Hit List

Shall I go ahead with this?”
    Keller told him to wait. From a pay phone, he called his own apartment in New York. While it rang he had the eerie feeling that the call would be answered, and that the voice he heard would be his own, talking to him. He shook his head, amused at the workings of his own mind, and then he did in fact hear his own voice, inviting him to leave a message. It was his answering machine, of course, but it took him a split second to realize as much, and he almost dropped the phone.
    There were no messages.
    He broke the connection and called Dot in White Plains, and she picked up halfway through the first ring. “Good,” she said. “It worked. I thought of having you paged. ‘Mr. Keller, Mr. John Keller, please pick up the white courtesy phone.’ But do we really want your name booming out over a loudspeaker?”
    “I wouldn’t think so.”
    “And would you even hear it? He’ll be through the airport like a shot, I thought. He won’t have to stop at the baggage claim, and as soon as he picks up his rental car he’s out of there. Bingo, I thought.”
    “So you called Avis.”
    “I called everybody. I remembered the name on that license and credit card of yours, but suppose you were using something else? Anyway, Avis had your reservation, and they said they’d see that you got the message, and they were as good as their word. So it worked.”
    “Not entirely,” he said. “While they were at it, they canceled my reservation.”
    “ I canceled your reservation, Keller. You don’t need a car because you’re not going anywhere, aside from the next plane back to New York.”
    “Oh?”
    “Three hours ago, while you were over what? Illinois? Iowa?”
    “Whatever.”
    “While you were experiencing slight turbulence at thirty-five thousand feet,” she said, “a couple of uniforms were making vain efforts to revive Heck Palmieri, who had put his belt around his neck, closed the closet door around the free end of the belt, and kicked over the chair he was standing on. Guess what happened to him?”
    “He died?”
    “For our sins,” Dot said, “or for his own, more likely. Either way, it leaves you with nothing to do out there. Other hand, who says you have to make a U-turn? I’ll bet you can find somebody to rent you a car.”
    “They were all set to reinstate the reservation.”
    “Well, reinstate it, if you want. Have some lunch, see the sights. You’re where, Orange County? Go look at some Republicans.”
    “Well,” Keller said. “I guess I’ll come home.”
    “It’s a good way to miss jet lag,” Keller said, “because I was back where I started before it could draw a bead on me.”
    “How were your flights?”
    “All right, I guess. Pointless, but otherwise all right.”
    They were on the open front porch of the big house on Taunton Place, sitting in lawn chairs with a pitcher of iced tea on the table between them. It was a warm day, warmer than it had been in Southern California. Of course he’d never really felt the temperature there, because he’d never stepped outside of the air-conditioned airport.
    “Not entirely pointless,” Dot said. “They paid half in advance, and we get to keep that.”
    “I should hope so.”
    “They called here,” she said, “to call it off, but of course your flight to California was already in the air by then. They said something about a refund, and I said something about they should live so long.”
    “A refund!”
    “They were just trying it on, Keller. They backed down right away.”
    “They should pay the whole thing,” he said.
    “How do you figure that?”
    “Well, the guy’s dead, isn’t he?”
    “By his own hand, Keller. His own belt, anyway. What did you have to do with it?”
    “What did I have to do with Klinger? Or Petrosian?”
    “May they rest in peace,” Dot said, “but they’re our little secret, remember? Far as the clients were concerned, you showed them the door, sent them on their way. With Palmieri, you were up in the air when he decided to check out the tensile strength of a one-inch strip of split cowhide. Don’t look at me like that, Keller. I don’t really know what kind of belt he used. The point is you were nowhere around, so how are they going to figure it was your doing?”
    “Something you said last time,” he said. “About how my thoughts are powerful.”
    “Oh, right, I’ll quick pick up the phone and sell that to the client. ‘My guy closed his eyes and thought real