At some point I’d gotten up and peed and shut the drapes, and we might have slept deep into the morning if the phone hadn’t rung. Both of us were startled awake, and I was sleeping next to the nightstand and reached for the phone, though my hand initially touched the nine millimeter’s cold metal skin. Then I found the receiver and it was the Broker.
“You’re to take Miss Girard back to Iowa City, to her apartment,” Broker said, after perfunctory hellos. “She’s to stay in for at least today. No meetings with Professor Byron or anybody else for that matter.”
“That would help me out,” I said, purposely vague, “if you intend me to pursue that other matter.”
“I do.”
“Okay, but shouldn’t I stay with her? I have a hunch there may be other black guys on the South Side who could find their way to her apartment.”
“Have breakfast at the Concort coffee shop,” he said. “Make a leisurely exit from the hotel. If you leave no earlier than ten, then by the time you reach Iowa City, the girl’s father will have representation there.”
By “representation” I took it to mean that guys with guns would be sitting in the apartment house parking lot. Hopefully white guys.
“Okay. But Miss Girard and her father aren’t on the best of terms. I’m not sure she will go along with that.”
As you might imagine, my nude bedmate was sitting up by now, leaning on an elbow, her eyes perked with interest and her nice little breasts just plain perked.
“Whatever their differences,” he said, “they have a common interest in this matter-specifically, keeping her alive.”
“Not a bad point.”
“But I would like you to have her call her father so they can discuss it themselves. Perhaps come to a meeting of the minds if not a reconciliation.”
“Got you. Right here from the room? This phone okay?”
“No. Have her use one of the booths in the lobby. I don’t care to have a long distance call of that nature billed to the hotel.”
“Fine. But I have a couple of concerns of my own.”
“The kind you can’t speak about in front of Miss Girard.”
“Bingo.”
“Well, we’ll have a chance to talk. For now, take a shower, have a nice breakfast, and head back to Iowa City.”
“Sure.”
We said perfunctory goodbyes, and I said to her, “That was my boss at the PI agency back in Des Moines, who your father hired me through. We’ll be heading back to Iowa City and, for the time being, you’ll have bodyguards provided by your father.”
She frowned. “What if I don’t want bodyguards provided by my father?”
“Well, I guess that’s up to you. But I killed two soul brothers yesterday, and if I kill any today, I’ll forfeit my NAACP membership card. It’s an associate membership, but still.”
She smiled. The absurdity of the situation was such that joking about murder played pretty well.
“I understand,” she said softly. From her expression I could tell she’d come to some sort of decision. “But I want to talk to my father, myself.”
“I want you to. My boss wants you to. Your father wants you to. So it’s unanimous.”
“Should I do that now?”
“I was advised that you use a phone booth. We don’t want to leave a trail.”
“Any other instructions from your boss?”
“We’re to have a shower and then some breakfast.”
Eyebrows went up over half-lidded brown eyes. “Alone or together?”
“What?”
“The shower? Alone or together?”
“I think that’s our call.”
So we showered together. Because she was tall, it was tricky-not the showering, the fucking-but we were both motivated enough to make it work.
Back in the same clothing as yesterday, we felt a little grungy despite the shower, or maybe because of it, and in the Concort coffee shop, we took a booth in back where we could talk and not look conspicuous. Not that we really looked conspicuous, but these were the same clothes I killed those guys in, and I did feel a little cruddy.
With morning sunlight pouring in the mostly glass walls of the corner-set restaurant, this being a new day was readily apparent, and she shook that fluffy, slightly frizzy brown mane as she interrupted sips of orange juice to say, “I can hardly believe it happened. Last night seems unreal, like something out of Jean-Luc Godard.”
“What did he write?”
“He’s a filmmaker. French New Wave?”
“All I know about the French is, they dig Jerry Lewis.”
She made a face. “Well, they are a contrary lot, the French.”
What was wrong with Jerry Lewis? Hadn’t she ever seen The Nutty Professor?
But I never argue with beautiful women who fuck me in the shower, so I said, “You need to cooperate with your father.”
“I will.”
“Really?”
“Really. I will. I know my ass is on the line.”
“And it’s a really nice ass, you don’t mind my saying, and I’d like to see it and everything attached to it stay that way. Nice, I mean.”
Our breakfast came. I was having Eggs Benedict and she had French toast.
