“She knew just by looking at your thumb.”
“And my chart. And I guess she more or less intuited it.” He sat up straight. “She’s the one you picked? Louise?”
“Keller-“
“Because they’re going to have a hard time finding her. She moved, and she must have left the area altogether, because her phone’s been disconnected. I suppose it’s possible she left a forwarding address, and there are other ways to track a person, but you wanted to bait the trap here in New York, didn’t you? If so, you can forget about Louise Carpenter.”
She didn’t say anything. He looked across the table at her and it dawned on him.
“No forwarding address,” he said.
“No.”
“She’s dead, isn’t she?”
“Either she’s one with the Universe,” Dot said, “or she’s been reincarnated as a butterfly. That’s how Louise herself would look at it, and who are we to argue?”
“But,” he stammered. “What… when? How?”
“Keller,” she said, “you sound like a training manual for newspaper reporters. Do you really want to know? Wouldn’t you be happier just figuring it was in the stars and letting it go at that?”
“I want to know.”
“You were on jury duty,” she said.
“And you got someone to-“
“No. Suppose you just let me tell it.”
“All right.”
She drank some iced tea. “I was thinking about this for a while,” she said. “Here’s a woman who knows something she’s not supposed to know, and how long before she says something to the wrong person? No, don’t interrupt. You were going to say it’s unethical for her to talk about her clients, weren’t you? That occurred to me, but what people are supposed to do and what they do aren’t always the same thing, or we’d both be in some other business.
“So what I did,” she went on, “is I called her up and made an appointment with her.”
“While I was on jury duty.”
“No, long before that. I don’t know where you were. At home in New York, probably, working on your stamp collection. I called her up and made an appointment, gave a phony name and date of birth, and took a train in and a cab to where she lived. Nice, if you like drapes and beaded curtains and overstuffed furniture. She sat me down with a cup of tea and we went over my chart.”
“But it wasn’t your chart.”
“Because I made up the date of birth. You know, I realized that, but by then I was stuck. I had to sit there pretending to be impressed by how accurate she was, and it wasn’t accurate, but then why should it be? It may have been right on the mark for somebody who happened to be born on the twenty-third of September. All in all, I was probably better off with a phony birthday, because it kept me from getting sidetracked by the chart, because I knew it was a lot of hooey. So I could focus on drawing her out.”
“About what?”
“About you. I talked about how I went to a palmist once, and she said she knew a little about palmistry and looked at my hand, and I told her about a girlfriend of mine in high school who had an unusual thumb, and before I knew it I was hearing all about a client of hers who had a murderer’s thumb.”
“She talked about my thumb?”
“It doesn’t necessarily mean anything,” she said, “but in this instance the client with the murderer’s thumb did in fact have a very real dark side. I didn’t dig too deeply, but I had the feeling I could have walked out of there with your name and address if I’d really wanted to.”
“That’s a surprise,” he said. “I thought she’d be discreet.”
“She probably thought she was being discreet. She mentioned some things about your chart, but don’t ask me what they were. Your Saturn squares Uranus, ooga booga dooga. You know how they talk. Keller, the woman was a loose end. She had a client who killed people for a living, and she knew it, and it didn’t take a lot to get her talking about it.”
“You should have said something.”
“To you?”
“Of course to me. I would have…”
“What? Taken care of it?”
“Sure.”
“You liked the woman, Keller. You talked about how maternal she was.”
“I don’t remember saying that.”
“Well, I remember. Maybe you could have gone ahead and done it anyway, but it would have been tough for you, and it would have been a bad idea to begin with. You were a client of hers, there’s a connection, so if anything’s going to happen to her it should happen when you’re out of town.”
“So you’d have to bring somebody in,” he said, thinking out loud. “And while you’re at it, why not bring in Roger, too? Tie off a loose end and bait a trap for Roger, both at the same time. It makes sense.” He looked up, frowning. “But it’s too late for that, because she’s already dead.”
“I wasn’t thinking about baiting traps at the time. And I wanted to leave you completely out of it, and I didn’t want to wait too long, because loose lips sink ships, and who knows how long it would be before the fat lady sang to the wrong person?”
“But you waited a while after all.”
“That wasn’t my idea,” she said. “Remember that string of jobs you had where you were back the next day? They called it off or the guy killed himself or somebody else closed the sale for you? You kept coming back before I could set things up.”
“You wanted me out of town when she got taken out.”
“Of course.”
“So I’d have an alibi. Of course, if anybody wanted to know what exactly I was doing in Albuquerque or St. Louis or wherever…”
“I know, it’s not much of an alibi. ‘Your Honor, I couldn’t have killed her because I was in Sausalito killing him.’ I guess I had other reasons for wanting you out of town. I guess I didn’t want you to know about it because I knew you wouldn’t like it.”
“You were right.”
“You still don’t like it, do you?”
He thought about it. “You had to do it,” he said. “I would have tried to talk you out of it, or find another way, but it’s over now, and I have to admit you were right. Who’d you use?”
“What’s the difference?”
“No difference, I guess. When the Baltimore job came in, you figured I’d be out of town, so you booked the guy to do Louise. And then you found out I had jury duty, but that’s an even better alibi than being out of town, so you let it go according to schedule. Whoever he was, he did good work. ‘Death Was in the Stars’-it’s a story the papers would have played up, an astrologer getting murdered. But I didn’t see anything. You use this guy before?”
“Once. And there was nothing in the papers then, either.”
“His trademark, I guess.”
“Hers.”
“Pardon?”
“Her trademark.”
“The hitter was a woman? We just said there weren’t any outside of the movies.”
“You’re the one said that, Keller. I didn’t say anything.”
He replayed the conversation in his head, shrugged. “Whatever,” he said. “A woman, huh? And you used her before?”
Dot nodded, then raised a hand and pointed at the ceiling. Keller looked up, saw nothing remarkable but a light fixture with one of its bulbs burned out. Then he got it and his jaw dropped.
Twenty-five
“The old man,” he said.
“Sometimes it amazes me how quick you are on the uptake.”
“But that was you, Dot. He was losing it, and he was talking about hiring a kid to help him write his memoirs, and you sent me off somewhere and did it yourself.”
“Sent you to Kansas City,” she said. “Your first stamp auction, if I remember correctly.”
“And you did Louise, too? Why, for God’s sake?”
“Short notice,” she said. “There was a window of opportunity, and who knew how long it would be open? And it wasn’t just a matter of taking her out. It had to be quiet, so you wouldn’t read about it. And somebody had to go through her files, somebody who would know what to look for. So I called her up and made another appointment.”