“I’m sure we’ll work something out,” she said.
“Fine.”
There was an awkward silence and I realized, suddenly, I’d been dismissed.
“Well,” I said. “Thanks for the advice.”
She went behind the desk and smiled flatly and looked down at its smooth empty surface, as if there were invisible papers that needed straightening.
I left, wondering what exactly had unnerved her. Made her cut short both business interview and seduction attempt. I hadn’t said enough myself to cause that. It had to be something she said. Something she let slip…
In the lobby, on my way out, I saw Martha on the way to the ladies’ john.
I blew her a kiss.
“What was that for?” she said, with a silly grin.
“That’ s for being the only female in this goddamn place that doesn’t think of me as a mere sex object.”
She said get outa here and I did.
29
I was sitting in the same booth as that first night, in the Roy Rogers room upstairs at the Red Barn Club. It was just after six, and I’d again ordered the ribs and wondered idly if they’d be better than mediocre this time.
Lu had to be at work by six, and I hadn’t got back to the apartment till five, so there’d been no time to eat at home. She didn’t mind, as she claimed to be on a diet anyway (though there was no fat on her that I could see, at least none that I wanted her to be rid of), and she was downstairs working, presently, while I was upstairs eating.
I’d spent the afternoon further checking out the dope scene in Des Moines. I’d wandered the East Side some more, had risked my ass in a black pool hall in a section that came as close to being a ghetto as anything in the city and bordered the Drake campus area, where I tried some of the college hangouts. Finally I went to West Des Moines, a suburb whose downtown was dominated by antique shops and other oddball places of business, where hippie types were highly visible but not high. It was the same everywhere. Nothing to be had. Not a pill to pop, not a token toke. Oh, there was undoubtedly a small supply, accessible only to ingrained members of the local under- ground community. But the D.O.P.E. crackdown was real. Frank Tree really was something of a social reformer. It was enough to rekindle my beliefs in the basic goodness of America. Or make me want to throw up. One of the two.
When I was finished with the salad, a gimlet arrived, a practical joke sent up by my lady bartender, who had made it extra strong knowing I liked my gimlets just the opposite. I drank it anyway, and the ribs came and I started in on them and they were just as mediocre as the other time.
Mediocre or not, I ate all the food they put in front of me (Tree was picking up the tab, after all) and, as she cleared the table, had a peek down my characteristically busty Barn waitress’s blouse for dessert. Then I tried to open the shutters on the window next to me, before remembering too late they were permanently closed. I stood and parted the ruffled curtains above the shutters and looked out at the parking lot. It was too early for there to be many cars. One of the perhaps twenty that were out, there was a familiar-looking Chevelle.
I sat back down and thought about that, wondering if the Chevelle’s driver was downstairs right now, a guy with a nose recently remodeled by a garbage can lid.
I went down to find out.
Only a few of the green baise-covered cardtables were in use this early in the evening. A blackjack table, and the five-card stud table. Most of the action was at the bar, people getting a little oiled before getting down to it.
The guy I was looking for wasn’t in the room. But a probable friend of his was.
The sullen little cocksucker in glasses was sitting alone at the table where he nightly dealt draw, shuffling his cards.
I went over and sat down next to him.
“How’s it going?” I said.
His eyes flicked up at me, then returned to watching his hands work the cards.
“It’s going,” he said.
What a sweetheart.
“Mind if I take a little money from you tonight?” I asked.
“You can try.”
“Why should it be any harder tonight than any other night?”
He shrugged.
“You can go blind from that,” I said.
“From what.”
“From playing with yourself.”
He said nothing. Just shuffled.
“Practice up good, now,” I said, and left him.
I’d been trying to bait him, but he wasn’t biting. In the past I’d made a point of being at least noncommittal to him, sometimes treating him damn near friendly. This should have jolted him a little. That permanent foul mood of his usually flared when people got smart with him, and he normally would’ve fired a cutting remark back. Why had he remained so passive? Still not the friendliest fucker in the world, but he’d barely reacted. Was it because it was me? Or was it something else?
I went over to the bar and Lu said, “How’d you like your drink?”
“Terrific. It tasted like an alcohol rub.”
“We aim to please.”
“Is Tree in his office?”
“Yes, but weren’t you going to wait till after closing to talk to him?”
“I changed my mind.”
“Go ahead, then. It’s that door over to the right. Just knock.”
I did, and Tree’s voice behind the heavy wood door asked who it was and I told him.
He buzzed me in.
I shut the door behind me and sat in the chair in front of his desk, which had a portable color TV on it, some copies of Playboy, Penthouse, and Hustler, and a tall glass of what was apparently Scotch and maybe some water.
It was a plain, even drab office, with barnwood paneling, a room the size a doctor examines you in and with the same sort of warmth. Besides the big metal desk and the chairs we were sitting in, the room was bare. Except for a big old iron safe that squatted in the corner to the right of Tree like the fat lady at the circus.
Tree turned down the sound on the Untouchables rerun he was watching.
