The Wrong Quarry (Hard Case Crime)

by Collins, Max Allan

  His eyes were hard now, though his chin was quivering. If he didn’t know what I was talking about, he’d have dismissed that last bit as more melodrama. He didn’t. He sure didn’t.

  “This is sounding like a shakedown, after all,” he said, but weakly.

  “No. I’ll leave if you aren’t interested in my services.”

  “What...what are your services?”

  “For a fee, I’ll remove those two men.”

  “Remove?”

  “Kill them.”

  He smiled, but it was an awful sideways thing. “You say that like...you’re saying you’ll wash my car.”

  “You do have a nice car. I always wanted a Corvette. Indicates you can afford my services, that’s for sure.”

  His eyes were racing with thought. “You’ll...kill them...both? The one who is...watching me, and the other who will...what, show up some time soon, and...?”

  “Kill you. Yes. It wouldn’t be hard. I know you’ve sequestered yourself in this concrete bomb shelter, but that just makes it easier. This place is very easy to break into. Do you have a gun?”

  “Of course I don’t have a gun!”

  I sipped my Diet Coke, then put the can back on its coaster next to the nine mil. “Yet you aren’t shocked when I say someone wants you dead.”

  “No...no, I’m not.”

  “Tell me about it, Roger. All right if I call you Roger?”

  “Yes.” He licked his lower lip. Dark eyes were racing under the darker slashes of eyebrow. “It’s...it’s the missing Stockwell girl.”

  “What missing Stockwell girl?”

  Another frown, irritated now. “The missing Stockwell girl. Candace Stockwell, daughter of Lawrence Stockwell, granddaughter of Clarence Stockwell.”

  “Ah...I take it this is the family that the town is named for.”

  He nodded. “It goes back to when Stockwell was the Buggy Whip Capital of America.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  His frown deepened. “I’m not in a joshing frame of mind, Mr. Quarry.”

  “Just Quarry is fine. Buggy whips?”

  Weary sigh. “There was a big demand at one time, and a factory here, and the Stockwells made their money at it, before it went bust after Henry Ford came along. All that early money put them in banking, and from banking came insurance, and if you’ve driven around downtown, you know that every other business is a Stockwell this or that.”

  “Not just named after the town?”

  “No. The Stockwell family doesn’t allow that name to be attached anywhere but to their enterprises. Or at least that’s what I understand. I’ve only lived here two years.” He was breathing heavily.

  “Take your time, Roger. Take it easy.”

  “Candy...Candace...was a very beautiful girl, lovely face, lovely figure. And very talented. She was easily the most talented dancer I’ve ever taught here, or possibly anywhere else. Even better than Sally, although Sally is better at ballet. Jazz dance was Candy’s forte.”

  “Nice girl, Candy?”

  He rolled his eyes. “Actually...if I may be forgiven? Candy Stockwell was a little slut. No. A gigantic slut. Spoiled, selfish, and, well...she was what we called, back when I was in school, loose. Oh, she had a steady boyfriend, captain of the football team...but the rest of the team had her, too. Everybody wanted some, but this Candy, I assure you, she was definitely not sweet.”

  “Okay. She put out. But why all the past tense? Is the girl dead?”

  He shrugged, threw up his hands. “Who knows? She’s gone. But plenty of people around here assume she’s dead. More than that, they assume she was murdered.”

  “Why isn’t the assumption that she’s a runaway?”

  “Why would she do that? Since her mother died, she had her daddy wrapped around her little finger. She drove a Datsun 280ZX. Kept whatever hours she chose. Hired her friends to do her homework, and no teacher in town would dare call her on it, or any cheating she might do. No. Her life was the best gig a teenage girl ever had.”

  “Somebody thinks you killed her.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  He sighed. Shook his head. Shrugged helplessly. “Well, she framed me, Quarry. Unwittingly, I believe. But she framed me.”

  “Explain.”

  “She used to come on to me. She loved to tease me, and tell me that I wasn’t gay, I was probably bi, and if I just found the right girl, I’d know that. She was that girl, she said. She just knew she could turn me. She wanted a chance to try, anyway.”

