Hit List - Lawrence Block [99]
He caught another cab and went home.
There was only one person he could think of who might know where Louise Carpenter had disappeared to. That was Maggie Griscomb, and he didn’t want to call her.
He had to look up the number, and then he had to force himself to dial it. By the time it had rung twice he was ready to hang up, but then she picked up in the middle of the third ring. He could still hang up, and he considered it, and she said hello again, the irritation evident in her tone, and he said, “I’ve been trying to reach Louise.”
He hadn’t meant to blurt it out that way. Hello, hi, how are you, di dah di dah di dah, and then he could bring up the business at hand. But something had made him cut to the chase, and there was a pause, and then she said, “It’s you.”
What could you say to something like that? Keller was stumped, and before he could come up with anything, she said, “You’ve got a lot of nerve. How come you didn’t call?”
“You told me not to call. Remember?”
“Vividly. And then when you didn’t call—“
Because you told me not to, he thought.
“—I called, and I left messages, and I never heard from you.”
“I never got the messages.”
“Yeah, right.”
Had she left messages? No, of course not. He already regretted this call, and he hadn’t even gotten to the point of it yet. “I’ve been having trouble with my answering machine,” he said, “and you can believe me or not, it doesn’t matter. I’ve been trying to reach Louise, and—“
“Why?”
“The astrologer,” he said.
“That’s who. What I asked you was why.”
“Why?”
“You don’t need an astrologer,” she said, “to know which way the stars are falling. You want her number, look it up. She’s in the book.”
“But that’s just it,” he said, and then he let it go, because he was talking to himself. She had hung up on him.
“It seems to me,” Dot said, “that we’ve got two choices. We can wait passively for the situation to resolve itself, or we can take a proactive approach.”
“That’s a word you never used to hear,” Keller said, “and now you hear it all the time. I know what it means, but what’s the point of it? Why not just say active?”
“It sounds better.”
“It does?”
“Sure. Proactive, like you’re really getting off your ass and doing something, and being professional about it, too. And I would have to say it’s about time. We’ve been taking precautions, but all that means is that Roger’s been killing other people. It would be nice if one of them caught on and turned the tables on him, but he’s a pro and he’s active and he takes them by surprise, so what chance have they got? Hejust keeps on doing what he does best, and we’re turning down jobs and looking over our shoulders when we do take one, and it’s about time we turned that around.”
“And hunted him down,” he said.
“And left him with a stake through his heart, because with a guy like that you want to make sure.”
“But how, Dot? How would you find him? Where would you start?”
“He has to come to us.”
He nodded. “We set a trap,” he said, “and draw him right into it.”
“There you go.”
“How? Offer him a job? He won’t take it. Unless—“
“What?”
“Well,” he said, “if the job was to hit a hit man, wouldn’t he make an exception? I mean, he’s been doing that for free, and if he was going to get paid for it—“
“I’d call him with a contract for a hit man.”
“Right.”
“And not just any hit man. I presume we’re talking about you.”
“Right.”
“So I give him your name and your address and a reasonably flattering photograph of you, while you sit home in front of the TV and listen for footsteps. Do I have to explain why that’s a bad idea?”
“No.”
“I’ve been working on this for a while,” she said, “so why don’t I lay it out for you? What I do, I call Roger and leave word, and he picks up the message