Quarry q-1 Page 14

  He stood up straight, forgot shooting pool for the moment, holding his cue tight in his fist, erect, like somebody carrying the flag in a parade. “Frankly, I don’t know what you are… other than a damn fool. I get the feeling you’re fishing around for something, that you aren’t sure of yourself. You’ve searched out a confrontation with me and now you aren’t quite sure what to do with it.” He shook his head side-to-side, his lips drawn back tight over very white teeth. “And frankly, Mr. Quarry, you scare me a little, with your implications, insinuations about my brother-in-law’s death… murder, if you will.”

  “Four thousand dollars,” I said.

  “… what?”

  “For four thousand dollars I’ll leave you alone.”

  He laughed. “I guess you are a damn fool at that. As you’ve said yourself, Mr. Quarry, I’m a businessman, and I’m not about to buy something without knowing what it is.”

  “Let me ask you something, then. Why would anyone want to kill Albert Leroy?”

  He shrugged, sat on the edge of the table. “The robbery motive is the one I accept, I suppose. The pack rat’s buried treasure. No one felt malice against Albert, really. He was a harmless enough guy, most people liked him, he had a smile for everybody, even if it was a simpering kind of a smile. I for one will miss him. We used to play pool up here together, Albert and I. He’d come over Sunday, after church, and we’d all have supper together, my wife and I and Albert and the aunts and uncles and cousins who take part in the radio show and the businesses, our weekly family gathering, a forced, silent charade. But after supper Albert and I would come up here and play eight-ball for a few hours, and I’d let him win one out of every three games or so, and the final game I’d let run close, then purposely sink the eight-ball to let Albert win and go home happy.”

  I thought back to Boyd’s surveillance report on Albert Leroy: the list of activities hadn’t included visits here. I said, “He came around every Sunday?”

  He nodded. “Up until a month and a half ago, when he and my wife had a falling-out, a little family quarrel… You know, Mr. Quarry, you do manipulate people well, you have a way of sneaking up on a person… you’ve had me talking when you should have been, because if you don’t start talking in a convincing manner about something I’m going to toss you out on your ass, and from up here that could be painful.”

  I said nothing; I was confused.

  “Look,” he said, “just why are you asking questions about Albert, anyway?”

  “Trying to establish a motive.”

  “A motive for what?”

  “His murder. I want to understand why you hired somebody to kill your brother-in-law.”

  His face reddened and he got slowly to his feet. He raised the cue as if to strike me and said, “I ought to break this thing over your head! You stun me. You crazy son of a bitch, where do you find the incredible, idiotic nerve to come barging into my house, a complete stranger, and blurt out an insane accusation like that!”

  “Maybe you’d feel better about it if you were swinging a wrench instead of a cue.”

  He got a puzzled look on his face; had what I’d said really been a non sequitur to him, or was this a mask? He said, “You’re insane. Get out of my house.”

  “Not without four thousand dollars.”

  He looked at me blank-faced for a moment. Then he started to laugh.

  Now I was the startled one.

  He said, “I have to give you credit.”

  I said, “Credit?”

  “You’re good. Better than you should be You know, I ruled Vince out at first, because you didn’t look right, you didn’t seem like the type who’d get involved with him. But this ridiculous attempt to implicate me in Albert’s death… who but Vince could come up with something so absurd?” He laughed again, more harshly this time. “You even had me wondering if maybe Peg put you up to this, to force me into handing Bunny’s to her on a platter… though I couldn’t really believe Peg would try anything of this sort. But Peg is a friend of Carol’s and could possibly have known about Carol and me, so I was thinking about it.”

  I swallowed. I wondered what the fuck was going on. I felt like an actor who had wandered into the last scene of a strange play.

  “Vince is just crook enough,” he was saying, “just cretin enough, to try something ridiculous like this… what’s the matter, isn’t he satisfied with the cushy job I set him up in? Does he know anybody else driving a hack making that kind of money?”

