Max Collins - Quarry's deal

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.

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.”