“Change of plans, Quarry?” he asked. “I thought we were going to talk later.”
“How much money do you keep in that thing?” I asked him, nodding at the cumbersome safe.
“A few thousand,” Tree said, a smile working at one corner of his mouth.
“A few thousand. A few thousand like thirty thousand? I figure that’s the minimum you need on hand at a place like this. Or maybe I’m off a little, maybe it’s twenty, twenty-five. But that kind of money.”
“I do have that kind of money, here. But not in that safe.”
“Where, then?”
He didn’t answer immediately.
Then he evidently decided if he could trust his life to me, he could trust me with other things.
“There’s a small floor vault under the carpet,” he said. “In that corner over there.”
“I guess you need to take some precautions, with a place stuck out here in the country like this, right? What other kind of security measures do you have? Besides that window behind you.”
The window high on the wall behind Tree had a heavy metal grill on the outside and I assumed the glass to be shatterproof.
“I’m tied in with a security outfit in Des Moines,” he said, “and with the police station, such as it is, in West Lake. Lights go on in both places if anybody tries to break in. We’re five miles from West Lake. Fifteen from Des Moines. Takes four minutes for the West Lake man to get here. The security outfit, Vigilant Protective Service, can get here in twelve minutes. With the alarm system I got, nobody could get in and out with the money in that short a time.”
“You seem pretty sure.”
“So would you, if you had triple-bolted doors, alarms on all of them, on the windows too, and three back-up devices, including some in the floor of this room, under the carpet, that I switch on just as I’m leaving.”
“You’re usually the last one out of here?”
“Yeah. We close at
two. It takes a while for the dealers to turn their money in, naturally. But by two-thirty, most nights, all the help’s out of here, and I’m gone by two-thirty-seven. A few nights lately I been cutting out early, to see Ruthy. I got a guy upstairs in the kitchen who closes up for me on nights like that.”
“What’s your arrangement with your dealers? How much do you pay them?”
Tree shrugged. “Percentage of winnings. That’s the only way to fly. Thirty percent, and that’s good and goddamn generous, as a place like this goes.”
“You start off each dealer with a set amount of cash, each night, then, which can be replenished if necessary…”
“Yeah, two thousand each, and that usually holds up, if they’re any good.”
“What if they aren’t?”
‘‘What?”
“Aren’t any good? What if they lose?”
“If a guy has a bad week, I come through for him. It can happen to anybody. I help him out, lay a few hundred on ’im. I keep my people happy, and that way they don’t try to pull anything on me.”
“What if somebody consistently loses?”
“Then I fire his ass, of course. What’s this all about?”
“The other night you said you were thinking of replacing a dealer. Did you say that just to have an excuse for giving me the job, or do you really have somebody worth getting rid of?”
“You tell me, Quarry. You played here for a week.”
“Then I’d say it’s the sour little asshole with the glasses. The college boy.”
“I’d say you’re right.”
“He loses heavily?”
“Not really. But he doesn’t win. He’s been with me a couple of months. Did okay at first, then had a real bad night and I think it kind of threw him for a loop. He’s never really recovered. He lost a few more times after that and then ever since he’s been just sort of breaking even.”
“He lost all the nights I played him.”
“Not according to him. He’s had at least two thousand to turn back in, at the end of the night.”
“He’s giving you money out of his own pocket, then.”
“Why in hell would he do that?”
“To postpone the inevitable… his getting canned.”
“It still doesn’t make any sense. If he’s losing, why would he want to hang onto his chair?”
“He could be a compulsive gambler, and’s hoping to recoup. Or he could be somebody who’s here to do something besides play cards.”
“Oh. Jesus. Is that what he is?”
“Possibly. I don’t know. I do know he’s one of the guys who worked me over a few nights back. The other one’s another college-boy type who’s been a regular here. Blond-haired kid with big ears?”
“I think I know who you mean.”
“Yeah, well the other night, before Lu and I joined you at DiPreta’s, I had a little run-in with that clown. He was following me, and I suckered him into an alley and put him to sleep. Temporarily, that is. He drives a Chevelle. It’s out in your lot right now. So is he, probably. I didn’t see him upstairs or down, but that’s no surprise. I broke his nose the other night and he probably doesn’t want to show what’s left of his face around here, where he might see me.”
“Then why’s he here at all?”
“I can think of a reason.”
That stopped him for a moment.
“This is it, then,” he said.
“Tonight’s the night, you mean? Shit, I don’t know. There’s too many things that just don’t track here. I’m starting to think this is something else entirely.”
“Like what?”
“I’m working on it. I think we better have an under- standing. If I get involved in something that is apart from our other business together, but something that turns out to be of benefit to you, can I expect to be rewarded accordingly?”
“You bet your ass.”
“Okay, then.”
And I got up and went to the door.
Went out to gamble.
30
John Smith was sitting in the blue Chevelle, on the rider’s side. Slouched against the door, smoking a cigarette, two fingers resting gingerly on his bandaged nose. Where surveillance was concerned, he’d been an incompetent agent, but you could hardly ask for a better subject. It was like sneaking up on a corpse.
