When I opened the Caddy trunk, its light clicked on and the girl gazed up at me with those big brown eyes, and a wide range of human emotion-fear, surprise, relief, hope, confusion-flashed one at a time through them, each punctuated by a blink. Under the duct tape gag, she made an unnnngggh that, while not as impressive as what her eyes had done, was fairly communicative at that.
“No questions,” I said, as I peeled off the tape. “We have to get out of here, right now.”
She complied as I helped her up and out of the compartment. That those long lovely legs had been somehow compressed into that space seemed as impossible as the old one-thousand clowns and one car gag. Her white leather coat with the white fur collar and a green pants suit with ruffle-neck blouse looked remarkably fresh, but her hair was every which way. The innocuous brick structure of the rest stop was our backdrop, nothing to hint at the horrors within the men’s room. She was stiff and I had to walk her over to the Maverick as gently as if this tall young woman were a little old lady. I guided her into the front seat passenger side, and came around and got in behind the wheel.
Luck was kind: nobody had pulled in here off I-80 to take a break or a dump or piss or any combination thereof in the vital seven minutes or so it had all taken. I had passed a larger rest stop perhaps twenty miles back where many trucks were parked, their drivers snoozing, but this stop was too small to accommodate more than a handful of semis, and we didn’t have even one at the moment. Nice to catch a break.
I had to keep going east, needing an exit that would allow me to get off and come around to head back west to Iowa City, although I wasn’t sure, frankly, if returning was such a good idea. Of course, I wasn’t sure of much at all, right now.
The heat was going in the car, just at a comfortable warm setting, but Annette was shivering, even though she was bundled in that lined leather coat with its fur at the neck, long brown hair spilled over her shoulders. She had her seat belt on, but was hugging the door, leaning in on herself as if trying to assume a fetal position while sitting down.
“You want more heat?” I asked.
She shook her head. Her fists clenched each side of her coat, holding it to her by the lapels as if she were freezing, but she shook her head. That shivering didn’t have much to do with the cold, I didn’t think.
“I’m going to turn around as soon as I can,” I said. “I’ll head us back.”
She nodded.
“Did they hurt you?”
She shook her head.
I just drove for a while. Maybe ten miles later I came to an exit, used it and then we were going west again. I still had the radio on, that easy listening station, but down so low you could barely make Dino out doing “Everybody Loves Somebody Sometime.”
After a while, I glanced over at her and she wasn’t shivering any more. Her askew hair nonetheless framed in a striking fashion the olive oval that held her beautiful features. She looked more relaxed, even a little sleepy.
I said, “I was coming out of the restaurant when I saw those two grab you.”
She turned her head and gazed at me, almost as if noticing I was there. “What happened to them?”
I wasn’t sure what to say. This was the daughter of one of the top mob bosses in Chicago, so the notion of killing shouldn’t shock her; but then she’d just spent an hour or so stuffed into a car trunk, waiting to be raped and killed herself, so I thought I should err on the gentle side.
“I took care of them.”
Her eyes tightened.
I returned my gaze to the road and the moonlit highway and the surrounding snow-patched landscape.
She asked, “Who are you?”
“I’m Jack, remember?” I glanced at her. “Are you okay? Did you take a blow to the head or something? Don’t you recognize me?”
“Who are you really?”
I didn’t say anything.
“You work for my father, don’t you?”
I didn’t say anything.
“What happened to those men? Did you…kill them?”
I didn’t say anything.
“Did you, Jack?”
“…Yes.”
She swivelled her gaze toward the road. “Good.”
I was thinking fast, or anyway trying to. This had all been on the fly, and there’d been no time to waste cooking up a story for the girl, if I somehow managed to rescue her. Now that I’d pulled off that unlikelihood, I had no option but to improvise.
“I do work for your father,” I said, “but I’m not one of his…whatever you call it.”
“Soldiers?”
“Yeah. I’m not a mob guy.”
“What are you, Jack?”
“I’m a PI out of Des Moines. I mostly do divorce work.”
“Aren’t you a little young for that?”
“I’m not the boss. I’m just an employee of the agency.”
