That’s why the rich are rich, my old man used to advise me; they turn off the goddamn lights when they don’t need them.
Well, maybe that helped them stay rich, but I doubted it made them rich. And if I were rich, I would eat better than Clarence was tonight. You could see him through a many-paned window framed by black shutters, sitting by himself at a black, metal-legged table. He had taken off his gray suit coat and draped it over the back of his kitchen chair; now that he was home relaxing, he had gone wild and loosened his necktie.
He was eating the meal the colored girl (as he likely thought of the middle-aged woman) had prepared for him, maybe even serving him up before she left. The biggest man in Stockwell, Mr. Stockwell Himself, slurping soup, and what was that he was nibbling between spoonfuls? A grilled cheese sandwich. Occasionally sipping a glass of milk, too.
I drew closer. Stood right there at the edge of the window and watched him eat in a big white kitchen with a late ’60s look. His wife would have long since remodeled, if she hadn’t died ten years ago. He was reading Sports Illustrated, apparently plucked from a pile of nearby mail—presumably he read Forbes and BusinessWeek and such at his office.
The soup seemed to be tomato. I hadn’t had tomato soup and grilled cheese with a glass of milk for supper since I was home sick from junior high. And at the time, I’d had no idea I was eating like a multi-millionaire.
So easy. I could shoot him from here, so easy. Just take the nine mil from my jacket pocket, take aim, and I would be the wealthier of the two of us, since dead guys don’t own shit.
Why didn’t I?
There’s a right way and a wrong way, and this was right enough to get the job done. Okay, maybe better to go in and stage a suicide and not just leave a flat-out murder, which would at the very least get my client called in for questioning.
But for me to find a locked door to deal with, and go in there and face him down, that was just wrong. Made no sense. Not when he was served up to me here, like soup and sandwich, framed in that window, like the target he was.
Then why didn’t I get it fucking over with?
Not that long ago I would have. If you think I was getting soft, if you think I was hesitant because I liked this man’s daughter, and there was a trickle of treacle running through the gristle that made up most of me, you are wrong. Or at least mostly you are. How had the Monkees put it? Was I a little bit wrong? And are you a little bit right?
But I wasn’t just a guy who killed people now. I had turned into someone who actually had curiosity between his ears, who had to think about things besides the pattern of a target and what weapon to use and means of entrance and egress, from a house, from a city. I wasn’t just killing people anymore. I had put myself in the position of having to think about the reasons why people were killed, before doing any killing myself (removing the lowlife likes of Farrell and Mateski excluded).
And something about this whole set-up was wrong.
Should I care? I had been paid money, and I would be paid more money. Maybe not enough to someday sit alone in a great big house and eat my soup and grilled cheese, but enough to pay the freight for a while. He was sitting right there. Almost facing me, angled to my right enough to make it unlikely he’d even notice when I took a single step to my left and fired.
But I didn’t take out the nine mil. I compromised. I left the automatic in my pocket, though my hand was in there with it, clutching it, as with my left fist I knocked on that side door where the help had exited.
He ignored it at first. He was old enough to be hard of hearing, but I hadn’t seen a hearing aid and somehow the man Jenny had described as a brick didn’t seem likely to allow himself to go through life not hearing the world around him. No, he could hear, all right. He wasn’t even wearing glasses as he read his magazine. He was a goddamn freak of nature.
I knocked again, pounding this time.
I kept it up, and finally the door opened about three inches, and an irritated slice of the big man’s sharp-featured face glowered at me. “No deliveries after dark.”
The door started to close and I managed to nose the toe of my left shoe in and say, “I’m sorry to bother you while you’re eating, sir.”
He frowned. His hair was silver and combed straight back— thinning from age, not going bald; he lacked his son’s fashionable sideburns. “You...you’re that...friend of my daughter’s, aren’t you? The reporter. You’ve already been told.”
“Sir...I need a few minutes. It’s important.”
