Quarry in the middle q-8

by Max Allan Collins

  “Not an option. Conflict of interest kind of deal.”

  His eyes showed the white all around now. “ Listen to me, Quarry…you can walk out of this room a rich man-I can have half a million deposited wherever you say, Swiss account, Caymans, you name it.”

  I lifted the hand that wasn’t training a gun on him. “No, you see, you’d hold a grudge. You’d give me the money, sure…but then people would come try to kill me, and that would take the fun out of it.”

  He had both his hands up, his palms out-surrendering, in a way; but still trying, as he said, “What can I do to make this right?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “But I do want to thank you for one thing.”

  “… What the fuck?”

  “Soundproofing this room.”

  I put one in his forehead, and his skull didn’t explode exactly, but it definitely cracked, and after he’d gone backward initially, he flopped forward on the table and spilled blood and brains on the green felt.

  I didn’t leave immediately-I had noticed his little tin box on the bar, which held the bank from the recent poker game. Taking a quick look, I determined Jerry G had done very well tonight-the box had twenty grand in it. Make a lucky devil joke here, if you’re so inclined.

  The tin box of money I tucked under my left arm, and-with the nine millimeter in my hand, and my hand in the right pocket of my windbreaker-strolled out into the dead parking lot and got into my new car.

  Chapter Twelve

  The morning had stayed chill, the sky smoky gray. One of those cold days in Hell they always talk about, or anyway a cold day in Haydee’s.

  It was six-thirty-something when I pulled into the Paddlewheel lot, which was empty save for two cars, one of them Richard Cornell’s Corvette, the other Angela Dell’s little red Subaru. I’d figured there was a good chance everybody would be gone for the night/day, except for Cornell himself, and I was almost right-and the only other person still here was part of the family, in a couple senses.

  So my timing was excellent, particularly considering that my client-typically spiffy in a navy blazer, yellow sport shirt and light-blue trousers-was exiting the big old reconverted warehouse and striding toward his Corvette, parked toward the rear of the lot. Had I been Monahan doing his vehicular homicide bit, I’d have been in perfect position to send Dickie flying into the next life or at least a hole in the ground.

  But of course I’d turned down Jerry G’s offer for a contract on my boss, for reasons previously stated.

  He saw the Firebird pulling in, and smiled, thinking it was Chrissy come to see him, which was sort of true. Then he made me behind the wheel and frowned, not in displeasure, just confusion. I stopped next to him and got out. He met me at the rear of the sporty red convertible.

  “Something I want to show you,” I said.

  The white crease lines formed in the too-tanned forehead. “What are you up to, love?”

  “This is sort of where I came in,” I said, and unlocked the trunk.

  The lid popped up to reveal, down in the well, the little yellow-permed Chrissy in her pink blouse (unknotted and loose now) and tight jeans and sandals, on her side fetally, front of her toward us as she craned her head to glare at me, the big dark-blue eyes popping over the wide slash of silver duct tape. She tried to call me something but I couldn’t quite make it out, though I think I got the gist.

  I’d taped her wrists behind her and wrapped the stuff all over and around her little fists, in hopes that would keep her bound. Her ankles were taped tight, too. She didn’t seem to have budged, which either meant she wasn’t as ambitious or smart as I’d been on that boat, or maybe I had just done a better job of taping her up.

  Cornell’s yap was hanging open. “What the bloody hell…?”

  I shut the trunk, and took him by the elbow, walking him near the line of trees at that end of the lot.

  “Little girls have big ears,” I said, keeping my voice low and raising a shush finger.

  “I didn’t hire you to kill some innocent-”

  “First of all, she’s about as innocent as Marilyn Chambers, and second, she’s still breathing. And I’m not going to make her stop, either. You can do what you want with her, from spank her to toss her dead in a ditch, but it’s not a job I want.”

  I quickly explained that Chrissy had been Jerry G’s industrial espionage agent, and Cornell found this news predictably dismaying.

  “I thought I was a better judge of character than that,” he said, shaking his head, the half-lidded, unblinking aqua eyes taking on a hurt, almost haunted quality.

