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.
One of them was being watched from this window by the woman currently calling herself Lucille Something. I thought I knew who it was she was watching, and I’d spend the rest of the day confirming that suspicion, and then I’d be in business.
Unless she killed the poor son of a bitch before I had a chance to do something about it.
12
Saturday night, about midnight, Frank Tree got in his LTD and by the time he was settled behind the wheel, leaning forward to insert key in ignition, I had put the fat cold nose of the silenced nine-millimeter up against the side of his neck, just under his ear.
I had to give the guy credit. He didn’t jump. Hell, he didn’t flinch. He didn’t yell, either. And he knew enough not to turn towards me. He didn’t try looking at the rear-view mirror, as if he knew in advance I’d turned it to face the windshield.
All he did was say: “I don’t have any money on me.”
“Good. I’m glad to hear you’re not a total idiot.”
“What?”
“Didn’t you ever hear of locking your car? How many hundred buck tape decks do you lose a week?”
“What is this?”
I leaned back a little, eased the gun off his neck. “Look on the seat next to you,” I said. “Tell me what you see. “
“A shirt.”
“Tell me about it.”
“It’s pale lemon color. It’s got a monogram on the pocket. It’s dirty.”
“What else.”
“It’s mine.”
“Where do you suppose I got it?”
“My dirty laundry, I guess. So you’ve been in my apartment. So what?”
“So now I’m in your car and I got a gun on you.”
“Yeah, well, congratulations. Now what the fuck’s this all about?”
“It’s about a guy who drives an LTD and makes a hell of a lot of money, who leaves his car unlocked and lives in an apartment you can open with a credit card, in an apartment building whose security is a joke.”
“There are two armed guards on duty twenty-four hours a day at Town Crest.”
That was the name of the high-rent apartment building I could see from Lucille’s window. Frank Tree was a tenant.
“Those guys aren’t guards,” I said. “They’re parking lot attendants. Anybody in a jacket and tie can walk in the lobby and go up the elevator and nobody says a word.”
“Is there a point to this?”
“The point is if I’d been hired to kill you, you’d be dead by now.”
“Hired to…”
“The only problem I can see in killing you is trying to pick from the dozens of ways to do it. I heard of sitting ducks, but this is ridiculous.”
Tree brought a hand up, and I touched the back of his neck with the silenced gun. But he was only scratching his head. A few flakes of dandruff floated onto his shoulders.
“I can offer you double,” Tree said. “Double whatever you’re being paid.”
“You don’t understand. No one’s paying me. Yet. I only said if I’d been hired to kill you.”
“What is this, some kind of extortion racket? Maybe you don’t know the kind of people I count as friends.”
“Mafia guys, you mean? They probably helped get you into this.”
