Quarry

by Collins, Max Allan

  I sat in the Ford, slouched down, trying to think. For two cents I would’ve gone to sleep. For three cents I would’ve never waked up. I kept trying to think, trying. I couldn’t. Maybe Broker was right, maybe I was being an ass, maybe I should give it up. My initial feeling of indignant rage had dissipated by this time. I felt crumpled, like an empty paper cup, used, emptied, discarded.

  I saw him out of the corner of my eye. Didn’t recognize him. At first. But he was familiar. I made myself think. And I knew him.

  The drummer.

  The drummer in the rock band at Bunny’s the other night. And Peg Bunny Herself Baker’s latest shack-up, if barroom rumor had it right, and what I’d seen of her cow-eyeing him from the sidelines substantiated that rumor.

  He was creeping from out the apartment down on the far left corner of the building, bottom floor, over there on the side where the pink Mustang was parked. He had closed the door gently and was moving slowly away, doing the walking-on-eggs bit, carrying tennis shoes in his left hand, holding them gently by his fingertips. He looked like a guy in a cartoon sneaking in late after a night’s drunk, only to be caught and clobbered by a shrew with a rolling pin. Except this guy was sneaking out, not in, and did not fit the henpecked hubby stereotype. His was another stereotype: long blond shaggy shoulder-length hair, stubbly beard, shirtless, faded blue jeans with “LOVE” stitched up the crotch.

  I sat there in the car, still slouched, still unseen by this refugee from a panel cartoon. Oh, I thought idiotically, what I’d give for a rolling pin. I watched him near the pink Mustang; he was shooting furtive glances every half-second, moving carefully, the tips of his dirty toes barely touching cement. I didn’t know what this boy was up to, but up to something he was.

  He opened the door to the Mustang on the driver’s side and crawled in. Crawled I say because he got down on the floor, on his back, poking fingers up under the dash. I sat and watched and for just a moment I wondered what the fuck the clown was doing and when the moment was up, I knew: he was hot-wiring the car.

  He didn’t see me coming. He was on his back still, but his eyes were watching as his hands scurried up under the dash. He had a pocket knife out and open, stripping insulation from wires, and he knew what he was doing but his work was going kind of slow. I knew why. I could smell the liquor and I was standing and he was down there on his back. So he was a drunk sneaking out, if not in, and who but a drunk would steal a pink Mustang, anyway?

  I grabbed him by an ankle and pulled him out. He bumped his head several times on several surfaces and by the time he was out onto the cement he was pretty shook up. I said, “Lose your keys?”

  He tried to kick me in the face. I didn’t let him. I batted his foot away and he tried to slash me with the knife. I didn’t let him do that, either. I kicked the knife out of his hand and it skid across the cement and into some bushes and I stepped on his throat. Not hard, but with a throat you don’t have to step hard, really. His eyes were round and terrified, saucers full of fear. He tried to say something, but nothing came out; it’s difficult to speak when someone is standing on your throat. So I eased the pressure to hear what he had to say, lifted my foot completely off and he took the opportunity to say, “Mother-bitch-son-of-a-fucker,” which was an indication of how drunk he was.

  I yanked him by the arm and he hung sort of in space and then I heard her.

  “What the hell’s going on here?” she was saying. Her voice was high-pitched, shrill at the moment, but of course she was screaming, so that was natural.

  “Is this your car?” I said, nodding to the Mustang.

  “It most certainly is!”

  “What about him? Is he yours too?”

  “I know him. What are you doing to him?” She came a little closer and said, “Jesus, what a stink. Christ, is he drunk. He must’ve guzzled down every ounce of booze in my apartment.” She wasn’t looking as good as her Playboy picture, or as prick-teasing as her appearance the other night at the club, but Peg or Bunny or whatever she called herself was a beauty, a natural one, and with no makeup and with tousled hair and in an old worn-out blue terrycloth robe that covered her neck to knee, tied round the waist and giving only the slightest hint of the body under there, she was a woman you could screw, not a picture you could masturbate over.