  “Dickie, you may be a good judge of character, but few heterosexual males are good judges of character when that character is attached to a tight little twenty-year-old pussy. If you’ll pardon my bluntness. Anyway, the job is done and maybe we can transfer that package to your trunk, and you can do whatever the fuck you-”

  “ What job is done?”

  “Are you kidding? Jerry G is still warm but he’s not breathing.”

  “…You did it. You really did it.”

  “What did you think I was going to do? Performance art?”

  “I mean…before, it seemed abstract…”

  “That other body in the trunk I showed you, that seemed abstract to you?”

  He was going pale despite the tan. “How…how did it go down?”

  “I told you I don’t do details. How it’s perceived depends on Jerry G’s Chicago partners and the bent local cops. It’ll probably be one of two ways-a robbery/homicide, or a boating accident. Or even, with the right doctor, natural causes. My guess is, the last thing Jerry G’s associates want, and I include both Chicago and the county sheriff’s department, is a homicide that brings in state cops. That kind of investigation could shut down Haydee’s Port, you included, at least for a while.”

  He didn’t contradict me. He seemed in shock.

  “What should I do with her?” he said finally, nodding toward the trunk.

  “I wouldn’t kill her.”

  “ Jesus! Neither would I!”

  “Give her a second chance. Maybe make her work for her supper as a hostess or something. Or send her back to Chicago. She has friends there. Oh…” I got an envelope out of my windbreaker jacket pocket. The envelope came from the Wheelhouse Motel, and it was plump with hundred dollar bills-four grand worth. “Give this to Chrissy. I bought her car.”

  A sick slice of white appeared in the dark face-a smile, technically anyway. “A little flashy for you, isn’t it, Quarry?”

  “I don’t know. Bright red car might be a nice souvenir of my trip to Haydee’s. Or I might trade it in for something more suited to my part of the world.”

  “Where is that?”

  “You don’t really want to know.”

  “No. No, I don’t. I wasn’t thinking.”

  “Right. Now let’s transfer the package from my trunk to yours…”

  He had no objection, and I was about to pop the lid when someone exited the big brick building-a woman, and we were far enough away that Cornell felt he had to prompt me.

  “That’s just Angie,” he said.

  But I already knew that, because I’d made her car. His wife or ex-wife or whatever she was strolled right toward us, which was natural, because she belonged to the one remaining ride in the lot. She was wearing jeans, rather looser than those Chrissy preferred, and a white blouse whose sleeves stopped at mid-forearm and with some ruffles up the front, like a gambler’s shirt seen on a real paddlewheel a hundred years ago.

  “Fellas,” she said, with a smile. She looked her age in the cold morning light, with no lipstick and not even eyeshadow, but her face was nice enough to get away with it. Her red hair was pinned and piled up like a turban, nothing fashionable, just getting it out of her way. “This looks like a serious pow-wow.”

  “My friend Mr. Gibson has finished his work for me,” Cornell said stiffly.

  Angela-who not long ago had helped me dump two bodies (let’s call it aiding a
nd abedding)-knew damn well that that “work” almost certainly had to be something on the nasty side; but she didn’t blink. She was, after all, this man’s wife-separated or not-and moreover she was Tony Giardelli’s daughter. She had spent a lifetime on the fringes of violence and had to be used to it, or at least used to ignoring it.

  “Sorry to hear you’re going, Jack,” she said, and offered me her hand, and I shook it. She gave it a secret squeeze. “Kind of hoped we’d have time for that breakfast you promised me. I’m headed over to the Wheelhouse diner now…”

  “Grab a booth in back. I have to check out of my room. Before I hit the road, I could use a meal, wouldn’t mind some pleasant company.”

  She said sure, smiled at me, nodded at her sort of husband, and went over to the Subaru and stirred gravel a little as she exited.

  “What are you, hitting on my wife?” he asked, with an eyebrow arched.

  “Maybe I already fucked her till eyes rolled back.”

  “You can be crude sometimes, Mr. Quarry.”

  “Normally no. Haydee’s Port is a bad influence on me. It’s all sex and murder and money, and an All-American boy like me can get corrupted. Shall we move the little slut?”