She was studying me. “Just an employee, for some private eye agency in Des Moines. Not a soldier, for my father back in Chicago.”
“That’s right.”
“But you killed those two? Those big black fucking sons of fucking bitches?”
“I, uh…I was in Vietnam. Thought I mentioned that.”
“Oh. Yes.” Her eyes were on the highway now. “You did say something about that, to K.J. Sorry. I…I forgot.”
“Under the circumstances, understandable.”
We rode in silence for maybe a minute.
Then she asked: “You were watching me for my father? Why would he do that?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe he had the wild idea you needed protection.”
You’d think that would have stopped her for a second, but instead she came right back: “Then you were watching me.”
I thought for a moment. The closer I could get my story to the truth, the better it would play and the easier it’d be to maintain.
“No,” I said. “I was watching Professor Byron.”
Her face jerked toward mine, eyes and nostrils flaring. “Why?”
“I don’t know for sure. I’m just doing a job.”
“Tell me what you do know, Jack.”
“Well…this is reading between the lines. I’m just a grunt in this war. But I think your father wanted me to gather evidence showing what a louse your prize professor is.”
“ What?”
“I gathered photos of Professor Byron with another coed. And he’s married.”
She was sitting forward, shaking her head, which sent her long hair tumbling back into more or less its normal down-her-back configuration. “Are you kidding? I told you before, at Sambo’s-I know all about K.J. He’s a free spirit. I don’t love him, not that way.”
I could have been a stickler for accuracy and reminded her that she’d been blowing the dude in his study the first time I saw them together. But she was running short enough a fuse already.
“Yeah, I get that,” I said. “I understand. But your father, and I’ve never met him, but knowing what generation he’s from, my guess is, he assumes you would be shocked and appalled by the professor’s lecherous activities. I mean, these guys from the Depression and World War Two, they have a whole different way of looking at the world. Sex and love are interchangeable to them. The idea that a nice girl like you could admire your professor and want to collaborate with him and also go to bed with him without being in love with him, without wanting to spend your life with him, and not caring how much action he’s getting on the side…well, that just doesn’t fly with that crowd.”
“And yet my father has fucked more showgirls than Sinatra.”
That would be a lot of showgirls.
She was saying, “My father is completely immoral, no make that amoral, where sex is concerned, but he’s got that same goddamn double-standard as the rest of the men of his generation. Madonnas and whores, that’s women to him.”
“Not to make too fine a point of it, but I doubt he thinks of you as a woman at all.”
“What?”
“You’re a girl. His little girl. And this professor is betraying a teacher’s trust and abusing daddy’s precious dainty child.”
She laughed and something harsh was in it, surprisingly so. “If you only knew what you were saying…”
Well, I didn’t. I was just filling the emptiness in the car, and trying to convince her I was on her side.
We drove silently again, maybe for five minutes. Then I noticed her sitting up, her brow furrowing.
“My God,” she said. Her brain was starting to work. “There are dead men back there at that rest stop.”
“That’s right.”
Wide eyes fixed on me. “What are you going to do about it? What am I going to do about it?”
“Well, we can’t go to the police.”
“Why not-wasn’t I kidnapped?”
“You were, but the way I handled it was not…strictly kosher.”
“You…what did you do?”
“I’m not going to give you the details.”
“You mean you…pretty much murdered them.”
“Pretty much.”
She sighed. Leaned against the door again. “I don’t know if I believe you…”
“Oh, I murdered them.”
“Not that.” She shrugged. “I buy that easy enough. What I doubt is you’re just some PI from Des Moines, not one of my father’s soldiers.”
“Do I look like one of your father’s soldiers?”
“No. You…you look like a soldier, though.”
“Did I mention Vietnam?”
“You mentioned it. Are you taking me to my apartment?”
“I’ve been thinking about that. How shaken up are you?”
“How shaken up would you be?”
“Fairly shaken up. You said you weren’t hurt, but they grabbed you, treated you rough, taped you up and threw you in that trunk-you must have aches and pains.”
“You could say I have aches and pains.”
I watched the road. We were coming up on the Quad Cities. “I think we should get a room somewhere and let you rest up and kind of heal up.”
“Why? What’s wrong with my apartment?”
