There was a counter-top sink, with more make-up and feminine things and another big mirror. There was also a small portable television on the edge of the counter, for her to watch as she bathed.
“Know what a black widow is?” I asked her.
“Sure,” she said, getting in, water still flowing, bubble bath bubbling up, “it’s a female spider that eats her mate. Why? You want eaten?”
“Don’t get me wrong, now,” I said, putting down the lid on the stool and sitting, “I’m not comparing you to a black widow. You don’t kill your men. You just set them up for it.”
A hardening around and in her eyes, very slight, told me she had caught on, for the first time, to what this conversation was about. Till now, she thought it was all some kind of coy sexual ritual, some verbal foreplay thing I was engaging in.
But she didn’t change her style.
“When I get done in this tub,” she said, taking some soap and soaping between her legs, “I can love you to death, if you want, honey.”
“I don’t want. But there’s something I do want.”
“Oh?”
“I want to know whether you picked up your money yet.”
“Huh?” She turned off the water. She slid down under the surface so that bubbles covered-her, except for her lipstick-painted breasts, which bobbled surrealistically on the water.
“I said I want to know whether you picked up the money. “
“What money?” she said.
“If you picked up the money, I want to know where and when. If you haven’t yet, well, have you?”
“Jack, I really don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Standard operating procedure, back when I was working with the Broker, was for the middle man to accept twenty-five percent down, from whoever was buying the contract. The balance was picked up by the back-up man, the passive half of the team, just a day or so prior to the actual hit; and that was the only contact (and an indirect contact at that, since it amounted to going to a drop point and picking up the cash) the hitmen had with whoever hired them.
Ruthy knew this, and I knew she did.
I turned on the portable TV.
“What are you doing?” she said.
“Turning on the TV,” I said. “What does it look like I’m doing? Say, Ruthy, tell me… you’re in show biz. Which soap opera is that that’s on? I can’t tell them apart. Is it One Life to Live, or Another World or what?”
“Jack…”
“You know it’s dangerous having something electrical like this in bathroom. It could fall off into the tub. Oh, but I see you have the cord knotted up, so if that happens the set would unplug itself. That’s smart thinking, Ruthy. Here. I’ll just unplug it for a minute and unwind this cord and, hey it’s nice and long isn’t it? Just plug it in again and there’s your soap opera back. You don’t mind if I keep the volume down while we talk?”
“Jack, I’m getting out.”
“No,” I said. “You just stay put.”
“Jack…”
“Stay put,” I said.
I was standing over her, holding the set by the handle on top, holding the plug in the wall socket with my free hand, while silent images of a man and a woman arguing, their faces in close-up, flickered across the screen. I held the set over the water, right above her lap, and said, “What about the money?”
“Jack, let me get out. We’ll go in the bedroom and I’ll make you real happy, Jack, God I’m good, Jack, look at these, Jack, Jack, look at me, you’d like it in me…”
“The money. Where. When.”
“I… I made the pick-up yesterday.”
Shit. I’d hoped she hadn’t made it yet, so I could make her lead me to the pick-up when it was made and I could find out who had hired Tree dead.
“Where?” I said.
“Iowa City,” she said.
“Iowa City?”
“Yes, in an alley, in a trashcan downtown. Jack. Jack, can I get out now?”
“You just sit there a minute.”
“If you let me out of here, Jack, I won’t say a word about this, I won’t mention this to Lucille, if you want, I’d even help you get rid of her, Jack, anything, anything you want.”
“Ruthy.”
“Jack?”
“For once I don’t think you’re acting,” I said, and tossed in the TV.
34
Along one side of the Psychopathic Hospital was a sun porch. Despite the massive iron doors that Tree and I had been buzzed through the other day, security here was nonexistent. Most of the patients at the hospital had signed themselves in, and were free to go when they chose to, theoretically anyway. I assumed there were some sections of the hospital where patients were in fact kept under lock and key. But the ward where Frank Tree, Jr., was staying was not a prison, nor a collection of padded cells. It was simply a sort of dormitory with doctors.
At least there were supposed to be doctors there. I’d seen just one, last visit, and then only fleetingly. The nurses had been kids of either sex in street clothes and with expressions as spacey as the patients, who had themselves been a scarce commodity around there Monday. Tree had explained that many of the patients were involved in one supervised activity or another, elsewhere in the building, afternoons.
All of which should make it easy for me to do what I had to.
I hoped.
The afternoon was shadowy with moving clouds, and the air was chill. Spring was supposed to be here any second now, but you could’ve fooled me.
But you couldn’t have fooled Roger. He alone was sitting out on the sun porch, enjoying the moody, overcast day, with the innocence that allows the retarded to find joy in joyless things.
He was wearing the same outfit as last time: gray IOWA tee-shirt, baggy brown slacks, enormous white tennis shoes. The slack expression on his irregularly featured face turned into a grin as he saw me approaching the porch. He shook a cue stick of a finger at me, trying to place me. Some sounds came out of his mouth and they had a vague resemblance to words.
I went up the few steps and Roger, who had been swinging in the porchswing, stood and towered over me like a gorilla in a person suit.
