A space was open next to the dark blue Thunderbird with the Illinois plates, and I filled it with the Maverick. Both my car and the goon squad’s were backed in, for a good view of the little red-brick apartment building and its modest parking lot.
Whenever I’d done surveillance on Annette, over the past several days, I parked across the way in Sambo’s semi-enclosed lot; where the Thunderbird was parked made it too easy to come up on them from behind. But I guessed Girardelli’s boys knew their own business.
Right now the Thunderbird had only one pockmarked weasel sitting in it, the heavier-set one, on the passenger side.
I came around and bent at his window; his droopy-mustached, suspicious face had followed me over and his eyes were glittery slits under thick eyebrows. His leisure suit was a pastel green, his turtleneck a slightly darker shade with a gold chain necklace nestling in sweater folds. Whatever happened to black-and-white pinstripe suits with black shirts and white ties for the hood about town?
The craggy-faced weasel powered the window down and said, “Mr. G is up with his daughter. He said you should go up there.”
“Okay. What happened to your partner?”
He nodded toward the restaurant down and across the way. “Sal’s over having a bite. We take turns.”
“That parking lot’s where they grabbed the girl last night.”
“You don’t fuckin’ say.”
“You and Sal might not want to split up. If the spades send reinforcements, taking you fellas out one at a time would be a way to go.”
“Do I look like I was born the fuck yesterday?”
For all the gunk on his hair, he might have been born the fuck a few seconds ago.
But I said, “Hey, just trying to help out.”
“You can help out by going up there like Mr. G said.”
“No problem.” I smiled and nodded.
He glowered at me and powered the window up and turned his eyes toward the building.
I took the steps to the exterior landing along which apartment doors were lined, motel-style, and I knocked at Annette’s. She answered right away, cracking the door, then undoing a night latch and letting me in. Looking pale and a not a little shell-shocked, she was in a black zippered top with pointed collars and black-and-white geometric-pattern bell bottoms, possibly the ones she’d worn that first night when I saw her go into the professor’s cottage.
Annette basically had two decent-size rooms and a bathroom here, the living room (which you entered into) taking up two-thirds of a long narrow area, the back third a kitchenette. The bedroom and bathroom were off to the left. These were not lavish living quarters, but in a college town, for a student, this was as good as it got-Annette lived alone with easily twice the space any double-occupancy dorm room would provide. Probably set her back two hundred bucks a month.
This pad, and her hip threads and that white Corvette, meant Daddy was still signing checks to and for his Darling Girl. And his Darling Girl-despite Daddy using her for a fuck toy when she was twelve-was still letting him underwrite her lifestyle and her education. She’d get cut off, no doubt, when her tell-all book came out; but Annette probably figured she’d be making her own way in the world by then.
A rust-colored couch was at left as you came in, a framed Warhol soup can over it-a framed pop art print was on the opposite wall, too, a panel out of a love comic book-and a big portable TV was sitting on a metal stand in the corner at right, angled so that couch sitters and a big overstuffed rust-color easy chair at right could take in its impressive 25 inches. Another example of Daddy’s love?
Speaking of Daddy, he was seated in that easy chair next to an end table with a remote control, a lamp with a Tiffany-style shade and a tumbler of what looked to be Scotch on the rocks resting on a coaster. I recognized him at once, since he’d been in many a national magazine and on the nightly news plenty of times.
Still, I was surprised by how small he was. He couldn’t have been more than five eight, and maybe weighed 140, despite a modest paunch. Like his boys, he wore a leisure suit, a money green one with a yellow shirt with pointy collars and a gold crucifix on a gold chain dangling in graying chest hair, bridging fashion and religion.
Very tan (he had a place in Florida), Lou Girardelli was probably late fifties but appeared older, with that shrunken look people in their seventies can get; his hair was cut short, no mutton chops for him, and was salt-and-pepper, emphasis on the salt. His face was oval like his daughter’s but his nose was hooked and crowded by dark little eyes behind goggle-lens glasses with dark green frames.
His smile was friendly enough as he got out of his easy chair and extended his hand, approaching me.
Annette, uncharacteristically timid, was saying, “Jack, this is my-”
“Jack!” Girardelli said in a sandpaper baritone, as we shook. “Nice to finally meet you. I spoke to your boss in Des Moines, of course, but you and I haven’t had a chance to talk ourselves.”
He was keeping to the PI story I’d fed Annette, whether from information the Broker gave him or what his daughter told him, I couldn’t say.
“No, we haven’t, sir.”
