Hit Man, Page 4

  “Yarnell,” she was saying. “Hobart Lee Yarnell, and what he’d like is for people to call him Bart, and what everybody calls him is Hobie. Now what does that tell you about the man?”

  That he’s not the man I came here to kill, Keller thought. This was comforting to realize, but left her waiting for an answer to her question. “That’s he’s not used to getting his own way,” Keller said.

  She laughed. “He’s not,” she said, “but it’s not for lack of trying. You know, I like you, Dale. You’re a nice fellow. But if it wasn’t you tonight it would have been somebody else.”

  “And here I thought it was my aftershave.”

  “I’ll just bet you did. No, the kind of marriage I got, I come around here a lot. I’ve put a lot of quarters in that jukebox the last year or so.”

  “And played a lot of cheating songs?”

  “And done a fair amount of cheating. But it doesn’t really work. I still wake up the next day married to that bastard.”

  “Why don’t you divorce him?”

  “I’ve thought about it.”

  “And?”

  “I was brought up not to believe in it,” she said. “But I don’t guess that’s it. I wasn’t raised to believe in cheating, either.” She frowned. “Money’s part of it,” she admitted. “I won’t bore you with the details, but I’d get gored pretty bad in a divorce.”

  “That’s a problem.”

  “I guess, except what do I care about money anyway? Enough’s as much as a person needs, and my daddy’s got pots of money. He’s not about to let me starve.”

  “Well, then—”

  “But he thinks the world of Hobie,” she said, glaring at Keller as if it were his fault. “Hunts elk with him, goes after trout and salmon with him, thinks he’s just the best thing ever came over the pass. And he doesn’t even want to hear the word divorce. You know that Tammy Wynette song where she spells it out a letter at a time? I swear he’d leave the room before you got past R. I say it’d about break Lyman Crowder’s heart if his little girl ever got herself divorced.”

  Well, it was true. If you kept your mouth shut and your ears open, you learned things. What he had learned was that Crowder rhymed with powder.

  Now what?

  After her departure, after his own shower, he paced back and forth trying to sort it all out. In the few hours since his arrival in Martingale, he’d slept with a woman who turned out to be the loving daughter of the target and, in all likelihood, the unloving wife of the client.

  Well, maybe not. Lyman Crowder was a rich man, lived north of town on a good-sized ranch that he ran pretty much as a hobby. He’d made his real money in oil, and nobody ever made a small amount of money that way. You either went broke or got rich. Rich men had enemies. People they’d crossed in business, people who stood to profit from their death.

  But it figured that Yarnell was the client. There was a kind of poetic inevitability about it. She picks him up in the lounge, it’s not enough that she’s the target’s daughter. She also ought to be the client’s wife. Round things out, tie up all the loose ends.

  The thing to do . . . well, he knew the thing to do. The thing to do was get a few hours’ sleep and then, bright and early, reverse the usual order of affairs by riding off into the sunrise. Get on a plane, get off in New York, and write off Martingale as a happy little romantic adventure. Men, after all, had been known to travel farther than that in the hope of getting laid.

  He’d tell the man in White Plains to find somebody else. Sometimes you had to do that. No blame attached, as long as you didn’t make a habit of it. He’d say he was blown.

  Which, come to think of it, he was. Quite expertly, as a matter of fact.

  In the morning he got up and packed his carry-on. He’d call White Plains from the airport, or wait until he was back in New York. He didn’t want to phone from the room. When the real Dale Whitlock had a fit and called American Express, they’d look over things like the Holiday Inn statement. No sense leaving anything that led anywhere.

  He thought about June, and the memory made him playful. He checked the time. Eight o’clock, two hours later in the East, not an uncivil time to call.

  He called Whitlock’s home in Rowayton, Connecticut. A woman answered. He identified himself as a representative of a political polling organization, using a name she would recognize. By asking questions that encouraged lengthy responses, he had no trouble keeping her on the phone. “Well, thank you very much,” he said at length. “And have a nice day.”

