So did I.
18
The sign said “Coke” and underneath, in only slightly larger letters, “Port City Taxi Service,” but the place was more than that: it was an all-night grocery of sorts, as well as restaurant and bookstore. The groceries ran to pretzels, pop and milk, and the books ran to porno paperbacks and skin mags, and the restaurant was little more than a couple of tables stuck next to a stand that had on it a coffeepot and napkins and plastic spoons and an infrared mini-oven for the heating of cellophane-wrapped sandwiches which were for sale at the counter as you came in.
Behind the glassed counter, which was long and full of candy and cigarettes, was a heavyset woman of indeterminate age with frowzy gray-brown hair and a curiously friendly face. She was wearing a red and white checkered dress that looked like a tablecloth left over from a 1957 picnic and was sitting in the corner with her back to an ancient black metal sender-receiver, a squared hand mike leading out from it on a worn spiral rubber cord and resting in one of her hands, a mostly smoked cigarette in the other. From somewhere out of the radio outfit came muffled static which she apparently understood, as she responded to it now and then.
When she and the static had finished talking to each other, she grinned at me and said, “Howdy, mister. Little early yet, ain’t it?”
“Sure is,” I said.
“It gets early every morning round this time.” She rasped out a little laugh and pointed a finger down toward the end of the counter. “Fresh rolls down there, dime a piece. You get first pick today, sonny. Early bird catches the worm. The coffee’s still perking, shouldn’t be more’n a couple of minutes and it’ll be ready. There’s a dish on the stand, by the napkin container. Drop a nickel in the dish for every cup of coffee you drink.”
“Thanks.”
I lifted the sheet of white paper on the box and looked in at rows of fresh, well-iced danish rolls and picked several out and left the old lady a quarter on the counter. I walked back and sat down at one of the tables and nibbled at a roll while I waited for the coffee.
The place was all length and little width, the groceries crowded on shelves on one side of the room, a few tall skinny glass-doored refrigeration units backed up flat against the wall like men in the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, and the paperbacks and magazines were thick on the other side of the room, various sorts of racks rubbing shoulders with one another. The ceiling was high and had all the room’s breathing space to itself; the ceiling edges were curved, ornately sculpted with little nude cupids and such and vines and flowers, and I wondered how old the building was and what it once had been.
I sat and stared at the tarnished aluminum coffeepot and listened to it perking. My mind was doing the same thing: perking, playing with thoughts, trying to get ready.
I didn’t understand, yet, what exactly the occurrences of this still early morning added up to. My mind was fuzzy, the events floating around inside my head like the synthetic snow in a wintery paperweight. I didn’t know what would happen next. I wasn’t sure what had happened so far. But I did know what I was going to do.
I was going to find the man.
The man who had paid to have Albert Leroy killed.
Who else in Port City knew Boyd and I were in town? Who else in Port City knew Boyd would have thousands of dollars in a suitcase in that particular apartment on this particular morning?
Motivation? I had no idea of what motivation lurked behind all of this. In the first place, it was still a mystery to me how anyone could feel it necessary to have Albert Leroy killed. He wasn’t my idea of the kind of man who posed a threat. Motivation, I didn’t know about that. Yet.
The coffee was ready and I got myself a cup. I sipped it slowly and thought some more.
What about Broker? He knew about Albert Leroy and Port City and all of it; hell, he set it up. Was this some kind of Broker Machiavellian kiss-off?
Unlikely. If Broker wanted to get rid of a man he wouldn’t do so in so sloppy a fashion, and in Broker’s home territory. There are plenty of methods, far better ones, for weeding out your bad stock. If Broker wanted me dead, he’d send someone up to see me between jobs, when I was sitting on my ass, fishing in Wisconsin or something. I’d be found floating in the lake up there, if I was found at all, not in an apartment in Port City, across the street from where I’d just hit a man.
Of course I was well aware that Broker meant to stop me, at all costs, from playing Sherlock Holmes in Port City. I knew that the meeting tonight at that stone quarry (which could’ve been the very place that provided Broker the inspiration for the name he’d bestowed on me years back) would be in one way or another designed to get me out of this, out of the area, out of the situation, out. Just what extent of violence he had in mind for me, if any, I didn’t know. I doubted Broker would try to have me killed, but it was possible. Possible.
It wasn’t smart to stay in Port City, I knew that. But it wasn’t smart to leave, either. In my business you have to know what’s happening, where you stand, what exactly’s being done to you and who by. I didn’t want to leave Port City till I understood what had happened this morning. All I knew now was that someone had tried to kill me, and it wasn’t smart to leave Port City till I knew who and why.
I also knew it wasn’t risky, particularly, to stay in town, as long as I didn’t stick around very long, long enough to give even hick town cops a chance to put the pieces together. If I could do it fast, in a day, maybe two, there was nothing to worry about. I had my salesman credentials and sample case if anyone asked questions at me hard, a cover that would hold water if it was checked out. As long as I didn’t attract too much attention or act too overly cautious about my actions, suspicions weren’t likely to be aroused. Soon as I left here, I would change barrels on the gun, toss the old barrel wrapped in the gloves I’d worn down a sewer duct, so nothing to worry about there.
There were logical answers to all the questions that came to my mind, and I answered them, all the while thinking: I don’t need reasons for what I do. No excuses, no logic. I do what feels right. I feel like I was double- crossed by the guy who hired me, and I feel like doing something about it.
The door slammed up front and I looked up. A skinny guy in jeans and a white T-shirt walked over to the counter and slammed down his coin changer and tossed some bills down. “Checkin’ in,” he said. His voice was high-pitched and didn’t fit the lean but tough look he carried with him, mostly coming from a dark complexion and scruffy black hair and a chipped-tooth smile.
“Where you been?” the old woman said. “Tried to get you on the call box.”
“Some ol’ bitch had me drive her home out in the country and I had to carry some shit in the house for her. She tipped me a goddamn quarter, you believe it, shee-it.”
He came over, grabbing a couple of danish rolls, and got himself some coffee and sat down with me at the table and said, “Care if I sit down here with you, Jack?”
“You already are.”
“Thanks, don’t mind if I do.”
He sat there and yelled up to the old lady, bantered back and forth with her, laughing over in-jokes, and the smell of him and his eating mouth-open while talking and the inane boring chatter got old fast. I got up and walked back to the book racks and looked them over.
One rack of paperbacks seemed largely devoted to gay literature and I recognized Twilight Love, a book I’d seen Boyd reading the other day, among the various titles and smiled for a moment and for that moment thought about Boyd and how before lately he hadn’t been that bad of a guy.
The skinny cabbie came over carrying a half-eaten danish and poked me in the ribs with his elbow and winked and said, “Like that stuff, honey?”
His voice seemed effeminate now. I didn’t know whether he was putting it on or not. For a second there I got mad-I don’t really know why-and I looked at him straight on and cold and didn’t say anything but he got the point. He was dumb, but he was smart enough to know I was going to hurt him if he said anything else.
After he went away I left the rack of books and headed for the magazines, then noticed a stack of papers in the corner, back by the Coke cooler. I walked over and bent down and took a look at them. Davenport papers, daily Times. They went back several days. Just for the hell of it I thumbed through them till I found notice of the airport