“Your apartment, across from the Sambo’s where two black thugs kidnapped you, couple hours ago? That the apartment you mean?”
She said nothing, but she was holding onto her coat lapels again, and despite her dark complexion looked very pale, though some of that was moonlight and dashboard glow.
I said, “I would like to talk to your father. Tell him what happened.”
She turned sharply toward me. “I don’t want to have anything to do with my father!”
“I can understand that. But those two dead guys from the South Side, they do have something to do with your father. He’s in the middle of some kind of war with them and their black brothers. I want to ask him what to do with you, strictly for your protection.”
“I don’t want his protection.”
“Would you rather I hadn’t been here tonight? Do I have to paint you a picture of what kind of fun and games would’ve been starting about now?”
She said nothing, but then shook her head. “You’re…you’re probably right. In a case like this, my father is the person to talk to.”
“You want to talk to him yourself?”
“No. He and I don’t talk.”
“Would it be all right if I protected your interests?”
She nodded, once, still clutching her lapels.
We crossed the Mississippi and before long I took the Highway 61 exit and drove down through Davenport all the way to the riverfront, crossing under the government bridge and pulling into the Concort Inn parking lot.
I was able to park near the entrance. “Look,” I said, turning to Annette and resting a hand on the seat behind her. “Just so you know. We’ll go in, I’ll register us as husband and wife, Jack and Annette some-shit, and ask for twin beds. You have some fairly liberal notions about sex, but in case you’re wondering, I have no intentions of asking for a reward or anything.”
“I didn’t think you were.”
“Good. This is about not getting killed. You not getting killed, me not getting killed. Those are the goals.”
“I can get behind those goals.”
“Fine. Let’s go in. If we get a twitchy desk clerk, I’ll say the airline lost our luggage.”
But the desk clerk didn’t give a shit whether we had luggage or not. He was a little put off by me paying in cash since the hotel really did prefer credit cards, but that was all.
The room was not as nice as the suite the Broker had arranged for my last visit, but it was anonymously modern and clean and had a view on the river. Also, the twin beds I’d requested. I set my nine millimeter on the nightstand between us, to emphasize the seriousness of the situation, and also because I might need the fucking thing.
Then I realized I was still in that stupid jacket I’d bought at the truck stop, and took it off and threw it on a chair. I also got out of the black Isotoner gloves.
She sat on the edge of her twin bed facing mine almost primly, hands folded in her lap. She looked beautiful in that fashion model way of hers, dark hair stopping at the white leather shoulders on its way down her back, eyes as big and brown as ever, mouth as fully lush if sans lipstick; but with an edge of controlled hysteria about her.
“Jack…Do you mind if I take a shower?”
“No. Let me in there for a couple minutes, first, would you? I neglected to use the bathroom at that rest stop, having other business to attend to.”
That actually made her smile.
So I went into the bathroom and I took a fairly major shit and emptied my bladder while I was at it; afterward, I turned on the ceiling fan, gentleman that I am, and splashed water in my face until I felt slightly alive. I mention all this not to share the fascinating details of my toilet activities but to demonstrate that I was giving Annette every opportunity to bail. She was alone out there, with my gun on the nightstand, with fan noise going behind the closed bathroom door, and I was doing my best to display trust. And to give her an opportunity to do the same.
When I emerged lighter and renewed, she was hanging up her coat in the closet. She smiled at me. She seemed calm enough.
She said, “I guess I haven’t thanked you.”
“It’s okay. I’ll hit your father up for some kind of bonus.”
She came over and touched my face. “You aren’t as tough as you pretend. I have a feeling, underneath it all, you’re a pussycat.”
I smiled. “I guess you’ve got my number.”
On the other hand, those dead assholes in the rest-stop john might’ve had a different opinion, if they’d still been in any shape to have opinions.
A terrycloth robe was hanging in the closet, with a CONCORT INN logo stitched on its breast pocket, and she took the robe with her into the bathroom and shut herself in.
I went over to the phone and had the desk put me through to the Broker’s emergency number. Three rings this time.
“I’m at the Concort Inn,” I said.
“What the hell are you doing there?”
