Lawrence Block - Hit Man

There was a pay phone just next door; he’d noticed it coming back from the Pizza Hut. He spent a quarter and dialed the number, and after two rings the machine answered and a computer-generated voice repeated the last four numbers of the number and invited him to leave his message at the tone.

“Toxic Shock,” he said.

Nothing happened. He stayed on the line for fifteen seconds and hung up.

But was that long enough? Suppose she was washing her hands, or in the kitchen making coffee. He dug out another quarter, tried again. Same story. “Toxic Shock,” he said a second time, and waited for thirty seconds before hanging up.

“Great system,” he said aloud, and went back to the motel.

Back at the motel, he put on the television set and watched the last half of a movie about a wife who gets her lover to kill her husband. You didn’t have to have watched the first half to know what was going on, nor did you need to be a genius to know that everything was going to go wrong for them. Amateurs, he thought.

He went out and tried the number again. “Toxic Shock.” Nothing.

Hell.

On the desk in his room, along with carry-out menus from half a dozen nearby fast-food outlets and a handout from the local Board of Realtors on the joys of settling in Muscatine, there was a flyer inviting him to try his luck gambling on a Mississippi riverboat. It looked appealing at first. You pictured an old paddle wheeler chunking along, heading down the river to New Orleans, with women in hoop skirts and men in frock coats and string ties, but he knew it wouldn’t be anything like that. The boat wouldn’t move, for one thing. It would stand at anchor, and boarding it would be like crossing the threshold of a hotel in Atlantic City.

No thanks.

Unpacking, he found the morning paper he’d read on the flight to Chicago. He hadn’t finished it, and did so now, saving the crossword puzzle for last. There was a step-quote, a saying of some sort running like a flight of stairs from the upper-left to lower-right corner. He liked those, because you had the sense that solving the crossword led to a greater solution. Sometimes, too, the step-quote itself was a pearl of wisdom of the sort you found in a fortune cookie.

Often, though, the puzzles with step-quotes in them proved difficult, and this particular puzzle was one of those. There were a couple of areas he had trouble with, and they formed important parts of the step-quote, and he couldn’t work it out.

There was a 900 number you could call. They printed it with the puzzle every morning, and for seventy-five cents they’d give you any three answers. You’d punch in 3-7-D on your touch-tone phone, and you’d get the answer to 37 down. He figured they used a computer. They couldn’t waste an actual human being’s time on that sort of thing.

But did people really call in? Obviously they did, or the service wouldn’t exist. Keller found this baffling. He could see doing a crossword puzzle, it gave your mind a light workout and passed the time, but when he’d gone as far as he could he tossed the paper aside and got on with his life.

Anyway, if you were dying of curiosity, all you had to do was wait a day. They printed a filled-in version of the previous day’s crossword in every paper. Why spend seventy-five cents for three answers when you could wait a few hours and get the whole thing for half a dollar?

They were immature, he decided. He’d read that the true measure of human maturity was the ability to postpone gratification.

Keller, ready to go out and try the number again, decided to postpone gratification. He took a hot shower and went to bed.

In the morning he drove into downtown Muscatine and had breakfast at a diner. The crowd was almost exclusively male and most of the men wore suits. Keller, in a suit himself, read the local paper while he ate his breakfast. There was a crossword puzzle, but he took one look at it and gave it a pass. The longest word in it was six letters: Our northern neighbor. The way Keller figured it, when it came to crossword puzzles it was the Times or nothing.

There was a pay phone at the diner, but he didn’t want his conversation overheard by the movers and shakers of Greater Muscatine. Even if no one answered, he didn’t want anyone to hear him say “Toxic Shock.” He left the diner and found an outdoor pay phone at a gas station. He placed the call, said his two words, and in no time at all a woman cut in to say, “Hello? Hello?”

Tinny phone, he thought. Rinky-dink local phone company, what could you expect. But it was better than the computer-generated phone message. At least you knew you were talking to a person.

“It’s all right,” he said. “I’m here.”

“I’m sorry I missed your call last night. I was out, I had to-”

“Let’s not get into that,” he said. “Let’s not spend any more time on the phone than we have to.”

“I’m sorry. Of course you’re right.”

“I need to know some things. The name of the person I’m supposed to meet with, first of all.”

There was a pause. Then, tentatively, she said, “My understanding was that there wasn’t to be a meeting.”

“The other person,” he said, “that I’m supposed to meet with, so to speak.”

“Oh. I didn’t… I’m sorry. I’m not used to this.” No kidding, he thought.

“His name is Stephen Lauderheim,” she said.

“How do I find him? I don’t suppose you know his address.”

“No, I’m afraid not. I know the license number of his car.”

He copied it down, along with the information that the car was a two-year-old white Subaru squareback. That was useful, he told her, but he couldn’t cruise around town looking for a white Subaru. Where did he park this car?

“Across the street from my house,” she said, “more often than I’d like.”

“I don’t suppose he’s there now.”

“No, I don’t think so. Let me look… No, he’s not. There was a message from him last night. In between your messages. Nasty, vile.”

“I wish I had a photo of him,” he said. “That would help. I don’t suppose-”

No photo, but she could certainly describe him. Tall, slender, light brown hair, late thirties, long face, square jaw, big white horse teeth. Oh, and he had a Kirk Douglas dimple in his chin. Oh, and she knew where he worked. At least he’d been working there the last time the police had been involved. Would that help?

Keller rolled his eyes. “It might,” he said.

“The name of the firm is Loud amp; Clear Software,” she said. “On Tyler Boulevard just beyond Five Mile Road. He’s a computer programmer or technician, something like that.”

“That’s how he keeps getting your phone number,” Keller said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“He doesn’t need a confederate at the phone company. If he knows his way around computers, he can hack his way into the phone company system and get unlisted numbers that way.”

“It’s possible to do that?”

“So they tell me.”

“Well, I’m hopelessly old-fashioned,” she said. “I still do all my writing on a typewriter. But it’s an electric typewriter, at least.” He had the name, the address, the car, and a precise description. Did he need anything else? He couldn’t think of anything.

“This probably won’t take long,” he said.

He found Tyler Boulevard, found Five Mile Road, found Loud amp; Clear Software. The company occupied a squat concrete-block building with its own little parking lot. There were ten or a dozen cars in the lot, many of them Japanese, two of them white. No white Subaru squareback, no plate number to match the one Cressida Wallace had given him.

If Stephen Lauderheim wasn’t working today, maybe he was stalking. Keller drove back into town and got directions to Fairview Avenue. He found it in a pleasant neighborhood of prewar houses and big shade trees. Driving slowly past number 411, he looked around unsuccessfully for a white Subaru, then circled the block and parked just down the street from Cressida Wallace’s house. It was a sprawling structure, three stories tall, with overgrown shrubbery obscuring the lower half of the first-floor windows. A light burned in a window on the third floor, and Keller decided that was where Cressida was, typing up happy and instructive tales of woodland creatures on her electric typewriter.