Hit Man - Lawrence Block [103]
Get into the house. Arrange an accident for wife number three. Take her out back and drown her in the pool, say. Or break her neck and leave her at the foot of the stairs, as if she’d taken a header down the staircase. There was no end of ways to kill her, and how hard could any of them be? The woman obviously had the self-preservation instincts of a lemming.
Then let Wickwire explain.
It was poetic, and that part appealed to him. Wickwire, having murdered two wives with impunity, would get one of the state of Louisiana’s special flu shots for a murder he hadn’t committed, a wife he hadn’t killed. Neat.
He went out and got something to eat, and by the time he got back to the room he had abandoned the scheme. There were a couple of things wrong with it, chief among them being the uncertainty of the enterprise. If they hadn’t been able to convict him before, when everybody but the jury flat-out knew he was guilty, who was to say they could do it now? The bastard’s luck might hold. You couldn’t be positive it wouldn’t.
Besides, the client had paid to have Wickwire killed, not framed. The client was getting on in years, and he didn’t have all the time in the world. If Wickwire finally wound up convicted, and if he did indeed draw a sentence of death by lethal injection, he still had enough money to stretch out the appeal process for years on end. Revenge, Keller had heard, was a dish best enjoyed cold, but you didn’t want it with mold growing on it. How sweet could it be if your victim outlived you?
Think of something else, Keller told himself, and let your subconscious take care of it. He picked up the stamp weekly he’d brought along—the current issue, he was a subscriber now—and flipped the pages until a story about precancels caught his eye. He read it, and half of another story. Then he straightened up in his chair and put the paper aside.
Gotcha, he thought.
He turned the idea over in his mind, and this time he couldn’t find anything wrong with it. It would take special equipment, but nothing that would be too hard to come by. He’d obtained the same item once before, in a small city in the American heartland, and if you could find it in Muscatine, Iowa, how hard would it be to lay hands on it a few hundred miles downriver?
He checked the Yellow Pages and found a likely source within walking distance. He called, and they had what he wanted. He broke the connection and looked up motels in the Yellow Pages, then thought of another listing to check.
The dealer was a pudgy, round-shouldered fellow in his fifties. He wore a pale blue corduroy shirt with a button-down collar he hadn’t troubled to button down. His suspenders had Roman coins on them, but the shop itself was exclusively devoted to stamps; there was a sign in the window, professionally lettered, asserting, WE DO NOT BUY OR SELL COINS.
“Nothing against them,” said the man, whose name was Hildebrand. “But I don’t happen to buy or sell chewing gum, either. Only difference is I don’t have to put a sign in the window to keep the gum chewers away. I don’t know anything about coins, I don’t understand coins, I don’t have a feel for coins, so why should I presume to traffic in the damned things?”
Keller’s eyes went involuntarily to the suspenders. Hildebrand noticed, and rolled his eyes. “Women,” he said.
That seemed to call for a reply, but Keller was stumped.
“My wife wanted to buy me suspenders,” Hildebrand said, “and she thought suspenders with stamps would be nice, seeing that I’ve been a collector all my life, and a dealer most of my life. She bought me a tie with stamps on it a few years ago—U.S. classics, the Black Jack, the Jenny invert, the one-dollar Trans-Mississippi. Nice stamps, and it’s a nice tie, and I wear it when I have to wear a necktie, which isn’t often.”
“I see,” Keller said.
“So she couldn’t find suspenders with stamps,” Hildebrand said, “so she bought these, with coins on them, because according to her they amounted to the same thing. Can you imagine?”
“Wow,” Keller