“Because if you never got involved with her…”
“It’s more direct than that. I was the client, I ordered the hit on her.”
“If you want to be technical,” she said, “I was the one who ordered it and set it up.”
“Maybe deep down I was angry at you,” he said, “and at myself, but that wasn’t how it felt. I sat there in the plane and I hated the guy, Dot. Him and his toupee and his fake mustache and his costume changes. He did just what I’d wanted him to do, what we were paying him to do, and I hated him for it.”
“I sort of get it,” she said.
“And the other one, Roger, had given us the slip. We went through all this and Roger slept through it, or whatever he did, and he’s still out there for us to worry about. Maybe he was lurking on Crosby Street when the neighbor called the cops, maybe he saw them bring her body out. I didn’t have a shot at Roger, but I had a shot at this bastard that I hated. So I took it.” He shook his head. “Roger’s home by now, cursing his luck. He doesn’t know I did his dirty work for him.”
“How’d you do it, Keller?”
“Followed him to the smoking lounge and stabbed him.”
“Stabbed him?”
“I leaned forward so he could light my cigarette, and I had a knife in my hand, and next thing you knew it was in his chest.”
“A knife.”
“Right.”
“How’d you get it through airport security?”
“It was already there.”
She looked at him.
“I had to fly first class,” he said, “and they serve you a real meal there, as if you were in a restaurant. Cloth napkin, china cup and plate, and metal utensils. When I was done eating, I put the knife in my pocket.”
“You were already planning to do it.”
“What struck me,” he said, “was this was a way to arm yourself after you had cleared the metal detector. At this point there was still a chance I’d find Roger waiting for us at Jacksonville.”
“And you could attack him with your butter knife.”
“It wasn’t a butter knife.”
“No, it was just the sort of thing Davy Crockett killed a bear with.”
“It had a serrated edge,” he said. “You could cut meat with it.”
“My God,” Dot said. “And they let just anybody have these lethal weapons? You’d think they’d fingerprint you before they passed them out.”
“Well, it worked just fine,” he said. “Went between the ribs and into the heart, and he wouldn’t have died any faster if I’d used a twelve-inch Bowie. There were a couple of women yakking away at the other end of the smoking lounge, and they didn’t notice a thing.”
“And you got rid of the knife.”
“And the cigarettes.”
“And spent a few days in Jacksonville, thinking about it.”
“That’s right.”
“Didn’t pick up a phone.”
“I thought about it.”
“Well, that’s the next best thing, isn’t it? If thoughts had wings, I could have heard them flapping. Instead I figured you were dead.”
“I’m sorry, Dot.”
“I figured Roger got you and the hitter both. Figured the bastard turned the hat trick.”
“The hat trick is three,” he said.
“I know that, Keller. The old man was a hockey fan, remember? Knew the names of all the Rangers back to the first year of the franchise. I used to watch hockey matches with him.”
“I didn’t know you were a fan.”
“I wasn’t. I hated it. But I know what a hat trick is. Three goals in one game, all scored by the same player.”
“Right.”
“So I figured Roger got the hat trick.”
“Roger got shut out,” he said. “Roger sat in the doorway with his thumb up his ass while I took out the hitter for him. But even the way you figured it, it wouldn’t have been the hat trick. If he killed me and the hitter, that’s two. Who’s the third?”
“Your girlfriend.”
“My-you mean Maggie?”
“That’s right, I wasn’t supposed to call her your girlfriend. I keep forgetting.”
“Roger didn’t kill her.”
“You sure about that, Keller?”
He stared at her, tried to read her face. He said, “Dot, we saw what happened. She brought a guy home and he left and our hitter went up, and he left, and a little while later the painter on the fourth floor had water coming through the ceiling.”
“Right.”
“The guy she brought home,” he said. “If that was Roger… but it couldn’t have been, because we saw him. And she was still alive when he left, remember? He forgot his keys, and she threw them down to him.”
“His wallet.”
“Whatever. Roger didn’t do anything except lurk in a doorway and eat at a lunch counter, and that’s the one good thing to come out of all this, Dot. Because I got a good look at him. I didn’t know who was who at the time, but I do now, and I can recognize him when I see him again.”
“The man in the cap and windbreaker.”
“Right, Roger.”
“You’d know him if you saw him again.”
“Absolutely.”
“Maybe you would,” she said, “but we’ll never know. Because you’ll never see him again.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Keller,” she said, “you’d better sit down.”
“I am sitting down. I’ve been sitting down for the past twenty minutes.”
“So you are,” she said. “And it’s a good thing. And don’t get up now, Keller. Stay right where you are.”
It was just as well that he was sitting. He didn’t know that what she told him would have knocked him off his feet, but he didn’t know that it wouldn’t, either. One thing he could say was that it was hard to take it all in.
“He was Roger,” he said.
“Right.”
“The guy in the hat and muffler. The guy who sat upstairs across the street, smoking one cigarette after another.”
“Most smokers do it that way, Keller. They smoke them in turn, rather than all at once.”
“The guy who went upstairs to Maggie’s loft. If he was Roger, why would he kill Maggie? He wasn’t getting paid for it. He turned down the assignment, remember? And came in on the sly so he could have a chance to kill off the competition.”
“That’s right.”
“So he was watching the building, waiting for the hitter to make his move. Did he think the guy she brought home was the hitter? No, he would have seen what we saw, her throwing his wallet down to him. He knew she was alive when he went up there.”
“And he knew she was dead when he left.”
“Thus depriving himself of the chance to draw a bead on the man who had a contract on her. So he threw away his hat and went home.”
“With you in hot pursuit.”
“Why would he leave New York without killing the man he came to kill? And why do the hitter’s work for him? What was he trying to do, make him lose face and kill himself? That might work in Japan, but-“
“He already did it, Keller.”
“Did what?”
“Hit the hitter. And we can stop calling him that, incidentally. His name was Marcus Allenby, or at least that’s the name he was registered under.”
“Registered where?”
“The Woodleigh,” she said. “And he had a couple different names on the ID in his wallet, and Allenby wasn’t one of them, and he’d hanged himself with a sheet from the bed, and it was all dramatic enough to get his picture in the Post. The picture didn’t show the cap or the windbreaker, but it was the same guy.”
“Roger drowned Maggie,” Keller said, working it out. “And then he went to the Woodleigh, went to Allenby’s room-Allenby?”
“Got to call him something.”
“Forced his way in, strung the guy up, and left.”
“I think he went to the Woodleigh first. Followed Allenby there, got into the room by posing as a cop or a hotel employee. That part wouldn’t be hard. Then he caught Allenby off guard.”
“And killed him? Then why did he come back after he killed Maggie?”