  “And you didn’t give her one.”

  He nodded glumly. “But then she wrote about me in her diary, in excruciating, pornographic detail, describing some imaginary affair, with all kinds of...” He sighed, shook his head. “...wild tales of anal sex and whips and chains and God knows what.”

  “And when she disappeared, that diary was found...and believed.”

  “By some.” He sat forward again. “I have a good deal of support in this community, Mr. Quarry... Quarry... despite the Stockwells. For the last two years, I’ve helped prepare local girls entering various pageants, and the first group I coached, one girl was first runner-up in Miss Missouri, and another was Miss Teen Missouri and went on to be second runner-up in national.”

  “Impressive,” I said, not giving a shit.

  He scowled, not at me, at a memory. “But the Stockwells, particularly Old Man Stockwell...Clarence, the grandfather, the senile old prick...he accused me. Slandered me right in the pages of the Stockwell Sentinel.”

  “You couldn’t sue or anything?”

  “Not in this town—and that was just the beginning of it! The old man pressured the police to bring me in for questioning. It never went anywhere, of course. I had an alibi, and I even allowed the police, without a warrant, to go through my quarters here. They found nothing. I was completely cleared.”

  I huffed a laugh. “But that wasn’t good enough for the Stockwell family.”

  “No. They brought in private detectives, who spent weeks invading my privacy, but also came up empty. That didn’t satisfy the Stockwells, either.” He shook his head, rubbed his mustache nervously. “I’ve thought about simply packing up and moving on, but that might seem an...an admission of guilt, and I didn’t do anything, Quarry, not a goddamn thing.”

  “You think the grandfather took out a contract?”

  He shook his head in a gesture of uncertainty. “He may seem the most likely, but it could be Candy’s father...her mother is deceased, did I mention that?...or that aunt of hers, who is wild as Candy was. Wilder. I’ve had anonymous death threats on the phone, veiled threats from her married choir director, and not so-veiled ones from that boyfriend, an oaf named Rodney Pettibone. Who in the twentieth century is named Pettibone, for God’s sake? And why would a parent add insult to injury with ‘Rodney’? But...a contract killing, is that what we’re talking about?”

  “Yes.”

  He squinted at the thought of it. “How would ordinary people be able to take out a... contract on someone’s life?”

  “Doesn’t sound like the Stockwells are all that ordinary. A rich family like that may have all kinds of shady associations in their past. Anyway, people in bars offer other people in bars fifty bucks to kill a spouse they hate, or a boss. Happens all the time.”

  “But this isn’t fifty dollars in a bar.”

  “No. You’re right about that. This is high-priced talent.”

  He cocked his head. “How much would someone have paid to...?”

  “At least as much as I intend to ask of you.”

  “Which is...how much?”

  “Ten thousand dollars. Five now, or anyway as soon as possible. Five more when I’ve finished the job.”

  He thought about it.

  “Sell your Corvette if you have to,” I said.

  “I still owe on it.” But then: “I can manage that much. But it strikes me...don’t I still have a problem?” Again, the dark eyes probed me, not at all h
ooded now. “Someone out there will still want to kill me, even after you’ve...removed these...God, am I really saying this? Hitmen.”

  I nodded. “That’s another ten grand.”

  “What is?”

  “Me finding out who wants you dead.”

  “And...removing them, too?”

  “And removing them, too.”

  He sat and thought about it some more.

  Then he sighed and said, “Will you take a check?”

  THREE

  Well, of course I told my new client that this was a cash only business, and he said he could have the money by tomorrow. I told him to get it together and I’d stop by sometime in the next few days to get it. I couldn’t be any more specific than that because my schedule was determined by Mateski’s. Didn’t mention the name Mateski to Vale, obviously. All he needed to know was that people were coming to kill him, and I was going to stop it. For cash.

