The Wrong Quarry (20 page)

This impressive but not obnoxious rich man’s mini-manse was on the northwest side of town—not far from the park where Stockwell’s daughter and I shared Kentucky Fried Chicken— perched on the corner of Country Club Lane and Park View Avenue. This was a residential area running to expensive homes built in the teens or twenties; Clarence’s castle, on the former country club site, seemed strikingly more new than its neighbors, and just enough bigger to make its point.

My stakeout began around quarter to five, dusk having already given in to evening. I’d gone from the dance studio back to the Holiday Inn, to collect the nine millimeter and snubnose .38, and to change into the white shirt, skinny brown tie and brown slacks I’d worn in journalist mode.

That glimpse of propriety under my fleece-lined jacket might make me less conspicuous in this upscale neighborhood. Even if I was sitting in a Pinto. Next time I wouldn’t be such a damn cheapskate.

I was parked across the way, just slightly down Park View, when a silver-gray black-vinyl-roof Town Car rolled into and up the circular drive. No one else in the big car, just Clarence Stockwell himself at the wheel—no sissy move like using a chauffeur for him—who swung the Lincoln around, raised a garage door with a remote, and sealed himself within. Jenny said her father worked regular hours, nine to five, and it was five-fifteen. That seemed right.

At five-thirty, I had just moved the car to a position on Country Club Lane when a black woman in her fifties in a cloth coat and a headscarf emerged from a door alongside the triple garage doors. The second non-white I’d seen in Stockwell. She walked to a vehicle parked off to the right, a ’70s piece of shit Buick. Like I could talk, in my Pinto.

This would be the housekeeper-cook. She had stayed just long enough to report to her boss that her work was done and a meal she’d prepared was warm and ready. Hers had been the only car parked on the cement apron. Unless someone else with garage privileges was already in that house, Clarence was alone in there.

Five minutes after the help departed, I got out and trotted across the street onto the golf course. The flag of the ninth hole was near enough that I could hear it flapping, but I couldn’t see it. The night was breezy, dark and cold, my breath visible. By late afternoon, dark clouds had said,
Enough of this Indian summer shit
, and rolled back in to take over; a fairly good-size moon would be up under there somewhere, but no visible evidence supported that theory.

At least the sky wasn’t grumbling tonight. If it exploded, though, we’d get snow this time, and what remained of yesterday’s rain was ice now, little patches of it here and there, my sneakers crunching on occasion as I stayed low and made for the house.

Where the golf course ended and Stockwell’s back yard began was a slope up to a flat area, much of it consumed by a private putting green and a patio, no lawn furniture out this time of year, not even a cherub standing guard. I knelt by a bush and studied the place. The big house was dark but for one room, the kitchen, right there on the first floor, near the garage.

That’s why the rich are rich,
my old man used to advise me;
they turn off the goddamn lights when they don’t need them.

Well, maybe that helped them stay rich, but I doubted it
made
them rich. And if I were rich, I would eat better than Clarence was tonight. You could see him through a many-paned window framed by black shutters, sitting by himself at a black, metal-legged table. He had taken off his gray suit coat and draped it over the back of his kitchen chair; now that he was home relaxing, he had gone wild and loosened his necktie.

He was eating the meal the colored girl (as he likely thought of the middle-aged woman) had prepared for him, maybe even serving him up before she left. The biggest man in Stockwell, Mr. Stockwell Himself, slurping soup, and what was that he was nibbling between spoonfuls? A grilled cheese sandwich. Occasionally sipping a glass of milk, too.

I drew closer. Stood right there at the edge of the window and watched him eat in a big white kitchen with a late ’60s look. His wife would have long since remodeled, if she hadn’t died ten years ago. He was reading
Sports Illustrated,
apparently plucked from a pile of nearby mail—presumably he read
Forbes
and
BusinessWeek
and such at his office.

The soup seemed to be tomato. I hadn’t had tomato soup and grilled cheese with a glass of milk for supper since I was home sick from junior high. And at the time, I’d had no idea I was eating like a multi-millionaire.

So easy. I could shoot him from here, so easy. Just take the nine mil from my jacket pocket, take aim, and I would be the wealthier of the two of us, since dead guys don’t own shit.

