“Gin. Make yourself something, too.”
She went away and made a gin gimlet for me and something for herself and I sat wondering how I could ever have failed to recognize that voice on the phone earlier today. Sometimes the full timbre of a voice is lost over the wires. On the phone hers had seemed pleasant, sultry, but that’s all. Here, now, in person, I was reminded of how haunting that baritone but in no way masculine voice of hers had seemed to me when I was first hearing it, memorizing it, learning to pick it out from the giggly crowd down round the pool at the Beach Shore. It was a voice I should have recognized, even though tonight was my first conversation with her.
She brought me the gimlet and I sipped it and nodded approval.
She sipped the Manhattan she’d made herself and said, “I know you from someplace.”
Well, now.
“Shouldn’t that be my line?” I said.
She gave me that earthy smile again, the gums showing, but attractive as hell. “Maybe so. You a regular here?”
“No. I’m from out of town. Why? Are you new?”
“New? Not exactly. This is my first night on the job at the Barn, if that’s what you mean. But new I’m definitely not. Hey, I do know you from someplace. Really. “
“I talked to you on the phone this afternoon.”
“Oh, yes! I gave you directions.”
“Pretty damn good ones, too, for a first-nighter.”
“Well. I just got here this morning myself, came by way of Des Moines like you did, so it was all pretty fresh in my mind.”
A waitress with short blond hair, an attractive pout, and perky little breasts that poked at her barn red sweater came up alongside me and said to Lucille (as Glenna Cole was calling herself here), “I hate to bust up this budding romance, but I got a couple dozen booze-happy cardplayers who’d be happy to get the couple dozen drinks you’re supposed to be making.”
“I’ll get right on it,” Lucille said. But those oriental eyes said Go fuck yourself.
Which didn’t in the least bother the pouty blond waitress, who parked herself on the stool next to me while the drinks were getting made.
“You got a smoke?” she said.
“No,” I said.
“I’ll do you a favor sometime,” she said, and moved over a stool.
I nursed my gimlet.
“Hey,” I said, after a while.
The pouty blonde, not looking, said, “You talking to me?”
“Yeah. Tell me something.”
“Such as.”
“Who’s that big guy that’s been circulating all evening?”
A guy about fifty, a young-looking and healthy fifty at that, several inches over six foot, shortcropped white hair, modest pot belly, craggy good looks, had been winding through the tables incessantly as long as I’d been there, though he never would butt in, never made conversation unless a player at a table began it, a constant presence in the room without being obnoxious about it. And though he wore a conservative but well-tailored suit with a solid-color blue tie, he had a rugged look that fit right in with the image the Barn sought.
“Why don’t you take a great big guess and see if you just can’t figure it out yourself?”
“He runs the place.”
“He owns it, too.”
“What’s his name?”
“Tree.”
“What?”
“Tree, I said. Frank Tree.”
“Is that a real name?”
“How should I know? Ask Mr. Tree.”
“You still want a smoke?”
“Sure.”
I got a buck out and wadded it up and tossed it down the counter in front of her.
“Buy yourself a couple packs,” I said.
She turned her nose up at the wadded-up buck. Then she put it in her denims.
Meanwhile, Lucille was on her way back with a tray full of drinks. One of the drinks was another gimlet for me; the rest of the tray went with the pouty waitress out into the room of cardtables.
I tasted the fresh drink and said, “I may give up Coke completely.”
“Oh shit,” Lucille said. “Here comes another empty tray to fill. Listen. We close in an hour and a half. I’ll be out of here fifteen minutes after that. Let’s do something.”
“Fine,” I said.
While I was waiting I went back out to the tables. By closing I’d lost half of my winnings from draw poker at seven-card stud.
I wasn’t sure yet whether I was winning or losing tonight.
10
“You’ll have to excuse this place,” she said, flicking on the light as we came in and locking the door behind us, “but I haven’t exactly had much time for decorating. As a matter of fact I haven’t unpacked.”
“Looks fine to me,” I said.
It also looked small: one twelve-by-twelve room serving as living room and bedroom and everything else, except for a cubbyhole kitchenette off to the far right and a bathroom to the near right. There was a beat-up couch against the left wall, a coffee table nearby, an armchair by the window, and on the kitchen table a portable television with a screen the size of a TV Guide folded in half. The walls were plaster, light green, the carpet wall to wall but worn, dark green. Not an elegant layout, but clean and not as depressing as some places I been in. The major problem was a pygmy could get stir crazy in there.
“I’ll fix us something to drink,” she said.
“Nothing with booze.”
“This time I agree with you. Instant Sanka okay?”
“Sounds fine.”
“Just take a second to make. You go ahead and pull out the bed.”
“The bed.”
“You know, the couch. It’s a hideaway bed.”
“Oh. Well, sure.”
I pulled out the bed.
“Are there sheets on it?” she asked from the kitchenette.
“Yeah. Also some blankets.”
“That’s a relief. This friend of mine who was supposed to be getting this apartment ready for me, well, she’s a kind of a scatterbrain. I didn’t expect things to be so well organized. She’s got the cupboard and refrigerator stocked for me and everything.”
