Hard Case Crime: The First Quarry

by Collins, Max Allan

  I sat for maybe fifteen minutes trying to think, but when my stomach began to growl—all I’d had for supper was a bowl of soup—I thought, Fuck it, and went on in to the Sambo’s.

  This was still winter break, and fairly late at night, so the garish, brightly illuminated orange-and-white restaurant was underpopulated, enough miserable kids in orange caps and orange-and-white uniforms for every customer to have a personal waiter or waitress.

  I damn near laughed, though, when I saw two big black guys, who looked like they’d wandered off the set of Cotton Comes to Harlem, sitting at the endless counter. One wore a green hat with a gold band, tilted rakishly, and a green long-sleeve shirt and green-and-brown plaid bell bottoms. The other wore a similar hat, but black with a leather band and a red feather, and a red shirt with pointy collars and deep-brown corduroy bells. Both had major Afros and Groucho-wide mustaches, and each had folded a leather (one black, one brown) topcoat carefully over the free stool next to him. They were drinking coffee and having pancakes and every side you can imagine. Tiger butter and all.

  Call me a racist if you like, but this urban pair sitting in a Sambo’s made a wonderful sight gag.

  Anyway, I found a booth and ordered my own big breakfast, and I sat by myself, thinking about how fucked-up this job had become and seriously considering risking the wrath of the Broker and bailing. Every time I turned around, some new wrinkle, some new conflict, presented itself. Whatever happened to Wait till he’s alone, go in and pop him and leave?

  Of course this had never been that kind of job. It had always had that little extra “challenge” (as the Broker put it) of destroying a certain manuscript, and wondering what to do next had my head swimming.

  I was well into my late-night breakfast when Annette came into Sambo’s, a green pants suit and ruffly blouse taking the place of naked skin under her white leather coat. She saw me at once, and smiled, and came over.

  “Nice to see a friendly face, Jack,” she said, and slid in across from me. “Mind if I join you?”

  Kind of hard to say no when she already had, so I said, “Sure,” and asked, “Rough day?”

  “Don’t ask! Horrible. Simply horrible.”

  I touched a napkin to my lips, then asked, “Want to order something?”

  “Oh yes, I’m starved.”

  A waitress came over, and the “starved” girl ordered a dinner salad with oil and vinegar, and a cup of coffee.

  I was almost done with my food, so I shoved it to one side and asked, “Trouble with your book?”

  “Kind of.” She shook her head and dark brown hair danced on her shoulders. “It’s tough, collaborating.”

  “Is that what you’re doing? Collaborating?”

  “...Not exactly.”

  “Your book, your non-fiction novel—is Professor Byron co-writing it?”

  Again she shook her head. “Not really. I think of it as a collaboration because he’s given me so much advice, so much support. We’ve become very close.”

  “Really. Doesn’t he have a kind of reputation for...if I’m out of line, just say so, but...”

  Her salad came.

  She said, “I’m not in love with Professor Byron or anything. We’re just good friends.”

  I could use a good friend who looked like her who would blow me.

  “But I won’t deny,” she said, “that he’s something of a satyr.”

  “A what?”

  She smiled, more to herself than at me. “He is known to hit on his female students.”

  “A letch, you mean. Dirty old man.”

  She smiled, maybe a tad embarrassed; she forked some salad. “He’s a wonderful, talented writer, and I’m glad to have a relationship with him. He’s mature but young at heart. Anyway, I’m not looking for a...a husband, or any kind of serious relationship. He’s a virile, charismatic man, and I’m single right now, and we are very close, very, very close friends, so...what’s the harm?”

  “Nothing, I’d say. You have your eyes open, anyway.”

  “Yeah, but...” She shook her head yet again, and those big brown eyes really were open—wide. “...tonight, out of nowhere, his wife showed up. God, she’s a crazy person. A shrew. Just a horrible monster.”

  “How long have you known her?”

  “Oh, we’ve never met. But K.J. has told me about her.”

  “Oh.” I sipped iced tea. “Listen, I’m interested in this non-fiction novel concept. I’ve fooled with writing since I was in grade school. I mean, I know I’m not in your league, but I am interested in pursuing it.”