“Come, sit, sit.” He gestured to the couch and I sat and he played host, extending his arms as if this were a castle and he its king. “What can we get you? Annie has Scotch and bourbon and-”
“Nothing, sir,” I said, with a mild smile and an upraised hand. “I’m fine.”
“You’re sure? It’s no trouble.”
Not for him. It was Annette who’d have to play bartender.
“You’re very gracious,” I said. “No.”
Annette smiled, tightly, joining me on the couch, but not right against me, not too cozy. Her hands were folded in her lap and she sat very still and stiff and straight.
Girardelli shrugged, and rather than return to his easy chair, joined us on the couch, sitting next to his daughter, putting her between us, and she scooched somewhat closer to me.
“I’ll always be grateful to you, Jack, coming forward to help Annie last night.” He rested a hand on Annette’s shoulder. Her flinch was barely perceptible.
He was saying, “Those moolies would have done Christ knows what to my little girl.”
“Wouldn’t have been pretty, no.”
“Animals. A bunch of damn animals. There’s going to be a bonus in it for you, Jack.”
“I appreciate that, sir, but it’s not necessary.”
He was studying me, smiling. But the eyes behind those oversize lenses bothered me. They were small and hard and cold, like black buttons sewn on a doll.
“I just stopped by,” I said, “to make sure everything is cool where Miss Girardelli is concerned. That she has proper protection, which I can see she has.”
He patted Annie’s leg, just above the knee; she closed her eyes. “No one’s going to touch my daughter, that I promise you. Sal and Vin are two of my best men, and another team will be in by midnight. They’ll work shifts, and I may even bring in a third team.”
“Good. How long will you keep that up?”
“Well, an indefinite period. Not long. Not long. We’re dealing with our little Mau Mau uprising back home in our own way, on our own turf.”
Annette said to him, “Daddy, I don’t want to live in a bubble. I need my space, and privacy.”
Christ, she sounded about twelve.
“Sweetheart, no one will bother you. My boys will stay out of your way, but they’re here if you need them. I’m gonna stay tonight myself, right here on this couch.”
Annette closed her eyes again. The hands in her lap were fists.
“Sir,” I said, sitting forward, “I think you should know, I’ve taken care of our other business.”
“Good! Good!” The genial smile broadened but the eyes stayed just as dead. “I am going to make sure you get something extra for this quality work. If you ever get tired of the private eye business, Jack, I can find a place for you on my personal security staff.”
“You’re kind, Mr. Girardelli. But I do think I need to get going.” I rose. “We’re a small agency and there’s always another job waiting…”
He nodded, then he got up and said to his seated daughter, “Jack and I are going to step out for a few moments, Sweetheart. I need to talk to him.”
She smiled tightly. “Sure, Daddy.”
I said, “There’s a restaurant across the way.”
“All right.” He went to the door, opened it and gestured for me to go on out. “We’ll get coffee.”
I smiled at Annette and she smiled at me and rolled her eyes as kids have forever done behind the back of a parent.
“Be good,” I said.
And she nodded, and smiled again, the young woman smiling, not the twelve-year-old.
So once again I sat in a booth at Sambo’s, this time with one of the top mob bosses in Chicago. I had a Coke and he had coffee with lots of cream and sugar. In the bright glare of the relentlessly illuminated pancake house, I could see every freckle and age spot and wrinkle and stray facial hair on that too-tan puss, every blackhead and tiny red vein and enlarged pore on that hooked honker. His eyebrows were out of control with lots of white twisting around black, and his teeth were too white, too big, probably purchased.
“Do you smoke?” he asked.
It was the first thing he’d said since we left his daughter’s apartment. We’d nodded to his boys in the Thunderbird (both weasels were in the front seat now) and just walked quickly over. I had my corduroy jacket on, but he hadn’t put his topcoat on, and it was bitter.
Now, in the warmth of Sambo’s, in a world of orange and brown and white and stainless steel and glass and faux-leather, the Chicago mob boss was seemingly asking for my permission to smoke.
But I’d misread him, because when I said I didn’t smoke, he said, “Good. I don’t, either. I gave it up, three years ago. Causes cancer, you know, that’s no joke. I can see you’re a clean-cut boy. Vietnam?”
I nodded.
“Your Broker, he likes ex-GIs. I don’t blame him. You’re dependable. You don’t scare easy. You can think on your feet.”
Right now I was on my ass in a Sambo’s booth, but I was thinking, all right. I was thinking that those dark eyes behind the green-framed glasses were like a shark’s.
We had good privacy, nobody in an adjacent booth, and we spoke softly but clearly.
He said, “What happened to that fucking prick?”
“If you mean Professor Byron,” I said, “his wife murdered him this evening. Sick of him cheating on her with this coed and that. Then she killed herself.”
