed to get him to think of it himself, and he drove to it. On the way he wanted to know what the problem was, and I slowed the conversation by turning around to make sure no one was following us.

Then I said, “Remember that guy? Over in Danville?”

“I don’t even know where that is.”

“Danville, a couple of towns over. Where that nut job killed the woman in the garden apartment.”

“Denville,” he said, coming down hard on the first syllable. “Not Danville. Denville.”

And he rolled his eyes. I really liked that. Genius couldn’t remember where he parked his car that morning, but I’m the asshole for screwing up the name of some Jersey shithole with two stop signs.

“My mistake. I keep thinking Danville because of the song.”

He didn’t ask what song, meaning either he knew or he didn’t care. Then I guess he got past the Denville/Danville snag and wanted to know what had happened. “Shit,” he said. “What did they do, catch the guy?”

“Is that what you heard?”

“Huh? I didn’t hear anything, for Christ’s sake. You’re the one who brought him up.”

“As far as I know,” I said, “he’s still at large.”

“Well, that’s good. For us, I mean.”

“You think?”

“Well, isn’t it? If he’s still on the loose, there’s a good chance they’ll think he’s to blame when Nerissa gets what’s coming to her. Isn’t that what we talked about?”

“This right here is perfect,” I said, pointing. “And they’ve got one of those twelve-screen movie houses at the far end, and their lot’s pretty close to empty at this hour. Park there, why don’t you? But, you know, not too close to the entrance.”

Driving there.

“So what did he do?”

“Who?”

“The nut job. Who else have we been talking about?”

“There’s a good spot,” I said.

“He did it again,” he said. “That’s got to be it. Another housewife? Still in Denville?”

He put it in park, cut the ignition.

I said, “Denville? I thought it was Danville.”

Sweet.

A few minutes later I said, “Here’s the thing. You came at me from absolutely out of nowhere. ‘Hey, you, kill my wife.’ Something you sensed, and I’ll never know how you sensed it, but one way or another you knew that A — I could do it and B — I would do it.

“Now how in the hell could you know something like that, when I didn’t know it myself? And could it possibly be true?

“I didn’t see how it could. I’d never had any thoughts in that direction. But now you got me thinking, and one day the thought got to me. I started getting excited. Let the fantasy run through my head, and couldn’t believe my own reaction.

“Next thing I know, I’m checking Craig’s List, looking for someone selling something. It could have been anywhere, but maybe I wanted to have the dress rehearsal close to where the real thing would go down. I don’t remember thinking that, but it’s possible I had it in mind. What do you think?”

He didn’t answer.

“Well, whatever. This was Thursday, the day after you got me to spot you on the bench press. I made a few calls, and one of them was to a woman who was looking to sell a free-standing air conditioner. Instead of having to mount it in a window or cut a hole in the wall, you just stand it up on the floor and plug it in. Anyway, she had one, and she said it worked fine, but the apartment complex was putting in through-the-wall units for everybody, so she thought she’d put Old Faithful up for sale.

“She said she lived in Denville, and when I said I’d be coming by train she offered to pick me up. She was so nice about it that I thought, well, I’m not gonna be able to do this, so I’ll just go and look at the unit and tell her it won’t really work for me, and the next time I see you I’ll tell you to shit in your hat, or do your own killing, or whatever.

“So I got on the train, and realized that I didn’t have to see her in person to tell her I didn’t want her air conditioner. I could have called back and found something to say, or saved the phone call and just failed to show up. But I was on the train, and I knew I wanted to do it.

“Perfectly nice woman, a little bit Chatty Cathy, but pleasant. Pretty in a bland way, nothing special. She picked me up at the station and drove me a couple of miles to her apartment development, and I kept thinking we’d run into somebody on the way, some witness, or there’d be somebody at her apartment, and that would be the end of that, and I might not buy her air conditioner but she’d still have a pulse when I got back on my train and went home.

“Nobody in the parking lot, nobody in the halls, nobody in her apartment. And once we’re inside and the door’s shut, there’s no fucking way to keep the rest of it from unfolding. Be easier to stop a train.

“She demonstrated how the unit worked, and how cold the air was that came out of it, and I said, ‘I’m really sorry about this.’ She was trying to figure out what I meant when I hit her.

“And then you know, I did what I did.”

I stopped there, and let myself remember the way it had felt. I’d been two people at once, one of them doing what I did, the other observing. I suppose it was the observer half who made sure I used a condom, made sure I left no prints or obvious trace evidence. Still, I did wind up walking all the way back to the train station. Anyone could have seen me, but evidently no one did.

“Just dumb luck,” I said now. “I had a long wait for the train, and I kept listening for sirens and waiting for the long arm of the law to take me by the shoulder, but by the time my train came I knew none of that was going to happen. I’d killed a woman for no reason at all, and if they hadn’t gotten me right away they weren’t going to get me at all. Even if I’d left DNA behind, they couldn’t match it to me unless I came up on their radar.

“Train pulled out of Denville and passed through Mount Tabor and Morris Plains and then Morristown. I knew that’s where you and Nerissa lived, I’d checked you out before I got to Craig’s List. And I damn well knew it was Denville and not Danville. First time I said it wrong it was to avoid sounding too familiar with the place, because I didn’t want you guessing I’d been there, but after that it just got to be fun. Jerking on your chain, you know?”

No response from him.

I said, “Anyway, I’d answered part of my question. Could I do something like this? Well, yes, I could. That was pretty well established, in that I’d just done it.

