Hard Case Crime: The First Quarry

by Collins, Max Allan

  “...It’s a so-called non-fiction novel he’s been working on.”

  “Well, that’s his specialty, right? He’s the Collateral Damage guy.”

  The Broker chuckled dryly. “Yes, in more ways than one, now. He’s writing what he’s described to others as his magnum opus—a non-fiction novel about a Mafia kingpin.”

  “Fuck,” I said. “The girl’s father?”

  “Yes,” the Broker said. “But ask me nothing more about it.”

  I didn’t need to. But you had to hand it to the prof—not everybody can do research and get a blowjob at the same time.

  SIX

  The Holiday Inn’s pool room was free of screaming kiddies on this Monday after Christmas. Families were homeward bound, and even my redheaded whirlpool partner was nowhere in sight—if she’d gone home, too, that would be a shame. I had worked up some pretty good fantasies about my thirty-something pick-up—I had a rough draft of a Penthouse Forum letter well under way in my mind.

  But having the pool to myself—it was warm, maybe a little too warm—was a pleasure. My arms and legs cutting the water in this aquamarine echo chamber provided an otherworldly backdrop for the twenty laps I swam. The whirlpool felt good, really good, as my neck and upper back were fairly tense from all of last night’s fun and games.

  I didn’t feel guilty about Charlie—he’d gone wading in and found himself in the deep end and that wasn’t my doing—but I hadn’t ever shot a guy right next to me before. Much of what I’d done in Vietnam had been as a sniper or in fire fights, and I’d seen plenty of bloody bodies nearby, but usually my fellow soldiers. As for that guy Williams I dropped the car on, well, obviously, the car was between him and me.

  But I did have to face that a profession presented to me by the Broker as clinical, surgical, and distant could have some haphazard, sloppy, and close-up ramifications. Didn’t bother me, but this wasn’t exactly what I expected. No biggie.

  So I sat and relaxed for maybe half an hour in the swirling, soothing hot water, just enjoying the emptiness of the big room. I did a little time in the sauna, too, and was loose and comfortable and ready to start my day, come mid-morning.

  The Broker had told me not to go back to the split-level till I’d talked to him, late afternoon; but I wasn’t comfortable with the mess I’d left behind. So after I asked a few questions at the hotel’s front desk, I headed out in the rental Maverick and picked up some cleaning stuff at the Kmart and headed over.

  The stuff on the wall in the kitchen, on Charlie’s side of the breakfast nook, was crusty and nasty, and took some muscle with the Brillo pad to make go away. I thought there’d be a bullet hole under there, but the slug must have still been in Charlie’s noggin, possibly because where I’d shot him had been where the bone was pretty solid.

  I cleaned up blackened blood from the linoleum, and some other encrusted grue, and the place soon looked like a kitchen and not a slaughterhouse. Probably nothing I’d done would have given a good forensics team any problem, but for a real estate agent or home buyer who came wandering in, nobody would be the wiser.

  You might think I would do exactly what the Broker told me to, and not stray in any way from his instructions; but the thing was, my ass was hanging out, not his. I was in the trenches and he was in his Caddy or at the Concort Inn or in some fancy mansion somewhere, so the decision was mine. If, this afternoon, the Broker wound up telling me to book it out of Dodge, and I’d have to leave that house behind, with blood spatter that wasn’t about to be mistaken for a Jackson Pollock painting, then we’d just be asking for trouble.

  Cleaning up that mess wasn’t my only secret insubordination where the Broker was concerned: I had also failed to mention the half a dozen rolls of 35mm film of Charlie’s that I’d found. My favorite game is poker, if I haven’t mentioned it, and in poker you protect your hole card. And my hunch was those film rolls might be my ace.

  In downtown Iowa City, I went to the photo shop the Holiday Inn desk clerk recommended, and left the rolls to be developed, with my photos ready tomorrow morning. I told the bored middle-aged guy behind the counter these were art shots, meaning naked women would be on some of them, and asked if that would be a problem. He said no, but it would be an extra twenty bucks.

