Hit Man

with the book. He put it down, picked up the phone, and dialed June’s number.
    “It’s Dale,” he said. “I was sitting here and—”
    “Oh, Dale,” she cut in, “you’re so thoughtful to call. Isn’t it terrible? Isn’t it the most awful thing?”
    “Uh,” he said.
    “I can’t talk now,” she said. “I can’t even think straight. I’ve never been so upset in my life. Thank you, Dale, for being so thoughtful.”
    She hung up and left him staring at the phone. Unless she was a better actress than he would have guessed, she sounded absolutely overcome. He was surprised that news of Edith Bodine’s death could have reached her so soon, but far more surprised that she could be taking it so hard. Was there more to all this than met the eye? Were Hobie’s wife and mistress actually close friends? Or were they—Jesus—more than just good friends?
    Things were certainly a lot simpler for Randolph Scott.
    * * *
    The same bartender was on duty at Joe’s. “I don’t guess your friend Hobie’ll be coming around tonight,” he offered. “I suppose you heard the news.”
    “Uh,” Keller said. Some Back Street affair, he thought, if the whole town was ready to comfort Hobie before the body was cold.
    “Hell of a thing,” the man went on. “Terrible loss for this town. Martingale won’t be the same without him.”
    “This news,” Keller said carefully. “I think maybe I missed it. What happened, anyway?”
    He called the airlines from his motel room. The next flight out of Casper wasn’t until morning. Of course, if he wanted to drive to Denver—
    He didn’t want to drive to Denver. He booked the first flight out in the morning, using the Whitlock name and the Whitlock credit card.
    No need to stick around, not with Lyman Crowder stretched out somewhere getting pumped full of embalming fluid. Dead in a car crash on I-25 North, the very accident that had slowed Keller down on his way back from Sheridan.
    He wouldn’t be around for the funeral, but should he send flowers? It was quite clear that he shouldn’t. Still, the impulse was there.
    He dialed 1-800- FLOWERS and sent a dozen roses to Mrs. Dale Whitlock in Rowayton, charging them to Whitlock’s American Express account. He asked them to enclose a card reading “Just because I love you—Dale.”
    He felt it was the least he could do.
    Two days later he was on Taunton Place in White Plains, making his report. Accidents were always good, the man told him. Accidents and natural causes, always the best. Oh, sometimes you needed a noisy hit to send a message, but the rest of the time you couldn’t beat an accident.
    “Good you could arrange it,” the man said.
    Would have taken a hell of an arranger, Keller thought. First you’d have had to arrange for Lyman Crowder to be speeding north in his pickup. Then you’d have had to get an unemployed sheepherder named Danny Vasco good and drunk and send him hurtling toward Martingale, racing his own pickup—Jesus, didn’t they drive anything but pickups?—racing it at ninety-plus miles an hour, and proceeding southbound in the northbound lane. Arrange for a few near misses. Arrange for Vasco to brush a school bus and sideswipe a minivan, and then let him ram Crowder head-on.
    Some arrangement.
    If the man in White Plains had any idea that the client was dead as well, or even who the client was, he gave no sign to Keller. On the way out, Dot asked him how Crowder pronounced his name.
    “Rhymes with chowder, ” he said.
    “I knew you’d find out,” she said. “Keller, are you all right? You seem different.”
    “Just awed by the workings of Fate,” he said.
    “Well,” she said, “that’ll do it.”
    On the train back to the city he thought about the workings of Fate. Earlier he’d tried to tell himself that his side trip to Las Vegas had been a waste of time and money and human life. All he’d had to do was wait a day for Danny Vasco to take the game off the boards.
    Never would have happened.
    Without his trip to Vegas, there would have been no wreck on the highway. One event had opened some channel that allowed the other to happen. He couldn’t explain this, couldn’t make sense out of it, but somehow he knew it was true.
    Everything had happened exactly the way it had had to happen. Encountering June in the Meet ’n’ Cheat, running into Hobie at the Burnout Bar. He could no more have avoided those meetings than he could have kept himself from buying the paperback