“You bumped into me in the hall. I’m not much on sucking cocks, though.”
I was waiting for him to notice the bundled towel under my arm, but I guess he already had; he evidently knew about my swimming with Carrie, and thought nothing of it.
Meanwhile, he was shoving me again, still giving me that nasty white grin.
“You’re in my way, asshole,” he was saying. “I don’t like assholes getting in my way and fucking things up for me. I don’t give a damn what Ash says. Get out of my way, or I’m putting a hole in you.”
“Let me know when you get to the scary part, will you?”
His sarcastic grin disappeared into the denseness of facial foliage, and he swung the nine-millimeter around to slap me with it, and I let the gun-in-towel fall into my hands and gave him a hole in his chest that he looked down at once, unbelievingly, before pitching forward toward me. I stepped aside and let him slump against the parked car behind me, and then he dropped to the pavement like a wet bag of laundry.
Some people drove by in a Cadillac, but didn’t notice anything, and when the lights of the Cad disappeared around the corner of the building, I stooped down and took his Ruger and put the nine-millimeter in his hand. I put the. 45 in his waistband. I wasn’t pleased about being left with a. 22 as my only firepower, but it was just too convenient to pass up: the dead guy in my room had been killed by the nine-millimeter, and the backup man got his from the dead guy’s. 45. So they were tied together in death, whether or not they’d been tied together in life-though I assumed they were-and since there was nothing about the nine-millimeter to tie it to me, except for the fingerprints I’d already wiped off, why not leave a neat, if baffling, package for the police? Some amusing conversations would no doubt ensue when Davenport’s finest tried to figure out how a guy with a. 45 slug in his chest made it down all those floors and to the parking lot without being seen, and without dying first; ultimately, however, they would find the obvious explanation just too tidy to resist. Or, so I imagined. If they did tag me for it, they wouldn’t get past the phony name I’d used at the desk, and I’d be long gone by then.
I picked her up at the front door, she got in, we drove away.
“Now,” she said. “What is it makes you think somebody’s out to kill me, anyway?”
“Oh,” I said, looking at the Concort receding in the rear-view mirror, “I don’t know.”
19
“How much do you know about your husband’s business dealings?” I asked her.
“He was an art dealer. He had money in an insurance agency. He was part owner of several mail-order businesses.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
“You mean his illegal business dealings.”
“That’s right.”
“Not much. Next to nothing.”
We were past the city limits, on our way out of town, now. Traffic was light, but it was a foggy night, misting, and visibility was poor.
“Tell me as much as you do know, then,” I said.
“While I was married to him, I thought he was a pillar of the community. Active in charity work. Chamber of Com- merce, Lions Club, everything. He was conservative, politically. He wasn’t active in local politics, not openly, anyway… he did have friends in political circles, and contributed heavily to various campaigns.”
“You’re talking about the public man, Carrie. What about the private man?”
“He was polite. Reserved. Kind. I know you’re wondering about the age difference, and if you’re thinking maybe he was more a father to me than a husband in some ways, yes, I suppose you’re right. But he was a husband, too.”
“Go on.”
“When he was found murdered… shot to death, by the side of the road…” She stopped a moment, shivered. “… when that happened, I realized I’d been pretty na ive. I realized there were things about him I hadn’t known, that I’d been like a sheltered child where much of his life was concerned. Did you know that some narcotics were found in his possession? Or, rather in a locker at the airport that he had a key to. It was pretty obvious that he’d been involved in some kind of, what? Underworld activity. Sounds silly to say that, doesn’t it?”
“No.”
“Anyway, there were a lot of people with a lot of questions. Police, of course. Federal agents, because of the narcotics. More federal men, IRS, checking the books of my husband’s various businesses. It only began cooling down this past month, and I don’t anticipate it cooling down completely till who knows when.”
“Are the federal men gone?”
“All but IRS. They haven’t bothered me personally, much. The narcotics people and the police did, though. Unmercifully.”
“Has anyone else come around to talk to you, Carrie? Someone who might claim to be an old business associate of your husband’s.”
“I haven’t talked to anyone in the last three months except members of my family and police and federal people. And you, Jack.”
“And right now you’re wondering how the hell to ask who the hell I am.”
“Yes.”
“Officially I was a salesman for one of those mail-order companies your husband was part owner of.”
“Unofficially?”
“I guess you could say I delivered messages for him.”
“You’re being vague.”
“I have to be.”
“You’re trying to say you were involved in the illegal side of what my husband did.”
“Yes.”
“I see. Then it wasn’t accidental, our meeting each other?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do you mean?”
“I didn’t arrange the meeting, Carrie. Did you?”
“No.”
“Then we’ll have to assume it was accidental.”
“A coincidence, you mean.”
“I used to stay at the Concort, whenever I came to the Cities on business, to confer with your husband. I like the Concort. I like to swim there. So when I came to the Cities this time, I stayed there again. And swam there again. You inherited an interest in the Concort when your husband was killed. You like to come around and swim there in the mornings. So we bumped into each other.”
“That’s still pretty coincidental.”
“I know it is. It’s the reason I didn’t call you back today. I looked in your purse, last night, saw who you were. It bothered me. I wasn’t going to contact you again till I was sure about you.”
“Are you sure about me now?”
“I guess I have to be. Just like you have to be about me. Maybe we should just be tentatively sure about each other.”
The fog and misting had us crawling along the highway. Few other cars were foolhardy enough to be out on a night like this, pushing through the thick, gray shifting unreality.
“You still haven’t answered my question,” she said.
“Which question?”
“Why do you think someone’s trying to kill me?”
So I explained it to her, modifying certain parts and leaving others out, but giving her what was, essentially, the truth. I told her that an attempt had been made on my life, for reasons I had yet to ascertain, but that I had managed to trace the attempt to another former associate of her husband’s (Ash) who I’d followed to the Quad Cities, where some sort of takeover of her husband’s extralegal business activities seemed to be in progress, part of which involved Ash and another man staking out her home and recording her every move and, eventually, killing her.
I also told her that despite our poolside encounter, I hadn’t known until a few hours ago that she was the potential victim in the brown brick house. And I told her that if she hadn’t broken her usually rigid daily routine and driven to the Concort last night for an evening swim, she’d probably be dead now.
That chilled her a bit.
“I still don’t understand why anyone would want to have me killed.”
“Neither do I. I was hoping you could tell me.”
“I can’t. The part of my husband’s life these people would be interested in, I’m totally ignorant of.”