Quarry in the Middle (5 page)

When I sat down, she was singing “What Is This Thing Called Love?” She had a soft, smoky voice that reminded me of Julie London—she reminded me physically of Julie London, too, though the nose was different, small, almost pug. Everything she did was sad but with a lilting, mid-tempo swing feel that was part her and part the deft piano player.

Some people were talking, laughing, at their tables, because for anybody not gambling, it was getting pretty drunk out. But perhaps half of the little crowd of maybe twenty-five at the tiny tables in front of the small stage were paying rapt attention.

I had a feeling she had a following. She might have made it big in another era—she was old enough that she might have tried, before she’d become a throwback, if a goddamn pure one. Anybody else would have been using a drum machine and a synthesizer. Yet somehow she was getting away with just her voice and a piano, right here in the middle of the USA, closer to the Gran’ Ole Opry in Nashville than the Rainbow Room in Manhattan.

She sang “Little White Lies” with a lot of humor and warmth, and then she slowed down “I Got Lost in His Arms” with such a rich, well-earned vibrato that I damn near remembered how to cry.

Rising, she got a nice hand as she smiled and nodded, gestured to her pianist, who was bald and bespectacled and maybe thirty and painfully skinny; then they both
got some more applause and came down off the stage.

On impulse, I rose and went over to her. “Excuse me,” I said. “But that was terrific.”

She seemed embarrassed. “Oh. Well. Thank you. Haven’t seen you here before.”

“Passing through.”

She grinned and it was wide and real with plenty of white. “Nobody passes through Haydee’s Port.”

“Passing through River Bluff. Can I buy you a drink?”

The smile tightened, the teeth disappearing. “No. I have one more set in fifteen minutes. I never take a drink till after my last set. But you’re very kind.”

“Coffee, then.”

“Makes me jumpy.”

“Perrier? Not coming on to you. Just liked what I heard.”

The teeth returned. “Nice young man like you, maybe I wouldn’t mind.”

“A Perrier?”

“You coming on to me.” The smile tightened again but in a nice way, this time. “Come on.”

She took me by the arm and led me to a booth with a reserved card on it. I sat opposite her as she retrieved a purse from somewhere. This booth was apparently her between-sets office. She got out Paddlewheel matches and a pack of Virginia Slims.

She offered me a smoke and I declined. When a waitress came over, my new friend indeed ordered a Perrier and I had the same. She got a cig going, waved the match out and gave me a skeptical look.

“You aren’t gay, are you?”

“No. Why?”

“You’re about…Beatles age, I’d say. Rolling Stones. Your idea of a female singer would be, what? Petula Clark? Dusty Springfield?”

“What’s wrong with them?”

“Nothing. But most guys your age who think Cole Porter and Rodgers and Hart are the shit are gay.” She nodded toward where her piano player sat with another young guy at a table. “Lonnie’s gay, as you might have guessed. Where would I find a straight kid who could play like that?”

I skipped any comment on Lonnie, and went to her first point. “Maybe I just have a healthy respect for professionalism.”

She seemed to like that.

I sipped my sparkling water and hauled out the charming smile again, which was getting a workout tonight. “My next line is, ‘What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?’ ”

She blew a smoky kiss at me. “I’m part owner of it. I can do what I like.”

“Part owner? I, uh…I came in on your act. I didn’t catch your name. Mine’s Jack, by the way. Jack Gibson.”

“Two of my favorite things—money and a mixed drink.” Her laugh was husky as she extended a hand for me to take and shake. “I’m Angela Dell.”

“I thought this place was owned by a guy named Cornell.”

“Dickie is my husband. Dell is my stage name—a shortened version of my maiden name. I used it before I met Dickie, and I’ve kept it.”

“You’ve been doing this a while.”

“Singing? Oh yes.”

“Do any recording?”

She nodded, twitched a smile that was more for her than me. “Had a contract with Verve back in the ’60s.”

“No kidding?”

That was a big deal—Verve was a jazz label and very picky about the artists they signed.

I went on: “I’m surprised I haven’t heard any of your records.”

“They just put one album out, and it sank like a stone.”

“I’d love to hear it.”

