Max Collins - Quarry's deal

“Sorry I was such bad company, on the way here,” she said, stretching out on her stomach on the bed, cupping her chin with one long-nailed hand, the dark blue, gold-flecked eyes with their oriental slant catching what little light there was and making electricity out of it.

“Bad company?”

“Yes. I’m afraid I slept all the way.”

And she had, head against my shoulder, for the whole thirty-minute ride from the Barn to the east side of Des Moines where this apartment was.

“You didn’t snore,” I said.

“I never snore.”

“Neither do I.”

“I want you to know something.”

“Okay. What is it?”

“I don’t usually do this kind of thing. I want you to know that.”

“Do what kind of thing?”

“You know. Fuck on the first date.”

“How do you know we’re going to?”

“Just a hunch.”

“You may be right. But right now I’m going to drink this Sanka.”

“See.”

“See what?”

“You do think I do this kind of thing all the time.”

“If I said something, I’m sorry.”

“You didn’t say anything. It was how you said it.’’

“I’ll pretend I understand that. I’m done with my Sanka.”

“Well, I’m just starting mine.”

“I’ll wait.”

“What the fuck’s your name, anyway?”

“Jack.”

“You already know my name.”

“Lucille. Lucy?”

“Lucille.”

“Lucille, then. How’d you get in the bartending business, Lucille?”

“I had a husband who owned a nightclub in Detroit. He thought it was good psychology to have a good-looking woman tending bar. Also it was cheaper, since he was married to me and didn’t have to pay me.”

“Had a husband?”

“That’s right.”

“Divorced?”

“No. They killed him.”

“They?”

“Some mob people.”

“No kidding?”

“Yeah. They were his silent partners and he was screwing them. They warned him and he didn’t listen. It was his fault, really.”

“You have a pretty cool attitude about it.”

“Not cool. Cold. I loved the little prick in the beginning. He was older than me, I was just a waitress in his place, impressed by the boss making advances. He had a wife at the time, who he dumped for me. He was really a little prick. But I was impressionable. Didn’t finish high school, that sort of thing. Never had anything going for me but my looks. So much for me. How about you?”

“Well. I could tell you about the time I came home from Vietnam and found my wife in bed with a guy. Or we could forget about the sad stories and fuck.”

“Good idea,” she said.

She was gone when I woke up. On the coffee table was a note: “Jack-you looked too restful to wake. Had a hair appointment and some other errands. Orange juice in the fridge. If you’re still in town, stop at the Barn tonight. If you want. L.”

I had a shower and got dressed, had some orange juice, and looked around the place a little.

But carefully. I didn’t pick anything up or look inside anything. Don’t think it wasn’t a temptation to get in that suitcase over in the corner, or to go through the double-door closet or through the drawers of the tiny dresser in the bathroom.

There are ways to tell if somebody’s been through your things. Traps you can lay before going out. You can apply a faint layer of baby powder to the inside of a drawer, for instance, or lay a thread or hair or something across the joining of two closet doors, or balance a little piece of metal or plastic or anything on the snap of a suitcase. There are a lot of tricks like that. I don’t know them all, and don’t bother with any myself, but a lot of people do.

Why else would she leave me here alone, if not to test me? Wasn’t that why she’d picked me up last night? She’d made the move, after all, not me. I figured she’d recognized me but hadn’t been able to place me. I was just a familiar face, but in the business she was in, a familiar face can be big trouble. So she was checking me out. I’ve been checked out worse ways.

That had to be it. No other way made sense. Women don’t usually go crawling in my lap looking for the zipper; not on first sight they don’t. Especially not an exotic-looking looker like Lucille or Ivy or Glenna Cole or whoever the hell she was. She sure wasn’t the dragon lady, not in the sack anyway.

Oh, she was nice in bed. Better than nice. A slow, hip-grinding, sensual screw that wasn’t the whambam of a casual bar pick-me-up, or a phony I-love-you-I-love-you bout like the married ladies indulge in, when they’re screwing somebody besides who they’re married to.

But she was not exotic. The promise of the oriental eyes was not delivered. It was that earthy, gumsshowing smile that kept its word, and that, as I sat at her kitchen table drinking a second glass of orange juice, was what was bothering me, now that I thought about it.

Because she wasn’t supposed to be real. She was acting, she had to be, but Christ did she seem real, opening her legs for me, sucking me in, hugging my back, goddamn it was real, nothing fake in it at all, not that I could see anyway, not the joyless copulation of the stag film actress, or the frantic humping of a hooker trying to fool and please at the same time, but something else, something she was caught up in, or seemed to be, and I got caught up in it myself, caught up in her should I say, and it disturbed me. I was supposed to be here to watch her, to see what she was up to and maybe kill her. Not fuck her. And certainly not fuck her and like it.

So I looked around the place without touching anything. There wasn’t much to see. The only interesting thing I found was on the window sill. The bottom of the sill was lined with dust. Two round circles were evident in the dust, as if left by two drinking glasses that had been set side by side, making their mark.

But it wasn’t drinking glasses that had made the mark. It was another sort of glasses. Binoculars.

I parted the curtains, looked out the window. I saw the parking lot, where I’d left my GT last night; beyond that a quiet side street, on the other side of which was an obviously high-rent apartment house.

Lucille’s apartment was on the third floor of a three-story building in a sleazy little block in a sleazy little area known as the East Side. To be fair, not every place of business on the East Side fell into that category. For every three or four Nude Go Go Bars there was a plumbing supply outfit or an auto parts shop or the like; there was even a bank and a drug store or two, left over from when the East Side had been the hub of the city, and not its most embarrassing eyesore, a ragtag collection of junk shops, porno houses and seedy bars, crouching at the foot of the gold-domed, archaically ornate Capitol Building like a poor relation waiting for the reading of the will.

Like the Capitol Building, the high-rent apartment house sat on one of a series of bluffs that rose above the deteriorating East Side, and the rest of the city too, for that matter. Unlike the Capitol Building, the apartment house was modern in style, a curved slab of white brick and black glass. Alone on its hill, aloof, it was bordered by a neighborhood of factories at the hill’s foot, and churches, clinics, government buildings and more apartment complexes at its rear.

A drive curving up the slope was clearly marked private. The place was undoubtedly well guarded, and even without the use of the binoculars I knew were somewhere in this apartment, I could see a pair of uniformed private cops on duty in the spacious parking lot that surrounded the building like a moat. The people living there probably felt pretty safe. Most of them probably were. One of them wasn’t.