That explained the Illinois license plates.
I said, “I’m starting here, second semester. What’s your major?”
“I’m in pre-law.”
Tom wasn’t unfriendly but neither was he interested, so I cut if off there. I sipped my beer, Tom ordered a second one. We did not speak again until my pizza arrived. The bartender, God bless him, placed it on the bar next to me, in front of the empty stool that separated Tom and me.
“Hey,” I said to Tom. “This is more than I can handle. Help yourself to a few slices.”
Tom frowned at me, then smiled. “That’s nice, brother, but...I’m not that hungry.”
“Come on. Why let it go to waste? Consider it a late Christmas present.”
He thought about that, shrugged, and moved over a seat.
The pie was in fact excellent, a thin crust with a lot of tomato sauce and just the right amount of mozzarella and seemed to me just about the best pizza ever, although you should factor in that I’d been living on Slim Jims, beef jerky and Hostess cupcakes.
I kept the conversation casual. “You got folks in Iowa City?”
“No,” he said. He was finished with his second beer and I called the bartender over and ordered us both another. Tom thanked me and said, “My girlfriend lives here.”
“Really? Local gal?”
“No. Actually, she’s from Chicago, too. She’s a little older than me, but we’ve gone together since high school.”
“How much older?”
He shrugged. “Just a year. But she’s in grad school now. That’s why she’s at Iowa.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah—Writers’ Workshop? Really famous writers’ school. Lots of big deal literary lights teach here. Kurt Vonnegut. Richard Yates. Phillip Roth.”
I’d read Vonnegut.
I said, “Yeah, I know all about that. I’m going to be in the Workshop myself.”
His eyebrows went up. “No kidding. Nice going— tough to get in. My girlfriend has been winning writing awards since she was in grade school.”
“What’s her name?”
“Annette Girard.”
“Speaking of which...my name’s Jack.” I wiped pizza sauce off my hand and extended it to him and grinned. “Jack Harper.”
“Tom Keenan,” he said, and we shook.
“So,” I said, “why are you sitting with some doofus in a bar, eating pizza and drinking beer, if your girl’s in town?”
“She is, but...man, can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“It’s the kind of question you can only ask some doofus...some other doofus...in a bar.” He laughed humorlessly. “Are all women untrustworthy little bitches?”
I shrugged. “Not all.”
“Really?”
“Well...none that aren’t come to mind.” I smiled. “But you’d figure there’d have to be some of ‘em out there who wouldn’t cheat on your ass.”
He grunted. “You been there, then?”
“Listen, let me tell you. I did a tour in Nam.”
His eyebrows went up. “Really?”
“Yeah. And when I came home, guess where I found my honeybun?”
“In bed with a guy?”
“In bed with a guy.”
We toasted beers.
“So what now, Tom? You gonna go talk sense to the little lady? Try to win her back?”
He sighed and shook his head. “Naw. She’s really... really not a bad girl, Jack. She’s smart and ambitious and talented and smart.” He was on his fourth beer. “But her parents, her father particularly, spoiled the shit out of her. So she’s used to getting her own way.”
“Is she cute?”
“Cute ain’t half of it! She looks like she walked out of a Penthouse centerspread.”
Particularly on your fourth beer, when you could get the soft focus just right.
“Then,” I said, “if I were you, I would forgive her lovely ass, no matter what she did to me.”
He laughed. Actually laughed. “Yeah. And some day I may get her back. But right now? This prick has filled her head with all kinds of garbage.”
“What prick? What kind of garbage?”
“Well, it’s this goddamn professor.” He sneered, shook his head. “Her fucking literary guru. Hell, he may wind up your teacher, Jack, in the Workshop!”
“Yeah? What’s his name?”
“Byron. Some initials in front of that, but I forget what the fuck they are.”
I was nodding. “Yeah, I know who you mean. He had a bestseller a while back, but he’s sure as hell no Vonnegut.”
