Quarry's Vote

by Max Allan Collins

  “I was hoping I could take you out for a bite of supper.”

  “That’d be nice. I don’t have any plans.”

  “Maybe we could take your girls along.”

  She smiled; teeth didn’t come much whiter, smiles didn’t come any better. “Wish you could meet them. And you will one of these days. But my mom drove the girls into Chicago for the day for a big shopping spree. They won’t be back till nine or ten tonight.”

  “How much longer are you here?”

  She checked her watch. “It is five, isn’t it? I’m off as of now. Let me go back in my office and change clothes. I’m going to be pretty casual . . .”

  I was still in the suit and brown leather overcoat. “Well, I could always change into my ninja threads,” I said.

  She laughed and said I looked just fine.

  I followed her into the showroom and the smell of new cars. “You got any place special you’d like to eat?” I asked her.

  “Any place but the Embers,” she said, and flashed her smile and disappeared into a small office. The other sales people had either gone or were going. But sitting in his office, staring out at me, was chunky little Lonny Best in his shirtsleeves and red-­white-and-blue tie. He had a filtered cigarette going. He was frowning at me.

  He stood and crooked his finger, like I was a kid he was summoning.

  What the hell.

  I went into his office and closed the door behind me.

  “What the fuck’s the idea,” he said.

  “Could you be a little more specific?”

  He came out from behind the desk, apple cheeks blazing, eyes hard and small and glittering. He thrust a hard forefinger into my chest.

  “You lied to me,” he said. “What was that shit about auto parts?”

  “Come again?”

  “You’re in the security game. Working for Freed. I know all about it.”

  I had hoped Angela would be more discreet.

  “Maybe I was checking up on you,” I said.

  He thumped my chest again. “Well I don’t fuckin’ appreciate it! And stay away from Angela. I don’t want you havin’ anything to do with her.”

  “Don’t touch me again.”

  He shoved me hard. “I’ll touch you. I’ll fuckin’ kill you.”

  I opened my coat and reached under my arm and took out the nine-millimeter.

  His eyes got very large, considering how small they were, and he backed up. “Jesus—what’s the idea . . .”

  I slapped him alongside his head with the barrel and he went down like a kid’s tower of blocks.

  I sat on top of him and put the gun’s nose against his. His ear was bloody from where the gun slapped him. His eyes looked back and up at me, frantic and afraid. “Jesus, Jesus . . . I didn’t mean . . .”

  “Don’t threaten to kill people,” I said. “It isn’t nice, unless you mean it. It isn’t nice if you mean it, either, but in that case, what’s the difference?”

  He was sweating. “What . . . what do you want?”

  “Like you said, I’m in the security game. And I’m working for Preston Freed.”

  “What . . . what’s that to me?”

  “That Buick that was stolen off your lot.”

  His eyes tensed. That told me something.

  “The men who took it,” I said, “did not have Preston Freed’s best interests at heart. Only I don’t think they ‘took’ it. I think you gave it to them.”

  “You’re . . . you’re fuckin’ nuts.”

  I twisted the bleeding ear and he howled.

  “You used to be a Freed supporter,” I said. “What turned you against him? Why do you want him dead?”

  “I don’t want anybody dead!”

  “You can be dead yourself, if you don’t come clean.” I twisted the ear again. “Talk to me Lonny,” I said, above his howl.

  A knocking at the office door interrupted us. “What’s going on in there?” Angela’s voice cried. “Lonny? Is Jack in there? Lonny, are you all right?”

  I climbed off him, helped him up. He was shak­ing and shaken.

  “Not a word about this,” I said, putting the gun away. “Find something to wipe off your ear.”

  “You’re crazy,” he said, breathlessly; it was not an accusation, or an insult—more a surprised state­ment of assumed fact. He stumbled into a small washroom off his office and used a damp cloth on his ear.

  I cleaned his blood off my hand with a handker­chief and opened the door and a wide-eyed, wor­ried Angela was standing there, poised to knock again. I slid past her and pulled her along.

