He could kill Lyman Crowder. He’d be keeping it simple, carrying out the mission as it had been given to him. And it would solve everybody’s problems. June and Hobie could get the divorce they both so desperately wanted.
On the downside, they’d both be losing the man each regarded as the greatest thing since microwave popcorn.
He could toss a coin and take out either June or her husband, thus serving as a sort of divorce court of last resort. If it came up heads, June could spend the rest of her life cheating on a ghost. If it was tails, Yarnell could have his cake and Edith, too. Only a question of time until she stopped calling him Bart and took to calling him Hobie, of course, and next thing you knew she would turn up at the Holiday Inn, dropping her quarter in the slot to play “Third-Rate Romance, Low-Rent Rendezvous.”
It struck Keller that there ought to be some sort of solution that didn’t involve lowering the population. But he knew he was the person least likely to come up with it.
If you had a medical problem, the treatment you got depended on the sort of person you went to. You didn’t expect a surgeon to manipulate your spine, or prescribe herbs and enemas, or kneel down and pray with you. Whatever the problem was, the first thing the surgeon would do was look around for something to cut. That’s how he’d been trained, that’s how he saw the world, that’s what he did.
Keller, too, was predisposed to a surgical approach. While others might push counseling or 12-step programs, Keller reached for a scalpel. But sometimes it was difficult to tell where to make the incision.
Kill ’em all, he thought savagely, and let God sort ’ em out. Or ride off into the sunset with your tail between your legs.
First thing in the morning. Keller drove to Sheridan and caught a plane to Salt Lake City. He paid cash for his ticket, and used the name John Richards. At the TWA counter in Salt Lake City he bought a one-way ticket to Las Vegas and again paid cash, this time using the name Alan Johnson.
At the Las Vegas airport he walked around the long-term parking lot as if looking for his car. He’d been doing this for five minutes or so when a balding man wearing a glen plaid sportcoat parked a two-year-old Plymouth and removed several large suitcases from its trunk, affixing them to one of those aluminum luggage carriers. Wherever he was headed, he’d packed enough to stay there for a while.
As soon as he was out of sight, Keller dropped to a knee and groped the undercarriage until he found the magnetized Hide-A-Key. He always looked before breaking into a car, and he got lucky about one time in five. As usual, he was elated. It was a good omen, finding a key. It boded well.
Keller had been to Vegas frequently over the years. He didn’t like the place, but he knew his way around. He drove to Caesars Palace and left his borrowed Plymouth for the attendant to park. He knocked on the door of an eighth-floor room until its occupant protested that she was trying to sleep.
He said, “It’s news from Martingale, Miss Bodine. For Christ’s sake, open the door.”
She opened the door a crack but kept the chain fastened. She was about the same age as June but looked older, her black hair a mess, her eyes bleary, her face still bearing traces of yesterday’s makeup.
“Crowder’s dead,” he said.
Keller could think of any number of things she might have said, ranging from “What happened?” to “Who cares?” This woman cut to the chase. “You idiot,” she said. “What are you doing here?”
Mistake.
“Let me in,” he said, and she did.
Another mistake.
The attendant brought Keller’s Plymouth and seemed happy with the tip Keller gave him. At the airport, someone else had left a Toyota Camry in the spot where the balding man had originally parked the Plymouth, and the best Keller could do was wedge it into a spot one aisle over and a dozen spaces off to the side. He figured the owner would find it, and hoped he wouldn’t worry that he was in the early stages of Alzheimer’s.
Keller flew to Denver as Richard Hill, to Sheridan as David Edwards. En route he thought about Edith Bodine, who’d evidently slipped on a wet tile in the bathroom of her room at Caesars, cracking her skull on the side of the big tub. With theDO NOT DISTURB sign hanging from the doorknob and the air conditioner at its highest setting, there was no telling how long she might remain undisturbed.
He’d figured she had to be the client. It wasn’t June or Hobie, both of whom thought the world revolved around Lyman Crowder, so who did that leave? Crowder himself, turned sneakily suicidal? Some old enemy, some business rival?
