“Yeah, I’m Jack. I told you I’m fine.”
She flipped a hand toward the floor. “Look, I can babysit the mummy here while you catch some z’s. I’ll wake you when it’s dark enough out.”
“No. I don’t want to sleep till this is dealt with.”
“Till the body’s dumped.”
“Right. I know just the right gravel pit. There’s a downhill slope to a drop-off. I can jump out and it’ll just keep going. Right through the ice and gone.”
“Cool. Kind of in your back yard, though.”
I shrugged. “Mob bodies get dumped around here all the time. Won’t come back on me.”
“Good.” She looked me over sympathetically. “Can’t sleep, huh?”
“Won’t sleep.”
She frowned in thought. “Could you eat?”
I nodded. “Yeah.”
Now that I’d washed my hair I could.
“How’s the food at that place you own?”
She’d been the surveillance half of the team, all right.
I said, “Limited menu but damn good. You like chili?”
“Who doesn’t, in this weather?”
“Let’s walk it.”
We did. We did not hold hands or anything. A near decade had passed, after all, and our relationship had been a short one. Plus, she may well have figured out I was behind that contract going south in Des Moines, all those years ago. And that I had been the one responsible for her partner, the active half of the team, meeting a “shocking fate,” as the Register put it.
Walking close enough for our shoulders to brush now and then, our breaths smoking with the cold, we exchanged a few vaguely embarrassed grins. Before long we were seated in a booth in the corner of the bar of the Inn, waiting for our chili to arrive. Charley was behind the bar, giving me the “who’s the babe?” fish-eye.
Lu was sipping a Bloody Mary and I was working on a Diet Coke. Suddenly things felt a little awkward.
Her chin crinkled with a smile.
“So,” she said. “What’s new?”
Seven
Late afternoon at Wilma’s Welcome Inn, in the bar, was not exactly hopping. A couple of locals who worked in Geneva but lived in Paradise Lake were chatting and drinking, with Charley wiping down the counter and cleaning glasses, pretending to work since the boss was around.
Lu and I ate our chili with the conversation limited at first to how good it was. Her inquiry about what was new got this response from me: “Not much.”
Meanwhile I was mulling, as I imagine she was, exactly what we should talk about here in public. Not much chance of anything being overheard, with just Charley and those locals around, although Brenda had stuck her head in, arriving for work. She frowned at me, as if I were her husband she’d caught running around, and disappeared, presumably getting back behind the register a wall away.
Lu and I both decided, without discussing it, that our conversation should be limited to the lives we led away from homicidal work pursuits. Our “real” lives. Or was that fake ones?
She paused with a spoonful of chili waiting midair for her attention. “How did you end up here, Jack?”
“I’ve been in that A-frame for years,” I said. “Going on fifteen.”
“No kidding.”
I nodded. Swallowed chili — I didn’t let the kitchen vary from Wilma’s recipe by a grain of spice. “I was given a generous advance by a businessman who took me on.”
“I may know him,” she said innocently. Another delicate bite of chili. “He was a broker, wasn’t he?”
There it was, out in the open. Or anyway, out in the open behind the bushes. She had come in on her partner about to kill me and had chosen to kill him instead — why, I didn’t know, other than my native charm.
“That’s right,” I said. “Oh, I forgot. You worked with him, too. The Broker.”
She didn’t miss a beat. “But what got you into the hotel and restaurant business?”
I shrugged, broke a couple of crackers in my chili. “Just drifted into it. This inn was just a place near where I lived, and I took a lot of meals here and got friendly with the people. There really was a Wilma, once.”
“Not just a name starting with ‘w’ to go with Welcome Inn?”
“Not at all. Big gal, kind of sexy in her way. I liked the hell out of Wilma.”
“What became of her?”
“She passed away.” Well, really, she got shoved down those stairs out there, by somebody I killed later. “And I ended up buying the place.”
Very softly she said, “Good money laundry, I bet.”
“It is. Makes real dough in season, though. Paradise Lake hasn’t been commercialized like Twin Lakes and Geneva. Wilma’s is one of a handful of places in town near the lake itself that’s zoned for dining and lodging.”
“Aren’t you the little businessman.”
“What about you, Lu? It is still ‘Lu,’ isn’t it?”
The wide mouth twitched in a smile. “It always will be, to you.”
We each had a little more chili, then I asked her, “What’s your story? What have you been up to? What’s your life like these days?”
She smiled, sighed, shrugged. “I’ve been in St. Paul for the last seven years or so. I have an antique shop. Specialize in ’30s, ’40s, ’50s modern. Good-size operation. We have auctions, I do appraisals.”
“I bet it requires occasional travel.”
Another twitch of a smile. “It does. Do you travel much?”
“Less than I used to. Significant other?”
She spooned her chili, as if looking for a diamond hidden in there. Then: “Had a few of those. Hard to manage, with my... travel. My interests. Compartmentalizing is hard.”
“Yeah it is.”
“Sometimes I think...”
“What do you think, sometimes?”
She looked up. “Sometimes I think I need to find somebody who can relate to some of the... odder things that have occupied my time, and interests.”
“I hear that.”
She leaned in, just a little. “You remember what I told you about my husband?”
“He ran a nightclub somewhere, didn’t he?”
She nodded. “Detroit. I tended bar for him. He liked having a good-looking young woman doing that. The men liked it.”
“I’m sure they did.”
“Do you remember how he... passed away?”
“I do.”
I actually didn’t, not the details anyway. All I knew was he’d been embezzling from his mobbed-up silent partners, and those silent partners got vocal about it. Him being dead was the gist.
“How about you, Jack?”
“How about what?”
“Do you have a significant other? Other than that twat who stuck her head in and gave us a dirty look?”
I shook my head. “That’s Brenda. She’s just an employee I have occasional inappropriate relations with. We have a kind of chemistry. Kind that blows up in a lab.”
That got a sultry chuckle out of her.
“Should be dark out, by now,” Lu said. “Shall we take care of business?”
I nodded. “No rest for the wicked.”
It was dark, all right, nicely so, with the moon glowing behind another overcast sky just enough to provide some context without putting us in the spotlight. We walked by way of the lane to my place, and she stopped at the Mercury station wagon parked along there, using a key she must have got off her late partner’s body.
We got in the woodie, with her behind the wheel. She started the engine, then said, “That Chevy out front of your place? Just wheels to dump?”
“Just wheels to dump. My Firebird’s in Muskego, waiting for me to sell the Chevy back and collect it.”
We were rolling now, nice and easy. “Firebird, huh? Aren’t you the wild and crazy guy.”
“So they tell me. I’ll lead you to the pit.”