“See you, Quarry.”
He gave me a thumbs-up sign and I returned it and left.
The sky was almost light, if you can call a murky gray sky light, and between that and the still-burning street lamps, I didn’t exactly have the cover of night to protect me. Not that it mattered: the street was empty, like a deserted movie backlot, and down half a block at the corner the traffic lights were going, changing colors as if to entertain themselves. So I wasn’t upset when there was no back entrance to Albert Leroy’s building. I had to use a street entrance, an unlocked door stuck between the taco joint and the laundry, but had no bad feelings about it.
The stairs creaked as I ascended, and I guess I would’ve bitched too if I was a hundred years old and somebody walked on me. The walls were flaking brown paint and the air was so musty I wanted to cough. When I got to the tiny landing I found two doors, one of them obviously leading up to the vacant apartment on the upper floor, the other bearing a slot with a yellowed card in it reading, “Albert Leroy.”
I worked the key in the lock.
The door opened on the kitchen. The ceiling was high, the walls a yellowing white, the stained wooden cabinets a darkening yellow. The kitchen appliances were ancient—a stoop-shouldered Westinghouse refrigerator and a four-burner gas range, the kind you light—and a kitchen table with a speckled Formica top was showing age, its plastic-covered chairs having seen better days, and the linoleum on the floor was cracked here and there and was rolling up at the edges. But the kitchen was clean, hospital clean. It even smelled like a hospital, as though he used it for surgical work instead of cooking.
A doorless archway led into the living room. It was small, a live-in elevator, with wallpaper of a faded purple-flowered design, like the pattern on an old woman’s dress, fitting in well with the furniture, which was drab and lifeless, the kind of stuff the elderly stick doilies on to hide the shabbiness. The only modern piece of furniture was a reclining chair back across from the portable TV and it was broken into a constant back-tilt, which didn’t help the limited space of the room. The guy was a hoarder, obviously, as the room was somehow both cluttered and orderly, stacks of books everywhere, newspapers saved, piles of backdated TV Guides on the television, a table with a stamp collection in progress, but everything seemed in its special, assigned position.
To the right was the bedroom.
The door was open and I could see him, sleeping there on the bed. Since it had been a hot night, he was sleeping only in his pajama bottoms, and on top of the covers. His arms were stretched out as if reaching and his mouth was open and he looked like a fountain in a park. He was breathing hard but he was not snoring, his face a putty mask, formless, puffy.
I stood in the doorway and looked at him for a moment. I didn’t go in there with him because the bedroom was so small it made the living room seem gigantic. I was plenty close here in the doorway. Close enough to see that his chest was sunken and he had just the start of a potbelly and neither chest nor belly had a hair on it; he was hairless smooth like a baby and I suddenly wondered how old he was. I had thought of him as an old man, but he was smooth, unwrinkled, unused. The only solid indications of age were streaks of white in his sandy crewcut and deep creases in the checks of that putty face. On his left arm was a long and unsightly brown birthmark that was hairy and ran from his outer bicep down cross his elbow and twisting round almost to his wrist and I now knew the reason for cardigan sweaters and long-sleeve shirts in summer.
I thought I saw his eyes flicker open for a moment just after the gun made its snicking sound and the bullet went crushing through his sternum. But I wasn’t sure. His body did a little dance, a small, quick jerk and that was all. His mouth stayed open, but slackly so, and he was limp, a stringless puppet.