  I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about. We’d been playing a game, both of us, but different games. Suddenly I was filled with doubt. Suddenly I knew Springborn was not the man with the wrench, and that I was digging a nice deep grave for myself by tossing around all those hints about Albert Leroy’s death.

  I stood up and said, “Four thousand isn’t so much to ask.”

  “No,” he said, “it isn’t. That’s one reason I figure this is Vince’s scheme. A small-time thinker, Vince, a man with extremely limited vision. Let me give you some advice. You seem like a reasonably intelligent guy. I don’t know how in Christ’s name you got mixed up with Vince, whether he’s a friend of a friend, or somebody you met in service, or someone you ran into in a bar, or what. But however you picked him, you picked a loser, Mr. Quarry. Now. I’d advise you to head back to wherever it is you hail from. Do not pass go. Do not collect four thousand dollars.”

  “I don’t bluff easy,” I said, aching to go but for appearance sake not wanting to give in too quickly.

  “How much do you know about Vince?”

  “Not much,” I admitted. Christ, not much.

  “You don’t… go in for that kind of stuff, do you?”

  “What kind of stuff?”

  “Maybe you aren’t, uh… listen, hasn’t he tried anything?” Those gray eyes were trying to tell me something.

  “I don’t understand you.”

  “Maybe. Maybe you don’t. Well, Mr. Quarry, you just find your own way out. You seem to have enough ingenuity to do that, anyway. I’m going to stay up here and shoot myself some pool… the activities downstairs are too morbid for my tastes. You know, you’re not a bad pool player yourself, Mr. Quarry, though you wouldn’t do well if we were to play a game for money. When we were shooting around I was sandbagging, you know.”

  “So was I.”

  “No you weren’t. You were playing full out. It’s a naive quality you seem to have. You’re a trusting sort, for a blackmailer. However, you do shoot a fair game of pool. But you won’t win playing with me. Pool’s my game.”

  “Wrong, Springborn,” I said, with some admiration. “Your game is poker.”

  He bent comfortably over the big old table and batted an eight-ball into a corner pocket and I left him.

  25

  One thought throbbed through my brain: get the hell out of here! I walked quickly across the unlit second floor hallway, anxious to reach the glowing area of light ahead that marked the top of the winding stairway which would lead me down into that big empty entryway and then outside into dreary, overcast freedom. I’d been an asshole to stay in Port City, an asshole to think I could find my way through so complex a maze in so short a period of time, an asshole to risk everything to regain four thousand dollars and maybe have a shot at avenging Boyd and myself on that son of a bitch with the wrench. Well, I wasn’t going to play asshole any longer. I was going to grab Peg by the hand, take her back to her apartment and bang her good-bye, then head on home, to Wisconsin. I actually sighed with relief as I neared the staircase. In the middle of the sigh, somebody touched my shoulder.

  I shivered. Not from being cold, though cold I was, cold-sweat variety; I’d been all but running through that hallway like a kid afraid of the dark. And now somebody was touching my shoulder and I didn’t know whether to laugh, cry, scream or crap my pants. So I didn’t do anything. I waited for something to happen. Linda Sue Springborn stepped out of the darkness and said, “I heard it all.”

  She was s
peaking very softly. This made sense, because she’d just finished eavesdropping and we weren’t that far away from the entrance to the tower stairway; we were close enough to hear the distinct clacking together of pool balls in the background.

  I didn’t say anything. She wasn’t acting hysterical. There was no hysteria in that smooth face at all. Had there been, I would’ve had to loop an arm around her chin and break her neck. A screaming woman was something I could do without right about now.

  But she was anything but a screaming woman. She spoke again, her voice soft, very soft, a whisper was a scream compared to this; she said, “Do you want your four thousand dollars?”

  It was like a hard blow against the chest, knocking the wind right out of me. But soon I was breathing easily again and I felt a grin tickling the corners of my mouth.

  “… you?” I said. “You hired me?”

  “Do you want your four thousand dollars?”

  I nodded.

  “And will you leave Port City?”

  I nodded.

  “Good. Go downstairs and escort Peg out of the house. She’s probably starting to wonder where you are and what you’re up to, so don’t waste any time. Go ahead, then, and leave with her.”

