I was exhausted when I got home, and I fell asleep almost immediately. I woke up late that afternoon and checked the news online. There was a preliminary report of a murder up in the hills. Neighbors heard yelling and fighting from at least three people. Then gunshots. The old man died in the ambulance. I felt all right. I had the pulse of self-preservation, but the murder itself — those two shots to an old man’s gut — wasn’t really biting at me.
Maybe it was very stupid, but I went back to the bar where I’d met Brack and asked after him. I wanted my ten grand, and — though I’m a little embarrassed to say it — I wanted another job. I still wanted to believe there was a valid reason he hadn’t met me on Rook Street or that his phone number was invalid. I saw this whole life of ease and leisure, punctuated by four or five hits a year. Maybe get my price up to an even twenty grand. But after four shots of bad whiskey, the image of me in a tailored suit, skulking in the shadows, sizing up victims, began to dissipate. I wouldn’t be a hit man. I wouldn’t get to call up Brack and say things like The fly has been swatted. I wouldn’t even get my ten grand.
Six thousand bucks to kill a sixty-eight-year-old widower named Keith Pelfrey. The murder was a big local story. A friend of mine from New York even called to see if I was working on it and whether there was anything nationally interesting about an old guy shot on his back lawn. Pelfrey had worked as a financial adviser for forty years before retiring the previous May. He was one of those unostentatious rich guys: nice house, decent car, but nothing crazy. He’d lived at his current address for the past twenty-five years. All his money went to his only child, a daughter named Lana. There were no twin infants and no reason to believe Keith had ever molested a child.
A blogger called me one morning, a young guy who sometimes took me to lunch. He had some family money to keep him upright while he tried to take on local stories, and he liked to hear me talk about turn-of-the-century newsrooms — We had to plug into a telephone jack to look at the Internet.
“The police are basically nowhere,” he told me over seafood. “A burglary gone wrong. Nothing left behind at the site. Really common weapon and ammo. They looked into a guy who robbed a few places with a handgun about ten years back, but that didn’t go anywhere. There’s even a theory that it was just a poor guy who took a wrong turn, went up to Pelfrey’s place to ask directions, and the old man opened fire.”
“Why would the old guy be so paranoid?”
“Old guys living alone? Once night falls, they’re ready to shoot at anything that moves.”
“So the cops have no one on the radar?”
“His daughter, of course. She’s getting all the money, but they seemed close. She’d visit twice a year. They’d bike around the neighborhood with little helmets and kneepads. All very wholesome. And she was in Florida when it happened. Unless you think she hired a guy.”
“That’s pretty far-fetched.”
“Maybe. But I have to say — and this is just raw hunch based on nothing — I have a feeling it’s a professional job.”
“How do you figure that? He didn’t even get inside the house, Pelfrey got three shots at him before he fired back, then our pro gets the old man in the stomach and dashes off before he’s even dead. Doesn’t sound all that well put together.” I ate more shrimp. I’d taken down nearly the entire plate while the kid had been talking. “I’d be wary about paying too much attention to raw hunch. Careful research and reasonable deductions are where the truth usually lies.”
For the first time since I’d known him, he looked at me like I was an old buffoon who didn’t realize his time was up.
“Maybe,” he said. “But it’s the wild ideas that get you clicks.”
He ran with wild ideas for a while but ended up abandoning the story a few weeks later as his blog pivoted from local news to outrage pieces that fed a certain kind of political idiot.
Lana got her money without a hitch and moved to British Columbia, where six months later she married someone called Jonah Reed. Jonah was at least his third legal name. I tracked him back to a man named Lou Kovacs who’d managed a punk band in Georgia. Younger, prettier, but with those same rough, dangerous hands, it sure looked like Brack. Last I could tell, Lana and Jonah had sold all their Canadian property and flown to Amsterdam.
I thought I might feel the guilt eventually, but it hasn’t come. Instead I feel an incredible sense of freedom, and for the first time in years I’m paying my bills with words. Last week my most widely read article was called “Top Ten Vacation Selfies of YouTube Stars.” You might have seen it pop up on your screen, daring you to read it. If you do click on it — or any article like it — you can be sure that you’re reading the work of a journalist who has abandoned any set of morals he may once have had. You can be sure that the writer has stolen from children, or gotten decent folks hooked on smack, or maybe even killed for money. And if you see a typo, an obvious inaccuracy, or a paragraph that seems spliced in from nowhere, don’t tell me about it. I don’t care. I’m making a living.
Jared Lipof
Mastermind
from Salamander
It was the fall the NFL players went on strike, asking that their wage scale be calculated as a function of gross revenue — a demand the team owners recoiled from as if someone had upended a pitcher of urine across each vast mahogany desk. So my father had no Patriots game to watch on television, and he flipped on the Wide World of Sports to endure, in his words, “whatever arcane bullshit Jim McKay feels like blathering on about. It’s probably gonna be cross-country skiing, or curling, or goddamn table tennis.”
“Want to play Mastermind?” I said.
My father looked at me and then back to the TV, where coverage had relocated to a synchronized swimming competition, trying to figure out which option was less unbearable.
“Fine.” But he left the TV on.
Invented by an Israeli postmaster, Mastermind was essentially a game of code-breaking where one player arranged four pegs of different colors behind a shield and the other player had twelve turns to guess the correct sequence. To make matters more difficult, there were six different peg colors and repetition was permitted, meaning there were 64 or 1,296 potential combinations. The code-breaker made his guess and then the code-maker would use even smaller black or white pegs to indicate how far off it was. A black peg meant correct color, correct position. A white peg meant correct color, incorrect position. No peg meant neither. The code-breaker used this information to make the next guess. Failed attempts generated cumulative data, applied in series. Games of this variety generally drove my father batshit, but my mother felt they fostered early cognitive development.
“I’ll be code-maker,” I said.
“Balls,” said my father. He spun the board around to face him and chuckled, which seemed to make him cough. He glanced toward the TV again, as if the NFL strike might have been settled in the past few moments to spare him this tedium.