She shrugged. “You can buy it at the bar—I got the rights back to put it out on CD and cassette. There are two newer ones, too, recorded with just Lonnie on the piano.”

“You’ll sign them?”

“Sure.” She tapped her cigarette into a glass tray with a Paddlewheel logo in its bottom. “What do you do, Jack?”

“Nothing very interesting, I’m afraid. I sell veterinary medicine.”

“Really? What kind?”

“Do you know anything about farms?”

“No. I have a cat, though.”

“Well, I strictly sell to vets who service farms. Pretty boring.”

“But you’re on the road a lot?”

“Yes. You must’ve been, too, at one time.”

She nodded. “Until I married Dickie.”

I was trying to figure out a way to finesse this, to use my new acquaintance with the missus to get to the man of the house, or anyway of the Paddlewheel.

Then she said, “But don’t let that discourage you.”

There was something sly in the green eyes now, and the full mouth was twisted up at one corner.

“Pardon?” I managed.

“Dickie and I are separated. We…we’d probably have been divorced a long time ago, but I’m a Catholic, and I don’t want to go to hell…even if I
do
work in Haydee’s.”

“Oh-kay,” I said.

“We’re friendly, Dickie and I. Best of buddies. He’s got a great business head, and I add a little class to the joint. I don’t have any desire to do anything in life but sing for my supper. No ambition—not for a new man, or an old career. Anyway, a shopworn broad like me can’t make it in show biz these days, that’s for sure.”

“I’d think some lounge in Vegas would—”

“I worked a lounge in Vegas for six years. It wasn’t a bad life, but it was a dead end, and here I’m a coowner and making nice money and singing six nights a week. Satisfies my work ethic and my artistic cravings, and fills my bank account. I live in a nice apartment over in River Bluff, just me and my pussy…cat.”

That pause was promising.

“How long,” she asked, tapping her ash off in the tray, “are you going to be in town?”

“Not sure. Few days. Maybe we could get together. Have lunch or something.”

She shrugged. “I only have another half hour set.
Why don’t you stick around? We could go over to the Wheelhouse and have breakfast. They’re open twenty-four hours.”

Then she smiled, sighed smoke dreamily, stubbed out her cigarette, and headed up onto the stage, swaying her hips a little, whether for the audience or me, I couldn’t say. But she had fine legs for a woman her age, strappy heels doing nice things to their musculature, her full caboose making the skirt twitch.

Warm applause greeted her, and she did “But Not For Me,” and I sat wondering how I’d managed to muff it so bad. Here we’d been having this nice friendly conversation, and I reflexively gave her the vet medicine cover story, before realizing I had no reasonable segue from that to asking her if she’d introduce me to her husband.

She would want to know why, and I couldn’t think of anything that made sense. I doubted Richard Cornell was in the market for animal tranquilizers.

By the time she’d started her next song, “You Do Something to Me,” I’d about given up. I figured I should just disappear before her set was over, though snubbing the boss’ wife (separated from him or not) was not exactly a great plan, either.

But I’d pretty much decided on skipping, and was maybe three seconds away from slipping out of the booth, when a six-footer slid in opposite.

He was dark-haired with some white coming in on the sideburns, a dark tan, lazy eyes and a smirky mouth, but handsome enough at about forty, attired in pale
yellow slacks and a darker yellow-and-black checked sportcoat over a black shirt open a few buttons to display several gold chains and some curly black hair.

“My name’s Richard Cornell,” he said, and extended a hand. “I run the Paddlewheel. Did you and my wife have a nice talkie-poo?”

I shook his hand. He smiled across the booth at me in a fashion that I’m sure fooled a lot of people, but I could see the coldness in the aqua-blue eyes, which were half-lidded and made his gaze seem casual when it was heart-attack serious.

“She’s a wonderful singer, your wife,” I said.

“Indeed she is.” The British accent was light but there, a touch of class that went well with his lilting baritone.

“Friendly, too. But I don’t want you to get the wrong idea, Mr. Cornell.”

He leaned back, smiled on half his face. He’d blinked maybe three times since sitting down. “Angela’s a big girl. We’re separated. She goes her way and I go mine…though I maintain an interest in her welfare. Didn’t get your name.”

“Jack Gibson,” I said.