  I said, “What I’m doing is stopping him from stealing your car.”

  “What?”

  “He was hot-wiring it.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “He was hot-wiring it, rigging it so the motor would run without the use of the ignition key.”

  “What the hell for?”

  “So he could drive it away, I suppose.”

  She came over and kicked the guy right along where the word “LOVE” was sewn. He kind of got away from me then, as he wrenched free from me so he could grab himself and roll into a ball.

  “Fucking asshole,” she said. “Why didn’t he just steal the keys out of my purse?”

  “You got me. Maybe he’s so drunk he’s stupid. Explain why anybody’d pick a pink Mustang to steal in the first place.”

  She laughed. Not at all shrill. “Explain why anybody’d own one.”

  “I was going to ask you about that.”

  “Maybe I’ll tell you. What’s your name?”

  “Quarry,” I said. I don’t know why I gave her that name. The moment I said it, I wished I hadn’t.

  “Let him go, Quarry.”

  “I’m not holding onto him.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  I said to the guy, “Okay. You can go.”

  It took him half a minute to get to his feet. He looked at the girl for a second, then glanced at me, then took off running, in a limping, just-kicked-in-the-balls sort of way. He was up on the corner of Cyprus after a moment. He stopped there and yelled back, “Bitch! Cunt!” and limped quickly out of sight.

  “He means you, I guess.”

  She grinned. “Well, actually my name’s Peg. Peg Baker. Come on in and have a cup of coffee.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What don’t you know?”

  “I don’t know if it’s safe to hang out with somebody who drives a pink car and sleeps with something like that.”

  “He slept on the couch. That’s where I made him sleep after he couldn’t get it up. You want coffee or don’t you?”

  21

  * * *

  * * *

  I STUDIED HER face and wondered how it could look so hard and so young at the same time and she said, “How about a grapefruit?”

  I said, “What?”

  “A grapefruit. How about a grapefruit.”

  She was standing there in the kitchenette, her robe loose enough toward the top for me to get a look at the start of the swell of those Bunny breasts. I sipped my coffee and wondered whether her sexual allusion had been intentional and said, “Yes, I’d like a grapefruit.”

  “Maybe it’s a little late for breakfast-type stuff, what the hell time is it, anyway?”

  There was a clock above the window over the kitchen sink but it wasn’t running. I checked my watch. “Quarter till ten,” I said.

  “I suppose you already had breakfast.”

  “No, I just got up a little while ago myself.”

  I sat at the table sipping the coffee and watched her as she went to the refrigerator and got out a big yellow softball of a grapefruit and sliced it in half on the counter with a long shiny knife. She sectioned the grapefruit halves and lightly sugared them, served them up in bowls and brought them over. She put one in front of me, leaning over so that I got a good look at what was happening under the robe. I took a bite of grapefruit.

  “You keep eating,” she said. “I’ll be right back.”

  She walked from the kitchenette to a cubbyhole hall and went in a door and closed it after her. I turned to the grapefruit and continued eating, slowly, looking around the room as I did.

