I got an answer to my question almost immediately, and without going to any library.
Just after six the Pontiac Grand Prix pulled out from the garage on the other side of the brick house, and glided out of the driveway and into the street. The car skimmed right by me, but the driver didn’t notice me.
I noticed the driver.
She was on her way to meet me for an evening swim, even though I hadn’t got around to calling her.
17
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SHE WAS IN a phone booth, in the Concort lobby, when I caught up with her.
I knocked on the glass, she opened the door and gave me an embarrassed look, and said, “I was just trying your room . . .”
“Never mind that.”
“ . . . you must think I’m terrible, chasing you like this. If you’d wanted to see me, you’d have called. I had no right coming around here and . . .”
I grabbed her by the arm and squeezed. Hard.
“I said never mind that.”
“Wh . . . what’s wrong? You’re hurting me.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, easing my grip but not letting go.
“What’s this all about, Jack?”
“You really don’t know, do you, Carrie?”
“Know what?”
“Listen. Later we can sort this out. Right now I want to get you out of here, okay?”
“Why.”
“Because someone’s going to try to kill you.”
At first she smiled, at first she thought I was putting her on, but then she studied my expression and thought a minute, and it sobered her.
“Does this have anything to do,” she said, “with my husband being killed?”
“Yes, it does . . . and unless you’re in a real hurry to join him, why don’t you come with me?”
“Jack, . . . I really don’t know who you are. I mean, I . . . please don’t misunderstand . . . but you’re just a man I slept with once. Hell, not even that. We just, well, I just got laid by you a couple times, and that’s about all there is to it, between us. That’s about all I know about you.”
“That’s all I know about you, too, Carrie.”
“No. No, you know more. I don’t want to go anywhere with you until you explain this to me so I can understand it, all of it. Don’t try to force me. I have friends here at the hotel I can turn to, if necessary. Some of them within earshot.”
“You only have one friend in this hotel, Carrie, and I’m it. That you can depend on, anyway . . . anybody else here, who you consider a friend, is a friend through your late husband, am I right? And his friends, well, they may not be.”
She considered that for a while, then finally said, “I’ll go with you to your room. We can talk there. You had me there alone before, and didn’t do anything to me I didn’t want done, so . . . that much I’m willing to do. Then we’ll see where we go from there . . .”
I didn’t like it, really, but on the other hand I needed to clear my things out of the room, anyway; I didn’t want to be hanging around this hotel anymore, and while nothing I’d brought with me ought to be too terribly incriminating, you never can tell. So I said okay, and we got on an elevator and had it to ourselves, thankfully. I looked at her, and she seemed shaken, but certainly not unhinged. I wished I was just taking her up there to climb in the sack with her again; she really looked fine, in her clinging sweater and slacks outfit, the same light blue as her eyes. I put that out of my mind, and asked her if there was any place I could hide her out for a few days.
“Like what sort of place?” she said.
“Do you have some girl friend who’s out of town, and has a temporarily vacant apartment? Something like that?”
“Well. I think I have something better, if you’re really serious about this.”
“I’m nothing if not serious, Carrie.”
“It’s a cottage. On the Mississippi.”
“Secluded?”
“Very much so. There’s a bridge out on the only road that leads to the place. We can get there by another road, but’ll have to walk the last half-mile or so.”
“That sounds all right. That sounds pretty good.”
“The bridge’s only been out a few weeks, and the cottage hasn’t even been shut down for the winter yet. There’s still lights, and water. No heat, though. The place isn’t heated, except for an old wood-burning stove.”
The elevator doors slid open and we were on my floor. We didn’t speak as we walked toward the room, and as I was digging in my jacket pocket for the key, I heard some noises corning from behind the door.
I raised a finger to my lips, and took her by the arm and led her back to the waiting area by the elevators.
“Somebody’s in there,” she whispered.
“That’s right,” I said.
“What are you going to do?”
“Go in and see who it is.”
“Is that . . . wise?”
“Wise? I don’t suppose so.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Get back on the elevator, go down one floor, and wait. I’ll join you as soon as I can.”
“What if you don’t?”
“What if I don’t what?”
“Join me. What if you never show up.”
I punched the down button.
“Then you’re on your own,” I said.
I put her on the elevator, and she gave me a look like a person descending into purgatory, as the doors eased shut.
I went back to the room, and could still hear rustling around in there. No particular effort was being made to be quiet, which was good: it meant that if this was an ambush of some kind, it was in the early stages; whoever it was was presently ransacking the room, and hadn’t got around yet to lying in wait.
