Hit Man - Lawrence Block [60]
Jesus.
Well, nothing all day but two doughnuts and a cup of coffee. That was as far as you had to look for an explanation. Got him irritable and angry, made him take it personally.
Still, he thought, after he’d turned in the car and bought his ticket, Lauderheim was unquestionably one thoroughgoing son of a bitch. No loss to anyone.
And he could still hear her saying she couldn’t thank him enough, and what was so wrong with enjoying that?
“I was thinking,” Andria said. “About looking up your name in phone books?”
“And?”
“At first I thought it was a way of looking for yourself. But then I had another idea. I think it’s a way of making sure there’s room for you.”
“Room for me?”
“Well,” she said, “if you’re not already there, then there’s room for you.”
Eight, nine days later, Dot called. Coincidentally enough, he was doing the crossword puzzle at the time.
“Keller,” she said, “guess what Mary Jones didn’t find in her mailbox?”
“That’s strange,” he said. “It’s still not here? Maybe you ought to call her. Maybe FedEx lost it and it’s in a back office somewhere.”
“I’m way ahead of you, boy. I called her.”
“And?”
“Line’s been disconnected. . . . You still there, Keller?”
“I’m trying to think. You’re sure that—”
“I called back, got the same recording. ‘The number you have reached, blah blah blah, has been disconnected.’ Leaves no room for doubt.”
“No.”
“The money doesn’t show up, and now the line’s been disconnected. Does it begin to make you wonder?”
“Maybe they arrested her,” he said. “Before she could send the money.”
“And stuck her in a cell and left her there? A quiet lady who writes about deaf rabbits?”
“Well—”
“Let me pull out and pass a few slow-moving vehicles,” she said. “What I did, I called Information in St. Louis.”
“St. Louis?”
“Webster Groves is a suburb of St. Louis.”
“Webster Groves.”
“Where Cressida Wallace lives, according to that reference book in the library.”
“But she moved,” Keller said.
“You’d think so, wouldn’t you? But the Information operator had a listing for her. So I called the number. Guess what?”
“Come on, Dot.”
“A woman answered. No answering machine, no computer-generated horseshit. ‘Hello?’ ‘Cressida Wallace, please.’ ‘This is she.’ Well, it wasn’t the voice I remembered. ‘Is this Cressida Wallace, the author?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘The author of How the Bunny Lost His Ears?’ ”
“And she said it was?”
“Well, how many Cressida Wallaces do you figure there are? I didn’t know what the hell to say next. I told her I was from the Muscatine paper, I wanted to know her impressions of the town. Keller, she didn’t know what I was talking about. I had to tell her what state Muscatine was in.”
“You’d think she’d have at least heard of it,” he said. “It’s not that far from St. Louis.”
“I don’t think she gets out much. I think she sits in her house and writes her stories. I found out this much. She’s lived in the same house in Webster Groves for thirty years.”
He took a deep breath. He said, “Where are you, Dot?”
“Where am I? I’m at an outdoor pay phone half a mile from the house. I’m getting rained on.”
“Go on home,” he said. “Give me an hour or so and I’ll call you back.”
* * *
“All right,” he said, closer to two hours later. “Here’s how it shapes up. Stephen Lauderheim wasn’t some creep, stalking some innocent woman.”
“We figured that.”
“He was a partner in Loud & Clear Software. He and a fellow named Randall Cleary started the firm. Lauderheim and Cleary, Loud & Clear.”
“Cute.”
“Lauderheim was married, father of two, bowled in a league, belonged to Rotary and the Jaycees.”
“Hardly the type to kidnap a dog and torture it to death.”
“You wouldn’t think so.”
“Who set him up? The wife?”
“I figure the partner. Company was doing great and one of the big Silicon Valley firms was looking to buy them out. My guess is one of them wanted to sell and the other didn’t. Or there was some kind of partnership insurance in place. One partner