It took two minutes to mess up the apartment. As I was doing it I knew it was illogical that anyone would try to rob this guy, but that was the way we’d been asked to handle it. I kicked his books around, knocked some chairs over, ripped up a few of the newspapers, tipped over the table with the stamps and magnifying glass and stamp book on it, dumped everything out of his hoarder’s closet, which was more books, newspapers, magazines, letters, stamps, and other assorted junk, and spread it around. A dresser of clothes in the living room—no space for it in the bedroom—I emptied and then tipped over. I gutted the sofa with my pocketknife and when I was through I went into the bedroom, shoved him to one side and then my nostrils filled with the smell of blood and shit: his bowels had voided with his body’s death. I made one quick obligatory rip down the center of the mattress and wiped the knife blade clean on a sheet and got the hell out of there. I shut the bedroom door behind me to keep the stink from crawling into the living room and I took a long breath of fresh air, sucking it into my lungs as it rolled in the open window. I took my raincoat from where I’d slung it over a chair, then set the chair down on its side to help the ransack effect. I folded the coat over my arm and glanced out the window. Light out there now, I noticed. It was dawn.
Then I noticed something else.
Across the way the shade was drawn.
16
* * *
* * *
BOYD’S DOOR WAS LOCKED.
I got out a key and used it. I turned the knob and eased the door forward, just enough to see if it was night-latched. It wasn’t. Good. I wouldn’t have to break it open. I could go in quiet. Slow. Careful. I did.
I stood there in the kitchen, closing the door soundlessly behind me, getting my eyes accustomed to the blackness of the apartment. I never realized how very dark this apartment could be, this long boxcar of an apartment with its only source of natural light being windows on either end. Every electric light in the place was switched off and the shade was drawn in the kitchen.
As was the shade in the living room, of course.
A full minute passed and night vision gradually came to me and I got my bearings. The door from the kitchen to the bedroom was open and so was the door from bedroom to living room, and I could see Boyd down there by the shaded window, but just barely, just his outline, just a quiet mass of something sitting way down there at the end of the boxcar.
I listened.
I listened and tried to hear a sound, any sound, any indication that someone else was in this damn apartment besides me, Boyd and silence.
And heard nothing.
I didn’t know what had gone wrong, but I knew it wasn’t likely to be law. If cops had somehow got wind of us and had come barging in (which was goddamn unlikely in Port City) Boyd would have pulled the shade halfway down, rather than down full, to signal me to get the hell away. If it was cops he wouldn’t signal help. Or he shouldn’t, anyway. Most likely it was something else. I didn’t know what. But it was something . . . someone . . . else.
I didn’t waste time thinking about who. A joker had turned up in the game and nobody mentioned anything about wild cards but I had to play the hand anyway. So. I went carefully forward, holding my gun arm tight against my ribcage, my wrist bent into a ninety-degree angle so that the nine-millimeter was pointing straight out, ready to blast anything, any damn thing that moved.
Nothing moved.
At least, nothing moved here in the kitchen. And there was no good place to hide in here, really, other than in the closet that housed the furnace, and that afforded only a narrow cubbyhole barely large enough for a child to squeeze into. I got close enough to see that the door to the furnace closet was open and the cubbyhole empty and I moved on.
The living room, I remembered, had no good hiding places, either. No furniture in corners that could shelter a hiding man, except possibly if someone should hide down behind the far end of the davenport that was against the wall on the right, near that window where Boyd was silently sitting; but the davenport sat so low to the ground that a man would have to curl in a ball to hide, which doesn’t make for the best of ambush techniques. And too, if Boyd was alive, quietly waiting to make a stand, the intruder wouldn’t be anywhere ne
ar him; likewise if Boyd was dead, the intruder wouldn’t want to be close at hand—even a pro (if this was a pro) doesn’t like being next door to a corpse, not for long anyway. The living room I ruled tentatively out, though admittedly that was where the front entrance was, the door being over on the left, near the back corner, and someone could be behind that door, waiting out on the landing. But I doubted that. I figured once the intruder got that far, got out the door and close to freedom, he’d most likely take off. Unless his express purpose was to kill Boyd and me, and since I didn’t know the intruder’s motives, yet, I had to count that as a possibility.
But not the best one.
The best possibility was the bedroom, which had two excellent vantage points for surprise attack: a large closet with sliding double doors and room enough for five men to hide; and a bathroom in the left corner on the left side, a small bathroom but one with a shower-curtained tub.
