Quarry's deal q-3

by Max Allan Collins

She looked up at me with hooded eyes, still hugging her pillow. “People are supposed to smoke afterwards, don’t you know that? Not drink instant coffee.”

  “I say if you can’t smoke during, why bother?”

  She laughed. Her laugh was throaty, baritone, like her voice. “You know,” she said, leaning on an elbow, “I used to smoke. I gave it up. Had an uncle who died from it.”

  “Cigarettes killed my mother.”

  “No kidding? That’s terrible.”

  “Yeah. She got hit by a Chesterfields truck.”

  “Go to hell,” she said, showing her gums as she smiled. “Gimme that goddamn coffee.”

  She sat up in bed, took the coffee, draping a sheet over her lap, for decorum’s sake, I guess. I wondered how decorum would feel about those two big naked boobs.

  “Seriously, though, folks,” I said, sitting by her on the bed, “I like it that you don’t smoke. It’s nice to taste a girl’s mouth that tastes like a girl’s mouth. Kissing some women is like sucking a tailpipe.”

  “It’s the same with men. Fucks your teeth up, too.”

  “It’s too bad everybody can’t be clean-cut like us.”

  “Fuckin’ shame. Hey, you haven’t said how your job interview went, this afternoon.”

  That was the story I told her. I even told her I was going to the Amanas, to see about a job selling the refrigerators and shit they make there. It was now about six, and I’d been back half an hour.

  “I won’t know for a while,” I said.

  “Don’t you even have a gut reaction to the interview or the job?”

  “Sure I got a gut reaction. I think it sounds like a crazy job, and the guy I talked to was also crazy, but I’ll probably take it anyway.”

  “Is that desperation talking, or just apathy?”

  “Protestant work ethic, I think. How’d you spend your day off?”

  “Like I thought I would: shopping. Didn’t you see the packages and sacks and stuff on the kitchen table?”

  Like I was supposed to?

  “Well, since you’re probably broke, why don’t I take you out to dinner? I understand Riccelli’s has terrific pasta.”

  “They do,” she said, “only…”

  “Only?”

  “We already have plans.”

  “We?”

  “You and me. You remember us, don’t you, Jack?”

  “Vaguely. But I seem to have forgotten our plans.”

  “That’s because I haven’t told them to you yet. Anyway, you’re finally going to get to meet Ruthy.”

  We hadn’t had time to see Ruthy after the Sunday performance at the Candle Lite, because Lu had to get to the Barn to work. It was about time I met her bosom buddy… and Tree’s. I still hadn’t broken the news to Tree, yet, about his current bed partner being a pal of the woman who was the surveilling half of a hit team that probably included a certain guy who was lousy at cards and good at smashing lamps in people’s faces.

  “Where are we going to meet her?” I asked.

  “Another Italian restaurant that’s supposed to be good. Downtown. It’s called DiPreta’s. Heard of it?”

  “Yeah. Family restaurant, isn’t it?”

  She didn’t catch my joke, or pretended not to. Instead she just nodded and said, “We’ll be meeting her there around midnight.”

  “Midnight? Midnight as in six hours from now?”

  “That’s right. We can have some popcorn at the show, if you’re so hungry.”

  “What show is that?”

  “The one you’re taking me to, as soon as we get dressed.”

  “What show are we going to?”

  “I thought I’d let you pick it.”

  “I don’t know if I can handle all this responsibility.”

  “Go fuck yourself.”

  “That would be an even bigger responsibility.”

  “The paper’s on the kitchen counter. See what movies are playing and what the times are.”

  I did.

  I suggested a Clint Eastwood double feature, which she rejected as too violent. I pointed out that we had a lot of time to kill, and we settled on a Woody Allen double feature.

  I watched her get dressed.

  “Do you own any kind of underwear except trans- parent?” I asked her.

  “Nobody else has complained.”

  “It’s just that I got a sample case someplace of real lacy things that you could have, if you wanted them. You know. If you ever were feeling feminine or something.”

