Quarry's ex q-9

by Max Allan Collins

  When I’d shown up unannounced and a day early, the only car in Joni’s drive had been her Marlin. So I figured the guy must have walked over from work, or maybe got picked up by her, but anyway it struck me as odd that a mechanic wouldn’t drive his own goddamn car over when he dropped by to fuck my wife.

  I decided to discuss this, and other topics, with him the next day. I felt I’d cooled down enough to have a nice rational conversation with the guy. Explain that I was Joni’s husband, back from Nam, and that I understood people had needs and I was going to try to work things out with her, and would appreciate it if he would back off. In my defense, while I thought I was rational, I was really in a sleep-deprived state-I’d slept not at all on the plane home, and had spent all last night wide awake in my motel room, killing her a dozen ways but finally deciding to be an adult about this.

  Why the mechanic’s car hadn’t been at Joni’s became immediately apparent when I went to his crummy little house and found him on his back under a sporty vehicle that most of his money probably went into, jacked up with its back wheels off. His “baby.” Working on its rear end. Kind of like he’d been working on my wife’s rear end.

  He looked up at me from under there, upper lip curling in contempt- now he knew who I was. Apparently Joni had got around to filling him in.

  Before I could say a word, he said, “I got nothing to say to you, bunghole.”

  “Fine,” I said.

  And kicked out the fucking jack.

  So that got me arrested. A couple of things saved my ass.

  For one, my actions had clearly not been premeditated-I made this point in a perhaps not subtle way, telling the cops at the scene, “If I’d planned to kill the prick, I’d have brought a gun along.”

  For another, a bunch of things soon emerged about Joni that I hadn’t known. Turned out I was her third husband. And not just any kind of third husband-her third serviceman-serving-in-Vietnam husband.

  Remember that pause when she was telling me how she’d never seen the California tourist spots till… I came along? Two of “me” had come along before I had.

  When she said she’d left home and made something of herself, it hadn’t been by going to work-it had been by marrying naive young schmucks like me who were about to go over to Vietnam and get dead. She was no polygamist, understand-she married us one at a time, and had been twice a widow.

  She got all the military bennies, including insurance and Christ knows what-but enough to buy a Marlin and a nice little house in La Mirada, even before yours truly had come along to sign over my pitiful paychecks to her.

  Only, I’d double-crossed her-I lived. If you called this living.

  Anyway, there was a lot of media coverage, strictly local, but a good deal of it. I should have got some jail time, manslaughter or something, but they didn’t even try me. The District Attorney wanted no part of it. At one point I sat across the desk from the guy, who wore a puzzled frown and a red bow tie. He was small and mustached and earnest, like a high school guidance counselor.

  The D.A. asked, “Is it possible that when you walked up to him, Mr. Williams may have accidentally knocked that jack out himself?”

  “Sure,” I said, and shrugged. What did that neighbor know, anyway? The one who’d been cutting his grass next door.

  It came out that I’d won some medals, and that further complicated things. The editorial pages were already full of complaints from right-wing columnists who thought returning veterans were being mistreated. If they were really concerned about guys like me being mistreated, they shouldn’t have sent us the fuck over in the first place.

  I told you before that I have never been a heavy drinker. But as I look back, I must admit I put it away pretty good for a while, after they cleared me of the murder. I got a little two-room apartment in a shitty section of L.A. and for several months sat around feeling sorry for myself, drinking rum and Coke and eating TV dinners and watching a little black-and-white TV and occasionally sprucing up enough to find a female to hate fuck.

  My father tracked me down to the flophouse. We had a fairly pleasant conversation, and he said he sympathized with me, understood what I’d done, and regretted my present situation. But the punchline was that my stepmother was afraid of me now, and I was told in no uncertain terms not to come home.

  Maybe Joni and I had something in common-maybe we were both looking for a father figure. The chief difference being she’d been looking for one to fuck her, like Williams, whereas I just needed a strong guiding hand. The Marine Corps wasn’t there to provide one anymore.

