Hit List

up one of the price lists. They must have had them at the opening, but at the time he hadn’t known to look for one.
    He spent two full hours at the gallery, going from canvas to canvas.
    Back at his apartment, he gave Dot a call. “I’ve been thinking,” he said.
    “You want to bail. Pull the plug. Cut and run. Well, I can’t say I blame you.”
    “No.”
    “No?”
    He shook his head, then remembered he was on the phone. “No,” he said, “that’s not it. I was wondering about the client.”
    “What about him?”
    “It’s a him?”
    “It’s a generic pronoun, Keller. What do you want me to say, ‘them’? ‘It’? ‘I was wondering about the client.’ ‘The client? What about him or her?’ I’m an old-fashioned girl, Keller. I do like my eighth-grade English teacher taught me.”
    “As,” he said.
    “Huh?”
    “You do as your teacher taught you.”
    “The suggestion that comes to mind,” she said, “is not one I learned from Mrs. Jepson, and anyway I don’t think it’s physically possible. So never mind. What about the client?”
    “Who is he?”
    “Or she? No idea.”
    “Because I’m having trouble figuring out why anybody would want to kill this guy. Except maybe someone from the logging industry.”
    “Huh?”
    “He paints pictures of trees, and after you’ve looked at them you wouldn’t want to cut one down.”
    “So what is it you’re turning into, Keller? A tree hugger or an art lover?”
    “I went out to Williamsburg last night, and—“
    “You think that was wise?”
    “Well, I might want to close the sale out there. So I had to do a little reconnaissance.”
    “I guess.”
    “It’s a nice neighborhood, artsy but honest. Place has a good feel to it.”
    “And you want to move there.”
    “I don’t want to move anywhere, Dot. But do you think you could find out anything about the client? Call the guy who called you, nose around a little?”
    “Why?”
    “Why?”
    “Yeah, why? It’s tricky enough, working in your hometown. Why muck it up more?”
    “Well . . .”
    “He won’t tell me anything. He’s a pro. And so am I, so I won’t even ask. And you’re a pro yourself, Keller. Need I say more?”
    “No, never mind. You know what he gets for a painting?”
    “The subject?”
    “Ten thousand dollars. That’s on the average. The bigger ones are a little more, the smaller ones are a little less.”
    “Like diamonds,” she said, “or, I don’t know. Apartments. What’s it matter what he gets? You don’t want to buy one, do you?”
    He didn’t say anything.
    “Oh, Lord have mercy,” she said. “That’s brilliant, Keller. You do the guy and you hammer a nail in your wall and hang up one of his paintings. Nothing quite so professional as keeping a little memento of the occasion.”
    “Dot . . .”
    “If you absolutely have to have a souvenir,” she said, “why don’t you cut off one of his ears? You’ll save yourself ten grand just like that. Anyone asks, you can tell ’em it was Van Gogh’s.”
    “There,” Maggie Griscomb said. “Now wasn’t that nice?”
    Keller would have said something, but he wasn’t sure he was capable of forming sentences.
    “As I worked my way through the Kellers,” she went on, “the Johns and the Jonathans and the mere Js, I wanted to kill the man who invented the Touch-Tone phone. With an old-fashioned rotary dial I never would have bothered in the first place. Because I knew you weren’t going to be in the book. Not the Manhattan book, anyway. I figured you lived in Scarsdale.”
    “Why Scarsdale?”
    “Well, someplace like it. Westchester or Long Island, or maybe Connecticut. Well-to-do suburban.”
    “I live in Manhattan.”
    “Why would you want to bring up kids in Manhattan?”
    “I don’t have any. I’m not married.”
    “I thought of seeing what John Kellers I could find in Westchester,” she said, “but you’d be at the office and I’d get your wife.”
    “I don’t have a wife.”
    “So then I thought of calling your office.”
    He didn’t have an office, either. “How? I never said where I worked.”
    “I was going to work my way through the Fortune 500 companies until I got you. But then you called me and saved me the trouble.”
    “I guess you see me as a corporate type.”
    “And why would I jump to a conclusion like that?” She put her hand on him. “Pegged you at a glance, Keller. Did you show up at the opening in basic black? Were you making a statement in