That first night camped out in the split-level turned into morning-three in the morning, actually-before I decided that my non-Mouseketeer Annette would be spending the night in the cobblestone cottage with her favorite professor, tuckered out after her oral exams.
I admit that I had considered several scenarios designed to bring this assignment to its desired conclusion and right away. None of these, however, suited the Broker’s mandate of care and caution, and mostly included me going over there and somehow dealing non-violently (or anyway non-fatally) with the brunette, and then snuffing the prof, finding the manuscript pages Broker wanted destroyed, destroying them, and heading back to the lake and my A-frame to wait for money and praise to arrive from the Broker.
Some of these scenarios were pretty fanciful, involving chloroforming the girl (where would I get that stuff, exactly-a heist at the University hospital?) or knocking her out gently, like they do on TV, only in real-life that kind of blow kills you half the time. Pretty much all of these idiot plans had me shooting the prof multiple times, watching him shake, rattle and roll in Wild Bunch slow motion while I grinned maniacally. Somehow this didn’t seem in line with the Broker’s low-key wishes.
What was my problem, anyway?
What was the philandering Byron to me? Why did I care how many coeds blew and/or boffed him? I was generally in favor of girls blowing and boffing guys, although old farts like the prof (fucker was pushing forty) getting blown and boffed by young girls made me a little queasy, admittedly. I mean, there are limits.
So part of why I threw in the towel at three a.m. on my first stakeout was a sense that I needed rest and refreshment of my faculties, and anyway I did not want to fall asleep in this cold house where my pants could catch fire being too close to the space heater while the rest of me froze its nuts off.
By three-thirty I was in my Holiday Inn Room all snuggled up in my wee little bed. I didn’t need a lot of sleep and woke up around eight-thirty a.m. The window view told me that snow had fallen during my slumber and the world was a winter wonderland out there, thick fluffy stuff and evergreen trees plump with white, but the plows had been out, so you could go and enjoy Jack Frost’s handiwork without winding up dead in a ditch.
I showered, threw on a sweater and jeans and went down for breakfast. The motel was pretty dead-this was the Sunday after Christmas and the usual businessman clientele were not on the road and the other guests seemed to be made up of family members who were overflow from the homes of relatives who’d run out of spare rooms.
That meant that later, around ten, when I went down for a swim, I had to share the chlorine-scented echo chamber with squealing, splashing kids, whose shrill glee would have sent a guy with a hangover looking for a drill press to squash his head in. But I didn’t have a hangover, or a drill press for that matter, and anyway didn’t hate children any more than the next guy, so I settled into the whirlpool bath and let the hot, churning water soothe me.
A woman who presumably was the mother of at least one or two of the eight or nine turning the swimming pool room into a combination day care center and horror show padded over in a bright orange one-piece swimsuit. She’d put on a little weight having kiddies, but there was no doubt why somebody had wanted to have kiddies with her in the first place-she was a redhead with an Afro-ish tower of permed but tousled hair and a roundish pleasant face and displayed the kind of curvy frame that makes you really lenient about cellulite.
She settled in across from me. In ten years, she wouldn’t rate a second look. But right now the way her full breasts hit the top of the water and the crinkles around her dark blue eyes as she smiled at the pleasure the water jet at her back was giving her was giving me a hard on. The hard on was safely beneath the water, not causing anybody any trouble, not even me, but I wondered what the hell was wrong with my ass. A woman almost ten years older than me, tending her kiddies at a pool, had my dick throbbing.
I was supposed to be in control. Last night, or early this morning I guess would be more accurate, I had considered wild scenarios that had me behaving like a lunatic in carrying out a job that required cautious planning and detached professionalism. What the fuck was wrong with me?
The bubbling water and the kiddie shrieks played like dissonant modern music as I sat there with my arms winged on the concrete lip of the whirlpool, smiling at the redheaded mom, whose posture mirrored mine.
“Have a nice Christmas?” she asked.
“You bet.”
“Get everything you wanted?”
She couldn’t see my erection, could she? I had boxer-type trunks on that billowed with the water, so I should be safe, though when the bubbles turned off, I could be sitting here with a tent in my lap.