The eyes suddenly got lively, gleaming, like water pearling off gun metal. “Excellent. Nicely done.”
Was it my fault he jumped to the wrong conclusion?
He was saying, “Sure you wouldn’t like to work for me, Jack? Maybe you didn’t want to say so, in front of Annette.”
I said, “I’m happy working for the Broker. But I do apologize for…well, I know you like being insulated from people like me. And with all due respect, sir, I prefer insulation from people like you. From any client-that’s our mutual protection, after all.”
He nodded. He was smiling but not showing his expensive teeth. That tan was damn near black; fuck cigarettes, he’d get skin cancer if he kept that up.
I asked, “How are we with the trash I dumped on I-80?”
That meant the two black kidnappers.
He said, “Right now it’s still classified a robbery. I believe within twenty-four hours, it’ll be a gangland killing. But that doesn’t mean it’ll come to my doorstep.”
“Good.”
“I mean, these niggers are always killing each other. They got more factions than the fucking communists. And, like I said, my people are busy killing black asses even as we speak.”
I nodded. “I was improvising, sir. I certainly didn’t mean-”
He raised a benedictory hand. “No. You did well. You saved my daughter. Nothing’s more precious to me than my little girl.” Then he sat forward. “What about the prick’s book? That fucking manuscript?”
“Assuming he didn’t send a copy to an editor in New York or somewhere, it’s gone, all of it. I had plenty of time in his study and I burned every goddamn page, every scrap, every note.”
He sighed. “Wonderful to hear-excellent work, first-class, Jack. But that bastard was close to Annette. Could she have a copy?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
He sipped his coffee, thought for a few moments, then shrugged and said, “You must understand, Jack, that Annette and I have had our differences.”
“That’s hard to believe. You seem so close.”
Another shrug, more elaborate. “It’s these times. These fucking draft dodgers, these dirty damn hippies, and that’s just the start of it. Think of that professor, and the trust he betrayed! I’m paying that university for my child’s education, and one of their staff is… is…I can’t say it. It’s disgusting.”
“Yeah. Kind of turns your stomach.”
The wild eyebrows climbed high, even above the goggle glasses. “Problem is, Jack, my generation, we had it tough. We survived the Depression. We survived World War Two, you know?”
What I knew was, Girardelli had gotten rich in the Depression off bootleg booze and brothels, and spent the war stateside and out of uniform, getting richer, selling black-market meat and tires and counterfeit ration stamps.
“Yeah,” I said. “Moral decline. It’s a pisser.”
He nodded vigorously. “Well, our problem was, we spoiled our kids. Wanted to give them what we couldn’t have, wanted them not to have to live through any of the tough times we suffered through.”
I was drinking Coke. Somehow I managed not to do a spit take.
Girardelli was saying, “So I don’t blame Annette. She can’t help it that, when she was little, I spoiled her little ass. I gave her everything a father could, and more.”
That was for sure.
“Anyway, she’s a wonderful girl, and very talented, really gifted, you should see the poetry she wrote in finishing school.” He shook his head and let out a weight-of-the-world sigh. “But she’s of her times, it’s these times, she’s one of these kids, wild and free and rejecting the old values, rejecting her own father, sometimes.”
“Kids today.”
He leaned forward. His sandpapery voice got a little rougher. “So it’s possible she was helping that prick with his book. Possible. Possible. And maybe, just maybe, she has a carbon copy or some shit.”
“I guess that’s not beyond the realm of possibility.”
He was almost purring now despite that rough-edged voice. “She likes you. She trusts you. Jack, I don’t mean to get personal, but did you have relations with her?”
“I won’t lie to you, sir. I kissed her.”
He threw up his hands. “She’s a beautiful girl. I don’t blame you.” Then he leaned in again, buddy buddy. “What I’m asking is, could you stay on and get closer to her? Just for a day or so? You can search her room. Or you can get her out of that apartment, and my guys can toss the place.”
“Well…maybe. I guess.”
“I can offer you ten thousand on top of all the other money, and it goes straight to you. Never mind your Broker. And if you turn up a copy of that manuscript, well, I’ll double it.”
“Well…I could do that, I guess. Who couldn’t use ten grand? Or twenty?”
“Good. Good!”
“But, sir-one thing does concern me. As I mentioned, normally I would be in the dark about all this-I wouldn’t know you, the client; I wouldn’t know about manuscripts and…it does worry me.”
“Why? How?”
“You maintain a degree of safety by requiring those levels of insulation we talked about. I don’t want to be a threat to you. I don’t want to be seen as a loose end. Or the Broker, either. You need to know I’m loyal. I’m discreet.”
