“Really?”
“Sure. I’m a junkie where swimming’s concerned. Don’t miss a day, if I can help it.”
“No kidding?”
“No kidding. And I suppose for much the same reasons as you. I even agree with you about swimming alone. I try to find a pool where I can do some nice solitary swimming, myself, when I can.”
“Well,” she said. Very pretty smile. Blue eyes, that light, clear blue. “I guess I’ve found a kindred spirit.”
“I guess so.”
“My name’s Carrie.”
She seemed to want a name from me, so I gave her one.
“Mine’s Jack,” I said.
“How long are you going to be in town, Jack?”
“I’m not sure. A week, maybe.”
“Then maybe I’ll see you here tomorrow,” she said, and got up, got her robe, and was gone.
I sat staring at the door for a good solid minute.
Then I swam some more.
11
Ash’s big shiny new LTD was sitting in the lot at the Holiday Inn, just as I expected it to be. And Ash would be in his room. Staying put. Not straying from his phone, in case his backup man should need to reach him.
And I was in my big mud-spattered used Buick, parked in the front lot of the motel, watching. I didn’t figure Ash to come out of there till evening, but I sat and watched just the same. When you’re working on supposition, as I was, you account for every possibility.
Even so, I was a little lax about getting started, and my vigil didn’t get under way till around noon. I’d had a good breakfast at the Concort, before my midmorning swim, and on my way out I spent ten minutes in the lobby at the newsstand, finally settling on a couple of paperback westerns and Penthouse magazine, anticipating a long, boring afternoon at the Holiday Inn.
And then I’d gone back to that neighborhood of decomposing dreams, driving around for half an hour through those several Gothic blocks, to get a look at things in the light of day (albeit a cloudy one). Most of those big old houses looked worse, paint chipping and peeling like a cheap whore’s layered make-up; almost none of them looked better, with a notable exception being that brown brick structure, which even in the better light showed no signs of decay. It sat, aloof, with a huge snow-covered lawn separating it from the lawn-turned-parking-lot of the peeling yellow monster next door, where Ash’s backup man was playing college-boy boarder. It was the last house on the block, perched on the edge of an impossibly steep hill, the street dropping sharply to intersect another half a block below. The landscape between was thick with skinny trees whose gnarled, twining branches reached out at odd angles, hovering over patches of snow, patches of dead grass, patches of bare earth that looked like some strange disease of the scalp. Perhaps if it hadn’t been winter, this tangle of branches and lumpy earth might have been pleasant to look at. As it was, it was dead and ugly and a disturbing contrast to the modern-day castle overlooking it.
The most important thing about that weird stretch of landscape was it made an approach from the rear of that brown brick palace almost impossible. The front of the house faced the lawn and that big yellow dump across the way, with the street on the one side, and more lawn on the other. So, if I was right, and Ash was planning to go in there and kill somebody in that place, he was going to be pretty conspicuous going in. Unless he planned to play Guns of Navarone and scale that steep, briar-patch of a hill to go in the back way, which was pretty conspicuous itself, considering doing that he’d be in full view of all four lanes of Harrison Street traffic.
I thought about all of that, as I sat in the Buick in the Holiday Inn lot, between leafing through the Penthouse, and reading one of the paperback westerns. And soon the afternoon slid uneventfully into evening.
Or, almost uneventfully.
Around four-thirty someone interesting entered the motel. Forty-five minutes later, give or take a minute, he came back out again.
His name was Curtis Brooks, and he was a lawyer, a trial lawyer. I had never met the man, but I knew of him. So would you, if I was using his right name. He was the most widely publicized, nationally known resident of the Quad Cities, except for maybe that lady mayor in Davenport, who temporarily eclipsed him.
Basically, what he did was see to it guilty people were found innocent.
He walked right by me, on his way to his Lincoln Continental, leather overcoat slung absently over his arm, as if he’d forgotten it was cold out. He was alone. He looked worried. Somebody in the parking lot recognized him and spoke, some businessman, and Brooks put on a smile and waved to the man, and then looked worried again.
He was smaller than I imagined. A handsome man with a Florida tan and character crinkles in all the right nooks and crannies of his face, wavy brown hair with solid white around his ears, large, intense, expressive brown eyes, expensive suit. Very expensive suit, such as to put the come-up-in-the-world Ash down.
Speaking of Ash, there was no reason, really, to connect Brooks to him. Brooks was a man whose reputation was colorful, but whose criminal connections were strictly lawyer/client. At least that’s what his p.r. man would tell you.
I knew the odds were good Brooks had just been to see Ash. There was a logical common bond between the two men. Both of them were in the murder business, Ash carrying them out, Brooks covering them up. Also, it seemed more than likely that Brooks, of all the lawyers in the Quad Cities, would have been the Broker’s. Especially considering how often the lawyer had represented the courtroom interests of various elements of organized crime.
What I didn’t know was the subject matter of the conversation between Brooks and Ash. The takeover of Broker’s operation? That brown brick castle hit? Both? Neither? What?
And so I sat in the Buick in the Holiday Inn parking lot, thinking about those and other things, and at seven-twenty Ash drove out of the lot and I followed him.
12
It was the same routine as the time before. Ash drove into the ghetto neighborhood, pulled up along the curb, and waited. A few minutes later, his long-haired associate came strolling onto the scene, from the direction of that yellow former mansion. I was parked up a good three blocks from them, where it wasn’t likely I’d been seen, but I didn’t plan to stick around, anyway. Why should I sit and watch them talk? I wasn’t a lip reader. I had something better to do.
After all, you can work on supposition only so long. There comes a point where you have to match up all that supposing with what’s really going on.
So, while the two conspirators sat conspiring in the LTD, I drove a few blocks, parked across from a certain seedy-looking yellow apartment house, walked over, and went in the front door.
There was a vestibule, with a grid of cubbyhole mailboxes nailed to either wall, and beyond that a hallway to the left, a wall with a few doors to the right, and in front of me directly was a stairway, going up to that second floor where Ash’s backup man had a room. Of course, that part was supposition: his being Ash’s backup man. And that was why I’d come here, to poke around the guy’s room while he and Ash were busy talking in that fancy-ass Ford a couple blocks over.
The place was pretty rundown. Both floors displayed faded, curling, ugly-to-begin-with wallpaper, and throw rugs that were as frayed as they were colorless, with good solid wood floors showing around the edges of the rugs, floors which unfortunately hadn’t been varnished for decades. There had been some remodeling done, however: a cheap, sloppy job of remodeling that neither the people who hired it done nor the people who did it could feel any pride about, as evidenced by the modern-style light-color plywood doors stuck in the middle of walls otherwise trimmed with dark, rich, occasionally carved woodwork dating back to the turn of the century, easy.