Hit Man

Maybe you ought to call her. Maybe FedEx lost it and it’s in a back office somewhere.”
    “I’m way ahead of you, boy. I called her.”
    “And?”
    “Line’s been disconnected. . . . You still there, Keller?”
    “I’m trying to think. You’re sure that—”
    “I called back, got the same recording. ‘The number you have reached, blah blah blah, has been disconnected.’ Leaves no room for doubt.”
    “No.”
    “The money doesn’t show up, and now the line’s been disconnected. Does it begin to make you wonder?”
    “Maybe they arrested her,” he said. “Before she could send the money.”
    “And stuck her in a cell and left her there? A quiet lady who writes about deaf rabbits?”
    “Well—”
    “Let me pull out and pass a few slow-moving vehicles,” she said. “What I did, I called Information in St. Louis.”
    “St. Louis?”
    “Webster Groves is a suburb of St. Louis.”
    “Webster Groves.”
    “Where Cressida Wallace lives, according to that reference book in the library.”
    “But she moved,” Keller said.
    “You’d think so, wouldn’t you? But the Information operator had a listing for her. So I called the number. Guess what?”
    “Come on, Dot.”
    “A woman answered. No answering machine, no computer-generated horseshit. ‘Hello?’ ‘Cressida Wallace, please.’ ‘This is she.’ Well, it wasn’t the voice I remembered. ‘Is this Cressida Wallace, the author?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘The author of How the Bunny Lost His Ears ?’ ”
    “And she said it was?”
    “Well, how many Cressida Wallaces do you figure there are? I didn’t know what the hell to say next. I told her I was from the Muscatine paper, I wanted to know her impressions of the town. Keller, she didn’t know what I was talking about. I had to tell her what state Muscatine was in.”
    “You’d think she’d have at least heard of it,” he said. “It’s not that far from St. Louis.”
    “I don’t think she gets out much. I think she sits in her house and writes her stories. I found out this much. She’s lived in the same house in Webster Groves for thirty years.”
    He took a deep breath. He said, “Where are you, Dot?”
    “Where am I? I’m at an outdoor pay phone half a mile from the house. I’m getting rained on.”
    “Go on home,” he said. “Give me an hour or so and I’ll call you back.”
    * * *
    “All right,” he said, closer to two hours later. “Here’s how it shapes up. Stephen Lauderheim wasn’t some creep, stalking some innocent woman.”
    “We figured that.”
    “He was a partner in Loud & Clear Software. He and a fellow named Randall Cleary started the firm. Lauderheim and Cleary, Loud & Clear.”
    “Cute.”
    “Lauderheim was married, father of two, bowled in a league, belonged to Rotary and the Jaycees.”
    “Hardly the type to kidnap a dog and torture it to death.”
    “You wouldn’t think so.”
    “Who set him up? The wife?”
    “I figure the partner. Company was doing great and one of the big Silicon Valley firms was looking to buy them out. My guess is one of them wanted to sell and the other didn’t. Or there was some kind of partnership insurance in place. One partner dies, the other buys him out at a prearranged price, pays off the widow with the proceeds of the partnership insurance policy. Of course the company’s now worth about twenty times what they agreed to.”
    “How’d you get all this, Keller?”
    “Called the city room at the Muscatine paper, said I was covering the death for a computer magazine and could they fax me the obit and anything they’d run on the killing.”
    “You’ve got a fax?”
    “The candy store around the corner’s got one. All the guy in Muscatine could tell from the number I gave him was it was in New York.”
    “Nice.”
    “After the fax came in, the stuff he sent gave me some ideas for other calls to make. I could sit on the phone for another hour and find out more, but I figure that’s enough.”
    “More than enough,” she said. “Keller, the little shit foxed us. And then she stiffed us in the bargain.”
    “That’s what I don’t get,” he said. “Why stiff us? All he had to do was send the money and I’d never have thought of Iowa again unless I was flying over it. He was home free. All he had to do was pay what he owed.”
    “Cheap son of a bitch,” Dot said.
    “But where’s the sense? He paid out half the money without even knowing who he was sending it to. If he could afford to do that on