Hit Man

“Never occurred to me.”

“It would, sooner or later.” Breen leaned forward, concern showing on his face. “I hate to see you sabotaging your own therapeutic process this way,” he said. “You were doing sowell. ”

From the bedroom window you could look down at Washington Square Park. There were plenty of dogs there now, but none of them were Australian cattle dogs.

“Some view,” Keller said. “Some apartment.”

“Believe me,” she said, “I earned it. You’re getting dressed. Going somewhere?”

“Just feeling a little restless. Okay if I take Nelson for a walk?”

“You’re spoiling him,” she said. “You’re spoiling both of us.”

On a Wednesday morning, Keller took a cab to La Guardia and a plane to St. Louis. He had a cup of coffee with an associate of the man in White Plains and caught an evening flight back to New York. He caught another cab and went directly to the apartment building at the foot of Fifth Avenue.

“I’m Peter Stone,” he told the doorman. “I believe Mrs. Breen is expecting me.”

The doorman stared.

“Mrs. Breen,” Keller said. “In Seventeen-J.”

“Jesus.”

“Is something the matter?”

“I guess you haven’t heard,” the doorman said. “I wish it wasn’t me that had to tell you.”

“You killed her,” he said.

“That’s ridiculous,” Breen told him. “She killed herself. She threw herself out the window. If you want my professional opinion, she was suffering from depression.”

“If you wantmy professional opinion,” Keller said, “she had help.”

“I wouldn’t advance that argument if I were you,” Breen said. “If the police were to look for a murderer, they might look long and hard at Mr. Stone-hyphen-Keller, the stone killer. And I might have to tell them how the usual process of transference went awry, how you became obsessed with me and my personal life, how I couldn’t seem to dissuade you from some inane plan to reverse the Oedipal complex. And then they might ask you why you employ aliases, and just how you make your living, and… do you see why it might be best to let sleeping dogs lie?”

As if on cue, the dog stepped out from behind the desk. He caught sight of Keller and his tail began to wag.

“Sit,” Breen said. “You see? He’s well trained. You might take a seat yourself.”

“I’ll stand. You killed her, and then you walked off with the dog, and-”

Breen sighed. “The police found the dog in the apartment, whimpering in front of the open window. After I went down and identified the body and told them about her previous suicide attempts, I volunteered to take the dog home with me. There was no one else to look after it.”

“I would have taken him,” Keller said.

“But that won’t be necessary, will it? You won’t be called upon to walk my dog or make love to my wife or bed down in my apartment. Your services are no longer required.” Breen seemed to recoil at the harshness of his own words. His face softened. “You’ll be able to get back to the far more important business of therapy. In fact”-he indicated the couch-“why not stretch out right now?”

“That’s not a bad idea. First, though, could you put the dog in the other room?”

“Not afraid he’ll interrupt, are you? Just a little joke. He can wait for us in the outer office. There you go, Nelson. Good dog… Oh, no. How dare you bring a gun to this office? Put that down immediately.”

“I don’t think so.”

“For God’s sake, why kill me? I’m not your father. I’m your therapist. It makes no sense for you to kill me. You’ve got nothing to gain and everything to lose. It’s completely irrational. It’s worse than that, it’s neurotically self-destructive.”

“I guess I’m not cured yet.”

“What’s that, gallows humor? But it happens to be true. You’re a long way from cured, my friend. As a matter of fact, I would say you’re approaching a psychotherapeutic crisis. How will you get through it if you shoot me?”

Keller went to the window, flung it wide open. “I’m not going to shoot you,” he said.

“I’ve never been the least bit suicidal,” Breen said, pressing his back against a wall of bookshelves. “Never.”

“You’ve grown despondent over the death of your ex-wife.”

“That’s sickening, just sickening. And who would believe it?”

“We’ll see,” Keller told him. “As far as the therapeutic crisis is concerned, well, we’ll see about that, too. I’ll think of something.”

The woman at the animal shelter said, “Talk about coincidence. One day you come in and put your name down for an Australian cattle dog. You know, that’s a very uncommon breed in this country.”

“You don’t see many of them.”

“And what came in this morning? A perfectly lovely Australian cattle dog. You could have knocked me over with a sledgehammer. Isn’t he a beauty?”

“He certainly is.”

“He’s been whimpering ever since he got here. It’s very sad, his owner died and there was nobody to keep him. My goodness, look how he went right to you! I think he likes you.”

“I’d say we were made for each other.”

“I can almost believe it. His name is Nelson, but of course you can change it.”

“Nelson,” he said. The dog’s ears perked up. Keller reached to give him a scratch. “No, I don’t think I’ll have to change it. Who was Nelson, anyway? Some kind of English hero, wasn’t he? A famous general or something?”

“I think an admiral. Commander of the British fleet, if I remember correctly. Remember? The Battle of Trafalgar Square?”

“It rings a muted bell,” he said. “Not a soldier but a sailor. Well, that’s close enough, wouldn’t you say? Now I suppose there’s an adoption fee to pay, and some papers to fill out.”

When they’d handled that part she said, “I still can’t get over it. The coincidence and all.”

“I knew a man once,” Keller said, “who insisted there was no such thing as a coincidence or an accident.”

“Well, I wonder how he’d explain this.”

“I’d like to hear him try,” Keller said. “Let’s go, Nelson. Good boy.”

4 Dogs Walked, Plants Watered

“N ow here’s mysituation,” Keller said. “Ordinarily I have plenty of free time. I take Nelson for a minimum of two long walks a day, and sometimes when the weather’s nice we’ll be out all afternoon. It’s a pleasure for me, and he’s tireless, literally tireless. He’s an Australian cattle dog, and the breed was developed to drive herds of cattle vast distances. You could probably walk him to Yonkers and back and he’d still be raring to go.”

“I’ve never been to Yonkers,” the girl said.

Neither had Keller, but he had passed through it often enough on the way to and from White Plains. There was no need to mention this.

“The thing is,” he went on, “I sometimes have to travel on business, and I don’t get much in the way of advance warning. I get a phone call, and two hours later I’m on a plane halfway across the country, and I may not get back for two weeks. Last time I boarded Nelson, and I don’t want to do that again.”

“No.”

“Aside from the fact that the ke

“I know what you mean.”

“So I’d like to be able call you,” he said, “when I find out I have to travel. You could come in every day and feed him and give him fresh water and take him for a walk twice a day. That’s the kind of thing you could do, right?”

“It’s what I do,” she said. “I have regular clients who don’t have the time to give their pets enough attention, and I have other clients who hire me just when they go out of town, and I’ll come to their houses and take care of their pets and their houseplants.”