Hit List - Lawrence Block [28]
When she answered he said, “Hi, it’s Keller.”
“There you are.”
“Here I am,” he agreed.
“And no wonder people tend to call you Keller. It’s what you call yourself.”
“It is?”
“ ‘Hi, it’s Keller.’ Your very words. Your roses are beautiful. Completely unexpected and wholly welcome.”
“I was wondering if they got there.”
“What you’re too polite to say is you were wondering if I was ever going to call.”
“Not at all,” he said. “I know you’re busy, and—“
“And maybe the florist lost the card, and I didn’t know who sent them.”
“That occurred to me.”
“I’ll just bet it did. You think I didn’t call? Believe me, I called. Do you happen to know how many Kellers there are in the Manhattan book?”
“There’s something like two columns of them, if I remember correctly.”
“Two columns is right. And there are two John Kellers and two Jonathans, not to mention seven or eight J Kellers. And not one of them is you.”
“No, I’m not in the book.”
“No shit, Sherlock.”
“Oh,” he said. “I guess you didn’t have my number.”
“I guess not, but I do now, Mr. Smarty, because I’ve got Caller ID on this phone, so your secret’s not a secret anymore. I can call you anytime I want to, big boy. What do you think about that?”
“I haven’t thought about it yet,” he said, “so it’s hard to say. But here’s what I was thinking. Suppose I come by for you around seven tonight and we have dinner.”
“Won’t work.”
“Oh.”
“But I’ve got a better idea. Suppose you come over around nine-thirty and we have sex.”
“That would work,” he allowed. “But don’t you want to have dinner?”
“I’m a lousy cook.”
“At a restaurant,” he said. “I meant for us to go out.”
“I have revolting table manners,” she said. “I also have a shrink appointment at five.”
“Aren’t they usually done in an hour?”
“Fifty minutes, generally.”
“We could have dinner after.”
“What I always do,” she said, “is pick up a banana smoothie on the way to the shrink’s, with added wheat germ and protein powder and spirulina, whatever that is, and I sip it while we talk. It’s the perfect time to be nourished, you know? And then I’ll go right home and work, because I’ve got an order I have to get out, and I’ll knock off at nine and bathe and wash my hair and make myself irresistible, and at nine-thirty you’ll show up and we’ll have an inventive and highly satisfying sexual encounter. To which, I might add, I’ll be looking forward all day. Nine-thirty, Keller. See ya.”
Early that afternoon, Keller took a bus across Twenty-third and found his way to the Regis Buell gallery. There were other art galleries on the same block, and he stopped in a couple of them for a brief look. Prices were lower on average than in the Fifty-seventh Street galleries, but not by much. Art could get expensive in a hurry, once you got past museum show posters and mass-produced prints of kabuki dancers.
On opening night the Buell gallery had been jammed with people. Now it was empty, except for Keller and the young woman at the desk, a self-assured blonde who’d recently graduated from a good college and would soon be some commuter’s wife. She gave Keller a low-wattage smile and went back to her book. Keller picked up one of the price lists. They must have had them at the opening, but at the time he hadn’t known to look for one.
He spent two full hours at the gallery, going from canvas to canvas.
Back at his apartment, he gave Dot a call. “I’ve been thinking,” he said.
“You want to bail. Pull the plug. Cut and run. Well, I can’t say I blame you.”
“No.”
“No?”
He shook his head, then remembered he was on the phone. “No,” he said, “that’s not it. I was wondering about the client.”
“What about him?”
“It’s a him?”
“It’s a generic pronoun, Keller. What do you want me to say, ‘them’? ‘It’? ‘I was wondering about the client.’ ‘The client? What about him or her?’ I’m an old-fashioned girl, Keller. I do like my eighth-grade English teacher taught me.”
“As,” he said.
“Huh?”
“You do as your teacher taught you.