  The room was horrifying. It made no se
nse that this supposed sexpot from the pages of Playboy lived here. This was an old woman’s apartment, loaded with memorabilia of decades past. Against the lefthand wall were two oak cabinets that nearly touched the pebbled plaster ceiling, the cabinets crammed full with china and cut glassware. Against the opposite wall was a sofa with doily-pinned arms, as were the arms of the several lounge chairs in the room, and over the sofa was a big mirror with a wooden frame painted gold and carved with cupids and flowers, the mirror reflecting the china cabinets back at themselves. The stucco walls were hung with plates picturing churches and dead presidents. Only the television seemed of this era, a new RCA Color job, but above it, in the corner it took up, was a knickknack rack whose shelves were filled with a salt and pepper shaker collection consisting mostly of little animals and miniature fruit, such as a white and a black lamb, and a pair of plump porcelain strawberries. The front two-thirds of the long room was living room and filled with this chamber of elderly horrors, and the back third was kitchenette. Two waist-high bookcases, with space between to walk through, divided the room. The books in the cases were not the sort you might expect from the girl behind Bunny’s; they ran to Reader’s Digest Condensed Books, a Collier’s Encyclopedia, occasional hardcovers, the raciest of which was Forever Amber, and scattered romance paperbacks. The kitchenette seemed largely spared of the senior-citizen school of interior decorating, outside of the clock above the sink which was a Felix the Cat clock with jeweled eyes and a tick-tocking tail, which was silenced now because the plug was pulled. Also, atop the refrigerator was a cute stuffed toy: a furry pink and black spider about the size of a healthy rat.

  She came back wearing the blue sweater I’d seen her in a few nights before at Bunny’s, though now she was also wearing matching blue hotpants. Her legs were pale white and slender but shapely and looked delicious, and her breasts bobbed up and down as she moved toward the table, where she sat and began eating her grapefruit, taking small but greedy little bites, as though she got a sensuous enjoyment out of every nibble.

  “Nice place you have here,” I said.

  “Pretty fucking grim, isn’t it?” she said.

  “Looking around I get the feeling you’re older than you look. Who are you, anyway, some hundred-year-old hag who discovered a fountain of youth?”

  “Not exactly. My mother lived here with me, up until last month.”

  “What happened last month?”

  “She died.”

  “Oh.”

  “Aren’t you going to say ‘I’m sorry to hear that’?”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “The hell you are.”

  “Terrible of me to behave so coldly, when your mother and I were such close friends.”

  She laughed. “I think I’m going to like you . . . what was your name? Quarry, is that it, Quarry?”

  “That’s right.”

  “You got a first name?”

  “Do I have to?”

  “Sure.”

  “Make you a deal.”

  “What kind of deal?”

  “You don’t ask me my first name and I don’t call you Bunny.”

  “Deal.”

  “You don’t seem overly upset about your mother’s death.”

  “I’m over it. Anyway, it was a blessing, she was senile as hell. I mean, look at this place, that ought to tell you where her mind was.”

  “Why don’t you move all this stuff out?”

  “Where to?”

  “You got money. Rent some place and store it.”

  “Oh, I got money, do I?”

  “Sure. You own a restaurant or a bar or whatever you call it, you must have money.”

  “I call it a club and I own half of it. I’m working on owning it all.”

  “Oh?”

  “All or none of it. See, when we started the place we had no idea it was going to go like it did. Business started out big and got bigger. But the business arrangement I got isn’t the best.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Well, when I got this idea for a club, I had some money, but not a whole hell of a lot. My mother was getting bedridden and like I said, sort of senile, and the big house we had on the hill we sold . . .”

  “You had one of those houses on the hill?”

  “Yeah, ours is a Port City family that goes way back. My old man was in the pearl button business, which used to be Port City’s claim to fame . . . Pearl Button Capital of the World! Until plastic came along and the pearl button market fizzled. Dad sold out early, and we had enough money to maintain the house on the hill and he and mother lived comfortably until Dad died five, six years ago and Mother started needing medical attention.”

  “Didn’t I see all this on a soap opera?”

  “Oh eat shit, Quarry. Anyway, I sold the house, moved Mother and all her possessions into this cozy two-bedroom flat and put up a chunk of money for the place you know as Bunny’s. I also provided the concept of the place and my shady reputation as the Port City fallen lady who was nude in front of God and everybody, and my business partner provided the land and the rest of the money. Because his investment, as far as land and capital is concerned, was bigger than mine, his share of the profits is bigger. I want more of the money than I been getting. More, hell, I want it all. I’m the fucking Bunny! If he wants the money, let him pose bare-ass.”