Cornell folded his arms and the smile widened, though it had no warmth. “And what brings you to my part of the world, Mr. Gibson?”

Not
this
part of the world—
his
part of the world.

In about half a second I processed the following: he wouldn’t have sat down casually to chat up a stray Paddlewheel patron, and as a nearly ex-husband he had no reason to check up on or protect his wife, meaning he was (for whatever reason) suspicious about me, I’d
been noticed somehow, and if I trotted out the veterinary meds schtick right now, I’d soon be dancing in the parking lot with two or three of his satin-vest bully boys before he even got around to blinking again.

“Are you always this attentive to your guests, Mr. Cornell?”

A black waitress in an Afro wig delivered him three fingers of what looked to be Scotch over two ice cubes. He smiled, said, “Thank you, darlin’…drinky-poo, Mr. Gibson?”

“No thanks.”

“That’ll be all, darlin’,” he told her, kissed the air in her direction and she smiled and walked off.

He watched with admiration, his smile genuine now. “Boobs like cannonballs,” he said, and shook his head, eyes darting up. “You believe it? Wants to be a grade-school teacher. Mine were all prunes.”

“Community college student, huh?”

He gave me a sharp look and said, “You pick up a lot, don’t you, Mr. Gibson?…What were we talking about?”

“I was asking what I’d done to deserve the massa’s attention.”

He chuckled at that. “You’re here alone. You’ve been here since around nine-thirty. You’ve had a meal, alone, you gambled alone…about broke even I believe, very modest, very controlled…you spent some time upstairs, but didn’t dance, and you haven’t been drinking at all, except possibly a beer and maybe a few gallons of diet cola…really, how can you
stand
that bilge?” He shuddered. “Finally you wound up here in the bar, where you struck up a conversation with my wife. In
fact, you struck up a lot of conversations this evening.”

Either I was getting sloppy, or his security team was smarter than they looked.

“I didn’t see any cameras,” I said.

That pleased him so much all his teeth came out to play in a beaming smile. “I don’t have security cameras—I just have a staff that looks out for their boss. The injuns send up smoke signals to their chiefy-poo, if somebody doesn’t fit any of the usual molds.”

“More like squaws—with the exception of your noneck squad, it’s mostly women here…like Cannonball Katie over there.”

His smile settled down and his eyes almost shut as he sipped the Scotch. He reached over for his wife’s purse and helped himself to a Virginia Slims—confident enough in his masculinity to risk the estrogen content. He used her matches and got his going, not bothering to ask me if I wanted one. The reports on me probably said I hadn’t been smoking. He knew everything about me. He thought.

“Here’s the thing, sport,” he said, and if condescension were a liquid he would have been dripping. “Casing the joint won’t do you any good. I’ll be upping my security team and my precautions will go on high alert status, so you can tell your friends that knocking over the Paddlewheel would be a very, very poor idea.”

“Of course it would. You’re doing land-office business, sure, which means a good payday for a score. But taking down a place that attracts a Wednesday night crowd like this? Calls for a D-Day Invasion.”

He wasn’t sure what to make of that. His eyes tightened
as he drew in smoke, held it so long it might have been marijuana, and let it out. Even in the dim nightclub light, you could see his face was as cracked and leathery as it was handsome.

Then he said, “Whatever you have in mind, mate, ponder this—I am connected to individuals in Chicago who would not rest until anyone who tried anything against this facility was apprehended. And by apprehended, I mean castrated, fed their genitals and dumped in the river.”

“Concrete overshoes?”

“Some fashions never go out of style.”

“That’d be the Giardelli family, I suppose.”

That surprised him, his nostrils flaring, though the eyes remained half-lidded. He said nothing.

I shook my head, laughed a little. “I’m not an advance man for a plunder squad. Get real, Dickie.”

“…Only my friends call me ‘Dickie.’ ”

“Oh, we’re going to be friends. You see, I’ve done work, off and on, myself for the Giardellis. Checking up on me would be tricky, though, because I worked through a middleman and he’s dead now. But I can give you chapter and verse on mutual acquaintances.”

He set the cigarette in the glass tray. “If you’re a federal agent, Mr. Gibson, I’m asking you to declare yourself, right now. Or we’ll be talking entrapment.”