“Hello, Roger. How are you? How is Frank Jr.?’’
He thought that over for a minute or two, and then something not unlike awareness glimmered in those oddly compelling green eyes of his. He grasped my wrist, which for him was like holding a pencil in his fist, and led me through a screen door and into a hallway. I recognized it as the same hallway as the other day, and the same bored-looking nurse moved briskly by us, with clipboard in hand, paying no attention to either one of us.
Roger stopped outside the door of the room where Frank Jr. had one of six beds. Roger put a finger to his lips and said, “Seeeep.”
“Right,” I said.
Then I leaned into the room and saw what he meant. Frank Jr. was on his back sleeping, or anyway resting, on one of the beds, head settled against the pillow with the word PSYCHO on it. He wasn’t wearing a robe today. He had on a yellow tee-shirt and jeans. He was alone in the room.
“I won’t disturb him,” I whispered.
Roger was still holding onto my wrist.
“I’ll sit with him till he wakes up, and then I’ll talk to him.”
Roger thought.
“Go back out on the porch now, Roger.”
And he nodded, dropped my wrist like a stone and shuffled away.
And I made damn sure he was out the door, before going in and taking Frank Jr. by the shoulder and shaking him.
“Wake up,” I said, several times.
He finally did.
He looked so much like his father it was spooky. The smaller, slightly feminine nose and the long dark black hair remained the only differences. Tree must’ve looked much the same at eighteen or nineteen.
“You don’t know who I am,” I said. “And you don’t need to know, other than I’m somebody trying to find out why you paid to have your father killed.”
/> He narrowed his eyes, just a little, and got upon his elbows, but said nothing.
“Now he’s not dead yet, don’t misunderstand. Today was supposed to be the day, I think, but I doubt it’ll come off. Of course I don’t expect you to say anything, but I do expect you to listen. I’m not a cop, nothing remotely like a cop. You aren’t in any danger of exposure any other way, either. I work for your father, you saw me here with him the other day, but I know him well enough to figure he’s not going to buy it when I tell him his own kid wants him wasted.”
Maybe that was a faint smile on the kid’s face; or maybe it was just the shadows from the clouds outside, coming in the window, filling this overcast room with more of the same.
“Your father told me all about how you have this habit of, wherever you go, falling in with bad company… but like most fathers he can’t conceive of his son being bad company. I think it’s just as funny as you probably do, that he really thinks he saved you in the nick of time, from the horrors of addiction… He actually thinks he stumbled onto that heroin stash minutes before you were to put a match under a spoon of the stuff and fill your hypo and stick it in and another hopeless junkie is born. He was so goddamn relieved when he brought you here and you weren’t hooked on anything stronger than grass. I guess there really is such a thing as a generation gap. You and your old man make your money different ways, that’s all, and he runs a gambling house but he gambles himself, so he finds it hard to understand that a guy who deals in dope rarely uses himself. Especially the hard stuff. Or maybe he can’t see that just because you’re his kid… won’t let himself see it, maybe.”
Yes it was a smile. Faint, but a smile.
“When he told me about the quantities of grass and H he found in your room, and your car, I figured he was just exaggerating, remembering through his emotions. But when I thought about it, it made sense… You had junk in quantity because you’re a dealer. A major dealer, maybe… maybe dealing to dealers. Something. How much heroin did he flush down the john? Hundred thousand bucks worth, maybe? That would hurt. No wonder you got pissed at Pop. And then he starts this half-ass citizens’ group, and hurts business even more, and embarrasses you in the eyes of the people you deal with, above you and below you both. I mean, shit. A kid can only take so much.”
He was sitting up, now, and his smile was gone. He wasn’t back doing his catatonic act, though; he was pretending to be bored, or maybe he just was.
“Little towns are where a lot of the major dope deals go down these days, am I right? We’re talking about distribution on pretty large scale, I’d guess. Too much heat in the bigger cities for that anymore. I’d bet West Lake was where you were making your drops, not Des Moines. How long you been in the business? Since you were fifteen? Thirteen? What the fuck. The old man’d be proud of you. He taught you the importance of money, and how you ought to hustle it up for yourself. You were a hell of a student, too. But my one question is this, junior. Did somebody bigger than you tell you the old man had to go? Or did you decide that yourself?”
And he spoke.
He said, “Blow it out your ass.”
“Thanks,” I said. “That’s all I wanted to know.”
It had been sheer speculation up to this point; but once Frank Jr. opened his trap, all suspicions were confirmed.
He rolled over on his side, away from me.
I took him by the arm and pulled him over, made him face me.
“I took a chance coming here,” I said “But I had to find out. And I did, and you’re coming with me.”
“You came, to the right place, asshole,” he said. “Because you are out of your fuck-ing mind.”
“Maybe so, but I’m still not crazy enough to think I can convince your dear old daddy that junior wants to make him dead old daddy. But you could do it. Not willingly, but with you there to have to try and knock down my story, well, it’s going to be worth a try.”
“What the fuck’s it to you?”
“Five thousand dollars.”
“Aw, Christ, I can get you that. I can get you more.”
