So I devised a way of making that file of Broker’s work for me. I would choose a name from it-the name of someone else like myself, who murdered for hire, by contract-and I would go stake out that someone, follow him to his latest assignment, and, once having determined who his potential target was, I would approach said target and offer my services.
That was the tricky part: approaching someone and saying, “Somebody’s been hired to kill you.” But such people tend to lead the sort of lives that include the possibility of violence, or they wouldn’t be on the receiving end of a contract: nice, quiet, respectable people seldom are assassinated. The potential targets also tend to be the sort of people who like my solution to their problem: that is, killing the killers, and also finding out (and presumably taking care of) whoever hired the killers.
All of which is not entirely relevant to the story at hand, but it is hard for me to explain my state of mind, where Turner was concerned, without discussing the file. Because it seemed to me possible that someone had found out-or figured out- that I had the Broker’s file; I had made an effort to lead the Broker’s associates to believe that the file was destroyed, but perhaps that effort had been less successful than I thought. If someone knew I had the Broker’s file, that, in itself, was good enough reason for Turner being sent to kill me.
Anyway, for now there was nothing to do but sit with gun in hand and wait and see if Turner was going to try and kill me. If he blew up my house or set fire to it or something, he could possibly get the job done, even now. Only he wasn’t imaginative or bold enough for anything like that. He’d come plodding in, about half an hour before dawn, probably, and I’d kill him, after getting the name of his new Broker out of him. Or maybe he’d come with his partner. Burden, wasn’t that the name he’d used? In which case I’d kill them both. But Jesus I hated the idea of that happening here, at home. It could be a messy, unpleasant business.
But maybe Turner had been telling the truth…
I waited.
It was a long night. I drank coffee. Lots of it. I read a paperback western and when my eyes got heavy, I allowed myself the television, playing the volume so low by morning I had learned to lip read.
He didn’t come. Not him or his partner, not anybody, and I waited until noon, when I decided to take Wilma up on that free lunch.
The cottage had been warm and the air a little stale, so the outside air, which was cold and a slap in the face, was okay with me. I felt almost refreshed, nearly awake, by the time I’d walked the short distance to Wilma’s Welcome Inn, and you’d never guess I had been up so long.
There was a “Closed” sign in the window, but the door was unlocked, so I went on in. Charley was alone in the tavern area, sitting in a booth, with his hands folded.
“Where’s Wilma?” I said “What’s going on?”
“She’s at Johnson’s,” he said. His voice was strange, strained.
“Johnson’s? What’s that?”
“A funeral home.”
“Who died?”
“She did.”
9
Charley said it was okay if I had a look around. I saw the stairs, where she had fallen, a steep but tightly enclosed flight of stairs, with a rail, and between the rail and the close walls, you’d think a big woman like Wilma would’ve been able to catch herself, to brace her fall at least a little bit. But she hadn’t. She’d fallen the entire flight and by the time she landed, her neck was broken and her life over.
No one had seen it happen. No one had even heard it. There was only one person staying in the hotel section of Wilma’s Welcome Inn, a man registered as Paul Thomas, and he had apparently packed up and left early that morning, before the accident, Charley said. During the slow season, Wilma didn’t open up till midmorning, ten o’clock, and that was only the grocery store section: the restaurant didn’t open until eleven-thirty, for lunch. The stairs were in the grocery section, in the rear, near a check-in desk that was usually unmanned this time of year. It was somewhat unusual for even Wilma herself to be in the place before nine-thirty; she didn’t live on the premises, but across the street in a two-story white clapboard. That’s where Charley lived, too, though this was the first I’d heard him actually admit it, even if it was common knowledge around here. He said he woke up and Wilma was gone; he supposed she’d decided to come over early and do some cleaning. Sometimes she’d go over about an hour early and do that. This time, while in the process of doing her cleaning, she had apparently stumbled and fallen down the steps. Apparently.
At any rate, it had obviously happened before ten-thirty, which was when Charley came across the street to work, and found her.
I climbed the stairs and walked down the narrow hall to the room Paul Thomas, that is, Turner, had so recently vacated. He hadn’t even shut the door, he’d gone out so fast. The drawers he’d emptied to fill his suitcase hung open like tongues sticking out at me. I went over the room carefully, to see if he’d left anything behind in his haste, and he had. Under the bed, was his stack of girlie magazines. I took them with me.
I stood and looked down the stairwell. Looked at the railing, at those narrow walls. There was only one way Wilma could’ve fallen here and died, and that was if she were unconscious before she started her fall.
I rejoined Charley, who was still sitting in the booth, with his hands folded.
“Who came around?” I asked him.
“I don’t know exactly. I called Sam Keenan and he took care of all of it.”
Keenan was a semi-retired doctor in his early sixties, from Chicago, who now lived in a cottage near mine, year-round.
“The ambulance was from Johnson’s Funeral Home, over in Geneva, and I let them have her. There were some people from the Sheriff’s department, too. I guess Sam called them. I didn’t.”
“What did the Sheriff’s people have to say?”
“Not much. They asked some questions, quite a few, actually. Looked over where it happened pretty close. They just left, not five minutes before you came in the door.”
