Max Collins - Quarry in the middle

“Sorry to hear you’re going, Jack,” she said, and offered me her hand, and I shook it. She gave it a secret squeeze. “Kind of hoped we’d have time for that breakfast you promised me. I’m headed over to the Wheelhouse diner now…”

“Grab a booth in back. I have to check out of my room. Before I hit the road, I could use a meal, wouldn’t mind some pleasant company.”

She said sure, smiled at me, nodded at her sort of husband, and went over to the Subaru and stirred gravel a little as she exited.

“What are you, hitting on my wife?” he asked, with an eyebrow arched.

“Maybe I already fucked her till eyes rolled back.”

“You can be crude sometimes, Mr. Quarry.”

“Normally no. Haydee’s Port is a bad influence on me. It’s all sex and murder and money, and an All-American boy like me can get corrupted. Shall we move the little slut?”

For now, we tucked Chrissy in his trunk, and she squirmed like a calf not wanting to get branded, making noises of protest that came off strangely like yummy sounds.

I left him there, standing at the rear of the Corvette, staring at the closed trunk. For a moment I wondered if he might not kill her, or have her killed, at that.

But it wasn’t any of my business.

Angela Dell had taken the same booth we’d shared before, and of course she remained unaware that, a few days and several lifetimes ago, Monahan and the blond kid had sat there, too, and plotted her husband’s death.

She was drinking coffee already, and when I joined her, I ordered iced tea. Coffee was for grown-ups. I was hugely hungry-I’d been through a lot of unappetizing shit over the past twenty-four hours or so, but hadn’t eaten a thing since my mobile-home Florence Nightingale had fed me leftover alphabet soup.

So I ordered scrambled eggs, hash browns, link sausage and silver-dollar pancakes. She had a half order of French toast and we ate in silence for a while-well, not quite silence: a breakfast the size of mine, on a stomach that empty, required some spirited grunting and swallowing and silverware clanking.

She watched me with mild amusement, just nibbling at her French toast. When I pushed my cleaned plate aside, she said, “I don’t know what to make of you.”

“Nothing to make.”

“What makes you tick, Jack?”

“Nothing. You’re just hearing the Timex.” I lifted my wrist. It got another little smile out of her. “I’m glad we had a chance to say goodbye, though.”

“Me, too. Oh!” She had a big black purse with her, and she dug inside it, came back with a CD-on the cover was a photo of her in a low-cut dress, soft-focus, sultry, and I’d guess taken around 1960 or ’61. She made Julie London look like a boy. It was called Angela on Your Shoulder.

“This is the Verve album you made,” I said, smiling. “Will you sign it?”

“I already have. I…didn’t use your name, since I know Jack isn’t really it.”

I popped the jewel case open and read what she had signed, in black felt-tip, across a song list of Rodgers and Hart, Cole Porter, Johnny Mercer and Frank Loesser: “To my favorite one-morning stand. Yours always, Angie.” Then, pro that she was, she had signed her full signature below: Angela Dell.

“This means a lot,” I said. “I don’t treasure much, but I’ll treasure this.”

“Least I could do.”

“Probably, considering I didn’t tell your husband you’re the one who hired his murder.”

She dropped her coffee cup, but it was mostly empty and didn’t spill, didn’t even break.

We had that section to ourselves, and our voices were low, so I wasn’t making a scene. Her dropping the coffee cup was as close to making a scene as either of us came.

She said, her voice as throaty as if she were singing“ Cry Me A River,” “You can’t be serious, Jack…”

“Dead serious. Jerry G’s father is so out of it, he gives senility a bad name-he couldn’t organize a fart in the bathtub, let alone set up a hit. And as for Jerry G? He was going to the trouble of having Dickie spied on-baby Madonna, remember?”

“That…that girl Chrissy? She was working for Jerry G?”

“Yeah. Oh, he’s dead, by the way. Somebody shot him about…not quite an hour ago. I believe it was a robbery, but it’ll probably wind up officially some kind of tragic accident. Powers-that-be wouldn’t want Haydee’s Port to go to hell.”

“Jerry G is dead?”

“I’m not going to repeat myself. Your husband or whatever the hell he is hired me to deal with Jerry G, and I did. He was also considering having the old boy taken out, till I gave him the latest medical update.”

“Just because that girl was spying on-”

“You don’t bother gathering intel on somebody you’ve already hired someone else to eliminate. Period. Anyway, look at his behavior-Jerry G knew, from Chrissy, that I was working for your husband…but if he knew or suspected I was here to take him out, he wouldn’t simply have had me beaten up-he would have had me killed. Last night he did try to have me killed, after he heard enough from Chrissy to gather I probably did have a contract from Dickie to remove his ass. But Jerry G stupidly sent a couple of bouncers to deal with me, who were in over their heads, or anyway are now.”

She said nothing. A waitress strolled over, filled Angela’s coffee from a container in one hand, and my iced tea from a pitcher in the other. Then we were alone again, us and our freshened liquids.

“What makes you think,” Angela said very quietly, looking at her wedding-ring-free hands, folded neatly near the coffee cup, steam rising from it like ghosts, “that I took out the contract?”

“No other candidate makes sense. You are still the wife, separated or not, and that puts you in a position to inherit everything. You are by birth a Giardelli, and female or not, would be in a good position to, first, utilize your connections to set up a hit, and second, take over the Paddlewheel with Chicago’s blessing. With your show biz background and expertise, all those years in Vegas, who better to run the Paddlewheel and its expanded operation? Especially when riverboat gambling comes in, and everything gets more respectable…Also, as a wife, you’d be more likely to have an accident staged than a simple drive-by hit. Hell, maybe there was double indemnity! Didn’t work for Barbara Stanwyck, but that’s just an old Hollywood movie, where crime doesn’t pay. Anyway, I don’t see Jerry G as the kind of guy who’d go to the trouble of disguising a killing as an automobile accident.”

Her lips trembled a little. Her voice, too: “What if…what if I told you I love my husband. That I still love my husband.”

“Wouldn’t surprise me. Your motivation may be greed, or it may be love or anyway the kind of love that curdles into hate when your guy gives you table scraps-say, like your little ongoing piano bar gig-at the same time he’s taking various baby Madonnas upstairs to his Playboy pad, for a banquet. These kinds of things are complicated. Emotions.”

The wide-set green eyes were as unblinking as her husband’s. “Why did you… take care of Jerry G, if you knew he wasn’t responsible for the contract on Richard?”

I shrugged. “Hey, I made it clear to Dickie that I had my doubts about Jerry G. I let him know that my services included trying to determine who took the contract out, and so on. But Dickie was convinced it was Jerry G. He wanted Jerry G gone, and I admit I developed a certain grudge against the guy myself, so I took the job. Did the job. End of story.”

The eyes remained wide but the flesh around them was tightening. “End of…”

“I haven’t told Dickie about you, or anyway my theory about you.”

Now she frowned. The eyes finally narrowed, and fear was in them. “What are you after? What do you want from me?”