I flipped over on my back, reached over to the nightstand and yanked a tissue from the Kleenex box and wiped myself off. My stomach muscles were aching, but pleasantly; I felt drained, but in a nice way. And my shoulder wasn’t bothering me at all. I propped a pillow up behind me, half-sitting, half-lying, and stared at the ceiling.
Earlier, when we’d finished the second grapefruit, we had moved into the living room, continuing our small talk. But as we approached the sofa, Peg had said, “This place is too goddamn depressing, it’s like talking in a rest home,” and I’d followed her into the bedroom, where her unmade double bed had obviously been slept in on one side only. The room wasn’t much different from the rest of the apartment; the furniture in here was just as pedestrian as out there, though unlittered by doilies and knickknacks. Just another study in stucco-walled apartment complex typicality, though considerably livened up by a smattering of posters, the brightest being reprints of gaudy old film ads from the Thirties, one showing King Kong having a gay old time atop the Empire State Building, another showing the Marx Brothers having equally good a time at the circus. There was also an orange poster showing an underground cartoonist’s vision of pinheaded men with very thick legs and large feet dancing in a line, the words “Keep on Truckin’” over their heads. Next to that was a poster of that pointy-eared spaceman from TV, while on another two rhinos humped below the words “Make Love Not War.” The most striking was a black and white poster of Marilyn Monroe’s face, right over the bed. The effect of them was strange, as instead of counteracting the elderly aura of the outer apartment, these posters, these free spirits, seemed imprisoned in this room in this old folks home of an apartment, and seemed to be looking at me, saying, “What are we doing here?” I couldn’t help but wonder if Peg had put them up to keep sanity while her mother was alive and dominating this world, or if she had put them up since her mother’s death, for company. I didn’t ask and she didn’t tell me. All she did was sit down on the bed, right under the Monroe picture, and looked at me with her lips slightly parted, as though she were going to say something, going to actually continue the small-talk we’d begun over grapefruit. But she hadn’t done that. I’d put a finger to her lips and had pulled the blue sweater gently over her head. She hadn’t protested. In fact she’d gone on to slip out of her hotpants and the blue lacy panties and helped me out of my clothes.
I heard water running in the other room and I sat up straight and called out, “What are you doing?”
“Taking a bath! Care to join me?”
I walked into the bathroom. She wasn’t in the tub yet; she was leaning down testing the water. I touched her back and she turned around and came into my arms and we kissed. It was a long kiss.
She said, “That’s the first time you ever kissed me.”
“I’ve only known you an hour and a half. Give me a chance.”
“Well, you screwed me. I’d think you would’ve had the decency to kiss me before you screwed me.”
“You didn’t seem to be interested in kissing.”
“I guess we both sort of skipped the preliminaries.”
“I guess so.”
“I guess people don’t kiss as much as they used to.”
“I guess not.”
“I guess they’d rather get down to business.”
“I guess.”
We kissed again. Just as long. “You know something?” she said.
“What?”
“It’s too bad kissing’s gone so out of style.”
“Why’s that?”
“It’s nice. Next time, tell you what.”
“What?”
“Let’s not skip the preliminaries.”
“You complaining about my technique?”
“Hardly.”
We kissed again. Shorter this time.
“Let’s get in the tub,” she said.
“Okay,” I said.
We got in, her in front; I soaped her back and kissed her neck.
She said, “I always take a bath after I screw.”
“Always?”
“Always.”
“What if you screw in the backseat of a car?”
“I sponge-bathe,” she said, and laughed. “No, you silly bastard, I take a bath as soon as I get home, in that case.”
“You like baths.”
“Yeah. You suppose I take baths after I screw because of guilt feelings? Like Lady Macbeth washing the blood off her hands?”
“I don’t know. I like to swim.”
“That’s like bathing.”
“Only you don’t have to fuck around washing.”
“Why do you suppose you like to swim, Quarry?”
“I like the feeling of water on me. All over me.”
“Pass the soap up here.”
“Okay.”
“Quarry.”
“Yeah?”
“You want to hear about the pink Mustang?”
“Sure.”
“It’s kind of personal.”
“I just screwed you, didn’t I? How much more personal can you get?”
“Screws aren’t always personal.”
“Oh?”
“Ours was a pretty personal screw. In twenty years I could tell somebody about that screw. How many screws can you remember well enough to tell about them the next day, even?”
“What about the Mustang?”