“Do they suspect foul play?”
“Foul play?” He was genuinely surprised, looking up from his folded hands like he was noticing for the first time I was here. “What are you talking about?”
“I just wondered.”
“Why?”
“Oh, seemed a little unlikely she’d fall and not catch herself, is all.”
“She was a big woman… a big, fat woman. She was clumsy sometimes, like a fat woman will be. That’s really all she was, a big fat woman.” He was talking through his teeth. His fists were clenched. His eyes weren’t wet, but they weren’t right, either.
“I’m sorry about this, Charley.”
“I did time.”
“What?”
“I did time. They might suspect foul play, at that. You might be right. She knew I did time. She knew I stole, she knew when she hired me. She didn’t give a shit. She trusted me, put me in charge of all her money. She didn’t care, but they will. Can you picture it? They’ll see she left the place to me. She told me that, she told me she had a will made and that I was to get this place if something happened to her. So now they’ll see that and see about me doing time in Joliet.. liquor store I robbed, about fifteen years ago… and they’ll think maybe I killed her. And that kills me. The thought that anybody could think I’d kill her, harm her in any way, it fucking kills me.”
“I wouldn’t worry about that, Charley.”
“Who’s worried? I’m not worried. I don’t give a shit. What can they do to me? She’s dead.”
“I’m afraid so.”
“I wish somebody had killed her.”
“What?”
“I wish somebody had killed her. I wish it hadn’t been an accident. Then I could put the fucker that did it between my hands and squeeze the life out of him like pus out of a boil, and maybe some of the pus that’s building up in me would get squeezed out, too. But I can’t do that. Instead, she’s just dead and there’s not a goddam
n thing I can do about it.”
“Charley, is that niece of Wilma’s around? I’d like to talk to her.”
“She’s over at the house. Across the street. She was with me when I found the body. Took it pretty hard. Why do you want to talk to her?”
“Just want to express my sympathy.”
10
The house sat on a big open yard, a few pathetic bushes clustered around the front steps, but that was all; no trees were anywhere in sight, except way off in the back, in some other yard. It was a vacant lot with a house on it, plopped down there by an Oz-like wind, maybe, a two-story white clapboard with a front porch with a swing and if you looked close enough you might find Norman Rockwell’s signature in the comer. The girl was sitting on the swing. She was not swinging. Not today, anyway.
The porch was not enclosed so I could walk up the steps and sit across from her on the ledge of the porch without seeming a total intruder.
“I don’t think I know your name,” the girl said. Her voice was young-sounding. It had sounded young last night, too. But even younger now.
“I don’t know yours, either,” I admitted.
“But you-know who I am.”
“Yes. Do you know who I am?”
“A customer at my aunt’s.”
“Yes.”
“More than that, really. She liked you. She always smiled real big when she saw you coming.”
“She smiled at everybody.”
“I guess so. At some people especially. One time after you were in for supper and left, she said something about how quiet you were and that you weren’t as tough as you think you are.”
“I don’t think I’m tough.”
“I wouldn’t know. It’s just something I overheard.”
I’d overheard some things last night myself; I felt a little uncomfortable in my private knowledge, of my having been an unseen spectator last night, during her fun and games with Turner or Thomas or whatever he might call himself. An asshole by any other name…
She was sitting in a shadow and her features were indistinct. Then I realized I was providing the shadow, and moved, and got a better look at her. She was still small and tan, with a lot of dark hair falling down behind her shoulders, pulled away from a pretty if not striking face that looked thirteen and thirty. Her eyes, I remembered, were Wilma’s: her eyes, today, were haunted. She was wearing a sweatshirt that said MARY HARTMAN, MARY HARTMAN on it, and jeans; both were baggy and obscured the mature figure I’d seen through the keyhole.
“Are you here for a reason?”
“I’m sorry about your aunt.”
“I know. Thank you for taking time to say so.”
I said nothing.
“Please. I don’t mean to be rude, but could you go, now? I’d like to sit here alone and just be kind of quiet for a while.”
“I don’t mean to be rude, either, but I need to ask you some questions.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I know about your friend. Mr. Thomas. Room twelve?”
Her face went pale, or tried to, under the tan. She rose and said, “I’m going in the house, now.”
“I’m coming with you.”
“No…”
“Then sit back down on the swing.”
“I won’t…”
“I talked to him last night. Your aunt asked me to. To tell him to lay off you.”
“She did. And what did he say?”
“He said you had the hairiest tight little pussy he ever dove into.”
Her mouth fell open in a kind of horror and she covered it with one cupping hand and sat back down on the swing and began to weep, convulsively.
It wasn’t a nice thing to say, and was of course a lie; but it got her attention.
“He isn’t a nice man, your Mr. Thomas.”
“Neither… neither… neither are you.”
“That’s true. But I’m not here to fuck you.”
“Do you… have to use language like that?”
“I know some of my words aren’t pretty. Neither is the world, sometimes. Neither was the sight of your aunt at the bottom of those steps with her neck broken, I’d imagine.”
“Oh, please… please stop.”
I sat on the swing by her. I reached out to touch her shoulder, then thought better of it. I tried to put the intent of that gesture into the sound of my voice.
