The car waiting in the little apartment complex across from Sambo’s was a dark blue late ’60s Thunderbird with a vinyl top. They had taken a spot off to the left as you faced the building, and I pulled into one nearby.
I got out and looked at the two guys, a mustached, pockmarked little weasel at the wheel and a huskier pockmarked big weasel on the passenger side; both wore pastel leisure suits with turtleneck sweaters and had greasy black hair plus the usual mutton chops and their mustaches drooped like they were auditioning for an Italian western.
I leaned at the window of the huskier guy and he powered down the glass.
“My name is Jack. I’m taking Miss Girardelli up to her apartment, but then I’ll be going out for a while. I may be back later.”
He frowned. “Why you tellin’ me this?”
“Mr. Girardelli sent you fellas, right?”
“And this concerns you how?”
“This concerns me that you know which side I’m on, so I don’t wind up with an extra navel.”
Then I went around to Annette, where she’d got out of the Maverick, and walked her up the wrought-iron-railed cement stairs. I got the nine millimeter out of my waistband to go in and take a quick look. Her apartment was furnished in low-end contemporary stuff, probably came that way, with the only signs of Annette the many books stacked here and there, and some posters on the bedroom wall—Albert Einstein sticking his tongue out, Ernest Hemingway in a sailor hat, a couple others I didn’t recognize, one a woman who was definitely not Raquel Welch, who would have been my choice.
The place was clear, closets and all. Before going out the door, I gave her a little kiss that she turned into something bigger, but I left it at that and made my getaway.
My original plan had been to utilize the window provided by standing up Dorrie Byron for lunch to finally dot the professor’s I, but that no longer seemed wise. Better to go collect those photo prints, which I did in downtown Iowa City, and then keep the meeting at the Holiday Inn coffee shop, which I also did, after showering (alone) and changing my clothes.
Turned out I wasn’t hungry enough to eat, after the big breakfast, and ordered an iced tea while Dorrie, having no appetite either, asked for a cup of coffee.
Frankly, she looked older than before, and I didn’t think it was because I’d been hanging out with a younger woman. Her attractive face had a puffiness, particularly around the eyes, which were red-rimmed. She was in a white blouse with pearls and a black skirt and black pumps, all of which complemented her figure and her legs and everything just fine. These were still eminently jumpable bones.
But her face was a mask of tragedy.
I’d barely settled in the booth when I asked her, “Are you okay?”
“Not really.”
“You saw your husband, didn’t you?”
She nodded, and her chin crinkled.
“Didn’t go well?”
“At first, just fine. He let me cook for him. He let me...service him. I even stayed the night. That way he got breakfast out of me. We even showered together.”
That gave me a chill. A little too weird, that.
I said, “And?”
“And then he told me—it was over. He wants a divorce. He said he was glad I’d stopped by and that we’d been able to make ‘one last bittersweet memory.’ But we were over. I told him...well, you know what kind of things I told him.”
Her voice was hoarse enough to make it obvious that many of those things had been screamed.
She was stirring her coffee. She’d been doing that when I got there, I never saw her put any sugar in, but she kept stirring. And her eyes were staring past me.
My iced tea arrived, but I didn’t touch it.
She said, “He didn’t care. He didn’t care about losing half or more of his money. Or losing one or both of his homes. He didn’t care. He didn’t care about losing me, at all. He was going to be very rich from his next book and I wouldn’t get any of that, and he would be able to start over, and at the top, he said.” Now she looked at me. “You know, it might not hurt so bad if he’d told me straight out, when I first got there? He shouldn’t have had me cook for him. He shouldn’t have let me make love to him.”
“No. That was bastardly, all right.”
“Bastardly. Good word for that bastard.”
“I have the photos for you.”
“Please.”
I got out the yellow packet, having already pulled the Annette photos, leaving only those of the little blonde behind. And of the little blonde’s behind. Charlie the dead PI had got some great shots through those gauzy curtains; perfect for Penthouse.