  For now, we tucked Chrissy in his trunk, and she squirmed like a calf not wanting to get branded, making noises of protest that came off strangely like yummy sounds.

  I left him there, standing at the rear of the Corvette, staring at the closed trunk. For a moment I wondered if he might not kill her, or have her killed, at that.

  But it wasn’t any of my business.

  Angela Dell had taken the same booth we’d shared before, and of course she remained unaware that, a few days and several lifetimes ago, Monahan and the blond kid had sat there, too, and plotted her husband’s death.

  She was drinking coffee already, and when I joined her, I ordered iced tea. Coffee was for grown-ups. I was hugely hungry-I’d been through a lot of unappetizing shit over the past twenty-four hours or so, but hadn’t eaten a thing since my mobile-home Florence Nightingale had fed me leftover alphabet soup.

  So I ordered scrambled eggs, hash browns, link sausage and silver-dollar pancakes. She had a half order of French toast and we ate in silence for a while-well, not quite silence: a breakfast the size of mine, on a stomach that empty, required some spirited grunting and swallowing and silverware clanking.

  She watched me with mild amusement, just nibbling at her French toast. When I pushed my cleaned plate aside, she said, “I don’t know what to make of you.”

  “Nothing to make.”

  “What makes you tick, Jack?”

  “Nothing. You’re just hearing the Timex.” I lifted my wrist. It got another little smile out of her. “I’m glad we had a chance to say goodbye, though.”

  “Me, too. Oh!” She had a big black purse with her, and she dug inside it, came back with a CD-on the cover was a photo of her in a low-cut dress, soft-focus, sultry, and I’d guess taken around 1960 or ’61. She made Julie London look like a boy. It was called Angela on Your Shoulder.

  “This is the Verve album you made,” I said, smiling. “Will you sign it?”

  “I already have. I…didn’t use your name, since I know Jack isn’t really it.”

  I popped the jewel case open and read what she had signed, in black felt-tip, across a song list of Rodgers and Hart, Cole Porter, Johnny Mercer and Frank Loesser: “To my favorite one-morning stand. Yours always, Angie.” Then, pro that she was, she had signed her full signature below: Angela Dell.

  “This means a lot,” I said. “I don’t treasure much, but I’ll treasure this.”

  “Least I could do.”

  “Probably, considering I didn’t tell your husband you’re the one who hired his murder.”

  She dropped her coffee cup, but it was mostly empty and didn’t spill, didn’t even break.

  We had that section to ourselves, and our voices were low, so I wasn’t making a scene. Her dropping the coffee cup was as close to making a scene as either of us came.

  She said, her voice as throaty as if she were singing“ Cry Me A River,” “You can’t be serious, Jack…”

  “Dead serious. Jerry G’s father is so out of it, he gives senility a bad name-he couldn’t organize a fart in the bathtub, let alone set up a hit. And as for Jerry G? He was going to the trouble of having Dickie spied on-baby Madonna, remember?”

  “That…that girl Chrissy? She was working for Jerry G?”

  “Yeah. Oh, he’s dead, by the way. Somebody shot him about…not quite an hour ago. I believe it was a robbery, but it’ll probably wind up officially some kind of tragic accident. Powers-that-be wouldn’t want Haydee’s Port to go to hell.”

  “Jerry G is dead?”

  “I’m not going to repeat myself. Your husband or whatever the hell he is hired me to deal with Jerry G, and I did. He was also considering having the old boy taken out, till I gave him the latest medical update.”

  “Just because that girl was spying on-”

  “You don’t bother gathering intel on somebody you’ve already hired someone else to eliminate. Period. Anyway, look at his behavior-Jerry G knew, from Chrissy, that I was working for your husband…but if he knew or suspected I was here to take him out, he wouldn’t simply have had me beaten up-he would have had me killed. Last night he did try to have me killed, after he heard enough from Chrissy to gather I probably did have a contract from Dickie to remove his ass. But Jerry G stupidly sent a couple of bouncers to deal with me, who were in over their heads, or anyway are now.”