  By then it was close to noon and I followed another of the desk clerk’s tips and walked over to a sandwich shop called Bushnell’s Turtle, named for an early submarine and reflecting the style of sandwiches they served.

  A record store, a book shop and Bushnell’s were among half a dozen businesses in double-wide temporary buildings housed right out in the middle of Clinton Street at the end of East College, which was mostly blocked off for the construction of a pedestrian mall. I walked up a wheelchair-friendly ramp and into the unpretentious sandwich emporium, where you ordered at a counter from a chalkboard menu on the wall, got your food and found a table.

  For winter break being on, the unpretentious sub shop was surprisingly busy, with straight customers from the business and retail community mixed in with hippie-ish college students. I’d already ordered when I spotted Annette Girard and Professor Byron, at a table over by the windows along Clinton, too late to make an inconspicuous retreat.

  What the hell, I was just another college student, right? Longish hair, young face, no sweat. The question was, did I take a nearby table to eavesdrop on their conversation, or did I play it safe and position myself as far away from the pair as possible?

  Do I have to tell you I took a table adjacent? I didn’t figure there was much if any chance of Annette, who was deep in conversation with her loving prof, recognizing me from Sambo’s, where we’d had our brief and not terribly memorable conversation.

  They seemed to be past their meal or just having coffee, and I nibbled at a delicious sandwich (not a sub) where bratwurst and mozzarella and sauerkraut mingled nicely on rye. Beat the hell out of Slim Jims and Hostess cupcakes. And I could hear the couple pretty well.

  “You have to open up, Annette,” he was saying, the oratorical baritone nicely modulated into whispery intimacy, “you have to be honest. That’s part of the novel technique, you know.”

  Her head was tilted, her brunette hair pausing at the shoulders of her green and black paisley blouse on its way down her back. “Honesty in characterization and human behavior, sure...but otherwise, isn’t all fiction a contrivance?”

  An out-of-control eyebrow lifted in his hawkish face. “Of course it is, but when done well, a very high level of contrivance. Fiction is, after all, the lie that tells the truth. In a non-fiction work, you have to find multiple sources, and you often have to hew to accepted history, and that’s a joke. But in fiction, you are inside the narrator’s head, and in the first person, you share space with that narrator.”

  She was frowning. “But narrators in fiction can be unreliable. You’ve told me that.”

  “And that’s permissible in a non-fiction novel, too, as long as the narrator, the main character, is you, and any exaggerations or lies are told in the context of your personal truth.”

  Wow. Was this guy full of shit!

  “But I would encourage you not to lie,” he was saying. “I would encourage you to engage your memories head-on. Confront them and conquer them. For example, you need to share with your reader every horrible thing your father ever did to you.”

  “K.J.,” she said, “I don’t want to relive all of that. It took me years of therapy to get past any of it.”

  “Then you haven’t gone past it. Anyway, therapy is a crutch; writing is catharsis. You put these experiences in your non-fiction novel, every single thing you witnessed, and when you’re done, you can close the book on that entire sordid chapter. Literally.”

  I was confused. Who was writing the book on Annette’s mob-boss father? Professor or student? Or were they collaborating?

  “Anyway, we can discuss it this evening,” Byron said, and rose, scooting his chair back and gathering his parka-style fur-lined khaki-green jacket; he was in a
darker green sweater with the collars of a pale yellow shirt sticking out, and well-worn, just-another-radical blue jeans.

  She asked him, “How many meetings do you have this afternoon?”

  “Three. Should be safe to come around by six. We’ll cook up some chili and put the Coltrane on and just talk this through.”

  She got up, too, getting into the familiar white coat with white fur collar, and that’s when she recognized me. She brightened and met my eyes and I frowned at her as if I didn’t know why the fuck she was looking at me—maybe not the most credible reaction from a straight guy having a beautiful girl gaze right at him.

  “Hi!” she said.

  “Hello,” I said.

  “You remember me—from Sambo’s?”

  The professor was studying me as if I were an exam paper written in crayon. Then he turned to Annette and asked, “What were you doing in Sambo’s?”

