The first quarry q-7

by Max Allan Collins

  The rear door was old but the lock was new, the kind you could open with a credit card. But I didn’t have a credit card, as that desk clerk at the Concort Inn could tell you. Trying to think of what I might use instead, I absently tried the knob and the goddamn thing was unlocked. The professor, for all his east coast sensibilities, had fallen for the Iowa hi-neighbor trustfulness. The sap.

  From peeking in windows on my previous visit, I already knew the layout: a small unremodeled kitchen in back, wooden cabinets with counter and an old stove and 1950s vintage refrigerator and yellow Formica table; a pantry and laundry room next door; then, as you came from the kitchen, a study and a bedroom to right and left respectively; and a good-size living room with a cobblestone fireplace, which was going nicely, red-and-blue flames snapping as if its owner were in attendance. In this surprisingly expansive open-beamed space was a lot of dark wood paneling that dated back to when the cottage was built. A very rustic interior, with built-in bookcases in one corner and a braided throw rug and a green sofa with a broken-down look and a big captain’s table under the glow of a hanging light fixture shaped like a yellow upside-down tulip.

  I decided to get a head start on it, and went into the study. For half an hour, I went through his desk, its drawers and the file cabinets. I gathered every damn document that had the name “Girardelli” or anything vaguely Italian or having to do with Chicago. I was feeling pretty proud of myself, looking at a big stack of manuscript pages and carbon copies and boxes and notebooks resting on his swivel chair when I heard the back door open, and then close.

  Positioning myself to the left of the door, snugged between the frame and the file cabinets, I waited and listened, the nine millimeter in hand, its snout up.

  Out in the kitchen, he was setting something down. Then I heard him open the door on the refrigerator and stuff was going onto wire shelving, and then cabinets were opening and cans and other things were getting set down on wood. He’d gone to the store. He had to eat, didn’t he? Well, actually, he didn’t, but he didn’t know that.

  I couldn’t think of any reason not to pop him there in the kitchen and was about to step out and do that very thing when somebody banged at the front door, hard, and I damn near pissed myself.

  Hugging the wall again, I heard him saying, “Now what the hell…”

  I knew the feeling.

  I heard him cross into the living room over the wooden floor, the footsteps different on the braided rug, then the door opened and he said, “ Dorrie! I thought we’d settled everything.”

  I knew the feeling!

  The door slammed behind her.

  “Almost, darling,” she said. “Tell me, though. We did have something, didn’t we? Once upon a time? Isn’t that what you storytellers say? Once upon a time?”

  “Dorrie…of course we did. For that part of my life, for all those years, you were the only woman, the most important person in my entire life…”

  Why was he talking so quickly? Why did he sound so goddamn desperate?

  “That’s nice to hear,” she said. Her voice had an odd wistfulness, and a distance that was much farther away than from the study to the living room. “It does help, darling. It does help.”

  “You need to put that down, Dorrie! Put it down right now!”

  If you ever watched the old sitcoms on TV, like I Love Lucy, there was always this audience member on the canned laugh track who said, “ Uh oh! ” at a key story moment. I wasn’t watching a sitcom exactly, but I heard that familiar voice. Uh oh was fucking right…

  Then came a sharp crack, almost as if the fire had popped, but it wasn’t the fire, was it?

  I was hoping I didn’t have to kill her. I really didn’t want to, and I stood there frozen in my tiny space between door and filing cabinets, hoping to hear that door slam as she went away, having done my job for me.

  But I didn’t hear the door slam.

  I heard a second sharp crack.

  And when I finally went out there, she was curled on the floor next to him, a certain elegance about how she lay there, as opposed to her husband, still in a tan jacket from going to the store and chinos and pretty much looking like a pile of laundry dumped by a fed-up housewife. And maybe he was. Her blouse was crimson and the stain on the white fabric grew where she’d shot herself through the heart the dead prick had broken. A little revolver was in her limp hand. Byron had taken his in the forehead and his talented brains were leaking out the back of his skull.