The odds were good, very good, that I’d find my intruder either in the bedroom or in the bathroom that led off from it.
I unfolded my raincoat, took it by the collar and shook it gently and held it in front of me and it was like a man was looking back at me. I walked slowly over to the open door to the bedroom and eased my hand around the corner to flick on the light switch, flooding the room with light, and tossed in the coat.
No reaction.
Well.
I moved into the room in a low crouch, fanning the gun around, looking, looking, looking.
Empty.
The fucking room was empty.
The double doors on the closet had been slid down to one end and a lot of hangers were staring me in the face. I walked over slow, staying low, and slid the doors back the other way, fast, and saw more hangers.
Okay.
The bathroom, then.
If the bathroom was empty, then whoever had caused Boyd’s trouble, whatever it was, had gotten away before I got there. Or was waiting in the living room. I couldn’t forget that; if the bathroom was empty I still wasn’t home free. I stood in the doorway of the can and tried to flick on the light but the switch clicked forth and back impotently, the bulb evidently burned out. I turned to the tub with its shower curtain and reached out and began tentatively to draw back the curtain and something lashed out, something solid, something much more solid than a fist, doubled me over, something metal had creased my belly and folded me in half like a slice of bread and I looked through burning eyes as a dark mass rose from the bottom of the tub, looked with red eyes into the black T-shirt of the man who’d hit me, who was now on his feet in the tub and I saw and heard a swishing object as it came down. I jerked to the left, collided with a wall and saw from the corner of my eye the object, a wrench, go sinking into my shoulder, making a crunching sound as it went, and I was down on my knees, like I was praying, my spine jammed hard against the stool behind me, and an arm swinging the wrench came down after me. With my free hand I batted upward and knocked the arm away before it did me any more damage and brought up my automatic and fired and the silenced gun went chunk; and chunk again, sounding loud in the confines of the small room, and I heard a yelp. I didn’t see him, not really, didn’t know for sure if the gun had hit home, but the wrench-swinger was scared, so shitass helpless scared, he started in waving his arms and got us tangled in the shower curtain somehow, and fabric and metal rods were down on us, and I fired again, hoping my gun wasn’t aimed at some part of me, and the man with the wrench, still scared, more scared, didn’t finish me like he could have, like he should have, but scrambled out of there, tucked tail between legs and left in a blur of black.
I thought he flicked off the bedroom light switch as he went out, because everything went dark, but when I woke up I realized it was minutes later, how many I didn’t know, not many, that was for sure, but by the time I was on my feet and staggering after the man with the wrench, he was gone. Not long gone maybe, but gone long enough. In the kitchen the door was wide open and when I got to the fire escape porch there was no sight of anybody.
I shut the kitchen door, locked it. I stumbled over to the cupboard, got out a bottle of aspirin and shook out six and got a glass of water from the tap and gulped down pills and water and stood there leaning on the counter, panting. Then I went to the kitchen table and sat down for a moment and stroked my crushed left shoulder with my right hand and felt tears run down my face and said, “Jesus Christ,” a few times, and then I ran fingers across my clavicle and it was fucked up, too, fucked over bad.
When my mind stopped being red with pain, it got red with anger and I slammed my fist down on the table and barely felt the pain as it shot back through my shoulder. By the time I was on my feet again, maybe a second later, I’d forgotten about the pain.
Back in the bedroom I found Boyd’s suitcase in a corner, open, flung there after it had been dumped out.
I went through the pile of clothes and the envelope was gone. I glanced in a wastecan and found it: the envelope had been emptied and then crumpled into a tight ball. I looked around the room for a while, but only for a very short while, as a search was useless. It was something I had to face: the money was gone.
What I found in the living room was no surprise.
