Hit Man - Lawrence Block [65]
“Be something, wouldn’t it?”
“Well, pissing people off is like anything else,” he said. “Certain people have a knack for it. But that’s not it.”
“No.”
“Different targets.”
“I’m afraid so.”
“Different targets, different clients. Same time, same place, but everything else is different. So? Help me out on this, Dot. I’m not getting anywhere.”
“Keller,” she said, “you’re doing fine.”
“Four people, all of them different. The fat man and the guy who hired us to hit him, and target number two and client number two, and. . . ”
“Is day beginning to break? Is light beginning to dawn?”
“The fat man wants to hire us,” he said. “To kill our original client.”
“Give the man an exploding cigar.”
“A hires us to kill B, and B hires us to kill A.”
“That’s a little algebraic for me, but it makes the point.”
“The contracts couldn’t have come direct,” he said. “They were brokered, right? Because the fat man’s not a wise guy. He could be a little mobbed up, the way some businessmen are, but he wouldn’t know to call here.”
“He came through somebody,” Dot agreed.
“And so did the other guy. Different brokers, of course.”
“Of course.”
“And they both called here.” He raised his eyes significantly to the ceiling. “And what did he do, Dot? Say yes to both of them?”
“That’s what he did.”
“Why, for God’s sake? We’ve already got a client, we can’t take an assignment to kill him, especially from somebody we’ve already agreed to take out.”
“The ethics of the situation bother you, Keller?”
“This is good,” he said, brandishing the lemonade. “This from a mix or what?”
“Homemade. Real lemons, real sugar.”
“Makes a difference,” he said. “Ethics? What do I know about ethics? It’s just no way to do business, that’s all. What’s the broker going to think?”
“Which broker?”
“The one whose client gets killed. What’s he going to say?”
“What would you have done, Keller? If you were him, and you got the second call days after the first one.”
He thought about it. “I’d say I haven’t got anybody available at the moment, but I should have a good man in about two weeks, when he gets back from Aruba.”
“Aruba?”
“Wherever. Then, after the fat man’s toast and I’ve been back a week, say, you call back and ask if the contract’s still open. And he says something like, ‘No, the client changed his mind.’ Even if he guesses who popped his guy, it’s all straight and clean and businesslike. Or don’t you agree?”
“No,” she said. “I agree completely.”
“But that’s not what he did,” he said, “and I’m surprised. What was his thinking? He afraid of arousing suspicions, something like that?”
She just looked at him. He met her gaze, and read something in her face, and he got it.
“Oh, no,” he said.
“I thought he was getting better,” she said. “I’m not saying there wasn’t a little denial operating, Keller. A little wishing-will-make-it-so.”
“Understandable.”
“He had that time when he gave you the wrong room number, but that worked out all right in the end.”
“For us,” Keller said. “Not for the guy who was in the room.”
“There’s that,” she allowed. “Then he went into that funk and kept turning down everybody who called. I was thinking maybe a doctor could get him on Prozac.”
“I don’t know about Prozac. In this line of work . . .”
“Yeah, I was wondering about that. Depressed is no good, but is mellow any better? It could be counterproductive.”
“It could be disastrous.”
“That too,” she said. “And you can’t get him to go to a doctor anyway, so what difference does it make? He’s in a funk, maybe it’s like the weather. A low-pressure front moves in, and it’s all you can do to sit on the porch with an iced tea. Then it blows over, and we get some of that good Canadian air, and it’s like old times again.”
“Old times.”
“And yesterday he was on the phone, and then he buzzed me and I took him a cup of coffee. ‘Call Keller,’ he told me. ‘I’ve got some work for him in Cincinnati.’ ”
“Déjá vu.”
“You said it, Keller. Déjá vu like never before.”
Her explanation was elaborate—what the old man said, what she thought