Hit Parade

Page 9

It all changed, of course, on a September morning, when a pair of airliners flew into the twin towers of the World Trade Center. Keller, who lived on First Avenue not far from the UN building, had not been home at the time. He was in Miami, where he had already spent a week, getting ready to kill a man named Rubén Olivares. Olivares was a Cuban, and an important figure in one of the Cuban exile groups, but Keller wasn’t sure that was why someone had been willing to spend a substantial amount of money to have him killed. It was possible, certainly, that he was a thorn in the side of the Castro government, and that someone had decided it would be safer and more cost-effective to hire the work done than to send a team of agents from Havana. It was also possible that Olivares had turned out to be a spy for Havana, and it was his fellow exiles who had it in for him.
Then, too, he might be sleeping with the wrong person’s wife, or muscling in on the wrong person’s drug trade. With a little investigative work, Keller might have managed to find out who wanted Olivares dead, and why, but he’d long since determined that such considerations were none of his business. What difference did it make? He had a job to do, and all he had to do was do it.
Monday night, he’d followed Olivares around, watched him eat dinner at a steak house in Coral Gables, then tagged along when Olivares and two of his dinner companions hit a couple of titty bars in Miami Beach. Olivares left with one of the dancers, and Keller tailed him to the woman’s apartment and waited for him to come out. After an hour and a half, Keller decided the man was spending the night. Keller, who’d watched lights go on and off in the apartment house, was reasonably certain he knew which apartment the couple was occupying, and didn’t think it would prove difficult to get into the building. He thought about going in and getting it over with. It was too late to catch a flight to New York, it was the middle of the night, but he could get the work done and stop at his motel to shower and collect his luggage, then go straight to the airport and try to get on the first flight home.
Or he could sleep late and fly home sometime in the early afternoon. Several airlines flew from New York to Florida, and there were flights all day long. Miami International was not his favorite airport-it was not anybody’s favorite airport-but he could skip it if he wanted, turning in his rental car at Fort Lauderdale or West Palm Beach and flying home from there.
No end of options, once the work was done.
But he’d have to kill the woman, the topless dancer.
He’d do that if he had to, but he didn’t like the idea of killing people just because they were in the way. A higher body count drew more police and media attention, but that wasn’t it, nor was the notion of slaughtering the innocent. How did he know the woman was innocent? For that matter, who was to say Olivares was guilty of anything?
Later, when he thought about it, it seemed to him that the deciding factor was purely physical. He’d slept poorly the night before, rising early and spending the whole day driving around unfamiliar streets. He was tired, and he didn’t much feel like forcing a door and climbing a flight of stairs and killing one person, let alone two. And suppose she had a roommate, and suppose the roommate had a boyfriend, and-
He went back to his motel, took a long hot shower, and went to bed.
When he woke up he didn’t turn on the TV but went across the street to the place where he’d been having his breakfast every morning. He walked in the door and saw that something was different. They had a television set on the back counter, and everybody was staring at it. He watched for a few minutes, then picked up a container of coffee and took it back to his room. He sat in front of his own TV and watched the same scenes, over and over and over.
If he’d done his work the night before, he realized, he might have been in the air when it happened. Or maybe not, because he’d probably have decided to get some sleep instead, so he’d be right where he was, in his motel room, watching the plane fly into the building. The only certain difference was that Rubén Olivares, who as things stood was probably watching the same footage everybody else in America was watching (except that he might well be watching it on a Spanish-language station)-well, Olivares wouldn’t be watching TV. Nor would he be on it. A garden-variety Miami homicide wasn’t worth airtime on a day like this, not even if the deceased was of some importance in the Cuban exile community, not even if he’d been murdered in the apartment of a topless dancer, with her own death a part of the package. A newsworthy item any other day, but not on this day. There was only one sort of news today, one topic with endless permutations, and Keller watched it all day long.
It was Wednesday before it even occurred to him to call Dot, and late Thursday before he finally got a call through to her in White Plains. “I’ve been wondering about you, Keller,” she said. “There are all these planes on the ground in Newfoundland, they were in the air when it happened and got rerouted there, and God knows when they’re gonna let them come home. I had the feeling you might be there.”
“In Newfoundland?”
“The local people are taking the stranded passengers into their homes,” she said. “Making them welcome, giving them cups of beef bouillon and ostrich sandwiches, and-”
“Ostrich sandwiches?”
“Whatever. I just pictured you there, Keller, making the best of a bad situation, which I guess is what you’re doing in Miami. God knows when they’re going to let you fly home. Have you got a car?”
“A rental.”
“Well, hang on to it,” she said. “Don’t give it back, because the car rental agencies are emptied out, with so many people stranded and trying to drive home. Maybe that’s what you ought to do.”
“I was thinking about it,” he said. “But I was also thinking about, you know. The guy.”