“That’s for fuckin’ A sure. But she’s been working on this book, this novel...actually, she says it’s a non-fiction novel—you know, like In Cold Blood?”
“What’s it about?”
He shrugged elaborately. “I don’t know. Probably her father.”
“Why her father?”
He just waved that off. I was already getting more out of him than a doofus in a bar had any right.
“But this Byron asshole,” Tom said, “he’s an expert at this stuff. That bestseller of his, it was one of these non-fiction novel deals.”
“Really.”
“Yeah. Anyway, she’s under his spell. But it’ll only be temporary. If I go off and live my life for a while, and fuck me a few honeys back in Evanston, maybe I can forget her for now, and then, down the road a ways, we can start back up again, with a clean slate.”
“The professor’s just a fling?”
“Yeah, but it’s Annette who’s gettin’ flung. This prof, he’s a well-known horndog. I asked around about him. He’s been at three colleges in six years, a dirty old man playing Mick Jagger to lit-rah-chure groupies.”
“Your girl’s just another in that long line?”
He nodded. “The bastard’ll discard her like the rest of the hundred fuck-bunnies he’s run through.”
“Would you take her back?”
“In a goddamn heartbeat.” He pushed a half-eaten slice away. “You think I’m a pussy, Jack?”
Kind of.
“No,” I said. “She’s just going through a phase. So then, what? You’ll head back to Evanston?”
“Yeah. Or anyway to Naperville. That’s where my folks live. That’s also the Chicago area. But I’ll crash in some motel, first. I can’t drive after all this beer.”
“Don’t blame you. Then you’ll head home tomorrow?”
“First thing.”
That was good to hear.
He seemed like a nice kid. Would have been a drag having to kill him.
FOUR
By four o’clock that afternoon, I had resumed my post in the split-level, and while my space heater and my radio and my dwindling supply of 7-Eleven delicacies were waiting patiently for me, the brunette’s white Corvette had finally departed.
This was good news, or anyway news, as it seemed to indicate Annette had not moved in over break with Professor Byron after all. That might have cleared a path for me to slip across the street, especially after sundown, and close the book on the supposedly famous writer, only another car was out front.
I knew whose car this was—a yellow Corvair from the early sixties, a model known to have a few deficiencies, such as leaking oil, impaling its driver on the steering column in a collision, sending noxious fumes into the interior, and occasionally blowing up. This specimen seemed pretty much in one piece, with dents here and there and twice as many anti-war and anti-Nixon bumper stickers as Tom’s GTO.
This questionable ride belonged to one of the four male students from the Writers’ Workshop who Professor Byron was known to advise. For just a moment I considered going over there and snuffing both of them, since they were both dead men, the prof my contracted target and his student a Corvair driver.
Around six-thirty, already dark as midnight but with a nearly full moon washing the snow an ivory-blue, the student exited—a skinny kid in a gray parka and jeans and galoshes. His nest of facial hair stuck
out like a porcupine was sitting on his face. A porcupine with granny glasses on its ass. The prof stayed in the doorway and watched his charge stride toward the Corvair with the confidence of a Lafayette Escadrille pilot about to go up after the Red Baron. I figured his odds of getting home were about the same.
That left the prof alone in his cottage, and me wondering if I should spend a couple of more days updating the obviously flawed surveillance info I’d been given, before laying my ass on the line. Maybe Annette hadn’t moved out—maybe she’d skedaddled to the shopping mall over on the southeast side, to kill time while Professor Loverboy dealt with a student who was presumably stopping by to deliver breathless prose and not a blowjob.
By that reasoning, the brunette might wander in right when I was fulfilling the contract. If all I had to do was pop this fucker, that might be worth the risk—I could be in and out in minutes. But I had that extra assignment of rounding up certain manuscript pages and disposing of them—that “challenge” Broker had given me, as his new boy.
