Quarry's Choice (16 page)

His back to me, his dark hair a damp skullcap, Killian was naked in the faux-marble tub, sitting on one of the steps down into the frothing water, his shoulders and the upper half of his chest exposed. His arms were spread, like a king on his throne, or maybe Caesar on whatever the hell he sat on. Anyway, Jack Killian looked relaxed and his head was tilted down, just a little. A glass of red wine was near his right hand.

He appeared to be sleeping, though he might be awake and merely very relaxed. Somebody else’s wife, and a hell of a one, had recently helped him rumple those sheets in the balcony bed. He had a right to be tired. And in that steamy, churning Jacuzzi, a right to be relaxed.

But I couldn’t see his damn eyes, so whether he was slumbering or just unwinding, I couldn’t tell for sure.

The stairs down had a bit of a curve to them, but they were carpeted and absorbed my footsteps, so I was able to keep the gun aimed at him all the way down. Not seeing his eyes was unsettling, but both his hands were showing and no weapon seemed at reach.

I approached him from behind with the nine millimeter raised. Probably should have brought a pillow down with me, but I didn’t relish the awkwardness of that. If I put the nose of the nine millimeter to back of his skull, the effect would be ideal though noisy. I could press the nose into his back, opposite his heart, flush with his flesh, and the sound would be muffled. This whirlpool would help.

But I didn’t do either. I moved quietly around to his left and saw that he was indeed asleep, his chest heaving, his breath heavy. He was just short of sawing logs. His hair, appropriately enough, made Caesar-like ringlets on his forehead.

I put the gun away.

I slipped out of the black suit coat and tossed it on a nearby chair. Fortunately I was in a short-sleeve shirt. I tossed the tie over my shoulder as my right hand took him by the wet hair atop his head and my left gripped a shoulder and shoved him under.

I held him there a long time and when he began to struggle, it was half-hearted, sluggish. That was good. I wasn’t holding onto him in a way that would leave bruises.

An unsettling thing happened, though, as the automatic turn-off stopped the Jacuzzi, and now the only bubbling was coming from Killian.

But soon it stopped, too.

Somebody said once that it’s better to be lucky than smart. But the truth is, it’s best to be lucky
and
smart.

Last night I’d certainly been lucky. The hotel had been under-populated and even the desk clerk had been a ghost. But I’d been at least a little smart, too. When we arrived at the Fantasy Sweets last night, I left the Caddy unlocked, so that I could leave the car keys with Killian in the Caligula Suite and still be able to wipe my fingerprints off the steering wheel before hoofing it the three blocks to the Tropical.

From the phone booth across the highway, I’d called Mr. Woody at his club and said, “Just so you know, Jack Killian drove himself to the Fantasy Sweets around eight this evening. I had the night off.”

“So then. . .”

“So then you might want to have somebody at the hotel check on him. Like maybe you expected him to stop by Mr. Woody’s at ten or so but you haven’t heard from him.”

“It isn’t ten.”

Was he slow on the uptake or what?

Patiently, I said, “Wait till eleven and call the desk at the hotel. To check on Jackie boy. You know, if you haven’t heard from him.”

“All right. Sorry. I follow.”

“Good. Good night.”

“Quarry!”

“Yeah?”

“Listen, come around tomorrow mornin’. We should talk about the future.”

“What future?”

“Well, the comin’ days.”

“I’m out of here by noon.”

“No. Come see me first.”

“Where? Your club?”

“My home. Got a pad and somethin’ to write with?”

I wrote down the directions and said I’d see him at ten.

“Uh, Quarry. . .?”

“Yeah?”

“Just in case? You might talk to the girl.”

He meant Luann, getting her to cover for me. Talking murder on a possibly tapped phone was always a pain in the ass.

So this morning around eight I knocked on the connecting door between our rooms. I had to do it a couple of times before Luann opened it and stood there yawning, raising her hands over her head. She’d been sleeping in a Led Zeppelin t-shirt and the yawn pulled it up to reveal her triangular muff like a curtain rising at the start of a show.

I wasn’t in the mood for a show or anything else. I had no desire to hang around Biloxi for even a morning, and needed a clean break with my little companion here. But Mr. Woody had thrown a wrench in my works, maybe just a morning’s worth, but a wrench.

“Let’s get some breakfast,” I said.

“Okay. Give me fifteen.”

“Take twenty.”

