Hit Man - Lawrence Block [101]
“Keller,” Dot said, “I’ll just bet you’re playing with your stamps.”
“Working with them,” he said.
“I stand corrected. Speaking of work, why don’t you come out and see me?”
“Now?”
“You’re just a part-time philatelist,” she pointed out. “You haven’t retired yet. Duty calls.”
Keller flew to New Orleans and took a cab to a hotel on the edge of the French Quarter. He unpacked and sat down with a city map and a photograph. The photo showed a middle-aged man with a full head of wavy hair, a deep tan, and a thirty-two-tooth smile. He was wearing a broad-brimmed Panama hat and holding a cigar. His name was Richard Wickwire, and he had killed at least one wife, and possibly two.
Six years previously, Wickwire had married Pam Shileen, daughter of a local businessman who’d done very nicely, thank you, in sulphur and natural gas. Several years into a stormy marriage, Pam Wickwire drowned in her swimming pool. After a brief mourning period, Richard Wickwire demonstrated his continuing enthusiasm for the Shileen family by marrying Pam’s younger sister, Rachel.
The second marriage was, it seemed, also problematic. Rachel, a friend later testified, had feared for her life, and had reported that Wickwire had threatened to kill her. Straighten up and fly right, he’d told her, or he’d drown her the same as he’d drowned her sad-ass sister.
He didn’t, though. He stabbed her instead, using the carving knife from the family barbecue set and sticking it straight into her heart. That at least was the prosecution’s contention, and the evidence was pretty convincing, but the essential twelve persons were not unanimously convinced. The first trial ended in a hung jury, and on retrial the second jury voted to acquit.
So Jim Paul Shileen had a few drinks, loaded a sixgun, and went looking for his son-in-law. Found him, called him a son of a bitch, and emptied the gun at him, hitting him once in the shoulder and once in the hip, hitting a female companion of Wickwire’s in the left buttock, and missing altogether with the three remaining bullets.
Shileen turned himself in, only to be charged with assault and attempted murder, acquitted of all charges, and given a stiff warning by the judge. “In other words,” Dot had said, “ ‘You didn’t do it. Now don’t do it again.’ So he’s not going to do it again, Keller, and that’s where you come in.”
Wickwire, fully recovered from his wounds, was living in the same Garden District mansion he’d shared in turn with Pam and Rachel Shileen. He had married again, taking as his third bride not the young woman Shileen had wounded but a sweet young thing who’d been a juror, coincidentally enough, at his second trial. She’d visited him in the hospital after the shooting, and one thing led to another.
“The shooting evidently got his attention,” Dot had said, “so he’s got himself a couple of live-in bodyguards now, and you’d think they were his AmEx cards.”
“Because he never leaves home without them.”
“Apparently not. The client thought an explosive device might do the trick, and for all he cares the new wife and the bodyguards can come to the party, too. I figured you might not care for that.”
“I don’t.”
“Too high tech, too noisy, and too much heat. Of course you’ll do it your own way, Keller. You’ve got two weeks. The client wants to be out of the country when it happens, and that’s how long he’ll be gone. I figure if you can do it at all you can do it in two weeks.”
Generally the case, he said. And what did the old man upstairs think about it?
“Unless he’s telepathic,” Dot said, “he’s got no opinion. I took the call myself and headed the play on my own.”
“I guess he was having a bad day.”
“Actually,” she said, “it was one of his better days, but I shortstopped the phone call anyway, and I figured, why give him a chance to screw this one up? You think I did the wrong thing?”
“Not at all,” he said. “I’ve got no problem with that. My only problem is Wickwire.”
“And you’ve got two weeks to solve him. Or until he murders wife number three, whichever comes first.”
Keller