Why didn’t I?

There’s a right way and a wrong way, and this was right enough to get the job done. Okay, maybe better to go in and stage a suicide and not just leave a flat-out murder, which would at the very least get my client called in for questioning.

But for me to find a locked door to deal with, and go in there and face him down, that was just wrong. Made no sense. Not when he was served up to me here, like soup and sandwich, framed in that window, like the target he was.

Then why didn’t I get it fucking over with?

Not that long ago I would have. If you think I was getting soft, if you think I was hesitant because I liked this man’s daughter, and there was a trickle of treacle running through the gristle that made up most of me, you are wrong. Or at least mostly you are. How had the Monkees put it? Was I a little bit wrong? And are you a little bit right?

But I wasn’t just a guy who killed people now. I had turned into someone who actually had curiosity between his ears, who had to think about things besides the pattern of a target and what weapon to use and means of entrance and egress, from a house, from a city. I wasn’t just killing people anymore. I had put myself in the position of having to think about the reasons why people were killed, before doing any killing myself (removing the lowlife likes of Farrell and Mateski excluded).

And something about this whole set-up was wrong.

Should I care? I had been paid money, and I would be paid more money. Maybe not enough to someday sit alone in a great big house and eat my soup and grilled cheese, but enough to pay the freight for a while.
He was sitting right there.
Almost facing me, angled to my right enough to make it unlikely he’d even notice when I took a single step to my left and fired.

But I didn’t take out the nine mil. I compromised. I left the automatic in my pocket, though my hand was in there with it, clutching it, as with my left fist I knocked on that side door where the help had exited.

He ignored it at first. He was old enough to be hard of hearing, but I hadn’t seen a hearing aid and somehow the man Jenny had described as a brick didn’t seem likely to allow himself to go through life not hearing the world around him. No, he could hear, all right. He wasn’t even wearing glasses as he read his magazine. He was a goddamn freak of nature.

I knocked again, pounding this time.

I kept it up, and finally the door opened about three inches, and an irritated slice of the big man’s sharp-featured face glowered at me. “No deliveries after dark.”

The door started to close and I managed to nose the toe of my left shoe in and say, “I’m sorry to bother you while you’re eating, sir.”

He frowned. His hair was silver and combed straight back— thinning from age, not going bald; he lacked his son’s fashionable sideburns. “You...you’re that...friend of my daughter’s, aren’t you? The reporter. You’ve already been told.”

“Sir...I need a few minutes. It’s important.”

Red climbed into the grooved face and the dark eyes fixed on me like gun sights, as he opened the door wider. “I don’t have a very high opinion of the press, young man, but I have an even lower one of rude people who bother other people at home. I went to college with the publisher of the
Sun,
and I can assure you, you will not have any luck placing any story there, not on this subject, not on any subject. Now, young man—go away.”

He began to shut the door and I said, “The two men you hired to kill Roger Vale are dead. Interested in the details?”

That froze him. His eyes widened and lost their focus, his mouth yawned in the kind of stupidity that even the most brilliant person can feel, when he sees a car is about to hit him.

“If I wanted to kill you, sir, you’d be dead. There’s a nine millimeter Browning automatic pointing at you right now. In my jacket pocket. And just moments ago, I could have dropped you face-down into your tomato soup. I’m coming in.”

He backed up.

I shut the door behind me. We were in a hallway that at left opened up into a laundry room off of which was a door to the garage.

I asked, “Is there anyone else in the house?”

“Who are you? Your name isn’t really Quarry, is it?”

“It will do.” I showed him the nine mil. “Anyone else in the house?”

“No. I live alone. No live-in help.”

“No one’s coming over this evening? Your son maybe? Your daughter?”

His frown deepened. “No. You saw I was eating a quiet supper. I had nothing planned.”

“Good. You’re about to schedule me in. Let’s get out of this entryway.”

His expression was morose. He had aged ten years in the last two minutes. Of course that only made him look his real age.

