Hit Man

come to see there’s things you can’t do all by yourself. He went and hired some professional, flew him down here from Chicago to take care of things Mob-style.”
    Oh boy, Keller thought.
    Keller had enjoyed walking to Wickwire’s house, but enough was enough. He returned to his hotel on the St. Charles Avenue streetcar, and made his next visit to the Garden District the next morning in a rented Pontiac. He spent the better part of three days—or the worst part, if you asked him—trailing along after Wickwire’s Lincoln. One of the bodyguards drove, the other rode shotgun, and Wickwire sat by himself in the rear seat.
    If you were in fact from Chicago, Keller thought, there was an obvious Mob-style way to take care of things. All you had to do was pull up alongside the Lincoln, zip your window down, and let go with a burst of auto fire at the rear side window. It was unlikely that Wickwire’s car sported reinforced side panels and bulletproof glass, so that ought to do the trick. You could probably manage to spray the two bozos in the front seat while you were at it. Pow! Take that! Now you know how we handle things in the city with the big shoulders!
    Not his style, Keller thought. He supposed it wouldn’t be impossible to find someone local who could sell him the tools for the job, the gun and the ammunition, but it still wasn’t his way of doing things. He was, after all, a New Yorker. He was inclined to be a little less obvious, a little more sophisticated.
    Besides, no matter how airtight an alibi the client put together, the cops would figure he’d put out a contract. So the less professional the whole affair looked, the better it was for Jim Paul Shileen.
    Keller walked around the Quarter. He passed bars offering genuine New Orleans jazz and restaurants boasting genuine New Orleans cuisine. If they had to keep insisting it was authentic, he thought, it probably wasn’t. When a strip-club barker began his pitch, Keller waved him off; he didn’t want to hear about genuine girls with genuine breasts.
    Next thing he knew he was standing in front of an antique shop, studying the earrings in the window. He turned away, got his bearings, and headed for his hotel.
    In his room he found himself changing channels as if determined to wear out the remote. He turned off the TV, picked up a magazine, flipped the pages, tossed it aside.
    The thing was, he didn’t want to be here. He wanted to be back in his own apartment, working on his stamps.
    So what he had to do was figure out the right approach to Richard Wickwire and go ahead and do it and go home. Get out of New Orleans and get back to Belgium.
    Let’s see. Wickwire got out of the house a lot, and the bodyguards always went with him. But the new wife, for the most part, stayed home. So Keller could pay a call in Wickwire’s absence.
    Once inside the house, he could stuff the new wife in a coat closet and lay doggo, waiting for Wickwire to return, taking out him and his bodyguards before they had a clue. But that was heavy-handed, that was as Chicago as deep-dish pizza. There ought to be a subtler way . . . and just like that it came to him.
    Get into the house. Arrange an accident for wife number three. Take her out back and drown her in the pool, say. Or break her neck and leave her at the foot of the stairs, as if she’d taken a header down the staircase. There was no end of ways to kill her, and how hard could any of them be? The woman obviously had the self-preservation instincts of a lemming.
    Then let Wickwire explain.
    It was poetic, and that part appealed to him. Wickwire, having murdered two wives with impunity, would get one of the state of Louisiana’s special flu shots for a murder he hadn’t committed, a wife he hadn’t killed. Neat.
    He went out and got something to eat, and by the time he got back to the room he had abandoned the scheme. There were a couple of things wrong with it, chief among them being the uncertainty of the enterprise. If they hadn’t been able to convict him before, when everybody but the jury flat-out knew he was guilty, who was to say they could do it now? The bastard’s luck might hold. You couldn’t be positive it wouldn’t.
    Besides, the client had paid to have Wickwire killed, not framed. The client was getting on in years, and he didn’t have all the time in the world. If Wickwire finally wound up convicted, and if he did indeed draw a sentence of death by lethal injection, he still had enough money