  And over the weekend, Mateski’s surveillance technique of staking Vale out for three or four hours at a time, at alternating intervals, continued. Mostly days, now. It was obvious nothing much happened late at night, with Vale never venturing from the black bunker. The dance instructor was clearly not going anywhere. Mateski was probably smiling by now, figuring he and his partner—whoever that partner might be—had a sitting duck of a target.

  Then on Sunday Mateski threw me a real curve. Though yesterday had been a day shift, my surveillance subject did not emerge from his cabin at the Rest Haven Court till late morning, at which time he drove to the nearby Denny’s for breakfast. Despite his shorter-haired, clean-shaven appearance, he suddenly looked more himself—back in the big-frame orange-tinted glasses, wearing his quilted ski jacket over blue-plaid flannel shirt with new jeans and Hush Puppy boots.

  Was he trying for a third demeanor as he headed into the last lap of his surveillance duties?

  Something the fuck was definitely up, and I was already tightening my loose tail, going ahead and having a burger at the counter where I could keep an eye on him sitting solo in a corner booth. He was in no hurry to get anywhere, taking up space and downing refills of coffee while he sat reading a doorstop of a paperback—North and South by John Jakes. I noticed the title heading to the john, breezing by him.

  He was still reading when I headed out to the parking lot and waited in the Pinto to see what he did next. Maybe he was taking a day off. That wasn’t typical for somebody working the passive role in our business, but maybe he needed a break—we had put in nine days straight, the two of us. Christ, I was starting to feel like we were in this together.

  When he finally emerged and got into the Bonneville, I picked up the tail and suddenly was in a rerun of how this trip began—he stopped at an antiques shop downtown. There were five other such shops taking up most of one side of the street on one of the shopping district’s four blocks.

  I didn’t follow him inside. Across the way was a cluster of gift shops that were obviously just hobbling along during the off-season. Among them was a too-cute “old-fashioned” soda fountain, where I went in and took a table in the window and sipped a chocolate malt through a straw, like Archie waiting for Veronica. The pleasantly plump blonde waitress who after while brought my check had a name tag that said BETTY. I shit you not.

  “That’s sure a whole bunch of antiques shops,” I said to her stupidly.

  “Antiques Row,” she said brightly. Nice kid. Pretty. Maybe oughta work someplace with less calories, though.

  “Must be a real draw in the summer,” I said.

  “Not just then. It’s a year-round destination for antiquers from all over.”

  Distracted for a moment by how awful a word “antiquers” was, I said, “Really? Just for that handful of shops?”

  She leaned in and pointed. She smelled good. Like hot fudge. “Down on the corner there? It’s one of the biggest antique malls in the Midwest. Why, a real dyed-in-the-wool antiquer could spend hours in there.”

  Which is just what Mateski did. Long enough for me to start and finish another Louis L’Amour—over two hours in just that corner building, and another two in the other shops, popping out occasionally with a God-awful painting in tow or some other primitive gee-gaw, including a small stool that looked like a slow kid pounded it out right before flunking shop class.

  Lovingly, he packed these horrific gems away in his trunk and in his back seat and even in the rider’s seat.

  He was indeed taking a day off, but not to relax—rather, he was doing some buying for his other business. After all, he’d told his employees back in Woodstock that he was off on a picking trip. Couldn’t go home empty-handed, could he?

  And going home was exactly what he was prepping to do.

  I followed him back to the Rest Haven, then watched from the window of my Holiday Inn room as he fussed with his finds in the trunk and back seat, utilizing bubble wrap he’d come up with somehow. But he did not take any of these treasures inside his room, content to leave them in the car, including the easily seen stuff in the back seat.

  That made it unlikely he intended to stay the night. He would be on the road soon. His job here was over.

  Mine was just beginning.

  * * *

  Just after dusk, I drove to the dance studio and swung into the parking lot. Only the red Corvette was parked there. I left the Pinto next to it, like its ugly cousin, all but ran up the back cement steps, then circled around the building to knock at the front entrance. I hadn’t wanted to park out front and ascend all those steps where someone would be more likely to notice.

