Hit Man - Lawrence Block [63]
Keller, who lived in a one-bedroom apartment in midtown Manhattan, had no lawn to mow. There was a tree in front of his building, planted and diligently maintained by the Parks Department, and its leaves fell in the fall, but no one needed to rake them. The wind was pretty good about blowing them away. Snow, when it didn’t melt of its own accord, was shoveled from the sidewalk by the building’s superintendent, who kept the elevator running and replaced burned-out bulbs in the hall fixtures and dealt with minor plumbing emergencies. Keller had a low-maintenance life, really. All he had to do was pay the rent on time and everything else got taken care of by other people.
He liked it that way. Even so, when his work took him away from home he found himself wondering. His fantasies, by and large, centered on simpler and more modest lifestyles. A cute little house in a subdivision, an undemanding job. A manageable life.
The fat man’s house, in a swank suburban community north of Cincinnati, was neither cute nor little. Keller wasn’t too clear on what the fat man did, beyond the fact that it involved his playing host to a lot of visitors and spending a good deal of time in his car. He couldn’t say if the work was demanding, although he suspected it might be. Nor could he tell if the man’s life was manageable. What he did know, though, was that someone wanted to manage him right out of it.
Which, of course, was where Keller came in, and why he was sitting in an Avis car across the street from the fat man’s estate. And was it right to call it that? Where did you draw the line between a house and an estate? What was the yardstick, size or value? He thought about it, and decided it was probably some sort of combination of the two. A brownstone on East Sixty-sixth Street was just a house, not an estate, even if it was worth five or ten times as much as the fat man’s spread. On the other hand, a double-wide trailer could sit on fifteen or twenty acres of land without making the cut as an estate.
He was pondering the point when his wristwatch beeped, reminding him the security patrol was due in five minutes or so. He turned the key in the ignition, took a last wistful look at the fat man’s house (or estate) across the road, and pulled away from the curb.
In his motel room, Keller put on the television set and worked his way around the dial without leaving his chair. Lately, he’d noticed, most of the decent motels had remote controls for their TV sets. For a while there you’d get the remote bolted to the top of the bedside table, but that was only handy if you happened to be sitting up in bed watching. Otherwise it was a pain in the neck. If you had to get up and walk over to the bed to change the channel or mute the commercial, you might as well just walk over to the set.
It was to prevent theft, of course. A free-floating remote could float right into a guest’s suitcase, never to be seen again. Table lamps were bolted down in the same fashion, and television sets, too. But that was pretty much okay. You didn’t mind being unable to move the lamp around, or the TV. The remote was something else again. You might as well bolt down the towels.
He turned off the set. It might be easy to change channels now, but it was harder than ever to find anything he wanted to see. He picked up a magazine, thumbed through it. This was his fourth night at this particular motel, and he still hadn’t figured out a good way to kill the fat man. There had to be a way, there was always a way, but he hadn’t found it yet.
Suppose he had a house like the fat man’s. Generally he fantasized about houses he could afford