“Know what a black widow is?” I asked her.
“Sure,” she said, getting in, water still flowing, bubble bath bubbling up, “it’s a female spider that eats her mate. Why? You want eaten?”
“Don’t get me wrong, now,” I said, putting down the lid on the stool and sitting, “I’m not comparing you to a black widow. You don’t kill your men. You just set them up for it.”
A hardening around and in her eyes, very slight, told me she had caught on, for the first time, to what this conversation was about. Till now, she thought it was all some kind of coy sexual ritual, some verbal foreplay thing I was engaging in.
But she didn’t change her style.
“When I get done in this tub,” she said, taking some soap and soaping between her legs, “I can love you to death, if you want, honey.”
“I don’t want. But there’s something I do want.”
“Oh?”
“I want to know whether you picked up your money yet.”
“Huh?” She turned off the water. She slid down under the surface so that bubbles covered-her, except for her lipstick-painted breasts, which bobbled surrealistically on the water.
“I said I want to know whether you picked up the money. “
“What money?” she said.
“If you picked up the money, I want to know where and when. If you haven’t yet, well, have you?”
“Jack, I really don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Standard operating procedure, back when I was working with the Broker, was for the middle man to accept twenty-five percent down, from whoever was buying the contract. The balance was picked up by the back-up man, the passive half of the team, just a day or so prior to the actual hit; and that was the only contact (and an indirect contact at that, since it amounted to going to a drop point and picking up the cash) the hitmen had with whoever hired them.
Ruthy knew this, and I knew she did.
I turned on the portable TV.
“What are you doing?” she said.
“Turning on the TV,” I said. “What does it look like I’m doing? Say, Ruthy, tell me… you’re in show biz. Which soap opera is that that’s on? I can’t tell them apart. Is it One Life to Live, or Another World or what?”
“Jack…”
“You know it’s dangerous having something electrical like this in bathroom. It could fall off into the tub. Oh, but I see you have the cord knotted up, so if that happens the set would unplug itself. That’s smart thinking, Ruthy. Here. I’ll just unplug it for a minute and unwind this cord and, hey it’s nice and long isn’t it? Just plug it in again and there’s your soap opera back. You don’t mind if I keep the volume down while we talk?”
“Jack, I’m getting out.”
“No,” I said. “You just stay put.”
“Jack…”
“Stay put,” I said.
I was standing over her, holding the set by the handle on top, holding the plug in the wall socket with my free hand, while silent images of a man and a woman arguing, their faces in close-up, flickered across the screen. I held the set over the water, right above her lap, and said, “What about the money?”
“Jack, let me get out. We’ll go in the bedroom and I’ll make you real happy, Jack, God I’m good, Jack, look at these, Jack, Jack, look at me, you’d like it in me…”
“The money. Where. When.”
“I… I made the pick-up yesterday.”
Shit. I’d hoped she hadn’t made it yet, so I could make her lead me to the pick-up when it was made and I could find out who had hired Tree dead.
“Where?” I said.
“Iowa City,” she said.
“Iowa City?”
“Yes, in an alley, in a trashcan downtown. Jack. Jack, can I get out now?”
“You just sit there a minute.”
“If you let me out of here, Jack, I won’t say a word about this, I won’t mention this to Lucille, if you want, I’d even help you get rid of her, Jack, anything, anything you want.”
“Ruthy.”
“Jack?”
“For once I don’t think you’re acting,” I said, and tossed in the TV.
34
Along one side of the Psychopathic Hospital was a sun porch. Despite the massive iron doors that Tree and I had been buzzed through the other day, security here was nonexistent. Most of the patients at the hospital had signed themselves in, and were free to go when they chose to, theoretically anyway. I assumed there were some sections of the hospital where patients were in fact kept under lock and key. But the ward where Frank Tree, Jr., was staying was not a prison, nor a collection of padded cells. It was simply a sort of dormitory with doctors.
At least there were supposed to be doctors there. I’d seen just one, last visit, and then only fleetingly. The nurses had been kids of either sex in street clothes and with expressions as spacey as the patients, who had themselves been a scarce commodity around there Monday. Tree had explained that many of the patients were involved in one supervised activity or another, elsewhere in the building, afternoons.
All of which should make it easy for me to do what I had to.
I hoped.
The afternoon was shadowy with moving clouds, and the air was chill. Spring was supposed to be here any second now, but you could’ve fooled me.
But you couldn’t have fooled Roger. He alone was sitting out on the sun porch, enjoying the moody, overcast day, with the innocence that allows the retarded to find joy in joyless things.
He was wearing the same outfit as last time: gray IOWA tee-shirt, baggy brown slacks, enormous white tennis shoes. The slack expression on his irregularly featured face turned into a grin as he saw me approaching the porch. He shook a cue stick of a finger at me, trying to place me. Some sounds came out of his mouth and they had a vague resemblance to words.
I went up the few steps and Roger, who had been swinging in the porchswing, stood and towered over me like a gorilla in a person suit.
“Hello, Roger. How are you? How is Frank Jr.?’’
He thought that over for a minute or two, and then something not unlike awareness glimmered in those oddly compelling green eyes of his. He grasped my wrist, which for him was like holding a pencil in his fist, and led me through a screen door and into a hallway. I recognized it as the same hallway as the other day, and the same bored-looking nurse moved briskly by us, with clipboard in hand, paying no attention to either one of us.
Roger stopped outside the door of the room where Frank Jr. had one of six beds. Roger put a finger to his lips and said, “Seeeep.”
“Right,” I said.
Then I leaned into the room and saw what he meant. Frank Jr. was on his back sleeping, or anyway resting, on one of the beds, head settled against the pillow with the word PSYCHO on it. He wasn’t wearing a robe today. He had on a yellow tee-shirt and jeans. He was alone in the room.
“I won’t disturb him,” I whispered.
Roger was still holding onto my wrist.
“I’ll sit with him till he wakes up, and then I’ll talk to him.”
Roger thought.
“Go back out on the porch now, Roger.”
And he nodded, dropped my wrist like a stone and shuffled away.
And I made damn sure he was out the door, before going in and taking Frank Jr. by the shoulder and shaking him.
“Wake up,” I said, several times.
He finally did.
He looked so much like his father it was spooky. The smaller, slightly feminine nose and the long dark black hair remained the only differences. Tree must’ve looked much the same at eighteen or nineteen.
“You don’t know who I am,” I said. “And you don’t need to know, other than I’m somebody trying to find out why you paid to have your father killed.”
He narrowed his eyes, just a little, and got upon his elbows, but said nothing.
“Now he’s not dead yet, don’t misunderstand. Today was supposed to be the day, I think, but I doubt it’ll come off. Of course I don’t expect you to say anything, but I do expect you to listen. I’m not a cop, nothing remotely like a cop. You aren’t in any danger of exposure any other way, either. I work for your father, you saw me here with him the other day, but I know him well enough to figure he’s not going to buy it when I tell him his own kid wants him wasted.”