“Cuts into the profit, doesn’t it?”

“It does,” he said, “but that’s not the point. It’s a funny thing about sitting in the front of the plane. You’ve got more leg room, and the seats are wider, with more space between you and the person sitting next to you. You’d think that would be a distancing factor, but people in first are much more likely to get into conversations. In coach you sit there with your knees jammed against the seat in front of you, and trying to keep your elbows from pushing the other guy’s elbows off the shared armrest, and you crawl in a cocoon and stay there until the plane’s back on the ground.”

“But in first class you turn into Chatty Cathy?”

“Not on the flight out,” he said. “The woman sitting next to me had her laptop up and running, and she might as well have been in her office cubicle, the way she was all wrapped up in her work.”

“That’s a shame, if she was cute. Was she?”

“Not really. On the way back, well, I was still in first class, because it was simpler to just go ahead and book the whole flight that way. And the guy next to me started talking the minute we got off the ground.”

“This is when I get to relax,” the man had said for openers. “When I’m in a plane and the plane’s in the air. I never even think about crashing. Never even consider the possibility. Do you?”

“Not until just now,” Keller said.

“What I do,” the man went on, “is I leave my troubles on the ground. Because I’m up here and they’re down there, and while I’m here there’s not a damn thing I can do about them, so why carry them around with me?”

“I see what you mean.”

“Except,” the man said, “this is one of those days when I just don’t think it’s gonna work. Because I just can’t shake the thought that in two hours we’ll be back on the ground and I’m in the same pile of crap as always.”

The fellow didn’t look like someone who spent much time in a pile of crap. He was dressed for success in a dark pinstripe suit, his button-down shirt was a Wedgwood blue, his tie gold with dark blue fleurs-de-lis. Like Keller, he was wearing loafers; if they were going to make you take off your shoes at airport security, you didn’t want to have to untie them and tie them up again. Slip ’em off, slip ’ em on. Maybe you couldn’t beat the system, but at least you could try to keep up with it.

He was a businessman, obviously, and in his early forties or thereabouts. Keller guessed he’d played a minor sport in college-track, maybe-and had eaten well since then. He wasn’t jowly yet, but he was on his way. And he had the florid complexion of someone who’d either spent a little too much time in the sun-unlikely, in Detroit-or whose blood pressure might bear watching.

“I’m from New York,” he announced. “Yourself?”

“The same,” Keller said.

“Live in the city itself? Manhattan?”

Keller nodded.

“Me too. Moved back after the divorce.”

“I was never married,” Keller said, “so I never left. Manhattan, I mean.”

“Right. Name’s Harrelson, Claude Harrelson.”

“Pleased to know you,” Keller said, and then realized it was now his turn to say who he was. “Eric Fischvogel,” he said, supplying the name he was flying under, the name on the ID and credit cards he was carrying.

“Fischvogel,” Harrelson said. “German?”

There was a lot to be said, Keller sometimes thought, for false ID with a name like Johnson or Brooks, something simple and unremarkable. “It means fish bird,” he said.

“I figured out the fish part.”

“I think it means like a fish hawk,” Keller improvised. “In fact one branch of the family changed it to Osprey.”

“Really. Well, Eric, it’s a pleasure to meet you.”

“Pleasure’s mine.”

The flight attendant came along with the cart, and Harrelson asked for a Bloody Mary. Keller thought about having a beer, but something made him ask for a Coke instead. She asked if Pepsi was all right, and he said it would be fine.

“I wonder,” Harrelson said, “what would have happened if you told her no, Pepsi wasn’t all right, and you had to have Coke. I mean, we’re at what, thirty-five thousand feet? It’s pretty much like it or lump it, wouldn’t you say?”

“That’s a point.”

Harrelson took a moment to work on his drink, then looked at Keller over the brim. “Eric,” he said, “mind a question?”

Which, Keller thought, was a little like asking him if Pepsi was all right, because how could he say no?

In any event, Harrelson didn’t wait for an answer. “Eric,” he said, “have you ever wanted to kill somebody?”

“Now that’s a hell of a question,” Dot said. “I thought all men talked about was sports and the stock market.”

“It shook me,” he admitted, “coming out of the blue like that. What I said was I supposed everybody felt like that from time to time. When some clown cuts you off in traffic, say. But we learn to suppress those impulses, and they pass.”

“That’s what you said?”

“Something like that.”

“Just who the hell did you think you were, Keller? Doctor Phil?”

