Hit List - Lawrence Block [102]
“About what?”
“About you. I talked about how I went to a palmist once, and she said she knew a little about palmistry and looked at my hand, and I told her about a girlfriend of mine in high school who had an unusual thumb, and before I knew it I was hearing all about a client of hers who had a murderer’s thumb.”
“She talked about my thumb?”
“It doesn’t necessarily mean anything,” she said, “but in this instance the client with the murderer’s thumb did in fact have a very real dark side. I didn’t dig too deeply, but I had the feeling I could have walked out of there with your name and address if I’d really wanted to.”
“That’s a surprise,” he said. “I thought she’d be discreet.”
“She probably thought she was being discreet. She mentioned some things about your chart, but don’t ask me what they were. Your Saturn squares Uranus, ooga booga dooga. You know how they talk. Keller, the woman was a loose end. She had a client who killed people for a living, and she knew it, and it didn’t take a lot to get her talking about it.”
“You should have said something.”
“To you?”
“Of course to me. I would have . . .”
“What? Taken care of it?”
“Sure.”
“You liked the woman, Keller. You talked about how maternal she was.”
“I don’t remember saying that.”
“Well, I remember. Maybe you could have gone ahead and done it anyway, but it would have been tough for you, and it would have been a bad idea to begin with. You were a client of hers, there’s a connection, so if anything’s going to happen to her it should happen when you’re out of town.”
“So you’d have to bring somebody in,” he said, thinking out loud. “And while you’re at it, why not bring in Roger, too? Tie off a loose end and bait a trap for Roger, both at the same time. It makes sense.” He looked up, frowning. “But it’s too late for that, because she’s already dead.”
“I wasn’t thinking about baiting traps at the time. And I wanted to leave you completely out of it, and I didn’t want to wait too long, because loose lips sink ships, and who knows how long it would be before the fat lady sang to the wrong person?”
“But you waited a while after all.”
“That wasn’t my idea,” she said. “Remember that string of jobs you had where you were back the next day? They called it off or the guy killed himself or somebody else closed the sale for you? You kept coming back before I could set things up.”
“You wanted me out of town when she got taken out.”
“Of course.”
“So I’d have an alibi. Of course, if anybody wanted to know what exactly I was doing in Albuquerque or St. Louis or wherever . . .”
“I know, it’s not much of an alibi. ‘Your Honor, I couldn’t have killed her because I was in Sausalito killing him.’ I guess I had other reasons for wanting you out of town. I guess I didn’t want you to know about it because I knew you wouldn’t like it.”
“You were right.”
“You still don’t like it, do you?”
He thought about it. “You had to do it,” he said. “I would have tried to talk you out of it, or find another way, but it’s over now, and I have to admit you were right. Who’d you use?”
“What’s the difference?”
“No difference, I guess. When the Baltimore job came in, you figured I’d be out of town, so you booked the guy to do Louise. And then you found out I had jury duty, but that’s an even better alibi than being out of town, so you let it go according to schedule. Whoever he was, he did good work. ‘Death Was in the Stars’—it’s a story the papers would have played up, an astrologer getting murdered. But I didn’t see anything. You use this guy before?”
“Once. And there was nothing in the papers then, either.”
“His trademark, I guess.”
“Hers.”
“Pardon?