  Now let Whitlock explain that one to American Express. He finished packing and was almost out the door when his eye caught the paperback western. Take it along? Leave it for the maid? What?

  He picked it up, read the cover line, sighed. Was this what Randolph Scott would do? Or John Wayne, or Clint Eastwood? How about Jack Elam?

  No, of course not.

  Because then there’d be no movie. A man rides into town, starts to have a look at the situation, meets a woman, gets it on with her, then just backs out and rides off? You put something like that on the screen, it wouldn’t even play in the art houses.

  Still, this wasn’t a movie.

  Still . . .

  He looked at the book and wanted to heave it across the room. But all he heaved was a sigh. Then he unpacked.

  He was having a cup of coffee in town when a pickup pulled up across the street and two men got out of it. One of them was Lyman Crowder. The other, not quite as tall, was twenty pounds lighter and twenty years younger. Crowder’s son, by the looks of him.

  His son-in-law, as it turned out. Keller followed the two men into a store where the fellow behind the counter greeted them as Lyman and Hobie. Crowder had a lengthy shopping list composed largely of items Keller would have been hard put to find a use for.

  While the owner filled the order, Keller had a look at the display of hand-tooled boots. The pointed toes would be handy in New York, he thought, for killing cockroaches in corners. The heels would add better than an inch to his height. He wondered if he’d feel awkward in the boots, like a teenager in her first pair of high heels. Lyman and Hobie looked comfortable enough in their boots, as pointy in the toes and as elevated in the heels as any on display, but they also looked comfortable in their string ties and ten-gallon hats, and Keller was sure he’d feel ridiculous dressed like that.

  They were a pair, he thought. They looked alike, they talked alike, they dressed alike, and they seemed uncommonly fond of one another.

  Back in his room, Keller stood at the window and looked down at the parking lot, then across the way at a pair of mountains. A few years ago his work had taken him to Miami, where he’d met a Cuban who’d cautioned him against ever taking a hotel room above the second floor. “Suppose you got to leave in a hurry?” the man said. “Ground floor, no problem. Second floor, no problem. Third floor, break your fockeen leg.”

  The logic of this had impressed Keller, and for a while he had made a point of taking the man’s advice. Then he happened to learn that the Cuban not only shunned the higher floors of hotels but also refused to enter an elevator or fly in an airplane. What had looked like tradecraft now appeared to be nothing more than phobia.

  It struck Keller that he had never in his life had to leave a hotel room, or any other sort of room, by the window. This was not to say that it would never happen, but he’d decided it was a risk he was prepared to run. He liked high floors. Maybe he even liked running risks.

  He picked up the phone, made a call. When she answered he said, “This is Tex. Would you believe my business appointment canceled? Left me with the whole afternoon to myself.”

  “Are you where I left you?”

  “I’ve barely moved since then.”

  “Well, don’t move now,” she said. “I’ll be right on over.”

  Around nine that night Keller wanted a drink, but he didn’t want to have it in the company of adulterers and their favorite music. He drove around in his palomino Caprice until he fou
nd a place on the edge of town that looked promising. It called itself Joe’s Bar. Outside it was nondescript. Inside it smelled of stale beer and casual plumbing. The lights were low. There was sawdust on the floor and the heads of dead animals on the walls. The clientele was exclusively male, and for a moment this gave Keller pause. There were gay bars in New York that tried hard to look like this place, though it was hard for Keller to imagine why. But Joe’s, he realized, was not a gay bar, not in any sense of the word.

  He sat on a wobbly stool and ordered a beer. The other drinkers left him alone, even as they left each other alone. The jukebox played intermittently, with men dropping in quarters when they could no longer bear the silence.

  The songs, Keller noted, ran to type. There were the tryin’-to-drink-that-woman-off-of-my-mind songs and the if-it-wasn’t-for-bad-luck-I-wouldn’t-have-no-luck-at-all songs. Nothing about Celia in the Jackson Park Inn, nothing about heaven being just a sin away.