“How’s the Sanka coming?”
“Just take a minute to get the water heated up. Go ahead and make yourself comfortable.”
“On the bed, you mean.”
“Of course on the bed. Is it hot in here?”
“A little, yes.”
“I don’t think the heat can be turned down. I think the thermostat’s broken or something.”
She fixed the Sanka, brought a cup over to me, and pulled off the sleeveless red sweater she’d filled out so admirably at the Barn. “I hope you know I’m taking terrible advantage of you.”
“Oh?”
“Sure,” she said, undoing her bra. “If it wasn’t for you I would’ve had to hitch a ride home with one of those creeps at the Barn. And you saw how well I got along with the waitresses there.”
“Maybe they were just giving you a hard time because it’s your first day.”
“First day and every day. I mean, I make more money than they do, so what can you expect? I could’ve got a ride from one of those guys dealing for the house, I suppose, but fraternizing with them is against policy, I’m told. Besides, I didn’t see anything in that room that appealed to me… with one exception.” She unzipped her denims. “Excuse me a second, would you?” She let the denims drop, stepped out of them and went into the bathroom.
“You see, I have a car of my own,” she called over some running water, “but I loaned it to my girl friend.”
“The one who got this apartment for you?”
“That’s right. How could I refuse her? She gave me a ride out there and I told her I could find a ride back. And I did, didn’t I?”
She emerged from the bathroom, walked over to the kitchenette, got her own cup of Sanka, and flicked off the kitchen light, and the overhead light, too. She was wearing transparent panties. That’s
all. She’d left a light on in the bathroom, and left the door open a crack, but otherwise it was dark in there. Still, I could see just fine. Subdued lighting can do nice things to a naked body. Nearly naked.
She was a study in dark and light contrast: dark Florida tan against the untanned flesh where her bikini had been, dark nipples against otherwise white breasts, dark pubic bush against the whiteness of her loins.
She was an architectural wonder, this girl. One day, if she lived long enough, those massive breasts would have to droop. Gravity, like death, is inevitable. But right now she and her high, huge breasts were alive and well in Des Moines, Iowa.
“Sorry I was such bad company, on the way here,” she said, stretching out on her stomach on the bed, cupping her chin with one long-nailed hand, the dark blue, gold-flecked eyes with their oriental slant catching what little light there was and making electricity out of it.
“Bad company?”
“Yes. I’m afraid I slept all the way.”
And she had, head against my shoulder, for the whole thirty-minute ride from the Barn to the east side of Des Moines where this apartment was.
“You didn’t snore,” I said.
“I never snore.”
“Neither do I.”
“I want you to know something.”
“Okay. What is it?”
“I don’t usually do this kind of thing. I want you to know that.”
“Do what kind of thing?”
“You know. Fuck on the first date.”
“How do you know we’re going to?”
“Just a hunch.”
“You may be right. But right now I’m going to drink this Sanka.”
“See.”
“See what?”
“You do think I do this kind of thing all the time.”
“If I said something, I’m sorry.”
“You didn’t say anything. It was how you said it.’’
“I’ll pretend I understand that. I’m done with my Sanka.”
“Well, I’m just starting mine.”
“I’ll wait.”
“What the fuck’s your name, anyway?”
“Jack.”
“You already know my name.”
“Lucille. Lucy?”
“Lucille.”
“Lucille, then. How’d you get in the bartending business, Lucille?”
“I had a husband who owned a nightclub in Detroit. He thought it was good psychology to have a good-looking woman tending bar. Also it was cheaper, since he was married to me and didn’t have to pay me.”
“Had a husband?”
“That’s right.”
“Divorced?”
“No. They killed him.”
“They?”
“Some mob people.”
“No kidding?”
“Yeah. They were his silent partners and he was screwing them. They warned him and he didn’t listen. It was his fault, really.”
“You have a pretty cool attitude about it.”
“Not cool. Cold. I loved the little prick in the beginning. He was older than me, I was just a waitress in his place, impressed by the boss making advances. He had a wife at the time, who he dumped for me. He was really a little prick. But I was impressionable. Didn’t finish high school, that sort of thing. Never had anything going for me but my looks. So much for me. How about you?”
“Well. I could tell you about the time I came home from Vietnam and found my wife in bed with a guy. Or we could forget about the sad stories and fuck.”
“Good idea,” she said.
11
She was gone when I woke up. On the coffee table was a note: “Jack-you looked too restful to wake. Had a hair appointment and some other errands. Orange juice in the fridge. If you’re still in town, stop at the Barn tonight. If you want. L.”
I had a shower and got dressed, had some orange juice, and looked around the place a little.
But carefully. I didn’t pick anything up or look inside anything. Don’t think it wasn’t a temptation to get in that suitcase over in the corner, or to go through the double-door closet or through the drawers of the tiny dresser in the bathroom.
