The First Quarry (Hard Case Crime (Mass Market Paperback))

by Max Allan Collins

  Then the girl—and she was a girl, maybe nineteen— noticed those windows herself and came down off the stoop to tippy-toe at the evergreen bushes to peek in. She seemed to see nothing. Then she strode across the front yard, arms pistoning, pretty little jaw firm, stopped to look in a window of the little free-standing cobblestone garage where the prof kept his Volvo, then disappeared around the house.

  I heard some more hammering. I took a bite of turkey and Swiss—pretty bad. Thin slices of would-be meat and processed cheese that took more chewing than cheese really should. I swigged at a Coke—I’d brought a few cans along, for the caffeine, and they stayed cold outside of space heater range—and let its sweetness wash away the bad sandwich. Some more hammering.

  Then she came marching around the house on the other side, looking like a soldier in a high school operetta with that high furry hat—you could thank Doctor Zhivago for this shit, I supposed—and she made her way up onto the porch.

  She did not hammer.

  She screamed: “I know you’re in there, you prick!”

  I smiled to myself. Nibbled some more sandwich. With a show to watch, it went down better.

  “You fucking, cock-sucking prick!”

  I laughed a little. I liked her. But I had a feeling she wasn’t a major player in the melodrama I’d just been inserted into. This was the tail end of her performance, I figured, based upon the surveillance info the Broker gave me.

  I was right.

  “You mother-fucking, dick-licking son of a fucking bitch!”

  I recalled how much trouble a girl I’d known in junior high had got into when she told a friend of hers, who’d moved in on her guy, to go to hell between classes. A week of detention, and lucky not to be expelled. Things had changed in a very few years in this country.

  The door opened, not at all tentatively, in fact with a suddenness that showed the novelist had a non-fictional way of making a point. He was tall and he was skinny, a handsome Ichabod Crane, his face narrow and well-carved with a hawkish nose the dominant feature, his hair dark blonde and shaggy but not hippie-length, his eyebrows unruly. He was wearing a maroon terry-cloth bathrobe, belt knotted at the waist, with a white t-shirt peeking out, and his legs were bare, his feet in slippers.

  He looked side to side, perhaps to see if any neighbors were observing this little scene, but his neighbors were well away from him and of course he had no idea I was spying.

  He said, “Is this really necessary, Alice? Haven’t we said our goodbyes?”

  I think that was what he said. He was speaking at a normal level, and I was across the street, but the clear cold air carried well, and he had a lecture-room baritone.

  “You bastard!” she said, and she started pounding on his chest with both gloved fists, at least as hard as she’d hammered the door.

  He took her by the shoulders and held her out away from him like an archeologist appraising a find. His arms were long and she was petite. She was screaming at him, no words, not even obscenities, and he shook her, hard, the way you might a child, if you were a sucky parent, anyway.

  Turned out I was right, she was a blonde: he shook that rabbit-fur hat right off her head. She had lots of blonde hair, long and flowing, and from my perch she seemed a real doll. But from my perch I knew the prof had already moved on: advance surveillance info indicated Byron’s latest conquest as being a brunette on the tall side, specifically a grad student in his creative writing class name of Annette Girard.

  “What we did I’ll never forget,” he told her, clasping her by the arms, working in compassion and regret the way a cook might sprinkle paprika. “But I’m a married man and twice your age. Let’s cherish what we have, and go back to our lives.”

  She said something that I couldn’t quite make out; more a whimper than speech, really, but I got the feeling she said she wanted to come in.

  That was her best card—she had to play it. If she could get the prof inside that house, then inside her, she was back in the game. I wondered if she knew about the brunette.

  “What do you see in that cunt, anyway? She’s a stick! She’s a skinny fucking stick!”

  Apparently she knew about the brunette.

  “I’m Annette’s faculty advisor,” he said, “and her teacher. She is also my teaching assistant. What we had, you and I, Alice...was special. Unique. My relationship with Annette is strictly...teacher-pupil.”

