Superficially, it looked like a dope buy. Rundown neighborhood, guy in a fancy suit and fancy car, talking with hippie type. Making a connection. Anyone in this neighborhood who had witnessed what I had would probably assume that. And around here chances were nobody would think much of it, either.
But it went on far too long for a dope buy, and of course Ash wasn’t into that . . . at least as far as I knew.
No, this was something else. Something I was beginning to recognize the pattern of.
And when the kid finally got out of the LTD and started strolling back the way he came, I let Ash go and picked up on the kid. On foot.
I walked on the other side of the street, a block back; I was still wearing the same clothes that allowed me to pass as a college kid myself, this morning. He didn’t spot me. Or, if he did, he was good at pretending he didn’t.
Within the space of a few short blocks, the tenement surroundings changed. The crowded-together two-story houses began disappearing, and in their place were grotesquely beautiful onetime mansions. Not that the change in appearance of the neighborhood was an entirely radical one; this, too, was a rundown area, and the Gothic old homes showed signs of decay, were even crumbling in some cases. Like the somewhat similar—if less elaborate— house in Milwaukee where Ash stayed, these homes all seemed to have been converted into apartment houses. Judging by the vans and compact cars in the parking lots carved out of the once well-kept and spacious lawns, I gathered that what had once been the homes of the city’s elite now provided housing for college students from the several nearby campuses.
He entered one of the largest of those huge old homes, a yellow, paint-peeling, clapboard palace with spired towers whose upper windows were stained glass. The place looked like it might hold a dozen or more efficiency apartments, and had a “Rooms for Rent” sign in one of the front windows. As I stood facing the house I could see three windows on the second floor that were dim, as the kid went in, and then after he’d had time to climb a flight of stairs, a light went on in one of those windows, and then went out again moments later. I checked my watch: it was a few minutes before nine. Ash’s long-haired friend either went to bed very early, or was coming out of there again.
Ten minutes passed and no sign of him, through the front way, and I began wondering if he’d seen me, and sneaked out a back door. I was leaned against a tree, gun still tucked under my arm, so I wasn’t worried, and as I was studying from an angle the window of what I assumed to be his room, I saw something glint.
Something glass, catching light from a street lamp.
Across the way from the big yellow apartment house was another of those Gothic homes, a brown brick affair that was unique-looking even among these once-distinguished neighbors. It was somewhat smaller than the others, and had been designed to look like a modern castle, with turrets and everything, and seemed well-maintained, with no lawn full of cars to indicate apartment house conversion.
Somebody living in that place was going to die. Probably soon, judging by the length of the conversation between Ash and the kid, who was sitting in his room by the window right now, using binoculars or perhaps a sniper scope to study the mark.
That “kid” was the backup man, and Ash was the trigger. Somebody in that brown brick castle was the target.
Now, where did I fit in?
10
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THE WATER IN the pool was warm. Too warm, really. I prefer a pool where the water’s on the chilly side. But of all the hotels and motels in Davenport, this place, the Concort Inn, was the only one with an indoor pool, so considering the time of year, if I wanted to swim, this was going to have to do.
And I wanted to swim. I swim every day, if I’m able. It keeps me in shape. Relaxes me. Helps me think, if I need to. Helps me not think, if I need that.
This morning I needed to think. Last night I’d been too tired to lose any sleep over the jumble of matters that needed sorting out, urgent matters though they were. I’d been up since this started, since night before yesterday when those two guys invaded my place in Wisconsin, so after my excursion last night into that neighborhood of crumbling mansions, I’d gone straight to the only place in town I knew of where I could find both bed and pool to dive into.
