Hit List

conversation.”
    “No, I didn’t call.”
    “No kidding, you didn’t call. Which would have been fine. I’m not your mother, I don’t get palpitations if a Sunday comes and goes without a phone call from you. If there’s nothing to report, why should you feel compelled to make a phone call?”
    “Dot—“
    “Then Monday afternoon I got a FedEx delivery. A little package about half the size of a cigar box, and guess what it was full of?”
    “Not cigars.”
    “Money,” she said, “and that threw me, because who would be sending me money? Coincidentally enough, it was just the amount we would have had coming if you’d closed the file in Baltimore. So I took a train to the city, bought the Baltimore Sun at the out-of-town newsstand, and read it on the way back to White Plains. Guess what I found.”
    “Uh—“
    “Macnamara surprised a burglar in her Fells Point home,” she said, “but his surprise was nothing compared to hers when he grabbed the fireplace poker and beat her head in with it. Now this has to be news to you, Keller, because of course otherwise you would have called. So it’s the famous Keller luck, right? Someone else helped us out and did the dirty deed, and we get the credit.”
    “I did it, Dot.”
    “No kidding.”
    “It was late by the time I got home Sunday night.”
    “Too late to call?”
    “Well, pretty late.”
    “And it was early when you left for court yesterday.”
    “I was a little rushed,” he said. “I had to pack a change of clothes, in case we were going to be sequestered overnight, and by then I was running late.”
    “And last night?”
    “We were sequestered.”
    “They didn’t let you make a phone call?”
    “No telling how secure the line was.”
    “I suppose. But what about before you got on the train in Baltimore? Sunday afternoon, Sunday evening, whenever it was. I’d have accepted a collect call, if you were out of quarters.”
    “I didn’t think of it.”
    “You didn’t think of it.”
    “I had things on my mind.”
    “Like what?”
    “Well, the trial,” he said. “You want to know something, Dot? I had the trial on my mind the whole time. Even in Baltimore, figuring out how to close the deal and then actually going and doing it, I kept thinking about the lawyers and the witnesses and that poor jerk Huberman.”
    “And how did it come out? And don’t tell me you’re not supposed to talk about the case, because the outcome’s a matter of record.”
    “Actually,” he said, “it’s okay to talk about it now. And we found him guilty.”
    “So he goes to jail.”
    “I guess so, but that part’s not up to us. He’s remanded to custody until sentencing.”
    “He’ll get what, a couple of years?”
    “Something like that.”
    “You went down to Baltimore and clipped a woman, and then you came back to New York and put a man away for a few years for selling a hot television set.”
    “A VCR.”
    “Well, that makes all the difference. Don’t you see a contradiction here, Keller? Or at least an irony?”
    He thought about it. “No,” he said. “One’s my job and the other’s my duty.”
    “And you did them both.”
    “That’s right.”
    “And we got paid, and Huberman’s headed upstate.”
    “That’s right,” he said. “The system works.”

Twenty-four
----
    Odd, Keller thought.
    He’d called his astrologer, Louise Carpenter, the night he came back from Baltimore. He couldn’t remember why, something about wondering if the moon was full, and you didn’t have to call an expert to determine something like that. He supposed he’d just had the urge to talk to her, and when she didn’t answer he got over it.
    Then a week or so later he called again, and it wasn’t Sunday evening this time, it was a weekday, and normal business hours, if there was such a thing for an astrologer. Middle of the afternoon, middle of the week, and no answer. No answering machine, either.
    He’d frowned, puzzled, and then he’d decided she was out of town. Astrologers very likely took vacations, just like anybody else. Maybe she was on a beach somewhere, looking up at the stars.
    He’d let it go, and hadn’t thought about the woman since, until the call from Dot.
    He was reading a stamp magazine when she called, absorbed in a story about forged overprints on early French colonial issues. There were a lot of legitimate varieties, as well as an abundance of forgeries, and it wasn’t all that easy to tell the difference. He was