I went over the layout of the room in my mind. Directly beyond the door was a brief hall or entryway, and beyond that was the bed, jutting out from the left wall, a nightstand on either side, a cushioned wooden chair in the left corner. The right corner was taken up by the windows, with no furniture to block the Concort’s guaranteed river view; and across from the foot of the bed was a portable color TV on a stand, and next to that a dresser with a mirror. That dresser would not be immediately in sight as I came in, because the bathroom would be to my right and the closet to my left, putting me in a short, cramped hallway that obscured my vision of anything to the right of the TV. Judging from the sounds coming from behind that door, my intruder was presently going through the dresser. But there could be more than one person in there, too, and of course somebody could be in the bathroom or going through the closet, or any number of combinations of possibilities, so I could end up with quite a surprise party on my hands, going in there.
The only marginally sane way to play it was to turn the surprise party around on my guests; in other words, go in fast and let everybody get a look at my gun before they did anything rash.
I was so fast I surprised myself. I turned the key in the lock, shoved open the door, and dove through the entryway, onto the bed, rolled off on the floor, and banged against the wall and wooden chair, but didn’t lose control.
But the guy going through the dresser did.
He was medium-size. He looked like a college kid, but he wasn’t the backup man, and he wasn’t a college kid, either. Like me, like the backup man, like everybody else wandering around town pretending to be young, he wasn’t. He was wearing a University of Iowa sweatshirt and brown jeans and used hairspray to keep his longish hair in place, and he just generally had the look of an insurance man playing dress-up. Or, rather dress-down. He was lean, but it wasn’t the leanness of, say, a junkie; it was the leanness of somebody in shape. And while he had very few lines in his face, it wasn’t from lack of age; it was from lack of emotion. He had those same cold Vietnam eyes as the backup man, and looking at him, I said to myself, This fucker’s a pro, and to this day I don’
t know why he went for it.
Maybe he didn’t think I’d shoot Maybe he didn’t know who I was exactly, or had been told I’d probably kill him if I got him in a situation like this, so was grasping for a straw. Whatever the case, he grabbed for the gun tucked in his waistband, a big goddamn thing, a .45 with a silencer half the size of the gun itself, and he almost had it out when my nine-millimeter quietly lifted the top of his head off and splashed the stuff inside all over the dresser mirror behind him.
He slid down the front of the dresser, his back closing drawers he’d opened. Most of what had been in his head was sliding down the mirror, which wasn’t broken, the slug having been deflected off into the ceiling. His mouth was open and his eyes were rolled up, as if he’d tried, in his last fraction of a moment, to see what was happening up there, to watch his skull fragment and see the blossom of red and the color of his brains.
I got up, crawled across the bed, and shut the door before anybody came by sightseeing. There had been little noise. My nine-millimeter had made its near-silent thudding sound, and the guy had bumped up against the dresser, dying, but other than that, nothing. He hadn’t had time to cry out. And somehow I didn’t think he would have even if he’d had the time.
I gave him a quick frisk. He had a billfold, with maybe ninety dollars in it, a driver’s license issued to James Hoffman, phony probably. Pockets empty, except for some sugarless gum.
So I packed my things. It was a little messy, moving him to one side to empty the dresser, but that was no big problem. I took his .45 with me, but it was too bulky to stick in my waistband, not with the nine-millimeter already stuck down there, warm against my flesh from recent use. I wrapped the .45 in a towel and stuffed it under my arm. I only had one bag and a shaving kit to tote, so the towel-wrapped .45 was no extra burden, really, and I was beginning to think having an extra gun could come in handy, now that the shooting was starting.
I hung the “Do Not Disturb” sign on the door, and went after Carrie.
18
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I FOUND HER one floor below, waiting. Like she was supposed to be. That was encouraging. It had, after all, been her suggestion that we go to the room. I found it not entirely impossible that she might have been setting me up, but the look of relief on her face at seeing me made me tend to feel otherwise. Despite the elements of coincidence in my meeting her, and her turning out to be the target of Ash’s afflictions, she seemed to be for real.
Or the best goddamn actress I ever ran across.
“Who was in there?” she asked.
“False alarm,” I said. “Just a maid.”
“A maid? With the door shut? Where was her cleaning cart?”
“She was in there watching TV and smoking a cigarette. I chased her out, but I admit it threw a scare into me. We’ll have to scratch your idea about using my room to talk. It’s just too dangerous staying around here.”
“I gathered you’d made that decision,” she said, wryly, seeing I was packed to go. “I suppose we can go ahead to the cottage, if you want. If you promise to fill me in on the way there.”
“I promise.”
We took the elevator down to the lobby. I got a few dirty looks from bellboys who saw me carrying my own bags, but I got over it. I walked her over to the front entrance, where a doorman was posted, and people were pulling up in cars, coming to dine at the hotel’s restaurant; that and various other continual activity made it a safe place to leave her, for a short time.
“I’m going to go get the car,” I told her. “Stay right here. Close to people. If anybody tries anything, scream.”
“That’s terrific advice.”
“It’s the best I can do.”
“I’ll just walk with you to the car.”
“No. It’s in the rear lot, and it’s not at all well lit back there. Too good a place for somebody to try something.”
“I must be pretty popular.”