“I’m in a room with our client’s daughter. She’s taking a shower. You wouldn’t want to come over here and have a talk with me about what I’ve been up to lately?”
A long pause. “I believe I would. What room are you in?”
I told him.
“I’ll get the key to another room nearby where we can talk.”
“How long?”
“It may be an hour.”
“Call from the lobby.”
“All right. Quarry?”
“Yes?”
“What have you done?”
“I’ve done fine. You’ll be pleased.”
She came out of the shower, her hair in a turbaned towel, her nice shape wrapped up in that terrycloth robe. She came over and sat on the edge of her bed, facing me where I sat on the edge of mine, having just got off the phone.
“Why don’t you take a shower?” she asked. “I feel like another woman.”
I felt like another woman, too, but I said, “Only one robe.”
“Don’t worry about it. It’ll be refreshing.”
Hell.
I went in and showered. When I came back out with a towel knotted around me, all the lights were off and she was under the covers of my bed. But the drapes were open on the window onto the river and River Drive, so some flickery illumination came in and turned the room blue-gray.
Her hair, towel-dried and a little frizzy and lots of it, framed that model’s face of hers; the covers were pulled up above her breasts but her shoulders were bare except for where her hair touched them.
She asked, “Don’t you want a reward?”
I came over and said, “Who’s that sleeping in my bed?”
She giggled; it did seem kind of funny at the time. On the other hand, she was about half out of her gourd, after all she’d been through.
“You know,” I said, looming over her, “your father, though I repeat I’ve never met him, hired my agency because he didn’t like the idea of you sleeping around with your professor.”
“You’re not my professor.”
“How do you know I’m interested? Maybe I’m gay.”
She pointed to where the towel was pointing back at her.
“Touche,” I said.
She giggled at that, too. I’m telling you, it was funny. I was wittier than Oscar Levant on the Jack Paar Show. You had to be there.
Of course, I was there, lucky me, and when she flipped the covers back, she showed off an olive-toned body that was perhaps more slender than to my usual taste, but those legs were as shapely as they were long and her waist was supernaturally narrow and the breasts, while small, got help from a prominent rib cage and had dark brown aureoles with nipples that were looking right at me, daring me to make something of it.
“Do me,” she said, and parted her legs and in the midst of a brown thicket, pink glistened and I buried my face down there and made it glisten some more. She came quickly and hard, and then I was on my back on the bed and she was kneeling between my legs now, and she was very skillful, thorough and even loving.
She got on top of me after that, riding me with no mercy, her eyes rolling back in her head as she came again, just as hard; but we wound up with her on her back and us fucking frantically, as if our lives depended on it, those long legs kicking the air past me, and me rutting like a goddamn dog, as if we’d almost lost our lives together tonight, and hadn’t we, almost?
For all that frenzy, the bang ended with a whimper as she began to cry and I felt my eyes tear up as I held her close and nuzzled and kissed her neck. Emotions were stirring in me, emotions I thought were gone. I hadn’t felt like this since my honeymoon and I had thought I would never feel like this again, and hadn’t really wanted to.
Then she trotted off to the bathroom again. I wiped myself off with my towel and leaned back against my pillow, propped against the headboard, and thought about Dorrie, sad, pretty Mrs. Prof. So far on this job I’d killed three guys and screwed two very lovely women. I’d done it all, in a very short time.
Everything except the job I’d been hired for.
The phone rang, and the Broker said, “I’m in 714, just down the hall from you.”
“Okay,” I said.
I got my clothes on and went over to the bathroom door, behind which water was running.
I said, “I’m going down to the front desk and get us some toiletries-toothbrushes and toothpaste and stuff.”
“Okay!” she said.
“Won’t be long.”
In 714, the Broker and I sat by the window at two chairs on either side of a small round table with a built-in lamp, which was the only light going. His expression was stern. He wasn’t staying long, judging by the camel’s hair topcoat remaining on.
“I have to make this fast,” I said, “or Annette will be suspicious.”
“You’re calling her ‘Annette’ now?”
“That’s right, because she isn’t Doreen or Cheryl or even Cubby.”
This Mickey Mouse Club reference was lost on him, so I cut the comedy and filled him in, in short, brutal strokes.
