Hit Man

6 Keller in Shining Armor

W hen the phonerang, Keller was finishing up theTimes crossword puzzle. It looked as though this was going to be one of those days when he was able to fill in all the squares. That happened more often than not, but once or twice a week he’d come a cropper. A Brazilian tree in four letters would intersect with an Old World marsupial in five, and he’d be stumped. It didn’t make his day when he filled in the puzzle or spoil it when he didn’t, but it was something he noticed.

He put down his pencil and picked up the phone, and Dot said, “Keller, I haven’t seen you in ages.”

“I’ll be right over,” he said, and broke the co

There was still plenty of money. Keller lived well-a good apartment on First Avenue with a view of the Queensboro Bridge, nice clothes, decent restaurants. But no one had ever taken him for a drunken sailor, and in fact he tended to squirrel money away, stuffing it in safe deposit boxes, opening savings accounts under other names. If a rainy day came along, he had an umbrella at hand.

Still, just because you had Blue Cross didn’t mean you couldn’t wait to get sick.

“Good boy,” he told Nelson, reaching to scratch the dog behind the ears. “You wait right here. Guard the house, huh?”

He had the door open when the phone rang again. Let it ring? No, better answer it.

Dot again. “Keller,” she said, “did you hang up on me?”

“I thought you were done.”

“Why would you think that? I said hello, not goodbye.”

“You didn’t say hello. You said you hadn’t seen me in ages.”

“That’s closer to hello than goodbye. Well, let it go. The important thing is I caught you before you left the house.”

“Just,” he said. “I had one foot out the door.”

“I’d have called back right away,” she said, “but I had a hell of a time getting quarters. You ask for change of a dollar around here, people look at you like you’ve got a hidden agenda.”

Quarters? What did she need with quarters?

“I’ll tell you what,” she said. “There’s this little Italian place about four blocks from you called Giuseppe Joe’s. Don’t ask me what street it’s on.”

“I know where it is.”

“They’ve got tables set up outside under the awning. It’s a beautiful spring day. Why don’t you take your dog for a walk, swing by Giuseppe Joe’s. See if there’s anybody there you recognize.”

“So this is the famous Nelson,” Dot said. “He’s a handsome devil, isn’t he? I think he likes me.”

“The only person he doesn’t like,” Keller said, “is the delivery boy for the Chinese restaurant.”

“It’s probably the MSG.”

“He barks at him, and Nelson almost never barks. The breed’s part dingo, and that makes him the silent type.”

“Nelson the Wonder Dog. What’s the matter, Nelson? Don’t you like mu shu pork?” She gave the dog a pat. “I thought he’d be bigger. An Australian cattle dog, and you think how big sheep dogs are, and cows are bigger than sheep, et cetera, et cetera. But he’s just the right size.”

If he hadn’t come looking for her, Keller might not have recognized Dot. He’d never seen her away from the old man’s house on Taunton Place, where she’d always lounged around in a Mother Hubbard or a housedress. This afternoon she wore a tailored suit, and she’d done something to her hair. She looked like a suburban matron, Keller thought, in town on a shopping spree.

“He thinks I’m shopping for summer clothes,” she said, as if reading his mind. “I shouldn’t be here at all, Keller.”

“Oh?”

“I’ve been doing things I shouldn’t do,” she said. “Idle hands and all that. What about you, Keller? Been a long dry spell. What have your idle hands been up to?”

Keller looked at his hands. “Nothing much,” he said.

“How are you fixed for dough?”

“I’ll get by.”

“You wouldn’t mind work, though.”

“No, of course not.”

“That’s why you couldn’t wait to hang up on me and hop on a train.” She drank some iced tea and wrinkled her nose. “Two bucks a glass for this crap and they make it from a mix. You wonder why I don’t come to the city often? It’s nice, though, sitting at an outside table like this.”

“Pleasant.”

“You probably do this all the time. Walk the dog, pick up a newspaper, stop and have a cup of coffee. While away the hours. Right?”

“Sometimes.”

“You’re patient, Keller, I’ll give you that. I take all day to come to the point and you sit there like you’ve got nothing better to do. But in a way that’s the whole point, isn’t it? You don’t have anything better to do and neither do I.”

“Sometimes there’s no work,” he said. “If nothing comes in-”

“Things have been coming in.”

“Oh?”

“I’m not here, you never saw me, and we never had this conversation. Understood?”

“Understood.”

“I don’t know what’s the matter with him, Keller. He’s going through something and I don’t know what it is. It’s like he’s lost his taste for it. There’ve been calls, people with work that would have been right up your alley. He tells them no. He tells them he hasn’t got anybody available at the moment. He tells them to call somebody else.”

“Does he say why?”

“Sure, there’s always a reason. This one he doesn’t want to deal with, that one won’t pay enough, the other one, something doesn’t sound kosher about it. There’s three jobs he turned down I know of since the first of the year.”

“No kidding.”

“And who knows what came in that I don’t know about.”

“I wonder what’s wrong.”

“I figure it’ll pass,” she said. “But who knows when? So I did something crazy.”

“Oh?”

“Don’t laugh, all right?”

“I won’t.”

“You familiar with a magazine calledMercenary Times?”

“LikeSoldier of Fortune, ” he said.

“Like it, but more homemade and reckless.” She drew a copy from her handbag, handed it to him. “Page forty-seven. It’s circled, you can’t miss it.”

It was in the classifieds, under “Situations Wanted,” circled in red Magic Marker.Odd Jobs Wanted, he read.Removals a specialty. Write to Toxic Waste, PO Box 1149, Yonkers NY.

He said, “Toxic Waste?”

“That may have been a mistake,” she acknowledged. “I thought it sounded good, cold and lethal and up to here with attitude. I got a couple of letters from people with chemicals to dump and swamps to drain, wanted someone to help them do an end run around the environmentalists. Plus I managed to get myself on some damn mailing list where I get invitations to subscribe to waste-management newsletters.”

“But that’s not all you got.”

“It’s not, because I also got half a dozen letters so far from people who knew what kind of removals I had in mind. I was wondering what kind of idiot would answer a blind ad like that, and they were about what you would expect. I burned five of them.”

“And the sixth?”

“Was neatly typed,” she said, “on printed letterhead, if you please. And written in English, God help us. But here, read it yourself.”

“ ‘Cressida Wallace, 411 Fairview Avenue, Muscatine, Iowa 52761. Dear Sir or-’ ”

“Not out loud, Keller.”

Dear Sir or Madam,he read to himself.I can only hope the removal service you provide is of the sort I require. If so, I am in urgent need of your services. My name is Cressida Wallace and I am a forty-one-year-old author and illustrator of books for children. I have been divorced for fifteen years and have no children.

While my life was never dramatically exciting, I have always found fulfillment in my work and quiet satisfaction in my personal life. Then, four years ago, a complete stranger began to transform my life into a living hell.