The Concort Inn was a modern-looking monolith of a building, made of glass and plastic and blue-tinged steel, sitting near the government bridge on the edge of Davenport, on a sort of concrete oasis, a full block’s worth of parking protecting the place from the seedy warehouse district at its back and the four busy lanes of traffic running in front. The rooms at the Concort were nice size, clean, pleasantly furnished and, since the building sat at an angle, usually had a decent view of the river. Downstairs was maybe the best restaurant in town, and a lounge with no cover and plenty of entertainment. All of which was pretty impressive, I suppose, if you hadn’t been there a thousand times before. I had.
The Concort was where the Broker and I would get together before jobs. Some kinds of business you just don’t handle by phone or through the mail, and every hit I ever made began with words rolling off Broker’s politician-smooth tongue, in a room at the Concort. Every assignment of my five and a half years in the business I had picked up here, or practically all of them; a few had been at other motels or hotels in the area, but most had been right here. At the Concort.
Maybe I was an idiot, coming back here, staying here again. Maybe I was risking my ass, just so I could go swimming, for Christsake. Broker had money in the Concort, no question, and he used the hotel as a tool in his operation; and it might be logical to assume Broker’s replacement would do the same.
Point of interest: Ash was operating not out of the Concort, but from the Holiday Inn near the Interstate.
Second point of interest: Ash and backup man were engaged in what looked to be a pretty much routine sort of hit.
And what that seemed to add up to was Ash was not the Broker’s replacement, but a hired hand, somebody else’s flunkey, only who was that somebody else? And why did that somebody else contract my death? Was there some sort of a power play going on here that I was caught in the middle of, several candidates going after Broker’s job, preparing to engage in a shooting war, what?
Questions. Questions.
I floated on the water’s warm surface, floated on my back, listening to the lapping sounds of the water, staring at the aqua-color ceiling, looking for answers.
“Oh . . . excuse me.”
The voice came from behind me: feminine, soft, so soft it didn’t even echo in a room that threw sound around so thoroughly the barest ripple of the pool caused a tremor.
I rolled off my back, snaked over to the edge of the pool before she was gone.
She’d come into the room, which was an aqua-blue cement box hardly big enough to hold the medium-size pool, and had apparently slipped off her robe before noticing me, and then when she did notice me was for some reason frightened, and said excuse me and was now getting back into her full-length white terry robe, heading toward the door.
“Hey!” I called.
My voice echoed like a yell off Lover’s Leap, and it stopped her.
“What’s to be excused?” I said, leaning against the edge of the pool.
She turned. Smiled a little. A good-looking woman of maybe twenty-eight, with white blond hair that hung to her shoulders and the sort of face you see on the covers of classy fashion magazines.
“I just didn’t know anyone was in here,” she said, hugging her white robe to herself protectively.
“Well, I’m in here,” I said, “and so what? This isn’t exactly my private property, this pool. And I’m not going to bother you. So swim if you want.”
She hesitated. Looked at me. Appraised me. “You don’t mind. . . ?” she asked.
“No.”
She made a shy, shrugging gesture, let the terry robe fall i
n a puddle at her feet and dove in the pool. She swam easily, gracefully, though there was nothing fancy about it; she just swam, like she was born knowing how, neither gliding nor chopping: swimming.
I had my elbow on the edge of the pool, leaning there, watching her. After a while she swam over and sat up on the poolside, not particularly close to me, but close enough to talk without shouting. She sat there catching her breath, and I just kept looking at her. She had a nice body, and she made me wish I had the time to do something about it. She was slender, but not skinny, and she had the best-looking legs I’d seen in a long time. She wasn’t really busty, but she had enough, and I was enjoying the way her nipples were pushing out at the thin nylon fabric of her simple one-piece black swimsuit.
I stayed down in the water, because something was pushing at the nylon of my swimsuit, too.
“They keep this pool too warm,” she said, suddenly.
I said I agreed.
“I like to dive into cold water,” she said. “Wakes you up. Slaps you around, a little. Gets your nerve endings work- ing. Reminds you you’re alive.”
I said I couldn’t agree more.
“You, uh . . . must think I’m pretty silly,” she said.