  I leaned down for a look at the gun, and it was Charlie Koenig’s. 38! I’d put it in my suitcase but Dorrie must have helped herself to it when she visited my room. Her using that weapon would add another nice confusing layer to any police investigation.

  The gunshots had seemed small if distinct. Nobody lived across the street now, not even me or the late Charlie. The cottages to left and right were spaced well away. I did not feel anyone was likely to have heard anything suspicious enough to call for investigation.

  Wasn’t much left to do but burn those manuscript pages and notebooks in the fireplace. It took a while, and as the flames ate the opus, its author-dead and sprawled on the floor by the wife whose spirit he’d killed-basked unknowingly in their dancing reflection.

  ELEVEN

  A space was open next to the dark blue Thunderbird with the Illinois plates, and I filled it with the Maverick. Both my car and the goon squad’s were backed in, for a good view of the little red-brick apartment building and its modest parking lot.

  Whenever I’d done surveillance on Annette, over the past several days, I parked across the way in Sambo’s semi-enclosed lot; where the Thunderbird was parked made it too easy to come up on them from behind. But I guessed Girardelli’s boys knew their own business.

  Right now the Thunderbird had only one pockmarked weasel sitting in it, the heavier-set one, on the passenger side.

  I came around and bent at his window; his droopy-mustached, suspicious face had followed me over and his eyes were glittery slits under thick eyebrows. His leisure suit was a pastel green, his turtleneck a slightly darker shade with a gold chain necklace nestling in sweater folds. Whatever happened to black-and-white pinstripe suits with black shirts and white ties for the hood about town?

  The craggy-faced weasel powered the window down and said, “Mr. G is up with his daughter. He said you should go up there.”

  “Okay. What happened to your partner?”

  He nodded toward the restaurant down and across the way. “Sal’s over having a bite. We take turns.”

  “That parking lot’s where they grabbed the girl last night.”

  “You don’t fuckin’ say.”

  “You and Sal might not want to split up. If the spades send reinforcements, taking you fellas out one at a time would be a way to go.”

  “Do I look like I was born the fuck yesterday?”

  For all the gunk on his hair, he might have been born the fuck a few seconds ago.

  But I said, “Hey, just trying to help out.”

  “You can help out by going up there like Mr. G said.”

  “No problem.” I smiled and nodded.

  He glowered at me and powered the window up and turned his eyes toward the building.

  I took the steps to the exterior landing along which apartment doors were lined, motel-style, and I knocked at Annette’s. She answered right away, cracking the door, then undoing a night latch and letting me in. Looking pale and a not a little shell-shocked, she was in a black zippered top with pointed collars and black-and-white geometric-pattern bell bottoms, possibly the ones she’d worn that first night when I saw her go into the professor’s cottage.

  Annette basically had two decent-size rooms and a bathroom here, the living room (which you entered into) taking up two-thirds of a long narrow area, the back third a kitchenette. The bedroom and bathroom were off to the left. These were not lavish living quarters, but in a college town, for a student, this was as good as it got-Annette lived alone with easily twice the space a
ny double-occupancy dorm room would provide. Probably set her back two hundred bucks a month.

  This pad, and her hip threads and that white Corvette, meant Daddy was still signing checks to and for his Darling Girl. And his Darling Girl-despite Daddy using her for a fuck toy when she was twelve-was still letting him underwrite her lifestyle and her education. She’d get cut off, no doubt, when her tell-all book came out; but Annette probably figured she’d be making her own way in the world by then.

  A rust-colored couch was at left as you came in, a framed Warhol soup can over it-a framed pop art print was on the opposite wall, too, a panel out of a love comic book-and a big portable TV was sitting on a metal stand in the corner at right, angled so that couch sitters and a big overstuffed rust-color easy chair at right could take in its impressive 25 inches. Another example of Daddy’s love?

  Speaking of Daddy, he was seated in that easy chair next to an end table with a remote control, a lamp with a Tiffany-style shade and a tumbler of what looked to be Scotch on the rocks resting on a coaster. I recognized him at once, since he’d been in many a national magazine and on the nightly news plenty of times.

