The first quarry q-7

by Max Allan Collins

  She said, “I guess I haven’t thanked you.”

  “It’s okay. I’ll hit your father up for some kind of bonus.”

  She came over and touched my face. “You aren’t as tough as you pretend. I have a feeling, underneath it all, you’re a pussycat.”

  I smiled. “I guess you’ve got my number.”

  On the other hand, those dead assholes in the rest-stop john might’ve had a different opinion, if they’d still been in any shape to have opinions.

  A terrycloth robe was hanging in the closet, with a CONCORT INN logo stitched on its breast pocket, and she took the robe with her into the bathroom and shut herself in.

  I went over to the phone and had the desk put me through to the Broker’s emergency number. Three rings this time.

  “I’m at the Concort Inn,” I said.

  “What the hell are you doing there?”

  “I’m in a room with our client’s daughter. She’s taking a shower. You wouldn’t want to come over here and have a talk with me about what I’ve been up to lately?”

  A long pause. “I believe I would. What room are you in?”

  I told him.

  “I’ll get the key to another room nearby where we can talk.”

  “How long?”

  “It may be an hour.”

  “Call from the lobby.”

  “All right. Quarry?”

  “Yes?”

  “What have you done?”

  “I’ve done fine. You’ll be pleased.”

  She came out of the shower, her hair in a turbaned towel, her nice shape wrapped up in that terrycloth robe. She came over and sat on the edge of her bed, facing me where I sat on the edge of mine, having just got off the phone.

  “Why don’t you take a shower?” she asked. “I feel like another woman.”

  I felt like another woman, too, but I said, “Only one robe.”

  “Don’t worry about it. It’ll be refreshing.”

  Hell.

  I went in and showered. When I came back out with a towel knotted around me, all the lights were off and she was under the covers of my bed. But the drapes were open on the window onto the river and River Drive, so some flickery illumination came in and turned the room blue-gray.

  Her hair, towel-dried and a little frizzy and lots of it, framed that model’s face of hers; the covers were pulled up above her breasts but her shoulders were bare except for where her hair touched them.

  She asked, “Don’t you want a reward?”

  I came over and said, “Who’s that sleeping in my bed?”

  She giggled; it did seem kind of funny at the time. On the other hand, she was about half out of her gourd, after all she’d been through.

  “You know,” I said, looming over her, “your father, though I repeat I’ve never met him, hired my agency because he didn’t like the idea of you sleeping around with your professor.”

  “You’re not my professor.”

  “How do you know I’m interested? Maybe I’m gay.”

  She pointed to where the towel was pointing back at her.

  “Touche,” I said.

  She giggled at that, too. I’m telling you, it was funny. I was wittier than Oscar Levant on the Jack Paar Show. You had to be there.

  Of course, I was there, lucky me, and when she flipped the covers back, she showed off an olive-toned body that was perhaps more slender than to my usual taste, but those legs were as shapely as they were long and her waist was supernaturally narrow and the breasts, while small, got help from a prominent rib cage and had dark brown aureoles with nipples that were looking right at me, daring me to make something of it.

  “Do me,” she said, and parted her legs and in the midst of a brown thicket, pink glistened and I buried my face down there and made it glisten some more. She came quickly and hard, and then I was on my back on the bed and she was kneeling between my legs now, and she was very skillful, thorough and even loving.

  She got on top of me after that, riding me with no mercy, her eyes rolling back in her head as she came again, just as hard; but we wound up with her on her back and us fucking frantically, as if our lives depended on it, those long legs kicking the air past me, and me rutting like a goddamn dog, as if we’d almost lost our lives together tonight, and hadn’t we, almost?

  For all that frenzy, the bang ended with a whimper as she began to cry and I felt my eyes tear up as I held her close and nuzzled and kissed her neck. Emotions were stirring in me, emotions I thought were gone. I hadn’t felt like this since my honeymoon and I had thought I would never feel like this again, and hadn’t really wanted to.

  Then she trotted off to the bathroom again. I wiped myself off with my towel and leaned back against my pillow, propped against the headboard, and thought about Dorrie, sad, pretty Mrs. Prof. So far on this job I’d killed three guys and screwed two very lovely women. I’d done it all, in a very short time.

  Everything except the job I’d been hired for.

  The phone rang, and the Broker said, “I’m in 714, just down the hall from you.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  I got my clothes on and went over to the bathroom door, behind which water was running.

  I said, “I’m going down to the front desk and get us some toiletries-toothbrushes and toothpaste and stuff.”

  “Okay!” she said.

  “Won’t be long.”

  In 714, the Broker and I sat by the window at two chairs on either side of a small round table with a built-in lamp, which was the only light going. His expression was stern. He wasn’t staying long, judging by the camel’s hair topcoat remaining on.

  “I have to make this fast,” I said, “or Annette will be suspicious.”

  “You’re calling her ‘Annette’ now?”

  “That’s right, because she isn’t Doreen or Cheryl or even Cubby.”

  This Mickey Mouse Club reference was lost on him, so I cut the comedy and filled him in, in short, brutal strokes.

  Finally, he said, “You did well.”

