Hit Man

“I don’t know how you can say such a thing?”

“It’s making every sentence sound like a question that does it,” she said. “That’s a nice touch, I’ve got to give you that. It makes you sound just like one of those teenage morons at the mall who can’t remember where she parked her mother’s car.”

“Well,” Keller said, “helikes me.”

“Who? Oh, I get it.”

“I’m meeting him the day after tomorrow. At my place.”

“Not until then?”

“It’s tough for him to get away.”

“It’s going to get even tougher. Well, at least you’re in a town with plenty to do. You shouldn’t have trouble amusing yourself for the next couple of days.”

“You’re right about that,” Keller said.

“ Australia,” the dealer said. He was a generation younger than Hildebrand, and his shop was on the second floor of an office building on Rampart Street.

“I’ve got a good run of the early Kangaroos, if you’d like to see them. How about Australian States, while we’re in that part of the world? Queensland, Victoria, Tasmania, New South Wales…”

“I haven’t got my lists for those.”

“Another time,” the fellow said. “Here’s tongs, here’s a gauge if you want to check perfs. Let me know if there’s anything else you need.”

“I’ll do that,” Keller said.

The motel was in Metairie. Before his conversation with Richard Wickwire, Keller had called the motel and tried out the voice-changer on them, booking a room as Sue Ellen Bates. Then he drove over there, paid cash for a week in advance, and picked up the key. He let himself into the room, stowed some women’s garments in the dresser and closet, and messed up the bed.

He didn’t pay another visit to the room until an hour before Sue Ellen’s date with Wickwire. He left the Pontiac a block away in a strip-mall parking lot, let himself into the room, and cracked the seal on a pint of bourbon. He poured an ounce of bourbon into each of two motel tumblers, made a lipstick mark on one of them, and placed them on the bedside table. He spilled a little bourbon on the rug, a little more on the chair, and left the pint standing open on the dresser.

Then he unlocked the door and left it very slightly ajar. He switched on the TV, tuned it to a talk show, lowered the volume. Next came the hard part-sitting and waiting. He should have brought the stamp weekly along. He’d read everything in it, but he could have read it again. You always picked up something you’d missed the first time.

Wickwire was due at two o’clock. At one-fifty, the phone on the bedside table rang. Keller frowned at it, then picked it up and said hello.

“Sue Ellen?”

“Mr. Wickwire?”

“I might be five or ten minutes late, sugar. Just wanted to let you know.”

“I’ll be waiting,” Keller said. “You just come right on in.”

He hung up and disco

At 2:10 Wickwire still hadn’t shown. At 2:15 there was a knock at the door. “Sue Ellen?” Keller didn’t say anything.

“You here, Sue Ellen?”

Wickwire edged the door open. Keller, waiting behind it, let him get all the way inside. No telling who might be watching.

“Sue Ellen? Girl, where are you hiding yourself?”

Keller wrapped an arm around the big man’s neck, got him in a choke hold, and applied the pressure, kicking the door shut while he was at it. Wickwire struggled at first, his shoulders bucking, then sagged in Keller’s arms and slumped forward.

Keller let him go, stepped back, and kicked him three times in the face. Then he knelt down next to the unconscious Wickwire and broke his neck. He stripped the corpse to socks and underwear, heaved him onto the bed, and spilled most of the remaining bourbon into his open mouth. He took a chair and laid it on its side, took a pillow and flung it across the room, left dresser drawers half-open. He packed up the voice-changer, along with the clothing from the drawers and closet, and remembered to fetch Wickwire’s wallet and money clip from his trousers.

He locked the door, fastened the chain bolt. The peephole in the door didn’t afford much of a view, but he was able to see what looked like Wickwire’s Lincoln Town Car parked at the very edge of his field of vision. It was odds-on the bodyguards were in it, listening to terrible music on the radio, waiting for their boss to knock off a cutie.

Or vice versa, Keller thought.

He wiped the surfaces where he might have left prints, then climbed out through the bathroom window and headed for the strip mall where he’d left the car.

Back in his own hotel, Keller packed his suitcase and checked flight schedules. There was, as far as he could tell, no point in sticking around. The job was done, and, if he said so himself, done rather neatly.

It would look for all the world like a badger game scam gone wrong. The woman who’d called herself Sue Ellen Bates had lured Wickwire to the motel room, and her male partner had turned up to extort money from him. There’d been a scuffle, with Wickwire sustaining injuries to the face and head before he had his neck broken, accidentally or on purpose.

Then the two con artists had had the presence of mind to try staging things, pouring bourbon on Wickwire, even though an autopsy would fail to show any of the stuff inside him. They hadn’t troubled to straighten up after themselves, however, had stuck around only long enough to rob the corpse, then fled.

There were probably some loose ends and inconsistencies, but Keller didn’t figure anybody would lose sleep over them. All in all, it was a death that looked like a logical consequence of the life Richard Wickwire had lately led, and both the New Orleans cops and the citizenry at large were apt to conclude that it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy. Which, come to think of it, was pretty much Keller’s own view of the matter.

He’d stuffed Sue Ellen’s clothes in one Dumpster, the telephone voice-changer in another. In the time-honored tradition of pickpockets and purse snatchers, he’d dropped Wickwire’s wallet (minus the cash and credit cards) into a mailbox. The plastic, sliced into unidentifiable fragments, went down a storm drain. Wickwire’s money clip-sterling silver, monogrammed-was identifiable, so he’d take it back to New York and manage to lose it there, where whoever found it would keep it or hock it or melt it or give it to a friend with the right initials.

Meanwhile it was full of cash, and the cash was now Keller’s. He counted it, along with the bills from Wickwire’s wallet, and was surprised by the total, which ran to just under fifteen hundred dollars.

He thought of Hildebrand, the man with the suspenders, and of the Austrian stamps he’d bought from him. There’d been a few more he’d have liked to buy, especially a mint copy of Austria ’s first stamp, Scott #1, the one kreuzer orange. It was an error, printed on both sides, and listed in the catalog at $1450. Hildebrand had tagged it $1000 and indicated he’d take $900 for it, but that struck Keller as an awful lot to pay for a stamp that his album didn’t even have a space for. Besides, he could pick up a used copy for a tenth the price of a mint specimen.

Still, he hadn’t been able to get the stamp out of his head. And now, with a windfall like this…

And it wasn’t as if he were in that big a rush to get back to New York.

It was about a month later when the telephone rang in Keller’s apartment. He was at his desk, working on his stamp collection. He still hadn’t finished the task of remounting everything in his new albums, but he’d made good progress, having recently knocked off Sweden and started in on Switzerland.

He picked up the phone, and Dot said, “Keller, you work too goddam hard. I think you should take a vacation.”

“A vacation,” he said.

“That’s the ticket. Haul your butt out of town and stay gone for a week.”