Then her lips moved and I read them.
We can trust him, she said. I can wrap that little prick around my finger. He’ll do it, all right.
Not quite enough.
He was in Vietnam, she said. He’ll kill that son of a bitch and we’ll finally be free. And all of it, all of it, will be ours.
That was enough.
Then she embraced him and they started to kiss. He pulled her halter-top down, much as I had Corrie’s tube top earlier today, and he buried his face between her breasts. Her head went back, liking it. This was a side angle now, and I had a fine window-peeker’s view of them, not that I wanted one.
Jesus Christ, sex again.
She took him by the hand, her titties hanging out, and led him up those open stairs.
Maybe a minute later, I let myself in with the key that Max Climer provided, and the sound of them fucking, really going at it, came down the stairs. That must have been a loft of sorts up there, with the bedroom not closed off by a door. Because I could hear every moan and cry and whimper and grunt and even the sound of bedsprings. He was a lucky bastard. She was great in bed, as well I knew.
I just didn’t have the heart to spoil it.
So I went over and sat on the couch with the nine millimeter in my hand, draped across my lap, and waited for them to finish. Maybe they’d come down and I could just take them out quickly, before they knew what hit them.
I had misgivings. I’m human. I’d made love to that woman, or anyway had sex with her, and the little time I’d spent with her had been pleasant, even out of bed. Vernon Climer seemed like a greedy, grasping louse, but he was also Corrie’s father. And I liked Corrie — she was the kind of girl I could have been serious about in another life, and I hated putting her through anything shitty, even if she didn’t like her old man much.
So I was just sitting there waiting for them to come down when I heard them talking, quietly, just some post-coital conversation. What the hell — I gave them a little time together. Then down those open stairs came not the two of them, but the snoring of both. It was almost comical, like the Three Stooges, but minus Larry.
You remember Larry — he died two nights ago on a lonely country road?
Anyway, I trudged upstairs, like a postman who knew he was delivering bad news, and in the big open room, they were at the right, in a vast round bed with pink silk sheets — Max Climer’s bed, technically — snoring on their bellies with Vernon’s hand draped across her back and starting up the slope of her ass. Between them on the nightstand were two after-sex cigarettes still burning in what looked to be a Climax Club ashtray.
Now if it bothers you that I removed them from the planet, it’s always possible I didn’t. That someone innocently left the gas on in the fireplace, turned all the way up, and those two cigarettes mingling in the bedside ashtray caused the explosion and fire.
At any rate, a hell of a fireball went up, just as I was reaching the Mustang.
And it’s a good thing some responsible citizen found a pay phone at a diner just off the highway and called it in. Imagine if all those beautiful trees had been lost.
Now that would have been a tragedy.
Fifteen
I used my security-consultant keys to go in through the club, where its chairs upended on tables greeted me to the accompaniment of the smell of disinfectant, tobacco smoke, stale beer and just a piquant hint of puke. The second floor found the magazine office inhabited only by cigarette ghosts, and when I came up into the kitchen of the penthouse, as before, I for the first time found it occupied.
Max Climer, in his black silk robe rather carelessly slung around him, was sitting at the round orange-topped kitchen table. His breakfast was a can of Bud and a cigarette, and his unblinking blue eyes were staring at nothing, his black Caesar curls tousled, his baby face bland as always but with something haunted about it.
I joined him. I used the bottom of my polo shirt to wipe the security keys clean of prints, then tossed them on the table with a clunk.
“I won’t be needing those now,” I said. “I’m on my way out of town.”
Looking past me, he nodded in a barely perceptible fashion.
“I assume you’ve received a phone call,” I said, “about the tragic event.”
Another barely perceptible nod, no eye contact.
I asked, “Do you know if anyone is on the way to talk to you? Cops, I mean? Fire department?”
His negative head shake also hardly registered.
“Someone may come,” I said, “so I can’t stay. I hope your cabin was insured.”
He just stared past me.
“They wouldn’t have suffered, if that helps. They didn’t die screaming while they burned or anything. It was a big boom and over.”
He swallowed.
“Anybody asks about me, my role as a security consultant ended Sunday. As we discussed, you don’t know anything about me. You didn’t ask for references and took me at face value, after interviewing me. Vietnam. Bronze Star. Give them all of that.”
Another nod.
“Tell your niece that my job with you was finished and I got called to another one right away. That I heard about the tragedy and offer her my condolences, and she’ll hear from me later.”
Another nod.
I rose. “Is Mavis here? Sleeping in the other room?”
Nod. A drag on the cigarette. Some smoke exhaled. “You need to accept that she’s using. We’re talking smack here, Max.”
Now he looked at me. The eyes were red-rimmed, like Christopher Lee in a Dracula movie.
“You’ll want to get her help,” I said. “I cut off her supply, remember.”
He swallowed and then finally spoke, nothing judgmental in the words or tone, merely curiosity, as he asked, “What kind of man are you, Quarry?”
I shrugged, smiled a little. “Just another loyal reader.” And then I got the hell out.
The Broker was pleased with the accidental nature of the passing of Max Climer’s cousin, Vernon, and estranged wife, Dorrie.
“I appreciate you going to so much trouble,” his voice said over the pay-phone receiver. I was back home in Wisconsin and calling in after the job, as was standard.
“I know,” he continued, “that you make a point of not doing ‘accidents,’ that you are a more straightforward kind of craftsman. So I thank you. In this case, your discretion was well placed.”
I didn’t know how discreet it was, blowing up a cabin in the woods with a couple of people in it, but I said, “Thanks, Broker. But let’s not make a habit out of these undercover jobs. I like a little distance between me and the guy I’m there to see.”
That was euphemistic talk, something the Broker insisted on, even though his line was supposedly secure and I was in a booth using a pay phone.
“I understand your reticence, Quarry. But you are very good at getting close to people. Surprisingly so, since I sense you don’t really like the human race very much.”
“Yeah, well I’m stuck with it. We need to make arrangements for my payment.”
“I’ll send it to you Federal Express. That’s a young Memphis company, ironically enough. You should consider investing. It’s the next big thing.”
I smirked. “Yeah, that and porno tapes.”
Well, you can’t always be right.
As for Max Climer, I never saw him again except on TV. Of course you already know the rest. How a disenfranchised member of Reverend Lesser Weaver’s Evangelical Redeemer Church, reportedly unhappy at the phasing out of snake-handling and longing for more yaba-daba-doo holy babble, used a .38 Smith & Wesson Model 30 to blast three holes in Max Climer’s belly.