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“Sure, but—”

  “Say, don’t I know you? You’re Steve Lauderheim, aren’t you?”

  “That’s right. Have we met?”

  Keller looked at him, at the cute little chin dimple, at the big white teeth. Of course he was Lauderheim, who else could he be? But a professional made sure. Besides, it wasn’t too long ago that he’d failed to make sure, and he wasn’t eager to let that happen again.

  “Cressida says hello,” Keller said.

  “Huh?”

  Keller buried the tire iron in his solar plexus.

  The results were encouraging. Lauderheim let out an awful sound, clapped both hands to his middle, and fell to his knees. Keller grabbed him by the front of his shirt, dragged him along the gravel until the Subaru screened the two of them from view. Then he raised the tire iron high overhead and brought it down on Lauderheim’s head.

  The man sprawled on the ground, still conscious, moaning softly. A few more blows to finish it?

  No. Stick to the script. Keller drew the extension cord from his pocket, unwound a two-foot length of it, and looped it around Lauderheim’s throat. He straddled the man, pinning him to the ground with a knee in the middle of his back, and choked the life out of him.

  The Mississippi, legendary Father of Waters, swallowed the tire iron, the hammer, the screwdriver, the funnel. The empty box of sugar floated off on the current.

  From a pay phone, Keller called his client. “Toxic Shock,” he said, feeling like an idiot. No answer. He hung up.

  He went back to his motel room, packed, carried his bag to the car. He didn’t have to check out. He’d paid a week in advance, and when his week was up they’d take the room back.

  He had to force himself to drive over to the Pizza Hut and get something to eat. All he wanted to do was drive straight to O’Hare and grab the first plane back to New York, but he knew he had to get some food into his system. Otherwise he’d start seeing things on the road north, swing the wheel to dodge something that wasn’t there, and wind up putting the car in a ditch. Professionalism, he told himself, and ate an individual pan pizza and drank a medium Pepsi.

  And placed the call again. “Toxic Shock”—and this time she was there, and picked up.

  “It’s all taken care of,” he said.

  “You mean—”

  “I mean it’s all taken care of.”

  “I can’t believe it. My God, I can’t believe it.”

  You’re safe now, he wanted to say. You’ve got your life back.

  Instead, cool and professional, he told her how to make the final payment. Cash, same as before, sent by Federal Express to Mary Jones, at another Mail Boxes Etc. location, this one in Peekskill.

  “I can’t thank you enough,” the woman said. Keller said nothing, just smiled and rang off.

  Driving north and east through Illinois, Keller went over it in his mind. He thought, Cressida says hello. Jesus, he couldn’t believe he’d said that. What did he think he was, some kind of avenging angel? A knight in shining armor?

  Jesus.

  Well, nothing all day but two doughnuts and a cup of coffee. That was as far as you had to look for an explanation. Got him irritable and angry, made him take it personally.

  Still, he thought, after he’d turned in the car and bought his ticket, Lauderheim was unquestionably one thoroughgoing son of a bitch. No loss to anyone.

  And he could still hear her saying she couldn’t thank him enough, and what was so wrong with enjoying that?

  “I was thinking,” Andria said. “About looking up your name in phone books?”

  “And?”

  “At first I thought it was a way of looking for yourself. But then I had another idea. I think it’s a way of making sure there’s room for you.”

  “Room for me?”

  “Well,” she said, “if you’re not already there, then there’s room for you.”

  Eight, nine days later, Dot called. Coincidentally enough, he was doing the crossword puzzle at the time.

  “Keller,” she said, “guess what Mary Jones didn’t find in her mailbox?”

  “That’s strange,” he said. “It’s still not here? Maybe you ought to call her. Maybe FedEx lost it and it’s in a back office somewhere.”

  “I’m way ahead of you, boy. I called her.”

  “And?”

  “Line’s been disconnected. . . . You still there, Keller?”

  “I’m trying to think. You’re sure that—”

  “I called back, got the same recording. ‘The number you have reached, blah blah blah, has been disconnected.’ Leaves no room for doubt.”