“There was this guy in Chicago. I was working as a Bunny in the club there, you know? He saw me in the magazine, the nude pose. He fell in love-at-first-sight with me, he said. He kept coming around the club, bothering me. It was getting me in trouble, almost lost me my job, you’re not supposed to fraternize with the customers, you know. So I agreed to go out with him, if he wouldn’t pester me. I went out with him and I didn’t like him at first. He wasn’t crude or anything, not your preconceived notion of what a gangster would be.. oh, I didn’t mention that, did I? He was a mob person of some kind. I suppose he killed people, or had them killed, but I didn’t think about that. If I’d’ve known for sure, it might’ve bothered me, so I never asked. We went together for a year and six months. He took me all over, Las Vegas, the Bahamas once. Then I found out he had a wife. I was humiliated. Oh, I wasn’t that much of a Iowa hick, I’d dated married men before, but I’d always known. I was with him a year and six months and he never told me, never mentioned it. He was older than he looked, he was fifty maybe and looked forty, and he was married to some old broad who didn’t care if he studded around. When I got upset, upset about his being married, he bought me a present. See, Playboy picks a Playmate of the Year, you know, and that year they gave the winning Playmate a pink Mustang. So he gave me a pink Mustang. He said I was his Playmate of the Year, and I guess I should have been insulted by the implication of that, but I knew how he meant it and it made me cry. He gave me the pink Mustang and told me he’d call me in a week, after I had some time to forgive him. But during that week he died. Or was killed, maybe, I don’t, know. He was found in his garage, door shut, car running, the carbon monoxide killed him, accidentally, on purpose, whatever. What’s it matter? That was seven years ago. I keep the Mustang in top shape. It’s like new. It’s going to kill me when I have to junk it, eventually.”
“Do you remember the first time you screwed with him?”
“No,” she said, a hint of surprise in her voice. “No, he couldn’t screw for shit.”
She didn’t say anything for a moment and then I realized she was crying. I wanted to help her but didn’t know what to do. I touched her shoulder and that seemed to do the trick.
We were putting our clothes on in the bedroom when I heard something outside that sounded like thunder. I went to the window and drew back the curtain and it was thunder. “I’ll be goddamned,” I said, “the sky’s black. It’s going to rain like a son of a bitch.”
“My windows are down,” she said.
“Mine too.” I crawled into my trousers, zipped up and moved out of the room. “I’ll go out and take ca
re of it.’’
I stepped out the door and the sky rumbled again and I ran to the Mustang, rolled up the windows, ran to the Ford, got my raincoat out of the backseat, rolled up the windows. A few drops of rain streaked my face and just as I got to the door the downpour began. Inside, I threw my raincoat down on the hard straightback chair next to the door and heard a clunk. My automatic was in the pocket. I hoped Peg wouldn’t run across it.
“Does it shock you,” she said, dressed in blue sweater and hotpants again, sitting on the sofa, “that I was a gangster’s woman?”
I laughed.
She smiled, but there was a hint of frown in the smile. “What’s so damn funny?”
“‘I Was a Gangster’s Woman,’” I said. “Sounds like something on the cover of True Confessions.”
She laughed. “That’s me. A real gun moll.”
“His business didn’t seem to bother you.”
“His business was his business. He only supplied what others demanded.”
I nodded.
“But,” she said, “if I’d known exactly what he did, I probably wouldn’t have stood for it.”
“That’s hypocritical as hell.”
“Hey, who appointed you preacher, Quarry? You’re awful moral all of a sudden.”
“Maybe you’ve just underestimated me.”
“Bullshit. Next thing you’re going to tell me is you’re not married.”
“I’m not.”
“Every traveling salesman is married.”
“Not this one. You’re even my first farmer’s daughter.”
“Sure. You’re my first man, too. Today.” She shook her head, smiled crookedly. “You know something?”
“What?”
“Something about you reminds me of Frank.”
“Who’s Frank?”
“My gangster. My poor dead gangster.”
“I thought you said I screw better.”
“Oh you do, you do. So far, anyway. But your eyes. There’s something in them, or something that isn’t in them…”
“Listen, I want to know something. Does it or doesn’t it bother you that this Frank was in the rackets?”
“It doesn’t bother me. So am I, in a way. You know, that guy I mentioned before? The one I’m in business with? The one who shafted my girl friend and sent her down to Florida for his health?”
“Yeah. Ray.”
“That’s right. Ray. How’d you know his name?”
“You let it slip two or three times.”
“So I did. Anyway, some of Ray’s money comes from that kind of people.”
“What kind of people?”
“Mob kind of people.”
“You mean he’s running businesses as fronts for them?”
“No. All his businesses are legitimate. But he’s done a lot of expanding, and some of the mob people in the Quad Cities channel money into his businesses, mainly ’cause it’s a good investment. Not to mention the last thing anybody’d suspect as being backed by that kind of money.” She touched her forehead. “Hey, that reminds me… I was supposed to go over to the Springborn place this morning. Going to talk with Ray just once more, and if we can’t settle those contractural differences of ours between us, I’ll get my lawyer to move on it. What time is it, anyway?”
“Quarter after eleven.”
“Shit! I was supposed to be over there at eleven!” She got up from the sofa and said, “I better call him and tell him I got, uh… waylaid.” She grinned and glided over to the telephone on the wall in the kitchenette. I followed her in and sat at the table and watched her dial.
“Mr. Springborn, please,” she said to the phone. She winked at me while she waited for Springborn. Finally she was saying, “Hello Ray, look, I’m sorry I didn’t make it over this… huh? What? You’re kidding?… Oh my God, that’s terrible, that’s awful, the poor guy
… What was it, robbery?… I can’t believe it, I just can’t believe it… Well, listen, what we have to talk about can sure wait until… Really?… Well, okay… Two-thirty then.”