  “Come on,” I said. “Let’s get something to eat.”

  “What was going on in there?”

  “Your car or mine?”

  “Let’s take both this time, I’ll follow you; but what . . .”

  “I’ll tell you when we get there.”

  The Sundance Restaurant in the Blackhawk Hotel was a yuppie’s notion of the old west—pottery and Indian-blanket carpeting, sepia photos of Wild Bill Hickok and Sitting Bull, mingling with the usual hanging plants. Rather large, the open-beamed place was sectioned off and made to seem cozy, its unfinished pine walls cluttered with wagon wheels and mounted buffalo heads and lamps made from antlers. We sat by ourselves in a nook below a blue-and-orange stained-glass skylight.

  “What was going on in Lonny’s office?” she asked, leaning forward. The ride over had not dimmed her interest or her concern. She was ner­vously toying with the gold chain around her neck; she was wearing a white blouse and blue jeans.

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said. I would have liked to take off my coat and tie and unbutton my top button; but I still wore my nine-millimeter in its shoulder holster. So I remained less than casual.

  “You’d said you’d tell me,” she said with brittle, barely controlled anger. “It sounded like you were fighting in there.”

  “It was just a scuffle.”

  “A scuffle! What about?”

  “You. He told me to stay away from you, and took a swing at me. I decked him, then sat on him a while till he was cooled down. That’s all.”

  Exasperated, she shook her head, eyes large, said, “Does this sort of thing happen to you often?”

  “It used to. I been leading a pretty quiet life lately.”

  “Well, you’re certainly getting back into the swing of things, aren’t you?”

  “Yes. But I wish I wasn’t.”

  “What do you mean, Jack?” Her anger was fad­ing already.

  “Nothing. Let’s forget about this and just have a nice meal, okay?”

  “Oh-kay,” she sighed, smirking with frustration, and we ordered drinks—her a martini (again) and me a Diet Coke (again), and I got her talking about her kids for awhile. The older one was a cheerleader, but not such a great student; the younger girl was shy, though her marks were excellent. Angela’s eyes lit up when she talked about them. The sadness that I’d noticed in her last night was absent this evening, at least when her kids were the topic of discussion.

  I hadn’t eaten anything today, so I had a full din­ner, the main course wiener schnitzel (the Sundance menu wasn’t particularly frontier-oriented); Angela, who probably weighed one hundred twenty, had the diet plate.

  She was having a second martini, an after din­ner one, when I got back into it.

  “I need to ask you something about your hus­band,” I said.

  “Bob? What about him?”

  “You said he’s working for George Ridge now.”

  “Yes. He’s an . . . executive assistant, I think is the title.”

  “But Ridge and Preston Freed had a bitter fall­ing out. Are you aware of that?”

  “Yes,” she said, nodding.

  “Yet you indicated your husband is still under Freed’s ‘spell.’”

  “Yes, Bob’s still a member of the Democratic Ac­tion party. I don’t think he’s as active as he used to be, but . . . I don’t get your point.”

  “Well, the point
is, how can he work for Ridge, and still be involved with Freed?”

  “I don’t know. Lots of people who work together, who’re in business together, disagree politically. Is that so unusual?”

  I let some air out. Shrugged. “I just figured the rift between Ridge and Freed was so acrimonious, it’d spill over into other things . . .”

  “Maybe so. I really don’t know anything about it. Why don’t you ask George Ridge about it? Or Freed? Or Bob, for that matter?”

  She didn’t know it, of course, but nobody was going to be talking to Bob again, not unless it was with a Ouija board. And the same would be true of George Ridge, before long, once I’d met him and his plane Monday night. Freed I could, and would, ask.

  “Something else we need to talk about,” I said.

  “Yes?” Her smile was eager; she was assuming, wrongly, this would be pleasant.

  “Don’t ask me how I know this. Don’t ask me how I did this exactly.”

  “Know what? Did what?”

  “That rumor about Preston Freed’s video-tape li­brary.”

  She smiled, laughed softly. “His triple-X home movies, you mean. What about it?”