  These songs were for drinking and feeling really rotten about it.

  “ ’Nother damn day,” said a voice at Keller’s elbow.

  He knew who it was without turning. He supposed he might have recognized the voice, but he didn’t think that was it. No, it was more a recognition of the inevitability of it all. Of course it would be Yarnell, making conversation with him in this bar where no one made conversation with anyone. Who else could it be?

  “ ’Nother damn day,” Keller agreed.

  “Don’t believe I’ve seen you around.”

  “I’m just passing through.”

  “Well, you got the right idea,” Yarnell said. “Name’s Bart.”

  In for a pound, in for a ton. “Dale,” Keller said.

  “Good to know you, Dale.”

  “Same here, Bart.”

  The bartender loomed before them. “Hey, Hobie,” he said. “The usual?”

  Yarnell nodded. “And another of those for Dale here.” The bartender poured Yarnell’s usual, which turned out to be bourbon with water back, and uncapped another beer for Keller. Somebody broke down and fed the jukebox a quarter and played “There Stands the Glass.”

  Yarnell said, “You hear what he called me?”

  “I wasn’t paying attention.”

  “Called me Hobie,” Yarnell said. “Everybody does. You’ll be doing the same, won’t be able to help yourself.”

  “The world is a terrible place,” Keller said.

  “By God, you got that right,” Yarnell said. “No one ever said it better. You a married man, Dale?”

  “Not at the moment.”

  “ ‘Not at the moment.’ I swear I’d give a lot if I could say the same.”

  “Troubles?”

  “Married to one woman and in love with another one. I guess you could call that trouble.”

  “I guess you could.”

  “Sweetest, gentlest, darlingest, lovingest creature God ever made,” Yarnell said. “When she whispers ‘Bart’ it don’t matter if the whole rest of the world shouts ‘Hobie.’ ”

  “This isn’t your wife you’re talking about,” Keller guessed.

  “God, no! My wife’s a round-heeled, mean-spirited, hard-hearted tramp. I hate my damn wife. I love my girlfriend.” They were silent for a moment, and so was the whole room. Then someone played “The Last Word in Lonesome Is Me.”

  “They don’t write songs like that anymore,” Yarnell said.

  The hell they didn’t. “I’m sure I’m not the first person to suggest this,” Keller said, “but have you thought about—”

  “Leaving June,” Yarnell said. “Running off with Edith. Getting a divorce.”

  “Something like that.”

  “Never an hour that I don’t think about it, Dale. Night and goddam day I think about it. I think about it and I drink about it, but the one thing I can’t do is do it.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “There is a man,” Yarnell said, “who is a father and a best friend to me all rolled into one. Finest man I ever met in my life, and the only wrong thing he ever did in his life was have a daughter, and the biggest mistake I ever made was marrying her. And if there’s one thing that man believes in it’s the sanctity of marriage. Why, he thinks divorce is the dirtiest word in the language.”

  So Yarnell couldn’t even let on to his father-in-law that his marriage was hell on earth, let alone take steps to end it. He had to keep his affair with Edith very much Back Street. The only person he could talk to was Edith, and she was out of town for the next week or so, which left him dying of loneliness and ready to pour out his heart to the first stranger he could find. For which he apologized, but—

  “Hey, that’s all right, Bart,” Keller said. “A man can’t keep it all locked up inside.”

  “Calling me Bart, I appreciate that. I truly do. Even Lyman calls me Hobie and he’s the best friend any man ever had. Hell, he can’t help it. Everybody calls me Hobie sooner or later.”

  “Well,” Keller said. “I’ll hold out as long as I can.”

  Alone, Keller reviewed his options.

  He could kill Lyman Crowder. He’d be keeping it simple, carrying out the mission as it had been given to him. And it would solve everybody’s problems. June and Hobie could get the divorce they both so desperately wanted.

  On the downside, they’d both be losing the man each regarded as the greatest thing since microwave popcorn.

