Hit Man

head on home?”
    * * *
    Back from his solitary walk, Keller looked at the phone and wished there was a way he could call Nelson. He’d avoided getting an answering machine, seeing great potential for disaster in such a device, but it would be useful now. He could call up and talk, and Nelson would be able to hear him.
    And, if he really opened up and spoke his mind, it would all be there on the tape, where anybody could retrieve it. No, he decided, it was just as well he didn’t have a machine.
    At noon the following day he was in his rented car when Dinsmore and his bodyguard drove downtown and parked in front of a restaurant in the Old Market district. Keller waited outside for a few minutes, then found a parking space and went in after them. The hostess seated Keller just two tables away from Dinsmore. Keller ordered shrimp scampi and watched Dinsmore and the wrestler each put away an enormous steak.
    A couple of hours later he called Dot in White Plains. “Guy’s forty pounds overweight and here I just saw him tuck into a porterhouse the size of a manhole cover,” he said. “Put half a shaker of salt on it first. How much of a rush are these people in? Because they shouldn’t have to wait too long before a stroke or a coronary closes the account.”
    “There’s no cause like a natural cause,” Dot said. “But you know what they say about time, Keller.”
    “It’s of the essence?”
    “Yabba dabba do,” Dot said.
    The next day Dinsmore and his bodyguard had the same table at the same restaurant. This time a third man accompanied them. He looked to be a business associate of Dinsmore’s. Keller couldn’t overhear the conversation, he was seated a little farther away this time, but he could see that Dinsmore and the third man were doing the talking, while the bodyguard divided his attention between the food on his plate and the other diners in the room. Keller had brought a newspaper along and managed to have his eyes on it when the bodyguard glanced his way.
    At one point Dinsmore got to his feet, and Keller’s pulse quickened. Before he could react, the bodyguard was also standing, and both men walked off to the men’s room. Keller stayed where he was and ate his spaghetti carbonara.
    He was watching out of the corner of his eye when the two men returned to their table. The bodyguard took a moment to scan the room, while Dinsmore sat down at once and shook some more salt onto his half-eaten steak.
    Almost without thinking, Keller reached out and let his hand close around his own salt cellar. It was made of glass, and fit his fist like a roll of nickels. If he were to hit someone now, the salt cellar would lend considerable authority to the blow.
    Damn thing was lethal.
    That night Keller had a couple of drinks after dinner. He still felt them when he got back to his motel. He walked around the block to sober up, and when he got back to his room he picked up the phone and called Nelson.
    He wasn’t drunk enough to expect the dog to answer. But it seemed to him that this was a way to make a minimal sort of contact. The phone would ring. The dog would hear it ring. While he could not be expected to recognize it as his master’s voice, Keller would have reached out and touched him, as they said in the phone company ads.
    No, of course it didn’t make sense. Dialing the number, he knew it didn’t make sense. But it wouldn’t cost anything, and there wouldn’t be a record of the call, so what harm could it do?
    The line was busy.
    His first reaction—and it was extremely brief, just momentary—was one of jealous paranoia. The dog was on the phone with someone else, and they were talking about Keller.
    The thought came and went in an instant, leaving Keller to shake his head in wonder at the mysteries of his own mind. A flood of other explanations came to him, each of them far more probable than that first thought.
    Nelson could have lurched into the end table on which the phone sat, knocking it off the hook. Andria, using the phone before or after their walk, could have replaced the receiver incorrectly. Or, most probably, the long-distance circuits were overloaded, and any call to New York would be rewarded with a busy signal.
    A few minutes later he tried again and got a busy signal again.
    He walked back and forth, fighting the impulse to call the operator and have her check the line. Eventually he picked up the phone and tried the number a third time, and this time it rang. He let it ring