Hit Man - Lawrence Block [70]
“No kidding.”
“In fact, what I just told you about Arthur? The really disgusting thing? Well, I have to admit it no longer disgusts me. In fact. . . ”
“Yes?”
“Oh, Kevin,” she said.
She was kinky, all right, and spirited, and afterward he decided he’d been wrong about the five pounds. She was fine just the way she was.
“I was wondering,” he said on his way out the door. “Your ex-husband? How did he feel about dogs?”
“Oh, Kevin,” she said. “And here I thought I was the kinky one. You’re too much. Dogs?”
“I didn’t mean it that way.”
“I’ll bet you didn’t. Kevin, honey, if you don’t get out of here this minute I may not let you go at all. Dogs!”
“Just as pets,” he said. “Does he, you know, like dogs? Or hate them?”
“As far as I know,” Marie said, “Arthur Strang has no opinion one way or the other about dogs. The subject never came up.”
Laurel Moncrieff, the second of three women with whom Barry had jumped over the broomstick, had nothing to report on the ups and downs of her ex-husband’s weight, or what he did or didn’t like to do when the shades were drawn. She’d worked as Moncrieff’s secretary, won him away from his first wife, and made sure he had a male secretary afterward.
“Then the son of a bitch joined a gym,” she said, “and he wound up leaving me for his personal trainer. He wadded me up and threw me away like a used Kleenex.”
She didn’t look like the sort of person you’d blow your nose on. She was a slender, dark-haired woman, and she had been no harder to get acquainted with than Marie Strang, and about as easy to wind up in the hay with. She hadn’t disclosed any interesting aberrations, her own or her ex-husband’s, but Keller found himself with no cause to complain.
“Ah, Kevin,” she said.
Maybe it was the name, he thought. Maybe he should use it more often, maybe it brought him luck.
“Living alone the way you do,” he said. “You ever think about getting a dog?”
“I’m away too much,” she said. “It’d be no good for me and no good for the dog.”
“That’s true for a lot of people,” he said, “but they’re used to having one around the house and they don’t want to give it up.”
“Whatever works,” she said. “I never got used to it, and you know what they say. You don’t miss what you never had.”
“I guess your ex didn’t have a dog.”
“Not until I left and he married the bitch with the magic fingers.”
“She had a dog?”
“She was a dog, honey. She had a face like a Rottweiler. But she’s out of the picture now, and she hasn’t been replaced. Serves her right, if you ask me.”
“So you don’t know how Barry Moncrieff felt about dogs.”
“Of the canine variety, you mean? I don’t think he cared much one way or the other. Hey, how’d we get on this silly subject, anyhow? Why don’t you lie down and kiss me, Kevin, honey?”
They both gave money to local charities. Strang tended to support the arts, while Moncrieff donated to fight diseases and feed the homeless. They both had a reputation for ruthlessness in business. Both were childless, and presently unmarried. Neither one had a dog, or had ever had a dog, as far as he could determine. Neither had any strong prodog or antidog feelings. It would have been helpful to discover that Strang was a heavy contributor to the ASPCA and the Anti-Vivisection League, or that Moncrieff liked to go to a basement in Kentucky and watch a couple of pit bulls fight to the death, betting substantial sums on the outcome.
But he came across nothing of the sort, and the more he thought about it the less legitimate a criterion it seemed to him. Why should a matter of life and death hinge upon how a man felt about dogs? And who was Keller to care anyway? It was not as if he were a dog owner himself. Not anymore.
“Neither one’s Albert Schweitzer,” he told Dot, “and neither one’s Hitler. They both fall somewhere in between, so making a decision on moral grounds is impossible. I’ll tell you, this is murder.”
“It’s not,” she said. “That’s the whole trouble, Keller. You’re in Cincinnati and the clock’s running.”
“I know.”
“Moral decisions.