Killing Quarry

by Max Allan Collins

  He had a car. Nothing to stop him.

  “I was supposed to stay here at the chalet,” he said, “but now.…”

  “Understood,” I said. “Will you be back tomorrow?”

  “I don’t honestly know.”

  Everybody was in there doing lines on the two round tables, Poole generously pouring out nose candy and everybody was giggling and laughing. Who knew better than I what things go better with?

  I said, “Dan Clark would arrange a room for you at the main lodge, I’m sure.”

  He put a hand on my shoulder and patted it. “I’ll find somewhere, Mr. Vanhorn. Thank you. These are not conscientious people.”

  No, really?

  But before the guru could leave, Michael McNally—Poole’s Playmate playmate—came back from wherever she’d been and grabbed Goldman by both hands. Astonished—whether by her beauty, which was considerable, or the abruptness of it all—he allowed himself to be pulled out to the dance floor, where “Suddenly” by Billy Ocean was playing.

  She folded herself into his arms. He was trying to just dance with her, to keep it friendly, but she was drunk and she’d been mishandled by her man, literally manhandled, and before Goldman could extricate himself, Poole came bolting in from coke town and yanked her free and slapped her twice, hard, enough for the blows to be heard above “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go.” Wham.

  She screamed and started slapping him back in a flurry, like a child trying to bat away a bully, which is really what she was doing. He grabbed her and started shaking her. Till her teeth rattled, and that’s not a figure of speech. It’s what you could hear.

  Now this is what Goldman did.

  He disappeared.

  He got out of there so fast and so slippery, I didn’t know whether to admire him or run after him to kick his ass.

  Now here’s what I did.

  Nothing.

  I wasn’t here to be a hero. I was here to watch and listen and do my best not to get killed, with Lu along for the ride. She got it. She was next to me, right next to me, her arm looped in mine. We were just pausing at a cage as we strolled through the zoo. Ah! The monkeys are throwing shit again—best keep our distance.

  No, it wasn’t a man who finally rode to the rescue. Not one of the other participants at the retreat, either, including yours truly, as I’ve said. The saviors of the Playmate—her mouth bloody, her big hair even more askew than her stylist had made it—were the high-class whores who came running in, several with powder on their noses, but every one indignant, yelling at Poole and then gathering around the Playmate protectively.

  Pam Grier’s stand-in yelled at Poole, “We are fucking out of here!”

  Poole yelled at her, “Well, get the fuck out then!”

  My turn.

  I stepped up and said, “I’ll call Dan. He’ll arrange something for them.”

  Poole, calming a little, said, “Our limo’s still here.”

  “No it isn’t.”

  He made a waving gesture, as if I were a fly. “Not parked here, but our driver is staying over in the main lodge. You make the call, whoever-the-fuck-you-are.”

  “Since you asked nicely,” I said, and went off and used the kitchen phone to call the desk and get Dan.

  Within fifteen minutes the young women had gathered their things and were the fuck out of there, to get swallowed up by the same black limo that had earlier disgorged them.

  The only female left was mine. Lu. And she was hanging close to me.

  Funny thing. Through all of that, nobody had bothered to turn off the music.

  Whitney Houston was singing, “The Greatest Love of All.”

  THIRTEEN

  The subdued lighting in the main lodge’s indoor pool reflected the hotel policy of adults only between nine and eleven PM. After hours, at a little before midnight, that twilight ambiance remained, but I didn’t have any other adults to put up with, thanks to my “in” with the manager.

  I’d called Dan before coming over. “How’s our financial guru doing?”

  “Not saying much. I gave him a suite and he was polite, but he doesn’t seem happy.”

  “Will he bail?”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. The, uh, ladies were picked up safely by the limo, I trust?”

  “Yup.”

  “Any additional drama?”

  “Nope.”

  His chuckle sounded warm, even over the phone. “I have to admit it’s kind of nice having you there on the scene, Jack. Your eyes and ears come in handy.”