When I cut into my eggs and they bled yellow, she said, “ Ick. How can you stand that?”
“The same way the French stomach Jerry Lewis, I guess.”
“I never liked Eggs Benedict. It sounds like somebody who might work for my father.”
That was pretty funny, and I gave up a smile. “Speaking of your father…please tell me he doesn’t know about the book you’re writing.”
“He doesn’t! Oh my God, how stupid do you think I am?”
“I don’t think you’re stupid. But you might be foolish.”
“I am not foolish. I pride myself on my levelheadedness.”
Sure. Like spending the night with a guy she knew jack shit about and humping him silly. After all, hadn’t I rescued her from kidnappers? Kidnappers I’d murdered without qualms, which I assumed was a trait not shared by all of her boyfriends. That kind of levelheaded.
I swallowed a bite of the eggs; the hollandaise wasn’t great, kind of vinegary.
“Your old man’s not to know,” I said. “Don’t mention your book under any circumstances. If he asks about the professor, just say Byron has been helping you on short stories or something.”
“Okay, but…some day he’s going to find out.”
“Right. If it’s published-”
“ When it’s published.”
“When it’s published, he’ll know…and probably won’t be able to do anything about it. But keeping it from him till then may be tough. I don’t know diddly damn about publishing, but don’t they announce the books they’re doing? Don’t they do advance publicity?”
She shrugged. “If the publisher is discreet, Daddy won’t learn of it until the review copies have gone out, and then it will be too late.”
I held up a palm. “Okay. I can’t help you with that. I don’t know what he’s going to do under those circumstances. But I do know, if he finds out now? He’ll do something severe.”
“Daddy wouldn’t harm me.”
No. He would just have sex with her when she was twelve and then have sex with her for another couple of years after that, and screw her up psychologically so bad that she was capable of levelheaded judgment like checking into a hotel with a hired killer just because he looked like a college student and was pleasant after he murdered people.
“Well,” I said, “he’d harm your book. He’d grab you just like those spades did, and hold you until his people have found every manuscript, every carbon copy, and destroy them all. If copies are in New York, you’ll read and hear all about a major office building where a whole floor got taken out by an electrical flare-up resulting in a most unexpected fire.”
She said nothing. She ate a bite of French toast.
“You’re not disagreeing with me,” I said.
“No.”
“Good. You be discreet. Anybody else on campus know about this project?”
She shook her head. “Just K.J.”
“And he won’t have told anybody, since all he’s doing is stealing from it.”
Her olive complexion paled. “It’s so hard for me to believe…that K.J. would betray me like that. I thought we were artists! Fellow artists.”
“I don’t know much about artists, but I do know they are self-centered egomaniacs who don’t give two shits about any other artist.”
Her full lips formed a tiny smile, touched with just a little maple syrup. “For somebody who doesn’t know much about artists, you could write a book.”
“Maybe I will someday.”
That amused her. “Will I be in it?”
“No. You can trust me for my discretion.”
After I paid the check, I ushered her into the lobby and then walked her to the bank of phone booths and she slipped into one. She’d be reversing the charges, so we didn’t need to go get change from the front desk or anything.
While I was waiting, a hand touched my shoulder and I whirled and damn near cold-cocked the Broker, who bobbed his head back in momentary alarm, then said, “Easy, my boy. Take it easy. We only have a few minutes, perhaps seconds. What is it we need to discuss that we haven’t already?”
I took him by the elbow and we crossed to a pair of soft chairs in a waiting area. I leaned forward and so did he, the light-blue eyes unblinking and looking almost gray today, possibly because of his gray-vested suit.
“I may be new to this business,” I said, “but I know all about loose ends.”
He said nothing, just barely nodding.
“Am I in any danger?” I asked. “Are we in any danger?”
He didn’t pretend not to know what I was talking about. His white eyebrows rose a tad, his thick white mustache wiggled just a little.
Then he said: “It’s true that we’ve wandered off course in this affair. That we’ve severely broken protocol. You are not supposed to know who our client is.”
“Yeah, and our client isn’t supposed to know who I am, either.”
Another tiny nod. “But none of that was our doing. And I think the gratitude of our client, for your gallantry where his daughter is concerned, cancels out any concern we might have that our client could consider us, as you say, loose ends that need…snipping.”
My gallantry, huh? Killing those soul men in a rest stop shitter, and banging the client’s daughter in a room in the Broker’s hotel. Who says chivalry is dead?
