Lawrence Block - Hit Parade

Keller’s face must have shown something, because Horvath grinned at him. “ Quotidian . Means ordinary, everyday. I read books. Not all the ones you see, but plenty. You a reader yourself?”

“Some.”

“Yeah? What else do you do? When you’re not flying off to Detroit.”

Keller told him.

“Stamps,” Horvath said. “I had a collection when I was a kid. I don’t know what the hell ever happened to it. That’s a great pastime, collecting stamps.”

They talked a little about stamps, and Keller was beginning to believe they weren’t going to kill him. You were planning on killing a man, would you start telling him about the stamps you collected as a kid?

“Where was I?” Horvath said and answered his own question. “Oh, right, meet you at the airport, turn you around and send you home. Thing is, why would you believe Phil and Normie? But if you meet the putative victim in his own house, that makes it clear-cut. So now I’ll shake your hand, because for all I know the day may come when I have to hire you myself, and I got no hard feelings against you, and hope you don’t resent me for keeping you from completing your job. You get paid something in front?”

“Half.”

“That’s what Dealey said, but he was never the kind of fellow whose word you could take to the bank. Well, that’s all you get, but the bright side is you get to keep it without having to earn it. You can buy yourself some stamps.”

“You say thatall the time,” Keller said.

“I do?”

“‘You can buy yourself some stamps.’ When you hand me my share, or when you let me know the money’s arrived. ‘Here you go, Keller-buy yourself some stamps.’”

“It does have a familiar ring to it,” Dot allowed. “I didn’t realize I said it all the time.”

“Well, a lot of the time.”

“Because I’d hate to be a bore, you know? There’s not all that many people I talk to besides you, and if I’m tossing the same catchphrases at you all the damn time-”

“Actually, it’s nice,” he said. “And it’ll echo in my mind when I’m looking over a price list and trying to decide whether to order something. I hear your voice in my head, telling me I can buy myself some stamps, and it gives me permission to be extravagant.”

“The roles we play in each other’s lives,” Dot said, “and we’re not even aware of it. Who says there’s no divine order to the universe?”

“Not me,” said Keller.

They were in White Plains, sitting across the kitchen table in Dot’s big old house on Taunton Place. She’d made coffee for him and was herself sipping her usual glass of iced tea.

“Well,” she said. “Must have been scary.”

“What I was afraid of,” he said, “was that there was a way out of it but that I couldn’t see it. So if I got killed, on top of being dead it’d be my own fault.”

“I think I see what you mean.”

“But it turned out I was worried about nothing, because all he wanted to do was let me know the game had changed. Between the time we got the contract and the time I got off the plane, our client stopped having a pulse.”

“And here you are,” she said. “And I’ve evidently said this before, but I’ll say it again, Keller. Now you can buy yourself some stamps.”

“But not as many as I’d like.”

“Oh?”

“It’s nice we got half the money,” he said, “but it would have been nice to get the other half. Even if I had to earn it.”

“Half a loaf may be better than none,” she agreed, “but it’s not as good as the whole enchilada. Are you hurting for dough?”

“I wouldn’t say hurting. But I was sort of counting on the money.”

“I know the feeling. I flat hate it when we’re supposed to get money and then we don’t.”

“Plus I wanted the work. You go too long between jobs and you start to lose your edge. And it’s been a while. Maybe if I’d worked more recently I’d have reacted quicker to Phil and Norman.”

“Which would have been the worst thing to do, because you might have gotten yourself killed, when you weren’t in any real danger in the first place.”

He frowned, thinking it over, then shrugged. “Maybe. It’s all pretty hypothetical. What’s that you say sometimes about my grandmother’s tea cart?”

“Huh? Oh, I know what you mean. ‘If your grandmother had wheels she’d be a tea cart, but she’d still be your grandmother.’”

“That’s it.”

“Is that something else I say all the time?”

“No, just once in a while.”

“Christ, I’m glad I don’t have to listen to myself. I’d bore myself to tears. I wish I had work for you, Keller, but all I can do is sit back like a good spider and see what flies into the web. The jobs have to come to us.”

“Maybe.”

She gave him a look.

“On the trip to Detroit,” he said, “I flew first-class. They were sold out in coach, and that was the flight I wanted, especially since we’d arranged for them to be meeting it. So I spent the extra money.”

“Cuts into the profit, doesn’t it?”

“It does,” he said, “but that’s not the point. It’s a funny thing about sitting in the front of the plane. You’ve got more leg room, and the seats are wider, with more space between you and the person sitting next to you. You’d think that would be a distancing factor, but people in first are much more likely to get into conversations. In coach you sit there with your knees jammed against the seat in front of you, and trying to keep your elbows from pushing the other guy’s elbows off the shared armrest, and you crawl in a cocoon and stay there until the plane’s back on the ground.”

“But in first class you turn into Chatty Cathy?”

“Not on the flight out,” he said. “The woman sitting next to me had her laptop up and running, and she might as well have been in her office cubicle, the way she was all wrapped up in her work.”

“That’s a shame, if she was cute. Was she?”

“Not really. On the way back, well, I was still in first class, because it was simpler to just go ahead and book the whole flight that way. And the guy next to me started talking the minute we got off the ground.”

“This is whenI get to relax,” the man had said for openers. “When I’m in a plane and the plane’s in the air. I never even think about crashing. Never even consider the possibility. Do you?”

“Not until just now,” Keller said.

“What I do,” the man went on, “is I leave my troubles on the ground. Because I’m up here and they’re down there, and while I’m here there’s not a damn thing I can do about them, so why carry them around with me?”

“I see what you mean.”

“Except,” the man said, “this is one of those days when I just don’t think it’s gonna work. Because I just can’t shake the thought that in two hours we’ll be back on the ground and I’m in the same pile of crap as always.”

The fellow didn’t look like someone who spent much time in a pile of crap. He was dressed for success in a dark pinstripe suit, his button-down shirt was a Wedgwood blue, his tie gold with dark blue fleurs-de-lis. Like Keller, he was wearing loafers; if they were going to make you take off your shoes at airport security, you didn’t want to have to untie them and tie them up again. Slip ’em off, slip ’ em on. Maybe you couldn’t beat the system, but at least you could try to keep up with it.

He was a businessman, obviously, and in his early forties or thereabouts. Keller guessed he’d played a minor sport in college-track, maybe-and had eaten well since then. He wasn’t jowly yet, but he was on his way. And he had the florid complexion of someone who’d either spent a little too much time in the sun-unlikely, in Detroit-or whose blood pressure might bear watching.