  “Glad to be of service. You okay with Lu and me coming over for a midnight swim? Think I need a little time away from this relaxing retreat.”

  He grunted a laugh. “Don’t blame you. Of course you can come over.”

  “Could you line up a suit for Lu?”

  “Glad to. It’ll be at the front desk. You still have that key to the pool area?”

  I said I did.

  Dan had a two-piece suit waiting for Lu at the front desk (I had trunks in my locker), and we had the place to ourselves. The kidney-shaped pool wasn’t large, rather overwhelmed in fact by the surrounding cement and endless deck chairs. Not ideal for swimming laps, though that was what I was doing. Nice and easy ones in the warm water.

  Funny how, while I did enjoy summer swims in a lake that was after all at my doorstep, I somehow preferred an indoor pool like this, year round. The echo of a big room lending an otherworldly resonance and the shimmer of water reflecting around the chamber, even the chlorine bouquet burning eyes and twitching nostrils, seemed oddly soothing to me. Probably because it took me back to high school days when I was on the swim team and winning ribbons and trophies that weren’t for shooting.

  Things at the chalet, it seemed to me, had really gotten out of hand, and the only way I could think it through was to swim. Lu, in a navy two-piece suit that fit her surprisingly well for a loaner, was not doing laps. She was in the hot tub, immersed to her shoulders, arms spread out along the sides, eyes hooded.

  After half an hour of laps, I swam slowly over near her, then, treading water, said, “Come join me.”

  Her smile was sleepy. “You come join me.”

  “No, that heat will lull me too much. Drowning asleep in a hot tub would only embarrass me.”

  She smirked. “Risk it.”

  So I climbed out, toweled off, and slipped down and in and under the water next to her, sitting on a little submerged ledge with a jet working on my lower back.

  She purred, “This is a nice break.”

  “From lunacy. Yes. It is.”

  A row of high windows was letting in moonlight. Red and white awnings at this end of the pool, a family friendly touch in post-Playboy Club days, were subdued into submission.

  “I thought,” she said, “you wanted to stay away from here.”

  She meant the main lodge.

  I said, “I did.”

  “Because there are people here who know you.”

  “Yes. But I needed this. And nobody’s around, really.”

  “Okay.” She was studying me. “Do you feel like you know any more about what’s going on, now that we’ve crashed the party and stayed a while?”

  I frowned. “Maybe ‘know’ is too strong. But I have the feeling that, with one exception, my seminar buddies don’t know about me.”

  She frowned back. “You mean, that you’re the fly in the ointment? The one behind ten years of contracts getting upended, here and there?”

  “That, but also they seem to accept my story about being Vanhorn’s business partner. These brokers don’t work together. Oh, they know about each other. But they’re independent businessmen with ties to the Outfit, who feed them jobs. Yet they aren’t themselves Outfit.”

  “That makes a difference?”

  “I think so. Your Envoy took over most of the Broker’s players. So he felt the squeeze of my interloping, over the years. He had reason to try to understand what was going on, and eventually figure out what I was up to. These other middle
men in murder? No.”

  “You said an exception. Who?”

  “Poole. Something’s not right about him.”

  Her eyebrows hiked. “I’ll say. Slapping his honey around like that. Getting soused. Handing out coke like Halloween candy.”

  I shrugged. “I don’t exactly run with this crowd. Maybe that was normal behavior, tonight. Par for the course. Maybe these bland sons of bitches are wild-ass party animals, when they attend something like this—work by day, play at night.”

  It was her turn to shrug. “Fairly typical convention-goer-type behavior, I’d say.”

  I nodded again. “But that’s not the only thing bothering me about Poole. He had an attitude toward me the others didn’t. Skepticism, maybe. Suspicion for sure.”

  “So what do we do tomorrow? Just let this play out?”

  I huffed a sigh. “That’s part of what I’ve been mulling. For one thing, I’m not sure this seminar isn’t already over. Seymour M. Goldman seemed fairly freaked out. He may head back to tax-dodger paradise.”