Red climbed into the grooved face and the dark eyes fixed on me like gun sights, as he opened the door wider. “I don’t have a very high opinion of the press, young man, but I have an even lower one of rude people who bother other people at home. I went to college with the publisher of the Sun, and I can assure you, you will not have any luck placing any story there, not on this subject, not on any subject. Now, young man—go away.”
He began to shut the door and I said, “The two men you hired to kill Roger Vale are dead. Interested in the details?”
That froze him. His eyes widened and lost their focus, his mouth yawned in the kind of stupidity that even the most brilliant person can feel, when he sees a car is about to hit him.
“If I wanted to kill you, sir, you’d be dead. There’s a nine millimeter Browning automatic pointing at you right now. In my jacket pocket. And just moments ago, I could have dropped you face-down into your tomato soup. I’m coming in.”
He backed up.
I shut the door behind me. We were in a hallway that at left opened up into a laundry room off of which was a door to the garage.
I asked, “Is there anyone else in the house?”
“Who are you? Your name isn’t really Quarry, is it?”
“It will do.” I showed him the nine mil. “Anyone else in the house?”
“No. I live alone. No live-in help.”
“No one’s coming over this evening? Your son maybe? Your daughter?”
His frown deepened. “No. You saw I was eating a quiet supper. I had nothing planned.”
“Good. You’re about to schedule me in. Let’s get out of this entryway.”
His expression was morose. He had aged ten years in the last two minutes. Of course that only made him look his real age.
He turned and moved slowly toward the kitchen, maybe half a dozen steps away; he was two or three inches taller than me, and outweighed me twenty-five pounds, easy. We were passing garden implements on the wall, pruning shears, trowel, hand pruner, and when he glanced at these, I said, “Please, sir, don’t consider that. I know you’re a powerful man in this community, but I’m a younger man. With a gun.”
His voice was soft, and maybe had some fear in it. “Why don’t you just kill me here and be done with it?”
“I’m not here to kill you,” I lied. “I’m here for an exchange of information.”
“About my granddaughter’s death?” This had a sharp-edged sound, with no fear, as he glanced tight-eyed over his shoulder.
“Assuming she’s dead, yes,” I said.
We were just moving into the kitchen, past cupboards and a refrigerator and stove that were all out of date for such a wealthy homeowner. A pan of tomato soup simmered on the stove, its comforting smell in the air. I glanced right at the big, many-paned window, with its filmy curtains tied back, which had provided such a generous view of his soup-eating.
I said, “I don’t want to talk in here. Let’s go in your study.”
He had his hands up, though I hadn’t told him to. “Did Vale hire you? Did that son of a bitch—”
“You’re reading it wrong,” I said, though he really wasn’t far off. “You lead the way.”
But he didn’t move.
Sneering back at me, he said, “Don’t you know the layout of the house? Haven’t you done your homework?”
“You were afraid before. Not a bad idea to stay that way.”
“I’m going to be eighty in a few months. How afraid of dea
th do you think an eighty-year-old man can be?”
“Judging by my experience? Pretty fucking afraid. Let’s go. I don’t want to stand here with a gun in my hand in a bright room by a window.”
He led me to a hallway, where at my bidding he switched on the light. I didn’t want to be walked through a dark house by its owner. This was clearly a dangerous man. Just as he needed not to underestimate me, I needed to pay him the same respect.
Passing archways, I got glimpses of a very femininely decorated home in the French Provincial Style. This was still his late wife’s house. Whether he’d left it that way out of love or respect, I couldn’t say. I doubted it was laziness.
The room he led me to—the addition on the far side of the house—was as much den as study, a deep narrow space with a brick fireplace facing you upon entering. Over it was a big goldframed oil painting of the Mr. and Mrs. Clarence Stockwell of thirty or forty years ago—the powerful banker and his trophy wife, a beautiful blonde combination of daughter Jenny and granddaughter Candy...and indeed the source of those green translucent eyes.
