Hit List - Lawrence Block [101]
“Well, sure.”
“It’s an equal-opportunity world,” she said. “I’ve even heard of women hit men, except I suppose the term would be hit women, but I don’t like the way that sounds. Female hit persons?”
“You hear stories,” he said, “but I don’t know if there really are any. Outside of the movies.”
“Then it’s a waste of time figuring out what to call them.”
He said, “No and no, you said. Not a guy and what? Not someone you know?”
“Right.”
“If it’s not someone you know,” he said, “then how come it’s not random?”
“Give it a minute, Keller. It’ll come to you.”
“It’s someone I know.”
“What did I tell you? It came to you.”
“Some woman I know . . .”
She sighed, reached for the pitcher of iced tea, filled both their glasses. “Keller,” she said, “maybe it’s this business with Roger, the stress of it, or maybe you’ve just been doing this for a long time. But lately you’ve been running risks and leaving loose ends.”
“I have?”
“I didn’t want to say anything,” she said, “because your life is your life.”
“Wait a minute,” he said. “Be specific, will you? What risks? What loose ends?”
She extended a forefinger and touched the tip of his thumb.
“My thumb’s a loose end? What am I supposed to do, cut it off?”
“I don’t see that your thumb’s the problem,” she said. “You lived with it all your life, and it was fine and so were you, and then some dame tells you it’s a murderer’s thumb and you go rushing off to another dame and she tells you you’re a Gemini with your temperature rising and your moon over Miami.”
“Cancer rising,” he said, “and my moon is in Taurus. The moon is exalted in Taurus.”
“And they probably don’t have to worry about hurricanes there, either. Keller, she told you all that crap, and you told her what you do for a living.”
“I didn’t exactly tell her.”
“She knew just by looking at your thumb.”
“And my chart. And I guess she more or less intuited it.” He sat up straight. “She’s the one you picked? Louise?”
“Keller—“
“Because they’re going to have a hard time finding her. She moved, and she must have left the area altogether, because her phone’s been disconnected. I suppose it’s possible she left a forwarding address, and there are other ways to track a person, but you wanted to bait the trap here in New York, didn’t you? If so, you can forget about Louise Carpenter.”
She didn’t say anything. He looked across the table at her and it dawned on him.
“No forwarding address,” he said.
“No.”
“She’s dead, isn’t she?”
“Either she’s one with the Universe,” Dot said, “or she’s been reincarnated as a butterfly. That’s how Louise herself would look at it, and who are we to argue?”
“But,” he stammered. “What . . . when? How?”
“Keller,” she said, “you sound like a training manual for newspaper reporters. Do you really want to know? Wouldn’t you be happier just figuring it was in the stars and letting it go at that?”
“I want to know.”
“You were on jury duty,” she said.
“And you got someone to—“
“No. Suppose you just let me tell it.”
“All right.”
She drank some iced tea. “I was thinking about this for a while,” she said. “Here’s a woman who knows something she’s not supposed to know, and how long before she says something to the wrong person? No, don’t interrupt. You were going to say it’s unethical for her to talk about her clients, weren’t you? That occurred to me, but what people are supposed to do and what they do aren’t always the same thing, or we’d both be in some other business.
“So what I did,” she went on, “is I called her up and made an appointment with her.”
“While I was on jury duty.”
“No, long before that. I don’t know where you were. At home in New York, probably, working on your stamp collection. I called her up and made an appointment, gave a phony name and date of birth, and took a train in and a cab to where she lived. Nice, if you like drapes and beaded curtains and overstuffed furniture. She sat me down with a cup of tea and we went over my chart.”
“But it wasn’t your chart.”
“Because I made up the date of birth. You know, I realized that, but by then