Hit Man Read online

“So?”

  “So I see you as all closed in and trying to reach out,” she said. “Going all over the country and getting real estate agents to show you houses you’re not going to buy.”

  “That was only a couple of times. And what’s so bad about it, anyway? It passes the time.”

  “You do these things and don’t know why,” she said. “You know what therapy is? It’s an adventure, it’s a voyage of discovery. And it’s like going to the gym. It’s . . . look, forget it. The whole thing’s pointless anyway unless you’re interested.”

  “Maybe I’m interested,” he said.

  Donna, not surprisingly, was in therapy herself. But her therapist was a woman, and they agreed he’d be more comfortable working with a man. Her ex-husband had been very fond of his therapist, a West Side psychologist named Breen. Donna had never met the man herself, and she wasn’t on the best of terms with her ex, but—

  “That’s all right,” he said. “I’ll call him myself.”

  He’d called Breen, using Donna’s ex-husband’s name as a reference. “But I doubt that he even knows me by name,” he said. “We got to talking a while back at a party and I haven’t seen him since. But something he said struck a chord with me, and, well, I thought I ought to explore it.”

  “Intuition is a powerful teacher,” Breen said.

  Keller made an appointment, giving his name as Peter Stone. In his first session he talked some about his work for a large and unnamed conglomerate. “They’re a little old-fashioned when it comes to psychotherapy,” he told Breen. “So I’m not going to give you an address or telephone number, and I’ll pay for each session in cash.”

  “Your life is filled with secrets,” Breen said.

  “I’m afraid it is. My work demands it.”

  “This is a place where you can be honest and open. The idea is to uncover those secrets you’ve been keeping from yourself. Here you are protected by the sanctity of the confessional, but it’s not my task to grant you absolution. Ultimately, you absolve yourself.”

  “Well,” Keller said.

  “Meanwhile, you have secrets to keep. I can respect that. I won’t need your address or telephone number unless I’m forced to cancel an appointment. I suggest you call in to confirm your sessions an hour or two ahead of time, or you can take the chance of an occasional wasted trip. If you have to cancel an appointment, be sure to give me twenty-four hours’ notice. Or I’ll have to charge for the missed session.”

  “That’s fair,” Keller said.

  He went twice a week, Mondays and Thursdays, at two in the afternoon. It was hard to tell what they were accomplishing. Sometimes Keller relaxed completely on the sofa, talking freely and honestly about his childhood. Other times he experienced the fifty-minute session as a balancing act; he was tugged in two directions at once, yearning to tell everything, compelled to keep it all a secret.

  No one knew he was doing this. Once when he ran into Donna she asked if he’d ever given the shrink a call, and he’d shrugged sheepishly and said he hadn’t. “I thought about it,” he said, “but then somebody told me about this masseuse, she does a combination of Swedish and shiatsu, and I’ve got to tell you, I think it does me more good than somebody poking and probing at the inside of my head.”

  “Oh, Keller,” she’d said, not without affection. “Don’t ever change.”

  It was on a Monday that he recounted the dream about the mice. Wednesday morning his phone rang, and it was Dot. “He wants to see you,” she said.

  “Be right out,” he said.

  He put on a tie and jacket and caught a cab to Grand Central and a train to White Plains. There he caught another cab and told the driver to head out Washington Boulevard and let him off at the corner of Norwalk. After the cab drove off he walked up Norwalk to Taunton Place and turned left. The second house on the right was a big old Victorian with a wrap-around porch. He rang the bell and Dot let him in.

  “The upstairs den,” she said. “He’s expecting you.”

  He went upstairs, and forty minutes later he came down again. A young man named Louis drove him back to the station, and on the way they chatted about a recent boxing match they’d both seen on ESPN. “What I wish,” Louis said, “I wish they had like a mute button on the remote, except what it would do is it would mute the announcers but you’d still hear the crowd noise and the punches landing. What you wouldn’t have is the constant yammer-yammer-yammer in your ear.” Keller wondered if they could do that. “I don’t see why not,” Louis said. “They can do everything else. If you can put a man on the moon, you ought to be able to shut up Al Bernstein.”