  “Leave…?”

  “Just walk her out to your car. Then tell her you forgot your raincoat. I’ll be waiting in front of the house for you. I’ll have your raincoat and the four thousand dollars.”

  I nodded again.

  She said, “Do it quickly. It won’t take me more than five minutes to get the money in order. Now go ahead.”

  “All right.”

  “Mr. Quarry?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Why couldn’t you just’ve done it and left town?”

  “Good question,” I said.

  I did as she told me. I went downstairs and found Peg in the drawing room getting her face talked off by a guy in a rumpled suit with a complexion so bad it looked like wax was running down his cheeks. Everybody else in the room was still about as lively as an oil painting, all standing around doing their best to look somber, but this guy was full of smiles and chatter.

  “Who the hell was he?” I said, as we walked out of the drawing room into the hall. “He seemed like the only one having a good time.”

  “Oh sure,” Peg said, “he’s lotsa yuks. He’s the fucking undertaker.”

  “Well when he goes,” I said, “I hope they close the casket.”

  Peg giggled. “Yeah, that is a nice face he’s wearing, isn’t it?”

  Outside the rain was still holding back pretty much, keeping it down to a light misting. It was getting into late afternoon, but nobody told the sky about it; it was stuck at midnight. On the way to the Ford, Peg told me anecdotes about the various creeps she’d been talking to inside the house, and as I opened the car door for her, I said, “Shit, forgot my raincoat.”

  “I’ll go back and get it for you, Quarry.”

  “Naw, that’s okay. Be back in a flash.”

  I didn’t see Mrs. Springborn at first. She wasn’t standing on the porch; she was off to the side, near some shrubbery. She was wearing a long black coat and all that showed up, as I approached, was the whiteness of her oval face, like the face of a madonna, but a madonna with a bad taste in her mouth.

  When I reached her, she handed me my raincoat and I put it on. Then she handed me an envelope and let me look inside and count the crisp hundred-dollar bills. There were forty of them. When she saw I was finished counting, she said, “Good-bye, Mr. Quarry.”

  “Not that easy, Mrs. Springborn.”

  “Just that easy.”

  “No. I want to hear about it. I want to know all about why you had your brother killed.”

  “I’m not going to tell you. My agreement was to pay you. And now here I am paying you again. Which seems payment above and beyond the call of duty, does it not?”

  “Are you trying to tell me…”

  “That I’m not responsible for your associate’s death? Yes. Your.. what? Agent? At any rate, the man you work through, the man you know as the Broker, I believe, called me and told me all about your wild story of a man with a wrench. I would imagine it’s a true story.. you don’t seem like a man who’d be prone to hallucination… but, sir, whatever it was that happened to you and your late partner was the result of some unknown factor that neither you nor I had control over, some joker in the deck that neither of us put there.”

  “If you didn’t have my partner killed, and didn’t try to have me killed, why pay the four thousand again?”

  “To get you the hell out of Port City, why else do you think, you incompetent bastard?” Her low voice sounded almost like a man’s-deep, harsh. “Your Broker warned me when he called that there was an outside chance you’d be poking your nose around; he’d take care of it, he said, but there was a slight chance you’d cause some trouble. And then you show up here! I couldn’t believe it. Even after we spoke and I knew that you must be who you were, I couldn’t believe it! I still don’t. My sweet God, I pay close to five thousand dollars for a relatively simple task, a task I could’ve had performed by some derelict in a bar for fifty dollars, but no, I have to have a professional, to minimize the risk, to make it safe, quick, someone who’d handle the task with skill… and what do I get? A bumbling fool who kills my brother and then comes to my home making noises about it!”

  “All right. I’ll leave town. With pleasure. But I want to know. I won’t leave until I know it all.”

