I glanced through the binoculars, over toward the brown brick place. I studied all the windows, but saw no one; all drapes were drawn. I looked over at the garage, which was a separate little brown brick building near the house, and saw the double door go up, suddenly, thanks to some automatic device, I guessed, and a car drove out, a Pontiac Grand Prix. The garage door shut itself, and the Grand Prix pulled out into the street and was gone.
I hadn’t got a look at the driver, but whoever it was, this marked a significant departure from the backup man’s time chart, a departure that would go unrecorded, and I took some mild pleasure in knowing that Ash and his pal had unwittingly screwed up. Since the record didn’t show any visitors tonight-and, judging by my quick flip through the notebook, there had never been any visitors since the stakeout began, either-I could safely assume the person who had driven off in that Grand Prix was the mark. Meaning a screwup serious enough to cost Ash and his pal an extra week of work, maybe, till they were again sure they had the mark’s schedule down pat.
I didn’t want to hang around too long, of course, so I began giving the rest of the one-room efficiency apartment a quick onceover. There was the usual second-hand furniture, more faded wallpaper, more frayed throw rugs, a kitchenette over in the corner, and the couch that would open out into a bed. In the chest of drawers I expected to find a box of slugs or, anyway, something of that sort among the guy’s clothes.
Only there weren’t any clothes in the chest of drawers.
But there was a suitcase, I finally noticed, over by the wall.
Packed and ready to go.
Which meant one thing, and one thing only: Tonight, as the saying goes, was the night.
The backup man would be coming back here, soon probably, to sit at the window and watch the brown brick house while Ash went in and did his thing. After which both of them would split.
Which was what I had to do, and fast.
I took a quick look around to make sure I hadn’t left any signs of my poking around, and got out of there, holding onto that nine-millimeter like a mother holding onto a kid. Or, maybe it was the other way around. I locked the door behind me as I left, and on the stairs I bumped into him.
The backup man.
I said excuse me and went on.
He said, “Hey…”
I turned around. Smiled.
I hadn’t seen the guy up close before. As I’d expected, he didn’t look quite so young, up close. He was on the short side, but wide in the shoulders and probably a strong son of a bitch. The long straight hair and full face beard gave him the desired hippie effect, but the cold little eyes said Vietnam. I hoped he wouldn’t see the same thing in my eyes. One item in my favor: his hands were exposed, and had nothing in them. He didn’t seem to realize how close he was to dying right now, closer to dying than a guy in a VW on a mountain road with two semis coming straight at him. Which is to say, he didn’t seem to realize what was under the raincoat slung over my arm.
He said, “I haven’t seen you around here before.”
I said, “I never been here before.”
He said, “Why not?”
I said, “Because it’s the first time I got the bitch to fuck me in a bed instead of in my fucking back seat, if it’s any of your fucking business, you nosy asshole.”
He studied me a second.
And then grinned.
“Sorry, man,” he said. “We had some guys rip us off here last week. Just checkin’ you out.”
I shrugged. “Forget it.”
We both waited a second for the other to leave, and finally he went on up the stairs, keeping an eye over his shoulder at me as he went, but smiling, waving a little as he disappeared from view.
I went on down, not looking back, wanting to, but not doing it. If he was up there, looking down at me, like I knew he would be, I couldn’t afford to be looking back. That could be enough to confirm suspicions he might have. And I could feel his eyes on my back, and my hand tightened around the gun and Jesus I wanted to look back, but I didn’t.
And then I was in the Buick again, starting it up, driving out of that goddamn neighborhood, and I noticed Ash, on foot, on the sidewalk, on his way to that brown brick palace with a gun in his pocket.
Which struck me funny, since nobody was home.
13
“I almost gave up on you,” she said.
She startled me. I didn’t know anyone else was in there. I’d come in, glanced around the room, seeing nothing but the pool and the aqua walls and the shadowy reflecting of the water on the walls, no one sitting around poolside, no sign of motion in the pool itself, and got out of the robe and folded it and put both robe and towel-wrapped gun on the floor, ready to dive in, when she spoke.
Those light-blue eyes of hers were peeking up over the edge of the pool at me, from just a few feet away. Her white-blond hair was wet and flat against her head. It made her look young.
I sat down next to the robe and towel and smiled. “I didn’t expect to see you till tomorrow morning.”
“I didn’t expect that, either.”
“What happened?”
“I got the urge to swim.”
“I see.”
“Sometimes you just get the urge, you know.”
“I know. I like to, a couple times a day, if I can.”
“Like to what?”
“Swim.”
The lighting in the room, over the pool especially, was subdued. On either end of the pool was some space for deck chairs, above which were windows in the ceiling (the pool room was on the top floor of the Concort) that during the day let in natural light, and in the summer were opened for purposes of suntanning. But it was winter, now, and nighttime as well, and there wasn’t any sun coming in those ceiling windows. And, as I said, the lighting over the pool itself was subdued.
“We seem to have the room to ourselves again,” she said.
“We seem to.”
“You want to come in for a swim, or you just going to sit there?”
“Come up here a minute.”