  “You’re going to try to buy him out, then?”

  “Yeah, I been saving my share of the profits like a good little miser. And if I can’t buy him out, I’ll make him buy me out and I’ll build another club someplace.”

  “Listen, I want to ask you something.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “The pink Mustang. Where’d you get it?”

  “It was a present. Back in my Bunny days. Maybe if I get to know you better I’ll tell you about it.”

  “I’d like to know you better.”

  “I know you would.”

  “Is that right?”

  “That’s right. This morning was no accident, was it?”

  I choked on my bite of grapefruit. “. . . pardon?”

  “This morning. You came around here looking for a way to get close to me, didn’t you? Don’t play dumb. I saw you a couple nights ago, at the club. I saw you staring at me.”

  I grinned, more in relief than anything else. “I’m sorry. Couldn’t help staring.”

  “A lot of men stare at me. Most of them stare at me like I’m so much meat, Grade-A U.S. government-inspected prime maybe, but meat just the same. You, you stared at me like you were staring at a woman.”

  “You can really tell the difference, huh?”

  “Sure can. I get that goddamn meat stare all the time. Almost every son of a bitch in Port City’s tried to get in my pants one time or another.”

  “But you’re selective.”

  “That’s right “

  “Then let me ask you something.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “You won’t get mad?”

  “Ask and see.”

  “If you’re selective, what are you doing shacking with a freak like that one who tried to heist your wheels?”

  She laughed. Her eyes laughed too, sparkled sort of. “I got a weakness for younger men. How old are you, anyway?”

  “How old are you?”

  “I’m thirty-two.”

  “I’m younger.”

  She smiled. She touched my hand. “Thanks for stopping that creep. I like that car of mine, I’m fond of it, it’s got sentimental meaning for me.”

  “He was drunk.”

  “Yeah, well, he sat around smoking pot last night and then he couldn’t get straight and I kicked him out of the bedroom, locked the sucker out, in fact. He must’ve sat up all night drinking up my liquor stock and planning his revenge.”

  “I didn’t think he knew what he was doing.”

  “Maybe he did. That was his band’s last night at the club, you know, and he told me the group was going to have to break up pretty soon,
’cause him and another guy had the drug rap hanging over ’em and the two of ’em were planning to hotfoot it to Canada. Maybe he got inspired and was going to drive my Mustang over the border.”

  “Or maybe he’s gay and pink just appeals to him.”

  “He just might’ve been, at that. Most men react pretty favorably to me, that’s the first time I can remember any guy having trouble.”

  “Younger guys, huh?”

  “Yeah. Younger guys, and guys moving through town, one-night stand things, you know? I like short relationships. Short and sweet. A long relationship to me is one that lasts a week.”

  “Is that so? You steer away from the locals, huh?”

  “Goddamn right. I like being on my own. Get involved with somebody around here and before you know it, I’d be into something serious. No true, deep abiding loves for me, thanks, I been stung by that shit before. No meaningful mature relationships with married men, either, I seen too many girls get shafted in the ear by that stuff. I like my relationships nice and shallow. One-night stands, yessir. And then there was my mother. When she was alive I couldn’t have men friends in, now could I? So it was motel rooms and backseats of cars and such. Little sordid, maybe, but it serves the purpose. I mean, everybody has to get their rocks off now and then.”

  “I know what you mean.”

  “What do you do for a living, anyway?”

  “I’m a salesman.”

  “Then of course you know what I mean. Your goddamn life’s a chain of one-night stands, isn’t it?”

  “Isn’t everybody’s?”

  She stopped for a moment, looked thoughtful, looked at me. “I wonder,” she said.

  It was silent for a while, and just as the silence was getting to the awkward stage, I said, “This grapefruit is good.”

  “You want another half?”

  “Only if you do.”

  “I do.”

  “Okay then.”

  She got another huge yellow softball and served it up and said, “Florida grapefruit.”