Lawrence Block - Hit Parade

“You whispered because voiceprints don’t work with whispers.”

“Right.”

“So why are you still whispering, Keller?”

“Oh,” he said aloud. “I didn’t realize.”

“I hate the idea of doing this for short money,” she said, “but you’re right about one thing. You need the work.”

Five days laterhe was in White Plains again.

“It felt good to be working again,” he told Dot. “Getting a look at the guy, tracking his movements, starting to put a plan together. He’s not going to be easy.”

“Oh?”

“He seems to lead a pretty regular life,” he said, “which can make things easy or difficult, depending. It’s easy because you know where he’ll be, but it’s not necessarily easy to get to him. He’s always at his office or in his apartment, or on the way from one to the other. The office building has the kind of security procedures that used to be reserved for the Pentagon, and the apartment building is one of those Park Avenue fortresses with twenty-four-hour doormen and elevator attendants, and security cameras all over the place.”

“How does he get from Point A to Point B?”

“He has a car service. The same driver every time, as far as I can see. Car pulls up in front of his apartment building in the morning, drops him at his office. Works the same way at night.”

“What happens when he goes to a restaurant?”

“He eats lunch at his desk, orders in from somewhere or other. Same thing at night. Either he works late, which he does most of the time, or he goes home and orders dinner delivered.”

“Workaholic, it sounds like.”

“Assuming he’s working. Maybe he goes to the office and puts his feet up, watches soap operas on a plasma TV.”

“Maybe. Didn’t he have an affair with somebody? Isn’t that how all of this got started?”

“At the office. They were both having an affair with their secretary.”

“My guess,” she said, “is she doesn’t work there anymore. He’s got to be seeing someone, don’t you think?”

“My guess is he orders in.”

“Like lunch and dinner. Well, it’s a tricky one, Keller. I’ll grant you that. Have you doped out a way into either of the buildings?”

“Too risky.”

“What does that leave?”

“Getting him between the door and the car. And that probably means in the morning, because the car seems to pick him up at the same time most mornings.”

“Eight, eight-thirty?”

“Try a quarter to five.”

“It’s one thing to be a workaholic,” Dot said, “but you don’t have to be a nut about it. A quarter to five? And you were there to see this? It can’t take long to get to the office, not at that hour.”

“Call it fifteen minutes.”

“So you’d do what, lurk outside his apartment building? Or lurk outside the office? Either way, that’s a pretty conspicuous hour to be lurking.”

“I’d have to time it so that I got there just in time. I’m not sure which is better, the apartment or the office. The apartment’s on Park Avenue and Eighty-fourth, and there’s nobody on the street at that hour, and you’ve got all those doormen keeping an eye on things. The office is on Madison Avenue and Thirty-seventh Street, and doormen aren’t a factor, but there are more people on the street.”

“You’d swoop in, catch him between the car and the door, and disappear before anybody can get a good look at you.”

“Something like that.”

“There’s an awful lot that can go wrong, Keller.”

“I know.”

“And it’s right here in New York. Thirty-seventh and Madison? That’s what, half a mile from where you live?”

“Not even that.”

“I can’t say I like it. Maybe we should pull the plug on this one.”

“Maybe we don’t have to,” he said. “Our client already did.”

Dot’s fingers drummedthe tabletop. It was a gesture Keller had seen her make before, though not too often. From what he could tell, it did not indicate a feeling of peace and contentment and the sense that all was right with the world.

“He wants the money back,” she said.

“He said it as if he really expected to get it,” Keller told her, “but he’s essentially a salesman, and that would make him an optimist, wouldn’t it?”

“Evidently.”

“He’s probably read a lot of books about the value of a positive attitude.”

“They’ve got seminars, Keller. He could have taken a seminar.”

“I told him I didn’t think it was possible. That I’d already passed the money on, and that it wasn’t like a refundable deposit. This was over the phone, so I could only go by his voice, but he didn’t seem surprised.”

“I guess a positive attitude only goes so far. Why did he want to call it off? Money?”

“Cold feet.”

“But while he was at it, he thought he’d ask for his money back.”

“Worth a shot. And money’s part of it, because he was saying it might be a while before he had the balance.”

“So it’s off. It was interesting, everything you said a few minutes ago about how you’d make your move on Blyden, but why bother telling me? If it’s all off.”

“It’s off until he tells me it’s on again.”

“Oh.”

“Because he’s going to call me in the next couple days and let me know. Cash flow is evidently a big consideration.”

“It always is.”

“He says he’ll be in touch,” he said, “and…Jesus, how’s that for timing?”

“Timing?”

He drew the phone from his pocket, looked at the screen, frowned. “It’s not him,” he said, “but who else could it be?”

“It’s not anybody,” Dot said, “which seems obvious, given that it didn’t ring.”

He touched the phone to her forearm, let her feel the vibration. She nodded, and he squinted at the screen again, then answered it. He listened for a moment, then broke into the middle of a Harrelson sentence.

“I gave you a phone,” he whispered. “Why aren’t you using it? You lost it?”

Dot put her face in her hands.

“Hang up,” Keller said. “I’ll call you back.” He broke the connection, got a dial tone, made a call. It rang a few times before Harrelson picked up.

“I didn’t knowthere was such a thing as an angry whisper,” Dot said. “You were whispering, and it sounded for all the world as if you were shouting.”

“He called me from his hotel,” he said. “Through the hotel switchboard, or whatever it is when you dial direct from your room.”

“Because he lost the phone you gave him?”

“Misplaced it, I guess you’d say. He knew it was somewhere in the room, but he couldn’t find it.”

“So you called him back, and when it rang he found it. It’s good he didn’t have it set to vibrate. I gather we’re back on the case.”

“More or less.”

“And you told him he has to come up with another twenty-five percent in front.”

“He’ll be back the end of the week,” he said, “and he’ll have the money then.”

“And the final payment? Is he going to be able to swing it?”

“He says it’s no problem. I think that means he’ll deal with it when the time comes.”

“In other words, stall us.”

He nodded. “He knows he’ll have plenty of cash when his partner’s dead and the situation with the company is settled. And I suppose he figures we can wait, because what else are we going to do?”

“Clients,” Dot said.

“I know.”

“If it weren’t for the clients, this would be the perfect business, wouldn’t it? Lucrative, challenging, and with enough variety built in that you’d never get bored.”

“There’s the moral aspect,” Keller said.