She flipped through the prints, glassy-eyed, like a poker player on a losing streak who just knew no winning hand was coming.
She asked, “You know this girl’s name?”
“I can get it.”
“I’ll...probably need it. For the divorce proceedings, and...” She reached out and gripped my left hand with hers, its diamond ring catching the light. “Jack, you’ve been wonderful. Very professional, and I...I feel we had something, you and I.”
Well, I’d had a really good time. Beyond that, I couldn’t or shouldn’t say. I merely nodded and smiled and that vagueness was plenty for her.
Then I said, “You need to go home, Dorrie. This time, you really do need to go home.”
She nodded. “I have to check out.”
Then she slid out of the booth, pausing to say, “Can you get this? Put it on the expense account?”
“Sure,” I said. I didn’t have an expense account, but a well-stirred cup of coffee and an undrunk iced tea wouldn’t break me.
I decided today would be the day. With Dorrie on her way home, and Annette holed up in her apartment, I should finally have my opportunity. I headed back to the split-level on Country Vista on an afternoon turned colder, with some icy teeth in a wind desperately looking for snow to blow around but finding the white stuff too frozen over to comply.
So confident was I that I actually loaded up the Maverick in the driveway down behind the split-level, piling in my sleeping bag and space heater and the little TV Charlie bequeathed me and a few leftovers from my 7-Eleven runs, and runs was right, when your regular diet was Slim Jims and Hostess.
When I returned to my window, the house was cold enough without the space heater for my breath to show. I sat like an Indian and looked out at that cobblestone cottage, just waiting for my moment. I had on a black sweatshirt and blue jeans over long johns and the corduroy jacket and the black Isotoner gloves and the nine millimeter was on the carpet next to me, since this goddamn job had been just one unexpected thing after another.
Maybe six-fifteen, with night here already, I saw the professor coming out from behind the cottage to go into the little unattached cobblestone garage. From within, he opened the double-door, a big slab of gray-painted wood, and then I could see him getting into his maroon Volvo and backing out. He stopped in the drive, got out, closed the garage door, got back into the Volvo, pulled out of the drive and headed down Country Vista toward the main drag.
I was sitting up straight, the nine millimeter in my gloved hand now.
Finally an opportunity had presented itself, and I went out the back way and once again trotted down to cut through woods to where I could cross the street and come up unseen behind the rear of the cobblestone cottage. The gun in my waistband but my jacket unzipped, I followed my breath to the back door of the cottage. That was the only bad thing: I needed to get in without the professor noticing on his return that the door had been jimmied.
The rear door was old but the lock was new, the kind you could open with a credit card. But I didn’t have a credit card, as that desk clerk at the Concort Inn could tell you. Trying to think of what I might use instead, I absently tried the knob and the goddamn thing was unlocked. The professor, for all his east coast sensibilities, had fallen for the Iowa hi-neighbor trustfulness. The sap.
From peeking in windows on my previous vis
it, I already knew the layout: a small unremodeled kitchen in back, wooden cabinets with counter and an old stove and 1950s vintage refrigerator and yellow Formica table; a pantry and laundry room next door; then, as you came from the kitchen, a study and a bedroom to right and left respectively; and a good-size living room with a cobblestone fireplace, which was going nicely, red-and-blue flames snapping as if its owner were in attendance. In this surprisingly expansive open-beamed space was a lot of dark wood paneling that dated back to when the cottage was built. A very rustic interior, with built-in bookcases in one corner and a braided throw rug and a green sofa with a broken-down look and a big captain’s table under the glow of a hanging light fixture shaped like a yellow upside-down tulip.
I decided to get a head start on it, and went into the study. For half an hour, I went through his desk, its drawers and the file cabinets. I gathered every damn document that had the name “Girardelli” or anything vaguely Italian or having to do with Chicago. I was feeling pretty proud of myself, looking at a big stack of manuscript pages and carbon copies and boxes and notebooks resting on his swivel chair when I heard the back door open, and then close.