  “Is this feminine enough for you?” she asked, grinning, giving me the finger.

  “I’ll just take you up on that,” I said, and a while later we were having some more instant coffee, and I said, “Why midnight?”

  “It’s the first chance Ruthy’ll have to get away. It’s strike weekend.”

  “Strike weekend?”

  “Sunday was the last day for Born Yesterday. A new play opens Wednesday, The Fourposter, I think.”

  “That’s some explanation.”

  “Don’t you know what strike means?”

  “Sure. Strike a match, strike it rich, the Teamsters…”

  “It means, like, strike the sets. They tear down all the old sets and put up new ones, one play making room for the next.”

  “Why’s an actress like your friend Ruthy involved in that?”

  “It’s a repertory company. Everybody works both back stage and on. You can be lead in one play and prop man in the next. On strike weekend they work their butts off.”

  “Interesting. Well. I guess we better try to get dressed again.”

  “Right. Hey, I almost forgot.”

  “What?”

  “We just might be able to line up that job at the Barn for you, tonight.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Ruthy’s boyfriend’s going to be there, too. This’ll come as a shock to you, but her boyfriend happens to be Frank Tree himself.”

  “You got to be kidding,” I said.

  25

  I parked around the corner from DiPreta’s Italian Restaurant, which was on a one-way that I couldn’t turn onto coming from the direction of Lu’s apartment, and as we were getting out of the car, the blue Chevelle I’d noticed following us on the way over slid by innocently and pulled into a place half a block up. The guy was either new at this or a moron. Both, maybe.

  “You go on ahead,” I said to her.

  “Why?”

  “Tell you later. Please go ahead.”

  She made a shrugging face and got out of the car and walked. When she’d disappeared around the corner, I leaned over and got the nine-millimeter out of the glove compartment, checked it over to see if it had been fucked with, stuck it in my belt. I was wearing a sportshirt and slacks but the night was cool enough to require a light jacket and the jacket covered the gun.

  This took a couple of minutes and in that time the sidewalk on my side of the street stayed clear. It stayed clear on the other side, too. Midnight Monday in Des Moines isn’t exactly rush hour.

  The little moron in the Chevelle was sitting tight, waiting for me to do something.

  I did something.

  I got out of the GT and walked, slowly, and before I turned the corner I heard a car door open and shut somewhere not far behind me.

  Christ, what a loser.

  DiPreta’s was down at the far end of the block, half of which it encompassed, an alley separating the restaurant from the other half block of commercial buildings. I turned down the alley, making no secret of it, but then picked up speed and about a third-way down stepped into a recessed doorway that had just enough room for me and three garbage cans. I took the lid off one of the cans and when the guy walked by hit him in the face with it.

  He staggered back a step, seemed to momentarily regain his composure, then did a belly flop on the brick alley floor. He hit like a wet sack of sand.

  I turned him over.

  He looked familiar. Naggingly so.

  He was average size, av
erage build, wearing a dark ribbed sweater over a light pressed shirt, brushed denim slacks, almost collegiate-looking. He had short blond hair, ordinary features, his large ears being the only distinguishing feature he had. That and the broken nose the garbage can lid had given him.

  I’d seen him before, no question, but where?

  Wherever, he wasn’t anybody I’d paid any attention to. I’d been half expecting that sullen young prick from the Barn, the house dealer who I was so sure had smashed that lamp in my face. In fact that was why I’d put so much oomph behind the garbage can lid. I wondered if I’d decked some poor schmuck who just happened to be on his way to the same restaurant, at the same time, as Lu and me.

  Then it came to me.

  He was from the Barn. Not the guy I’d expected, but someone else I’d seen there; not a house dealer, but a regular. A clown who’d been there every night, and who liked to play five-card stud but didn’t have the balls for too high stakes, though he didn’t play badly, if I recalled right.

  I checked his billfold. There was a couple hundred bucks in there, and it might have been mine, so I pocketed it. He had a driver’s license, too. It said he was from Santa Barbara, California, and that he was twenty-eight. And here’s the good part: his name was John Smith.