  Keller took the train back to New York and walked to his apartment. He made a couple of phone calls and packed a bag. At 3:30 he went downstairs, walked half a block, and hailed a cab to JFK, where he picked up his boarding pass for American’s 6:10 flight to Tucson.

  In the departure lounge he remembered his appointment with Breen. He called and canceled the Thursday session. Since it was less than twenty-four hours away, Breen said, he’d have to charge him for the missed session, unless he was able to book someone else into the slot.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Keller told him. “I hope I’ll be back in time for my Monday appointment, but it’s always hard to know how long these things are going to take. If I can’t make it I should at least be able to give you the twenty-four hours’ notice.”

  He changed planes in Dallas and got to Tucson shortly before midnight. He had no luggage aside from the piece he was carrying, but he went to the baggage claim area anyway. A rail-thin man with a broad-brimmed straw hat stood there holding a hand-lettered sign that read NOSCAASI. Keller watched the man for a few minutes, and observed that no one else was watching him. He went up to him and said, “You know, I was figuring it out the whole way to Dallas. What I came up with, it’s Isaacson spelled backwards.”

  “That’s it,” the man said. “That’s exactly it.” He seemed impressed, as if Keller had cracked the Japanese naval code. He said, “You didn’t check a bag, did you? I didn’t think so. Car’s this way.”

  In the car the man showed him three photographs, all of the same man, heavyset, dark, with glossy black hair and a greedy pig face. Bushy mustache, bushy eyebrows. Enlarged pores on his nose.

  “That’s Rollie Vasquez,” the man said. “Son of a bitch wouldn’t exactly win a beauty contest, would he?”

  “I guess not.”

  “Let’s go,” the man said. “Show you where he lives, where he eats, where he gets his ashes hauled. Rollie Vasquez, this is your life.”

  Two hours later the man dropped him at a Ramada Inn and gave him a room key and a car key. “You’re all checked in,” he said. “Car’s parked at the foot of the staircase closest to your room. She’s a Mitsubishi Eclipse, pretty decent transportation. Color’s supposed to be silver-blue, but she says gray on the papers. Registration’s in the glove box.”

  “There was supposed to be something else.”

  “That’s in the glove box, too. Locked, of course, but the one key fits the ignition and the glove box. And the doors and the trunk, too. And if you turn the key upside down it’ll still fit, ’cause there’s no up and down to it. You really got to hand it to those Japs.”

  “What’ll they think of next?”

  “Well, it may not seem like much,” the man said, “but all the time you waste making sure you got the right key, then making sure you got it right side up.”

  “It adds up.”

  “It does,” the man said. “Now, you got a full tank of gas. It takes regular, but what’s in there’s enough to take you upwards of four hundred miles.”

  “How’re the tires? Never mind. Just a joke.”

  “And a good one,” the man said. “ ‘How’re the tires?’ I like that.”

  The car was where it was supposed to be, and the glove box held the car’s registration and a semiautomatic pistol, a .22-caliber Horstmann Sun Dog, fully loaded, with a spare clip lying alongside it. K
eller slipped the gun and the spare clip into his carry-on, locked the car, and went to his room without passing the desk.

  After a shower, he sat down and put his feet up on the coffee table. It was all arranged, and that made it simpler, but sometimes he liked it better the other way, when all he had was a name and address and no one on hand to smooth the way for him. This was simple, all right, but who knew what traces were being left? Who knew what kind of history the gun had, or what the string bean with the NOSCAASI sign would say if the police picked him up and shook him?

  All the more reason to do it quickly. He watched enough of an old movie on cable to ready him for sleep, then slept until he woke up. When he went out to the car he had his bag with him. He expected to return to the room, but if he didn’t he’d be leaving nothing behind, not even a fingerprint.