“No, you come on in.”
“Please.”
“Well… all right.”
She pushed up out of the pool and emerged shyly, perhaps embarrassed about the brief two-piece suit she had chosen to wear, a white suit clinging wetly to her, in place of the black one-piece she had worn this morning.
“Come here a second,” I said.
“I’ll get you wet,” she said, grinning, dripping.
“Bend down.”
She bent down.
I gave her a nice, soft hello kiss, a little kiss, and then drew back and waited.
She took my hand and tugged and I got to my feet, and she pressed herself to me and gave me an altogether different sort of a kiss.
“You got me wet,” I said.
“I warned you.”
“How did you know I’d come swimming this evening? How long were you prepared to wait for me?”
“I didn’t know, and who says I was waiting for you? Not longer than midnight.”
Then she pushed away from me playfully and dove into the pool. She splashed around in there like a porpoise, and called at me to come on in, taunted me, and I said just a minute and walked over and looked out the door. The hall was empty. It was midevening, and the pool was open for use by Concort guests, but in the middle of winter, middle of the week, I didn’t figure it would be too busy. So maybe nobody would notice and make a stink if I closed the door and flipped the lock.
I did that, and dove in after her.
We swam around and played like kids, splashing, chasing, dunking each other, all of that, in a good twenty-minute romp. Then she paddled over to the side and hugged it, hollering, “Base! Enough! Time out.” She was out of breath, gasping for breath, and yet laughing at the same time. I paddled over to her.
“You…” she said, still trying to catch her wind, “… you locked the door.”
“Just noticed that, did you?”
“Why’d you do that? Lock the door.”
“I thought maybe we could use some privacy.”
“What if somebody complains?”
“I’m a friend of a friend of the manager.”
“Me, you mean.”
“You.”
“Well, I suppose that’s right. Still…”
“Why, you got something against privacy?”
“No…”
“We talked about that this morning, remember?”
“What?”
“How nice it is swimming alone.”
“Alone? There’s two of us.”
“Who’s counting?”
“Who’s swimming?”
Not us. I was holding onto her. I was up against her. She was holding onto the side of the pool with one hand and me with the other.
“Not us,” I admitted. “Do you mind?”
“No.”
“Have you ever done it in the water?”
“Done what? No.”
“Me neither.”
“Why… why do you ask?”
“I was just wondering what it would be like.”
“I, uh… wonder.”
My hand was cupping her ass now.
“I don’t suppose anyone’s ever done it in here,” I said.
“I don’t suppose. You think it’s, uh, possible, here? I mean, this is the deep end.”
“I wonder.”
“But, uh… we’ll never know, if we don’t try, will we?”
“No,” I said, slipping casually out of my trunks, “I guess not.”
“And the door is locked…”
“Yes,” I said, thumbs in the brief bottoms of her bikini, “it is.”
And they slid right off her.
And I slid right into her.
Fucking in the water is a lot like drowning, I suppose, only when you go down for the third time, you don’t give a damn. It’s very noisy, at least the way we did it, thrashing around, clinging to each other or anyway me clinging to her while she hugged me with her thighs, pumping, churning, while trying to hold onto the edge of the pool behind her, but toward the end there she lost hold and we drifted away, locked together, and we were underwater, and we came under there, both of us, and we kicked to the surface and let loose of each other but stayed close, and gulped the air, and when we could, laughed, and then silently stroked over to the side of the pool. The whole thing lasted about three minutes, but they were three of the most enjoyable minutes I ever spent.
This time, I was holding onto the side of the pool, and she touched my shoulder and said, “Thank you.”
“Are you kidding?”
“Not at all. You’ll never know.”
“Maybe I’d like to.”
“Why… why don’t we just, uh… leave it at thank you.”
“Up to you.”
“And I want you to know there’s no obligation. You don’t have to see me again, while you’re in town, Jack. Understand? If you don’t want me to come here to swim tomorrow morning, or if you just don’t want to show up yourself or something, fine, fine.”
“You know what?”
“What?”
“It’s hard to take a speech like that seriously, coming from somebody who doesn’t have any pants on.”
She looked down into the water, where her silky white-blond pubic hair was waving like provocative seaweed, and she laughed again. “I see what you mean,” she said, and touched me.
“You know something else?” I said.
“What?”
“I haven’t eaten yet.”
“In the water, you mean?”
I splashed her. “Supper.”
“Oh. Neither have I.”
“Want some? I hear there’s a good restaurant downstairs.”
“Oh… I can’t.”
“Well. Up to you.”
“No, it’s not that… I just can’t go down there, my hair, all wet.”
“We could always go up to my room and call room service.”
“We could do that.”
We did.
First, I had to go deep-diving to retrieve my trunks and her bikini bottoms from the bottom of the pool, where they’d sunk like soggy stones; and then she got her robe, which she’d folded up and laid behind a deck chair, and stopped across the hall at the ladies’ dressing room for her clothes, but went down in the elevator wearing her robe over her swimsuit, like I did.