She hung up, shaking her head, and I said, “What was all that about?”
She told me. She told me about Albert Leroy dying. She explained that Albert Leroy was a simple, harmless guy who was Springborn’s brother-in-law, a quiet little man who’d had a nervous breakdown once and afterward was never the same. No one in the family, she told me, gave a damn about old Albert; a lot of folks in town thought it was a sin that the Springborns gave Albert a token janitorial job at the soup plant and let it go at that. It was something of a pain, she said, hearing Ray Springborn pretending to be upset, just as it would be a pain to watch Linda Sue Springborn going through the motions of mourning. She said as an indication of how callous the Springborn reaction to the death was, Ray had told her to come on over for their business chat this afternoon, to help him “take his mind off the tragedy.” I asked her how it happened and she said, “Robbery, they say. His place was ransacked. You see, it’s almost a legend in town that Albert was something of a pack rat. And the Leroy family has been a money family in Port City for years. Somebody must’ve figured they’d find a mattress full of money.”
“Too bad.”
“Yeah. Sure as hell is.”
Thunder cracked again. The rain was coming down hard. She went to the window over the sink and parted the curtains and looked out at the rain slanting down and it reflected back on her face, running down her cheeks in gray streams. She said, “You know something, Quarry?”
“What?”
“I wish I hadn’t cried this morning.”
“What?”
“Because now I haven’t got any crying left in me. And it seems to me like somebody ought to shed a tear for that poor son of a bitch Albert Leroy.”
23
By early afternoon the rain let up, but the sky was black and constantly spitting, an arrogant reminder that this was only a temporary reprieve. The hot summer rain had taken the air away and left in its place a humid cloud, a dank overcast through which the Springborn place looked unreal, like something off the cover of a gothic paperback. But it was the mood of the afternoon that was gothic, not the house, which was a massive but fairly commonplace two-story structure, red brick trimmed with white-painted wood, the brick faded and smoothed by age to the color of rust. Outside of a rococo effect from the curlicued wood trim, the only vestige of nineteenth-century pretension was the single central box tower that sat on top of the two-story building like a little separate house that’d been plopped down on the big one. This was a house built by common folk who’d made it rich, an ordinary brick house only slightly puffed up by wealth.
There could be little doubt, however, that this was an important home: in a neighborhood crowded with would-be palaces, only the Springborn place had half a block to itself, sitting far back on a gentle hill of a lawn, graveled private drives on either side. The drive on the right led to a red-brick four-door garage large enough to barrack a hippie commune, and at present both drives were jammed with cars, as though the big old home were a way-station hotel filled with guests stranded during a storm.
We parked in front, or so I thought; when I got out of the Ford and stood and got a good look I could see we were facing the ass-end of the house. Somehow I resented that, it seemed vaguely pompous to me, even though it made sense to take advantage of the river view. But it was sort of hypocritical for this “common man’s mansion” to turn its back on a public street.
We stood at the big solid oak front door (or back door, depending on how you look at it) and Peg said, “Thanks for coming with me.”
“I’m going to feel like a fool,” I said. “A stranger coming around at a time like this.”
“You’re not a fool and you’re not a stranger, you’re my escort and shut up about it.”
I was glad to shut up about it. Peg’s asking me along had saved me from having to fish for an invitation from her. So far I’d managed to pump her for a lot of information without making myself
seem overly curious, and now I was getting inside the Springborn house, again without causing any suspicion on Peg’s part or hopefully on anyone else’s. What better way to get inside the Springborn place than to come with a friend of the family, with the rest of Albert Leroy’s mourners. It beat hell out of breaking-and-entering.
My knock was answered by an attractive woman in her mid-forties. She was slender, her graying black hair pulled back in a neat bun; she wore a flowing but conservative black dress which came down to her knees in a straight and waistless line. Her face was smooth, the skin pulled almost tight, while her neck was heavily creped, indicating a probable face-lift. Her features were intelligent and well-formed, her eyes widespread and alert. She smiled at Peg and nodded, an artificial smile with pain in it, or the semblance of pain, as though she wanted to make sure we knew that she was distraught but in control.
“Thank you for coming,” she said, her voice a steady contralto, and she reached for Peg’s hand, squeezed it and gave it back.
Peg said, “I’m so sorry about all this, Linda Sue. This must be a horrible time for you and Ray.”
She nodded gravely, then looked at me and arched an eyebrow. “I’m somewhat confused today, in the aftermath of this tragedy… I must admit I can’t seem to recall your friend, Peg… you’ll have to excuse my rudeness…”
“This is Mr. Quarry. He’s not a native of Port City, but he’s a close friend of mine and was with me when I got the news about Albert. I didn’t think you’d mind if he accompanied me.”
“Of course not,” she said. “I only wish we’d been able to meet under more pleasant circumstances, Mr. Quarry. Won’t the two of you come in, please.”
We stepped inside and were standing in a hallway that could have been a ballroom, what with its empty impressive size, or perhaps a chapel for some strict Protestant sect, what with all its austere dark wood. The most striking thing in the otherwise vacant hallway was a deep polished wood stairway that curved down from a darkened second floor.
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