  “Right! Cocksucking 101!”

  “That’s enough.” He took her by the arm and he marched her down the stoop’s stairs and the sidewalk, practically dragging her, his bathrobe flapping, belt coming undone, skinny bare legs showing. Her eyes were like a raccoon’s, black-ringed hysteria, the mascara wet and running. Her lips were trembling.

  Now she was saying, “I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you,” how many times I lost count.

  At her car, he looked to his left but not to his right—this I took not to be checking on the neighbors but seeing if anybody was coming from the main drag half a mile or so down. I got the impression this scene with Alice was not one he would like Annette to come in on.

  Then it occurred to me that Alice and Annette were both A’s, and were in alphabetical order, at that. Maybe Professor Hefner was working his way through his female students. If so, he was using the second semester list, and starting over. This stud would have covered more ground in the first semester than just a couple of damn A’s.

  He deposited her in the car, though the driver’s side door remained open. “Can you drive?”

  She responded, behind the wheel, but I couldn’t hear it.

  “I tell you what. At the end of the school year, when you’ve graduated, when seeing each other would be more appropriate...we’ll talk again.”

  Her body straightened as hope sprung. This I could hear: “Really? Really, my darling?”

  My darling motherfucking, dick-licking son of a fucking bitch?

  “Yes. It will be hard for us...”

  Right. This prick was always hard.

  “...but we’ll wait, until you’re twenty-one, and a college graduate. And if you go on for your MFA? Perhaps I’ll need a new teaching assistant....”

  This seemed to please her, and he leaned in and gave her a kiss. At least I think that’s what he did— couldn’t quite make it out, though it lasted a while and was not just a peck. I could only wonder why Alice hadn’t realized he was tacitly admitting that he boinked his teaching assistants, but logic was never that big in Wonderland.

  He shut her in the little red car and she drove off, and he watched, and waved, and smiled, and then the smile drooped and he shivered, not with the cold I didn’t think, and he stooped his shoulders and trod back up and inside his cobblestone cottage.

  Killing this fucker wouldn’t lose me any sleep. I finished my Coke and leaned back against the rolled-up sleeping bag I’d brought with me. Like I said, I didn’t figure to spend any of the nights here, but that option was good to have and, anyway, the sleeping bag rolled up made a nice soft object to rest against.

  Twilight turned to honest-to-shit night and a couple of street lamps—well-spaced—came on. Though I sat in a split-level, the world across the way was woodsy and rustic with those quaint-looking cottages like something out of another era.

  Around seven, “American Woman” was on the radio, throbbing despite the low volume, when the white Corvette pulled up. I turned the sound down to zero and watched, impressed, as the tall brunette unfolded from a vehicle that should have been splashed with winter grue but was showroom shiny. She’d taken time to run it through a car wash, I’d bet, as careful with her wheels as with her own appearance.

  And she was careful with her appearance, all right. Her coat was white leather with a white fur collar, her long legs in black-and-white geometrically patterned bell bottoms, her boots white leather with heels. Her long dark hair went halfway down her back, straight as a waterfall, the mane of a lanky lioness. Her complexion was olive, almost tan, whether from some va
cation she’d grabbed or just her natural state, I couldn’t say.

  Alice had been cute, perky, if psychotic. Annette was a different animal, and not the short, plump Italian Mouseketeer Frankie Avalon had tried to beach ball. This was a fashion-model type, her oval face, her full dark-lipsticked mouth, her big brown eyes, her well-shaped dark eyebrows, a study in symmetry.

  Teaching assistant my ass.

  He came down out of the cottage to meet her, and the bathrobe had been replaced by a tan leisure suit with a brown shirt with one of those collars that could put an eye out. Both eyes.

  He came down, his breath pluming in the cold—the temperature had dropped some—and slipped an arm around her shoulders and led her up and inside. She had a little brown briefcase with her, so perhaps they were just going to work.

  Three hours later they were still in there.