  Was that why the Broker’s approach had worked so well on me? He had tracked me down, too, imposing figure that he was-a broad-shouldered six two with prematurely white hair and a well-trimmed matching mustache, contrasting with his dark tan; handsome, his face younger than his demeanor, his eyes an icy blue. Tailored suit and a knowing half-smile-the type who used to appear in those “What kind of man reads Playboy?” ads.

  He was Madison Avenue smooth, all the way, and had really done his homework. Knew about my wife and Williams and the publicity (even though he did not live in California). We sat at a scarred table in my crap pad and he politely accepted a rum and Coke in a Yogi Bear jelly jar and told me how badly I’d been treated, by my wife, by the media, by my family, by the law.

  I thought the law had done fine by me, actually. And what did he know about my family, and how did he know it?

  I am good at remembering conversations. I can even recall the nuances, right down to gestures and tone of voice, and I can report everything from the time of day to the weather, including the clothing worn…usually. But as you’ve seen, my memory of conversations with darling Joni is limited. And that first conversation with the Broker — arguably the most important of my life-is similarly vague in my mind.

  I do distinctly remember him saying, “I have an unusual opportunity for you, Mr…” He used my real name. “A money-making opportunity.”

  He didn’t come right out and say, “Are you interested in killing for hire?” It wasn’t like I’d filled out a truck stop matchbook, answering a question like, Looking for Opportunities in the Murder Trade? Can you draw Winky?

  No, but he did say something very similar to “How would you like to make real money at home doing what you did for almost no money overseas?”

  There’s no question that he caught me at just the right moment. Maybe I would have pulled out of my tailspin some other way, had I been offered some other, more mainstream opportunity. Still, I knew-just like the Broker knew-that I had only one marketable skill.

  I knew how to kill people.

  And I knew how to do it dispassionately. Because I understood, when the Broker explained that the individuals I would be asked to remove were already tagged for death.

  I believe he put it this way: “Essentially, they are walking around, marking time, until who they are and what they’ve done catches up with them. No one has earned the dubious distinction of being targeted for death without due cause.”

  Broker made it sound like all of the targets were bad persons whose transgressions could not be addressed by the legal system. But that was a rationalization designed to draw me in. I soon understood that a given target might be a decent sort who stood in the way of another party’s selfish interests.

  Anyway, none of it had anything to do with me. Someone with money enough to have another person killed had decided to do so, and that was that. The decision was made well before I got in the picture. My role was impersonal- clients opened a drawer, stuck in their hand, and I was the weapon they pulled out.

  I worked with the Broker for over five years. He described himself as “sort of an agent,” a middleman in the murder game, providing insulation between client and killer. Actually, killers, because the Broker’s system was to use those two-man Passive and Active teams I mentioned.

  The details are not important to this narrative, but you need to know that the Broker eventually betrayed me. And after
disposing of him, I wound up with what today you’d call a database, but in the mid-’70s was just a list.

  A very valuable list, however-over fifty names of guys like me, who had worked for the Broker, with full detailed files on each. Seeing my file with my face in it, as well as detailed info on two dozen kills of mine, I swore I’d never work through a middleman again. Not in the murder business, anyway.

  Of course, I could have exited that business-I had some money saved-but an interesting thought presented itself. I saw how I could use the Broker’s list, and keep working, in a new way, and on my own terms.

  I would choose a name from the Broker’s file-someone like myself-and travel to where that name lived and stake him out, then follow him to his next job. (I should note that a few of the names were female.) Through further surveillance, I would determine the identity of the target, whom I’d approach, offering to eliminate the threat. For a healthy fee, the hit team would be discreetly removed. For a further fee, I could also look into who had hired the hit, and remove that threat, too.

  It was risky. What if a target-approached by a stranger with a crazy story, claiming to be a sort of professional killer himself-called the cops or otherwise wigged out?