“Why’s that?”
“The, you know . . . fuss I made, when I came in.”
“What fuss? You just didn’t see me, and then you did, and it startled you. That’s all.”
“That’s close, anyway,” she said, smiling less tentatively now. “You see, I come in here, every morning about this time, that is every weekday morning . . . what day is this?”
“Thursday.”
“Thought I lost track for a minute. See, on the weekdays, around this time of morning, this time of year, pool’s usually empty. I can have it to myself.”
“Do you live here or something?”
“No. This hotel, you mean? No. I’m local, live here in Davenport. The manager is a friend. He lets me swim here when I want.”
“You do that often, do you? Swim here?”
“Lately, I have. I’ve . . . I’ve been going through a kind of a rough period, personally, and I don’t get out much. Coming here during the week, in the middle of the morning, that’s about it for me, lately. I’ve got a lot on my mind, and coming here, swimming here, alone, seems to help me get myself together, a little.”
“I can understand that.”
“Really?”
“Sure. I’m a junkie where swimming’s concerned. Don’t miss a day, if I can help it.”
“No kidding?”
“No kidding. And I suppose for much the same reasons as you. I even agree with you about swimming alone. I try to find a pool where I can do some nice solitary swimming, myself, when I can.”
“Well,” she said. Very pretty smile. Blue eyes, that light, clear blue. “I guess I’ve found a kindred spirit.”
“I guess so.”
“My name’s Carrie.”
She seemed to want a name from me, so I gave her one.
“Mine’s Jack,” I said.
“How long are you going to be in town, Jack?”
“I’m not sure. A week, maybe.”
“Then maybe I’ll see you here tomorrow,” she said, and got up, got her robe, and was gone.
I sat staring at the door for a good solid minute.
Then I swam some more.
11
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ASH’S BIG SHINY new LTD was sitting in the lot at the Holiday Inn, just as I expected it to be. And Ash would be in his room. Staying put. Not straying from his phone, in case his backup man should need to reach him.
And I was in my big mud-spattered used Buick, parked in the front lot of the motel, watching. I didn’t figure Ash to come out of there till evening, but I sat and watched just the same. When you’re working on supposition, as I was, you account for every possibility.
Even so, I was a little lax about getting started, and my vigil didn’t get under way till around noon. I’d had a good breakfast at the Concort, before my midmorning swim, and on my way out I spent ten minutes in the lobby at the newsstand, finally settling on a couple of paperback westerns and Penthouse magazine, anticipating a long, boring afternoon at the Holiday Inn.
And then I’d gone back to that neighborhood of decomposing dreams, driving around for half an hour through those several Gothic blocks, to get a look at things in the light of day (albeit a cloudy one). Most of those big old houses looked worse, paint chipping and peeling like a cheap whore’s layered make-up; almost none of them looked better, with a notable exception being that brown brick structure, which even in the better light showed no signs of decay. It sat, aloof, with a huge snow-covered lawn separating it from the lawn-turned-parking-lot of the peeling yellow monster next door, where Ash’s backup man was playing college-boy boarder. It was the last house on the block, perched on the edge of an impossibly steep hill, the street dropping sharply to intersect another half a block below. The landscape between was thick with skinny trees whose gnarled, twining branches reached out at odd angles, hovering over patches of snow, patches of dead grass, patches of bare earth that looked like some strange disease of the scalp. Perhaps if it hadn’t been winter, this tangle of branches and lumpy earth might have been pleasant to look at. As it was, it was dead and ugly and a disturbing contrast to the modern-day castle overlooking it.
The most important thing about that weird stretch of landscape was it made an approach from the rear of that brown brick palace almost impossible. The front of the house faced the lawn and that big yellow dump across the way, with the street on the one side, and more lawn on the other. So, if I was right, and Ash was planning to go in there and kill somebody in that place, he was going to be pretty conspicuous going in. Unless he planned to play Guns of Navarone and scale that steep, briar-patch of a hill to go in the back way, which was pretty conspicuous itself, considering doing that he’d be in full view of all four lanes of Harrison Street traffic.