  “It’s no rumor.”

  She shrugged. “I’m not really surprised. But how’d you verify it? Oh, sorry—you said not to ask . . .”

  She wasn’t as impressed as she should be.

  I reached over to the chair next to me where my brown leather coat was draped. I got the black plas­tic box out of one pocket and showed it to her. “This is from his private library.”

  She smiled one-sidedly, a little amazed. “You’re kidding!”

  “No. Check out the spine.”

  She looked at it. “‘Angela,’” she said. “Well, this isn’t me, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  “Hey, he’s got a camera pointing right at his bed. He’s got a shelf of over thirty tapes with the names of women on every one of them. There’s no reason to kid me.”

  “Jack. Read my lips. This isn’t me. I never slept with Freed. Or did anything with him. Have you screened this?”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t know where to find a ma­chine that’ll play it. It won’t play in a home VCR—I need the kind they use at TV stations.”

  “Three-quarter inch, not half-inch,” she said, nod­ding. “You know, I think I know where I can find us a screening room.”

  We took her car. It was dark now, as we headed up Brady through its neon franchise canyon, glid­ing along by BEST BUY, heading on out past the shopping malls and even her own housing addition. Well past the city limits, as Iowa farmland began to kick in, a cluster of small buildings appeared at our left, a garden of big metal mushrooms— satellite dishes—along its one side.

  We got out of the car and she looped her arm in mine, saying, “If Chuck still works here, and I think he does, we’ll be in business. I used to drop Preston Freed’s weekly ‘news’ show off to ’im.”

  There were no lights on in the front, office part of the small building complex, but a few windows glowed toward the rear. The side door, marked “Cable Vision Employees Only,” just this side of the mesh fence that enclosed the satellite-dish gar­den, was unlocked. I followed her in and down a narrow hall.

  An open door to the right revealed a small stu­dio, lights unlit, cameras unattended; she knocked at the next door and, shortly, a shaggy-haired mustached guy in a dark green sweater and blue jeans answered, styrofoam coffee cup in hand. He was about thirty-five and sleepy-eyed; dope was in his past and maybe his present. Behind him was a small but elaborate control booth, video tape machines and monitors and banks of switches, with a big window looking out on that empty studio.

  “Well! How ya doin’, beautiful,” he said, bright­ening at seeing her. “Don’t tell me you’re workin’ for the Great White Father again.”

  She laughed. “No, I had enough of that windbag to last a lifetime. You’re still running on caffeine, I see.”

  He sipped his coffee. “It’s legal. What’s the oc­casion?”

  “Need a favor, Chuck.”

  “Hey, anything for a pretty face. You still selling cars?”

  “Yes, and that’s why I’m here. We had this hot­shot advertising firm out of Cedar Rapids do some commercials for us, but when the tape arrived, it was on three-quarter. All we have at the showroom is a VHS.”

  “And you wanna screen the sucker. Well, no prob­lem, babe. There’s a machine and a monitor in the office next door.” He pointed with his thumb to a door that said STATION MANAGER. “It’s not locked.”

  “Thanks, Chuck.”

  “No problem-o, babe. Gotta get back to work. Let me know when you’re leavin’ . . .”

  He toasted her with his coffee and shut himself back in his booth.

  “They run a pretty tight ship around here,” I said.

  “It’s a small operation,” she said, leading me into the station manager’s office, a cluttered cubbyhole with a desk and several files but also a stand on which sat a TV monitor and, under it, a big VCR. “They serve several small communities. And they’re making some dough uplinking Freed’s show for him every week.”

  I handed her the tape and she inserted it in the machine and we stood and watched.

  Watched, thanks to a sharply focused if station­ary camera, Preston Freed in spirited action with a lovely blond girl of about twenty. I fast-forwarded it through several sexual positions and practices and some mutual coke use and, while it was hardly a testimonial to the conservative values Preston Freed extolled, the tape had nothing to do with Angela Jordan.

  Almost immediately she said, “That’s Angela Huseby.”

  “So it isn’t you.”