  “Which leaves us where?”

  “Not sure,” I admitted. “As for right now, we can go back and spend the night, then leave first thing in the morning. Announce that tonight’s fun and games were just a little much for us, and go.”

  “Go where?”

  “That is a goddamn good question. Back to my place, to wait to see if anybody comes around to kill me? Back to yours in St. Paul, to wait to see if anybody comes around to kill you? Or do we, together or separately, walk away from those left-handed lives of ours and start over, right-handed? We both have the money for it. Tahiti maybe. You go topless and I’ll learn to paint like Gauguin. Maybe sell black velvet paintings of you to tourists.”

  By the end of that, she was laughing. Not hard, but laughing, though we both knew it was no laughing matter, really.

  “Maybe,” she said, finally, “I should swim for half an hour and think about it.”

  “There’s an aspect of this,” I said, “we haven’t looked at. What about the list?”

  “The list? The Broker’s list?”

  I nodded. “What if this is an unfriendly takeover, in the business sense? Those four are all working the Midwest. So was Vanhorn. Maybe one of them wants to expand. Take over Vanhorn’s market share. In which case he—whoever ‘he’ is—needs access to the Envoy’s roster of friendly neighborhood hired guns.”

  “Wouldn’t he—whoever he was—force that list out of Vanhorn first? Get it out of that wall safe of his? Or get access to it in some way or fashion?”

  “Maybe. Maybe not.” I lifted my shoulders and put them back down. “If not, then my list becomes really valuable, even with ten years of tire tread worn off it. Or maybe…shit, that could be it!”

  “What could?”

  I leaned toward her. “If one of my seminar buddies does know about me—knows what I’ve been up to—he’d obviously want to stop me. Stop me from screwing up contracts and bumping off his assets. But maybe he also wants to lay hands on that list, to see if it still has useful assets.”

  The Asian eyes opened wider than I thought they could. “God. It’s starting to look like your only good option is to go home and wait for somebody to come around to kill you. And kill them instead.”

  “…I’m going to swim some more.”

  “I’ll join you.”

  She started to climb out, her top-heavy, long-legged frame nicely water-pearled. Funny how ten years later she was even lovelier than she’d been—back then, she’d only been stunning.

  I followed her over to the pool and we swam lazy, loping laps for around fifteen minutes. Then, wordlessly, we got out, gathered our handguns wrapped in towels, and went to our appropriate locker rooms.

  We had driven over in the Firebird. We walked to the car in the side parking lot under half a moon and a scattering of clouds and a handful of stars flung carelessly around by a God who didn’t care about our problems or what we did about them. The cold felt bracing, after the hot tub and warm pool. With no wind, it really wasn’t so bad.

  Behind the wheel, with Lu next to me, I glanced over and said, “We could just go. Just ride.”

  “Into the sunset?”

  “Into the dawn, anyway. For now, we don’t have to make our minds up. If we don’t want to play this game of kill or be killed, fuck it. We have enough money to set up shop somewhere. Antiques is fine. We are not old, lover.”

  She smiled. “Lover. You never called me that before.”

  “Well, it’s overdue.”

  I leaned over and kissed her. She kissed me back, as warm as the night was cold. It lasted a while. Then we went to our respective corners, with more rounds left to fight.

  “We’ll sleep on it,” she said.

  “Sleep on it,” I said with a nod.

  I drove over to the chalet, where not a single car was in the lot until I parked mine, close to the entry. No lights on in the place, either, not on any of the three floors.

  “Odd,” I said.

  “Why so?”

  “Well, after the coke and music and slapping and screaming…our busy little party animals all seem to be tucked in their wee little beds.”

  “It’s after one, Jack.”

  I was looking at the chalet like it was a spooky house and our car had broken down, and was it wise to ask for help there? Let’s do the Time Warp again.

  “I know it’s after one,” I said. “But nobody’s reading in bed, or humping with the lights on or anything? Even a TV would provide some glow. Nobody’s rustling around in the kitchen for food? Or a stray line of coke?”