  “You ass! You’ve been incredibly lucky so far… your associate’s body hasn’t been found yet, for one thing, thanks to this miserable weather you’ve got me out standing in, and until it’s found the police will have no reason to figure Albert’s death was anything but a robbery, performed by some idiot who believed the local legend about Albert’s treasure. But your friend’s body won’t go undiscovered forever, and how do you think the police are going to react? We just don’t have two murders on one day in Port City, one is a rarity, two is unheard of. Oh, but you aren’t afraid of the Port City police, are you? Well there’s a man from the Iowa Criminal Bureau of Investigation in this town, and he handles all such matters personally, and he’s a professional, Quarry, you do know what a professional is? And how do you think he’s going to react when he hears you’ve been wandering around town asking questions? Take the money, Quarry, and…”

  “And run?”

  “Yes, damnit!”

  “Take five minutes. Take one minute. But tell me.”

  “No!”

  “Then listen to me. I think I know what happened, or part of it.”

  She was silent.

  So I told her.

  The way I had it figured, Albert Leroy had found out what was going on between Raymond Springborn and his girl friend in the apartment across the way. Maybe it had started out as a streak of the voyeur in Albert, maybe he had just come upon the two lovebirds by happy accident, who knew? But come upon them he had, and Albert found power in what he knew, power to come to Raymond Springborn and ask for money, more money than he’d gotten in his job as janitor, that was for sure, probably far beyond that. Maybe he’d asked to be on the goddamn board of directors, or some other sillyass thing he felt he had coming to him as right of birth. Whatever, he had used what he knew to twist Raymond Springborn’s arm, and had gotten killed for his trouble.

  She remained silent till I was finished. Then she said, “Take the four thousand and go, Quarry.”

  “I’m close, aren’t I?” I said through gritted teeth. “I thought I had it figured exactly right, I thought your husband had tried to keep his affair from you, to hide this little girl he was using to scratch his seven-year itch, that he’d hired your brother’s death and had done away with the threat of you finding out about his cheating, getting rid of the family deadwood to boot.”

  She leaned forward and spoke with her lips peeled back, saying, “Do you think I care whether or not Raymond fucks that little whore? Do you think I give a good
goddamn if he fucks every bitch-in-heat in the world? I don’t want his goddamn bed, I haven’t wanted it for years. I like the pressure off me!”

  “Oh… wait,” I said, “wait a minute… no wonder. No wonder. Your husband has never known a thing about this, has he? Damn! Albert came to you with the story about Ray’s cheating, didn’t he? Albert came to you with the demands.”

  “This is nonsense.”

  “It sure is. No wonder your husband was so indignant when I made those implications about him killing Albert! And you, you didn’t really give a damn about that little girl he was screwing, did you?”

  “I told you, I didn’t want to be a part of his damn sex life! Raymond and I, we have an understanding, a way of living together. Our life together is the business. The business is our relationship. We don’t have any children, couldn’t have any, our family is the business, and our relationship is the business, and why don’t you go fuck yourself!”

  “You don’t want your husband to find out about Albert, do you? You don’t want him to know that you had your own brother killed.”

  “Quarry…”

  “And no wonder. A woman who’ll murder her brother might do most anything…”

  “How much, Quarry? I have another four thousand in the house. Just wait here. I’ll get it. I’ll get it for you.”

  “Why did you want him dead? What threat did Albert pose you? You didn’t give a damn about your husband’s cheating.”

  She said, quietly, in defeat, “He said… he said he’d tell everyone about Raymond… he’d go to the press and he’d tell them about Raymond and the girl.”

  And I laughed.

  Because it all made sense; the motive was there at last.

  Scandal.

  An empire built on chicken soup and fudge recipes and family cannot endure a scandal. The rest of the world may accept adultery, the jet set and movie stars may be able to screw when and whom they please, but not in the Midwest, not when you’re Linda Sue and Ray Springborn, the Kitchen Korner couple.

  And who knew how many ether Springborn skeletons- in-the-closet Albert would have been able to reveal, intended to reveal? Raymond Springborn’s mob connec- tions, perhaps? And what else did Linda Sue have to hide from her public? There had to be something. Perhaps any number of somethings. Whatever they were, the scandals would be fueled by their source: the broken-down, pitifully neglected member of the Kitchen Korner clan, Albert Leroy.