Positioning myself to the left of the door, snugged between the frame and the file cabinets, I waited and listened, the nine millimeter in hand, its snout up.
Out in the kitchen, he was setting something down. Then I heard him open the door on the refrigerator and stuff was going onto wire shelving, and then cabinets were opening and cans and other things were getting set down on wood. He’d gone to the store. He had to eat, didn’t he? Well, actually, he didn’t, but he didn’t know that.
I couldn’t think of any reason not to pop him there in the kitchen and was about to step out and do that very thing when somebody banged at the front door, hard, and I damn near pissed myself.
Hugging the wall again, I heard him saying, “Now what the hell....”
I knew the feeling.
I heard him cross into the living room over the wooden floor, the footsteps different on the braided rug, then the door opened and he said, “Dorrie! I thought we’d settled everything.”
I knew the feeling!
The door slammed behind her.
“Almost, darling,” she said. “Tell me, though. We did have something, didn’t we? Once upon a time? Isn’t that what you storytellers say? Once upon a time?”
“Dorrie...of course we did. For that part of my life, for all those years, you were the only woman, the most important person in my entire life....”
Why was he talking so quickly? Why did he sound so goddamn desperate?
“That’s nice to hear,” she said. Her voice had an odd wistfulness, and a distance that was much farther away than from the study to the living room. “It does help, darling. It does help.”
“You need to put that down, Dorrie! Put it down right now!”
If you ever watched the old sitcoms on TV, like I Love Lucy, there was always this audience member on the canned laugh track who said, “Uh oh!” at a key story moment. I wasn’t watching a sitcom exactly, but I heard that familiar voice. Uh oh was fucking right....
Then came a sharp crack, almost as if the fire had popped, but it wasn’t the fire, was it?
I was hoping I didn’t have to kill her. I really didn’t want to, and I stood there frozen in my tiny space between door and filing cabinets, hoping to hear that door slam as she went away, having done my job for me.
But I didn’t hear the door slam.
I heard a second sharp crack.
And when I finally went out there, she was curled on the floor next to him, a certain elegance about how she lay there, as opposed to her husband, still in a tan jacket from going to the store and chinos and pretty much looking like a pile of laundry dumped by a fed-up housewife. And maybe he was. Her blouse was crimson and the stain on the white fabric grew where she’d shot herself through the heart the dead prick had broken. A little revolver was in her limp hand. Byron had taken his in the forehead and his talented brains were leaking out the back of his skull.
I leaned down for a look at the gun, and it was Charlie Koenig’s .38! I’d put it in my suitcase but Dorrie must have helped herself to it when she visited my room. Her using that weapon would add another nice confusing layer to any police investigation.
The gunshots had seemed small if distinct. Nobody lived across the street now, not even me or the late Charlie. The cottages to left and right were spaced well away. I did not feel anyone was likely to have heard anything suspicious enough to call for investigation.
Wasn’t much left to do but burn those manuscript pages and notebooks in the fireplace. It took a while, and as the flames ate the opus, its author—dead and sprawled on the floor by the wife whose spirit he’d killed—basked unknowingly in their dancing reflection.
ELEVEN
A space was open next to the dark blue Thunderbird with the Illinois plates, and I filled it with the Maverick. Both my car and the goon squad’s were backed in, for a good view of the little red-brick apartment building and its modest parking lot.
Whenever I’d done surveillance on Annette, over the past several days, I parked across the way in Sambo’s semi-enclosed lot; where the Thunderbird was parked made it too easy to come up on them from behind. But I guessed Girardelli’s boys knew their own business.
Right now the Thunderbird had only one pockmarked weasel sitting in it, the heavier-set one, on the passenger side.