“Okay,” I said. “But if anybody with spaghetti sauce on his tie gives me a funny look, he’s had his last fucking meatball.”
“Understood.”
“And, Broker-if some people die who maybe weren’t scheduled to die, you need to know I was protecting our asses… capeesh?”
He smiled a little and nodded. “By all means, protect us at every cost. One can always find another client. A young man with your skills, Quarry, is a rare find.”
He sounded like that fat guy in that movie about the Maltese falcon, right before Chubby sold out his sidekick.
But I said, “Just so we understand each other.”
“We do.”
I got up and went one way and the Broker got up and went another.
When Annette stepped from the phone booth, I asked, “Everything all right?”
She nodded. “He says he’s concerned for my safety, and insists that two of his people position themselves outside my apartment. He wanted two more in the apartment, but I convinced him there just wasn’t room.”
Plus, there seemed to be no access to that second-floor apartment other than the front, open stairway, so another pair of bodyguards would have been overkill.
“That’s all?” I asked. “You were on with him for quite a while.”
“I know. We did…we did argue about something.”
“What?”
“He wants to come to Iowa City himself, tonight. To see me. He’s worried about me. He says he wants to make it up to me. Make amends.”
“And you said no.”
“I said no.”
“And he’s coming anyway.”
“Yes.”
On the drive back to Iowa City, I encouraged her to find a radio station of her choice; she turned the dial to classical. That stuff gets on my nerves, but I didn’t say anything. She needed settling down worse than I did.
The trip back, which didn’t take much more than an hour on I-80, she spent grilling me, but in a nice enough way. She had spilled her lovely guts to me yesterday, and now she felt like turnabout was fair play.
So I gave her the story of my life. I won’t repeat this conversation because you’ve heard it all before, only you got the unexpurgated version. I let her know about Vietnam and my cheating bride, but left out minor details like crushing that asshole Williams under his car and turning to hired killing as a way to re-enter the civilian population and make a meaningful contribution.
The car waiting in the little apartment complex across from Sambo’s was a dark blue late ’60s Thunderbird with a vinyl top. They had taken a spot off to the left as you faced the building, and I pulled into one nearby.
I got out and looked at the two guys, a mustached, pockmarked little weasel at the wheel and a huskier pockmarked big weasel on the passenger side; both wore pastel leisure suits with turtleneck sweaters and had greasy black hair plus the usual mutton chops and their mustaches drooped like they were auditioning for an Italian western.
I leaned at the window of the huskier guy and he powered down the glass.
“My name is Jack. I’m taking Miss Girardelli up to her apartment, but then I’ll be going out for a while. I may be back later.”
He frowned. “Why you tellin’ me this?”
“Mr. Girardelli sent you fellas, right?”
“And this concerns you how?”
“This concerns me that you know which side I’m on, so I don’t wind up with an extra navel.”
Then I went around to Annette, where she’d got out of the Maverick, and walked her up the wrought-iron-railed cement stairs. I got the nine millimeter out of my waistband to go in and take a quick look. Her apartment was furnished in low-end contemporary stuff, probably came that way, with the only signs of Annette the many books stacked here and there, and some posters on the bedroom wall-Albert Einstein sticking his tongue out, Ernest Hemingway in a sailor hat, a couple others I didn’t recognize, one a woman who was definitely not Raquel Welch, who would have been my choice.
The place was clear, closets and all. Before going out the door, I gave her a little kiss that she turned into something bigger, but I left it at that and made my getaway.
My original plan had been to utilize the window provided by standing up Dorrie Byron for lunch to finally dot the professor’s I, but that no longer seemed wise. Better to go collect those photo prints, which I did in downtown Iowa City, and then keep the meeting at the Holiday Inn coffee shop, which I also did, after showering (alone) and changing my clothes.
Turned out I wasn’t hungry enough to eat, after the big breakfast, and ordered an iced tea while Dorrie, having no appetite either, asked for a cup of coffee.
Frankly, she looked older than before, and I didn’t think it was because I’d been hanging out with a younger woman. Her attractive face had a puffiness, particularly around the eyes, which were red-rimmed. She was in a white blouse with pearls and a black skirt and black pumps, all of which complemented her figure and her legs and everything just fine. These were still eminently jumpable bones.
But her face was a mask of tragedy.
