Lawrence Block - Hit List

Keller finished his beer and went home.

There were no phone messages when he got home that night, and nobody called the next morning while he was around the corner having breakfast. He looked up a number and picked up the phone.

When she answered he said, “Hi, it’s Keller.”

“There you are.”

“Here I am,” he agreed.

“And no wonder people tend to call you Keller. It’s what you call yourself.”

“It is?”

“ ‘Hi, it’s Keller.’ Your very words. Your roses are beautiful. Completely unexpected and wholly welcome.”

“I was wondering if they got there.”

“What you’re too polite to say is you were wondering if I was ever going to call.”

“Not at all,” he said. “I know you’re busy, and-“

“And maybe the florist lost the card, and I didn’t know who sent them.”

“That occurred to me.”

“I’ll just bet it did. You think I didn’t call? Believe me, I called. Do you happen to know how many Kellers there are in the Manhattan book?”

“There’s something like two columns of them, if I remember correctly.”

“Two columns is right. And there are two John Kellers and two Jonathans, not to mention seven or eight J Kellers. And not one of them is you.”

“No, I’m not in the book.”

“No shit, Sherlock.”

“Oh,” he said. “I guess you didn’t have my number.”

“I guess not, but I do now, Mr. Smarty, because I’ve got Caller ID on this phone, so your secret’s not a secret anymore. I can call you anytime I want to, big boy. What do you think about that?”

“I haven’t thought about it yet,” he said, “so it’s hard to say. But here’s what I was thinking. Suppose I come by for you around seven tonight and we have dinner.”

“Won’t work.”

“Oh.”

“But I’ve got a better idea. Suppose you come over around nine-thirty and we have sex.”

“That would work,” he allowed. “But don’t you want to have dinner?”

“I’m a lousy cook.”

“At a restaurant,” he said. “I meant for us to go out.”

“I have revolting table manners,” she said. “I also have a shrink appointment at five.”

“Aren’t they usually done in an hour?”

“Fifty minutes, generally.”

“We could have dinner after.”

“What I always do,” she said, “is pick up a banana smoothie on the way to the shrink’s, with added wheat germ and protein powder and spirulina, whatever that is, and I sip it while we talk. It’s the perfect time to be nourished, you know? And then I’ll go right home and work, because I’ve got an order I have to get out, and I’ll knock off at nine and bathe and wash my hair and make myself irresistible, and at nine-thirty you’ll show up and we’ll have an inventive and highly satisfying sexual encounter. To which, I might add, I’ll be looking forward all day. Nine-thirty, Keller. See ya.”

Early that afternoon, Keller took a bus across Twenty-third and found his way to the Regis Buell gallery. There were other art galleries on the same block, and he stopped in a couple of them for a brief look. Prices were lower on average than in the Fifty-seventh Street galleries, but not by much. Art could get expensive in a hurry, once you got past museum show posters and mass-produced prints of kabuki dancers.

On opening night the Buell gallery had been jammed with people. Now it was empty, except for Keller and the young woman at the desk, a self-assured blonde who’d recently graduated from a good college and would soon be some commuter’s wife. She gave Keller a low-wattage smile and went back to her book. Keller picked up one of the price lists. They must have had them at the opening, but at the time he hadn’t known to look for one.

He spent two full hours at the gallery, going from canvas to canvas.

Back at his apartment, he gave Dot a call. “I’ve been thinking,” he said.

“You want to bail. Pull the plug. Cut and run. Well, I can’t say I blame you.”

“No.”

“No?”

He shook his head, then remembered he was on the phone. “No,” he said, “that’s not it. I was wondering about the client.”

“What about him?”

“It’s a him?”

“It’s a generic pronoun, Keller. What do you want me to say, ‘them’? ‘It’? ‘I was wondering about the client.’ ‘The client? What about him or her?’ I’m an old-fashioned girl, Keller. I do like my eighth-grade English teacher taught me.”

“As,” he said.

“Huh?”

“You do as your teacher taught you.”

“The suggestion that comes to mind,” she said, “is not one I learned from Mrs. Jepson, and anyway I don’t think it’s physically possible. So never mind. What about the client?”

“Who is he?”

“Or she? No idea.”

“Because I’m having trouble figuring out why anybody would want to kill this guy. Except maybe someone from the logging industry.”

“Huh?”

“He paints pictures of trees, and after you’ve looked at them you wouldn’t want to cut one down.”

“So what is it you’re turning into, Keller? A tree hugger or an art lover?”

“I went out to Williamsburg last night, and-“

“You think that was wise?”

“Well, I might want to close the sale out there. So I had to do a little reconnaissance.”

“I guess.”

“It’s a nice neighborhood, artsy but honest. Place has a good feel to it.”

“And you want to move there.”

“I don’t want to move anywhere, Dot. But do you think you could find out anything about the client? Call the guy who called you, nose around a little?”

“Why?”

“Why?”

“Yeah, why? It’s tricky enough, working in your hometown. Why muck it up more?”

“Well…”

“He won’t tell me anything. He’s a pro. And so am I, so I won’t even ask. And you’re a pro yourself, Keller. Need I say more?”

“No, never mind. You know what he gets for a painting?”

“The subject?”

“Ten thousand dollars. That’s on the average. The bigger ones are a little more, the smaller ones are a little less.”

“Like diamonds,” she said, “or, I don’t know. Apartments. What’s it matter what he gets? You don’t want to buy one, do you?”

He didn’t say anything.

“Oh, Lord have mercy,” she said. “That’s brilliant, Keller. You do the guy and you hammer a nail in your wall and hang up one of his paintings. Nothing quite so professional as keeping a little memento of the occasion.”

“Dot…”

“If you absolutely have to have a souvenir,” she said, “why don’t you cut off one of his ears? You’ll save yourself ten grand just like that. Anyone asks, you can tell ’em it was Van Gogh’s.”

“There,” Maggie Griscomb said. “Now wasn’t that nice?”

Keller would have said something, but he wasn’t sure he was capable of forming sentences.

“As I worked my way through the Kellers,” she went on, “the Johns and the Jonathans and the mere Js, I wanted to kill the man who invented the Touch-Tone phone. With an old-fashioned rotary dial I never would have bothered in the first place. Because I knew you weren’t going to be in the book. Not the Manhattan book, anyway. I figured you lived in Scarsdale.”

“Why Scarsdale?”

“Well, someplace like it. Westchester or Long Island, or maybe Connecticut. Well-to-do suburban.”

“I live in Manhattan.”

“Why would you want to bring up kids in Manhattan?”

“I don’t have any. I’m not married.”

“I thought of seeing what John Kellers I could find in Westchester,” she said, “but you’d be at the office and I’d get your wife.”

“I don’t have a wife.”