I came around and bent at his window; his droopy-mustached, suspicious face had followed me over and his eyes were glittery slits under thick eyebrows. His leisure suit was a pastel green, his turtleneck a slightly darker shade with a gold chain necklace nestling in sweater folds. Whatever happened to black-and-white pinstripe suits with black shirts and white ties for the hood about town?
The craggy-faced weasel powered the window down and said, “Mr. G is up with his daughter. He said you should go up there.”
“Okay. What happened to your partner?”
He nodded toward the restaurant down and across the way. “Sal’s over having a bite. We take turns.”
“That parking lot’s where they grabbed the girl last night.”
“You don’t fuckin’ say.”
“You and Sal might not want to split up. If the spades send reinforcements, taking you fellas out one at a time would be a way to go.”
“Do I look like I was born the fuck yesterday?”
For all the gunk on his hair, he might have been born the fuck a few seconds ago.
But I said, “Hey, just trying to help out.”
“You can help out by going up there like Mr. G said.”
“No problem.” I smiled and nodded.
He glowered at me and powered the window up and turned his eyes toward the building.
I took the steps to the exterior landing along which apartment doors were lined, motel-style, and I knocked at Annette’s. She answered right away, cracking the door, then undoing a night latch and letting me in. Looking pale and a not a little shell-shocked, she was in a black zippered top with pointed collars and black-and-white geometric-pattern bell bottoms, possibly the ones she’d worn that first night when I saw her go into the professor’s cottage.
Annette basically had two decent-size rooms and a bathroom here, the living room (which you entered into) taking up two-thirds of a long narrow area, the back third a kitchenette. The bedroom and bathroom were off to the left. These were not lavish living quarters, but in a college town, for a student, this was as good as it got—Annette lived alone with easily twice the space any double-occupancy dorm room would provide. Probably set her back two hundred bucks a month.
This pad, and her hip threads and that white Corvette, meant Daddy was still signing checks to and for his Darling Girl. And his Darling Girl—despite Daddy using her for a fuck toy when she was twelve—was still letting him underwrite her lifestyle and her education. She’d get cut off, no doubt, when her tell-all book came out; but Annette probably fi
gured she’d be making her own way in the world by then.
A rust-colored couch was at left as you came in, a framed Warhol soup can over it—a framed pop art print was on the opposite wall, too, a panel out of a love comic book—and a big portable TV was sitting on a metal stand in the corner at right, angled so that couch sitters and a big overstuffed rust-color easy chair at right could take in its impressive 25 inches. Another example of Daddy’s love?
Speaking of Daddy, he was seated in that easy chair next to an end table with a remote control, a lamp with a Tiffany-style shade and a tumbler of what looked to be Scotch on the rocks resting on a coaster. I recognized him at once, since he’d been in many a national magazine and on the nightly news plenty of times.
Still, I was surprised by how small he was. He couldn’t have been more than five eight, and maybe weighed 140, despite a modest paunch. Like his boys, he wore a leisure suit, a money green one with a yellow shirt with pointy collars and a gold crucifix on a gold chain dangling in graying chest hair, bridging fashion and religion.
Very tan (he had a place in Florida), Lou Girardelli was probably late fifties but appeared older, with that shrunken look people in their seventies can get; his hair was cut short, no mutton chops for him, and was salt-and-pepper, emphasis on the salt. His face was oval like his daughter’s but his nose was hooked and crowded by dark little eyes behind goggle-lens glasses with dark green frames.
His smile was friendly enough as he got out of his easy chair and extended his hand, approaching me.
Annette, uncharacteristically timid, was saying, “Jack, this is my—”
“Jack!” Girardelli said in a sandpaper baritone, as we shook. “Nice to finally meet you. I spoke to your boss in Des Moines, of course, but you and I haven’t had a chance to talk ourselves.”
He was keeping to the PI story I’d fed Annette, whether from information the Broker gave him or what his daughter told him, I couldn’t say.
“No, we haven’t, sir.”
Hard Case Crime: The First Quarry Page 14