  “No.”

  “The money doesn’t show up, and now the line’s been disconnected. Does it begin to make you wonder?”

  “Maybe they arrested her,” he said. “Before she could send the money.”

  “And stuck her in a cell and left her there? A quiet lady who writes about deaf rabbits?”

  “Well—”

  “Let me pull out and pass a few slow-moving vehicles,” she said. “What I did, I called Information in St. Louis.”

  “St. Louis?”

  “Webster Groves is a suburb of St. Louis.”

  “Webster Groves.”

  “Where Cressida Wallace lives, according to that reference book in the library.”

  “But she moved,” Keller said.

  “You’d think so, wouldn’t you? But the Information operator had a listing for her. So I called the number. Guess what?”

  “Come on, Dot.”

  “A woman answered. No answering machine, no computer-generated horseshit. ‘Hello?’ ‘Cressida Wallace, please.’ ‘This is she.’ Well, it wasn’t the voice I remembered. ‘Is this Cressida Wallace, the author?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘The author of How the Bunny Lost His Ears?’ ”

  “And she said it was?”

  “Well, how many Cressida Wallaces do you figure there are? I didn’t know what the hell to say next. I told her I was from the Muscatine paper, I wanted to know her impressions of the town. Keller, she didn’t know what I was talking about. I had to tell her what state Muscatine was in.”

  “You’d think she’d have at least heard of it,” he said. “It’s not that far from St. Louis.”

  “I don’t think she gets out much. I think she sits in her house and writes her stories. I found out this much. She’s lived in the same house in Webster Groves for thirty years.”

  He took a deep breath. He said, “Where are you, Dot?”

  “Where am I? I’m at an outdoor pay phone half a mile from the house. I’m getting rained on.”

  “Go on home,” he said. “Give me an hour or so and I’ll call you back.”

  * * *

  “All right,” he said, closer to two hours later. “Here’s how it shapes up. Stephen Lauderheim wasn’t some creep, stalking some innocent woman.”

  “We figured that.”

  “He was a partner in Loud & Clear Software. He and a fellow named Randall Cleary started the firm. Lauderheim and Cleary, Loud & Clear.”

  “Cute.”

  “Lauderheim was married, father of two, bowled in a league, belonged to Rotary and the Jaycees.”

  “Hardly the type to kidnap a dog and torture it to death.”

  “You wouldn’t think so.”

  “Who set him up? The wife?”

  “I figure the partner. Company was doing great and one of the big Silicon Valley firms was looking to buy them out. My guess is one of them wanted to sell and the other didn’t. Or there was some kind of partnership insurance in place. One partner dies, the other buys him out at a prearranged price, pays off the widow with the proceeds of the partnership insurance policy. Of course the company’s now worth about twenty times what they agreed to.”

  “How’d you get all this, Keller?”

  “Called the city room at the Muscatine paper, said I was covering the death for a computer magazine and could they fax me the obit and anything they’d run on the killing.”

  “You�
�ve got a fax?”

  “The candy store around the corner’s got one. All the guy in Muscatine could tell from the number I gave him was it was in New York.”

  “Nice.”

  “After the fax came in, the stuff he sent gave me some ideas for other calls to make. I could sit on the phone for another hour and find out more, but I figure that’s enough.”

  “More than enough,” she said. “Keller, the little shit foxed us. And then she stiffed us in the bargain.”

  “That’s what I don’t get,” he said. “Why stiff us? All he had to do was send the money and I’d never have thought of Iowa again unless I was flying over it. He was home free. All he had to do was pay what he owed.”

  “Cheap son of a bitch,” Dot said.

  “But where’s the sense? He paid out half the money without even knowing who he was sending it to. If he could afford to do that on the come, you can imagine what kind of money was at stake here.”

  “It paid off.”

  “It paid off but he didn’t. Stupid.”

  “Very stupid.”