There are ways to tell if somebody’s been through your things. Traps you can lay before going out. You can apply a faint layer of baby powder to the inside of a drawer, for instance, or lay a thread or hair or something across the joining of two closet doors, or balance a little piece of metal or plastic or anything on the snap of a suitcase. There are a lot of tricks like that. I don’t know them all, and don’t bother with any myself, but a lot of people do.
Why else would she leave me here alone, if not to test me? Wasn’t that why she’d picked me up last night? She’d made the move, after all, not me. I figured she’d recognized me but hadn’t been able to place me. I was just a familiar face, but in the business she was in, a familiar face can be big trouble. So she was checking me out. I’ve been checked out worse ways.
That had to be it. No other way made sense. Women don’t usually go crawling in my lap looking for the zipper; not on first sight they don’t. Especially not an exotic-looking looker like Lucille or Ivy or Glenna Cole or whoever the hell she was. She sure wasn’t the dragon lady, not in the sack anyway.
Oh, she was nice in bed. Better than nice. A slow, hip-grinding, sensual screw that wasn’t the whambam of a casual bar pick-me-up, or a phony I-love-you-I-love-you bout like the married ladies indulge in, when they’re screwing somebody besides who they’re married to.
But she was not exotic. The promise of the oriental eyes was not delivered. It was that earthy, gumsshowing smile that kept its word, and that, as I sat at her kitchen table drinking a second glass of orange juice, was what was bothering me, now that I thought about it.
Because she wasn’t supposed to be real. She was acting, she had to be, but Christ did she seem real, opening her legs for me, sucking me in, hugging my back, goddamn it was real, nothing fake in it at all, not that I could see anyway, not the joyless copulation of the stag film actress, or the frantic humping of a hooker trying to fool and please at the same time, but something else, something she was caught up in, or seemed to be, and I got caught up in it myself, caught up in her should I say, and it disturbed me. I was supposed to be here to watch her, to see what she was up to and maybe kill her. Not fuck her. And certainly not fuck her and like it.
So I looked around the place without touching anything. There wasn’t much to see. The only interesting thing I found was on the window sill. The bottom of the sill was lined with dust. Two round circles were evident in the dust, as if left by two drinking glasses that had been set side by side, making their mark.
But it wasn’t drinking glasses that had made the mark. It was another sort of glasses. Binoculars.
I parted the curtains, looked out the window. I saw the parking lot, where I’d left my GT last night; beyond that a quiet side street, on the other side of which was an obviously high-rent apartment house.
Lucille’s apartment was on the third floor of a three-story building in a sleazy little block in a sleazy little area known as the East Side. To be fair, not every place of business on the East Side fell into that category. For every three or four Nude Go Go Bars there was a plumbing supply outfit or an auto parts shop or the like; there was even a bank and a drug store or two, left over from when the East Side had been the hub of the city, and not its most embarrassing eyesore, a ragtag collection of junk shops, porno houses and seedy bars, crouching at the foot of the gold-domed, archaically ornate Capitol Building like a poor relation waiting for the reading of the will.
Like the Capitol Building, the high-rent apartment house sat on one of a series of bluffs that rose above the deteriorating East Side, and the rest of the city too, for that matter. Unlike the Capitol Building, the apartment house was modern in style, a curved slab of white brick and black glass. Alone on its hill, aloof, it was bordered by a neighborhood of factories at the hill’s foot, and churches, clinics, government building
s and more apartment complexes at its rear.
A drive curving up the slope was clearly marked private. The place was undoubtedly well guarded, and even without the use of the binoculars I knew were somewhere in this apartment, I could see a pair of uniformed private cops on duty in the spacious parking lot that surrounded the building like a moat. The people living there probably felt pretty safe. Most of them probably were. One of them wasn’t.
One of them was being watched from this window by the woman currently calling herself Lucille Something. I thought I knew who it was she was watching, and I’d spend the rest of the day confirming that suspicion, and then I’d be in business.
Unless she killed the poor son of a bitch before I had a chance to do something about it.
12
Saturday night, about midnight, Frank Tree got in his LTD and by the time he was settled behind the wheel, leaning forward to insert key in ignition, I had put the fat cold nose of the silenced nine-millimeter up against the side of his neck, just under his ear.
I had to give the guy credit. He didn’t jump. Hell, he didn’t flinch. He didn’t yell, either. And he knew enough not to turn towards me. He didn’t try looking at the rear-view mirror, as if he knew in advance I’d turned it to face the windshield.
All he did was say: “I don’t have any money on me.”
“Good. I’m glad to hear you’re not a total idiot.”
“What?”
“Didn’t you ever hear of locking your car? How many hundred buck tape decks do you lose a week?”
“What is this?”
I leaned back a little, eased the gun off his neck. “Look on the seat next to you,” I said. “Tell me what you see. “
“A shirt.”
“Tell me about it.”
“It’s pale lemon color. It’s got a monogram on the pocket. It’s dirty.”
“What else.”
“It’s mine.”
“Where do you suppose I got it?”
“My dirty laundry, I guess. So you’ve been in my apartment. So what?”
“So now I’m in your car and I got a gun on you.”
“Yeah, well, congratulations. Now what the fuck’s this all about?”
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