An hour went by and no Annette. The radio station had cycled through its playlist for the fourth or fifth time, and “American Woman” was back on when I decided to do something more than sit on my ass. I had Annette’s address, which was in Coralville, a small suburb to the west of Iowa City. I drove there.
She was on the second floor of a little modern redbrick apartment complex, six apartments up, five down, all with exterior entrances, the walkway above providing the first floor with an overhang. A laundry room on the lower level seemed to be the only shared living experience here.
The apartment facility was just a block off Coralville’s busy retail and restaurant strip, an artery pumping monetary life’s blood into the little suburb. And I was able to park in the lot of a Sambo’s restaurant on the corner, the Maverick nosed in against the cement-block six-foot wall that separated the restaurant from its residential next-door neighbor, but with a clear view of Annette’s digs. She was on the second floor, apartment 204, with her white Corvette parked in a specified spot in the complex’s tiny parking lot.
The curtained windows of her apartment glowed yellow. She was in there, maybe writing. She had to produce material for her advisor to advise her over, right? For maybe an hour, I sat watching those windows, figuring if she stayed in her nest until, say, midnight, she wasn’t likely to go back out and rejoin the prof.
This wasn’t scientific. I was learning on the job, which is to say making it up as I went along. But I was giving serious thought to making tonight the night— drive back to my split-level and go over to the cobblestone cottage and get this the fuck over with. The longer I hung around, it seemed, the more wild cards were getting played. In a game like that, you either play what’s dealt you and hope for the best, or you get the hell away from the table.
And what would the Broker say if I bailed on my very first contract? Not only would I be a disappointment to my new employer, I’d be an instant loose end. This wasn’t the kind of job, wasn’t the kind of business, where you can apply, get a position, discover you’re not right for it, shake hands with the boss and say thanks anyway and go along your merry way, until the next position came along. No. I knew the Broker was a middleman in the murder business, and that was dangerous information to possess, in and of itself. On top of that, I knew about the Concort Inn and could extrapolate that the Quad Cities was Broker’s base of operations.
If I didn’t want to go through with this, I would have to disappear and leave behind my A-frame on the lake and money in the bank and still risk getting shot to shit by some asshole sent by the Broker.
Amway and the Jehovah’s Witnesses were looking better all the time.
I’d been watching maybe another half hour when she came out of her apartment and trotted down the central staircase, a big white purse on a strap over her shoulder. Again she was in the white leather coat with the white fur collar; her bell bottoms were dark blue with black polka dots that didn’t show till she’d crossed the street and walked right past where I was parked.
I watched her go into the Sambo’s.
What the hell. I went in after her. I hadn’t eaten since the pizza at the Airliner.
The restaurant had a motif based on the old children’s book about little black Sambo chasing tigers around a tree until they turned into butter, which must have seemed like a fun concept for a chain of pancake houses until Black Power came along. The Sambo kid on the menus and in decorative art in this aggressively bright orange-and-white restaurant was not black, rather some vague turbaned Oriental type, like that wouldn’t offend somebody in a college town like Iowa City.
The place was damn near empty, Sunday night during break, a few families in booths and a couple of truck drivers at the endless counter, with the young waiters and waitresses in their orange outfits and caps stricken with that hollow expression that says, How did my life bottom out so soon?
I took a counter seat and ordered some eggs and pancakes and sausage and iced tea. I was able from here to see Annette, seated by herself in a corner booth, reading a book whose title was Armies of the Night; I wasn’t actually seated close enough to see that, but I’d picked up on it when I walked past her.
Her coat was off—the heat was going at a pretty good clip here in the tropical world of Sambo’s—and she had on a black sweater that made the polka dots on the purple slacks stand out more; her smallish breasts under the sweater were doing a swell job, considering. She wasn’t eating anything, at least not yet, just working on a cup of black coffee.
She seemed fairly engrossed in the book. I had my eggs, sausage and pancakes, “tiger butter” and all, and decided to take a risk. Maybe it was the sugar rush.
