“I’m Ray’s cousin,” I said.
“Cousin?”
“Hasn’t Ray ever mentioned me? Charlie Wilson? He was expecting me today.”
“Mr. Drake didn’t say anything about expecting anyone,” she said, looking more than a trifle suspicious and perhaps a little scared. “As a matter of fact, he left on a business trip just yesterday, and told me he wouldn’t be back for some time. Possibly as long as a month. Now, could you explain why he’d be expecting you, when he was leaving?”
“No, wait,” I said, smiling, hoping the smile looked real, “you got it wrong. I’m here because he left. He said I could use his place tonight. I came in town to check out some colleges. I just got out of service, and now I’m going back to school. Would you believe it, a guy my age?”
She drew in a breath. Then let it out. Smiled.
She bought it.
She said, “Oh, you don’t look so old.” She touched her face. “Now, me, I look old. It’s this damn woman’s work. You know. Cleaning.”
“Well, this apartment could sure use it.”
“I know,” she smiled. “Ray doesn’t keep a very tidy place, I’m afraid, does he?”
It was Ray, now; I wondered whatever happened to Mr. Drake.
“I was just coming up to clean it, when I heard you up here,” she explained. “Ray asked me to get it in shape for him. He doesn’t like coming home to a messy place, even though he doesn’t seem to mind living in one.”
“You want to come in?” I asked her.
“No, not unless you, uh… want me to clean the place up now.”
“Why don’t you do that this afternoon? If it’s no trouble, I mean. I’ll be out, then. If I get everything done I need to, I might not even have to stay the night.”
“Oh, I see… well, it was nice meeting you, Mr. Wilson. I’ll just leave Mr. Drake’s mail and get back to my work.”
And she handed me an envelope, smiled, touched her face, and left.
It was pretty obvious she and “Mr. Drake” had something going on the side. Something minor, like when her husband wasn’t home and when Ash was between women; a nice fast physical fuck now and then, and probably I could have had one myself, if I’d been so inclined.
And it had been awhile since I’d been with a woman. I could’ve used it, I guess. But I had more urgent needs to take care of.
Though I did owe Ash’s landlady some thanks.
That envelope she handed me was a motel confirmation, and it told me right where my old friend Ash had gone.
7
Before I left Milwaukee I traded my Opel GT in on a recent-model Buick, and on my way to the Quad Cities, where Ash was staying at a Holiday Inn, I got to thinking about the second of the three jobs I’d worked with him, the one where I’d saved his life.
At first glance, it was the sort of job you could pull in your sleep. We’d been provided with reams of information up front. We’d come up with a perfect, easy way to pull it off. I had the backup role and went in a week early, keeping an eye on the guy we were to hit, checking out the information we’d been given to see if the mark’s schedule really was as regimented as we’d been told. And it was. The mark had a timetable he didn’t vary from every working day of his life. His weekends were likewise regimented, but his working day provided that perfect, easy way I mentioned.
The mark was a real estate agent, a prosperous one. A congenial, well-dressed little man in his early fifties with a toupee and a weight problem. He had an office in the tallest building in the business district of a large Southwestern city, a hundred-thousand-dollar ranch-style house out in the country, a wife, no kids, three poodles, and mob connections.
Now, the Broker claimed not to be in the direct employ of the so-called Mafia or Family or whatever, and most of the people I helped kill had nothing to do with the mob, or, anyway, that’s what I was told. But some of what those of us who worked through the Broker did was unquestionably mob related, and this supposedly fell into the area of piece- work we did for them now and then, hits that for some reason or another would be better handled by outside people.
And there was no doubt that this Southwestern real estate agent had mob connections. Unless you don’t consider it a little unusual for your average real estate agent to be constantly accompanied by bodyguards.
Not that they looked like bodyguards, those two guys that were always at his side. They looked like real estate agents. They were not particularly big: one of them was a sandy-haired man in his thirties who was five-eight, solidlooking but no bruiser; and the other was of similar age and height, only with brown hair, a round face, and a paunch. Neither man looked especially sinister.
But they were bodyguards, all right. No mistaking that. For instance, both of them chose to wear their suit coats at all times, even when standing out in the sun while their employer spent three hot hours one afternoon showing some of his outlying land holdings.
In the mornings they drove him to work in his yellow Cadillac. At lunch they ate at a table close by him in the restaurant on the bottom floor of his office building; they even went in with him when he used a public toilet. And in the late afternoon they drove him back to his house in the country, where their employer provided them quarters over the four-car garage. The weekends had them playing golf with him, among other things, but never mind.
The point is, they accompanied him constantly.
Except for his long lunch hours, Tuesdays and Thursdays, when he spent 12:30 to 2:30 P.M. in a sleazy little room at the Tuck-a-Way Motel, in the company of a sleazy little blonde, while the bodyguards went across the street to have lunch at a sleazy little diner.
And that, of course, was the perfect, easy way of hitting him.
The girl would be no trouble. Just shove her out of the way before the shooting started, knock her out if she got physical or vocal or anything. It would mean Ash had to pull on a stocking mask or something before going in the back window of the room and doing his thing, and he’d have to take the time to tie the girl up and gag her before cutting out, but that was a small price to pay. We certainly had no intention of killing the girl, and if that surprises you, think about it a minute.
In the first place, I was no homicidal maniac and I assumed Ash wasn’t, either. The Broker didn’t take on people who took pleasure in killing; he took on people who could kill dispassionately, and well.
Furthermore, kill one guy and it’s a killing; kill two or more and all of a sudden it’s a mass murder. The papers and TV start hollering psychopath on the loose, or in this instance splashing “Love Nest Slaying” all over the place, and pretty soon an unnatural interest has been stirred up in what otherwise would have been considered a routine occurrence, buried in the back pages of the papers, unworthy of more than a mention on the tube.
So when I was hired, as part of a team, to kill somebody, that one somebody got it, and nobody else. Period. Anything else is just plain bad business.
If I thought life was cheap, I wouldn’t charge so much to take one.
Anyway, the stakeout had been uneventful. Working backup is always boring, and for that reason I avoided it whenever possible; but this guy was especially boring. A goddamn robot. No variety whatsoever, every day the same clockwork run-through.
But thank God for Tuesday and Thursday, and those long lunches at the Tuck-a-Way Motel. Seeing him duck into that motel room, a few minutes after that cheap little blonde had done the same, and catching a glimpse of an awkward but impassioned embrace, made him seem almost human.
We took a week and a half, a full week of stakeout, just me alone, checking out what we’d been told about the mark’s habit pattern, and another half a week with Ash, joining me on stakeout, even spelling me one evening so I could catch a movie and relax a little, and just generally getting filled in from me on the mark’s pattern and the overall lay of the land.