  Still, I was surprised by how small he was. He couldn’t have been more than five eight, and maybe weighed 140, despite a modest paunch. Like his boys, he wore a leisure suit, a money green one with a yellow shirt with pointy collars and a gold crucifix on a gold chain dangling in graying chest hair, bridging fashion and religion.

  Very tan (he had a place in Florida), Lou Girardelli was probably late fifties but appeared older, with that shrunken look people in their seventies can get; his hair was cut short, no mutton chops for him, and was salt-and-pepper, emphasis on the salt. His face was oval like his daughter’s but his nose was hooked and crowded by dark little eyes behind goggle-lens glasses with dark green frames.

  His smile was friendly enough as he got out of his easy chair and extended his hand, approaching me.

  Annette, uncharacteristically timid, was saying, “Jack, this is my-”

  “Jack!” Girardelli said in a sandpaper baritone, as we shook. “Nice to finally meet you. I spoke to your boss in Des Moines, of course, but you and I haven’t had a chance to talk ourselves.”

  He was keeping to the PI story I’d fed Annette, whether from information the Broker gave him or what his daughter told him, I couldn’t say.

  “No, we haven’t, sir.”

  “Come, sit, sit.” He gestured to the couch and I sat and he played host, extending his arms as if this were a castle and he its king. “What can we get you? Annie has Scotch and bourbon and-”

  “Nothing, sir,” I said, with a mild smile and an upraised hand. “I’m fine.”

  “You’re sure? It’s no trouble.”

  Not for him. It was Annette who’d have to play bartender.

  “You’re very gracious,” I said. “No.”

  Annette smiled, tightly, joining me on the couch, but not right against me, not too cozy. Her hands were folded in her lap and she sat very still and stiff and straight.

  Girardelli shrugged, and rather than return to his easy chair, joined us on the couch, sitting next to his daughter, putting her between us, and she scooched somewhat closer to me.

  “I’ll always be grateful to you, Jack, coming forward to help Annie last night.” He rested a hand on Annette’s shoulder. Her flinch was barely perceptible.

  He was saying, “Those moolies would have done Christ knows what to my little girl.”

  “Wouldn’t have been pretty, no.”

  “Animals. A bunch of damn animals. There’s going to be a bonus in it for you, Jack.”

  “I appreciate that, sir, but it’s not necessary.”

  He was studying me, smiling. But the eyes behind those oversize lenses bothered me. They were small and hard and cold, like black buttons sewn on a doll.

  “I just stopped by,” I said, “to make sure everything is cool where Miss Girardelli is concerned. That she has proper protection, which I can see she has.”

  He patted Annie’s leg, just above the knee; she closed her eyes. “No one’s going to touch my daughter, that I promise you. Sal and Vin are two of my best men, and another team will be in by midnight. They’ll work shifts, and I may even bring in a third team.”

  “Good. How long will you keep that up?”

  “Well, an indefinite period. Not long. Not long. We’re dealing with our little Mau Mau uprising back home in our own way, on our own turf.”

  Annette said to him, “Daddy, I don’t want to live in a bubble. I need my space, and privacy.”

  Christ, she sounded about twelve.

  “Sweetheart, no one will bother you. My boys will stay out of your way, but they’re here if you need them. I’m gonna stay tonight myself, right here on this couch.”

  Annette closed her eyes again. The hands in her lap were fists.

  “Sir,” I said, sitting forward, “I think you should know, I’ve taken care of our other business.”

  “Good! Good!” The genial smile broadened but the eyes stayed just as dead. “I am going to make sure you get something extra for this quality work. If you ever get tired of the private eye business, Jack, I can find a place for you on my personal security staff.”

  “You’re kind, Mr. Girardelli. But I do think I need to get going.” I rose. “We’re a small agency and there’s always another job waiting…”

  He nodded, then he got up and said to his seated daughter, “Jack and I are going to step out for a few moments, Sweetheart. I need to talk to him.”

  She smiled tightly. “Sure, Daddy.”

  I said, “There’s a restaurant across the way.”