“Oh, we’re talking entrapment, all right. Anyway, the fix your Chicago friends put in must go at least up into the lower federal rungs. You don’t open up a casino because you have the county sheriff in your pocket. This has to go way higher.”

“What kind of middleman?”

He’d been thinking. He might even have figured it out.

“I used to do contract work.”

“Used to?”

“Now I’m more in…preventive maintenance.”

“What kind of…preventive maintenance?”

“Helping people like you stay alive.”

“Why would I need your help to stay alive?”

“Because
other
people still do contract work.”

He was staring at me, the eyes wider now, though more alert than scared. He got it. He followed.

“I’m not wearing a wire,” I said. “And I don’t have a weapon on me. You can have one of your musclemen frisk me, if they can bend over that far.”

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. Extra to what?”

“To the price of saving your ass.”

He thought about that. “How would you go about saving my…ass?”

“I’d stop the hit from going down.”

“Non-violently?”

“Of course not. I’ll have to kill the bastards. What do you think?”

His eyes widened and his smile widened and he played at thinking this was funny. “You are a card, Mr. Quarry.”

“Let’s stick with Gibson. There’s no extra charge for the amusement factor.”

He grunted a laugh. “This may be the most outrageous shakedown I’ve ever heard of. You come in to my place of business and make a few references to low people in high places, to convince me of your authenticity…and then you presume to have me pay you off, to protect me from what? From
whom
?”

“I’ll want twenty thousand dollars,” I said, ignoring
most of that. “
After
I’ve delivered. I don’t expect you to pay in cash, though with the casino you probably could. But I understand the accounting problems that might ensue.”

“Oh you do. Accounting problems.”

“I’ll give you the banking information—I’m using the Cayman Islands now—and you can have the twenty K transferred to an account there.”

“I see. I agree to pay you, and nothing happens to me.” He laughed loud enough now for it to ping off the brick wall opposite. “This
has
to be the most
audacious
extortion scheme I’ve ever heard of…and I’ve heard of a few.”

“Bet you have.”

His face seemed to darken further under the leathery tan. He slammed the empty tumbler down on the glass and leaned forward and pointed a finger at me. “Listen, booby—you know not with whom you fuck. I ran key clubs on the West End for the Kray brothers when you were sucking your mama’s titty.”

“I’m a bottle baby.”

“I’ve seen things undreamed of in your fucking philosophy, Horatio. Fuck! I ran Rush Street Clubs for the Giardellis when you were—”

“Shooting gooks with a sniper rifle?”

That stopped him.

“Listen,” I said, and I held my hands up, palms open. “I’ve invested some time and money and energy in this, but I’m well aware it’s a speculative endeavor. You can say no—you don’t have to buy my Fuller brushes, you can pass on my Amway products, you don’t even
have to buy any magazine subscriptions to send me to Bible camp. Your choice. Of course, you’ll be dead, this time tomorrow.”

I rose.

He looked up at me. I had a feeling he had a gun stuffed down in that chair, particularly because of the way his hand was way back on the cushion. If he made a move, I could have the glass coffee table in his face faster than Chrissy could snort a line.

But he raised his own palms and patted the air, gently. “Sit,” he said. “Sit.”

I sat.

“Suppose I take you seriously,” he said. He got a cigarette going, taking one from a gold box on the coffee table—not a Virginia Slim, I’d wager. “Suppose I accept this outrageous scenario as potentially real and not just ridiculous twaddle.”

“Isn’t twaddle inherently ridiculous?”

He closed his eyes. “You are insufferable.”

“Sorry. Just trying to lighten the mood.”

“What do you know about this?”

“About this?”

“About how I would be…eliminated.”

I shrugged. “It’s going to be nasty. You’re going to be run down by a car.”

His eyes popped. “You said something about triggers being pulled…”

“That was meant to cover the whole panorama of how many ways your ass can be ‘eliminated.’ My guess is, this particular specialist has been brought in so that
your death can pass as accidental. Somebody wants you dead who doesn’t want a killing coming back on them.”

He frowned, looked off toward the door. But he wasn’t thinking about Chrissy, I didn’t think.