“Sure,” I said. I didn’t have an expense account, but a well-stirred cup of coffee and an undrunk iced tea wouldn’t break me.
I decided today would be the day. With Dorrie on her way home, and Annette holed up in her apartment, I should finally have my opportunity. I headed back to the split-level on Country Vista on an afternoon turned colder, with some icy teeth in a wind desperately looking for snow to blow around but finding the white stuff too frozen over to comply.
So confident was I that I actually loaded up the Maverick in the driveway down behind the split-level, piling in my sleeping bag and space heater and the little TV Charlie bequeathed me and a few leftovers from my 7-Eleven runs, and runs was right, when your regular diet was Slim Jims and Hostess.
When I returned to my window, the house was cold enough without the space heater for my breath to show. I sat like an Indian and looked out at that cobblestone cottage, just waiting for my moment. I had on a black sweatshirt and blue jeans over long johns and the corduroy jacket and the black Isotoner gloves and the nine millimeter was on the carpet next to me, since this goddamn job had been just one unexpected thing after another.
Maybe six-fifteen, with night here already, I saw the professor coming out from behind the cottage to go into the little unattached cobblestone garage. From within, he opened the double-door, a big slab of gray-painted wood, and then I could see him getting into his maroon Volvo and backing out. He stopped in the drive, got out, closed the garage door, got back into the Volvo, pulled out of the drive and headed down Country Vista toward the main drag.
I was sitting up straight, the nine millimeter in my gloved hand now.
Finally an opportunity had presented itself, and I went out the back way and once again trotted down to cut through woods to where I could cross the street and come up unseen behind the rear of the cobblestone cottage. The gun in my waistband but my jacket unzipped, I followed my breath to the back door of the cottage. That was the only bad thing: I needed to get in without the professor noticing on his return that the door had been jimmied.
The rear door was old but the lock was new, the kind you could open with a credit card. But I didn’t have a credit card, as that desk clerk at the Concort Inn could tell you. Trying to think of what I might use instead, I absently tried the knob and the goddamn thing was unlocked. The professor, for all his east coast sensibilities, had fallen for the Iowa hi-neighbor trustfulness. The sap.
From peeking in windows on my previous visit, I already knew the layout: a small unremodeled kitchen in back, wooden cabinets with counter and an old stove and 1950s vintage refrigerator and yellow Formica table; a pantry and laundry room next door; then, as you came from the kitchen, a study and a bedroom to right and left respectively; and a good-size living room with a cobblestone fireplace, which was going nicely, red-and-blue flames snapping as if its owner were in attendance. In this surprisingly expansive open-beamed space was a lot of dark wood paneling that dated back to when the cottage was built. A very rustic interior, with built-in bookcases in one corner and a braided throw rug and a green sofa with a broken-down look and a big captain’s table under the glow of a hanging light fixture shaped like a yellow upside-down tulip.
I decided to get a head start on it, and went into the study. For half an hour, I went through his desk, its drawers and the file cabinets. I gathered every damn document that had the name “Girardelli” or anything vaguely Italian or having to do with Chicago. I was feeling pretty proud of myself, looking at a big stack of manuscript pages and carbon copies and boxes and notebooks resting on his swivel chair when I heard the back door open, and then close.
Positioning myself to the left of the door, snugged between the frame and the file cabinets, I waited and listened, the nine millimeter in hand, its snout up.
Out in the kitchen, he was setting something down. Then I heard him open the door on the refrigerator and stuff was going onto wire shelving, and then cabinets were opening and cans and other things were getting set down on wood. He’d gone to the store. He had to eat, didn’t he? Well, actually, he didn’t, but he didn’t know that.
I couldn’t think of any reason not to pop him there in the kitchen and was about to step out and do that very thing when somebody banged at the front door, hard, and I damn near pissed myself.
Hugging the wall again, I heard him saying, “Now what the hell…”
I knew the feeling.
I heard him cross into the living room over the wooden floor, the footsteps different on the braided rug, then the door opened and he said, “ Dorrie! I thought we’d settled everything.”
I knew the feeling!
The door slammed behind her.
“Almost, darling,” she said. “Tell me, though. We did have something, didn’t we? Once upon a time? Isn’t that what you storytellers say? Once upon a time?”
“Dorrie…of course we did. For that part of my life, for all those years, you were the only woman, the most important person in my entire life…”
Why was he talking so quickly? Why did he sound so goddamn desperate?
“That’s nice to hear,” she said. Her voice had an odd wistfulness, and a distance that was much farther away than from the study to the living room. “It does help, darling. It does help.”
“You need to put that down, Dorrie! Put it down right now!”
If you ever watched the old sitcoms on TV, like I Love Lucy, there was always this audience member on the canned laugh track who said, “ Uh oh! ” at a key story moment. I wasn’t watching a sitcom exactly, but I heard that familiar voice. Uh oh was fucking right…
Then came a sharp crack, almost as if the fire had popped, but it wasn’t the fire, was it?
I was hoping I didn’t have to kill her. I really didn’t want to, and I stood there frozen in my tiny space between door and filing cabinets, hoping to hear that door slam as she went away, having done my job for me.
But I didn’t hear the door slam.
I heard a second sharp crack.
And when I finally went out there, she was curled on the floor next to him, a certain elegance about how she lay there, as opposed to her husband, still in a tan jacket from going to the store and chinos and pretty much looking like a pile of laundry dumped by a fed-up housewife. And maybe he was. Her blouse was crimson and the stain on the white fabric grew where she’d shot herself through the heart the dead prick had broken. A little revolver was in her limp hand. Byron had taken his in the forehead and his talented brains were leaking out the back of his skull.
I leaned down for a look at the gun, and it was Charlie Koenig’s. 38! I’d put it in my suitcase but Dorrie must have helped herself to it when she visited my room. Her using that weapon would add another nice confusing layer to any police investigation.
The gunshots had seemed small if distinct. Nobody lived across the street now, not even me or the late Charlie. The cottages to left and right were spaced well away. I did not feel anyone was likely to have heard anything suspicious enough to call for investigation.
Wasn’t much left to do but burn those manuscript pages and notebooks in the fireplace. It took a while, and as the flames ate the opus, its author-dead and sprawled on the floor by the wife whose spirit he’d killed-basked unknowingly in their dancing reflection.
ELEVEN
A space was open next to the dark blue Thunderbird with the Illinois plates, and I filled it with the Maverick. Both my car and the goon squad’s were backed in, for a good view of the little red-brick apartment building and its modest parking lot.
Whenever I’d done surveillance on Annette, over the past several days, I parked across the way in Sambo’s semi-enclosed lot; where the Thunderbird was parked made it too easy to come up on them from behind. But I guessed Girardelli’s boys knew their own business.
Right now the Thunderbird had only one pockmarked weasel sitting in it, the heavier-set one, on the