  But remember-anyone designated for a hit is somebody who almost certainly has done something worth getting killed over. Such an individual tends not to be a sterling model citizen-or, at least, is somebody well aware of a powerful, ruthless adversary, capable of such malfeasance.

  My hunch had been that these people would welcome help, especially since the other option was to take a bullet or get run over or fall down icy stairs. The money I could demand of my clients meant that I’d only have to perform this risky task once a year or so.

  And so far my thinking had proved valid-Nick Varnos was the sixth name I’d plucked from the Broker’s list. I’d watched him in Vegas for a month, and now I was in Boot Heel, Nevada, where I’d followed him. Admittedly, I’d got a little ahead of myself. But running into my talkative old pardner Jerry had saved me a lot of work.

  I already knew who the target was-I just needed a name. Couldn’t be too many movie directors staying at the Spur Motel. Of course, Nick Varnos was staying there as well, and I had to make my pitch to my prospective client before Nick made an accident happen.

  What the hell-I needed a place to stay myself.

  Maybe the Spur had another room available.

  THREE

  The Spur Motel was not my first stop, after returning to Boot Heel; in fact, I rolled right past it in the late Jerry’s red Mustang. I had another motel in mind, which required making my way through Main Street’s four-block minicanyon of neon.

  Traffic was modest-this was a Thursday night in the little casino town-as I made my way to the northern outskirts where that other motel awaited…the Saddle Up, which I have to say is one of the best names I ever heard for a sleazy little motel.

  The Saddle Up certainly fit that shabby bill. The Spur, which I’d only glimpsed, was three stories and quite modern. This was a horizontal strip of rooms with a freestanding office, a light-blue badly cracked and chippedup stucco structure that had been around since Bonnie and Clyde went looking for places to shack up away from the law. Billy the Kid may have attended the grand opening.

  Not that there was anything grand about the Saddle Up. Even its neon sign couldn’t deliver, depicting not a saddle but a horseshoe, a red one with yellow nails, several of which had burned out. Yellow neon lettering filled the upside-down U:

  COOL AIR

  COLOR TV

  NO VACANCY

  These were shorting in and out. No pool, just a gravel lot. Twelve rooms with only three cars, despite the buzzing No Vacancy notice.

  Which I knew to be inaccurate. Jerry had been staying here, and he’d checked out, all right. Maybe not from the Saddle Up, but…

  I nosed the Mustang into its stall outside Jerry’s room- number eight-and used the key I’d found in his wallet. I’d considered stopping at my car, which you may recall was parked on Main Street down from the Four Jacks, to get my nine millimeter Browning out of the glove compartment. But I didn’t really see any need for a weapon. Jerry was dead, and his partner Nick had no idea I was in town. It pays to be paranoid in my business, but why go to extremes?

  When I flipped on the light switch, I for the first time felt sorry for the late Jerry. That he’d had to live in this dump for the last month or so of his life was a small tragedy. The best that could be said for number eight was that the bed was made; oh, and for a quarter the mattress would vibrate. And the chugging air conditioner indeed delivered the cool air the neon sign promised.

  Looming over the bed’s nubby piss-color spread was one of those garishly framed matador prints that every cheap motel room seemed to have, jarring against ancient peeling wallpaper the color of sand dotted with green cartoon cacti. For that Southwestern flavor. The green shag carpeting gave you the feeling a whole realm of dirt and germs existed down in the underbrush, well out of any sweeper’s reach, not that any sweeper had recently gone on safari there.

  If some industrious biographer discovered Alfred Hitchcock had been traveling through these parts in the late 1950s, this bathroom with its shower stall might well turn out to have inspired a certain very famous scene. Of course, this was sheer speculation on my part; after all, Hitch couldn’t have fit inside that bathroom unless they’d built it around him.

  Beyond number eight’s natural ambiance, Jerry had added his own touches, namely a stack of well-thumbed men’s magazines (Hustler, Club, Gallery) on the junky dresser, which was also home to a bottle of baby oil, a king-size box of Puffs tissues, a boom box with a scattering of audio cassettes (Boston, Foghat, ZZ Top), two bottles of Dewar’s, one unopened, and a bathroom water glass with Scotch traces, adding more circles to the wooden dresser top. Everything a sophisticate like Jerry required for a rewarding night in.