  I probably shouldn’t have done it, but I was getting bored. Surveillance was not what I’d bargained for, though the Broker had made it clear sitting watch would come into play from time to time in this line of work. Anyway, I was getting bored and itchy and frankly curious.

  So I stuffed the nine millimeter in my waistband, zipped the cord jacket over it, and went out the back way and cut through some undeveloped wooded property until I could cross the street a quarter of a mile away, and come up behind the cobblestone house and peek in a window or two.

  Which is exactly what I did.

  They were in a small room that I would best describe as a study—lots of books on shelves, and a big rolltop desk littered with more books and manuscript pages and a typewriter with a ream of white typing paper next to it. That’s where he was sitting.

  So maybe they were working, right?

  Well, she was anyway. She was in pink panties on her knees, blowing the guy, his leisure suit pants around his ankles.

  Fuck, I would have killed this lucky prick for free.

  TWO

  I have a pretty good memory. I can recall conversations well, at least well enough to write them down for your benefit and have them pass muster. Same is true of people, their physical descriptions and the sounds of their voices and even what they were wearing—it all seems to stick.

  But I don’t remember the exact words when the Broker came around to that little two-room apartment and recruited me for his team, even though it was one of the more important conversations of my life.

  That was a bad period for me. For the month or so I’d been living in a rough patch of L.A., alternating between staying in bed feeling sorry for myself, watching daytime TV (game shows, not soaps), eating TV dinners, and venturing forth looking for women who were willing to fuck me for free, even if a certain venereal after-fee might get tacked on.

  I was also drinking heavily, which is something I don’t normally do. In fact, I am more a soft drink kind of guy, though I do like wine, on special occasions, like New Year’s Eve or getting back from Vietnam.

  And getting back from Vietnam is where I should start, really, to fill you in a little on how I became somebody who killed people for money. Or I should say somebody who killed people for good money, because in Nam I killed people for shit change, didn’t I? And the only person I ever killed for free was probably the only one that really counted, the only one that really mattered, and that I truly enjoyed doing.

  Before I went over, I’d been stationed on the West Coast, and that’s where I met the California girl who became my bride. It was one of those whirlwind romances that are passionate and romantic and run to montages in the movies where the couples are hand in hand on the beach and in the park and share one ice cream cone with pop songs playing in the background. In our case it would have been something by the Association, “Cherish” maybe, though “No Fair At All” would have been more like it.

  Because when I got home to our little bungalow in La Mirada, a day early, meaning to surprise my darling girl, I got surprised myself because she was in bed with a guy named Williams. I didn’t know his name was Williams at the time, but when I asked around the neighborhood later that day, I got filled in fast. He lived in La Mirada, too, just a couple blocks away, which is one reason why his car wasn’t in my sweetie’s driveway.

  Another reason was that, at the moment, his car wasn’t running right. The next morning he and it were in his own driveway, Williams under the spiffy little sportscar, on his back working on its rear end—a coincidence, because the day before he’d been working on my wife’s rear end—and he looked up at me from under there, the buggy jacked up with the back wheels off, and gave me this look, which I read as contemptuous, and commented, “I got nothing to say to you, bunghole,” which didn’t take much reading at all, and I said, “Fine,” and kicked out the fucking jack.

  That almost caused me some trouble. Had I killed the prick still in the sack with my wife, I’d have been in a better position to claim temporary insanity and irresistible impulse and suchlike. Instead, after I’d found them together in what I’d presumed was my bed, I’d walked off and settled down and thought about it overnight and gone around to his house the next day and crushed the fucker under his car.

  That got me arrested, though I explained that if I’d gone over there to do anything but talk, I would have taken a gun. I’d killed his ass, all right, but it wasn’t premeditated. He’d just gotten on my wrong side, calling me a bunghole and being generally disrespectful, and the thing hadn’t been planned. Not calculated at all. It was just he said “Fuck you” in his way and I said “Fuck you” in mine—only mine took on a more physical form.