  “Will you handle our client? And explain that I wasn’t trying to discover his identity, that it just fell in my lap?”

  “Yes. Certainly.”

  “Do it now. Tonight.”

  “Well, of course.”

  “I mean, we’ll stay the night, Annette and me, and tomorrow morning I will need to know the game plan. Does her father want to send somebody to collect her? Do I go back to Iowa City and let her return to her apartment? And do we finally pull the plug on this cluster-fuck of a job?”

  The Broker shook his head. “I believe our client will want you to attempt to complete what you’ve started.”

  “Getting a window to do that, where the stateroom isn’t jammed with coeds and wives and writing students, may not be a breeze.”

  The Broker shrugged and stood. “You’ll do your best, I’m sure…We’ll talk tomorrow, first thing. I’ll let you know then.”

  I stood. “Okay. There’s one other thing.”

  “What?”

  “Tell the desk clerk I need a couple of those little traveler’s kits-tiny toothpaste, toothbrushes, deodorant, and so on. Have a bellhop bring ‘em up right away.”

  “All right. Why not just call down?”

  “That’s where I am right now, getting that stuff. Got it?”

  “Got it.”

  When I returned to our room, Annette was still in my bed. The lights were off but for a reading light built into the headboard. Her face had a carved beauty, her Italian heritage giving her a Madonna look, despite our recent whore-worthy bed boogie.

  She asked, “Do you mind if I sleep with you?”

  “No.”

  “May be a little crowded.”

  “That’s okay.”

  “I just…just don’t want to sleep alone right now. I need somebody strong beside me.”

  “Well, I’ll have to do.”

  She smiled. I was a card, wasn’t I?

  “Jack, where’s our toothbrushes?”
<
br />   “They had to go rummaging in a storeroom. They’re sending the stuff up.”

  Right then came a knock- thank you, Broker — and I gave the kid a buck and took the two little plastic bags of sample-size toiletries and deposited them in the bathroom. Then she was right behind me, in the Concort Inn robe, and first she brushed her teeth and then I did and it was as cute and domestic as could be.

  I got in bed, and she got in after me and switched off the reading light, but we didn’t close the drapes, liking the soft glow from the streetlamps and business signs and the river with Rock Island glimmering beyond. I had an arm around her and she was cuddled to my chest, like she was a tiny thing though she was almost as tall as I was.

  There is something about being in a hotel room in bed with a woman with the lights out and nothing out there but the night that encourages a peculiar kind of intimacy. Like being at camp in a bunk bed in the dark and sharing with friends all sorts of hopes and dreams and secrets.

  I said, “Can I ask you a few things?”

  “Sure.”

  “Remember how I wondered if you were collaborating with the professor on your book?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you said you weren’t.”

  “Right.”

  “He was just helping you.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I don’t want to upset you. Maybe this can wait. This can wait.”

  She sat up, leaned on an elbow, the big browns locked on me. “No. Tell me.”

  “I found something out, shadowing the professor.”

  “That he likes to fuck young women?”

  “Well, I learned that, too. But…what kind of stuff are you dealing with in your book?”

  “What…what do you mean, Jack?”

  “I mean, there was something Byron said to you the other day, about you reporting every bad thing you ever saw or experienced with your father. What would that be, exactly?”

  “Jack, I…that’s kind of personal.”

  Not long ago, I’d been eating her out; not along ago, my dick had been halfway down her throat. And this was kind of personal?

  “Honey,” I said, trying that out, “I have a good reason for asking.”

  She sat all the way up. I did, too. But the sheets and covers were around her waist, so her small, pointy breasts were accusing me.

  She said, “You know I have a rather…strained relationship with my father. Right?”

  “I kind of gathered.”

  “There are…reasons for that.”

  “Reasons besides he’s a drug trafficker and murderer?”

  She half-laughed, half-sighed. “Yes. Yes. Other reasons.”

  “He beat you?”

  “No.”

  “Then he…oh.”

  “Yes. ’Oh.‘ He fucked me, Jack. He fucked me from when I was twelve, around when my mother died, and until I was fourteen when he remarried and I got shipped off to boarding school. When I was older, later teens, when I was home for vacations or during the summer, there were no…advances, no sneaking into my room. He had a wife now and that was the past and it was never spoken of. Like it never happened. But it did.”

  “Christ. I’m sorry. How does a thing like that…?”

  “My mother died. Of cancer. It was lingering. In fact, the…abuse, the psychologists call it, began during Mother’s illness. I became the woman of the house at a very young age, her surrogate in many respects…”

  Many respects was right.

  She was saying, “I have terribly mixed feelings about it all, and-”

  “Mixed feelings? What’s to be ‘mixed’ about?”

  “That’s just the thing. The horrible, the most awful part to admit-I was his willing partner. Oh, I didn’t like it at first, it hurt me, I was too small, but I knew Daddy loved me and that I made him happy and I was taking over for Mother. Filling in for her, taking her place. And as the months passed, I came to like it. I liked having orgasms, and I liked having closeness with my father, and I became a kind of second wife to him.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Neither did I. Only, after he married, and our relationship stopped? At first, I know this is sick, this is crazy, but I was jealous. And I told a priest, and the priest secretly, taking a big chance, got me psychiatric help, and I came to know how wrong it was, how sad and sick and awful it was, and became very ashamed.”

