Lawrence Block - Enough Rope

“And he wanted you to murder his wife.”

“Indeed he did. Men so often do. If they want their mistresses killed they’re apt to perform the deed on their own, but they call a professional when they want an instant divorce.”

“And before you could conclude the assignment, a woman hired you to kill her husband.”

“It’s an interesting thing,” Colliard said. “When a woman wants her husband done away with she’s very much apt to hire help, but what’s odd is she more often than not engages the services of a rank amateur. The newspapers are full of that sort of thing. Typically the woman works it all out with her lover, who’s likely to be some rough-diamond type out of a James M. Cain novel. And the paramour knows someone who went to jail once for passing bad checks, and the bad-check artist knows somebody who served time for assault, and ultimately an exceedingly sloppy operation is mounted, and either the woman is swindled out of a couple of thousand dollars by a man who hasn’t the slightest intention of killing anybody or else the husband is indeed killed and the police have everybody in custody before the body’s had time to go cold. Interesting how often women operate in that fashion.”

“Well, after you’d accepted both assignments, and of course you’d been paid in front by both clients—”

“A matter of personal policy.”

“—Then you discovered that your two clients were husband and wife, and each had engaged you to murder the other.”

“And what did I do?”

“According to what I’ve heard, the husband hired you first, and so the first thing you did was murder the wife.”

Wilson Colliard nodded, smiling gently at a memory. “The husband had to go to Chicago on business. We scheduled the affair for that time. I called him at his hotel there to make very certain that he was indeed out of town. Then I went to his home. He and his wife shared an enormous Victorian pile of a house in the heart of Trenton. It was still a decent neighborhood at the time. By now the old house has probably been partitioned into a half dozen apartments. But that’s off the point, isn’t it? I went there and did what I was supposed to do. Made it look like a burglary, left some signs of forced entry, overturned dresser drawers, and added a few professional flourishes. I killed the bitch with a knife from her very own kitchen. I thought that was a nice touch.”

“And of course the police figured it as a burglary.”

“Of course they did. A burglary for gain followed by a murder on impulse. There was never the slightest suspicion of my client. He was rid of a wife and home free.”

The younger man was breathing more quickly and his face was slightly flushed. “And then,” he said.

“Yes?”

“Then you killed him.”

“Indeed. Why would I do a thing like that?”

“Because the wife had hired you and once you accepted a fee the target was as good as dead. Of course you didn’t have to kill the man. The only person who knew you’d been hired to kill him was the woman who hired you, and she was already dead. You could have kept the fee she paid you and done nothing to earn it and no one would ever have known the difference. But you were true to the ethics of the profession, true to your own personal ethics, and so you killed him all the same.”

“I waited almost a month,” Colliard said: “I didn’t want his death to look like murder, and I didn’t even want it to take place in Trenton, so I waited until he made another trip, this time a short one to Philadelphia. I followed him there, stole a car off the street, dogged his footsteps until they led off a curb, and then performed vehicular homicide. He turned in my direction just as the car was about to remove him from this life, and do you know, I can still see the expression on his face. I don’t know whether he recognized my face through the windshield or whether he simply recognized that he was about to be struck down and killed. Facial expressions at such times are distressingly ambiguous, you see. Be that as it may, the car did the job and I had no trouble making a clean getaway.”

“So it really happened that way,” Haig said, eyes shining. “And then your reputation was made. Everyone knew that when Colliard took an assignment the target was a dead man.”

“Yes. They all knew.”

“So the legend is true.”

“The Legend of Wilson Colliard,” Colliard intoned. “It is an effective legend, isn’t it? And now do you see what I meant when I said a man can see to the growth of his own reputation?”

“I certainly do. But isn’t it really just a question of being true to your professional standards and ethics? Oh, I can see how you must have functioned as your own press agent and all that, because you would have had to be the source of the legend. Only the man and the woman knew they’d hired you, and even they didn’t know that you were hired by both of them, so the story could never have gotten out if you hadn’t done something to spread it in the first place. But as far as what you did, well, that was a matter of behaving professionally.”

“Do you think so?” Colliard raised his prominent white eyebrows. “Don’t you think it might have been more professional to keep the woman’s fee and not kill her husband? After all, she was in the grave and was thus certain to remain silent. The only reason to kill her husband was for publicity purposes. Otherwise, Michael, I’d have been better advised to adhere to the first principle of minimizing risk. But by performing the second murder I assured myself of a reputation.”

“Of course,” Haig said. “You’re absolutely right. I should have realized that.”

Colliard made a tent of his fingertips. “Ah, Michael,” he said, “there’s more to it than you could possibly realize. It’s interesting that the legend is incomplete. You know, I think this is really one of those rare occasions wherein the truth is more dramatic than the legend.”

“How do you mean?”

“This crazy business of ours. Wheels within wheels, complexities underlying complexities. I wonder, Michael, if you have a sufficiently Byzantine mind to distinguish yourself in your chosen profession.”

“I don’t understand.”

“The woman never hired me.”

Michael Haig stared.

“Never hired me, never knew of my existence as far as I know. She and I didn’t set eyes one upon the other until the night I stuck a carbon-steel Sabatier chef’s knife between her ribs. For all I know the poor woman adored her husband and never would have harmed him for the world.”

“But—”

“So I killed her and went on my way, Michael, and then about a month later I happened to be in Philadelphia for reasons I can’t at the moment recall, not that they matter, and whom did I chance to see emerging from Bookbinder’s after a presumably satisfying lunch than the Bicycle Tire King of Trenton. Do you know, the mind is capable of extraordinary quantum leaps. All at once I saw the whole thing plain, saw just the shape the entire legend would take. All I had to do was kill the fool and my place in my profession was assured. It was the sort of thing people would talk about forever, and everything they said could only redound to my benefit. I followed him, I stole a car, and—” he spread his hands “—and the rest is history. Or legend, if you prefer.”

“That’s... that’s incredible.”

“I saw an opportunity and I grasped it before it could get away.”

“You just killed him for—”

“For the benefit that could not help but accrue to my reputation. Killed him without a fee, you might say, but there’s no question but that his death paid me more handsomely in the long run than any murder I ever undertook for immediate gain. Overnight I became the standard of the profession. I stood head and shoulders above the competition as far as potential clients were concerned. I had an edge over men with infinitely more distinguished careers, men who had far more years in the business than I. And what gave me this advantage? An elementary hit-and-run killing of a former client, an act that but for the ensuing publicity would have been pointless beyond belief. Remarkable, isn’t it?”