Lawrence Block - Hit Parade

“And he said, ‘Have you got anybody who’d like to kill a dog?’”

“I’m not sure he knows it’s a dog. He gave me a number to call, and I drove twenty miles and picked up a pay phone and called it.”

“And somebody answered?”

“The woman who’s going to meet you at the airport.”

“A woman’s going to meet me? At an airport?”

“She had somebody call Chicago,” Dot said, “so I told her I was calling from Chicago, and she thinks you’re flying in from Chicago. So she’ll go to JFK to meet a flight from Chicago, and you’ll show up, looking like you just walked off a plane, and she’ll never guess that you’re local.”

“I don’t have a Chicago accent.”

“You don’t have any kind of an accent, Keller. You could be a radio announcer.”

“I could?”

“Well, it’s probably a little late in life for a career change, but you could have. Look, here’s the thing. Unless Fluffy gets his teeth in you, your risk here is minimal. If they catch you for killing a dog, about the worst that can happen to you is a fine. But they won’t catch you, because they won’t look for you, because catching a dog killer doesn’t get top priority at the NYPD. But what we don’t want is for the client to suspect that you’re local.”

“Because it could blow my cover sooner or later.”

“I suppose it could,” she said, “but that’s the least of it. The last thing we want is people thinking a top New York hit man will kill dogs for chump change.”

“The person I spoke tosaid there was no need for us to meet. She told me all I had to do was supply the name and address of the dog’s owner, and you could take it from there. But that just didn’t seem right to me. Suppose you got the wrong dog by mistake? I’d never forgive myself.”

That seemed extreme to Keller. There had been a time in St. Louis when he’d gotten the wrong man, through no fault of his own, and it hadn’t taken him terribly long to forgive himself. On the other hand, forgiving himself came easy to him. His, he’d come to realize, was a forgiving nature.

“Is the coffee all right, Mr. Niebauer? It feels strange calling you Mr. Niebauer, but I don’t know your first name. Though come to think of it I probably don’t know your last name either, because I don’t suppose it’s Niebauer, is it?”

“The coffee’s fine,” he said. “And no, my name’s not Niebauer. It’s not Paul, either, but you could call me that.”

“Paul,” she said. “I always liked that name.”

Her name was Evelyn, and he’d never had strong feelings about it one way or another, but he’d have preferred not to know it, just as he’d have preferred not to be sitting in the kitchen of her West End Avenue apartment, and not to know that her husband was an attorney named George Augenblick, that they had no children, and that their eight-month-old Weimaraner had answered to the name of Rilke.

“I suppose we could have called him Rainer,” she said, “but we called him Rilke.” He must have looked blank, because she explained that they’d named him for Rainer Maria Rilke. “He had the nature of a German Romantic poet,” she added, “and of course the breed is German in origin. From Weimar, as in Weimar Republic. You must think I’m silly, saying a young dog had the nature of a poet.”

“Not at all.”

“George thinks I’m silly. He humors me, which is good, I suppose, except he’s careful to make it clear to me and everyone else that that’s what he’s doing. Humoring me. And I in turn pretend I don’t know about his girlfriends.”

“Uh,” Keller said.

They’d come to her apartment because they had to talk somewhere. They’d shared long silences in the cab, interrupted briefly by observations about the weather, and her kitchen seemed a better bet than a coffee shop, or any other public place. Still, Keller wasn’t crazy about the idea. If you were dealing with pros, a certain amount of client contact was just barely acceptable. With amateurs, you really wanted to keep your distance.

“If he knew about you,” Evelyn said, “he’d have a fit. It’s just a dog, he said. Let it go, he said. You want another dog, I’ll buy you another dog. Maybe I am being silly, I don’t know, but George, George just doesn’t get the point.”

She’d taken her glasses off while she was talking, and now she turned her eyes on him. They were a deep blue, and luminous.

“More coffee, Paul? No? Then maybe we should go look for that woman and her dog. If we can’t find her, at least I can show you where they live.”

“Rilke,” he told Dot.“How do you like that for a coincidence? A Weimaraner and a pit bull, and they’re both named after poets.”

“What about the Yorkie?”

“Evelyn thinks his name was Buster. Of course that could just be his call name, and he could have been registered as John Greenleaf Whittier.”

“Evelyn,” Dot said thoughtfully.

“Don’t start.”

“Now how do you like that for a coincidence? Because that’s just what I was about to say to you.”

His name aside,there was nothing remotely fluffy about Percy Bysshe Shelley. Nor did his appearance suggest an evil nature. He looked capable and confident, and so did the woman who held on to the end of his leash.

Her name, Keller had learned, was Aida Cuppering, and she was at least as striking in looks as her dog, with strong features and deeply set dark eyes and an athletic stride. She wore tight black jeans and black lace-up boots and a leather motorcycle jacket with a lot of metal on it, chains and studs and zippers, and she lived alone on West Eighty-seventh Street half a block from Central Park, and, according to Evelyn Augenblick, she had no visible means of support.

Keller wasn’t so sure about that. It seemed to him that she had a means of support, and that it was all too visible. If she wasn’t making a living as a dominatrix, she ought to make an appointment right away for vocational counseling.

There was no way to lurk outside her brownstone without looking as though he was doing precisely that, but Keller had learned that lurking wasn’t required. Whenever Cuppering took Fluffy for a walk, they headed straight for the park. Keller, stationed on a park bench, could lurk to his heart’s content without attracting attention.

And when the two of them appeared, it was easy enough to get up from the bench and tag along in their wake. Cuppering, with a powerful dog for a companion, was not likely to worry that someone might be following her.

The dog seemed perfectly well behaved. Keller, walking along behind the two of them, was impressed with the way Fluffy walked perfectly at heel, never straining at his leash, never lagging behind. As Evelyn had told him, the dog was unmuzzled. A muzzle would prevent Fluffy from biting anyone, human or animal, and Aida Cuppering had been advised to muzzle her dog, but it was evidently advice she was prepared to ignore. Still, three times a day she walked the animal, and three times a day Keller was there to watch them, and he didn’t see Fluffy so much as glower at anyone.

Suppose the dog was innocent? Suppose there was a larger picture here? Suppose, say, Evelyn Augenblick had found out that her husband had been dillydallying with Aida Cuppering. Suppose the high-powered attorney liked to lick Cuppering’s boots, suppose he let her lead him around on a leash, muzzled or not. And suppose Evelyn’s way of getting even was to…

To spend ten thousand dollars having the woman’s dog killed?

Keller shook his head. This was something that needed more thought.

“Excuse me,”the woman said. “Is this seat taken?”