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