“Oh, him.”
“I don’t want to say his name, but-”
“No, don’t.”
“The thing is, he’s still, uh…”
“Doing what he always did.”
“Right.”
“Instead of doing like John Brown.”
“Huh?”
“Or John Brown’s body,” Dot said. “Moldering in the grave, as I recall.”
“Whatever moldering means.”
“We can probably guess, Keller, if we put our minds to it. You’re wondering is it still on, right?”
“It seems ridiculous even thinking about it,” he said. “But on the other hand-”
“On the other hand,” she said, “they sent half the money. I’d just as soon not have to give it back.”
“No.”
“In fact,” she said, “I’d just as soon have them send the other half. If they’re the ones to call it off, we keep what they sent. And if they say it’s still on, well, you’re already in Miami, aren’t you? Sit tight, Keller, while I make a phone call.”
Whoever had wanted Olivares dead had not changed his mind as a result of several thousand deaths fifteen hundred miles away. Keller, thinking about it, couldn’t see why he should be any less sanguine about the prospect of killing Olivares than he had been Monday night. On the television news, there was a certain amount of talk about the possible positive effects of the tragedy. New Yorkers, someone suggested, would be brought closer together, aware as never before of the bonds created by their common humanity.
Did Keller feel a bond with Rubén Olivares of which he’d been previously unaware? He thought about it and decided he did not. If anything, he was faintly aware of a grudging resentment against the man. If Olivares had spent less time over dinner and hurried through the foreplay of the titty bar, if he’d gone directly to the topless dancer’s apartment and left the premises in the throes of postcoital bliss, Keller could have taken him out in time to catch the last flight back to the city. He might have been in his own apartment when the attack came.
And what earthly difference would that have made? None, he had to concede. He’d have watched the hideous drama unfold on his own television set, just as he’d watched on the motel’s unit, and he’d have been no more capable of influencing events whatever set he watched.
Olivares, with his steak dinners and topless dancers, made a poor surrogate for the heroic cops and firemen, the doomed office workers. He was, Keller conceded, a fellow member of the human race. If all men were brothers, a possibility Keller, an only child, was willing to entertain, well, brothers had been killing each other for a good deal longer than Keller had been on the job. If Olivares was Abel, Keller was willing to be Cain.
If nothing else, he was grateful for something to do.
And Olivares made it easy. All over America, people were writing checks and inundating blood banks, trying to do something for the victims in New York. Cops and firemen and ordinary citizens were piling into cars and heading north and east, eager to join in the rescue efforts. Olivares, on the other hand, went on leading his life of self-indulgence, going to an office in the morning, making a circuit of bars and restaurants in the afternoon and early evening, and finishing up with rum drinks in a room full of bare breasts.
Keller tagged him for three days and three nights, and by the third night he’d decided not to be squeamish about the topless dancer. He waited outside the titty bar until a call of nature led him into the bar, past Olivares’s table (where the man was chatting up three silicone-enhanced young ladies), and on to the men’s room. Standing at the urinal, Keller wondered what he’d do if the Cuban took all three of them home.
He washed his hands, left the restroom, and saw Olivares counting out bills to settle his tab. All three women were still at the table, and playing up to him, one clutching his arm and leaning her breasts against it, the others just as coquettish. Keller, who’d been ready to sacrifice one bystander, found himself drawing the line at three.
But wait-Olivares was on his feet, his body language suggesting he was excusing himself for a moment. And yes, he was on his way to the men’s room, clearly aware of the disadvantage of attempting a night of love on a full bladder.
Keller slipped into the room ahead of him, ducked into an empty stall. There was an elderly gentleman at the urinal, talking soothingly in Spanish to himself, or perhaps to his prostate. Olivares entered the room, stood at the adjoining urinal, and began chattering in Spanish to the older man, who spoke slow sad sentences in response.
Shortly after arriving in Miami, Keller had gotten hold of a gun, a.22-caliber revolver. It was a small gun with a short barrel, and fit easily in his pocket. He took it out now, wondering if the noise would carry.
If the older gentleman left first, Keller might not need the gun. But if Olivares finished first, Keller couldn’t let him leave, and would have to do them both, and that would mean using the gun, and a minimum of two shots. He watched them over the top of the stall, wishing that something would happen before some other drunken voyeur felt a need to pee. Then the older man finished up, tucked himself in, and headed for the door.
And paused at the threshold, returning to wash his hands, and saying something to Olivares, who laughed heartily at it, whatever it was. Keller, who’d returned the gun to his pocket, took it out again, and replaced it a moment later when the older gentleman left. Olivares waited until the door closed after him, then produced a little blue glass bottle and a tiny spoon. He treated each of his cavernous nostrils to two quick hits of what Keller could only presume to be cocaine, then returned the bottle and spoon to his pocket and turned to face the sink.