  She touched my arm, squeezed. “It’s fine. You’re getting paranoid. Let’s just go in and go to bed. But that decides it.”

  “What?”

  Her expression was firm. “We’re out of here in the morning. First thing.”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  The heel of my hand hit the steering wheel. “Tonight. We’ll go in, pack up, and follow the example of those working girls. Get the hell out of Dodge.”

  She thought about it, then nodded.

  We went in that first-floor door—all the guests had been given keys to the chalet—and I switched on a light over the entry area. Still mostly in the dark was the big low-ceilinged living room, awash in wood, where all the fun had been had.

  For a change, we used the elevator. On the third floor, we went to our room and turned several lights on, which had a settling effect on us, even if the doe-hoof lamp didn’t. Nonetheless, my mind hadn’t been changed. I began packing and so did Lu, which for her largely consisted of collecting the guns she had salted around.

  And I was paranoid?

  She stepped into one of her jumpsuits and I got back in the black Aloha shirt with white blossoms and my lined black leather jacket and black jeans, the nine millimeter in the deep jacket pocket. I noticed she was carrying her little Smith and Wesson .22 in a palm.

  Soon, like guests trying to duck the bill, we crept out of our room and I almost missed it.

  Almost missed it because I had been wrong—somebody did have a light on. I hadn’t noticed when we’d got off the elevator and quickly made it to our room, probably because the half-open door was off to the side, and the light within probably wasn’t more than a nightstand lamp.

  We were waiting for the elevator when something made me go over and check it out.

  “Jack,” she whispered, “what are you doing?”

  “Not sure,” I said, something prickling at the back of my neck. I was getting my nine mil out.

  With the toe of my right Reebok, I nudged the door open just a little. Just a tad. Not much at all.

  But enough to see him sprawled on the floor.

  “Jack,” she whispered, not having the view I did. “Elevator’s here.”

  I summoned her with a curled finger.

  She came over, frowning, then as I shouldered the door gently open, her eyebrows went up and her jaw went down. I slipped inside and
she followed, shutting the door quietly behind her with an elbow. For a good ten seconds, which is longer than it sounds, we just stared.

  Pudgy Alex Kraft, in yellow pajamas and brown slippers, was on his back and he was staring at the open-beamed ceiling with three eyes. Well, really two eyes and a red hole in his forehead. His hands were over his head, as if he were doing a prone jumping jack, though I doubted he’d ever done one standing up. His weak-chinned, blond fuzz-topped head lay in a little lake of blood, still glistening red.

  This had happened not long ago. Probably not while we were in the building, although that was not impossible. But not long ago.

  I checked the bathroom and the closet, and even under the bed, then glanced at Lu and shook my head.

  Nobody.

  We used our sleeves to wipe off anything we’d touched, then reconvened in the area by the elevator, which had gotten impatient waiting for us and gone away.

  “What now?” she asked, softly but not quite a whisper.

  “We could just fucking go,” I said, also sotto voce, “and maybe get shot in the back stepping off the elevator or coming down the stairs.”

  “Or?”

  My look told her this was my preferred option. “Check out the rest of this building.”

  We did that.

  In the room next to ours, the door was also cracked open but no lights were on. Enough moonlight was coming in the windows, though, to illuminate George Callen in his bed, sleeping on his side, or anyway he had been when somebody put a bullet in his left temple, turning his pillow an irregular scarlet. He appeared to be in his underwear, but I wasn’t about to pull the covers back to confirm that.

  She was frowning. “Could all this have just happened? Wouldn’t we have heard it?”

  My nod was slow. “Probably. Even with a silenced gun, the noise in a place this quiet would’ve got our attention.”

  “Then you think if this had happened before we left, we’d have heard the shots.”

  “I think if this had happened before we left,” I said, “we’d have been shot.”

  She shuddered, frowned, shook her head as if to clear cobwebs. “So the shooter is gone.”

  “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”