  He stopped at Denny’s for breakfast. Around one he had lunch at a Mexican place on Figueroa. In the late afternoon he drove up into the hills north of the city, and he was still there when the sun went down. Then he drove back to the Ramada.

  That was Thursday. Friday morning the phone rang while he was shaving. He let it ring. It rang again just as he was ready to leave. He didn’t answer it this time, either, but went around wiping surfaces a second time with a hand towel. Then he went out to the car.

  At two that afternoon he followed Rolando Vasquez into the men’s room of the Saguaro Lanes bowling alley and shot him three times in the head. The little gun didn’t make much noise, not even in the confines of the tiled lavatory. Earlier he had fashioned an improvised suppressor by wrapping the barrel of the gun with a space-age insulating material that muffled most of the gun’s report without adding much in the way of weight or bulk. If you could do that, he thought, you ought to be able to shut up Al Bernstein.

  He left Vasquez propped in a stall, left the gun in a storm drain half a mile away, left the car in the long-term lot at the airport.

  Flying home, he wondered why they had needed him in the first place. They’d supplied the car and the gun and the finger man. Why not do it all themselves? Did they really need to bring him all the way from New York to step on the mouse?

  “You said to think about my name,” he told Breen. “The significance of it. But I don’t see how it could have any significance. It’s not as if I chose it myself.”

  “Let me suggest something,” Breen said. “There is a metaphysical principle which holds that we choose everything about our lives, that in fact we select the very parents we are born to, that everything which happens in our lives is a manifestation of our will. Thus there are no accidents, no coincidences.”

  “I don’t know if I believe that.”

  “You don’t have to. We’ll just take it for the moment as a postulate. So, assuming that you chose the name Peter Stone, what does your choice tell us?”

  Keller, stretched full length upon the couch, was not enjoying this. “Well, a peter’s a penis,” he said reluctantly. “A stone peter would be an erection, wouldn’t it?”

  “Would it?”

  “So I suppose a guy who decides to call himself Peter Stone would have something to prove. Anxiety about his virility. Is that what you want me to say?”

  “I want you to say whatever you wish,” Breen said. “Are you anxious about your virility?”

  “I never thought I was,” Keller said. “Of course it’s hard to say how much anxiety I might have had back before I was born, around the time I was picking my parents and deciding what name they should choose for me. At that age I probably had a certain amount of difficulty maintaining an erection, so I guess I had a lot to be anxious about.”

  “And now?”

  “I don’t have a performance problem, if that’s the question. I’m not the way I was in my teens, ready to go three or four times a night, but then who in his right mind would want to? I can generally get the job done.”

  “You get the job done.”

  “Right.”

  “You perform.”

  “Is there something wrong with that?”

  “What do you think?”

  “Don’t do that,” Keller said. “Don’t answer a question with a question. If I ask a question and you don’t want to respond, just leave it alone. But don’t turn it back on me. It’s irritating.”

  Breen said, “You perform, you get the job done. But what do you feel, Mr. Peter Stone?”

  “Feel?”

  “It is unquestionably true that peter is a colloquialism for the penis, but it has an earlier meaning. Do you recall Christ’s words to the first Peter? ‘Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I shall build my church.’ Because Peter means rock. Our Lord was making a pun. So your first name means rock and your last name is Stone. What does that give us? Rock and stone. Hard, unyielding, obdurate. Insensitive. Unfeeling.”

  “Stop,” Keller said.

  “In the dream, when you kill the mice, what do you feel?”

  “Nothing. I just want to get the job done.”

  “Do you feel their pain? Do you feel pride in your accomplishment, satisfaction in a job well done? Do you feel a thrill, a sexual pleasure, in their death?”

  “Nothing,” Keller said. “I feel nothing. Could we stop for a moment?”

  “What do you feel right now?”

  “Just a little sick to my stomach, that’s all.”

  “Do you want to use the bathroom? Shall I get you a glass of water?”