“Well, I didn’t know what to say. But he wasn’t talking about getting cut off in traffic, or momentary impulses. He was serious.”

“My business partner,” Harrelson was saying. “We’ve got this little company, merchandising generic pharmaceuticals. We were both in the field, and I was a born salesman, and he’s the kind of guy who makes the trains run on time. We were both itching to go on our own, and we figured the two of us would be a good fit, Mr. Inside and Mr. Outside.”

“And you were wrong?”

“No, we were absolutely right. We showed a profit the first year, and both our sales and our net have gone up every year since.”

“That’s great.”

“Yeah, it’s just peachy.”

Keller looked at him.

“We were never like buddy-buddy, see. But we got along. I was on the road most of the time, and he never left the city, so we didn’t spend that much time looking at each other. Then he started nailing our secretary.”

“A bad thing, eh?”

“I suppose it’s never good policy,” Harrelson said, “but I can’t be too critical here, because I was shtupping her myself.”

“Oh.”

“I’m not really clear who started first,” he said, “but she was having affairs with both of us. Overlapping affairs, except that’s probably not a good word to use here. Or maybe it is. She was…nice.”

“I see.”

“And it was okay, Eric. I mean, if neither of us knew the other was boinking her, what difference did it make? I certainly didn’t figure I was the only man in her life, and anyway I wouldn’t have wanted to be. I mean, I was a married guy, I was on the road more often than not. I only had limited time for her, and what did I want with the responsibility?”

“It makes sense,” Keller said.

“But then Chandra lost it.”

“That was her name? Chandra?”

“That was her name,” Harrelson said, “and she lost it big-time. The excrement made contact with the ventilation system.”

“Hit the fan?”

“Hit it head-on. She went public, and by the time it was over my wife had left me and his wife had left him and we had two nasty divorces going on and Barry and I weren’t speaking.”

“Barry’s your partner.”

“My partner,” Harrelson said heavily. “You can divorce your wife. You can’t divorce your partner.”

“They wound up stuck with each other,” he told Dot. “By now they both hate each other, I mean really hate each other, and neither can buy the other out. And the company’s all either of them has, and neither one of them can walk away from it.”

“Couldn’t they sell it?”

“I asked him that. I wasn’t going to mention it just now because I figured you’d ask me who the hell I thought I was, Suze Orman? He explained why they couldn’t, and the gist of it was that the business didn’t have a lot of assets. It’s only worth the profit it returns, and it only does that when they’re running it. So it’s worth far more to them than it would be to another buyer.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” she said. “You know, Keller, I’m beginning to see where this is going.”

23

“I swear I’d kill him,” Harrelson said. “Except there’s no way on earth I could get away with it. Who’s got a motive here? Hell, you’re looking at him.”

“They’d certainly look long and hard at you.”

“And they’d have me dead to rights. Besides, look at me. Am I a killer?”

“My guess would be that you’re not.”

“And your guess is a good one. I don’t even like swatting flies. And spiders, my wife would get creeped out when she saw a spider and she’d want me to kill it. I’d take it outside and release it. I mean, what have I got against spiders?”

Keller, who had nothing against spiders himself, nodded encouragingly.

“Barry Blyden,” Harrelson said, “is a different matter altogether. You know what I need?”

You need me, Keller thought.

“A sorceress,” Harrelson said. “Like Whatshername, turned Odysseus’s men into swine? Except she could turn Barry into a spider, or a fucking cockroach. And then I’d stomp him into the ground.”

“Strangers on a plane,” Dot said. “Like the Hitchcock movie, except at thirty-five thousand feet. You remember the setup? Two strangers, and each one commits the other one’s murder.”

“Well, they’re supposed to. But then it gets complicated.”

“It always does, Keller. Otherwise there’s no movie. I don’t suppose you gave him your card, told him you worked for a first-class removal service.”

“No.”

“He said he wanted his partner dead, if only someone could turn him into a cockroach first, and you left it at that.”

“Right.”

“The plane landed and you went your separate ways.”

“Right.”

She frowned. “So you’re telling me this just to let me know that there are a lot of people out there who want other people dead? No, I don’t think so. If that was all there was to it you wouldn’t have bothered including the names. I’ll be damned, Keller. You’re trying to drum up a little business.”

“I’m thinking about it,” he admitted.

“You remember the time we ran an ad? And you wound up chasing out to the middle of nowhere?”

“ Muscatine, Iowa.”

“The town that time forgot,” she said, “but you and I remember it well. What a mess that was.”