I’d called Dan before coming over. “How’s our financial guru doing?”
“Not saying much. I gave him a suite and he was polite, but he doesn’t seem happy.”
“Will he bail?”
“Maybe. Maybe not. The, uh, ladies were picked up safely by the limo, I trust?”
“Yup.”
“Any additional drama?”
“Nope.”
His chuckle sounded warm, even over the phone. “I have to admit it’s kind of nice having you there on the scene, Jack. Your eyes and ears come in handy.”
“Glad to be of service. You okay with Lu and me coming over for a midnight swim? Think I need a little time away from this relaxing retreat.”
He grunted a laugh. “Don’t blame you. Of course you can come over.”
“Could you line up a suit for Lu?”
“Glad to. It’ll be at the front desk. You still have that key to the pool area?”
I said I did.
Dan had a two-piece suit waiting for Lu at the front desk (I had trunks in my locker), and we had the place to ourselves. The kidney-shaped pool wasn’t large, rather overwhelmed in fact by the surrounding cement and endless deck chairs. Not ideal for swimming laps, though that was what I was doing. Nice and easy ones in the warm water.
Funny how, while I did enjoy summer swims in a lake that was after all at my doorstep, I somehow preferred an indoor pool like this, year round. The echo of a big room lending an otherworldly resonance and the shimmer of water reflecting around the chamber, even the chlorine bouquet burning eyes and twitching nostrils, seemed oddly soothing to me. Probably because it took me back to high school days when I was on the swim team and winning ribbons and trophies that weren’t for shooting.
Things at the chalet, it seemed to me, had really gotten out of hand, and the only way I could think it through was to swim. Lu, in a navy two-piece suit that fit her surprisingly well for a loaner, was not doing laps. She was in the hot tub, immersed to her shoulders, arms spread out along the sides, eyes hooded.
After half an hour of laps, I swam slowly over near her, then, treading water, said, “Come join me.”
Her smile was sleepy. “You come join me.”
“No, that heat will lull me too much. Drowning asleep in a hot tub would only embarrass me.”
She smirked. “Risk it.”
So I climbed out, toweled off, and slipped down and in and under the water next to her, sitting on a little submerged ledge with a jet working on my lower back.
She purred, “This is a nice break.”
“From lunacy. Yes. It is.”
A row of high windows was letting in moonlight. Red and white awnings at this end of the pool, a family friendly touch in post-Playboy Club days, were subdued into submission.
“I thought,” she said, “you wanted to stay away from here.”
She meant the main lodge.
I said, “I did.”
“Because there are people here who know you.”
“Yes. But I needed this. And nobody’s around, really.”
“Okay.” She was studying me. “Do you feel like you know any more about what’s going on, now that we’ve crashed the party and stayed a while?”
I frowned. “Maybe ‘know’ is too strong. But I have the feeling that, with one exception, my seminar buddies don’t know about me.”
She frowned back. “You mean, that you’re the fly in the ointment? The one behind ten years of contracts getting upended, here and there?”
“That, but also they seem to accept my story about being Vanhorn’s business partner. These brokers don’t work together. Oh, they know about each other. But they’re independent businessmen with ties to the Outfit, who feed them jobs. Yet they aren’t themselves Outfit.”
“That makes a difference?”
“I think so. Your Envoy took over most of the Broker’s players. So he felt the squeeze of my interloping, over the years. He had reason to try to understand what was going on, and eventually figure out what I was up to. These other middlemen in murder? No.”
“You said an exception. Who?”
“Poole. Something’s not right about him.”
Her eyebrows hiked. “I’ll say. Slapping his honey around like that. Getting soused. Handing out coke like Halloween candy.”
I shrugged. “I don’t exactly run with this crowd. Maybe that was normal behavior, tonight. Par for the course. Maybe these bland sons of bitches are wild-ass party animals, when they attend something like this — work by day, play at night.”
It was her turn to shrug. “Fairly typical convention-goer-type behavior, I’d say.”
I nodded again. “But that’s not the only thing bothering me about Poole. He had an attitude toward me the others didn’t. Skepticism, maybe. Suspicion for sure.”
“So what do we do tomorrow? Just let this play out?”
I huffed a sigh. “That’s part of what I’ve been mulling. For one thing, I’m not sure this seminar isn’t already over. Seymour M. Goldman seemed fairly freaked out. He may head back to tax-dodger paradise.”
“Which leaves us where?”
“Not sure,” I admitted. “As for right now, we can go back and spend the night, then leave first thing in the morning. Announce that tonight’s fun and games were just a little much for us, and go.”
“Go where?”
“That is a goddamn good question. Back to my place, to wait to see if anybody comes around to kill me? Back to yours in St. Paul, to wait to see if anybody comes around to kill you? Or do we, together or separately, walk away from those left-handed lives of ours and start over, right-handed? We both have the money for it. Tahiti maybe. You go topless and I’ll learn to paint like Gauguin. Maybe sell black velvet paintings of you to tourists.”
By the end of that, she was laughing. Not hard, but laughing, though we both knew it was no laughing matter, really.
“Maybe,” she said, finally, “I should swim for half an hour and think about it.”
“There’s an aspect of this,” I said, “we haven’t looked at. What about the list?”
“The list? The Broker’s list?”
I nodded. “What if this is an unfriendly takeover, in the business sense? Those four are all working the Midwest. So was Vanhorn. Maybe one of them wants to expand. Take over Vanhorn’s market share. In which case he — whoever ‘he’ is — needs access to the Envoy’s roster of friendly neighborhood hired guns.”
“Wouldn’t he — whoever he was — force that list out of Vanhorn first? Get it out of that wall safe of his? Or get access to it in some way or fashion?”
“Maybe. Maybe not.” I lifted my shoulders and put them back down. “If not, then my list becomes really valuable, even with ten years of tire tread worn off it. Or maybe... shit, that could be it!”
“What could?”
I leaned toward her. “If one of my seminar buddies does know about me — knows what I’ve been up to — he’d obviously want to stop me. Stop me from screwing up contracts and bumping off his assets. But maybe he also wants to lay hands on that list, to see if it still has useful assets.”
The Asian eyes opened wider than I thought they could. “God. It’s starting to look like your only good option is to go home and wait for somebody to come around to kill you. And kill them instead.”
“...I’m going to swim some more.”
“I’ll join you.”
She started to climb out, her top-heavy, long-legged frame nicely water-pearled. Funny how ten years later she was even lovelier than she’d been — back then, she’d only been stunning.
I followed her over to the pool and we swam lazy, loping laps for around fifteen minutes. Then, wordlessly, we got out, gathered our handguns wrapped in towels, and went to our appropriate locker rooms.
We had driven over in the Firebird. We walked to the car in the side parking lot under half a moon and a scattering of clouds and a handful of stars flung carelessly around by a God who didn’t care about our problems or what we did about them. The cold felt bracing, after the hot tub and warm pool. With no wind, it really wasn’t so bad.