  “I’ll tell you what I think,” he said. “I think the money was the least of it. I think he wanted to feel superior to us. I mean, why go through all this Cressida Wallace crap in the first place? Does he figure I’m a Boy Scout, doing my good deed for the day?”

  “He figured we were amateurs, Keller. And needed to be motivated.”

  “Yeah, well, he figured wrong,” he said. “I have to pack, I’ve got a flight in an hour and a half and I have to call Andria. We’re getting paid, Dot. Don’t worry.”

  “I wasn’t worried,” she said.

  Which one, he wondered, was Cleary? The plump one who’d gone to lunch with Lauderheim? Or the nerd in the lab coat who’d walked out to the parking lot with him?

  Or someone else, someone he hadn’t even seen. Cleary might well have been out of town that day, providing himself with an alibi.

  Didn’t matter. You didn’t need to know what a man looked like to get him on the phone.

  Cleary, like his late partner, had an unlisted home phone number. But the firm, Loud & Clear, had a listing. Keller called from his motel room—this time he was staying at the one with HBO. He used the electronic novelty item he’d picked up at Abercrombie & Fitch, and when a woman answered he said he wanted to speak to Randall Cleary.

  “Whom shall I say is calling?”

  Whom, he noted. Not bad for Muscatine, Iowa.

  “Cressida Wallace,” he said.

  She put him on hold, but he did not languish there for long. Moments later he heard a male voice, one he could not recognize. “Cleary,” the man said. “Who is this?”

  “Ah, Mr. Cleary,” he said. “This is Miss Cressida Wallace.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  “It is,” Keller said, “and I understand you’ve been using my name, and I’m frightfully upset.”

  Silence from Cleary. Keller unhooked the device that had altered the pitch of his voice. “Toxic Shock,” he said in his own voice. “You stupid son of a bitch.”

  “There was a problem,” Cleary said. “I’m going to send you the money.”

  “Why didn’t you get in touch?”

  “I was going to. You can’t believe how busy we’ve been around here.”

  “Why’d you disconnect your phone?”

  “I thought, you know, security reasons.”

  “Right,” Keller said.

  “I’m going to pay.”

  “No question about it,” Keller said. “Today. You’re going to FedEx the money today. Overnight delivery, Mary Jones gets it tomorrow. Are we clear on that?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “And the price went up. Remember what you were supposed to send?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, double it.”

  There was a silence. “That’s impossible. It’s extortion, for God’s sake.”

  “Look,” Keller said, “do yourself a favor. Think it through.”

  Another silence, but shorter. “All right,” Cleary said.

  “In cash, and it gets there tomorrow. Agreed?”

  “Agreed.”

  He called Dot from a pay phone, had dinner, and went back to his room. This motel had HBO, so of course there was nothing on that he wanted to watch. It figured.

  In the morning he skipped the diner and had a big breakfast at a Denny’s on the highway. He drove up to Davenport and made two stops, at a sporting goods store and a hardware store. He went back to his motel, and around two in the afternoon he called White Plains.

  “This is Cressida Wallace,” he said. “Have there been any calls for me?”

  “Damned if it doesn’t work,” Dot said. “You sound just like a woman.”

  “But I break just like a little girl,” Keller said.

  “Very funny. Quit using that thing, will you? It sounds like a woman, but it’s your way of talking, your inflections underneath it all. Let me hear the Keller I know so well.”

  He unhooked the gadget. “Better?”

  “Much better. Your pal came through.”

  “Got the numbers right and everything?”

  “Indeed he did.”

  “I think the voice-change gizmo helped,” he said. “It made him see we knew everything.”

  “Oh, he’d have paid anyway,” she said. “All you had to do was yank his chain a little. You just liked using your new toy, that’s all. When are you coming home, Keller?”

  “Not right away.”

  “Well, I know that.”

  “No, I think I’ll wait a few days,” he said. “Right now he’s edgy, looking over his shoulder. Beginning of next week he’ll have his guard down.”

  “Makes sense.”

  “Besides,” he said, “it’s not a bad town.”

