Quarry in the Middle - Max Allan Collins [19]
He had another sip of the Scotch. And another.
He checked his watch, mumbled to himself, “It’s after two…” Then he said, “Maybe we should talk privately.”
“Maybe we should,” I said.
The “after two” reference had been about the dance club on the upper floor closing at that time. He mentioned on the way up in a private elevator off the kitchen that he had a small business office on the restaurant level, but a larger, more comfortable one shared the third floor with the Paddlewheel Lounge.
Office wasn’t really the word for it—bachelor pad would be more like it, a room wider than it was long with the far wall engulfed by a projection TV screen and a viewing area consisting of a plump brown leather sofa bookended by overstuffed brown leather chairs. Between them was a glass coffee table under which the projection TV unit lurked, and a brown geometric-patterned area rug was beneath all those furnishings. The exposed floor was a gray marble-like tile, with the upper reaches of the brick walls at left and right given to shelving, books at left, video cassettes and CDs at right; stereo speakers rode the walls, as did track lighting.
The wall to the left of the projection screen displayed a framed Warhol “Marilyn” pop-art print. An open door to the screen’s right provided a glimpse of a bedroom, though the lights were off and its shape remained vague. Much less vague was the shape of the slender little blonde, with an Orphan Annie head of yellow curls, who was in sheer white panties, her knees on the rug in front of one brown comfy chair, as she leaned prayerfully over the glass table, snorting a line of coke. And I don’t mean Diet.
“Chrissy!” Cornell snapped. “Go wait in the other room.”
Still on her knees, she looked up, powder on her nostrils; she was cute as cotton candy, if you injected cotton candy. No more than twenty, I’d guess, skinny enough for her ribs to show but with pert little puffynippled handful titties.
“Sure, Dickie,” she said.
But she finished snorting before jumping up to pad into the bedroom, displaying a cute dimpled ass and not one iota of cellulite (or for that matter shame), shutting the door tight behind her.
“Sorry,” he said.
I shrugged. “Kids.”
There was a wet bar against the back wall, next to where we’d come in.
“Drinky?” he asked.
“I’m fine.”
He got himself a few inches of Dewar’s on the rocks, then gestured to the chair Chrissy had been kneeling before. I took it. It was warm. From here I could see on the glass the ghosts of two more lines of consumed coke. People and their vices.
He seated himself on the brown comfy chair opposite, rested an ankle on a knee—he was wearing Italian loafers and, like me, no socks. It was like we were long-lost brothers—this was just like my place at Paradise Lake, except for the dope, the near-naked doper girl, the projection TV and the leather furniture.
His eyes at half-mast but his smile full-bore, he asked, “So who the fuck are you, love?”
“I’m using Jack Gibson. When I worked for a guy called the Broker, I used Quarry.”
His eyes tightened. “I, uh…know that name.”
“Quarry?”
“No. The Broker. Quad Cities, isn’t it?”
“Right. You ever have occasion to use his services?”
“No. Indeed not. But I was…aware of those services.”
“Yeah, well. I used to perform that kind of service. I perform another one now.”
He took in some Dewar’s, swirled it around, sent it down. “And what service would that be?”
“I have a method, which is my own concern, of following assassins to their intended targets. The assassins usually work in pairs of two—back-up slash recon, and the actual trigger puller.”
He pretended to smile on half his face; the rest of his sour puss told the truth. “You sound like Mario Puzo suffering from the D.T.’s. What kind of fantasy is this?”
“Not the good kind. Somebody wants you dead, Dickie. I don’t know who that somebody is, although I might be able to find out. That would be extra, of course.”
“Extra.