  I didn’t touch much of anything. Whether that was to prevent fingerprints or to avoid catching something, I’ll leave for you to decide. But I found what I was looking for: a spiral notebook in a drawer by the bed that had all of Jerry’s surveillance notes. Each day was dated and ran to three pages. Three weeks and a few days worth.

  Everybody in the trade took such notes. But hanging on to them was a dangerous practice. On those rare occasions that I took the Passive role, I made sure my notes were cryptic, never including the name or even initials of the target or any secondary subjects.

  And by the time the Active half of the team showed up, a month or more of such information would be distilled- “He takes breakfast at the diner on Vermont Place every morning around seven,” “She walks the dog when she gets home from work, between five and five-thirty,” “He smokes a joint in the hot tub on his deck every night at eleven,” and so on. You transferred information along verbally, like the Indians used to pass their lore from generation to generation.

  And any notes were disposed of. Burned, usually.

  Jerry had names or initials and times and dates. Perfect for my purposes. But also another reason to wonder why he’d lasted as long as he had, or why somebody as skillful as Nick Varnos-staging accidental deaths was maybe the hardest kind of hit to pull off-had for ten fucking years put up with this douchebag.

  Part of why I stopped by the Saddle Up was to remove any trace of Jerry. So I packed his suitcase, including everything from his clothes (here at least he did well- they were as bland as mine, a page out of a Sears catalogue) to his stroke books, from his Dewar’s to his boom box with blues-rock cassettes. Toiletries, too. Included among the deceased’s effects were a. 38 Colt Super Automatic from his nightstand drawer and the box of slugs that went with it.

  I saved out a HENDRIX LIVES t-shirt (Hendrix maybe, not Jerry) and used it to rub away any fingerprints I might have left. Better than going near that box of Puffs.

  When the one-room suite was devoid of Jerry’s personality and had been returned to its own natural charming state, I hauled the
suitcase out and stuffed it in his trunk. Jerry had another handgun in there-a Colt Diamondback revolver in a little belt holster-and two boxes of ammunition for it. Just sitting there.

  Fucking idiot-what if a cop, suspecting a DUI, had stopped him and found this? Or worse, what if just now I’d gone through a stop sign or something, unfamiliar with Boot Heel, and got stopped, and the fuzz checked the trunk when they ran my driver’s license (a phony) and found it didn’t go with a red Mustang?

  Shit, if I hadn’t already killed that fuckwad, I’d have gladly done so now. It was all I could do not to drive back to that lonely road and run over him a few more times.

  Anyway, I used the Hendrix t-shirt to wipe any potential prints off any surface I touched, then drove the Mustang back into Boot Heel. I found a parking space not far from the Four Jacks in front of the Old West Museum amp; Gift Emporium-open but doing scant business-and (with some more Hendrix wiping) left the Mustang there.

  With the keys in the dash, and the windows rolled down.

  I had checked the registration and Jerry’s name wasn’t on it-at least, not any name I knew him by. Probably he’d bought it specifically for this gig, paying cash and using false I.D. Should any cops lay hands on it, there was no reason to think it would lead to Jerry, either the Jerry who lived somewhere with a straight cover story, or the Jerry who lay on a dirt highway with a head looking like a Halloween pumpkin some nasty neighbor kids kicked in.

  Might have made one of the more interesting wagers in Boot Heel tonight-betting somebody how long it would take the Mustang to disappear.

  Personally I didn’t give a shit where the Mustang wound up. I was just looking to get rid of it and simplify matters in a way that would buy me a day or two. With his skidmark puss, Jerry was unrecognizable, and when (next county over) he was found, whenever he was found, the wheels of justice should grind fairly slowly. At least as slowly as mine had over Jerry.