I said, “I guess no kid gets everything he wants.”
“Oh, so you’re a kid, huh?”
“Overgrown.”
“Like all men,” she said, and she grinned, nice white teeth, kind of big, a very real smile that wasn’t at all practiced.
“Which of these kids are yours?”
“What? None of them.”
“Oh.” Actually, more like: “Oh!” Not out of surprise (though everything I’d assumed about her had just gone poof), but the need to talk above the frothing hot tub and the screaming brats. Pretty much everything we were saying rated an exclamation point, only you’ll have to fill that in yourself.
She said, “So aren’t you going to ask me what a nice girl like me is doing in a place like this?”
“I didn’t want to pry.”
She slid around and sat next to me. Not right next to me, but a more intimate arrangement for sure, though still requiring shouted conversation.
“My name’s Dorrie,” she said, and she offered a hand with red-painted nails.
I froze for a second, wondering if I was supposed to kiss it; not being a fucking Frenchman, I just shook it. I was really nervous, because my erection had grown a heartbeat of its own by now and here she was right next to me, her considerable cleavage on display above the orange wet cloth at which her nipples were poking not helping any, either.
“Jack,” I said, with a nod. “I’m here on business.”
She arched an eyebrow, a dark, plucked thing that already had an arch. “Funny time of year to do business.”
“I won’t dig in till next week,” I said. I didn’t feel like going into my lingerie salesman routine.
“What do you sell?”
Shit.
“Things you’d look good in,” I said.
“Such as?”
“Lingerie.”
“Really? You don’t mean that Frederick’s of Hollywood type jazz?”
“Not that obvious. But sexy enough to get your husband’s attention.”
She looked toward the pool and the kids who weren’t hers. “What makes you think I have a husband?”
“The diamond ring.”
She turned to me sharply and her laugh was sharp, too. “I guess that is a dead giveaway…You’ll be around all this coming week, then?”
“Some of it.”
“Maybe we’ll run into each other. I’m sometimes in the bar in the evenings.”
“You’ll be here a while, too?”
“Maybe. It’s kind of…open-ended. Trying to work something out.”
That was when I noticed that though her eyes were smiling, they had a sadness. No, that wasn’t it: weariness. I’d seen that look before, just not on a good-looking woman. Guys who’d been in the jungle on one too many a tour, they got that kind of weariness in their eyes.
For a moment there, I thought maybe she’d slip her hand under the water and inside my trunks and help me out. Instead I had to wait for her to go and then do my best to get up and out of the whirlpool with my back to the other guests and those impressionable kiddies and wrap a towel around my waist and disguise my condition until I could get back to my motel room and do something about it.
About time I got a grip on myself.
Pretty soon I was climbing back into my long underwear (a real turn-on for dolls like Dorrie you picked up at a bar) and wondered how stupid it would be to indulge with this sad-eyed curvy older woman. I was on a job. Relieving tension was a good thing, when you had a job to do. But what if she somehow figured out who I was, or why I was here?
That was stupid. Nothing wrong with picking up some chick (was a thirty-five-year-old woman still a chick, I wondered?) and getting your rocks off. Might help me not go around getting raging erections in public, which is the kind of attention grabber a guy trying to stay invisible generally tries to avoid.
As I reflected on the little whirlpool mini-encounter, I realized the redhead probably hadn’t been hitting on me or anything, just indulging in some gentle flirting, maybe checking to make sure she still had what it takes to get a younger guy’s attention.
And how had I reacted? I’d gone off on another wild-ass mental scenario, this time involving some housewife from Who-the-Fuck-Cares Junction, probably because the professor was getting some and I wasn’t.
Shit, I should cut the old boy some slack. Why shouldn’t he enjoy himself a little in his last days? I was young. I had plenty of time ahead of me to get my ashes hauled. Give the dead guy a break.
Before long I was back at my window in the split-level, in my corduroy jacket over my clothes and long johns under them, with the space heater making its electrical whine. I had another thermos of hot chocolate, and a six-pack of canned Cokes and a gourmet selection of beef jerky and Slim Jims and a package of those yellow Hostess Cupcakes with the orange frosting that they don’t sell year-round.
