Chapter 28
October 7
Artificial Insinuation
ROCKWELL KINGMAN was steamed. He was having a very bad day. He had missed a target. That was not a good thing. It was the kind of thing that could ruin a career. He sat on a park bench across from the scene of his disgrace watching the police pick up the pieces. He had killed a second-echelon member of a third-rate crime family, his two bodyguards, and three passersby, but they were the wrong passersby. He had missed the object of the hit, the abusive and philandering husband of the head of a mail-order cosmetics firm. He sat there, eating a tuna salad sandwich and cursing his luck. What a waste of great camouflage. For a long while, he thought about giving it another shot. Second attempts lay very far outside his book of unwritten rules for the conduct of Rockwell Kingman. It was his conviction that things went wrong on second tries. Something got into the works — sloppiness, hastiness, pride, anxiety — something that guaranteed failure, and with a second failure a guy could get caught. “No,” he said to himself. “Don’t do that. Do what you do.” So he went to the home of his client, driving a car identical to her husband’s, and he apologized to her, and when she wasn’t looking he killed her with three deliberately clumsy blows to the head, using the first heavy object that came to hand, a candy dish. Then he simulated a clumsy attempt to simulate a robbery gone bad, an amateur’s attempt at camouflage, took some jewelry from the bedroom, and left. On the way to the car, he stepped into a newly seeded spot beside the driveway, leaving a nice imprint of the heel of a right shoe identical in every way to the right shoe of the pair he had observed the husband buying two days earlier. He drove to the parking lot beside the husband’s office and placed one of his client’s “stolen” earrings under the driver’s seat. Then he drove away, leaving no one behind who knew that he had botched a job.
He sat in his office tracing figures in the dust on his desk and drinking from a bottle of dark rum that he kept in the bottom right-hand drawer. The late afternoon sun threw the slanting shadows of his venetian blinds across the trophies of a long and brilliant career: a crystal statuette from the Societé Internationale des Tueurs, the award of merit from Kalashnikov Arms, a picture of him with his arm across the shoulders of old man Kalashnikov himself, other photographs, taken during the shooting of Blown to Bits and Shot to Hell, for both of which he had served as murder consultant — and suddenly he threw the rum bottle against the wall beside the picture of old man Kalashnikov.
It was that little guy, Leroy! That’s why things had gone wrong. He’d thrown a monkey wrench in the works somehow, with his idiotic suicide plan. It was all his fault. He had misunderstood everything, and Kingman hated being misunderstood. It had rattled him, that was it. The little twerp seemed to have no understanding of his principles whatsoever. He adjusted the venetian blinds so that he wouldn’t lose the slanted shadows in the last of the light. Suddenly inspired, he sat at his desk, rolled a sheet of paper into his old Underwood, and typed:
There’s a certain slant of light, October afternoons, that sends the shadows of the slats of my venetian blinds across the wall of my dusty office in such a way that they start out thin and parallel and separate on the left but end up broad and bent and overlapping on the right, like lives driven together by the dark hand of fate. Whenever I see those shadows slanted like that, I start thinking, and when I start thinking I start to feel a need to explain myself. On this particular afternoon the need was particularly strong, because I had been offered a job that called into question all my assumptions about who I was and what I did and why I did it. I had just completed a couple of assignments successfully -- one involving a car bomb, the other a simulated robbery -- and in the pause that every worker takes after a job well done I found myself thinking about this other job. The owner of a failing hotel wanted me to kill him and make it look like an accident, so that his wife would collect his insurance. Greater love hath no man, I guess, but I explained the triangular nature of the contract killing (see Appendix A) and threw the bastard out. Now, however, under the influence of the slanting shadows of my venetian blinds, I began to think about the job I had been offered, and although at first I was actually repulsed by it and I was glad that I had refused it, when I began to think about it, I began to ask myself how I would have gone about it if I had taken it on, and almost against my will I began to hatch a plot. I knew that the target -- let’s call him Larry -- sometimes captained a leaking launch, a fine vehicle for an accidental death to hide a suicide, but I am not in the business of assisted suicide. I had another idea. I would be the client. He would be the victim. To complete the triangle, all I needed was a killer. I threw a few things into my battered leather valise and headed for a small hotel on a small island.
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