He turned and moved slowly toward the kitchen, maybe half a dozen steps away; he was two or three inches taller than me, and outweighed me twenty-five pounds, easy. We were passing garden implements on the wall, pruning shears, trowel, hand pruner, and when he glanced at these, I said, “Please, sir, don’t consider that. I know you’re a powerful man in this community, but I’m a younger man. With a gun.”

His voice was soft, and maybe had some fear in it. “Why don’t you just kill me here and be done with it?”

“I’m not here to kill you,” I lied. “I’m here for an exchange of information.”

“About my granddaughter’s death?” This had a sharp-edged sound, with no fear, as he glanced tight-eyed over his shoulder.

“Assuming she’s dead, yes,” I said.

We were just moving into the kitchen, past cupboards and a refrigerator and stove that were all out of date for such a wealthy homeowner. A pan of tomato soup simmered on the stove, its comforting smell in the air. I glanced right at the big, many-paned window, with its filmy curtains tied back, which had provided such a generous view of his soup-eating.

I said, “I don’t want to talk in here. Let’s go in your study.”

He had his hands up, though I hadn’t told him to. “Did Vale hire you? Did that son of a bitch—”

“You’re reading it wrong,” I said, though he really wasn’t far off. “You lead the way.”

But he didn’t move.

Sneering back at me, he said, “Don’t you know the layout of the house? Haven’t you done your homework?”

“You were afraid before. Not a bad idea to stay that way.”

“I’m going to be eighty in a few months. How afraid of death do you think an eighty-year-old man can be?”

“Judging by my experience? Pretty fucking afraid. Let’s
go.
I don’t want to stand here with a gun in my hand in a bright room by a window.”

He led me to a hallway, where at my bidding he switched on the light. I didn’t want to be walked through a dark house by its owner. This was clearly a dangerous man. Just as he needed not to underestimate me, I needed to pay him the same respect.

Passing archways, I got glimpses of a very femininely decorated home in the French Provincial Style. This was still his late wife’s house. Whether he’d left it that way out of love or respect, I couldn’t say. I doubted it was laziness.

The room he led me to—the addition on the far side of the house—was as much den as study, a deep narrow space with a brick fireplace facing you upon entering. Over it was a big goldframed oil painting of the Mr. and Mrs. Clarence Stockwell of thirty or forty years ago—the powerful banker and his trophy wife, a beautiful blonde combination of daughter Jenny and granddaughter Candy...and indeed the source of those green translucent eyes.

Yet despite the dead woman’s looming presence, this was a man’s room—dark wood paneling, Oriental carpet, to the right a pair of comfy brown-leather recliners facing a console TV with a big 25” tube, to the left an office area dominated by a massive mahogany desk surrounded by built-in bookcases extending above and below and around windows. A comfortable-looking tufted leather visitor’s chair was positioned opposite.

This was where Clarence lived—here and the kitchen and a bedroom upstairs, probably. The rest of the house belonged to his late wife.

“You take that,” I said, pointing to the tufted leather guest chair, and got back behind the desk, settling myself into the swivel number. A drawer back there might have a gun in it, and I didn’t want this getting ugly.

He complied, sitting arrow-straight, as if in defiance, his hands on his knees, his chin up. In his tie and white shirt and suit pants, he looked like an over-the-hill waiter about to get a dressing-down.

“Relax,” I said. I wasn’t pointing the nine millimeter at him, my elbow propped against an armrest, the weapon firmly but casually in hand.

“I’m fine,” he said.

“No. You’re making me nervous. Relax.”

He let air out, a lot of it. He crossed his legs. Folded his arms. Some of the stiffness went away.

“Good,” I said. “Do you smoke?”

“No. Why, do you?”

“No, that shit’s bad for you. Not smoking must’ve helped you make almost eighty. I just thought it might put you at ease.”

His face clenched in a fist-tight frown. “Let’s just get this over with, whatever the hell it is.”

“All right. I’m an interloper. The details aren’t important, but I knew who those two men were, and why they were in Stockwell, and I stopped them.”

He narrowed his eyes as he picked his words with painful care. “The two men. The...two men carrying out the assignment...?”

“I’m not wearing a wire, and if I were, this would be way past entrapment, Mr. Stockwell. You can talk freely. Call them assassins, hitmen, contract killers, whatever you’re comfortable with.”