She drank some iced tea. “So the people in One forty-seven died hours before anybody knew Hirschhorn was dead.”
“Well, I knew, and you knew because I told you. But you’re the only person I told, and I have a feeling you didn’t spread it around.”
“I figured it was our little secret.”
“Besides not knowing I’d done what I was brought in to do,” he said, “how would they know where to find me?”
“Unless they followed you there from Windy Hill.”
“Winding Acres.”
“Whatever.”
“Nobody followed me,” he said. “And if they had they’d have followed me to the new room, not the old one. I didn’t go anywhere near One forty-seven.”
“The people in One forty-seven. A man and a woman?”
“A man and a woman. The room had two beds, they all do, but they were only using one of them.”
“Let me take a wild guess. Married, but not to each other?”
He nodded. “Guy at the Louisville paper told me the cops are talking to the dead woman’s husband. Who denies all knowledge, but right now they like him for it.”
“All you have to do is call up and they tell you all that?”
“If you’re polite and well-spoken,” he said, “and if they somehow get the impression you’re a researcher at Inside Edition.”
“Oh.”
“I told him it sounded pretty open and shut, and he said that’s how it looked up close. He’s going to update me if there’s a big break in the case.”
“How’s he going to do that? You didn’t leave him a number.”
“Sure I did.”
“Not yours, I hope.”
“Inside Edition’s. ‘Hang on,’ I said. ‘I can never remember the number here.’ And I looked it up and read it off. I could have just made something up. He’s never going to call. The husband did it, and what does Inside Edition care?”
“If he strikes out there,” she said, “he can always try Hard Copy. The husband did it, huh? That’s your best guess?”
“Or his wife, or somebody one of them hired. Or he was two-timing somebody else, or she was. There were empty bottles and full ashtrays all over the room, they’d been drinking and smoking since they checked in…”
“In a nonsmoking room? The bastards. And on top of that they were committing adultery?” She shook her head. “Triple sinners, it sounds like to me. Well, they deserved to die, and may God have mercy on their souls.”
She was reaching for her iced tea but drew her hand back as the door chime sounded. “Now who could that be?” she wondered aloud, and went to find out. He had a brief moment of panic, sure he ought to do something, unable to think what it was. He was still working on it when she came back brandishing a package.
“FedEx,” she said, and gave the parcel a shake. It didn’t make a sound. She pulled the strip to open it and drew out banded packets of currency. She slipped the wrapper off one of them and riffled the bills. “I hate to admit it,” she said, “but I’m starting to get used to the way the new bills look. Not the twenties, they still look like play money to me, but the fifties and hundreds are beginning to look just fine. You buy any stamps in Louisville?”
“A few.”
“Well,” she said, counting out stacks of bills, making piles on the table. “Now you can go buy some more.”
“I guess the customer’s satisfied.”
“Looks that way, doesn’t it?”
“You just gave them the address and they put the cash in the mail?”
“No, I told them I work for Inside Edition. It’s not the mail, anyway. It’s Federal Express.”
“Whatever.”
“There’s a cutoff man between me and the client, Keller. This particular one is a guy in-well, it doesn’t matter where, but it’s not Louisville and it’s not New York. We’ve done business for years, even before I was part of the picture.”
She gestured toward the ceiling, and Keller understood the reference to the old man, who’d never come down from the second floor in the final years of his life. You’d think he was up there still, the way they referred to him.
“So he knows where to send the money,” she said, “and the client knows how to get it to him. No business of ours how much of it stays with him, as long as we get our price. And the client doesn’t know anything about you, or me either.” She patted the piles of money. “All he knows is we do good work. Well, a happy customer is our best advertisement, and I’d say this one’s happy. How did you do it, Keller? How’d you manage natural causes?”
“I didn’t, not exactly. It was suicide.”
“Well, that’s close enough, isn’t it? It’s not as though they had their hearts set on a lingering illness.” She drained her glass, put it down on the table. “Let’s hear it. How’d you do it?”
“When he got out of the car,” he said, “I got him in a choke hold.”
“It’s good you’re not a cop, Keller. These days that comes under the heading of police brutality.”
“I kept the pressure on until he went limp. And it would have been the most natural thing to finish the job, you know? Cut off his air a little longer. Or just break his neck.”
“Whatever.”
“And I could have left him looking like he had a heart attack and hurt himself when he fell down. Something like that. But I figured any coroner who looked twice would see it didn’t happen that way, and then it looks staged, which is probably worse from the client’s point of view than a straightforward homicide.”
“I suppose.”
“So I put him behind the wheel,” he said, “and I got out the gun they gave me-“
“The twenty-two auto, first choice of professionals from coast to coast.”
“And overseas as well, for all I know. I wrapped his hand around it and stuck the business end in his mouth.”
“And squeezed off a round.”
“No,” he said, “because who knows how far the sound is going to carry?”
“ ‘Hark, I hear the cannon’s roar.’ “
“And suppose one bullet doesn’t do it? It’s a small calibre, it’s not going to splatter his brains all over the roof liner.”
“And I guess it’s a pretty severe case of suicide if the guy has to shoot himself twice. Although you could argue that it shows determination.”
“I stayed with what I’d worked up while I was waiting for him to come home. I had a length of garden hose already cut, and I taped one end to the exhaust pipe and stuck the other end in the car window.”
“And started the engine.”
“I had to do that to get the window down. Anyway, I left him there, in a closed garage with the engine running.”
“And got the hell out.”
“Not right away,” he said. “Suppose somebody heard him drive in? They might come out to check. Or suppose he came to before the carbon monoxide level built up enough to keep him under?”
“Or suppose the engine stalled.”
“Also a possibility. I waited by the side of the car, and then I started to worry about how much exhaust I was breathing myself.”
“ ‘Two Men Gassed in Suicide Pact.’ “
“So I let myself out the side door and stood there for ten minutes. I don’t know what I would have done if I heard the engine cut out.”
“Gone in and fixed it.”
“Which is fine if it stalled, but suppose he came to and turned it off himself? And I rush in, and he’s sitting there with a gun in his hand?”
“You left him the gun?”
“Left it in his hand, and his hand in his lap. Like he was ready to shoot himself if the gas didn’t work, or if he got up the nerve.”
“Cute.”
“Well, they gave me the gun. I had to do something with it.”
“Chekhov,” she said.
“Check off what?”
She rolled her eyes. “Anton Chekhov, Keller. The Russian writer. I’ll bet you anything he’s got his picture on a stamp.”
“I know who he is,” he said. “I just misheard you, because I didn’t know we were having a literary discussion. He was a physician as well as a writer, and he wrote plays and short stories. What about him?”