  She shrugged. “Glad to help, if I can.” Another bite of salad. Her lips were very full and quite beautiful; female lips that stay beautiful while chewing food are to be treasured. “What can I tell you?”

  “You’re writing your own story—of your own life.”

  Eager nod. “Yes.”

  “And the professor isn’t doing any of the writing. He’s just guiding you.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Well...how old are you?”

  “Twenty-two.”

  “Okay. Isn’t twenty-two a little young to have a life story to write? I mean, don’t people do their memoirs right before they croak, generally?”

  She laughed and it was musical, contrasting with faint Muzak piped in. “I had an unusual childhood. An unusual life all the way around.”

  “Really?”

  She nodded. “My father is someone...famous. Or infamous.”

  “Oh. So it’s a celebrity story. What it’s like to be the kid of a celebrity. Cool.”

  She frowned, shook her head. “Not so cool. My father...you’ve heard of Lou Girardelli?”

  “You mean...Sinatra’s pal?”

  That caught her off-guard and she laughed again. “Yes. Yes, Sinatra’s pal.”

  “You mean you’ve met Sinatra?”

  “Oh yes. He’s charming, most of the time. The nicest manic depressive I know.”

  I thought, I bet he’s mature but young at heart, too....

  I asked, “Isn’t that a dangerous story to write?”

  She leaned forward, her eyes earnest. “You mean, wouldn’t my father be displeased? Yes, he will. But I’m his daughter. He’ll dismiss my story, in public, as a drug-addled fantasy from an estranged daughter, trying to make a fast buck by writing a ‘tell-all.’ You see, I don’t know any of the criminal details of his life. I only know the home life. But that’s enough. Really enough.”

  “You said ‘drug-addled.’...You don’t seem very drug-addled to me.”

  Her eyebrows lifted and she looked down at her mostly eaten salad. “I was into pot and pills in high school. It did get bad, I won’t deny it, and I had to be hospitalized for a while. But I’m fine now.”

  “You seem awfully well-adjusted, for all you’ve been through.”

  She brightened. “Thanks. And K.J., Professor Byron, he’s helping me throw off the...the final shackles of my past.”

  I nodded. “Write about it, and get it out of your system, you mean?”

  “Exactly. Exorcize the demons. Everyone has them. I just happened to have one as a father.”

  I had a drink of tea, then I asked, “So now that Mrs. Professor has shown up, what’s your plan?”

  She sighed. “I guess I’ll burrow into my little apartment and work by myself till I hear from K.J. In any event, I won’t work any more tonight. I can use some sleep.”

  She reached for her check but I touched her hand.

  “Let me get it,” I said. “You’re a cheap enough date.”

  With a laugh, she said, “Thanks,” and slid out of the booth.

  “See you, Jack. You’re easy to talk to.”

  “You are, too.”

  Then she was gone.

  The iced tea had run through me, so I went back to the men’s room, thinking that since I knew Annette would not be returning to the professor’s until she was summoned, I could wait till tomorrow before my next step. After Dorrie Byron left the p
rof’s pad to take her meeting with me, and pick up those photos, I wouldn’t show up, being busy back at the cobblestone cottage, killing her straying husband and destroying his manuscript.

  Because my theory now was that this wasn’t about the manuscript Annette had carried out of the prof’s at all. No. The prof was writing his own in-depth book about Lou Girardelli, and Annette was just one phase of his research. He was encouraging her, building her up, to get more out of her, and not just blowjobs. I was convinced the prof had a book in progress that Annette knew nothing about.

  And that was the manuscript I’d been sent to destroy.

  I paid the check and was coming around the building when I spotted those two black guys again, the supercool dudes in the threads and pimp hats. They were at the rear of what I assumed was their car, a Cadillac Fleetwood Eldorado like the Broker’s, except bright red with white sidewalls, and they were stuffing something into the trunk.

  Annette Girard.

  EIGHT

  The good news was the girl wasn’t dead. The bad news was everything else.

  Well, maybe some more good news at that: they hadn’t seen me. Coming around the side of the restaurant like I had, I’d been able to slip behind some snowy bushes, and plaster myself against the stucco wall and peek around.

