Hit Man - Lawrence Block [87]
“Good to met you,” Ramsgate said, and stood up to shake hands. He was wearing suspenders, and Keller noticed that they had cats on them, different breeds of cats.
When you pictured a traitor, he thought, you pictured a furtive little man in a soiled raincoat, skulking around a basement or lurking in a shabby café. The last thing you expected to run into was a pair of suspenders with cats on them.
“Well, now,” Ramsgate was saying. “Did we have an appointment? I don’t see it on my calendar.”
“I just took a chance and dropped by.”
“Fair enough. How’d you manage to get past Janeane?”
The secretary. Keller had timed her break, slipping in when she ducked out for a quick cigarette.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I didn’t notice anybody out there.”
“Well, you’re here,” Ramsgate said. “That’s what counts, right?”
“Right.”
“So,” he said. “Let’s see your mousetrap.”
Keller stared at him. Once, during a brief spate of psychotherapy, he had had a particularly vivid dream about mice. He could still remember it. But what on earth did this spy, this traitor—
“That’s more or less a generic term for me,” Ramsgate said. “That old saw—create a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door. Emerson, wasn’t it?”
Keller had no idea. “Emerson,” he agreed.
“With that sort of line,” Ramsgate said, “it was almost always Emerson, except when it was Benjamin Franklin. Solid American common sense, that’s what you could count on from both of them.”
“Right.”
“As it happens,” Ramsgate said, “Americans have registered more patents for mousetraps than for any other single device. You wouldn’t believe the variety of schemes men have come up with for snaring and slaughtering the little rodents. Of course”—he plucked his suspenders—“the best mousetrap of all’s not patentable. It’s got four legs and it says meow.”
Keller managed a chuckle.
“I’ve seen my share of mousetraps,” Ramsgate went on. “Like every other patent attorney. And every single day I see something new. A lot of the inventions brought to this office aren’t any more patentable than a cat is. Some have already been invented by somebody else. Not all of them do what they’re supposed to do, and not all of the things they’re supposed to do are worth doing. But some of them work, and some of them are useful, and every now and then one of them comes along and adds to the quality of life in this wonderful country of ours.”
Solid American common sense, Keller thought. This great country of ours. The man was a traitor and he had the gall to sound like a politician on the stump.
“So I get stirred up every time somebody walks in here,” Ramsgate said. “What have you brought for me?”
“Well, let me just show you,” Keller said, and came around the desk. He opened his briefcase and placed a yellow legal pad on the desktop.
“ ‘Please forgive me,’ ” Ramsgate read aloud. “Forgive you for what?”
Keller answered him with a choke hold, maintaining it long enough to guarantee unconsciousness. Then he let go and tore the top sheet from the legal pad, crumpled it into a ball, dropped it into the wastebasket. The sheet beneath it, the new top sheet, already held a similar message: “I’m sorry. Please forgive me.”
It wouldn’t stand up to a detailed forensic investigation, but Keller figured it would make it easy for them to call it suicide if they wanted to.
He went to the window, opened it. He rolled Ramsgate’s desk chair over to the window, took hold of the man under the arms, hauled him to his feet, then heaved him out the window.
He put the chair back, tore the second sheet off the pad, crumpled it, tossed it at the basket. That was better, he decided—no note, just a pad on the desk, and then, when they look in the basket, they can come up with two drafts of a note he decided not to leave after all.
Nice touch. They’d pay more attention to a note if they had to hunt for it.
Janeane was back at her desk when he left, chatting on the phone. She didn’t even look up.
Keller, back in New York, started each of the next five days with a