We both showered and got dressed. She emerged through the connecting door in the red top and striped jeans from the Dixie Club trip. Out of habit, and as not to raise any suspicion if the wrong somebody noticed me, I got into my last clean black suit, a pale blue shirt and a red-and-navy tie. Mr. Conservative Businessman, that’s me.

I drove us to a nearby Waffle House where, just to be rebels, we had pancakes. Silver-dollar ones. This time I remembered to ask for unsweetened iced tea. Luann looked a little tired to me, puffy around the eyes.

“Rough night?” I asked.

“Watched TV too late. You?”

“That’s what I want to talk to you about.”

“Oh?”

“I don’t think it’ll come up, but if anybody asks, we watched TV together last night.”

“Oh. Okay. Like who would ask?”

“Cops maybe. Probably won’t happen.”

She frowned just a touch. “Should I tell you what I. . .what we watched?”

“Wouldn’t hurt.”

She told me what the movies were—
The Impossible Years
with David Niven and
In the Cool of the Day
with Hanoi Jane—and it turned out I’d seen them both first-run, so no synopses were required. Both terrible.

“You need to forget what I told you,” I said, “about where I was going and what I was doing last night.”

“You were watchin’ movies with me.”

“Good girl. Thanks.”

She shrugged and ate a forkful of pancakes. I had taken her so far off her diet there was no going back. Before she knew it, she’d be a big fat sloppy hundred-and-five.

“I have to work at Mr. Woody’s tonight,” she said. “A dancer called in sick.”

“Oh. Well, I guess you can’t loaf around with me forever.”

She smiled and licked maple syrup of her fork. “I’d like to, Johnny. I’m done at eleven. Out by eleven-fifteen.”

“Like me to pick you up?”

“If you want.”

“That’d be swell.”

She drank some orange juice. “You gonna stay around town a while?”

“I honestly don’t know.”

“If you do, you can’t live in a motel forever.”

Killian had. Of course, forever hadn’t taken that long.

I said, “Neither can you, Luann.”

“Well. . .if you got an apartment, I wouldn’t mind movin’ out of mine. Be cool to live somewhere with no pot smoke and girls makin’ noise. When they’re making it. You know.”

“Luann. . .I don’t think I’ll be in Biloxi that long.”

She nodded. “Guess I gotta face up to it.”

“To what, honey?”

“That it’s back to Mr. Woody’s for me.” She shrugged. “Oh well. A couple three years, I can cash out and go somewhere’s else. Do somethin’ else.”

“Yeah? Like what?”

She shrugged. “Buy my own strip bar maybe.”

That was the problem, living in a particular bubble: you only saw the possibilities that were inside that bubble.

* * *

Judging by the upscale neighborhood Woodrow Colton lived in, running sleazy joints on Biloxi’s Strip paid very goddamn well. The rambling shades-of-brown-brick ranch-style, with its wide drive and double carport, perched on a tree-shaded, shrub-hugged, gently sloping lawn on Country Club Lane, which said it all.

I pulled my rental Chevelle in behind the two-tone brown Cadillac in the carport—the Dixie Mafia boys did love their Caddies. The vehicle looked like its colors had been selected to go with the house. Or maybe it was vice versa.

I felt like a Mormon or Jehovah’s Witness in my black suit, going up the walk to the deeply recessed front door—all I lacked was Good Books. I rang the bell and Mr. Woody answered almost immediately, all magnified eyes and grinning teeth as usual. He was in khaki pants, an untucked cream-color cotton shirt, and sandals, a glass of Scotch in hand, though it was only late morning. He looked like a gardener who was sneaking a drink while the wealthy homeowner was away.

“Come in, come in,” he said, waving me to do so, and I did. He gave me a used-car salesman’s smile. “Let’s talk by the pool.”

The house we moved through was really something—rich wood floors, pastel plaster walls, open-beamed ceilings, modern kitchen, elaborate bar, all very open, giving a glimpse of a dining room here, living room with fieldstone fireplace there, tastefully selected Southern-landscape artwork on walls, and plush contemporary furnishings.

He led me into a pool area almost as expansive as the one at the Fantasy Sweets, only nicer. This screened-in cathedral overlooked a landscaped backyard that fell to a stream or a river or something—anyway, water enough to rate a dock and a motorboat. This was the kind of Olympic-sized pool I wished I owned.