“And I knew the answer to the second part, too. Would I do it — do it for you, do it to your wife, and do it to earn seventy-five thousand dollars?

“You know, it took me a little time to be sure of my answer. Because I can’t say I didn’t get any pleasure out of what I did in Denville. I can’t explain it, but there was something exciting about it. Afterward it left me feeling empty, and sorry I’d done it. I don’t know whether or not to call it remorse, but there’s no question I felt a certain amount of regret.

“Would I want to do it again? I gather that’s what happens with people who make a habit of this sort of thing. They get something out of it that makes them do it again. And again, and again. I had to live with the whole thing for a while before I could rule it out, but the days passed and I knew I wasn’t going to find some other innocent like the Denville girl, and I wasn’t going after Nerissa Tillman, either.

“But I kind of wanted the money. I hadn’t thought about large sums of money before, anymore than I’d thought about killing anybody, but the idea got in my head and I decided I wanted it, even if I didn’t know what I wanted it for. I knew I didn’t want to kill your wife, but I thought maybe I should go ahead and do it anyway, just because I wanted the money.

“Except I’d get caught.

“I mean, face it, man. No matter how much I made it look like the Denville killing, no matter how they might want to believe both acts were the work of the same man, they just had to look long and hard at you, you know? You’re the husband, you had a reason to want her dead, and they always look first and longest and hardest at the husband, because he almost always either did it or hired it done.

“And you’d crack like a fucking egg.

“You would, you know. They’d want to talk to you, and you’d know you ought to lawyer up right away, but how would that look? A man’s wife’s dead, the probable victim of a serial killer, and a couple of sympathetic cops come to talk to him, and the first words out of his mouth are ‘I want a lawyer.’ Is that the way an innocent man would react?

“So you wouldn’t do that, not right away. You’d start out all earnest and cooperative, and by the time you realized your mistake you’d have told them more than you meant to. If nothing else, they’d come out of that interview room knowing you were their guy, and all they had to do was find out who you’d hired.

“And, one way or another, you’d tell them. ‘Mr. Tillman, we figure you just wanted him to scare her a little. That was your deal, and it was just bad luck that you picked a homicidal maniac, or maybe she fought back and he lost control, but he’s the one who did the killing and he’s the one we want, and if you cooperate and come up with a name—’ A couple of smart cops who do this sort of thing all the time, and you’re the textbook definition of an amateur, and do you want to tell me you’d have been able to hold out? Go ahead, let’s hear you say it.”

Not a word.

“Right,” I said. “That’s what I figured. With you to point me out, they wouldn’t waste any time picking me up. And they’d probably have me, too, once they knew who to look for, but I could stop all that by not getting picked up in the first place, and that meant not doing the job.

“But I still wanted the money. It was pulling at me, the same way the idea of killing someone had pulled at me early on.

“Remember why you balked at paying me the full sum in front? Because that way you wouldn’t have any leverage. Because what was to stop me from taking your money and walking off with it?

“Remember what I said? Like, am I the sort of person who’s gonna leave a loose end?

“You know what I did this afternoon? After I got off the train, and before I grabbed you by the shoulder? I took a walk out to your house on Witherspoon Place. I was thinking about waiting for you in the garage, but I didn’t want to smash a window, and then I thought about this mall and its nice big parking lot and I made my choice.

“But before I came back to the station I rang your doorbell.

“Because aside from that picture I’d never really laid eyes on your wife, and I wanted to meet her. So I rang the bell and she came to the door. She was wearing jeans and a blouse, sandals on her feet, and she’s a fine-looking woman, but I guess you know that. You may not care, the way the marriage has broken down, but you’re still aware of it, right?

“We talked through the screen door. I said something about some people in the area reporting a problem with cable reception, and she said hers was working fine, and I said I was sorry to have bothered her.

“And I turned around and walked back to the train station to wait for you. And take care of a loose end.

“Jesus, man, even if I did the fucking job, even if I killed your wife and ran her through a fucking woodchipper, you’re still a loose end. You’re the loosest end there is. Go on, let me hear you deny it.”

But he didn’t say anything. And, really, how could he? Right after he’d put the car in park I’d got hold of him by the throat, and by the time he realized what was happening, well, it had pretty much happened. And we were still parked in the same spot, and all this time I’d been having a conversation with a dead man.

Better than having him interrupting all the time, going all Denville-Danville on me.

The parking area around the cinema was starting to fill up, as it got closer to showtime, but we didn’t have any next-door neighbors yet. Even so it was time I got out of there. I could switch places with him, start the engine and get myself a little closer to the train station before we parted company. But I checked the map app on my phone, and saw that I could walk the whole distance in under an hour.

It seemed simpler that way. I’d been careful what I touched in the car, and wiped off any surfaces my fingers might have brushed, and took a moment to position him so that he looked like a man sitting behind the wheel and waiting for his wife to return to their car.

It wasn’t a bad walk. Cooler now, with the sun down. Quiet tree-lined suburban streets, not much in the way of auto traffic, and the only pedestrians were out walking their dogs.

It had been satisfying, killing him. The Denville killing had had sex mixed in, and you’d think that would make it better, but I actually liked it better this way. I’d made money, and I’d tied off a loose end, and the body I left behind was somebody I didn’t like very much. Somebody I actually disliked, come right down to it.

Wondered if this was something I’d do again. Impossible to say, really. Couldn’t rule it in, couldn’t rule it out.

A long walk, clear back to the train station. But what I did, same as I’ll do on the treadmill, I synched my breathing to my steps and counted breaths. Something for my mind to do, you know?

Worked just fine.