Lawrence Block - Hit Man

Another shrug, accompanied by a photograph. Or a part of one; it had apparently been cropped from a larger photo, and showed the upper half of a middle-aged man who looked to have spent a lot of time outdoors. A big man, too. Keller wasn’t sure how he knew that. You couldn’t see the man’s legs and there was nothing else in the photo to give you an idea of scale. But somehow he could tell.

“What did he do?”

Again a shrug, but one that conveyed information to Keller. If the other man didn’t know what Crowder had done, he had evidently done it to somebody else. Which meant the man in White Plains had no personal interest in the matter. It was strictly business.

“So who’s the client?”

A shake of the head. Meaning that he didn’t know who was picking up the tab, or that he knew but wasn’t saying? Hard to tell. The man in White Plains was a man of few words and master of none.

“What’s the time frame?”

“The time frame,” the man said, evidently enjoying the phrase. “No big hurry. One week, two weeks.” He leaned forward, patted Keller on the knee. “Take your time,” he said. “Enjoy yourself.”

On the way out he’d shown the index card to Dot. He said, “How would you pronounce this? As in crow or as in crowd ?”

Dot shrugged.

“Jesus,” he said, “you’re as bad as he is.”

“Nobody’s as bad as he is,” Dot said. “Keller, what difference does it make how Lyman pronounces his last name?”

“I just wondered.”

“Well, stick around for the funeral,” she suggested. “See what the minister says.”

“You’re a big help,” Keller said.

There was only one Crowder listed in the Martingale phone book. Lyman Crowder, with a telephone number but no address. About a third of the book’s listings were like that. Keller wondered why. Did these people assume everybody knew where they lived in a town this size? Or were they saddle tramps with cellular phones and no fixed abode?

Probably rural, he decided. Lived out of town on some unnamed road, picked up their mail at the post office, so why list an address in the phone book?

Great. His quarry lived in the boondocks outside of a town that wasn’t big enough to have boondocks, and Keller didn’t even have an address for him. He had a phone number, but what good was that? What was he supposed to do, call him up and ask directions? “Hi, this here’s Dale Whitlock, we haven’t met, but I just rode a thousand miles and-”

Scratch that.

He drove around and ate at a downtown café called the Singletree. It was housed in a weathered frame building just down the street from the Martingale Hotel. The café’s name was spelled out in rope nailed to the vertical clapboards. For Keller the name brought a vision of a solitary pine or oak set out in the middle of vast grasslands, a landmark for herdsmen, a rare bit of shade from the relentless sun.

From the menu, he learned that a singletree was some kind of apparatus used in hitching up a horse, or a team of horses. It was a little unclear to him just what it was or how it functioned, but it certainly didn’t spread its branches in the middle of the prairie.

Keller had the special, a chicken-fried steak and some French fries that came smothered in gravy. He was hungry enough to eat everything in spite of the way it tasted.

You don’t want to live here, he told himself.

It was a relief to know this. Driving around Martingale, Keller had found himself reminded of Roseburg, Oregon. Roseburg was larger, with none of the Old West feel of Martingale, but they were both small western towns of a sort Keller rarely got to. In Roseburg Keller had allowed his imagination to get away from him for a little while, and he wouldn’t want to let that happen again.

Still, crossing the threshold of the Singletree, he had been unable to avoid remembering the little Mexican place in Roseburg. If the food and service here turned out to be on that level-

Forget it. He was safe.

After his meal Keller strode out through the bat-wing doors and walked up one side of the street and down the other. It seemed to him that there was something unusual about the way he was walking, that his gait was that of a man who had just climbed down from a horse.

Keller had been on a horse once in his life, and he couldn’t remember how he’d walked after he got off of it. So this walk he was doing now wasn’t coming from his own past. It must have been something he’d learned unconsciously from movies and TV, a synthesis of all those riders of the purple sage and the silver screen.

No need to worry about yearning to settle here, he knew now. Because his fantasy now was not of someone settling in but passing through, the saddle tramp, the shootist, the flint-eyed loner who does his business and moves on.

That was a good fantasy, he decided. You wouldn’t get into any trouble with a fantasy like that.

Back in his room, Keller tried the book again but couldn’t keep his mind on what he was reading. He turned on the TV and worked his way through the channels, using the remote control bolted to the nightstand. Westerns, he decided, were like cops and cabs, never around when you wanted them. It seemed to him that he never made a trip around the cable circuit without running into John Wayne or Randolph Scott or Joel McCrea or a rerun of Gunsmoke or Rawhide or one of those spaghetti westerns with Eastwood or Lee Van Cleef. Or the great villains-Jack Elam, Strother Martin, the young Lee Marvin in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.

It probably said something about you, Keller thought, when your favorite actor was Jack Elam.

He switched off the set and looked up Lyman Crowder’s phone number. He could dial it, and when someone picked up and said, “Crowder residence,” he’d know how the name was pronounced. “Just checking,” he could say, cradling the phone and giving them something to think about.

Of course he wouldn’t say that, he’d mutter something harmless about a wrong number, but was even that much contact a good idea? Maybe it would put Crowder on his guard. Maybe Crowder was already on his guard, as far as that went. That was the trouble with going in blind like this, knowing nothing about either the target or the client.

If he called Crowder’s house from the motel, there might be a record of the call, a link between Lyman Crowder and Dale Whitlock. That wouldn’t matter much to Keller, who would shed the Whitlock identity on his way out of town, but there was no reason to create more grief for the real Dale Whitlock.

Because there was a real Dale Whitlock, and Keller was giving him grief enough without making him a murder suspect.

It was pretty slick the way the man in White Plains worked it. He knew a man who had a machine with which he could make flawless American Express cards. He knew someone else who could obtain the names and account numbers of bona fide American Express cardholders. Then he had cards made that were essentially duplicates of existing cards. You didn’t have to worry that the cardholder had reported his card as stolen, because it hadn’t been stolen, it was still sitting in his wallet. You were off somewhere charging the earth, and he didn’t have a clue until the charges turned up on his monthly statement.

The driver’s license was real, too. Well, technically it was a counterfeit, of course, and the photograph on it showed Keller, not Whitlock. But someone had managed to access the Connecticut Bureau of Motor Vehicles computer, and thus the counterfeit license showed the same number as Whitlock’s, and gave the same address.

In the old days, Keller thought, it had been a lot more straightforward. You didn’t need a license to ride a horse or a credit card to rent one. You bought or stole one, and when you rode into town on it nobody asked to see your ID. They might not even come right out and ask your name, and if they did they wouldn’t expect a detailed reply. “Call me Tex,” you’d say, and that’s what they’d call you as you rode off into the sunset.