  “Having coffee, reading. When you had your meetings last night? You know it’s just across from where I live.”

  “Ah. Sure.” He put on a smile for me and nodded.

  She held her hand out. “I didn’t get your name. I’m Annette.”

  “Jack,” I said, and shook hands with her.

  The prof didn’t offer his hand. But he did ask, with tight politeness, “What are you studying, Jack?”

  “Just another English major,” I said. “Nice to meet you, Annette...Professor Byron.”

  That seemed to please him, me knowing who he was. “So I don’t need to introduce myself.”

  “No, I read your book about Vietnam. I’m a vet myself.”

  “How did you like it?”

  “Vietnam really sucked.”

  “I meant my book.”

  “Oh! It was really good.” I of course hadn’t read it. But I figured that was all you needed to say to any writer to make a pal out of him.

  And it worked.

  “Well, thanks, Jack,” he said, and now he finally held out his hand. “You interested in writing? You can always try out for the Workshop.”

  His grip was cold and clammy.

  I said, “I hear it’s tough, the competition.”

  “Oh yes, definitely.” He nodded toward his favorite student. “But talent, like cream, does rise to the top.”

  Some writer, coining a phrase like that.

  He was saying, “Annette here is going to be the next Flannery O’Connor.”

  “Hey, that’s great.” Who the fuck was Flannery O’Connor?

  Must have been somebody pretty good, because Annette was blushing. That’s what I said: blushing.

  She nodded and headed out and he followed with no nod to me and I finished my sandwich. The Broker would love that, me talking literature with the target and the client’s kid.

  So that afternoon, with the world already growing dark outside my window, I called the Broker from the phone in my room at the Holiday Inn, and left out any report on my luncheon meeting at Bushnell’s Turtle.

  “You’ll be relieved to know,” the Broker said, “that Charles Koenig has a small one-man private investigative agency in Des Moines, Iowa. He is divorced and has no children and is unlikely to be missed by anyone other than perhaps his landlord.”

  “Cool,” I said.

  “And I would doubt that Mrs. Byron hired him in person. She lives in a small college town in Connecticut, where her husband first taught, before his writing career really took off. They, too, are a childless couple.”

  “You figure the wife looked for a PI in Iowa who could take on this case. Let her fingers do the walking, or anyway the long distance operator’s fingers.”

  “Precisely. Hence, Charles Koenig of Des Moines.”

  I believe the Broker is the only person I ever heard speak the word “hence” in a sentence. Or not in a sentence, for that matter.

  “So then I should stay,” I said, “and finish what I came to do.”

  “I believe so...if you are willing to take a certain risk.”

  Well, let’s see. Last night I had dragged a plastic-wrapped corpse down a hill so I could load it in a car trunk and drive to a truckstop and pass the stiff off to some other asshole. Yeah. I guessed I was up for a risk.

  “What kind of risk, Broker?”

  “You need to keep that meeting.”

  “What meeting?...Oh. You mean, the meeting Charlie was supposed to have with the professor’s wife. And, what, I should pretend to be Charlie?”

  “Yes. And why not? It’s the lounge in your very own hotel. As you said yourself, how much more convenient could it be for you?”

  “Well,” I said, having second thoughts, “it won’t be very convenient if your assumptions are wrong, and Mrs. Byron has in fact met Charlie. You could put me in a position of having to do something else unpleasant. More collateral damage.”

  “No. That shouldn’t be a problem. Don’t pass yourself off as Charlie, but as an operative in his employ.”

  Actually, that was a good idea. I’d already thought of it, but said nothing, not wanting to burst the Broker’s bubble.

  “Quarry, you know what Mr. Koenig was up to. Improvising your lines should be simple; a child could do it.”

  “Yeah, well, Christmas is over and all the kids have checked out of this dump, except for me, and I wasn’t in any school plays or anything.”

  “You underestimate your abilities, my boy.”

  Broker was also the only person who had ever called me “my boy.” No, strike that: my drunken Uncle Pete called me that once, too, when I was six and he slipped his hands in my shorts. See how good I am at this non-fiction novel stuff?