  The media had a whale of a time with it, and the public was on my side, so there was no trial. The war wasn’t popular, sure, but Johnny couldn’t be expected to come marching home and not get pissed off catching some son of a bitch fucking his wife. So the D.A. dropped it, saying it would be a waste of the taxpayers’ money, and then some fuss followed, since a public servant can’t really win in a situation like that. Damned if you do....

  Only there was a backlash against me. I couldn’t find work, not that I was qualified for anything except shooting yellow people from atop brown trees between green fronds. Sure, I’d worked in garages as a high school kid and was a pretty good pick-up mechanic, certainly qualified to pump gas and learn on the job. But nobody was interested, not even where Williams used to work as a mechanic, and it wasn’t like they didn’t have an opening.

  By the way, I had nothing to do with my wife after that. At this point I didn’t want to kill her any more than I wanted to fuck her (though fuck her and kill her had flashed through my mind as an option, on reflection not a terribly good one) and she divorced me. Hey, she had grounds.

  The first week I was in that little two-room shithole, my old man came out from Ohio and looked me up. We’d had a pretty good relationship over the years; I’d lettered in swimming in high school and that had pleased him (he’d been an athlete in college). I maintained a B average and I didn’t get any girls pregnant, which was the very definition of a good kid. He was out of town on business a lot, so we weren’t maybe as close as some fathers and sons. But we didn’t hate each other, like a lot of my friends and their dads.

  He’d hit a bad slump around 1967 in his business—he had a little real estate agency—and that had made putting me through college a non-starter. He advised me to enlist and then I’d have Uncle Sam’s help with college, and that seemed like a good idea at the time.

  Anyway, he knew about the trouble I’d been in, even though it didn’t hit the national press, and came to see me with a very special message: “Don’t come home.” He would have been cool with it, but my stepmother (a wealthy widow he’d snagged who’d made his business worries go away) had found me off-putting even before I started kicking jacks out.

  “You’re a man,” he’d said. “You understand about women.”

  I almost said, Why don’t you reflect on my current situation, Dad, and see if you still think I understand about women. But I didn’t.

  “I just want yo
u to know,” he said right before he departed my fleabag Shangri-la, “I’m proud of what you did in the service of your country.”

  So killing a bunch of Cong who were strangers to me, squeezing off rounds and shattering and splattering their noggins like melons at target practice back home, that was fine, that made sense. Killing that prick Williams, who had needed killing, who I had a reason for killing, that was wrong.

  That may have been when the gears shifted in my skull and made me view things from my own admittedly off-kilter perspective. Society sanctioned killing strangers in war, but didn’t like it when you took out some bastard you knew who richly deserved it. To me that’s hypocritical, but what the hell, that’s just my take on it.

  So the Broker.

  He knocked on my door. At that stage in my existence, I didn’t even bother to take a gun with me. This joint couldn’t afford peepholes, either, so I just opened the door and there he stood, an apparition of success: six two and broad-shouldered, with stark-white hair made starker by a tropical tan and a gray double-knit suit and a darker stripes of gray tie, as distinguished as a guy in a bourbon ad in Playboy.

  He called me “Mister,” and used my real name, which is none of your fucking business. He had the damnedest face, too young for the white hair, long and fleshy but largely unlined, and his eyes were light blue, like arctic waters, or anyway like I figured arctic waters would look.

  I do remember he said, “I have an unusual opportunity for you, Mr. _____. A money-making opportunity.”

  And I remember my answer: “Amway’s not my thing, Mac. Try next door. There’s a hooker with some real sales experience.”

  But he talked his way in, and we sat at the little scarred-up table where I had my TV dinners and the rum I was mixing with Coca-Cola, a twelve-ounce can of Coke lasting longer than a bottle of Bacardi.

  I took him for forty, despite the white hair, but came to find out fifty was more like it. He had the manner of a well-heeled lawyer or maybe a politician, and I do recall he began with a fairly lengthy diatribe on how poorly I’d been treated by, well, just about everybody—my wife, the press, the legal system, even my family, and how the hell did he know that?