Hit Man - Lawrence Block [51]
“Well, for heaven’s sake. Where else would you sleep?”
“On the couch.”
Keller gave her a look. She colored, and he said, “While I was away I thought about your toes.”
“My toes?”
“All different colors.”
“Oh,” she said. “Well, I had trouble deciding which color to go with, and it came to me that when God couldn’t decide on a color, he created the rainbow.”
“Rainbow toes,” Keller said. “I think I’ll take them one by one into my mouth, those pink little rainbow toes. What do you think about that?”
“Oh,” she said.
Later he said, “Suppose someone got killed by mistake.”
“How could that happen?”
“Say an area code turns into a room number. Human error, computer error, anything at all. Mistakes happen.”
“No they don’t.”
“They don’t?”
“People make mistakes,” she said, “but there’s no such thing as a mistake.”
“How’s that?”
“You could make a mistake,” she said. “You could be swinging a dumbbell and it could sail out of the window. That would be a case of you making a mistake.”
“I’ll say.”
“And somebody looking for an address on the next block could get out of a cab here instead, and here comes a dumbbell. The person made a mistake.”
“His last one, too.”
“In this lifetime,” she agreed. “So you’ve both made a mistake, but if you look at the big picture, there was no mistake. The person got hit by a dumbbell and died.”
“No mistake?”
“No mistake, because it was meant to happen.”
“But if it wasn’t meant to happen—”
“Then it wouldn’t.”
“And if it happened it was meant to.”
“Right.”
“Karma?”
“Karma.”
“Little pink toes,” Keller said. “I’m glad you’re here.”
6
Keller in Shining Armor
When the phone rang, Keller was finishing up the Times crossword puzzle. It looked as though this was going to be one of those days when he was able to fill in all the squares. That happened more often than not, but once or twice a week he’d come a cropper. A Brazilian tree in four letters would intersect with an Old World marsupial in five, and he’d be stumped. It didn’t make his day when he filled in the puzzle or spoil it when he didn’t, but it was something he noticed.
He put down his pencil and picked up the phone, and Dot said, “Keller, I haven’t seen you in ages.”
“I’ll be right over,” he said, and broke the connection. She was right, he thought, she hadn’t seen him in ages, and it was about time he paid a visit to White Plains. The old man hadn’t given him work in months, and you could get rusty, just sitting around with nothing better to do than crossword puzzles.
There was still plenty of money. Keller lived well—a good apartment on First Avenue with a view of the Queensboro Bridge, nice clothes, decent restaurants. But no one had ever taken him for a drunken sailor, and in fact he tended to squirrel money away, stuffing it in safe deposit boxes, opening savings accounts under other names. If a rainy day came along, he had an umbrella at hand.
Still, just because you had Blue Cross didn’t mean you couldn’t wait to get sick.
“Good boy,” he told Nelson, reaching to scratch the dog behind the ears. “You wait right here. Guard the house, huh?”
He had the door open when the phone rang again. Let it ring? No, better answer it.
Dot again. “Keller,” she said, “did you hang up on me?”
“I thought you were done.”
“Why would you think that? I said hello, not goodbye.”
“You didn’t say hello. You said you hadn’t seen me in ages.”
“That’s closer to hello than goodbye. Well, let it go. The important thing is I caught you before you left the house.”
“Just,” he said. “I had one foot out the door.”
“I’d have called back right away,” she said, “but I had a hell of a time getting quarters. You ask for change of a dollar around here, people look at you like you’ve got a hidden agenda.”
Quarters? What did she need with quarters?
“I’ll tell you what,” she said. “There’s this little Italian place about four blocks from you called Giuseppe Joe’s. Don’t ask me what street it’s on.”
“I know where it is.”
“They’ve got tables set up outside under the awning. It’s a beautiful spring day. Why don’t you take your dog for