He realized he had a drink in hand, and as he gestured me to a black wrought-iron chair at a black wrought-iron table, he asked, “Somethin’ to drink? Barq’s maybe?”

I sat. “Coke would be nice.”

He had a smaller bar out here, so that was no problem. He delivered a glass of the pop with ice and then settled next to me in his own black wrought-iron chair.

“Very safe to talk here,” he said, though the pool area made his words reverberate some. “I have it debugged now and then.”

“For microphones or cockroaches?”

He smiled a little as he sipped his Scotch. “Both. The mikes are small these days, Quarry, and the cockroaches are big.”

Enough small talk.

I said, “Why shouldn’t I leave town, Woody?”

“All sorts of reasons, son.” A hand brushed his silver comb-over, as if it needed help under that hairspray. “Startin’ with, you
owe
me that much.”

“Owe you? What do you have to do with it?”

“I recommended you. That’s known by more than just us and the late Jackie. If the new man, who I recommended, up and disappears, right after Jackie’s demise, how does that look?”

“What does it matter how it looks? Killian died accidentally. Drank too much red wine, fell asleep, and drowned in his own decadence.”

That was a line Killian might have appreciated. Possibly it was lost on Mr. Woody.

“Quarry, accidental drownin’ will no doubt be the official determination. As you might guess, I’ve spent considerable time, startin’ in the wee hours of last night and the early mornin’, in discussion with Sheriff Delmar. He will do everythin’ in his considerable power to see that this death goes down as a tragic mishap. Why, there won’t even be an autopsy.”

“I don’t think an autopsy would show anything. He really was asleep. I just helped him a little.”

He waved his free hand. “Be that as it may, among Jackie’s people are a number of loyal souls who simply must not suspect that I played a role, however minor, in the passin’ of the torch to my own self. So I would appreciate it very much if you would stick around for a while.”

“What’s ‘a while?’ ”

“Maybe a week. Shade more, shade less.” He leaned over and the magnified hazel eyes narrowed while his toothy smile expanded. “I can arrange for that little Lolita gal to keep you company as long as you’re here. Or if you’re bored with her, we can line up somebody else to tickle your fancy and wet your wick.”

“The girl is fine. She’s no trouble.”

He gave a
heh-heh
laugh. “Doesn’t surprise me. She’s a sweet young thing. I’ve known her a long time, Quarry. Long time.”

“Yeah. Since she was knee-high to a grasshopper. I remember.”

He frowned, seemingly in concern, not irritation. “Are you cross with me, son? Have I done somethin’ to offend? After all, I thought I’d been of considerable help to you.”

“You were. You are. I’m just. . .after a job, what I normally do? Is get the hell out. That’s the way it’s usually done, anyway. I really should already be gone.”

“But what is there about this job that’s been ‘usual?’ ”

He had a point.

“You just hang around the Tropical for a few days,” he said with a flip of the hand. “I’ll be movin’ my office into Jackie’s in that upstairs suite of his. I don’t really require the livin’ quarters, but it’ll be nice to have a little hideaway, ’way from home.” He leaned in conspiratorially, licking his lips, leaving them wet. “Never know when you might desire a night away from the little woman.”

“Yeah. Sure. You’re keeping Killian’s staff on?”

He nodded. “But I may loosen up the dress code. Let me give it some thought, over the next day or so, as to what exact role you’ll play durin’ this. . .transitional period.”

“Will I have to talk to cops? That sheriff or any deputies?”

He shook his head. “No one knows that you were at the Fantasy Sweets last night.”

“You know. I know.” Luann knew.

He half-smiled. “Well, it’s a funny thing. Jackie used to always talk about the basis of trust. He said—”

“I heard it.”

My host shrugged, had a last sip of Scotch. “Tell you what, Quarry. Agree to stay another week, and you’ll find ten grand in your stockin’, and you won’t even have to wait till Christmas.”

“Woody, that’s generous, more than generous. . .but I need to clear all this with the Broker. Like I said, he’ll be expecting me to be gone already.”

But Mr. Woody had begun shaking his head halfway through that. “Quarry, I’ve
already
discussed this with the Broker.”

“What? When?”

“This mornin’.”

“By phone?”

“Not by semaphore, son. You should call him yourself. See what his instructions are. I think you’ll find they mirror my own.”

A female voice behind us said, “Woody! Do you have a minute? Sorry to interrupt.. . .”