  “No, I’m all right. It’s better when I sit up. It’ll pass. It’s passing already.”

  Sitting at his window, watching not marathoners but cars streaming over the Queensboro Bridge, Keller thought about names. What was particularly annoying, he thought, was that he didn’t need to be under the care of a board-certified metaphysician to acknowledge the implications of the name Peter Stone. He had very obviously chosen it, and not in the manner of a soul deciding what parents to be born to and planting names in their heads. He had picked the name himself when he called to make his initial appointment with Jerrold Breen. Name? Breen had demanded. Stone, he had replied. Peter Stone.

  Thing is, he wasn’t stupid. Cold, unyielding, insensitive, but not stupid. If you wanted to play the name game, you didn’t have to limit yourself to the alias he had selected. You could have plenty of fun with the name he’d borne all his life.

  His full name was John Paul Keller, but no one called him anything but Keller, and few people even knew his first or middle names. His apartment lease and most of the cards in his wallet showed his names as J. P. Keller. Just Plain Keller was what people called him, men and women alike. (“The upstairs den, Keller. He’s expecting you.” “Oh, Keller, don’t ever change.” “I don’t know how to say this, Keller, but I’m just not getting my needs met in this relationship.”)

  Keller. In German it meant cellar, or tavern. But the hell with that, you didn’t need to know what it meant in a foreign language. Just change a vowel. Keller = Killer.

  Clear enough, wasn’t it?

  On the couch, eyes closed, Keller said, “I guess the therapy’s working.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “I met a girl last night, bought her a couple of drinks, went home with her. We went to bed and I couldn’t do anything.”

  “You couldn’t do anything.”

  “Well, if you want to be technical, there were things I could have done. I could have typed a letter, sent out for a pizza. I could have sung ‘Melancholy Baby.’ But I couldn’t do what we’d both been hoping I would do, which was have sex with her.”

  “You were impotent.”

  “You know, you’re very sharp. You never miss a trick.”

  “You blame me for your impotence,” Breen said.

  “Do I? I don’t know about that. I’m not sure I even blame myself. To tell you the truth, I was more amused than devastated by the experience. And she wasn’t upset, perhaps out of relief that I wasn’t upset. But just so nothing like this ever happens again, I’ve decided I’m changing my name to Dick Ha
rdin.”

  “What was your father’s name?”

  “My father,” Keller said. “Jesus, what a question. Where did that come from?”

  Breen didn’t say anything.

  Neither, for several minutes, did Keller. Then, eyes closed, he said, “I never knew my father. He was a soldier. He was killed in action before I was born. Or he was shipped overseas before I was born and killed when I was a few months old. Or possibly he was home when I was born, or came home on leave when I was very small, and he held me on his knee and told me he was proud of me.”

  “You have such a memory?”

  “I have no memory,” Keller said. “The only memory I have is of my mother telling me about him, and that’s the source of the confusion, because she told me different things at different times. Either he was killed before I was born or shortly after, and either he died without seeing me or he saw me one time and sat me on his knee. She was a good woman but she was vague about a lot of things. The one thing she was completely clear on, he was a soldier. And he got killed over there.”

  “And his name—”

  Was Keller, he thought. “Same as mine,” he said. “But forget the name, this is more important than the name. Listen to this. She had a picture of him, a head-and-shoulders shot, this good-looking young soldier in a uniform and wearing a cap, the kind that folds flat when you take it off. The picture was in a gold frame on her dresser when I was a little kid, and she would tell me how that was my father.

  “And then one day the picture wasn’t there anymore. ‘It’s gone,’ she said. And that was all she would say on the subject. I was older then, I must have been seven or eight years old.

  “Couple of years later I got a dog. I named him Soldier, I called him that after my father. Years after that two things occurred to me. One, Soldier’s a funny thing to call a dog. Two, whoever heard of naming a dog after your father? But at the time it didn’t seem the least bit unusual to me.”

  “What happened to the dog?”