Lawrence Block: Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 137, No. 2. Whole No. 834, February 2011

He drove past the house, taking a quick look at it, and all he really managed to establish was that it was still there. He couldn’t stake the place out and watch the comings and goings, not in this neighborhood, where a man lurking in a parked car would be reported to the police in no time at all. Nor could he park a few blocks away and approach on foot, because if there was a single pedestrian over the age of six anywhere in the area, he’d managed to keep out of Keller’s field of vision.

The right way he thought, was to take a week or two, but the hell with that. This wasn’t some well-guarded mafioso in a walled castle, with a moat full of bent-nosed alligators. This was a woman who had no idea just how much her husband wanted to be rid of her, and no reason to fear a stranger at her door.

Keller went back to a strip mall he’d passed earlier, with a Walgreens at one end and an Office Depot at the other. Park near one and walk to the other? No, he told himself, Why bother? Nobody was going to look at his license plate, and what difference did it make if they did?

He parked in front of the Office Depot and was in and out of it in ten minutes, paying cash for the clipboard and the pad of yellow paper. Duct tape? No, not necessary. He was going to buy a pen, then remembered that he already had one of his own.

What else? A box cutter, a letter opener, something sharp and pointed? No. He had his hands, and there would be knives in the kitchen if he felt the need.

He drove back to the Walmsley house and parked in the driveway, where anyone walking by could see his car and take note of the license plate. Fat chance, he thought, and walked up to the door and rang the bell.

Nothing.

Maid’s day off, he thought. Getting lucky, he told himself, was when you rang a doorbell and nobody answered. That was even better than going home alone, and—

Footsteps, approaching the door. He waited for it to open, and when it didn’t he poked the bell again, and this time the door opened immediately, and he found himself looking at his own reflection in the mirror that faced the door. Just for an instant, albeit a disconcerting one; then he lowered his eyes and looked down at the Salvadoran maid.

“Ah, good morning,” he said. “Mrs. Walmsley?”

“No,” the maid said, in Spanish or English, it was impossible to tell. “Her no aquí,” she said, in a combination of the two.

“And Mr. Walmsley?”

“Him not vive aquí.” A shake of the head, good enough in either language.

“Is anyone else at home?”

Another head shake. The simple thing to do, Keller realized, would be to kill the woman, stuff her in a closet — or a laundry hamper, or a big hatbox. She was innocent, but then so was Portia Walmsley, for all he knew.

But Jesus, she was so tiny.

The client, he recalled, didn’t care one way or the other about the woman. He wasn’t paying a bonus for some illegal immigrant, and—

Bingo.

He brandished the clipboard, gave her a look at it. He hadn’t thought to write anything on the top sheet of paper, but it didn’t matter.

“INS,” he said.

Her face remained expressionless, but eloquently so.

“Green card,” he said.

“No hablo inglés.”

“Carta verde,” Keller said, straining his command of the language to the limit. “¿Tienes un carta verde?”

Una, he thought. Not un, for God’s sake. Una. An INS man would know that, right? Jesus, you couldn’t live in New York without knowing that much, let alone Texas, and—

Un, una , what difference could it possibly make? Her shoulders slumped, and she managed somehow to become even smaller. Keller felt horrible.

“I will be back,” he said. “I’ll go away now to have my lunch, and when I come back you can show me your green card. Your carta verde, comprendez-vous?”

Comprendez-vous? That was French, for God’s sake, yet another language he was unable to speak. But it was clear that she comprendez ed just fine.

“You come back?”

“In an hour,” he said, and turned away, unable to bear the sight of her expressionless face.

He drove to the strip mall, parking this time near the Walgreens, and tossed the clipboard into a trash bin alongside the entrance. He wasn’t hungry and he couldn’t think of anything to buy, so he returned to his car and sat behind the wheel. Nothing to read, nothing to do really but let time pass. He fiddled with the radio, but couldn’t figure out how to get it to play without running the engine. There’d be a way to do it, there always was, but every car maker felt compelled to work out its own way of doing things, and when you rented cars you could never figure out how to adjust the seats or play the radio or work the air conditioning or dim the lights, and when you went to signal a left turn you generally wound up switching on the windshield wipers. The steering was always more or less the same, and so were the brakes, and it was a good thing or everybody would crash into everybody else.

They’d have newspapers in the drugstore. Magazines, maybe even paperback books.

No, the hell with it.

He gave her an hour and a half, then returned to the Walmsley house and parked once again in the driveway. He walked up to the door and rang the bell, and wondered if he might have been a shade precipitous in ditching the clipboard, because what if she opened the door with Portia Walmsley on her left and some slick immigration lawyer on her right? Hang on, he’d say. Be right back, soon as I get my clipboard— No one came to the door. He rang the bell again, and listened carefully, and heard no footsteps. The car, the rented Subaru, had now become a problem, and he wished he’d left it at the strip mall and approached on foot. But that was a long way to walk in a neighborhood where everybody drove.

He couldn’t leave the thing in the driveway. There was probably room for it in the three-car garage, since her estranged husband wouldn’t have left on foot, but Portia Walmsley would almost certainly notice his car when she parked her own beside it, and—

He backed out of the driveway, drove fifty yards down the street, parked and walked back. Rang the bell, listened for footsteps, knocked, listened again. He tried the doorknob, because you never know, but it was locked.

No problem.

Keller had never been a thief, let alone a burglar. In his youth, he’d been one of several young men who’d hung around the Old Man’s place in Yonkers. The Old Man was Joseph Raggone, dear to the hearts of tabloid journalists, who wrote about him as Joey Rags. Keller had never called him that, or anything like it. In direct conversation, if he called the man anything it was Sir. To others, he’d refer to him as Mr. R. In his own mind, though, his boss was the Old Man.

And Keller liked hanging around. The Old Man would give him errands to run, packages to pick up and deliver, messages to pass along. Eventually he sent Keller along when disciplinary actions were called for, and something he saw led him to devise assignments that, in retrospect, Keller was able to recognize as little tests. Keller, unaware he was being tested, passed with flying colors. What the Old Man managed to establish was that Keller didn’t flinch when called upon to pull the trigger. The Old Man had suspected as much, that was why he’d devised the tests, but it was all news to Keller.

So Keller went from being an errand boy to taking people out, and at first the people he took out were men who had somehow managed to get on the Old Man’s hit list, and then the Old Man realized what a fine, dependable asset he had, and began renting Keller out to interested parties. Not many people knew Keller’s name, the Old Man saw to that, but an increasing number of people knew he was out there somewhere, at the beck and call of Joey Rags, and that he did good work. So from that point on, that was the only kind of work he was called upon to perform. There were no more packages or messages to deliver, no more errands to run.