  “Okay, Broker,” I said, “I’ll do it. But what do I say to her?”

  “Tell her you have the goods on her husband. That you’ll gather all the materials and provide them soon.”

  “Listen, what’s she doing here anyway? She’s got an Iowa PI on the job who could report to her where she lives, which is Connecticut. What’s going on?”

  “She probably wants to be assured by Mr. Koenig—that’s you—that her husband is indeed the philandering louse she assumes. And she plans to confront him about it, once having seen the evidence.”

  “Great. One more cast member in the stateroom.”

  “No. There won’t be. You will tell her that you need several more days to collect the evidence. Send her home. Advise her in no uncertain terms that a confrontation with her husband is a mistake. That it will compromise her position in court.”

  “Would it?”

  “Jesus Christ, young man!”

  You guessed it: first time I ever heard that combination of words coming out of a fellow human; and it was a pretty rare outburst of any kind, coming from the Broker.

  Who was saying, “What difference does that make? You aren’t really a private investigator working on a divorce case. You are merely trying to manipulate her ass into taking a goddamn hike. Understood?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Call me tonight and we’ll discuss how the meeting with Mrs. Byron went, and we will decide, together, whether or not you should resume your activities.”

  “Okay.”

  We said goodbye and hung up.

  So I had a shower and brushed my teeth and gargled and even splashed on a little Brut. I left off the long johns but my wardrobe was limited—I had a dark gray shirt and some jeans I hadn’t worn yet, and that was the best I could do. I spent an hour in the coffee shop, having a bowl of chicken noodle soup for supper and reading the local papers. I don’t follow sports or world affairs, but the funnies and the movie reviews took some time away.

  By a quarter to seven, I was in the lounge, which was about the size of a high school classroom, only all red and black and with a bar in the middle and a little stage and dance floor in one corner. The band wasn’t going on till nine, and a TV up high behind the bar showed Red Skelton doing Clem Kadiddlehopper and laughing at his own jokes. Within minutes, Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In replaced it, the comedy team exuding
cheerful irony, and the collision of the two eras was pretty jarring. The sound wasn’t on loud enough for me to make everything out from my booth, but I took in the sight gags and watched the girls in bikinis and body paint dance around and that passed the time.

  A sultry alto said, “Hi.”

  I looked up and a pretty, and pretty familiar, face was staring down at me: the redheaded bestower of hard ons from the whirlpool yesterday morning.

  So she hadn’t checked out; and she had, after all, said she was “sometimes in the bar” here at the Holiday Inn. And now my fantasies were poised to come true, Penthouse Forum here I come, only I was supposed to meet someone else, wasn’t I?

  Truth was, I wished I was meeting this blue-eyed redhead. She looked fucking great. Her tower of titian curls on top of that attractive roundish face, softened by the lounge lighting, her shapely body nicely served by a fuzzy yellow sweater, orange toreador pants and off-white heels. She had a yellow clutch purse in one hand and was gesturing to herself with the other, her nails the same orange as her tight slacks.

  I smiled and did a kind of half rise from my seat in the booth. “Dorrie, isn’t it? Gee, you look great.”

  Yes, I said “gee.” But give me credit: I left off “whillikers.”

  Big white teeth formed a terrific smile. “You look good out of trunks....Actually, that sounded wrong, didn’t it?”

  I grinned. “Sounded just fine. Boy, do I wish I could ask you to join me, but I’m meeting somebody here.”

  “Actually, so am I. Trouble is, I didn’t get a description.”

  My brain was making connections that yours probably already has. I said, “Dorrie...that isn’t short for Dorothy, is it?”

  Long lashes flashed over the blue eyes, which were almond shaped. “Well, yes....”

  “You’re Dorothy Byron?”

  Now those blue eyes narrowed. “Yes. But you’re not Charles Koenig, are you? You don’t sound anything like him.”

  So she had dealt him over the phone.

  I gestured for her to sit, and she slid in across from me. “I work for Mr. Koenig. He got called away on another case, out of state.”