Finally, he said, “You did well.”
“Will you handle our client? And explain that I wasn’t trying to discover his identity, that it just fell in my lap?”
“Yes. Certainly.”
“Do it now. Tonight.”
“Well, of course.”
“I mean, we’ll stay the night, Annette and me, and tomorrow morning I will need to know the game plan. Does her father want to send somebody to collect her? Do I go back to Iowa City and let her return to her apartment? And do we finally pull the plug on this cluster-fuck of a job?”
The Broker shook his head. “I believe our client will want you to attempt to complete what you’ve started.”
“Getting a window to do that, where the stateroom isn’t jammed with coeds and wives and writing students, may not be a breeze.”
The Broker shrugged and stood. “You’ll do your best, I’m sure…We’ll talk tomorrow, first thing. I’ll let you know then.”
I stood. “Okay. There’s one other thing.”
“What?”
“Tell the desk clerk I need a couple of those little traveler’s kits-tiny toothpaste, toothbrushes, deodorant, and so on. Have a bellhop bring ‘em up right away.”
“All right. Why not just call down?”
“That’s where I am right now, getting that stuff. Got it?”
“Got it.”
When I returned to our room, Annette was still in my bed. The lights were off but for a reading light built into the headboard. Her face had a carved beauty, her Italian heritage giving her a Madonna look, despite our recent whore-worthy bed boogie.
She asked, “Do you mind if I sleep with you?”
“No.”
“May be a little crowded.”
“That’s okay.”
“I just…just don’t want to sleep alone right now. I need somebody strong beside me.”
“Well, I’ll have to do.”
She smiled. I was a card, wasn’t I?
“Jack, where’s our toothbrushes?”
“They had to go rummaging in a storeroom. They’re sending the stuff up.”
Right then came a knock- thank you, Broker — and I gave the kid a buck and took the two little plastic bags of sample-size toiletries and deposited them in the bathroom. Then she was right behind me, in the Concort Inn robe, and first she brushed her teeth and then I did and it was as cute and domestic as could be.
I got in bed, and she got in after me and switched off the reading light, but we didn’t close the drapes, liking the soft glow from the streetlamps and business signs and the river with Rock Island glimmering beyond. I had an arm around her and she was cuddled to my chest, like she was a tiny thing though she was almost as tall as I was.
There is something about being in a hotel room in bed with a woman with the lights out and nothing out there but the night that encourages a peculiar kind of intimacy. Like being at camp in a bunk bed in the dark and sharing with friends all sorts of hopes and dreams and secrets.
I said, “Can I ask you a few things?”
“Sure.”
“Remember how I wondered if you were collaborating with the professor on your book?”
“Yes.”
“And you said you weren’t.”
“Right.”
“He was just helping you.”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t want to upset you. Maybe this can wait. This can wait.”
She sat up, leaned on an elbow, the big browns locked on me. “No. Tell me.”
“I found something out, shadowing the professor.”
“That he likes to fuck young women?”
“Well, I learned that, too. But…what kind of stuff are you dealing with in your book?”
“What…what do you mean, Jack?”
“I mean, there was something Byron said to you the other day, about you reporting every bad thing you ever saw or experienced with your father. What would that be, exactly?”
“Jack, I…that’s kind of personal.”
Not long ago, I’d been eating her out; not along ago, my dick had been halfway down her throat. And this was kind of personal?
“Honey,” I said, trying that out, “I have a good reason for asking.”
She sat all the way up. I did, too. But the sheets and covers were around her waist, so her small, pointy breasts were accusing me.
She said, “You know I have a rather…strained relationship with my father. Right?”
“I kind of gathered.”
“There are…reasons for that.”
“Reasons besides he’s a drug trafficker and murderer?”
She half-laughed, half-sighed. “Yes. Yes. Other reasons.”
“He beat you?”
“No.”
“Then he…oh.”
“Yes. ’Oh.‘ He fucked me, Jack. He fucked me from when I was twelve, around when my mother died, and until I was fourteen when he remarried and I got shipped off to boarding school. When I was older, later teens, when I was home for vacations or during the summer, there were no…advances, no sneaking into my room. He had a wife now and that was the past and it was never spoken of. Like it never happened. But it did.”