Yet despite the dead woman’s looming presence, this was a man’s room—dark wood paneling, Oriental carpet, to the right a pair of comfy brown-leather recliners facing a console TV with a big 25” tube, to the left an office area dominated by a massive mahogany desk surrounded by built-in bookcases extending above and below and around windows. A comfortable-looking tufted leather visitor’s chair was positioned opposite.
This was where Clarence lived—here and the kitchen and a bedroom upstairs, probably. The rest of the house belonged to his late wife.
“You take that,” I said, pointing to the tufted leather guest chair, and got back behind the desk, settling myself into the swivel number. A drawer back there might have a gun in it, and I didn’t want this getting ugly.
He complied, sitting arrow-straight, as if in defiance, his hands on his knees, his chin up. In his tie and white shirt and suit pants, he looked like an over-the-hill waiter about to get a dressing-down.
“Relax,” I said. I wasn’t pointing the nine millimeter at him, my elbow propped against an armrest, the weapon firmly but casually in hand.
“I’m fine,” he said.
“No. You’re making me nervous. Relax.”
He let air out, a lot of it. He crossed his legs. Folded his arms. Some of the stiffness went away.
“Good,” I said. “Do you smoke?”
“No. Why, do you?”
“No, that shit’s bad for you. Not smoking must’ve helped you make almost eighty. I just thought it might put you at ease.”
His face clenched in a fist-tight frown. “Let’s just get this over with, whatever the hell it is.”
“All right. I’m an interloper. The details aren’t important, but I knew who those two men were, and why they were in Stockwell, and I stopped them.”
He narrowed his eyes as he picked his words with painful care. “The two men. The...two men carrying out the assignment...?”
“I’m not wearing a wire, and if I were, this would be way past entrapment, Mr. Stockwell. You can talk freely. Call them assassins, hitmen, contract killers, whatever you’re comfortable with.”
“A rose by any other name,” he said dryly.
“Right. I stopped them.”
His chin raised just a little, but not a defensive gesture. “Meaning you...killed them?”
“Like you said—by any other name. I’m not going to provide any details. I’ll say this much—one handled surveillance on Vale, the other was here to do the killing. Did you know that was how it worked?”
He shook his head.
“You didn’t hire them directly?”
He shook his head again.
“You approached a middleman, by networking through a mob source...some Chicago connection...dating back to your dog track days.”
His eyes widened briefly and again his chin lifted. This was only the second time I’d really surprised him tonight. “Who are you, Mr. Quarry?”
“I told you. An interloper. So the middleman hasn’t called you, today, yesterday? To inform you of the death of one or more of the men he sent?”
“No.”
“You were not aware that this thing had started to go south?” “Absolutely not.”
I believed him.
“Okay, Mr. Stockwell. You almost certainly will be hearing from the individual you dealt with. You may be told that the contract is kaput, or you may be told a replacement team will be sent. I really have no idea which. You might be asked to put up more money, and you would have every right to refuse. You might suspect you’re being taken advantage of, and I would tend to agree, because why would you pay more just because his people screwed up?”
“Who the hell are you?”
“Not a reporter. But I have been doing some digging. And here’s what I don’t understand. Here’s why you are still alive.”
He tasted his tongue. “You have my attention.”
“Whatever minor association you had, decades ago, with the Chicago Outfit, you are not a criminal. You were born into a wealthy family, a family that had to make adjustments when their wealth-creating business went bust. So you learned to be a businessman, and a damn good one. Were you in the military?”
“No.”
“Doing the math, I figure you were probably too young for the First World War, too old for the second, way too old for Korea.”
His frown mingled irritation and confusion. “Why is that significant?”
“It’s significant because you didn’t go to war and learn to kill people. The kind of attitude toward life and death that you can acquire in war, that’s not an apparent part of who you are.”