  She said nothing. A waitress strolled over, filled Angela’s coffee from a container in one hand, and my iced tea from a pitcher in the other. Then we were alone again, us and our freshened liquids.

  “What makes you think,” Angela said very quietly, looking at her wedding-ring-free hands, folded neatly near the coffee cup, steam rising from it like ghosts, “that I took out the contract?”

  “No other candidate makes sense. You are still the wife, separated or not, and that puts you in a position to inherit everything. You are by birth a Giardelli, and female or not, would be in a good position to, first, utilize your connections to set up a hit, and second, take over the Paddlewheel with Chicago’s blessing. With your show biz background and expertise, all those years in Vegas, who better to run the Paddlewheel and its expanded operation? Especially when riverboat gambling comes in, and everything gets more respectable…Also, as a wife, you’d be more likely to have an accident staged than a simple drive-by hit. Hell, maybe there was double indemnity! Didn’t work for Barbara Stanwyck, but that’s just an old Hollywood movie, where crime doesn’t pay. Anyway, I don’t see Jerry G as the kind of guy who’d go to the trouble of disguising a killing as an automobile accident.”

  Her lips trembled a little. Her voice, too: “What if…what if I told you I love my husband. That I still love my husband.”

  “Wouldn’t surprise me. Your motivation may be greed, or it may be love or anyway the kind of love that curdles into hate when your guy gives you table scraps-say, like your little ongoing piano bar gig-at the same time he’s taking various baby Madonnas upstairs to his Playboy pad, for a banquet. These kinds of things are complicated. Emotions.”

  The wide-set green eyes were as unblinking as her husband’s. “Why did you… take care of Jerry G, if you knew he wasn’t responsible for the contract on Richard?”

  I shrugged. “Hey, I made it clear to Dickie that I had my doubts about Jerry G. I let him know that my services included trying to determine who took the contract out, and so on. But Dickie was convinced it was Jerry G. He wanted Jerry G gone, and I admit I developed a certain grudge against the guy myself, so I took the job. Did the job. End of story.”

  The eyes remained wide but the flesh around them was tightening. “End of…”

  “I haven’t told Dickie about you, or anyway my theory about you.”

  Now she frowned. The eyes finally narrowed, and fear was in them. “What are you after?
What do you want from me?”

  I lifted the CD. “This’ll do. This is plenty.”

  “…You’re not telling Richard?”

  “No. I did the job he hired me to do, and I’m out of here.”

  “How do you know I won’t…won’t go to my ‘Chicago connections’ and somehow make this happen some other way?”

  “I don’t. Do what you want. Fuck him. Kill him. Fuck him, then kill him. He’s your husband. But I don’t want a contract from either one of you. I’ve had my fill of Haydee’s Port.”

  She had a clubbed baby seal expression, and just couldn’t find any words. Hard to sing torch songs over breakfast.

  “I’ll enjoy this,” I said, gesturing with the CD, “I really will…I’ll get the check.”

  I left her there to contemplate her future, and Dickie bird’s, and went to my room and showered and shaved and changed my clothes and got my things and got the hell out.

  I did make one stop on my way-that little mobile home with the rusting Mustang out front. I had a paper bag in my left hand, held in a choke hold, like a trick-or-treater protecting his candy hoard.

  I went up the handful of wooden steps and knocked. Nothing. It took prolonged and increasingly insistent knocking to get a response, and I finally got the little kid. He opened the door fearlessly and glared up at me.

  “Mommy’s sleeping,” he said, and started to shut the door.

  I pushed in, shut the thing behind me and looked down at the tow-headed boy in the Star Wars pajamas. “Listen, kid-I don’t care if your mom is home. Don’t go just opening the door ’cause somebody’s knocking. You don’t know who it might be.”

  From the bedroom came her voice: “ Jack? ”

  “Go watch TV, kid,” I said.

  He gave me a dirty look but followed instructions, and I tiptoed around the wooden train set to where she was receding into the bedroom. She was in a t-shirt and cotton panties, had no makeup on and her natural blonde hair was ponytailed back and she looked fucking great.

  “I didn’t think I’d see you again,” she said, her voice indicating she was glad she’d been wrong.