I thought about all of that, as I sat in the Buick in the Holiday Inn lot, between leafing through the Penthouse, and reading one of the paperback westerns. And soon the afternoon slid uneventfully into evening.
Or, almost uneventfully.
Around four-thirty someone interesting entered the motel. Forty-five minutes later, give or take a minute, he came back out again.
His name was Curtis Brooks, and he was a lawyer, a trial lawyer. I had never met the man, but I knew of him. So would you, if I was using his right name. He was the most widely publicized, nationally known resident of the Quad Cities, except for maybe that lady mayor in Davenport, who temporarily eclipsed him.
Basically, what he did was see to it guilty people were found innocent.
He walked right by me, on his way to his Lincoln Continental, leather overcoat slung absently over his arm, as if he’d forgotten it was cold out. He was alone. He looked worried. Somebody in the parking lot recognized him and spoke, some businessman, and Brooks put on a smile and waved to the man, and then looked worried again.
He was smaller than I imagined. A handsome man with a Florida tan and character crinkles in all the right nooks and crannies of his face, wavy brown hair with solid white around his ears, large, intense, expressive brown eyes, expensive suit. Very expensive suit, such as to put the come-up-in-the-world Ash down.
Speaking of Ash, there was no reason, really, to connect Brooks to him. Brooks was a man whose reputation was colorful, but whose criminal connections were strictly lawyer/client. At least that’s what his p.r. man would tell you.
I knew the odds were good Brooks had just been to see Ash. There was a logical common bond between the two men. Both of them were in the murder business, Ash carrying them out, Brooks covering them up. Also, it seemed more than likely that Brooks, of all the lawyers in the Quad Cities, would have been the Broker’s. Especially considering how often the lawye
r had represented the courtroom interests of various elements of organized crime.
What I didn’t know was the subject matter of the conversation between Brooks and Ash. The takeover of Broker’s operation? That brown brick castle hit? Both? Neither? What?
And so I sat in the Buick in the Holiday Inn parking lot, thinking about those and other things, and at seven-twenty Ash drove out of the lot and I followed him.
12
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IT WAS THE same routine as the time before. Ash drove into the ghetto neighborhood, pulled up along the curb, and waited. A few minutes later, his long-haired associate came strolling onto the scene, from the direction of that yellow former mansion. I was parked up a good three blocks from them, where it wasn’t likely I’d been seen, but I didn’t plan to stick around, anyway. Why should I sit and watch them talk? I wasn’t a lip reader. I had something better to do.
After all, you can work on supposition only so long. There comes a point where you have to match up all that supposing with what’s really going on.
So, while the two conspirators sat conspiring in the LTD, I drove a few blocks, parked across from a certain seedy-looking yellow apartment house, walked over, and went in the front door.
There was a vestibule, with a grid of cubbyhole mailboxes nailed to either wall, and beyond that a hallway to the left, a wall with a few doors to the right, and in front of me directly was a stairway, going up to that second floor where Ash’s backup man had a room. Of course, that part was supposition: his being Ash’s backup man. And that was why I’d come here, to poke around the guy’s room while he and Ash were busy talking in that fancy-ass Ford a couple blocks over.
The place was pretty rundown. Both floors displayed faded, curling, ugly-to-begin-with wallpaper, and throw rugs that were as frayed as they were colorless, with good solid wood floors showing around the edges of the rugs, floors which unfortunately hadn’t been varnished for decades. There had been some remodeling done, however: a cheap, sloppy job of remodeling that neither the people who hired it done nor the people who did it could feel any pride about, as evidenced by the modern-style light-color plywood doors stuck in the middle of walls otherwise trimmed with dark, rich, occasionally carved woodwork dating back to the turn of the century, easy.
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