On my way to the counter to pay my bill, I stopped at her booth and asked, “How is that?”
She glanced up from her paperback, not at all irritated by the interruption, and said in a nice throaty alto, “Do you like Norman Mailer?”
“I’ve only read Naked and the Dead,” I said, which was true. I read it in high school back when I thought war sounded like a heroic thing for a kid to get involved in. Mailer’s opinion had been different, and now so was mine, although he hadn’t had anything to do with it.
“Well, he’s a completely out of control egotist,” she said. “Or perhaps I should say ego-ist.”
Was there a difference? Not if you hadn’t been to college there wasn’t.
She was saying, “But he may be onto something here—referring to himself in the third person and all.”
I nodded toward the book in her scarlet-nailed hands. “Isn’t that non-fiction? Something about the march on the Pentagon?”
“Yes. But it’s a non-fiction novel, or at least it’s trying to be. I don’t know if he’s really successful here, but it’s interesting to see him try. I really think this is the future.”
“Yeah. Of what?”
She beamed at me in a winning combination of embarrassment and confidence. “Of the novel. Of journalism. I don’t know really, but something new.”
“Does sound interesting.”
I smiled and nodded, and she smiled and nodded back and returned to her book, and I went on outside and climbed into the Maverick and got the heat going.
No way to know how long Mailer’s book and Sambo’s coffee would hold her interest; no way to know if she’d be heading back to her place or the prof’s cottage, after. I could sit here and wait and watch to see when she emerged, five minutes or two hours from now, but if she noticed me, that would be bad. That was the downside of getting friendly with my target’s best girl. I couldn’t think of an upside, incidentally. I just kind of liked her looks.
Less than half an hour later I was back at the old stand. The space heater was doing fine and in fact was making me a little sleepy; well, the space heater and those pancakes—blame the tiger butter. A car belonging to another of those male Writers’ Workshop students was parked in front of the cobblestone pad, meaning a legit advisory session was again under way.
This meant Annette might be staying away just until these meetings were over. Another half an hour dragged by and I was sipping some cocoa from the thermos lid-cup when I heard a crinkling sound. Now this new house had plastic down on the floors, but I had rolled the living room sheet back to give me a nice space by and around the window where I could sit on carpet and not on cold crinkly plastic. I mention this because the plastic could also serve as an early warning system, alerting me to somebody else moving through this house.
Of course, I would have to have been fully awake and not trying to maintain surveillance with my head up my ass, and when I removed my head from that orifice and turned, I was facing a guy with a gun. Which is to say, I wasn’t facing him with my gun, he was facing me with his, a little .38 Police Special with a snub nose, a dinky nothing that could kill you deader than Jimi and Janis.
He was short and dark and pudgy with Nixon jowls and tiny dark eyes and an awful bulb of a nose. He had no hat on a mostly bald noggin, though the hair he did have was longish, enough so that he had sideburns, not quite mutton chops but close. He was in a tan trench-coat that had a lumpiness indicating it was heavily lined; and brown slacks and brown rubber-soled shoes.
He was grinning, not a very wide grin, but a toothy Bucky Beaver thing that gave him a hint of childish glee. Whoever he was, he figured he’d really put one over on me.
Which he had.
“Just take it easy, kid,” he said. His voice was a fairly squeaky tenor, not at all impressive, except for belonging to a guy with a gun.
The nine millimeter was in my waistband but my corduroy jacket was zipped. Maybe I could slip my hand up and under and get at the weapon; and maybe not. Probably not.
“Why don’t you come over here, kid,” he said, and motioned with the .38. “Get away from the windows.”
“I’m okay where I am.”
“No, really, you aren’t. I’m not going to shoot you.”
“Then put the gun down.”
“Not till we’re better acquainted. I think we might work for the same team...well, not the same team. But maybe affiliated teams, you know?”
The First Quarry (Hard Case Crime (Mass Market Paperback)) Page 5