He picked up the other towel and walked off with it. He spread it out on the sand at the private beach for Gulf Water Towers residents. A glance left and right revealed no one who in any way resembled George Stillman, so Keller stretched out on his back and closed his eyes. The sun, a real stranger to New York of late, was evidently wholly at home in Florida, and felt wonderful on his skin. If it took a while to find Stillman, that was okay with him.
But it didn’t.
Keller opened his eyes after half an hour or so. He sat up and looked around, feeling a little like Punxsutawney Phil on Groundhog Day. When he failed to see either Stillman or his own shadow, he lay down and closed his eyes again.
The next time he opened them was when he heard a man cursing. He sat up, and not twenty yards away was a barrel-chested man, balding and jowly, calling his right hand every name in the book.
How could the fellow be that mad at his own hand? Of course he might have a murderer’s thumb, but what if he did? Keller had one himself, and had never felt the need to talk to it in those terms.
Oh, hell, of course. The man was on a cell phone. And, by God, he was Stillman. The face had barely registered on Keller at first, his attention held by the angry voice and the keg-shaped torso thickly pelted with black hair. None of that had been visible in the head-and-shoulders shot Dot had shown him, and it was what you noticed, but it was the same face, and here he was, and wasn’t that handy?
While Stillman took the sun, Keller did the same. When Stillman got up and walked to the water’s edge, so did Keller. When Stillman waded in, to test his mettle in the surf, Keller followed in his wake.
When Keller came ashore, Stillman stayed behind. And by the time Keller left the beach, carrying two towels and a cellular phone, Stillman had still not emerged from the water.
Why a thumb?
Keller, back in New York, pondered the question. He couldn’t see what a thumb had to do with murder. When you used a gun, it was your index finger that gave the trigger a squeeze. When you used a knife, you held it in your palm with your fingers curled around the handle. Your thumb might press the hilt, as a sort of guide, but a man could have no thumbs at all and still get the business end of a knife to go where he wanted it.
Did you use your thumbs when you garroted somebody? He mimed the motion, letting his hands remember, and he didn’t see where the thumbs had much of a part to play. Manual strangulation, now that was different, and you did use your thumbs, you used all of both hands, and would have a hard time otherwise.
Still, why a murderer’s thumb?
“Here’s what I don’t get,” Dot said. “You go off to some half-a-horse town at the ass end of nowhere special and you poke around for a week or two. Then you go to a vacation paradise in the middle of a New York winter and you’re back the same day. The same day!”
“I had an opening and I took it,” he said. “I wait and maybe I never get that good a shot at him again.”
“I realize that, Keller, and God knows I’m not complaining. It just seems like a shame, that’s all. Here you are, the two of you, fresh off a couple of planes from the frozen North, and before either one of you gets the chill out of your bones, you’re on a flight to New York and he’s rapidly approaching room temperature.”
“Water temperature.”
“I stand corrected.”
“And it was like a bathtub.”
“That’s nice,” she said. “He could have opened his veins in it, but after you held his head underwater for a few minutes he no longer felt the need to. But couldn’t you have waited a few days? You’d have come home with a tan and he’d have gone into the ground with one. You meet your Maker, you want to look your best.”
“Sure,” he said. “Dot, have you ever noticed anything odd about my thumb?”
“Your thumb?”
“This one. Does it look strange to you?”
“You know,” she said, “I’ve got to hand it to you, Keller. That’s the most complete change of subject I’ve ever encountered in my life. I’d be hard put to remember what we were talking about before we started talking about your thumb.”
“Well?”
“Don’t tell me you’re serious? Let me see. I’d have to say it looks like a plain old thumb to me, but you know what they say. You’ve seen one thumb...”
“But look, Dot. That’s the whole point, that they’re not identical. See how this one goes?”
“Oh, right. It’s got that little...”
“Uh-huh.”
“Are mine both the same? Like two peas in a pod, as far as I can make out. This one’s got a little scar at the base, but don’t ask me how I got it because I can’t remember. Keller, you made your point. You’ve got an unusual thumb.”
“Do you believe in destiny, Dot?”
“Whoa! Keller, you just switched channels again. I thought we were discussing thumbs.”
“I was thinking about Louisville.”
“I’m going to take the remote control away from you, Keller. It’s not safe in your hands. Louisville?”
“You remember when I went there.”
“Vividly. Kids playing basketball, guy in a garage, and, if I remember correctly, the subtle magic of carbon monoxide.”
“Right.”
“So?”
“Remember how I had a bad feeling about it, and then a couple got killed in my old room, and—”
“I remember the whole business, Keller. What about it?”
“I guess I’ve just been wondering how much of life is destined and preordained. How much choice do people really have?”
“If we had a choice,” she said, “we could be having some other conversation.”
“I never set out to be what I’ve become. It’s not like I took an aptitude test in high school and my guidance counselor took me aside and recommended a career as a killer for hire.”
“You drifted into it, didn’t you?”
“That’s what I always thought. That’s certainly what it felt like. But suppose I was just fulfilling my destiny?”
“I don’t know,” she said, cocking her head. “Shouldn’t there be music playing in the background? There always is when they have conversations like this in one of my soap operas.”
“Dot, I’ve got a murderer’s thumb.”
“Oh, for the love of God, we’re back to your thumb. How did you manage that, and what in the hell are you talking about?”
“Palmistry,” he said. “In palmistry, a thumb like mine is called a murderer’s thumb.”
“In palmistry.”
“Right.”
“I grant you it’s an unusual-looking thumb,” she said, “although I never noticed it in all the years I’ve known you, and never would have noticed it if you hadn’t pointed it out. But where does the murderer part come in? What do you do, kill people by running your thumb across their lifeline?”
“I don’t think you actually do anything with your thumb.”
“I don’t see what you could do, aside from hitching a ride. Or making a rude gesture.”
“All I know,” he said, “is I had a murderer’s thumb and I grew up to be a murderer.”
“ ‘His Thumb Made Him Do It.’ ”
“Or was it the other way around? Maybe my thumb was normal at birth, and it changed as my character changed.”
“That sounds crazy,” she said, “but you ought to be able to clear it up, because you’ve been carrying that thumb around all your life. Was it always like that?”
“How do I know? I never paid much attention to it.”
“Keller, it’s your thumb.”
“But did I notice it was different from other thumbs? I don’t know, Dot. Maybe I should see somebody.”