  “All right.” He went to the door, opened it and gestured for me to go on out. “We’ll get coffee.”

  I smiled at Annette and she smiled at me and rolled her eyes as kids have forever done behind the back of a parent.

  “Be good,” I said.

  And she nodded, and smiled again, the young woman smiling, not the twelve-year-old.

  So once again I sat in a booth at Sambo’s, this time with one of the top mob bosses in Chicago. I had a Coke and he had coffee with lots of cream and sugar. In the bright glare of the relentlessly illuminated pancake house, I could see every freckle and age spot and wrinkle and stray facial hair on that too-tan puss, every blackhead and tiny red vein and enlarged pore on that hooked honker. His eyebrows were out of control with lots of white twisting around black, and his teeth were too white, too big, probably purchased.

  “Do you smoke?” he asked.

  It was the first thing he’d said since we left his daughter’s apartment. We’d nodded to his boys in the Thunderbird (both weasels were in the front seat now) and just walked quickly over. I had my corduroy jacket on, but he hadn’t put his topcoat on, and it was bitter.

  Now, in the warmth of Sambo’s, in a world of orange and brown and white and stainless steel and glass and faux-leather, the Chicago mob boss was seemingly asking for my permission to smoke.

  But I’d misread him, because when I said I didn’t smoke, he said, “Good. I don’t, either. I gave it up, three years ago. Causes cancer, you know, that’s no joke. I can see you’re a clean-cut boy. Vietnam?”

  I nodded.

  “Your Broker, he likes ex-GIs. I don’t blame him. You’re dependable. You don’t scare easy. You can think on your feet.”

  Right now I was on my ass in a Sambo’s booth, but I was thinking, all right. I was thinking that those dark eyes behind the green-framed glasses were like a shark’s.

  We had good privacy, nobody in an adjacent booth, and we spoke softly but clearly.

  He said, “What happened to that fucking prick?”

  “If you mean Professor Byron,” I said, “his wife murdered him this evening. Sick of him cheating on her with this coed and that. Then she killed herself.”

  The eyes suddenly got lively, gleaming, like water pearling off gun metal. “Excellent. Nicely done.”

  Was it my fault he jum
ped to the wrong conclusion?

  He was saying, “Sure you wouldn’t like to work for me, Jack? Maybe you didn’t want to say so, in front of Annette.”

  I said, “I’m happy working for the Broker. But I do apologize for…well, I know you like being insulated from people like me. And with all due respect, sir, I prefer insulation from people like you. From any client-that’s our mutual protection, after all.”

  He nodded. He was smiling but not showing his expensive teeth. That tan was damn near black; fuck cigarettes, he’d get skin cancer if he kept that up.

  I asked, “How are we with the trash I dumped on I-80?”

  That meant the two black kidnappers.

  He said, “Right now it’s still classified a robbery. I believe within twenty-four hours, it’ll be a gangland killing. But that doesn’t mean it’ll come to my doorstep.”

  “Good.”

  “I mean, these niggers are always killing each other. They got more factions than the fucking communists. And, like I said, my people are busy killing black asses even as we speak.”

  I nodded. “I was improvising, sir. I certainly didn’t mean-”

  He raised a benedictory hand. “No. You did well. You saved my daughter. Nothing’s more precious to me than my little girl.” Then he sat forward. “What about the prick’s book? That fucking manuscript?”

  “Assuming he didn’t send a copy to an editor in New York or somewhere, it’s gone, all of it. I had plenty of time in his study and I burned every goddamn page, every scrap, every note.”

  He sighed. “Wonderful to hear-excellent work, first-class, Jack. But that bastard was close to Annette. Could she have a copy?”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  He sipped his coffee, thought for a few moments, then shrugged and said, “You must understand, Jack, that Annette and I have had our differences.”

  “That’s hard to believe. You seem so close.”

  Another shrug, more elaborate. “It’s these times. These fucking draft dodgers, these dirty damn hippies, and that’s just the start of it. Think of that professor, and the trust he betrayed! I’m paying that university for my child’s education, and one of their staff is… is…I can’t say it. It’s disgusting.”