The overcast day threw soft blue shadows on the wintry landscape. The cottage looked homey and quaint; the Corvette parked out front, already white, took on a lumpy, surrealistic look with the layering of snow. After two and a half hours, I was starting to wonder if Annette had moved in with the prof for the rest of winter break, which would make my job much harder. I would have to wait for her to leave on some errand of shopping or a doctor’s appointment or whatever-the-fuck, and run across the street and get the job done with no notion of when she might be back.
Also, the lack of activity over there was numbing. I began to think I was looking at a photograph, and would squint until I could see some movement from the light wind, branches rustling, snow blowing, anything to convince me otherwise. The radio station I was listening to was on its second pass through its play list-“Spill the Wine” had come around again and, if memory served, would be followed by “War,” which apparently was worth absolutely nothing, as if I needed a fucking song to tell me.
That was when the dark green Pontiac GTO rolled up in front of my split-level and I ducked down, even though from where I was sitting I probably couldn’t be seen, anyway. Like a kid peeking over a fence, checking if the coast was clear before sneaking into a ball game, I edged my eyes up to where I could see who the hell my visitor was.
Nobody was getting out of the GTO, which was a nice set of wheels, by the way. I could make out a figure with brown hair (Beatles ‘64 length), mutton chops and a trim mustache behind the wheel, just sitting there with the motor going and the windows up. No snow was on the car, either, so he’d either cleaned it off or had just arrived from enough of a drive to completely melt it off.
He was in a tan cowhide jacket with fleece lining. Had sunglasses on, even though the sun was M.I.A. He began pounding on the steering wheel with the heel of a hand. And “War” was indeed playing on my radio and this guy was keeping time to it, which kind of freaked me out.
Then I figured it was either a coincidence or he was listening to the same station. Nonetheless, I picked up the nine millimeter automatic from where it lay by my thermos of hot chocolate and I held onto it tight. I felt colder all of a sudden and leaned over and drew the space heater closer; it hummed but not in tune with “War.”
When “War” ended, and “Get Ready” began, the guy was still sitting there. He wasn’t watching my split-level, that was for sure. His eyes hadn’t turned my way even once, not a casual quick check on his surroundings. He was glued to the cobblestone cottage.
This guy was staking out the same fucking house as me! Not very damn subtly, I grant you, though his ass-hanging-out method did validate my own more careful approach. As I resumed my normal position at the window-normal except for the gun being in my hand and resting in my lap-I frowned at the mustached kid (and that’s what he was, a kid, even younger than me) who was suddenly smack dab in the middle of my surveillance.
Okay, I thought, this is really getting fucked up.
If this was what my new career was going to be like, I might want to consider signing on with Air America instead: there was always room for another mercenary in this shithole of a world.
Here’s the thing: this little prick in sunglasses, with a cool ride that made my Opel GT back home look like a kiddy car, did not match up with any of the surveillance info the Broker had given me. I had a list of names and descriptions that included four guys who were staying in Iowa City over winter break, who the prof was the advisor of or some shit, and who might stop by his pad for an hour or two of legitimate college work, as opposed to coeds stopping by to polish his professorial knob. I had cars and license plates on this quartet (none of whom had shown as yet) and addresses and even goddamn phone numbers, like that would come in handy.
“Hi. My name’s Quarry. I’m in town to blow your favorite professor’s brains out. Can you tell me whether you’re planning to stop by his place this afternoon, so I can pick a time when I wouldn’t have to spray your fucking brains against the wall, too? Thanks!”
So who the hell was this little bastard?
“Let It Be” was on the radio now, doing its endless thing; apparently the DJ had to take a dump. I watched the GTO. Here I was, supposedly keeping an eye on the cobblestone cottage, and now I had this green machine on my mind. Further, he was seated in front of my split-level, inadvertently calling attention to me, or anyway my post.
The front door of the cottage opened.