  Well, I guess somebody has to be named John Smith. And I figured that’s who this guy was, because nobody, not even a little moron, picks a phony name that obvious.

  He also had no gun. No weapon of any kind. Not even a goddamn pen knife.

  Something was starting to tingle on the back of my neck. It was a bad feeling and it was spreading. Something was very, very wrong here.

  My still unconscious friend was clearly not a professional anything. His idea of shadowing you was to tailgate; he was unarmed; and his name was either the worst alias in the world or maybe just proof he was some poor, dumb, bland-looking son of a bitch named John Smith from Santa Barbara, California.

  Shit. The numbers here were not adding up. If the former Glenna Cole, current Lucille was the stakeout, and that prick dealer from the Barn was the hitter, where the hell did John Smith fit in?

  The frustrating thing was I couldn’t just shake him awake and have a talk with him and find out. Talking to him meant I might have to kill him when I was done, and I didn’t want to do any killing right now. Killing him would perhaps tell certain people something about me I didn’t want them to know; leaving him alive, as the possible victim of a mugging, might make it necessary for the jury on me to stay out a while longer.

  So I had to be content with stuffing him ass first in a garbage can and leaving him to wake up and wonder, after which I returned to my car, left the nine-millimeter in the glove compartment, and walked back to the restaurant to meet Frank Tree for the first time.

  26

  The outside of the place was classy-looking charcoal- colored brick with white mortar. There was more brick inside, but whorehouse-red brocade wallpaper dominated. And that’s the whole story of DiPreta’s Italian Restaurant: it was alternately sleazy and luxurious, as plush as the backseat of a millionaire’s limo, as tasteless as a girl whose panties have the day of the week on them.

  Lu was waiting for me just beyond the huge. wooden front doors, with their elaborate carved wood handles shaped like rearing, roaring lions (you grabbed a lion around the belly to pull open a door), and she looked genuinely worried.

  “What was that all about?” she wanted to know.

  “I thought somebody was following us,” I said.

  We walked past the area in front where some guys in white outfits and chef hats were making pizzas in front of the street window, the pizza ovens built of that same fancy charcoal-color brick, and moved into the subdued lighting of the dining area.

  “ Was somebody following us?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  A lady in her forties wearing a dark red evening gown and a white corsage, with dark black brittle hair piled as high as a small child, and a mole as black as her hair next to a mouth as red as her dress in a face as white as her corsage, said, “Party of two?” and Lu told her we were with the Tree party and the lady asked us to walk this way, and I resisted the urge to turn that into an even bigger joke than it already was.

  There were booths on either side of us, as we walked, and each booth had its own tiffany shade hanging lamp and its own original oil painting, which ran to matadors and still lifes and crying clowns and big-eyed children and frozen summer landscapes. We followed the lady in red into a large open area, where a mammoth cut-glass chandelier was suspended which no one seemed anxious to stand under, with an ornate bar off to the left, the prerequisite reclining-nude oil painting in the midst of an obscenely well-stocked series of wine and liquor racks, and an open stairway rising before us to reveal the second floor, or anyway a hallway thereof, with more oil paintings and the closed doorways to banquet rooms, apparently, and we went off to the right, to a private nook (or was it a cranny?) where Frank Tree and Ruthy sat at a table big enough for twelve.

  “Jack Wilson, Frank Tree,” Lu said.

  Tree stood and extended a hand and I shook it. If he was surprised, he didn’t show it.

  He said, “I’ve seen you around, Jack. You been winning some money off me, if I’m not mistaken.”

  I said he wasn’t and sat down.

  Ruthy raised a hand to boob level and milled her fingers in a sort of wave. “I’m Ruthy,” she said.

  “I guessed,” I said.

  She gave me a schoolgirl grin and said, “I’ve heard a lot about you, Jack.”

  “If it isn’t bad, it isn’t true,” I said.