When we got to the room, I called room service and was told it was too late for anything but drinks. She got on the phone and told them her name and they took her order: chateaubriand for two and a bottle of red wine, which had an elaborate name and a date and all, and to someone like me who knows little or nothing about such things, that’s pretty impressive. So was the service she was getting, at the drop of her name.
We turned on the TV and crawled onto the bed and fooled around awhile, and just when it was getting interesting, supper came. The nine-millimeter was still wrapped in the towel, and I stuck it under my arm as I answered the door, but supper was all it was, so I tipped the guy five and he went away and we ate. We didn’t talk much at all, except to comment now and then on the television show we were pretending to watch. I did learn that she was a widow, a fairly recent one, and that this was a coming-out party of sorts for her.
I’d had a tingle about her all night, and not just sexual. She was real. She was not some whore sent around to set me up. In the first place, nobody knew I was in town, that I knew of, so nobody was likely to be setting me up. In the second place, the action she got on the phone, getting that after-hours room service, proved she was important in a way even the fanciest hooker can never hope to be. And that fast fuck in the pool had been real. Some sort of emotional purging for her. She was real. Nobody could be that good an actress.
But I had this goddamn tingle about her, and after she fell asleep, after we’d screwed a few times, I went through her purse, and found a picture in her wallet, a picture that I knew was of her late husband, knew it in my head and my gut simultaneously.
The picture was of someone I knew. Used to know.
The woman in my bed was the Broker’s widow.
14
She was gone when I woke up.
For one groggy moment, I wondered where she’d gone, then remembered I’d heard her leaving, last night, around midnight. She’d got up, got her clothes on, got her things together, stopping momentarily to brush my face with her lips before she left. She was barely out of there when I was sitting up in bed, in the dark, pointing the nine-millimeter at the door. But the door didn’t do anything, so after a few minutes I got out of bed, fastened the night latch, laid the gun on the nightstand, and slept through till nine the next morning.
This morning.
On the bureau I found a note she’d left, saying, “Think I’ll pass on the morning swim. Call me this afternoon, if you want another evening one.” Knowing her, that ambiguous use of the word “one” was on purpose. The note was signed, “Carrie,” with phone number beneath.
I decided to pass on the morning swim, myself, and not just because she wasn’t going to be there. Until now, I’d been reasonably convinced no one knew I was in town; but I couldn’t be so sure, now that my easy poolside pickup of the evening before had turned out to be Broker’s widow. I mean, I could hardly afford to just shrug and say, “Oh, so that’s who she is. Isn’t that an interesting coincidence.” Not that coincidences don’t happen, but in my position, chalking things up casually to coincidence could coincidentally lead to things going suddenly black… perhaps at the same time water in a swimming pool was taking on a reddish tone.
Cold needles of water struck my face, and I let them, wanted the water cold, showering and waking up at the same time, still thinking about Carrie and who she was. And the more I did, the less this seemed like a coincidence, or, anyway, the less it seemed a wildly, suspiciously improbable one. After all, I used to meet the Broker at the Concort, and knew that he had money in the place; well,
now his wife had inherited his interest, and was it so unusual for her to come around and make occasional use of the pool?
This was, keep in mind, a young woman who evidently had been a showpiece-you should excuse the expression-for a husband twice her age, a bright, probably well-educated girl from a wealthy, sheltered background, no doubt, who would likely know little or nothing about her late husband’s illicit business activities. The fact that Broker died a violent death, which had led to a partial public surfacing of the dark side of his business life, could explain her extended period of mourning, which had apparently ended last night, in the pool, in bed.
I thought about all that, going down in the elevator, and by the time I’d had breakfast, had made my mind up about something.
So far, these several days I’d been in town, I’d kept a low profile, and that had its advantages; but it gets boring in the shadows, after a while, and I never did enjoy doing stakeout work. Besides, after my run-in with Broker’s wife, I was feeling confused, even paranoid, and enough of that. Time to come out.
Time to go see an old friend and say hello.
Time to see Ash.
15
It was almost warm. People were going around without coats. Occasional patches of snow remained, but that was about all. The ground was soft, the streets were slushy, but it was a nice day, for a change.
Then the sun slid under a cloud, the wind got some of its bite back, and I spotted Curtis Brooks going in the Holiday Inn.
I was just getting out of the Buick and was on my way to see Ash, when I saw the lawyer going in ahead of me. I laid back. Yesterday I had seen Brooks coming out of the motel and assumed he’d been to see Ash, and now today I’d be able to confirm or dispel that assumption. Only I was already convinced Brooks had called on Ash yesterday, so this would just get in my way. I wanted to confront Ash, but not with company around. And I might eventually want to confront Brooks, but not both of them at once.
Shit.
Brooks, by the way, seemed about as happy to be here as I was to have him here. All I got was a glimpse of him, before he ducked inside the motel, but that was all I needed to see how irritated he was. He had the frustrated, defiant gait of a constipated man on his way to complain about an out-of-order toilet, and the pained expression of somebody who just found out where his tax money was going. His frown threatened to put a crack in that Florida tan of his, and when a guy spoke to him in the lobby, old Public Image-conscious Curtis Brooks didn’t reply.
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