I’d barely settled in the booth when I asked her, “Are you okay?”
“Not really.”
“You saw your husband, didn’t you?”
She nodded, and her chin crinkled.
“Didn’t go well?”
“At first, just fine. He let me cook for him. He let me…service him. I even stayed the night. That way he got breakfast out of me. We even showered together.”
That gave me a chill. A little too weird, that.
I said, “And?”
“And then he told me-it was over. He wants a divorce. He said he was glad I’d stopped by and that we’d been able to make ‘one last bittersweet memory.’ But we were over. I told him…well, you know what kind of things I told him.”
Her voice was hoarse enough to make it obvious that many of those things had been screamed.
She was stirring her coffee. She’d been doing that when I got there, I never saw her put any sugar in, but she kept stirring. And her eyes were staring past me.
My iced tea arrived, but I didn’t touch it.
She said, “He didn’t care. He didn’t care about losing half or more of his money. Or losing one or both of his homes. He didn’t care. He didn’t care about losing me, at all. He was going to be very rich from his next book and I wouldn’t get any of that, and he would be able to start over, and at the top, he said.” Now she looked at me. “You know, it might not hurt so bad if he’d told me straight out, when I first got there? He shouldn’t have had me cook for him. He shouldn’t have let me make love to him.”
“No. That was bastardly, all right.”
“Bastardly. Good word for that bastard.”
“I have the photos for you.”
“Please.”
I got out the yellow packet, having already pulled the Annette photos, leaving only those of the little blonde behind. And of the little blonde’s behind. Charlie the dead PI had got some great shots through those gauzy curtains; perfect for Penthouse.
She flipped through the prints, glassy-eyed, like a poker player on a losing streak who just knew no winning hand was coming.
She asked, “You know this girl’s name?”
“I can get it.”
“I’ll…probably need it. For the divorce proceedings, and…” She reached out and gripped my left hand with hers, its diamond ring catching the light. “Jack, you’ve been wonderful. Very professional, and I…I feel we had something, you and I.”
Well, I’d had a really good time. Beyond that, I couldn’t or shouldn’t say. I merely nodded and smiled and that vagueness was plenty for her.
Then I said, “You need to go home, Dorrie. This time, you really do need to go home.”
She nodded. “I have to check out.”
Then she slid out of the booth, pausing to say, “Can you get this? Put it on the expense account?”
“Sure,” I said. I didn’t have an expense account, but a well-stirred cup of coffee and an undrunk iced tea wouldn’t break me.
I decided today would be the day. With Dorrie on her way home, and Annette holed up in her apartment, I should finally have my opportunity. I headed back to the split-level on Country Vista on an afternoon turned colder, with some icy teeth in a wind desperately looking for snow to blow around but finding the white stuff too frozen over to comply.
So confident was I that I actually loaded up the Maverick in the driveway down behind the split-level, piling in my sleeping bag and space heater and the little TV Charlie bequeathed me and a few leftovers from my 7-Eleven runs, and runs was right, when your regular diet was Slim Jims and Hostess.
When I returned to my window, the house was cold enough without the space heater for my breath to show. I sat like an Indian and looked out at that cobblestone cottage, just waiting for my moment. I had on a black sweatshirt and blue jeans over long johns and the corduroy jacket and the black Isotoner gloves and the nine millimeter was on the carpet next to me, since this goddamn job had been just one unexpected thing after another.
Maybe six-fifteen, with night here already, I saw the professor coming out from behind the cottage to go into the little unattached cobblestone garage. From within, he opened the double-door, a big slab of gray-painted wood, and then I could see him getting into his maroon Volvo and backing out. He stopped in the drive, got out, closed the garage door, got back into the Volvo, pulled out of the drive and headed down Country Vista toward the main drag.
I was sitting up straight, the nine millimeter in my gloved hand now.
Finally an opportunity had presented itself, and I went out the back way and once again trotted down to cut through woods to where I could cross the street and come up unseen behind the rear of the cobblestone cottage. The gun in my waistband but my jacket unzipped, I followed my breath to the back door of the cottage. That was the only bad thing: I needed to get in without the professor noticing on his return that the door had been jimmied.
The rear door was old but the lock was new, the kind you could open with a credit card. But I didn’t have a credit card, as that desk clerk at the Concort Inn could tell you. Trying to think of what I might use instead, I absently tried the knob and the goddamn thing was unlocked. The professor, for all his east coast sensibilities, had fallen for the Iowa hi-neighbor trustfulness. The sap.