For a moment, I thought the brunette was finally leaving, and doing so coincidental to the GTO’s arrival; but I’d been right before, when I figured the sleek Pontiac on this quiet street would attract attention. She appeared on the porch, breath pluming, holding her arms to herself in the cold-she did not have the fur-collar coat on, just a black sweater and the same black-and-white geometric-pattern bell bottoms as yesterday.
She trotted down the sidewalk, long legs pumping, and was heading across the street as the kid in the GTO got out, his breath pluming, too. He was of medium height and on the slight side.
“ Tom!” Her teeth were bared and her eyes large. She loomed, at least an inch taller than the kid. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
“Then it’s true?”
She stood there, hugging her arms to her body, shivering. “Then what is true?”
“You are shacked with that creep!”
Even at this distance, from the meager crack of my window, I could hear her sharp, indignant draw of breath.
“Professor Byron is my advisor! I told you I couldn’t see you over break. We are working on a very, very important project.”
“I bet you are! I just bet you are!”
This guy sure had some snappy responses.
She was shaking her head, the brunette locks bouncing every which way. “I told you. I told you he was helping me with my book. It’s the most important thing in my life right now.”
“More important than me?”
“Yes! Right now, yes. I don’t have time to see you right now, and you know yourself things aren’t the same, anyway, not with the distance between us.”
He was waving his arms a little, not in a threatening way. Just desperate. “We could see each other probably twice a month, if you wanted to. If you weren’t so intent on this stupid project of yours…”
“That’s what you think of me, isn’t it?”
“What…?”
“I’m nothing to you but your ‘girl’-I’m not a serious writer doing serious work!”
I wondered if a serious writer would use the word “serious” twice in the same sentence. But what did I know about it?
Her arm went out straight from her side and she pointed toward the main drag that Country Vista bisected-the gesture of a parent ordering a child to its room.
“ Go, Tom! Go back to your frat brothers. Or go home to Mommy and Daddy, I don’t give a damn. Maybe you can work at the bank over break!”
He put his hands on her shoulders. “Annette, please-come with me. Spend the afternoon with me.
You’ll freeze out here. Your teeth are chattering. Come on, baby, give me a chance. Give us a chance.”
I wish I could tell you the radio was playing “Give Peace a Chance,” but I can’t. Actually, “Let It Be” was still going, though I’d turned it down very low, to hear this little soap opera.
She shook off his hands from her shoulders. “ Go! Tommy-go! Right now. And don’t bother us.”
“Us?”
“We are working, K.J. and me.”
“K.J.” The kid shook his head. “First name basis now, you and the prof.”
Actually, initials aren’t really a first name, but I got his point.
“Tommy…”
“Listen, babe, I asked around about him. I talked to people.”
“You don’t even go to Iowa. How would you know?”
“I have friends. I know people. He was at Columbia two years ago, and-”
She shoved him against his car. The sound was loud enough to really carry, a substantial whump.
“Get the fuck out of my life,” she said, teeth bared again, and she turned and strode toward the cottage.
Tom went right after her, and that was when, finally, the prof came out. He was in a beige sweater and tan chinos and sandals, but he charged right out into the winter weather and caught Tom by the arm and hauled him across the street and flung him against the car again. Byron, his dark yellow hair a straw-like tangle, had a wild-eyed look as he leaned in to Tom, whose back was to me,
pushed up against the GTO.
“You are leaving now,” Byron said, some oratory in the baritone. “Of your own volition. Otherwise, get back in your car and wait for the police to arrive, because that’s the call I’m making when I get back inside, if your vehicle is still here. Do I make myself clear?”
Tom scrambled into the car and got behind the wheel and drove off in a cloud of exhaust fumes. Byron walked back and positioned himself, arms folded, about halfway up the walk and watched as his unwanted guest had to go through the humiliation of pulling into the no-name lane the split-levels were on, backing out, and turning around. Poor little bastard couldn’t even make a quick getaway.
But I could.
I headed to the back of the house where I could exit unseen and scrambled like hell to get my rental Ford out of the split-level-next-door’s garage. I was moving fast, damn near running, because if I didn’t shake it, Tom would be long gone.