“Christ. I’m sorry. How does a thing like that…?”
“My mother died. Of cancer. It was lingering. In fact, the…abuse, the psychologists call it, began during Mother’s illness. I became the woman of the house at a very young age, her surrogate in many respects…”
Many respects was right.
She was saying, “I have terribly mixed feelings about it all, and-”
“Mixed feelings? What’s to be ‘mixed’ about?”
“That’s just the thing. The horrible, the most awful part to admit-I was his willing partner. Oh, I didn’t like it at first, it hurt me, I was too small, but I knew Daddy loved me and that I made him happy and I was taking over for Mother. Filling in for her, taking her place. And as the months passed, I came to like it. I liked having orgasms, and I liked having closeness with my father, and I became a kind of second wife to him.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Neither did I. Only, after he married, and our relationship stopped? At first, I know this is sick, this is crazy, but I was jealous. And I told a priest, and the priest secretly, taking a big chance, got me psychiatric help, and I came to know how wrong it was, how sad and sick and awful it was, and became very ashamed.”
Yeah, you got to hand it to psychiatry. Really put things right, that crowd.
“And the priest and the shrink, they didn’t report your father?”
“Daddy is a big contributor to the diocese. And as for my psychiatrist, well, you know who my father is. What would Daddy have done to that doctor?”
Hired somebody like me.
“Anyway,” she said, “I know now, intellectually and emotionally, that my father is a terrible man, a sociopath. I want nothing to do with him.”
“And you’re putting this in your book?”
“Yes. Yes, of course.”
“Aren’t you afraid of the repercussions?”
“What can Daddy do about it? Kill me?”
Well, he’d fucked her, hadn’t he? Why was killing her out of the question?
And this was it, wasn’t it? The secret that Lou Girardelli could not allow to get out. A book about him could contain all sorts of speculation about the mob and criminal activities; that kind of occasional bad publicity came with the territory, and even built a guy’s legend. But a confirmed story, from his own daughter, of incest and abuse?
I put my hands on her shoulders and said, “You don’t know what you’ve got yourself into, Annette.”
She shook her head of hair the way a lioness does its mane. “Of course I do. I’m going to free myself and became an artist, a real artist, through my book.”
“Your non-fiction novel.”
“Yes. My non-fiction novel.”
“Thanks to the instruction and nurturing of Professor Byron.”
“That’s right. Absolutely right.”
How could I tell her that her latest father-figure was fucking her in a whole new way?
Maybe just give it to her straight.
“For all I know,” I said, “the book you’re writing may be a masterpiece. But even so, I discovered something very troubling about Professor Byron.”
“Please. You’re not…come on. Jealous, Jack?”
“No. Did you know the professor was writing his own book about your father?”
She smiled. Laughed. Shook her head. “No he isn’t. You’re confused. He’s helping me.”
“He’s pumping you.” Boy was he pumping her. “He’s got all this juicy stuff about your father committing incest with his underage daughter, and that’s going to make his non-fiction book a huge bestseller…” If it didn’t get him killed first.
She was frowning now, and shaking her head again. “No. No, Jack. This is crazy.”
“I swear to you, Annette. He’s been researching your father for several years. This is his big follow-up to Collateral Damage. He already has a publishing contract. He isn’t collaborating with you-he’s researching you.”
Her mouth dropped open and her eyes were wide as well. But thoughts were flickering behind those eyes, as defensiveness and denial gave way to everything fitting into place…
Finally she said, damn near shrieked, “That bastard! That fucking bastard…”
I took her by the shoulders again, held tight. “I know this is a shock, but you have to get past it in a hurry. What the professor did to you isn’t even the worst thing that happened to you tonight.”
Breath poured out of her and she swallowed and, those huge brown eyes locked on me but half-lidded, she nodded.
She asked, “What now?”
“You get some sleep. I’m going to help you.”
“How?”
“I don’t know yet. But I will.”
“What about calling my father?”
“I’ll handle that.”
“Can I trust you, Jack?”
“You can.”
The crazy thing was, I wasn’t lying.