  The two black guys, whose presence at Sambo’s seemed ever less comical, were in their dark leather coats and had just completed dropping Annette into the trunk like a big golf bag that took both their best efforts. Since the girl probably weighed 130 pounds, those efforts had been expended in part by subduing her, though not knocking her out or chloroforming her (even these guys didn’t know where to get chloroform), just slapping some duct tape over her mouth, a slash of it covering much of her lower face, her eyes wide and wild above, and very much conscious. Her wrists were also duct-taped and so were her ankles. She wasn’t struggling now, fairly paralyzed with fear, I’d say.

  Then the one in the red hat, who was a little bigger than his partner, held up a palm toward the one in the green hat, who gave him, I shit you not, a high five. The slap rang in the chill night like a gunshot, and they both chuckled, the bigger one’s voice higher, the slightly smaller one having more of a low growly laugh.

  They seemed pretty proud of overcoming a coed in a Sambo’s parking lot. Some fucking people.

  I watched like an Indian behind a tree, scouting a cowboy campfire, as the red Fleetwood roared to life, the red-hat kidnapper behind the wheel (apparently color-coordinating). The driver made more noise revving up his engine than I would have, had I just thrown a live girl in my trunk (or a dead one for that matter), but no one noticed except me. Then they backed out of their space and drove out of the lot, turning left toward the Coralville strip.

  I knew where they were heading, or was at least pretty sure, and by “knew” I mean what city, which since the city was Chicago maybe was a little vague at that.

  Anyway, I got into the Maverick and went after them. I was fond of Annette, but that wasn’t why I took what I guess you’d call pursuit. Even on my first job, I knew this was not standard operating procedure; but I had inadvertently learned that her father was our client, and this was after all our client’s daughter being driven away to face a variety of possibilities, the most benign of which wasn’t very benign.

  I’d been told by the late Des Moines PI Charles Koenig that Chicago mobster Lou Girardelli was in the middle of a drug turf war with black gangsters. You didn’t have to be Sherlock Holmes or even Charles Koenig to figure out these two black thugs had been sent to kidnap the mob boss’s daughter for fun and profit. Might be a straight ransom kidnapping, might be a trade-off for turf rights (you get the girl, we get the South Side), might be they wanted to fuck her, torture her, fuck her again, kill her slow, maybe fuck her one more time, and dump her on daddy’s porch. That last one wasn’t the benign possibility, by the way.

  Two blocks down and a few more over were the east and west ramps onto Interstate 80. The Caddy would almost undoubtedly take the I-80 E ramp, and head toward Illinois and sweet home Chicago. I hadn’t thought much farther ahead than that, except for the possible futures for Annette outlined above, and had nothing specific in mind.

  I did know that if that pair of soul brothers made it to Chicago with Annette, I would not be able to lend the girl a hand. I needed them to interrupt their trip with a stop. It was a good four hours and change to Chicago, and considering they’d just been in a Sambo’s, both guys would need to piss and/or shit, sooner or later. Probably sooner.

  I was nervous. I don’t apologize for that. I’d been through rough stuff in the jungle, but a kind of adrenaline high plus the camaraderie of your fellow soldiers got you into it and then through it, and sniper duty was a whole other deal, more a Zen kind of state where nerves didn’t come into play, not if you wanted to survive.

  I liked surviving. It was about all I valued. I’d seen plenty of evidence supporting the notion that life and death were meaningless, and God was either nonexistent or uninterested, but what was wrong with breathing? Didn’t a decent meal and getting laid and watching something funny or exciting on television or reading a good western and did I mention getting laid, didn’t that all beat nothingness inside a box six feet under all to shit? So I tend to come down strong on the survival side.

  And these two guys were big. They were also black, and fuck you, I’m no racist, I fought alongside black guys and I bet you didn’t; so you go up against a couple of streetwise soldiers for the Black Mafia, taller than you, fifty pounds each on you, probably packing all kinds of shiny steel. Either one of those guys could fuck me up in a fair fight, and together they could throw me down and kick me till a busted rib punctured something and I drowned in my own goddamn blood.