The parking lot, dimly lit except directly under the small neon over the door, was empty of anything but cars at the moment. Ten o’clock was too late for many people to be arriving and too early for many people to be leaving. And a perfect time to go out to my GT on one side of the lot, unlock the glove compartment and get out the silenced nine-millimeter, and walk over to the other side of the lot and the Chevelle.
The door he was leaning against was unlocked, I noticed, and when I opened it he fell out like an ironing board from its closet.
He had a gun, a Smith and Wesson snubnose. 38, but it, like his cigarette, tumbled out of his fingers while he was tumbling out himself. I scooped up the. 38, dropped it into a jacket pocket and pointed the nine-millimeter at the middle of his face.
He was sprawled on his right side and looked like he was trying to swim in the gravel. He looked comical. More so, when his eyes crossed to look at the barrel of the nine-millimeter.
“You motherfucker,” he said, lamely, like he’d never used the word before in his life.
“Shhh,” I said.
“What’s going…”
I poked his nose with the gun’s.
“Shhh, I said.”
He put a hand over his nose. He started to weep.
“Please,” I said. “This is embarrassing enough as it is.”
I patted him down with my free hand. He had no other weapon.
“Keys,” I said.
He pointed at the car.
I looked over and the keys were in the dash.
“Get them,” I said.
He pushed himself up, hesitantly, and leaned into the car. I leaned in with him, pressing the flat snout of the silenced gun against his back, his ribs, and he got the keys. We leaned back out and he turned slowly and held out the keys to me. They dangled like a vulgar earring.
I didn’t take them. I shut the car door and said, “Open the trunk.”
He cocked his head, like he couldn’t quite make out what I was saying. With those ears of his, you’d think he wouldn’t have any trouble hearing.
“The trunk,” I said.
He shrugged, but the casualness of that gesture didn’t work for him. This was one scared shitless character.
Which didn’t keep him from opening the trunk, fumblingly of course, but he opened it.
I had, by this time, stuck the nine-millimeter in my waistband. For a guy like this I didn’t need the gun. In fact I could’ve given it to him to hold for me.
I glanced around, looking for the beams of light that would indicate someone coming up the drive into the lot, looking to see if anyone was coming out a Barn door, or if anyone might be able to see us from a window. The latter was barely possible, but between the lack of windows downstairs and the shuttered ones upstairs, and our being way over to the far side of the lot, I felt it unlikely there were any eyes on us.
So we were standing in front of the trunk of the Chevelle like a couple of guys in front of an altar, or urinal. And my bland-looking college kid companion, with his busted nose and big, apparently nonfunctional ears, looked at me wondering what to do next. I told him.
“Get in,” I said.
He cocked his head again.
“In,” I said, and pointed at the trunk.
He cocked his head and pointed at the trunk with me.
“Oh Jesus,” I said, and pushed him in there and shut the lid.
31
After closing I sat at the bar and nursed a gimlet while Lu was cleaning glasses and generally tidying up. The dealers were filing into Tree’s office to turn in their money, and witness the ritual of seeing the money go in his fat relic of a safe. There was
a second ritual, nightly, of the money being shifted to the real safe, the one in the floor under the carpet, but the dealers didn’t get to see that.
The guy with glasses was one of the first to go, but the sound of the outer door opening and closing didn’t follow him. I hadn’t expected it to.
I waited till the line of dealers had thinned down to two, and went to the coat room to get my jacket. The. 38 I’d lifted from the party currently residing in the trunk of a Chevelle was still in the pocket I’d dropped it in. I’d returned the bulky nine-millimeter to the GT’s glove compartment. If Lu happened to see me with a gun, I’d prefer it was the. 38 and not the silenced automatic, professional tool that the latter one was.
I went up the short flight of stairs to the landing that separated the club room of the Barn from the restaurant. Stairs rose from the landing a full flight, wide and without a rail, softly carpeted, to the wide doorless entry area of the dining room. I slipped the. 38 out of the jacket pocket and started up.
The restaurant closed down at eleven, and all the help involved with that part of the Barn operation were long gone. The large rustic dining room, with its many booths, was dark. I didn’t like that. Not at all. All those fucking booths, so many places to hide, Christ.
I stalked the room like a parody of a western gunfighter in this parody of a western setting. Winding through the rows of picket-fence booths, the thick carpet cushioning my steps, soaking up what little noise I made. Clint Eastwood would’ve been proud of me.
Then I saw the hairline of light beneath the door of the men’s room.
Both of the johns were just off the top of the flight of stairs. An easy, logical place to duck into.
But the lack of imagination these guys showed was staggering. Not only was this asshole hiding in the john, an overly enclosed space and an obvious choice, and the men’s john at that, but he’d even left the lights on. After all, who wants to wait around in the dark? Pathetic.
“Yeah, okay,” I said loudly, in a lower voice that I hoped didn’t sound like my own. “Be with you in a second, Frank. Just let me take a leak.”
And I went in.
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