“You don’t know how popular.”
The Concort sat on an entire block of parking lot, none of it lighted adequately except in front. The Buick was well toward the back; it was early evening, but dark. I’d left my bag and shave kit with Carrie, but still had the towel-wrapped .45 under my arm, and I almost dropped it when the guy jumped out from between two cars and grabbed me, just as I was nearing the Buick.
He slammed me up against a car and shoved a gun in my side and shoved a hand in my jacket and jerked my nine- millimeter out of my waistband and held it against my throat with his left hand, while putting his own gun, a .22 Ruger automatic with silencer, back in his belt.
It was the backup man, of course.
He pushed me, hard, and stood away from me, his teeth white and grinning in the midst of his matted beard.
“So you followed us here,” I said.
“I followed you here,” he said. His voice was high-pitched and ruined the effect. I hadn’t noticed his voice was high-pitched the other day; or maybe it just climbed the scale when he was excited. He was excited now. But despite that, and the cold eyes and wild beard and all, he didn’t seem very sinister to me. I was having a hard time taking him seriously, especially now that the nine-millimeter wasn’t against my neck anymore.
“What now?” I said. “If you talked to Ash, you know about me. You know killing me’s not a good idea.”
“Killing you’s a very good idea. You’re the cocksucker I bumped into in the hall, last night, aren’t you?”
“You bumped into me in the hall. I’m not much on sucking cocks, though.”
I was waiting for him to notice the bundled towel under my arm, but I guess he already had; he evidently knew about my swimming with Carrie, and thought nothing of it.
Meanwhile, he was shoving me again, still giving me that nasty white grin.
“You’re in my way, asshole,” he was saying. “I don’t like assholes getting in my way and fucking things up for me. I don’t give a damn what Ash says. Get out of my way, or I’m putting a hole in you.”
“Let me know when you get to the scary part, will you?”
His sarcastic grin disappeared into the denseness of facial foliage, and he swung the nine-millimeter around to slap me with it, and I let the gun-in-towel fall into my hands and gave him a hole in his chest that he looked down at once, unbelievingly, before pitching forward toward me. I stepped aside and let him slump against the parked car behind me, and then he dropped to the pavement like a wet bag of laundry.
Some people drove by in a Cadillac, but didn’t notice anything, and when the lights of the Cad disappeared around the corner of the building, I stooped down and took his Ruger and put the nine-millimeter in his hand. I put the .45 in his waistband. I wasn’t pleased about being left with a .22 as my only firepower, but it was just too convenient to pass up: the dead guy in my room had been killed by the nine-millimeter, and the backup man got his from the dead guy’s .45. So they were tied together in death, whether or not they’d been tied together in life—though I assumed they were—and since there was nothing about the nine-millimeter to tie it to me, except for the fingerprints I’d already wiped off , why not leave a neat, if baffling, package for the police? Some amusing conversations would no doubt ensue when Davenport’s finest tried to figure out how a guy with a .45 slug in his chest made it down all those floors and to the parking lot without being seen, and without dying first; ultimately, however, they would find the obvious explanation just too tidy to resist. Or, so I imagined. If they did tag me for it, they wouldn’t get past the phony name I’d used at the desk, and I’d be long gone by then.
I picked her up at the front door, she got in, we drove away.
“Now,” she said. “What is it makes you think somebody’s out to kill me, anyway?”
“Oh,” I said, looking at the Concort receding in the rear-view mirror, “I don’t know.”
19
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“HOW MUCH DO you know about your husband’s business dealings?” I asked her.
“He was an art dealer. He had money in an insurance agency. He was part owner of several mail-order businesses.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
“You mean his illegal business dealings.”
“That’s right.”
“Not much. Next to nothing.”
We were past the city limits, on our way out of town, now. Traffic was light, but it was a foggy night, misting, and visibility was poor.
“Tell me as much as you do know, then,” I said.
“While I was married to him, I thought he was a pillar of the community. Active in charity work. Chamber of Com- merce, Lions Club, everything. He was conservative, politically. He wasn’t active in local politics, not openly, anyway . . . he did have friends in political circles, and contributed heavily to various campaigns.”
“You’re talking about the public man, Carrie. What about the private man?”
“He was polite. Reserved. Kind. I know you’re wondering about the age difference, and if you’re thinking maybe he was more a father to me than a husband in some ways, yes, I suppose you’re right. But he was a husband, too.”
“Go on.”
“When he was found murdered . . . shot to death, by the side of the road . . .” She stopped a moment, shivered. “. . . when that happened, I realized I’d been pretty naïve. I realized there were things about him I hadn’t known, that I’d been like a sheltered child where much of his life was concerned. Did you know that some narcotics were found in his possession? Or, rather in a locker at the airport that he had a key to. It was pretty obvious that he’d been involved in some kind of, what? Underworld activity. Sounds silly to say that, doesn’t it?”
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