We rode in silence for maybe a minute.
Then she asked: “You were watching me for my father? Why would he do that?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe he had the wild idea you needed protection.”
You’d think that would have stopped her for a second, but instead she came right back: “Then you were watching me.”
I thought for a moment. The closer I could get my story to the truth, the better it would play and the easier it’d be to maintain.
“No,” I said. “I was watching Professor Byron.”
Her face jerked toward mine, eyes and nostrils flaring. “Why?”
“I don’t know for sure. I’m just doing a job.”
“Tell me what you do know, Jack.”
“Well…this is reading between the lines. I’m just a grunt in this war. But I think your father wanted me to gather evidence showing what a louse your prize professor is.”
“ What?”
“I gathered photos of Professor Byron with another coed. And he’s married.”
She was sitting forward, shaking her head, which sent her long hair tumbling back into more or less its normal down-her-back configuration. “Are you kidding? I told you before, at Sambo’s-I know all about K.J. He’s a free spirit. I don’t love him, not that way.”
I could have been a stickler for accuracy and reminded her that she’d been blowing the dude in his study the first time I saw them together. But she was running short enough a fuse already.
“Yeah, I get that,” I said. “I understand. But your father, and I’ve never met him, but knowing what generation he’s from, my guess is, he assumes you would be shocked and appalled by the professor’s lecherous activities. I mean, these guys from the Depression and World War Two, they have a whole different way of looking at the world. Sex and love are interchangeable to them. The idea that a nice girl like you could admire your professor and want to collaborate with him and also go to bed with him without being in love with him, without wanting to spend your life with him, and not caring how much action he’s getting on the side…well, that just doesn’t fly with that crowd.”
“And yet my father has fucked more showgirls than Sinatra.”
That would be a lot of showgirls.
She was saying, “My father is completely immoral, no make that amoral, where sex is concerned, but he’s got that same goddamn double-standard as the rest of the men of his generation. Madonnas and whores, that’s women to him.”
“Not to make too fine a point of it, but I doubt he thinks of you as a woman at all.”
“What?”
“You’re a girl. His little girl. And this professor is betraying a teacher’s trust and abusing daddy’s precious dainty child.”
She laughed and something harsh was in it, surprisingly so. “If you only knew what you were saying…”
Well, I didn’t. I was just filling the emptiness in the car, and trying to convince her I was on her side.
We drove silently again, maybe for five minutes. Then I noticed her sitting up, her brow furrowing.
“My God,” she said. Her brain was starting to work. “There are dead men back there at that rest stop.”
“That’s right.”
Wide eyes fixed on me. “What are you going to do about it? What am I going to do about it?”
“Well, we can’t go to the police.”
“Why not-wasn’t I kidnapped?”
“You were, but the way I handled it was not…strictly kosher.”
“You…what did you do?”
“I’m not going to give you the details.”
“You mean you…pretty much murdered them.”
“Pretty much.”
She sighed. Leaned against the door again. “I don’t know if I believe you…”
“Oh, I murdered them.”
“Not that.” She shrugged. “I buy that easy enough. What I doubt is you’re just some PI from Des Moines, not one of my father’s soldiers.”
“Do I look like one of your father’s soldiers?”
“No. You…you look like a soldier, though.”
“Did I mention Vietnam?”
“You mentioned it. Are you taking me to my apartment?”
“I’ve been thinking about that. How shaken up are you?”
“How shaken up would you be?”
“Fairly shaken up. You said you weren’t hurt, but they grabbed you, treated you rough, taped you up and threw you in that trunk-you must have aches and pains.”
“You could say I have aches and pains.”
I watched the road. We were coming up on the Quad Cities. “I think we should get a room somewhere and let you rest up and kind of heal up.”
“Why? What’s wrong with my apartment?”
“Your apartment, across from the Sambo’s where two black thugs kidnapped you, couple hours ago? That the apartment you mean?”
She said nothing, but she was holding onto her coat lapels again, and despite her dark complexion looked very pale, though some of that was moonlight and dashboard glow.
I said, “I would like to talk to your father. Tell him what happened.”
She turned sharply toward me. “I don’t want to have anything to do with my father!”
“I can understand that. But those two dead guys from the South Side, they do have something to do with your father. He’s in the middle of some kind of war with them and their black brothers. I want to ask him what to do with you, strictly for your protection.”
“I don’t want his protection.”
“Would you rather I hadn’t been here tonight? Do I have to paint you a picture of what kind of fun and games would’ve been starting about now?”
She said nothing, but then shook her head. “You’re…you’re probably right. In a case like this, my father is the person to talk to.”
“You want to talk to him yourself?”
“No. He and I don’t talk.”
“Would it be all right if I protected your interests?”
She nodded, once, still clutching her lapels.
We crossed the Mississippi and before long I took the Highway 61 exit and drove down through Davenport all the way to the riverfront, crossing under the government bridge and pulling into the Concort Inn parking lot.
I was able to park near the entrance. “Look,” I said, turning to Annette and resting a hand on the seat behind her. “Just so you know. We’ll go in, I’ll register us as husband and wife, Jack and Annette some-shit, and ask for twin beds. You have some fairly liberal notions about sex, but in case you’re wondering, I have no intentions of asking for a reward or anything.”
“I didn’t think you were.”
“Good. This is about not getting killed. You not getting killed, me not getting killed. Those are the goals.”
“I can get behind those goals.”
“Fine. Let’s go in. If we get a twitchy desk clerk, I’ll say the airline lost our luggage.”
But the desk clerk didn’t give a shit whether we had luggage or not. He was a little put off by me paying in cash since the hotel really did prefer credit cards, but that was all.
The room was not as nice as the suite the Broker had arranged for my last visit, but it was anonymously modern and clean and had a view on the river. Also, the twin beds I’d requested. I set my nine millimeter on the nightstand between us, to emphasize the seriousness of the situation, and also because I might need the fucking