Boyd was in his usual position at the window: sitting on the floor; leaning against the wall; head tilted back; but dead. The upper side of his head was caved in and looked as though it had been gently done, as though his was the head of a china doll that had been delicately shattered with a single tap of a child’s hammer. But maybe that was because it was dark in there. Maybe if I had had to look at him closer, in the light, I would have seen it the way it was: a man’s skull cracked bloody open from two or more savage blows of a hard-swung wrench. His eyes were round open and glowing white in the blackness and I could almost hear his voice speaking in those dead eyes, Quarry . . . Quarry, what the fuck? The reality of death must’ve been a shock to Boyd, the cruelty, the absurdity, the finality, the million things that must flash through your mind as you die violently. A man can get detached on the winning side of a gun and he can forget what it is he’s doing and Boyd, evidently, died in a traumatic realization of what he was, what he did and what was being done to him. But at least he’d shown one last trait of professionalism, in his final moment: his right hand was still clutching the shade he’d pulled down to warn me.
I had to give him that much.
17
* * *
* * *
UNDER THE WOODEN steps in back, grouped close against the wall, were garbage cans. Six of them. I arranged them into a slight semicircle and that was where I left Boyd.
My shoulder was a hunk of agony and made it no pleasure carrying my ex-associate down those three flights of steps. But it had to be done. I didn’t know if the Port City cops would buy this as what was perhaps a rare event around these parts—a mugging—but that’s what I was hoping. I had stripped Boyd of all valuables, leaving his pockets pulled inside out, not only to fabricate a robbery, but to prevent discovery of Boyd’s identity. With luck, Boyd would end up just another cipher in a potter’s field, a poor slob who was passing through Port City and got mugged and killed for his trouble.
I hadn’t had the time to analyze what had happened yet and was acting, really, out of sheer instinct: I was a knee struck by a mallet at the precise point and was jerking up like I was supposed to. Reflex had me getting Boyd out of there and away from that apartment, which had been provided by our nameless employer, who by unwritten law must be protected at all costs. Or almost all: it would have been better to lug Boyd off someplace farther away, like drive him out along the Mississippi twenty miles and dump him off a bluff, but I wouldn’t take that big a chance. Reflex action or not, confusion or no, I thought of my ass first. Survival.
So I had cleaned both Boyd and apartment of his effects and placed everything I collected in the trunk of his green Mustang. I had wrapped Boyd in a sheet, which I removed once I deposited him behind the wall of cans, and had slung him over my good sh
oulder and headed down the fire escape, hoping for the best.
I was lucky about the configuration of the alley, which in fact wasn’t really an alley at all, as it dead-ended halfway in, surrounded by three-story buildings, making for something of a modest courtyard back there. The windows in the buildings were few and as yet dark—it was still very early morning—and the building across the way was a garage and windowless. The dreary buildings and the overcast sky gave me a perhaps false sense of security, and once I had pulled Boyd’s Mustang up into the mouth of the street entry, blocking it off and partially obstructing vision from out there, I felt relatively safe carrying him down. Or as safe as you can feel in the company of somebody murdered.
I guided the Mustang out of the little courtyard and let loose a monumental sigh as I got out onto the still empty street. As I drove around to the front the street lights winked out, officially signaling morning’s arrival, and I pulled the Mustang into a vacant spot behind my gray rental Ford and turned the car off and sat there for a while. Across the street all was silent. No one had stumbled onto Albert Leroy as yet. Idle curiosity made me wonder who would be found first—Boyd or Albert.
That particular irrelevant thought was a sign of just how dazed I was. I got out of the car and walked down to the corner and stood there for maybe a minute, alone on the sidewalk, gathering my thoughts. My mind had been blown, almost literally, and I didn’t know how long it would take to collect the pieces and reassemble them.
Across the street, kitty-corner from where I stood, was a telephone booth, standing in front of a big gothic-looking church like a reminder of what century it was. The moment I saw it I was on my way over, digging a dime out of my pocket, searching for more change to make the necessary long-distance call.
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