  We were in the middle of the big table. I was across from Ruthy, who was wearing a yellow short-sleeve sweatshirt that had a dancing Snoopy on it. Her blond hair was pulled back from her face and she had little make-up on. She looked good, though. Nice tits. Lu looked good, too, in her pants suit with the halter top. Tree was wearing a sportcoat and open-collar shirt, and seemed to have sobered up considerably since this afternoon. The range of clothing at the table was in keeping with the rest of the patrons at DiPreta’s; there was everything from evening wear to sandals and sweatshirts and all the stops between. It was like being on Mars, or in Cleveland.

  A middle-aged waitress in traditional black-and-white uniform with black hose came over to take our order, asking first if we wanted anything from the bar. Tree and I both declined, but Lu asked for a Bloody Mary and Ruthy a screw- driver. Then Tree recommended the rigatoni and Lu and I went along with him, but Ruthy wanted an anchovy pizza.

  When the waitress had gone, I told Ruthy how much I enjoyed the play Sunday.

  “Did you really?” It lit up her dark blue eyes, which darted around as she spoke, never looking at you, never landing. “It’s too bad you couldn’t see me in something heavy. I mean, Born Yesterday, after all. How shallow can you get? Anyway at least it was fun, and, well, you can’t go dropping Edward Albee in the laps of these little old ladies in tennis shoes at the matinees, can you?”

  “I wouldn’t,” I said.

  “Not that anybody in Des Moines is ready for something heavy.” She shook a Virginia Slims out of the pack in front of her; she’d already had several. Tree used a lighter to fire it for her. “The theater’s a once-or-twice-a-year thing for Des Moines-birthday, anniversary… Before curtain the manager comes out and has everybody in the house applaud for people celebrating ‘special days.’ But you know that. You were there. Bunch of smalltown bullshit, but what can you expect? Now this Fourposter play coming up isn’t so bad, but I’m not in it. A good woman’s role for a change, too. I guess I’ll be playing these lousy ingenues and sexpot roles till my teeth fall the fuck out. It’d be nice to play something sensitive for a change. Like when I was at Drake.”

  “Drake?”

  “The university here. I did a lot of good stuff there. I did Rhinoceros. ”

  “I don’t think I know it.”

  “It’s a wonderful play. It’s about everybody t
urning into rhinoceroses.”

  “Sounds nice.”

  “Oh, it is. It’s very symbolic.”

  “What of?”

  She gestured with her cigarette. “Uh, people getting insensitive, I think. People turning into monsters and nobody noticing or caring and pretty soon everybody’s a monster. Our director at the time said it was about Vietnam, even though it was written before Vietnam. I think it’s about conformity. It’s a comedy.”

  “I like a good laugh.”

  “I played an ingenue in that, too, but at least the play was heavy. There are so few good roles for women. That’s because most of the playwrights are men. If it wasn’t for the queer ones, we wouldn’t have any decent roles.”

  I started to ask something and Lu, who knew I was leading Ruthy on, cut in.

  “How’s your work coming?” she said. “Those sets struck yet, kiddo?”

  “God, no, and we been working all day without a real break and am I famished. And here we sit in the slowest restaurant in town, and it’ll be years before the food comes. We really should’ve gone to Babe’s or Noah’s.”

  “Then why’d we come here?” I asked.

  “First, some friends of Frank’s own the place and even at the busy times we get a private place to eat, and second, they got the best anchovy pizza in town.”

  Tree had been silent through all of this. He’d been watching Ruthy throughout, hanging on her every word, savoring everything about her with that special fatherly sort of lust that gives incest a bad name.

  And she was a fine-looking girt. She had a lot going for her besides her chest, too. There was a fascinating mouth on the child, a fascination having nothing at all to do with the words that came out of said mouth. Puffy, pouty lips and little white teeth. It was easy to imagine that mouth doing things other than eating an anchovy pizza.

  But watching her eat the pizza, once it came, wasn’t especially fascinating. She wolfed it down and kept up her chatter as she did, which was impressive in its way, but a sexy girl eating with her mouth open is just as obnoxious as if it were you or me.

  Between bites of rigatoni I asked her how she and Lucille met.