And I needed to follow Tom. He was a new player in this game and, unlike the blonde yesterday, might turn back up in the middle of things and at a very inconvenient time. If the Broker’s trusty surveillance expert wasn’t going to give me all the dope I needed, and I don’t mean hash, I had to do the job myself.
By the time I came out of the lane and turned onto Country Vista, the professor was back in his cottage, but Tom was visible up ahead three blocks or so. I thought the kid might go tearing out of there, but instead he was crawling. We were almost to the main drag when he pulled over, and gave me a real start.
I had to go on by him and glimpsed him, hunkered over the wheel, crying.
Poor bastard.
I waited for an opening, then cut across the main drag into the parking lot of a medical clinic and waited there for the green GTO to appear at the mouth of Country Vista. Within minutes, it did, Tommy getting himself under control enough to drive, and I fell in behind him. His car had Illinois license plates; interesting. Also, a PEACE NOW bumper sticker, the O of NOW the familiar peace symbol; a second sticker said, REMEMBER KENT STATE.
They didn’t make frat boys like they used to.
Before long I had followed Tom into the Iowa City business district, a ghost town on this Sunday afternoon; parking places were usually at a premium, but neither Tom nor I had trouble finding one. This was Clinton Street and the buildings of the university sprawled to my right, as I sat in my rental, and a street of bookstores, boutiques and bars was at my left. I watched Tom angle across to the Airliner, a long-in-the-tooth brick-fronted establishment whose sign bragged about its 1944 origin. Customers were sitting in a big front window eating slices of pizza and drinking beer and looking across at the snowy campus as if something were going on.
After five minutes, I cut across the barely existent traffic and entered the bar, which didn’t seem to have been remodeled since 1944, either. The pizza smell was inviting, though, and I would have taken a booth and burrowed in with a small pie if I hadn’t noticed Tom sitting at the bar in his fleece-lined jacket. Most of the stools were open, so plopping down next to him and getting friendly might have been read wrong.
So I left a stool between us and ordered a beer and asked the bartender if I could eat at the bar and he said sure. I ordered a small pepperoni and, my beer not here yet, turned toward Tom and said, “I hope the pizza is as good as it smells.”
Slouched over the bar, Tom gave me a “huh” look-he already had his beer, and most of it was gone-and then forced a smile and said, “It is good.”
“You’re from here?”
He shook his head. I was getting a better look at him now but he was just another of these semi-longhaired college kids with mustaches and fetus faces. “I go to Northwestern,” he said. “Evanston?”
That explained the Illinois license plates.
I said, “I’m starting here, second semester. What’s your major?”
“I’m in pre-law.”
Tom wasn’t unfriendly but neither was he interested, so I cut if off there. I sipped my beer, Tom ordered a second one. We did not speak again until my pizza arrived. The bartender, God bless him, placed it on the bar next to me, in front of the empty stool that separated Tom and me.
“Hey,” I said to Tom. “This is more than I can handle. Help yourself to a few slices.”
Tom frowned at me, then smiled. “That’s nice, brother, but…I’m not that hungry.”
“Come on. Why let it go to waste? Consider it a late Christmas present.”
He thought about that, shrugged, and moved over a seat.
The pie was in fact excellent, a thin crust with a lot of tomato sauce and just the right amount of mozzarella and seemed to me just about the best pizza ever, although you should factor in that I’d been living on Slim Jims, beef jerky and Hostess cupcakes.
I kept the conversation casual. “You got folks in Iowa City?”
“No,” he said. He was finished with his second beer and I called the bartender over and ordered us both another. Tom thanked me and said, “My girlfriend lives here.”
“Really? Local gal?”
“No. Actually, she’s from Chicago, too. She’s a little older than me, but we’ve gone together since high school.”
“How much older?”
He shrugged. “Just a year. But she’s in grad school now. That’s why she’s at Iowa.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah-Writers’ Workshop? Really famous writers’ school. Lots of big deal literary lights teach here. Kurt Vonnegut. Richard Yates. Phillip Roth.”
