The lid popped up to reveal, down in the well, the little yellow-permed Chrissy in her pink blouse (unknotted and loose now) and tight jeans and sandals, on her side fetally, front of her toward us as she craned her head to glare at me, the big dark-blue eyes popping over the wide slash of silver duct tape. She tried to call me something but I couldn’t quite make it out, though I think I got the gist.
I’d taped her wrists behind her and wrapped the stuff all over and around her little fists, in hopes that would keep her bound. Her ankles were taped tight, too. She didn’t seem to have budged, which either meant she wasn’t as ambitious or smart as I’d been on that boat, or maybe I had just done a better job of taping her up.
Cornell’s yap was hanging open. “What the bloody hell…?”
I shut the trunk, and took him by the elbow, walking him near the line of trees at that end of the lot.
“Little girls have big ears,” I said, keeping my voice low and raising a shush finger.
“I didn’t hire you to kill some innocent-”
“First of all, she’s about as innocent as Marilyn Chambers, and second, she’s still breathing. And I’m not going to make her stop, either. You can do what you want with her, from spank her to toss her dead in a ditch, but it’s not a job I want.”
I quickly explained that Chrissy had been Jerry G’s industrial espionage agent, and Cornell found this news predictably dismaying.
“I thought I was a better judge of character than that,” he said, shaking his head, the half-lidded, unblinking aqua eyes taking on a hurt, almost haunted quality.
“Dickie, you may be a good judge of character, but few heterosexual males are good judges of character when that character is attached to a tight little twenty-year-old pussy. If you’ll pardon my bluntness. Anyway, the job is done and maybe we can transfer that package to your trunk, and you can do whatever the fuck you-”
“ What job is done?”
“Are you kidding? Jerry G is still warm but he’s not breathing.”
“…You did it. You really did it.”
“What did you think I was going to do? Performance art?”
“I mean…before, it seemed abstract…”
“That other body in the trunk I showed you, that seemed abstract to you?”
He was going pale despite the tan. “How…how did it go down?”
“I told you I don’t do details. How it’s perceived depends on Jerry G’s Chicago partners and the bent local cops. It’ll probably be one of two ways-a robbery/homicide, or a boating accident. Or even, with the right doctor, natural causes. My guess is, the last thing Jerry G’s associates want, and I include both Chicago and the county sheriff’s department, is a homicide that brings in state cops. That kind of investigation could shut down Haydee’s Port, you included, at least for a while.”
He didn’t contradict me. He seemed in shock.
“What should I do with her?” he said finally, nodding toward the trunk.
“I wouldn’t kill her.”
“ Jesus! Neither would I!”
“Give her a second chance. Maybe make her work for her supper as a hostess or something. Or send her back to Chicago. She has friends there. Oh…” I got an envelope out of my windbreaker jacket pocket. The envelope came from the Wheelhouse Motel, and it was plump with hundred dollar bills-four grand worth. “Give this to Chrissy. I bought her car.”
A sick slice of white appeared in the dark face-a smile, technically anyway. “A little flashy for you, isn’t it, Quarry?”
“I don’t know. Bright red car might be a nice souvenir of my trip to Haydee’s. Or I might trade it in for something more suited to my part of the world.”
“Where is that?”
“You don’t really want to know.”
“No. No, I don’t. I wasn’t thinking.”
“Right. Now let’s transfer the package from my trunk to yours…”
He had no objection, and I was about to pop the lid when someone exited the big brick building-a woman, and we were far enough away that Cornell felt he had to prompt me.
“That’s just Angie,” he said.
But I already knew that, because I’d made her car. His wife or ex-wife or whatever she was strolled right toward us, which was natural, because she belonged to the one remaining ride in the lot. She was wearing jeans, rather looser than those Chrissy preferred, and a white blouse whose sleeves stopped at mid-forearm and with some ruffles up the front, like a gambler’s shirt seen on a real paddlewheel a hundred years ago.
“Fellas,” she said, with a smile. She looked her age in the cold morning light, with no lipstick and not even eyeshadow, but her face was nice enough to get away with it. Her red hair was pinned and piled up like a turban, nothing fashionable, just getting it out of her way. “This looks like a serious pow-wow.”
“My friend Mr. Gibson has finished his work for me,” Cornell said stiffly.
Angela-who not long ago had helped me dump two bodies (let’s call it aiding and abedding)-knew damn well that that “work” almost certainly had to be something on the nasty side; but she didn’t blink. She was, after all, this man’s wife-separated or not-and moreover she was Tony Giardelli’s daughter. She had spent a lifetime on the fringes of violence and had to be used to it, or at least used to ignoring it.
“Sorry to hear you’re going, Jack,” she said, and offered me her hand, and I shook it. She gave it a secret squeeze. “Kind of hoped we’d have time for that breakfast you promised me. I’m headed over to the Wheelhouse diner now…”
“Grab a booth in back. I have to check out of my room. Before I hit the road, I could use a meal, wouldn’t mind some pleasant company.”
She said sure, smiled at me, nodded at her sort of husband, and went over to the Subaru and stirred gravel a little as she exited.
“What are you, hitting on my wife?” he asked, with an eyebrow arched.
“Maybe I already fucked her till eyes rolled back.”
“You can be crude sometimes, Mr. Quarry.”
“Normally no. Haydee’s Port is a bad influence on me. It’s all sex and murder and money, and an All-American boy like me can get corrupted. Shall we move the little slut?”
For now, we tucked Chrissy in his trunk, and she squirmed like a calf not wanting to get branded, making noises of protest that came off strangely like yummy sounds.
I left him there, standing at the rear of the Corvette, staring at the closed trunk. For a moment I wondered if he might not kill her, or have her killed, at that.
But it wasn’t any of my business.
Angela Dell had taken the same booth we’d shared before, and of course she remained unaware that, a few days and several lifetimes ago, Monahan and the blond kid had sat there, too, and plotted her husband’s death.
She was drinking coffee already, and when I joined her, I ordered iced tea. Coffee was for grown-ups. I was hugely hungry-I’d been through a lot of unappetizing shit over the past twenty-four hours or so, but hadn’t eaten a thing since my mobile-home Florence Nightingale had fed me leftover alphabet soup.
So I ordered scrambled eggs, hash browns, link sausage and silver-dollar pancakes. She had a half order of French toast and we ate in silence for a while-well, not quite silence: a breakfast the size of mine, on a stomach that empty, required some spirited grunting and swallowing and silverware clanking.
She watched me with mild amusement, just nibbling at her French toast. When I pushed my cleaned plate aside, she said, “I don’t know what to make of you.”
“Nothing to make.”
“What makes you tick, Jack?”
“Nothing. You’re just hearing the Timex.” I lifted my wrist. It got another little smile out of her. “I’m glad we had a chance to say goodbye, though.”
“Me, too. Oh!” She had a big black purse with her, and she dug inside it, came back with a CD-on the cover was a photo of her in a low-cut dress, soft-focus, sultry, and I’d guess taken around 1960 or ’61. She made Julie London look like a boy. It was called Angela on Your Shoulder.