I watched his eyes carefully as he responded.
“Jack, I know how to reward loyalty.”
His smile was winning, almost charismatic. The smile wrinkles around his eyes were convincing, too. But those eyes. Those black-button eyes. Those shark eyes.
He left a ten on the table on top of the check, and we headed outside. The night had grown colder and darker, the moon lurking behind cloud cover, and I put on my gloves. We came along the side of the restaurant, and I went ahead a few steps and pointed.
“That’s where they grabbed her, sir,” I said.
And I walked over to the spot. Only a few cars in the lot, and no people but us.
He came over.
“Really, Jack, it doesn’t matter,” he said.
“Actually, it does.”
The. 357 magnum came out of my pocket in a flash of shiny silver and I slapped him alongside the head, its long, thick barrel colliding with bone and tearing flesh. His knees buckled and he went down, not unconscious but stunned, a pile of meat in a green leisure suit. I kicked him in the head and now he was unconscious.
The Sambo’s lot might stay empty only a few seconds, so I had no time to waste. At the street, I waited for a car to pass, then trotted across and over to the apartment house parking lot, and came up along the rider’s side of the Thunderbird.
The heavier-set pock-faced weasel was behind the wheel again, and I startled him a little. I leaned in and grinned at him and made the roll-the-window-down motion, even though I knew the windows were electric, and when the glass was no longer between us, he said, “You scared me for a second, you dumb shit,” and I shot him in the head.
The other weasel jumped a little as his partner’s brains splattered him in the face like a cream pie, and he hadn’t had time to get over it when I shot him in the head, too, that bullet going through and taking some brain and blood to splash and streak the now spider-webbed rider’s side window.
Then I trotted over to the Sambo’s lot, where Lou Girardelli was just coming around, pushing up on one hand.
“What the fuck,” he said, blood streaming down his face from where the. 357 barrel’s sight had torn his flesh. The dead little eyes had some life in them, for once. “What the fuck, Jack?”
“Just tying off a loose end, Lou,” I said, and fired once and the dead little eyes were dead again.
I was wearing the Isotoners so I didn’t need to wipe off the handle of the. 357 I’d taken off Charlie back at the rest stop, and just tossed it near Girardelli’s body. He was on his back and the entry wound was about the size of a quarter and the seepage under his skull was something I was careful not to slip in as I left the lot to cross the street.
One more loose end to deal with.
I kept my head down in case any of the apartment tenants were peeking out their windows after hearing sounds that could have been shots. The nine millimeter was in my waistband and the corduroy jacket was unzipped as I went up the cement stairs.
After I knocked on Annette’s door, I said, “It’s Jack!”
She cracked the door, then opened it, her eyes wider than I’d seen them and I’d seen them pretty damn wide.
I stepped inside. “Your father’s dead. I’m sorry.”
She said nothing, her hand splayed to her mouth.
“They got the two downstairs, too,” I said, “then took off, fast.”
Her eyes somehow got even wider, moving side to side now.
“I don’t think you’re in any danger, not with your daddy dead. But I can’t stay.”
Now they narrowed. “Oh, please, you have to-”
I put a hand on her arm. “Honey, I’m not really a PI from Des Moines. I do freelance work for guys like your father, and if I stick around, I’ll be hip deep in shit.”
“You lied to me?”
“If I’d told you I was just another soldier, how would you’ve reacted? I have to go.”
What, did you think I was going to shoot her in the head, too? What kind of prick do you take me for? She didn’t know anything. She couldn’t hurt me.
She was shaking her head, overwhelmed. “Will I…see you again?”
“Someday,” I said.
Maybe a hundred years from next Tuesday.
I touched her face, and slipped out. She was just a silhouette in the doorway, then, and not even that for long.
Some first job. Six kills but not the guy I was hired for. Two beautiful women and more sex than I’d had in the last six months. I’d survived it all, but hoped this shit wasn’t typical. I wanted to live a while.
It was a risk, removing a client before getting paid. But killing Lou Girardelli’s ass was only prudent, in this case, and anyway, the Broker did enough business with Chicago that they’d surely pay off for their associate, so tragically and brutally murdered by those black bastards from the South Side.
As I headed west on I-80, toward Cedar Rapids to turn in my rental car and catch the next plane north, I had a pang or two about Annette. She’d have some rough days ahead-I’d left her with dead Daddy and his just as dead goombahs in her lap, and then there’d be the news about the murder/suicide at the cobblestone cottage. But she’d get over it.
Hadn’t I left her a hell of a last chapter for her book?