  My first knocks didn’t rouse him, so I pounded harder on the steel framing of the glass doors, which were painted out black. I was about to try again when one cracked open and the tanned mustached mug of Roger Vale peeked out at me.

  “Quarry,” he said, goggling, surprised to see me but also wondering if he should be alarmed.

  I brushed by him through the barely opened door and when he had shut and locked it behind me, I said, “What the fuck’s the idea, opening the door like that?”

  He was in baggy black sweats and sneakers, not the former lithe vision in tights and Capezios. “Well, didn’t you want in?”

  I pointed to the black-painted glass. “You can’t see out that door. I could be anybody.”

  “I’m expecting a pizza!”

  “I’m expecting somebody to kill your ass. Look, the guy watching you is wrapping things up. That means the hit will go down in no more than three days, very probably much less.”

  His eyes widened and his mouth dropped. “Fuck me.”

  “You, fuck you, if you aren’t more cautious. Get my money.”

  He swallowed. Gestured toward the open door to the room where we’d sat and spoken—the brown-leather couch and the framed Broadway posters visible. “You want to come in and go over things?”

  “No. Get my money.”

  He wasn’t sure whether to be offended or frightened. Then he shrugged and disappeared in there, was gone maybe half a minute, returning to hand me a thick envelope.

  “Hundred, fifties and twenties,” he said. “Like you said.”

  I stuffed the envelope in the jacket pocket that didn’t have a nine millimeter in it. “You need to be more careful. I am on top of this, but you need to be, too.”

  He nodded and nodded some more.

  There was a knock at the door, hard and rattling, and we both jumped like a couple of girls trying out for his class.

  “Fuck,” we said softly.

  Shortly I was edged along the inside wall next to the doors and, as per my whispered instructions, Vale stood plastered to the wall on the other side (“You know, Roger, it’s possible to shoot through glass, even if it is painted black”).

  “Yes,” Vale nearly shouted. “What is it?”

  “Pizza Hut,” a young bored male voice said.

  I gave Vale the okay and he reached over and flipped the lock. The kid was allowed in, delivered the pie, got paid, tipped, and went on hi
s way, unaware that a nine mil was in my fist behind my back all the while.

  Vale stood there in his sweats with a big flat brown greasy box in his hands. How did he eat pizza like that and stay so fucking slim? Life was not fair.

  He said, “Sure you don’t want to stay? There’s plenty.”

  “I’ve stayed too long. Let me out the back.”

  He did, and I was right—I shouldn’t have risked the trip to the dance studio at all. I had wanted to warn Vale and, frankly, get my down payment. But even before I pulled into the Holiday Inn parking lot, I could see the Bonneville was no longer parked in front of Cabin 12.

  Fuck me, as my client had said.

  Was Mateski already on the way home? Had I somehow missed the requisite meeting between him and his partner? In these post-Broker days, that practice of passive and active conferring face-to-face could have evolved into something else—with Mateski filling his partner in via Ma Bell maybe, and leaving a notebook at some designated drop.

  Shit.

  I didn’t know who Mateski’s partner was. There was a longshot possibility that the active hitter would be somebody I knew, someone I’d worked with. But that was a short list, particularly compared to the Broker’s. I had looked at every photograph in the file, more than once, but it wasn’t like I’d memorized all those faces.

  This left me shit out of luck—Vale, too. Worse for him, I’ll grant you. Me, I could leave Stockwell right now, taking along the dance instructor’s five thousand bucks, to make up for all the surveillance I’d sat. And what would be the harm? A dead guy doesn’t miss money.

  Still, I preferred to earn my fees, and anyway another fifteen grand was at stake. I knew where Mateski was heading—Woodstock, Illinois. He’d probably begin that journey, at least, by heading north on Highway 218, going back the way we came.

  With his car full to the brim with that primitive junk, he wasn’t heading in some other direction for more buying. No. Woodstock Or Bust. Right now he would only have maybe forty minutes on me.

  But there was another possibility, glimmering like heat over asphalt. Maybe Mateski was still in town. Maybe he hadn’t met with his partner yet, and that meet was scheduled for...right now. This evening.