“I want you to tell me what happened this morning,” I said. “Something happened between you, your aunt and Mr. Thomas. Tell me what it is.”
She looked at me with big, beautiful wet blue eyes. They grabbed at me somewhere, in the back of my throat or in my stomach or somewhere, where I didn’t know I could be reached anymore, and held me and I had this crazy urge to reach out to her, to hold her, and not for any reason remotely sexual, but then the urge passed, and I was glad it did.
“How did you know?” she said.
“I didn’t,” I said. “Not for sure. Until you confirmed it just now.”
“Please… please don’t play any more of these games with me.”
“No games. I had a good idea something happened. It might have happened just between your aunt and Mr. Thomas, without you around. But when I saw you, here, on the swing, I could tell. I could tell you were there.”
“I wasn’t there when it happened. I didn’t know my aunt had… fallen… until I saw her, when Charley and I, we found her, this morning. But I was there, earlier, when…” And she shuddered.
“Go on.”
“I got up this morning. About seven. And I went over to Paul… to Mr. Thomas’s room, and knocked. And went in. And…”
“And you went in and did some things.”
“Yes.”
“And your aunt came around and barged in on you two?”
“Yes. That’s about it.”
“Then what?”
“She was pretty mad. I thought she’d have a heart attack. I was really worried. Mr. Thomas was very calm, though. He sort of took it in stride, didn’t raise his voice to her or anything. He got out of bed and used this reasoning tone with her and at the same time was getting his pants on… it was, I can’t think of any other way to put it, it was kind of impressive.”
Turner had practice getting caught in bed with women. He had his act down pat; he’d be a cinch on the Amateur Hour, if Ted Mack wasn’t dead.
“My aunt told me to go home, to go back to bed and… she said
… and sleep this time. Real sarcastic. I almost… I hated her when she said that. That’s the part that hurts, isn’t that silly? That for a second I hated her and I think, I think maybe I even consciously thought it, thought, I wish that fat bitch would go off someplace and die, and… she did.”
The girl looked at me blankly, but the blankness quickly dissolved into more tears and I let her cry a while.
“So they were arguing when you left,” I said, when it began to let up.
“Yes.”
“You know that your friend has flown the coop.”
“Yes. I went up to his room. It looked like he left in a hurry.”
“It sure did. Then what do you think really happened?”
“I don’t know. It was an accident, it had to be. They were arguing and she went storming out of the room and lost her step and… just fell. Maybe? Or… God. Or they came to blows and he accidently slapped her or something and she fell or… I don’t know. It’s upsetting. It’s scary as hell, too.”
“Well he’s gone.”
“Maybe I don’t blame him. For going. No. No, that’s not right. I do blame him. I wish…”
“What do you wish?”
“I wish I could hate him.”
“You want some free advice?”
“I think maybe I could use it.”
“Forget about this. It was an accident.”
“Do you really think that?”
“I don’t know. But I just talked to Charley, and he’s very shaken by it He said he wished this wasn’t an accident, so he c
ould have somebody to blame. If he knew about your Mr. Thomas, I’m afraid he’d go looking for him. And kill him.”
“Oh… oh. Oh.”
“And you wouldn’t want that.”
“No.”
“So sit there and swing and think and then forget.”
“And then what?”
“How do you feel about Charley?”
“I’ve been living with them… Wilma and Charley… for over a year. Since my folks split up. Charley’s been good to me. He’s a nice man.”
“Then help him put his life back together. Help him run that place across the street. For a year or two, and then go about the business of putting your own life together.”
“You’re a funny one.”
“Oh?”
“I think, my aunt was right about you. You come on strong, but you’re not so tough, really.”
“Anything you say. You going to be okay?”
“I guess.”
“Okay, then. I’ll see you later.”
“Will you? I’m going to see if I can’t get Charley to open for business again, in a day or so. Come in and maybe we can find out each other’s name.”
“Maybe. I probably won’t be in for at least a week, though.”
“Oh?”
“I’ve got some business to attend to.”
Some business named Turner.
11
I’d forgotten the cold, back when I was on the porch talking to Wilma’s niece, but as I walked home a chill wind blew in off the still half-frozen lake and reminded me. I’d been living in southern Wisconsin for four or five years now, and was used to winter extending itself well into what should’ve been spring; still, this was unusual weather: by the time I reached my A-frame I’d seen perhaps a dozen fat flakes of snow fall heavily to the ground, fat wet flakes that hit like bird droppings. Somebody didn’t know it was April.
It was cold inside the A-frame as well. I built a fire in the conical metal fireplace that took up the far corner and went over to the couch beneath the overhang of the loft and sat.
The stack of girlie magazines (the ones I’d found in Turner’s room) I’d been carrying rolled up and stuck under my arm. I now flopped them onto the coffee table in front of me, and a bare-breasted girl with dark hair and very brief bikini bottoms that didn’t completely conceal more dark hair was grinning at me with considerably more than friendship in mind, below the word Hustler. This was the cover of the magazine on top of half a dozen others, and I started flipping through them, and they were interesting, in a gynecological way, and in one of them I came across an interview with a director of pornographic films.
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