  “Oh, God, Keller.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “ ‘It’s not a bad town.’ I bet you’re the first person to say that, including the head of the chamber of commerce.”

  “It’s not,” he insisted. “The motel set gets HBO. There’s a Pizza Hut down the street.”

  “Keep it to yourself, Keller, or everybody’s going to want to move there.”

  “And I’ve got things to do.”

  “Like what?”

  “A little metalwork project, for starters. And I want to buy something for Andria.”

  “Not earrings again.”

  “You can’t have too many earrings,” he said.

  “Well, that’s true,” she agreed. “I can’t argue with you there.”

  He hung up and used the carbide-bladed hacksaw from the hardware store to remove most of both barrels of the shotgun from the sporting goods store, then switched blades and cut away most of the stock as well. He loaded both chambers and left the gun tucked under the mattress. Then he drove along the river road until he found a good spot, and he tossed the sawed-off gun barrels, the hacksaw, and the box of shotgun shells into the Mississippi. Toxic waste, he thought, and shook his head, just imagining all the junk that wound up in the river.

  He drove around for a while, just enjoying the day, and returned to the motel. Right now Randall Cleary was telling himself he was safe, he was in the clear, he had nothing to worry about. But he wasn’t sure yet.

  In a few days he’d be sure. He’d even think to himself that maybe he should have called Keller’s bluff, or at least not agreed to pay double. But what the hell, it was only money, and money was something he had a ton of.

  Stupid amateur.

  Which one was he, anyway? The nerd with the wispy mustache? The plump one, the dumpling? Or someone yet unseen?

  Well, he’d find out.

  Keller, feeling professional, feeling mature, sat back and put his feet up. Postponing gratification was turning out to be more fun than he would have guessed.

  7

  Keller's Choice

  Keller, behind the wheel of a rented Plymouth, kept an eye on the fat man’s house. It was very grand, with col
umns, for heaven’s sake, and a circular driveway, and one hell of a lot of lawn. Keller, who had done his share of lawn mowing as a teenager, wondered what a kid would get for mowing a lawn like that.

  Hard to say. The thing was, he had no frame of reference. He seemed to remember getting a couple of bucks way back when, but the lawns he’d mowed were tiny, postage stamps in comparison to the fat man’s rolling green envelope. Taking into consideration the disparity in lawn size, and the inexorable shrinkage of the dollar over the years, what was a lawn like this worth? Twenty dollars? Fifty dollars? More?

  The non-answer, he suspected, was that people who had lawns like this one didn’t hire kids to push a mower around. Instead they had gardeners who showed up regularly with vehicles appropriate to the season, mowing in the summer, raking leaves in the fall, plowing snow in the winter. And charging so much a month, a tidy sum that actually didn’t cost the fat man anything to speak of, because he very likely billed it to his company, or took it off his taxes. Or, if his accountant was enterprising, both.

  Keller, who lived in a one-bedroom apartment in midtown Manhattan, had no lawn to mow. There was a tree in front of his building, planted and diligently maintained by the Parks Department, and its leaves fell in the fall, but no one needed to rake them. The wind was pretty good about blowing them away. Snow, when it didn’t melt of its own accord, was shoveled from the sidewalk by the building’s superintendent, who kept the elevator running and replaced burned-out bulbs in the hall fixtures and dealt with minor plumbing emergencies. Keller had a low-maintenance life, really. All he had to do was pay the rent on time and everything else got taken care of by other people.

  He liked it that way. Even so, when his work took him away from home he found himself wondering. His fantasies, by and large, centered on simpler and more modest lifestyles. A cute little house in a subdivision, an undemanding job. A manageable life.

  The fat man’s house, in a swank suburban community north of Cincinnati, was neither cute nor little. Keller wasn’t too clear on what the fat man did, beyond the fact that it involved his playing host to a lot of visitors and spending a good deal of time in his car. He couldn’t say if the work was demanding, although he suspected it might be. Nor could he tell if the man’s life was manageable. What he did know, though, was that someone wanted to manage him right out of it.