“Why do I have the sense, Mr. Quarry, that it is part of who you are?”
I smiled. “Because you’re an astute businessman, Mr. Stockwell. You have dealt with a lot of people of a wide variety in your long experience. But my point is—you haven’t routinely been involved in criminal enterprises. For one thing, no need. You own the town.”
“That’s an exaggeration.”
“But not much of one. And, as I say, you are not a killer. Yet you reached back into your family’s one major brush with the mob to arrange not just a killing, but for someone to be tortured to death. That’s extra. Very expensive. And it speaks of a depth of revenge. Of hate.”
His arms were unfolded now, elbows on the armrests. “I loved my granddaughter very much.”
“That part of it, I understand. That I get. That kind of emotion, that’s something almost any of us can wrap our head around. But why are you so sure of yourself in this?”
This frown was strictly confusion. “I don’t follow...”
“You wouldn’t target Roger Vale for torture and death lightly. And I have to tell you, sir, that I have done some due diligence here. I have investigated, in a limited but experienced way. Your granddaughter may not be dead. She could be a runaway.”
“No.”
“I understand why you consider it unlikely, but it’s possible. Or she could have gone off to a big city and met with an unfortunate end before she had a chance to get in touch with her father, and say she was sorry and please Daddy send me a plane ticket. First class, as your son pointed out. No, she was a beautiful, sexually desirable young woman. She could easily meet with a tragic end on her first night in a big bad city.”
“No.”
“But if she was murdered—and that murder had been made to look like a disappearance—the possible suspects here in Stockwell are many. I know you loved your granddaughter, sir, but...she was sexually promiscuous. I think you know that.”
He grunted something that was not quite a laugh. “It seems to run in the family.”
“Your daughter is another story. I think you probably spoiled her like Candy’s father spoiled his daughter. It led to some unfortunate things in both instances, but Jenny is really a good daughter, sir, and you should appreciate her more, what a smart, unique person she i
s, whatever her quirks. You might want to shift some of that love for your dead granddaughter your alive daughter’s way, but hey. That’s none of my business.”
“No it isn’t.”
“Candy, for whatever reason, had the sort of low self-esteem that leads a girl to seek approval by giving herself to men. She gave herself to a lot of men and boys. And any one of them is a candidate for her murder. Roger Vale is a gay dance instructor, and the notion that he is actually pretending so he can ravage young students, well...it seems absurd on its face. That dumbass Pettibone kid is a likelier suspect. So is her married choir director, or Christ knows how many of her discarded sexual partners. Why Roger Vale?”
“Because, Mr. Quarry,” he said, “he killed her. And...and did God knows what else to her before that.”
And he began to cry.
Just as his son had, in that insurance office, only harder and longer. He fished a handkerchief from his pocket—he was of an age that still carried those—and covered his face in it, like me covering Farrell’s face with a pillow.
When it subsided, he blew his nose, put the hanky away, and said, “Sorry.”
“That’s okay. Vale. Why are you so sure?”
He was still working at getting his composure back. Then he made a circular gesture with a forefinger toward the desk, and asked: “Could we trade places please?”
I didn’t answer right away.
He said, “There’s no weapon in any of the drawers. But there’s something I want to show you. May I get back there?”
I nodded, rose, and vacated the swivel chair. We swapped places, but I didn’t sit immediately, and neither did he. He was reaching for his other pants pocket but froze his fingers before digging into it.
“There’s a key I need to get,” he said, wanting permission. “I need to unlock a drawer. No weapon, you have my word.”
Anyway, like they said in the old cowboy pictures, I still had the drop on him.
“Go ahead,” I said.
He nodded thanks, then got out keys on a chain, selected a very small one from among maybe a dozen including house keys, and bent over slightly to unlock a desk drawer to his right. I kept the nine mil trained on him, but what he brought back was a stack of manila file folders, four of them, each around an inch thick.
The Wrong Quarry Page 16