“I see.”
“And it was okay, Eric. I mean, if neither of us knew the other was boinking her, what difference did it make? I certainly didn’t figure I was the only man in her life, and anyway I wouldn’t have wanted to be. I mean, I was a married guy, I was on the road more often than not. I only had limited time for her, and what did I want with the responsibility?”
“It makes sense,” Keller said.
“But then Chandra lost it.”
“That was her name? Chandra?”
“That was her name,” Harrelson said, “and she lost it big-time. The excrement made contact with the ventilation system.”
“Hit the fan?”
“Hit it head-on. She went public, and by the time it was over my wife had left me and his wife had left him and we had two nasty divorces going on and Barry and I weren’t speaking.”
“Barry’s your partner.”
“My partner,” Harrelson said heavily. “You can divorce your wife. You can’t divorce your partner.”
“They wound up stuck with each other,” he told Dot. “By now they both hate each other, I mean really hate each other, and neither can buy the other out. And the company’s all either of them has, and neither one of them can walk away from it.”
“Couldn’t they sell it?”
“I asked him that. I wasn’t going to mention it just now because I figured you’d ask me who the hell I thought I was, Suze Orman? He explained why they couldn’t, and the gist of it was that the business didn’t have a lot of assets. It’s only worth the profit it returns, and it only does that when they’re running it. So it’s worth far more to them than it would be to another buyer.”
“I’ll take your word for it,” she said. “You know, Keller, I’m beginning to see where this is going.”
23
“I swear I’d kill him,” Harrelson said. “Except there’s no way on earth I could get away with it. Who’s got a motive here? Hell, you’re looking at him.”
“They’d certainly look long and hard at you.”
“And they’d have me dead to rights. Besides, look at me. Am I a killer?”
“My guess would be that you’re not.”
“And your guess is a good one. I don’t even like swatting flies. And spiders, my wife would get creeped out when she saw a spider and she’d want me to kill it. I’d take it outside and release it. I mean, what have I got against spiders?”
Keller, who had nothing against spiders himself, nodded encouragingly.
“Barry Blyden,” Harrelson said, “is a different matter altogether. You know what I need?”
You need me, Keller thought.
“A sorceress,” Harrelson said. “Like Whatshername, turned Odysseus’s men into swine? Except she could turn Barry into a spider, or a fucking cockroach. And then I’d stomp him into the ground.”
“Strangers on a plane,” Dot said. “Like the Hitchcock movie, except at thirty-five thousand feet. You remember the setup? Two strangers, and each one commits the other one’s murder.”
“Well, they’re supposed to. But then it gets complicated.”
“It always does, Keller. Otherwise there’s no movie. I don’t suppose you gave him your card, told him you worked for a first-class removal service.”
“No.”
“He said he wanted his partner dead, if only someone could turn him into a cockroach first, and you left it at that.”
“Right.”
“The plane landed and you went your separate ways.”
“Right.”
She frowned. “So you’re telling me this just to let me know that there are a lot of people out there who want other people dead? No, I don’t think so. If that was all there was to it you wouldn’t have bothered including the names. I’ll be damned, Keller. You’re trying to drum up a little business.”
“I’m thinking about it,” he admitted.
“You remember the time we ran an ad? And you wound up chasing out to the middle of nowhere?”
“ Muscatine, Iowa.”
“The town that time forgot,” she said, “but you and I remember it well. What a mess that was.”
“It turned out okay, Dot.”
“The client was playing games with us.”
“That’s true.”
“And then he tried to stiff us out of the final payment.”
“We convinced him to change his mind.”
“And taught him a lesson once the account was paid in full,” she recalled. “Still, neither one of us was in a big rush to run the ad again.”
“No.”
“But you want to be proactive, don’t you? You want this Harrelson to hire us.”
“Well,” he said.
She gave him a look. “He’s met you,” she said. “He knows who you are.”
“He knows my name’s Eric Fischvogel.”
“He saw your face.”
“He barely looked at it. All I was was somebody to talk to, and in a sense he was just talking to himself.”
“He’s in New York. He travels a lot, but his partner-Blyden?”
“Barry Blyden.”
“Blyden’s here in New York, right? And he’s Mr. Inside, he stays put.”
“That’s right.”
“Two things we try to avoid,” she said, “are working for people who know who we are, and working close to home.”
“Sometimes we don’t have any choice.”
“But in this case,” she said, “we do.” She looked long and hard at him. “You want to do this, don’t you? In spite of everything.”
“Well, I could use the work,” he said. “And I could use the money. And here’s the thing, Dot. When he asked me that question out of the blue, had I ever wanted to kill anybody, something just clicked.”
“ Opportunity knocked.”
“Something like that. I want to take the next step, see where it goes.”
Keller, wearing jeans and a Mets warm-up jacket, stood near a water fountain in Central Park. On the phone, he’d designated a particular park bench, and he’d stationed himself where he could keep an eye on it. He’d set the meeting time for 10 P.M., and Claude Harrelson, wearing a suit and carrying a briefcase, was two minutes early.
Keller watched him walk right to the bench and sit down. The man didn’t look around at all, but there was something furtive about him all the same. Keller circled around, came up behind Harrelson, and stood there for a moment.
I’m the man who sat next to you on the flight from Detroit, he’d said on the phone. No names, all right? There was something you wished you could do. Suppose somebody could do it for you. Wouldn’t that solve all your problems?
And here was Harrelson, ready to have his problems solved.
“Don’t turn around,” Keller said quietly, and Harrelson started visibly, but didn’t turn. “I don’t want to see your face, and I don’t want you to see mine. I’m going to touch you, though, because I need to make sure you’re not wearing a wire.” Harrelson offered no resistance, and Keller, who hadn’t really expected to find a wire, made certain Harrelson wasn’t wearing one.
Then he talked, explaining just what was on offer here. He had a friend, an associate, who would undertake to solve Harrelson’s problem in return for a substantial fee, payable half in advance and half on completion of the work. “He won’t know your name,” Keller assured him, “and you won’t know his, and you’ll never meet him, so there’ll be nothing to connect the two of you.”
“I like that part,” Harrelson said.
“So? Have you had enough time to think it over?”
“God knows I’ve been thinking about it,” Harrelson said. “I haven’t been able to think of anything else. It’s strange, you know? For all this time I’ve wanted him dead, I’ve had fantasies of killing him in dozens of different ways. Smashing his skull with a baseball bat, stabbing him, shooting him, running him over with a car. You can’t imagine.”
Keller, who had done all those things and more at one time or another, figured he could imagine well enough. But he didn’t say anything.