  He could toss a coin and take out either June or her husband, thus serving as a sort of divorce court of last resort. If it came up heads, June could spend the rest of her life cheating on a ghost. If it was tails, Yarnell could have his cake and Edith, too. Only a question of time until she stopped calling him Bart and took to calling him Hobie, of course, and next thing you knew she would turn up at the Holiday Inn, dropping her quarter in the slot to play “Third-Rate Romance, Low-Rent Rendezvous.”

  It struck Keller that there ought to be some sort of solution that didn’t involve lowering the population. But he knew he was the person least likely to come up with it.

  If you had a medical problem, the treatment you got depended on the sort of person you went to. You didn’t expect a surgeon to manipulate your spine, or prescribe herbs and enemas, or kneel down and pray with you. Whatever the problem was, the first thing the surgeon would do was look around for something to cut. That’s how he’d been trained, that’s how he saw the world, that’s what he did.

  Keller, too, was predisposed to a surgical approach. While others might push counseling or 12-step programs, Keller reached for a scalpel. But sometimes it was difficult to tell where to make the incision.

  Kill ’em all, he thought savagely, and let God sort ’em out. Or ride off into the sunset with your tail between your legs.

  First thing in the morning. Keller drove to Sheridan and caught a plane to Salt Lake City. He paid cash for his ticket, and used the name John Richards. At the TWA counter in Salt Lake City he bought a one-way ticket to Las Vegas and again paid cash, this time using the name Alan Johnson.

  At the Las Vegas airport he walked around the long-term parking lot as if looking for his car. He’d been doing this for five minutes or so when a balding man wearing a glen plaid sportcoat parked a two-year-old Plymouth and removed several large suitcases from its trunk, affixing them to one of those aluminum luggage carriers. Wherever he was headed, he’d packed enough to stay there for a while.

  As soon as he was out of sight, Keller dropped to a knee and groped the undercarriage until he found the magnetized Hide-A-Key. He always looked before breaking into a car, and he got lucky about one time in five. As usual, he was elated. It was a good omen, finding a key. It boded well.

  Keller had been to Vegas frequently over the years. He didn’t like the place, but he knew his way around. He drove to Caesars Palace and left his borrowed Plymouth for the attendant to park. He knocked on the door of an eighth-floor room until its occupant protested that she was trying to sleep.

  He said, “It’s news from Martingale, Miss Bodine. Fo
r Christ’s sake, open the door.”

  She opened the door a crack but kept the chain fastened. She was about the same age as June but looked older, her black hair a mess, her eyes bleary, her face still bearing traces of yesterday’s makeup.

  “Crowder’s dead,” he said.

  Keller could think of any number of things she might have said, ranging from “What happened?” to “Who cares?” This woman cut to the chase. “You idiot,” she said. “What are you doing here?”

  Mistake.

  “Let me in,” he said, and she did.

  Another mistake.

  The attendant brought Keller’s Plymouth and seemed happy with the tip Keller gave him. At the airport, someone else had left a Toyota Camry in the spot where the balding man had originally parked the Plymouth, and the best Keller could do was wedge it into a spot one aisle over and a dozen spaces off to the side. He figured the owner would find it, and hoped he wouldn’t worry that he was in the early stages of Alzheimer’s.

  Keller flew to Denver as Richard Hill, to Sheridan as David Edwards. En route he thought about Edith Bodine, who’d evidently slipped on a wet tile in the bathroom of her room at Caesars, cracking her skull on the side of the big tub. With the DO NOT DISTURB sign hanging from the doorknob and the air conditioner at its highest setting, there was no telling how long she might remain undisturbed.

  He’d figured she had to be the client. It wasn’t June or Hobie, both of whom thought the world revolved around Lyman Crowder, so who did that leave? Crowder himself, turned sneakily suicidal? Some old enemy, some business rival?

  No, Edith was the best prospect. A client would either want to meet Keller—not obliquely, as both Yarnells had done, but by arrangement. Or the client would contrive to be demonstrably off the scene when it all happened. Thus the trip to Las Vegas.