From peeking in windows on my previous visit, I already knew the layout: a small unremodeled kitchen in back, wooden cabinets with counter and an old stove and 1950s vintage refrigerator and yellow Formica table; a pantry and laundry room next door; then, as you came from the kitchen, a study and a bedroom to right and left respectively; and a good-size living room with a cobblestone fireplace, which was going nicely, red-and-blue flames snapping as if its owner were in attendance. In this surprisingly expansive open-beamed space was a lot of dark wood paneling that dated back to when the cottage was built. A very rustic interior, with built-in bookcases in one corner and a braided throw rug and a green sofa with a broken-down look and a big captain’s table under the glow of a hanging light fixture shaped like a yellow upside-down tulip.
I decided to get a head start on it, and went into the study. For half an hour, I went through his desk, its drawers and the file cabinets. I gathered every damn document that had the name “Girardelli” or anything vaguely Italian or having to do with Chicago. I was feeling pretty proud of myself, looking at a big stack of manuscript pages and carbon copies and boxes and notebooks resting on his swivel chair when I heard the back door open, and then close.
Positioning myself to the left of the door, snugged between the frame and the file cabinets, I waited and listened, the nine millimeter in hand, its snout up.
Out in the kitchen, he was setting something down. Then I heard him open the door on the refrigerator and stuff was going onto wire shelving, and then cabinets were opening and cans and other things were getting set down on wood. He’d gone to the store. He had to eat, didn’t he? Well, actually, he didn’t, but he didn’t know that.
I couldn’t think of any reason not to pop him there in the kitchen and was about to step out and do that very thing when somebody banged at the front door, hard, and I damn near pissed myself.
Hugging the wall again, I heard him saying, “Now what the hell…”
I knew the feeling.
I heard him cross into the living room over the wooden floor, the footsteps different on the braided rug, then the door opened and he said, “ Dorrie! I thought we’d settled everything.”
I knew the feeling!
The door slammed behind her.
“Almost, darling,” she said. “Tell me, though. We did have something, didn’t we? Once upon a time? Isn’t that what you storytellers say? Once upon a time?”
“Dorrie…of course we did. For that part of my life, for all those years, you were the only woman, the most important person in my entire life…”
Why was he talking so quickly? Why did he sound so goddamn desperate?
“That’s nice to hear,” she said. Her voice had an odd wistfulness, and a distance that was much farther away than from the study to the living room. “It does help, darling. It does help.”
“You need to put that down, Dorrie! Put it down right now!”
If you ever watched the old sitcoms on TV, like I Love Lucy, there was always this audience member on the canned laugh track who said, “ Uh oh! ” at a key story moment. I wasn’t watching a sitcom exactly, but I heard that familiar voice. Uh oh was fucking right…
Then came a sharp crack, almost as if the fire had popped, but it wasn’t the fire, was it?
I was hoping I didn’t have to kill her. I really didn’t want to, and I stood there frozen in my tiny space between door and filing cabinets, hoping to hear that door slam as she went away, having done my job for me.
But I didn’t hear the door slam.
I heard a second sharp crack.
And when I finally went out there, she was curled on the floor next to him, a certain elegance about how she lay there, as opposed to her husband, still in a tan jacket from going to the store and chinos and pretty much looking like a pile of laundry dumped by a fed-up housewife. And maybe he was. Her blouse was crimson and the stain on the white fabric grew where she’d shot herself through the heart the dead prick had broken. A little revolver was in her limp hand. Byron had taken his in the forehead and his talented brains were leaking out the back of his skull.
I leaned down for a look at the gun, and it was Charlie Koenig’s. 38! I’d put it in my suitcase but Dorrie must have helped herself to it when she visited my room. Her using that weapon would add another nice confusing layer to any police investigation.
The gunshots had seemed small if distinct. Nobody lived across the street now, not even me or the late Charlie. The cottages to left and right were spaced well away. I did not feel anyone was likely to have heard anything suspicious enough to call for investigation.
Wasn’t much left to do but burn those manuscript pages and notebooks in the fireplace. It took a while, and as the flames ate the opus, its author-dead and sprawled on the floor by the wife whose spirit he’d killed-basked unknowingly in their dancing reflection.