The Holiday Inn’s pool room was free of screaming kiddies on this Monday after Christmas. Families were homeward bound, and even my redheaded whirlpool partner was nowhere in sight-if she’d gone home, too, that would be a shame. I had worked up some pretty good fantasies about my thirty-something pick-up-I had a rough draft of a Penthouse Forum letter well under way in my mind.
But having the pool to myself-it was warm, maybe a little too warm-was a pleasure. My arms and legs cutting the water in this aquamarine echo chamber provided an otherworldly backdrop for the twenty laps I swam. The whirlpool felt good, really good, as my neck and upper back were fairly tense from all of last night’s fun and games.
I didn’t feel guilty about Charlie-he’d gone wading in and found himself in the deep end and that wasn’t my doing-but I hadn’t ever shot a guy right next to me before. Much of what I’d done in Vietnam had been as a sniper or in fire fights, and I’d seen plenty of bloody bodies nearby, but usually my fellow soldiers. As for that guy Williams I dropped the car on, well, obviously, the car was between him and me.
But I did have to face that a profession presented to me by the Broker as clinical, surgical, and distant could have some haphazard, sloppy, and close-up ramifications. Didn’t bother me, but this wasn’t exactly what I expected. No biggie.
So I sat and relaxed for maybe half an hour in the swirling, soothing hot water, just enjoying the emptiness of the big room. I did a little time in the sauna, too, and was loose and comfortable and ready to start my day, come mid-morning.
The Broker had told me not to go back to the split-level till I’d talked to him, late afternoon; but I wasn’t comfortable with the mess I’d left behind. So after I asked a few questions at the hotel’s front desk, I headed out in the rental Maverick and picked up some cleaning stuff at the Kmart and headed over.
The stuff on the wall in the kitchen, on Charlie’s side of the breakfast nook, was crusty and nasty, and took some muscle with the Brillo pad to make go away. I thought there’d be a bullet hole under there, but the slug must have still been in Charlie’s noggin, possibly because where I’d shot him had been where the bone was pretty solid.
I cleaned up blackened blood from the linoleum, and some other encrusted grue, and the place soon looked like a kitchen and not a slaughterhouse. Probably nothing I’d done would have given a good forensics team any problem, but for a real estate agent or home buyer who came wandering in, nobody would be the wiser.
You might think I would do exactly what the Broker told me to, and not stray in any way from his instructions; but the thing was, my ass was hanging out, not his. I was in the trenches and he was in his Caddy or at the Concort Inn or in some fancy mansion somewhere, so the decision was mine. If, this afternoon, the Broker wound up telling me to book it out of Dodge, and I’d have to leave that house behind, with blood spatter that wasn’t about to be mistaken for a Jackson Pollock painting, then we’d just be asking for trouble.
Cleaning up that mess wasn’t my only secret insubordination where the Broker was concerned: I had also failed to mention the half a dozen rolls of 35mm film of Charlie’s that I’d found. My favorite game is poker, if I haven’t mentioned it, and in poker you protect your hole card. And my hunch was those film rolls might be my ace.
In downtown Iowa City, I went to the photo shop the Holiday Inn desk clerk recommended, and left the rolls to be developed, with my photos ready tomorrow morning. I told the bored middle-aged guy behind the counter these were art shots, meaning naked women would be on some of them, and asked if that would be a problem. He said no, but it would be an extra twenty bucks.
By then it was close to noon and I followed another of the desk clerk’s tips and walked over to a sandwich shop called Bushnell’s Turtle, named for an early submarine and reflecting the style of sandwiches they served.
A record store, a book shop and Bushnell’s were among half a dozen businesses in double-wide temporary buildings housed right out in the middle of Clinton Street at the end of East College, which was mostly blocked off for the construction of a pedestrian mall. I walked up a wheelchair-friendly ramp and into the unpretentious sandwich emporium, where you ordered at a counter from a chalkboard menu on the wall, got your food and found a table.
For winter break being on, the unpretentious sub shop was surprisingly busy, with straight customers from the business and retail community mixed in with hippie-ish college students. I’d already ordered when I spotted Annette Girard and Professor Byron, at a table over by the windows along Clinton, too late to make an inconspicuous retreat.
What the hell, I was just another college student, right? Longish hair, young face, no sweat. The question was, did I take a nearby table to eavesdrop on their conversation, or did I play it safe and position myself as far away from the pair as possible?
Do I have to tell you I took a table adjacent? I didn’t figure there was much if any chance of Annette, who was deep in conversation with her loving prof, recognizing me from Sambo’s, where we’d had our brief and not terribly memorable conversation.
They seemed to be past their meal or just having coffee, and I nibbled at a delicious sandwich (not a sub) where bratwurst and mozzarella and sauerkraut mingled nicely on rye. Beat the hell out of Slim Jims and Hostess cupcakes. And I could hear the couple pretty well.
“You have to open up, Annette,” he was saying, the oratorical baritone nicely modulated into whispery intimacy, “you have to be honest. That’s part of the novel technique, you know.”
Her head was tilted, her brunette hair pausing at the shoulders of her green and black paisley blouse on its way down her back. “Honesty in characterization and human behavior, sure…but otherwise, isn’t all fiction a contrivance?”
An out-of-control eyebrow lifted in his hawkish face. “Of course it is, but when done well, a very high level of contrivance. Fiction is, after all, the lie that tells the truth. In a non-fiction work, you have to find multiple sources, and you often have to hew to accepted history, and that’s a joke. But in fiction, you are inside the narrator’s head, and in the first person, you share space with that narrator.”
She was frowning. “But narrators in fiction can be unreliable. You’ve told me that.”
“And that’s permissible in a non-fiction novel, too, as long as the narrator, the main character, is you, and any exaggerations or lies are told in the context of your personal truth.”
Wow. Was this guy full of shit!
“But I would encourage you not to lie,” he was saying. “I would encourage you to engage your memories head-on. Confront them and conquer them. For example, you need to share with your reader every horrible thing your father ever did to you.”
“K.J.,” she said, “I don’t want to relive all of that. It took me years of therapy to get past any of it.”
“Then you haven’t gone past it. Anyway, therapy is a crutch; writing is catharsis. You put these experiences in your non-fiction novel, every single thing you witnessed, and when you’re done, you can close the book on that entire sordid chapter. Literally.”
I was confused. Who was writing the book on Annette’s mob-boss father? Professor or student? Or were they collaborating?
“Anyway, we can discuss it this evening,” Byron said, and rose, scooting his chair back and gathering his parka-style fur-lined khaki-green jacket; he was in a darker green sweater with the collars of a pale yellow shirt sticking out, and well-worn, just-another-radical blue jeans.
She asked him, “How many meetings do you have this afternoon?”
“Three. Should be safe to come around by six. We’ll cook up some chili and put the Coltrane on and just talk this through.”
She got up, too, getting into the familiar white coat with white fur collar, and that’s when she recognized me. She brightened and met my eyes and I frowned at her as if I didn’t know why the fuck she was looking at me-maybe not the most credible reaction from a straight guy having a beautiful girl gaze right at him.
“Hi!” she said.
“Hello,” I said.
“You remember me-from Sambo’s?”
The professor was studying me as if I were an exam paper written in crayon. Then he turned to Annette and asked, “What were you doing in Sambo’s?”
“Having coffee, reading. When you had your meetings last night? You know it’s just across from where I
