Hit List - Lawrence Block [129]
“And killed him? Then why did he come back after he killed Maggie?”
“Maybe he left Allenby trussed up,” she said. “And then, after he’d killed her and left the tub running to establish the time of death, he went back to the Woodleigh, took the Do Not Disturb sign off the knob, let himself in with the key he’d taken from Allenby on his first visit, hanged the poor bastard with a sheet from his own bed, and wrote out the note.”
“What note?”
“Didn’t I mention that? A note on hotel letterhead. ‘I can’t do this anymore. God forgive me.’ “
“Allenby’s handwriting?”
“How would anybody know?”
He nodded. “The drowning looks like an accident,” he said, “but the client who ordered the job—“
“Which is to say us.”
“—knows it’s a hit, and figures it was one job too many for Allenby, and the guy’s conscience tortured him into ending it all. Either he left Allenby alive while he went down and did Maggie—“
“Risky.”
“—or he killed him the first time, figuring nobody was going to discover the body, and so what if they did? But by coming back he could make a phone call from the dead man’s room, and the phone records would establish time of death regardless of the forensic evidence.”
Keller frowned. “It’s too tricky,” he said. “Too many things could go wrong.”
“Well, he was a tricky guy.”
“Speaking of tricky, didn’t you say he hanged him with a bed sheet? That’s what guys do in prison, but would you hang yourself with a sheet if you had other things to choose from?”
“I wouldn’t hang myself at all, Keller.”
“But a sheet,” he said. “Why not a belt?”
“Maybe Allenby wore suspenders. Or maybe it was part of the game Roger was playing.”
“He liked playing games,” he agreed. “The whole thing was a game, wasn’t it? I mean, chasing around the country to murder other people in the same line of work as yourself. The idea is you increase your income that way, but do you? What you really do is use up a lot of time and spend a ton of money on airfare.”
“Not a good career move, you’re saying.”
“But it made him feel smarter than the rest of us. Smarter than everybody. Switching clothes, pasting on a mustache and peeling it off. All that phony crap. You’d expect it from some jerk in the CIA, but would a pro waste his time like that?”
“He wasn’t perfect, Keller. He killed the couple in Louisville that wound up in your old motel room, and he popped the guy in Boston who stole your coat.”
“I was lucky.”
“And he was a little too cute for his own good. I guess he spotted Allenby easily enough. Well, so did we. Allenby wasn’t worried about being spotted by anybody but the designated victim. And then I guess he got tired of waiting. Well, I can understand that. We were getting pretty sick of it ourselves, as I recall. You even said something about killing them both and getting it over with.”
“I remember.”
“Once he spotted Allenby, why wait? He could just follow him home and take him out, and he did, in his hotel room.”
“He didn’t have to kill Maggie,” Keller said.
“But the contract was always carried out, remember? That was Roger’s trademark, he bided his time until the hitter got the job done, and then he did a job of his own on the hitter. This time the hitter was out of the picture early, so Roger felt it was up to him to do the job. Maybe he thought it was part of being a pro.”
“Maybe.”
“And it got him killed.”
He sat there for a while. She went on talking, going over it, and he let the words wash over him without taking in everything she was saying. He’d avenged Maggie, which had seemed important at the time, for reasons that made no sense at all now. He tried to picture her, and realized that her image was already fading, getting smaller, losing color and definition. Fading into the past, fading the way everything faded.
And Roger was gone. He’d been looking over his shoulder for months, stalked by a faceless killer, and now that threat had been removed. And he’d done it himself. He hadn’t known that was what he was doing, but he’d done it anyway.
“If I’d done the right thing,” he said, “he would have