No, Edith was the best prospect. A client would either want to meet Keller-not obliquely, as both Yarnells had done, but by arrangement. Or the client would contrive to be demonstrably off the scene when it all happened. Thus the trip to Las Vegas.
Why? The Crowder fortune, of course. She had Hobie Yarnell crazy about her, but he wouldn’t leave June for fear of breaking Crowder’s heart, and even if he did he’d go empty-handed. Having June killed wouldn’t work either, because she didn’t have any real money of her own. But June would inherit if the old man died, and later on something could always happen to June.
Anyway, that’s how he figured it. If he’d wanted to know Edith’s exact reasoning he’d have had to ask her, and that had struck him as a waste of time. More to the point, the last thing he’d wanted was a chance to get to know her. That just screwed everything up, when you got to know these people.
If you were going to ride a thousand miles to kill a man you’d never met, you were really well advised to be the tight-lipped stranger every step of the way. No point in talking to anybody, not the target, not the client, and not anybody else, either. If you had anything to say, you could whisper it to your horse.
He got off the fourth plane of the day at Sheridan, picked up his Caprice-the name was seeming more appropriate with every passing hour-and drove back to Martingale. He kept it right around the speed limit, then slowed down along with everyone else five miles outside of Martingale. They were clearing a wreck out of the northbound lane. That shouldn’t have slowed things down in the southbound lane, but of course it did; everybody had to slow down to see what everyone else was slowing down to look at.
Back in his room, he had his bag packed before he realized that he couldn’t go anywhere. The client was dead, but that didn’t change anything; since he had no way of knowing that she was the client or that she was dead, his mission remained unchanged. He could go home and admit an inability to get the job done, waiting for the news to seep through that there was no longer any job to be done. That would get him off the hook after the fact, but he wouldn’t have covered himself with glory, nor would he get paid. The client had almost certainly paid in advance, and if there’d been a middleman between the client and the man in White Plains he had almost certainly passed the money on, and there was very little likelihood that the man in White Plains would even consider the notion of refunding a fee to a dead client, not that anyone would raise the subject. But neither would the man in White Plains pay Keller for work he’d failed to perform. The man in White Plains would just keep everything.
Keller thought about it. It looked to him as though his best course lay in playing a waiting game. How long could it take before a sneak thief or a chambermaid walked in on Edith Bodine? How long before news of her death found its way to White Plains?
The more he thought about it, the longer it seemed likely to take. If there were, as sometimes happened, a whole string of intermediaries involved, the message might very well never get to Garcia.
Maybe the simplest thing was to kill Crowder and be done with it.
No, he thought. He’d just made a side trip of, yes, more than a thousand miles-and at his own expense, yet-solely to keep from having to kill this legendary Man He Never Met. Damned if he was going to kill him now, after all that.
He’d wait a while, anyway. He didn’t want to drive anywhere now, and he couldn’t bear to look at another airplane, let alone get on board.
He stretched out on the bed, closed his eyes.
He had a frightful dream. In it he was walking at night out in the middle of the desert, lost, chilled, desperately alone. Then a horse came galloping out of nowhere, and on his back was a magnificent woman with a great mane of hair and eyes that flashed in the moonlight. She extended a hand and Keller leaped up on the horse and rode behind her. She was naked. So was Keller, although he had somehow failed to notice this before.
They fell in love. Wordless, they told each other everything, knew one another like twin souls. And then, gazing into her eyes, Keller realized who she was. She was Edith Bodine, and she was dead, he’d killed her earlier without knowing she’d turn out to be the girl of his dreams. It was done, it could never be undone, and his heart was broken for eternity.
Keller woke up shaking. For five minutes he paced the room, struggling to sort out what was a dream and what was real. He hadn’t been sleeping long. The sun was setting, it was still the same endless day.
God, what a hellish dream.
He couldn’t get caught up in TV, and he had no luck at all 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.