  So, hell yes, I was nervous.

  But not scared, really. My nine millimeter was on the seat next to me, the radio tuned to an FM station where the Beaker Street program was going, DJ Clyde Clifford doing zonked-out intros to album cuts against electronic space music right out of Forbidden Planet, and while I hadn’t done weed since Nam, Clyde and his offbeat music choices chilled me out nicely, though “In-a-Gadda-Da-Vida” (coming up on the drum solo) probably meant we again had a disc jockey who needed a bathroom break.

  The landscape was an ivory-washed blue once more, the snow frozen in odd clumps and clusters on the terraced earth along I-80, the temperature having gone up and down today, thawing, freezing, thawing, freezing, making modern art out of precipitation. The trucks were blowing past me again, and the traffic in general was heavier. This didn’t bother me, and even encouraged me, because it meant I could stay several car lengths away from the Fleetwood and not be spotted. An interstate in general was proving a great place to tail somebody; so what if you and somebody else were going in the same direction?

  Several exits for gas and restaurants slipped by, including the green dinosaur and the Cove. We drove such a distance that even “Vida” ended, and the Vanilla Fudge doing “Season of the Witch” took over, filled with screams and whimpering, and though normally I dug that cut, I ditched Clyde for an easy listening station. Frank, Dino and Sammy were more like it, anyway. I was doing a job for Frank’s pal, Lou, right? Even if Lou didn’t know it.

  As Frank sang “My Kind of Town,” we blew past the Quad Cities where the Broker and his Concort Hotel were. Then, with Bobby Darin doing “Once in a Lifetime,” just west of the Mississippi River and north of Walcott, Iowa, they pulled off at a dinky oasis economically called the I-80 Truck Stop—two diesel pumps, four gas pumps, a small white enamel gas station attached to a slightly bigger restaurant.

  Shit.

  I’d been hoping for one of the state-run rest stops. With a little luck, at one of those—which were just toilets and vending machines—I might have what I needed to deal with Annette’s captors, which was no audience.

  I pulled off anyway. Were they going to eat again? Wasn’t that Sambo’s feast enough for them? Maybe they worked up an appetite ov
erpowering a twenty-two year-old college girl.

  The Fleetwood pulled into one of the slots along the row of restaurant windows. If these guys had a brain between them, they would take the nearest window onto that stall. I stopped at the gas pumps, cut the engine, got out and instructed the kid to fill me up with regular, which was pushing forty cents a gallon, highway fucking robbery. Then I went into the gas station portion of the interconnected buildings. They sold some trucker gear, and I bought a rabbit-lined brown nylon zipper jacket.

  I’d left my corduroy jacket in the car. While I had no reason to think those two had noticed me at Sambo’s, I also had no reason not to. The gas station had all kinds of toiletries, so I was able to buy a tube of Brylcreem and a comb. I went into the Truckers Only restroom, which had showers and an array of sinks, at one of which I dumped water into my hands and dumped it on my head. Then I used the Brylcreem, and a little dab didn’t do me, no, I squeezed that shit out of the tube and combed my hair into a style that must have been at least as effective a birth control method as the Pill.

  After paying for the gas, and getting an odd look from the young attendant, since I seemed to be a different customer now, I drove the Maverick over into another of the stalls. I was still flying by the seat of my pants, and when I got out and then walked past the parked red Fleetwood, knowing that the girl was in that trunk, I wondered if I could somehow get her out of there and toss her in the Maverick and just book it the hell away.

  Problem was, her black escorts were seated at the window adjacent, as I’d figured they would (apparently they did have at least one brain between them). What was I supposed to do, shoot the lock off the trunk? I’d never tried that, and I doubt you have. I would have probably killed the girl and then those assholes would have come tumbling out the restaurant and jumped my ass, if they didn’t just fire through the window at me.

  Or I could shoot out the window of the Fleetwood, reach in and open the car and hope this vehicle had a trunk release button; that should be standard on a Caddy, right? But where? Under the dash, or in the glove compartment, and oh by the way, those black bastards have killed me by now.