  Yeah, you got to hand it to psychiatry. Really put things right, that crowd.

  “And the priest and the shrink, they didn’t report your father?”

  “Daddy is a big contributor to the diocese. And as for my psychiatrist, well, you know who my father is. What would Daddy have done to that doctor?”

  Hired somebody like me.

  “Anyway,” she said, “I know now, intellectually and emotionally, that my father is a terrible man, a sociopath. I want nothing to do with him.”

  “And you’re putting this in your book?”

  “Yes. Yes, of course.”

  “Aren’t you afraid of the repercussions?”

  “What can Daddy do about it? Kill me?”

  Well, he’d fucked her, hadn’t he? Why was killing her out of the question?

  And this was it, wasn’t it? The secret that Lou Girardelli could not allow to get out. A book about him could contain all sorts of speculation about the mob and criminal activities; that kind of occasional bad publicity came with the territory, and even built a guy’s legend. But a confirmed story, from his own daughter, of incest and abuse?

  I put my hands on her shoulders and said, “You don’t know what you’ve got yourself into, Annette.”

  She shook her head of hair the way a lioness does its mane. “Of course I do. I’m going to free myself and became an artist, a real artist, through my book.”

  “Your non-fiction novel.”

  “Yes. My non-fiction novel.”

  “Thanks to the instruction and nurturing of Professor Byron.”

  “That’s right. Absolutely right.”

  How could I tell her that her latest father-figure was fucking her in a whole new way?

  Maybe just give it to her straight.

  “For all I know,” I said, “the book you’re writing may be a masterpiece. But even so, I discovered something very troubling about Professor Byron.”

  “Please. You’re not…come on. Jealous, Jack?”

  “No. Did you know the professor was writing his own book about your father?”

  She smiled. Laughed. Shook her head. “No he isn’t. You’re confused. He’s helping me.”

  “He’s pumping you.” Boy was he pumping her. “He’s got all this juicy stuff about your father committing incest with his underage daughter, and that’s going to make his non-fiction book a huge bestseller…” If it didn’t get him killed first.

  She was frowning now, and shaking her head again. “No. No, Jack. This is crazy.”

  “I swear to you, Annette. He’s been researching your father for several years. This is his big follow-up to Collateral Damage. He already has a publishing contract. He isn’t collaborating with you-he’s researching you.”

  Her mouth dropped open and her eyes were wide as well. But thoughts were flickering behind those eyes, as defensiveness and denial gave way to everything fitting into place…

  Finally she said, damn near shrieked, “That bastard! That fucking bastard…”

  I took her by the shoulders again, held tight. “I know this is a shock, but you have to get past it in a hurry. What the professor did to you isn’t even the worst thing that happened to you tonight.”

  Breath poured out of her and she swallowed and, those huge brown eyes locked on me but half-lidded, she nodded.

  She asked, “What now?”

  “You get some sleep. I’m going to help you.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know yet. But I will.”

  “What about calling my father?”

  “I’ll handle that.”

  “C
an I trust you, Jack?”

  “You can.”

  The crazy thing was, I wasn’t lying.

  TEN

  At some point I’d gotten up and peed and shut the drapes, and we might have slept deep into the morning if the phone hadn’t rung. Both of us were startled awake, and I was sleeping next to the nightstand and reached for the phone, though my hand initially touched the nine millimeter’s cold metal skin. Then I found the receiver and it was the Broker.

  “You’re to take Miss Girard back to Iowa City, to her apartment,” Broker said, after perfunctory hellos. “She’s to stay in for at least today. No meetings with Professor Byron or anybody else for that matter.”

  “That would help me out,” I said, purposely vague, “if you intend me to pursue that other matter.”

  “I do.”

  “Okay, but shouldn’t I stay with her? I have a hunch there may be other black guys on the South Side who could find their way to her apartment.”

  “Have breakfast at the Concort coffee shop,” he said. “Make a leisurely exit from the hotel. If you leave no earlier than ten, then by the time you reach Iowa City, the girl’s father will have representation there.”

  By “representation” I took it to mean that guys with guns would be sitting in the apartment house parking lot. Hopefully white guys.

  “Okay. But Miss Girard and her father aren’t on the best of terms. I’m not sure she will go along with that.”

  As you might imagine, my nude bedmate was sitting up by now, leaning on an elbow, her eyes perked with interest and her nice little breasts just plain perked.

  “Whatever their differences,” he said, “they have a common interest in this matter-specifically, keeping her alive.”

  “Not a bad point.”

  “But I would like you to have her call her father so they can discuss it themselves. Perhaps come to a meeting of the minds if not a reconciliation.”

  “Got you. Right here from the room? This phone okay?”

  “No. Have her use one of the booths in the lobby. I don’t care to have a long distance call of that nature billed to the hotel.”

  “Fine. But I have a couple of concerns of my own.”

  “The kind you can’t speak about in front of Miss Girard.”

  “Bingo.”