I’d read Vonnegut.
I said, “Yeah, I know all about that. I’m going to be in the Workshop myself.”
His eyebrows went up. “No kidding. Nice going- tough to get in. My girlfriend has been winning writing awards since she was in grade school.”
“What’s her name?”
“Annette Girard.”
“Speaking of which…my name’s Jack.” I wiped pizza sauce off my hand and extended it to him and grinned. “Jack Harper.”
“Tom Keenan,” he said, and we shook.
“So,” I said, “why are you sitting with some doofus in a bar, eating pizza and drinking beer, if your girl’s in town?”
“She is, but…man, can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“It’s the kind of question you can only ask some doofus…some other doofus…in a bar.” He laughed humorlessly. “Are all women untrustworthy little bitches?”
I shrugged. “Not all.”
“Really?”
“Well…none that aren’t come to mind.” I smiled. “But you’d figure there’d have to be some of ‘em out there who wouldn’t cheat on your ass.”
He grunted. “You been there, then?”
“Listen, let me tell you. I did a tour in Nam.”
His eyebrows went up. “Really?”
“Yeah. And when I came home, guess where I found my honeybun?”
“In bed with a guy?”
“In bed with a guy.”
We toasted beers.
“So what now, Tom? You gonna go talk sense to the little lady? Try to win her back?”
He sighed and shook his head. “Naw. She’s really… really not a bad girl, Jack. She’s smart and ambitious and talented and smart.” He was on his fourth beer. “But her parents, her father particularly, spoiled the shit out of her. So she’s used to getting her own way.”
“Is she cute?”
“Cute ain’t half of it! She looks like she walked out of a Penthouse centerspread.”
Particularly on your fourth beer, when you could get the soft focus just right.
“Then,” I said, “if I were you, I would forgive her lovely ass, no matter what she did to me.”
He laughed. Actually laughed. “Yeah. And some day I may get her back. But right now? This prick has filled her head with all kinds of garbage.”
“What prick? What kind of garbage?”
“Well, it’s this goddamn professor.” He sneered, shook his head. “Her fucking literary guru. Hell, he may wind up your teacher, Jack, in the Workshop!”
“Yeah? What’s his name?”
“Byron. Some initials in front of that, but I forget what the fuck they are.”
I was nodding. “Yeah, I know who you mean. He had a bestseller a while back, but he’s sure as hell no Vonnegut.”
“That’s for fuckin’ A sure. But she’s been working on this book, this novel…actually, she says it’s a non-fiction novel-you know, like In Cold Blood?”
“What’s it about?”
He shrugged elaborately. “I don’t know. Probably her father.”
“Why her father?”
He just waved that off. I was already getting more out of him than a doofus in a bar had any right.
“But this Byron asshole,” Tom said, “he’s an expert at this stuff. That bestseller of his, it was one of these non-fiction novel deals.”
“Really.”
“Yeah. Anyway, she’s under his spell. But it’ll only be temporary. If I go off and live my life for a while, and fuck me a few honeys back in Evanston, maybe I can forget her for now, and then, down the road a ways, we can start back up again, with a clean slate.”
“The professor’s just a fling?”
“Yeah, but it’s Annette who’s gettin’ flung. This prof, he’s a well-known horndog. I asked around about him. He’s been at three colleges in six years, a dirty old man playing Mick Jagger to lit — rah-chure groupies.”
“Your girl’s just another in that long line?”
He nodded. “The bastard’ll discard her like the rest of the hundred fuck-bunnies he’s run through.”
“Would you take her back?”
“In a goddamn heartbeat.” He pushed a half-eaten slice away. “You think I’m a pussy, Jack?”
Kind of.
“No,” I said. “She’s just going through a phase. So then, what? You’ll head back to Evanston?”
“Yeah. Or anyway to Naperville. That’s where my folks live. That’s also the Chicago area. But I’ll crash in some motel, first. I can’t drive after all this beer.”
“Don’t blame you. Then you’ll head home tomorrow?”
“First thing.”
That was good to hear.
He seemed like a nice kid. Would have been a drag having to kill him.