  “No, of course not. See for yourself. I’m not the only Angela in the world.”

  “Who is this girl?”

  “She was only with the party for a few months. She’s dead.”

  I looked at her sharply. “Dead?”

  “She had a nervous breakdown. Suicide.”

  “When was this?”

  “At least two years ago.”

  I shut the tape off. “I’m sorry. I should’ve believed you.”

  She smiled at me, touched my arm. “You were trying to do me a favor, weren’t you? You saw the name on that tape, and assumed it was me, and took it. To give to me.”

  “Yeah, or to destroy,” I said. Like I had already done with the other tape, the one that had the name “Becky” on the spine, co-starring me and my stun gun.

  “You’re sweet,” she said. “But that tape isn’t me. It is, however, political dynamite. If you’re working for Freed, you’d better get rid of it.”

  “Maybe I’m a blackmailer.”

  She smiled wide. “I don’t think so. You’re just not the type. And I’m a pretty good judge of charac­ter.”

  If she were a good judge of character, she wouldn’t be a divorcee twice over. But I didn’t point that out to her.

  I tucked the tape back in my pocket and we ex­ited the cubbyhole. Out in the silent hall, she stuck her head in the studio and waved at Chuck through the glass of his booth; he looked up from inserting a tape in a machine and smiled and waved. Soon we were on the road again, heading back to Davenport.

  “Would you mind stopping by my house for a few minutes?” she asked. “We’ll be going right by. It’s getting late and I’d like to check and see if Mom and the girls are back yet.”

  “That’s fine. I’d like to meet your family.”

  But when she pulled into the driveway of the green split-level, next to a shiny white Pontiac Bonneville, she said “Damn! They’re not home . . .”

  “Then whose car is that?”

  She paused. Made a face. “Lonny’s.”

  “I’ll handle the little jerk,” I said.

  She touched my arm. “Don’t let things get out of hand.”

  “I’ll just send him on his way.”

  I got out of the car and opened her door for her and escorted her up the sidewalk. He w
as sitting up on the front stoop, the tip of his cigarette an amber eye in the darkness; he stood as we ap­proached, still in his BEST BUY blue blazer, no top­coat.

  She got between us. “Now, I don’t want any trou­ble . . .”

  But I could already see from Lonny’s haunted expression that this was about something else. “Angela,” he said. “Please. We have to talk.”

  “We can talk at work on Monday.”

  He paused. “I’m afraid I have some bad news. It’s Bob.”

  “What about Bob?”

  “Bob . . .” He sighed. “He’s apparently drowned. Him and Jim Crawford both.”

  She clutched my arm. “Oh, my God. How . . . how did it happen?”

  “A boating accident,” he said.

  “A boating accident?” she asked, incredulous.

  “I know it sounds crazy, this time of year. But Bob and Jim Crawford were apparently takin’ a small cabin cruiser, this morning, to this island on Lake Superior. I guess some business associates of their boss, Ridge, lived on this island and, well, a storm blew in out of nowhere and . . . a wind like that can dump a vessel a lot larger, they said . . .”

  “Oh, my God. What will I tell the girls? What will I tell the girls?”

  “The boat was found, capsized. Nobody aboard.”

  “What about Ridge?” I asked.

  “He never was aboard,” Best said. “They were going to that island to meet him.” To her, he said: “There’s . . . I’m sorry, honey, but they said there’s really not much chance of recovering the bodies.”

  She was weeping now, into my arm. “Jack . . . Jack . . . what can I do?”

  I patted her back.

  Best, looking stunned himself, shook his head, touched her shoulder; said, “Sorry, hon. I’m very sorry.”

  “Why’d they call you?” I asked him.

  “Authorities been trying to reach Angela all day,” he said, refusing to get defensive about it. “Some­body finally led ’em to the car lot. When they called, it was just after you left, and I was the only one still around.”

  I looked at him hard, looking for complicity in his reddish round face; but I couldn’t find any. He seemed genuinely concerned, upset, himself.

  “You want me to hang around?” he asked her.

  She shook her head no.