“Sorry. That’d be unethical. Besides, I don’t like to work for anybody who hasn’t gone through puberty yet. Also, I got this aversion to father killers. Call me picky, if you like, but we all got our little quirks.”
“I’m not going with you.”
“I think you will. I got a roll of nickels in my jacket pocket, here, that’s going to be in my hand when I hit you, if you make me. Not the latest in anesthetics, but it’ll do. Or we could go to the doctors and tell them you want ’em to contact your father, so you can talk to him. That’s okay with me, too. Up to you.”
“And suppose I just tell them you’re some fucking crank and they should throw you the fuck out of here.”
“I don’t think they’ll do that to the miracle man who gave you back the gift of speech, now, do you? So come on. Let’s just walk out the side door, to my car, and we’ll go see what’s happening back in Des Moines.”
I let go of his arm and he got off the bed and slid onto the floor, and I turned a little to let him by me and then the little bastard was on me, tight little hands on my throat, and I was going over on my back, landing hard on the cold tile floor, and he was on top of me, squeezing my throat, fingernails digging in, and he wasn’t particularly strong but he’d got me by surprise and had dug in good before I got my arms out from under him and punched him on one ear, which shook him, and he let go of my throat but one hand found its way into my hair, which he proceeded to pull, and his other hand was a fist, hammering me in the upper chest. I was trying to slide my hand inside my jacket pocket, to get that roll of nickels and give him a shot that’d put him out now, when the sound of a groan filled the room, that might have been a moose in heat or King Kong annoyed or Roger.
Roger, coming across the room faster than he should’ve been able to.
And then he was lifting Frank Jr. off of me, pulling Frank Jr. off, and squeezed him, protectively, the grotesque features of his face twisted with concern, confusion, excitement, and as he squeezed Frank Jr. I heard things snapping, like twigs, popping, like flashbulbs, and as I saw the boy go limp and his head roll back, showing large lifeless eyes looking at nothing, I realized the snapping twigs and popping bulbs were the things inside Frank Jr. that held him together, that made the machine of his body function, but this was something Roger didn’t realize, and he kept hugging the boy.
Boy did he hug him.
And suddenly there wasn’t anything left to do but try to get out of there before Roger looked for someone else to turn his attention to.
35
When I got back, she wasn’t there. It was evening now, close to seven, and maybe she was at the Barn, behind the bar, making drinks for people.
I doubted it. With Ruthy dead, Lu would be leaving town, maybe already had. Hitting Tree now would be out of the question. Her back-up “man” gone, possibly murdered, Lu had no choice but get the hell out.
You just don’t hang around when a job goes sour, and it can’t go much more sour than your partner getting electrocuted in a bathtub.
But when I looked in the closet, her things were still there. It was a relief and a disappointment. A relief because the notion of maybe seeing her again was something I hadn’t been able to let go of yet; a disappointment because I’d tried to work this thing around so that she’d be forced out of it. She was supposed to be gone.
The phone was on the wall in the kitchenette. The dirty dishes from the late breakfast I’d fixed were still in the sink. I called the Barn and asked for her. She wasn’t there. I wondered whether that was good or bad, then asked to be put through to Tree.
I wondered if he’d heard about his kid yet.
“Quarry… where the fuck are you?”
So he hadn’t heard. After all, I’d told him to hole up in a motel all day somewhere, and he hadn’t been at the Barn for more than an hour or so probably, and Iowa City evidently hadn’t tracked him down yet. Well, I wasn�
�t about to break the news.
“Des Moines,” I said. “I won’t be coming out tonight. I’m leaving.”
“There were a couple of cops, just here… They left not five minutes ago. I don’t have to tell you what they were doing here, do I?”
“No.”
“Did you have to… to do that to her, Quarry? My God… I.. I thought a lot of that little girl, I thought she was… I just can’t… my first reaction was I wanted your goddamn throat in my hands, but… if she was what you say she was, Jesus. It’s hard to accept… but I suppose it had to be done.”
“That’s right.”
“And I suppose an… accident is, uh, better than…”
“That’s right.”
“I notice I’m missing a lady bartender tonight.”
“You better replace her.”
“I see. So. You’re leaving. That means you weren’t able to do anything about finding who was responsible…?”
“I found out.”
“Well, shit, man, who? And what’s to be done?”
“It’s been done. You’re better off not knowing the details, but I’ll tell you this… It was someone very close to your son, involved in this narcotics thing just like you imagined.”
“And you’ve taken care of the son of a bitch?”
“He’s been taken care of.”
“Knowing the kind of work you do, Quarry, I’ll just bet he has. Look, I got another call coming in on my other line…”
“You know where to send the money.”
“I’ll do it. And thanks, Quarry.”
“Yeah.”
I put the receiver back, wondering if that incoming call was Iowa City finally getting hold of him. And then Lu came home.
36
She came in and sat on the couch. She seemed a little depressed. She was wearing that dark brown pants suit again. She slipped the jacket off and draped it over the coffee table and stretched, breasts straining at the yellow-and-tan stripe halter top.
“I heard about Ruthy,” I said, “Tree told me. I’m sorry.”
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