A professional killer taking out a target isn’t self-defense, obviously; but I didn’t figure killing somebody who was already dead was anything I couldn’t live with. Because anybody that somebody else had decided needed to be killed was already dead, at least when that somebody else was powerful enough and determined enough to go the extra yard and hire a killer.
And yet I wouldn’t be the killer, not really. I’d just be the mechanism. The killer had hired the job. And if it wasn’t me, it would be somebody else getting paid. And fuck somebody else, anyway.
Now the Broker had provided the target’s pattern. Somebody had been in before me to do surveillance, and had taken it all down, and I’d been provided with the data. But it was pretty worthless-the Broker knew that-and I’d been told I’d have to basically start from scratch. The hope was that the prof’s life during the uncharted territory of his Christmas break would be leisurely. Maybe he’d burrow in and write a book or something.
No such luck.
I had taken a chance and got started at dusk, parking the Maverick in the garage of the split-level behind my surveillance post (as per instruction), and I had barely settled in at the window, my thermos nearby, a little portable radio quietly playing an FM station that mixed hits with album cuts, when the first female showed up at the cobblestone cottage.
She was driving a little red Fiat and was small and fair and pretty in a Breck Girl kind of way. I took her for a blonde but truth be told she had on a rabbit-fur hat that looked like a beehive hairdo gone wacky (wackier) and I couldn’t see any hair except for dark eyebrows. Her coat was light green corduroy with a rabbit collar like the hat and she had similarly fur-trimmed tan suede boots with heels. Her legs were black, or that is, her leggings were.
I shut off the radio and cranked the window open enough to let in the cold and some outside sound.
The way she slammed the car door, you just knew she was pissed off. Then she tromped up the graduated cement sidewalk with similar irritated determination; up on the little stoop, she opened the storm door and then her tan-gloved right fist hammered the dark wood of the front door like she was driving a nail. There was a brass knocker, but she apparently preferred hammering.
She paused, waited for ten seconds, then hammered some more.
Nothing.
I knew the prof was in there-I’d seen him moving around through the front room windows, whose curtains were open.
Then the girl-and she was a girl, maybe nineteen- noticed those windows herself and came down off the stoop to tippy-toe at the evergreen bushes to peek in. She seemed to see nothing. Then she strode across the front yard, arms pistoning, pretty little jaw firm, stopped to look in a window of the little free-standing cobblestone garage where the prof kept his Volvo, then disappeared around the house.
I heard some more hammering. I took a bite of turkey and Swiss-pretty bad. Thin slices of would-be meat and processed cheese that took more chewing than cheese really should. I swigged at a Coke-I’d brought a few cans along, for the caffeine, and they stayed cold outside of space heater range-and let its sweetness wash away the bad sandwich. Some more hammering.
Then she came marching around the house on the other side, looking like a soldier in a high school operetta with that high furry hat-you could thank Doctor Zhivago for this shit, I supposed-and she made her way up onto the porch.
She did not hammer.
She screamed: “I know you’re in there, you prick!”
I smiled to myself. Nibbled some more sandwich. With a show to watch, it went down better.
“ You fucking, cock — sucking prick!”
I laughed a little. I liked her. But I had a feeling she wasn’t a major player in the melodrama I’d just been inserted into. This was the tail end of her performance, I figured, based upon the surveillance info the Broker gave me.
I was right.
“ You mother- fucking, dick- licking son of a fucking bitch! ”
I recalled how much trouble a girl I’d known in junior high had got into when she told a friend of hers, who’d moved in on her guy, to go to hell between classes. A week of detention, and lucky not to be expelled. Things had changed in a very few years in this country.
The door opened, not at all tentatively, in fact with a suddenness that showed the novelist had a non-fictional way of making a point. He was tall and he was skinny, a handsome Ichabod Crane, his face narrow and well-carved with a hawkish nose the dominant feature, his hair dark blonde and shaggy but not hippie-length, his eyebrows unruly. He was wearing a maroon terry-cloth bathrobe, belt knotted at the waist, with a white t-shirt peeking out, and his legs were bare, his feet in slippers.
He looked side to side, perhaps to see if any neighbors were observing this little scene, but his neighbors were well away from him and of course he had no idea I was spying.
He said, “Is this really necessary, Alice? Haven’t we said our goodbyes?”
I think that was what he said. He was speaking at a normal level, and I was across the street, but the clear cold air carried well, and he had a lecture-room baritone.
“You bastard!” she said, and she started pounding on his chest with both gloved fists, at least as hard as she’d hammered the door.
He took her by the shoulders and held her out away from him like an archeologist appraising a find. His arms were long and she was petite. She was screaming at him, no words, not even obscenities, and he shook her, hard, the way you might a child, if you were a sucky parent, anyway.
Turned out I was right, she was a blonde: he shook that rabbit-fur hat right off her head. She had lots of blonde hair, long and flowing, and from my perch she seemed a real doll. But from my perch I knew the prof had already moved on: advance surveillance info indicated Byron’s latest conquest as being a brunette on the tall side, specifically a grad student in his creative writing class name of Annette Girard.
“What we did I’ll never forget,” he told her, clasping her by the arms, working in compassion and regret the way a cook might sprinkle paprika. “But I’m a married man and twice your age. Let’s cherish what we have, and go back to our lives.”
She said something that I couldn’t quite make out; more a whimper than speech, really, but I got the feeling she said she wanted to come in.
That was her best card-she had to play it. If she could get the prof inside that house, then inside her, she was back in the game. I wondered if she knew about the brunette.
“What do you see in that cunt, anyway? She’s a stick! She’s a skinny fucking stick!”
Apparently she knew about the brunette.
“I’m Annette’s faculty advisor,” he said, “and her teacher. She is also my teaching assistant. What we had, you and I, Alice…was special. Unique. My relationship with Annette is strictly…teacher-pupil.”
“Right! Cocksucking 101!”
“That’s enough.” He took her by the arm and he marched her down the stoop’s stairs and the sidewalk, practically dragging her, his bathrobe flapping, belt coming undone, skinny bare legs showing. Her eyes were like a raccoon’s, black-ringed hysteria, the mascara wet and running. Her lips were trembling.
Now she was saying, “I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you,” how many times I lost count.
At her car, he looked to his left but not to his right-this I took not to be checking on the neighbors but seeing if anybody was coming from the main drag half a mile or so down. I got the impression this scene with Alice was not one he would like Annette to come in on.
Then it occurred to me that Alice and Annette were both A’s, and were in alphabetical order, at that. Maybe Professor Hefner was working his way through his female students. If so, he was using the second semester list, and starting over. This stud would have covered more ground in the first semester than just a couple of damn A’s.