Quarry in the Middle - Max Allan Collins [8]
“Also closes at five, I understand.”
She nodded. Brunette, brown-eyed, she was pushing fifty and just a little heavy, with a lined face and neck that weren’t enough to conceal how attractive she’d once been.
“We’re just a kind of annex over here,” she said. “We run an hourly shuttle over there and everything.”
“To the Paddlewheel? Really.”
“Really. Anybody staying with us is here for the Paddlewheel, and they almost all take supper over there. We make it on breakfast and lunch and really do pretty well right up to late afternoon.”
“How long has the Paddlewheel been around?”
“Going on ten years. It’s on its third management, British ‘bloke’ named Cornell, Richard Cornell—but everybody calls him Dickie. Real smoothie. He’s the boss here. He built the Wheelhouse, and he’s done wonders with the Paddlewheel. Oh, it was always nice, you know, always the respectable entertainment alternative in Haydee’s. But Dickie upgraded everything—food, entertainment, even expanded the gambling.”
“How can you be respectable running an illegal casino?”
She shrugged, refilling my iced tea from a pitcher. “Haydee’s has always been a wide-open little town. It’s like Reno or Vegas.”
“This isn’t Nevada.”
“No, honey, it’s Illinois.” She grinned like a female wolf; her bridgework could have been better. “And last I looked, Chicago was in Illinois, too, right?”
She had a point.
So I had the pool to myself. That I was feeling this mellow was either a testament to my self-confidence or my self-delusion. Still, it was nice knowing I could have that much caffeine (I’d consumed more than my share of Diet Coke and iced tea today) and still feel this laid-back.
Plus (as I say) I’d killed a guy, who was currently in my trunk in my line of vision, and it didn’t seem to faze me, though the ass of the buggy was thumbing its nose at me. Idly I hoped that trunk didn’t leak. Be a bitch if it were seeping red stuff the way the late blond kid’s Mustang had dripped oil.
I wanted to make sure I was relaxed before I went over to the Paddlewheel. No reason to go in right at five p.m.—last thing I needed, either for my own peace of mind or for staying inconspicuous, was to be a new patron who dropped in and stayed for twelve hours. I figured going over around nine should do it. Time would be required to make contact with Richard Cornell, but that should be plenty. And I could grab a late bite.
My mellowness took a hit, however, when a memory floated into the stream of my consciousness like a turd in the pool.
I had heard of Haydee’s Port before. And I’d heard of the Paddlewheel, too…
About eight years ago, the very first time I utilized the Broker’s list, I’d helped out a guy who ran a much smaller casino in the hinterlands near Des Moines. His name was Frank Tree, and he’d filled me in on his personal history, and part of it had been running the Paddlewheel in Haydee’s Port. He’d sold the place, and that was all I knew about it.
This had just been a stray piece of information that hadn’t been pertinent to the job at hand—which had been keeping Tree from getting killed—and it was a small miracle that this trivia occurred to me now.
I doubted this information had any current pertinence, either; but it troubled me that the synapses in my brain hadn’t sparked immediately. Christ, I was only in my mid-thirties. How could my memory let me down like that?
Physically, I felt up to whatever came along. I was no muscleman, but swam often, usually daily—it was the variety of physical exercise I preferred, and helped me relax, and allowed my thoughts to either fade or come into focus, as the case might be. Out here, on my back, staring at the stars and moon over Haydee’s Port, clarity was the result.
Maybe it was time to retire the Broker’s list. Maybe I was getting too casual about killing, or cocky or sloppy or whatever. After all, I had an investment opportunity back in Wisconsin, where I lived, and if I could make enough of a killing on this job—again, of the financial variety—it could be the last one.
Maybe a hired assassin has a natural working life, like