“Hi!” she said.
“Hello,” I said.
“You remember me-from Sambo’s?”
The professor was studying me as if I were an exam paper written in crayon. Then he turned to Annette and asked, “What were you doing in Sambo’s?”
“Having coffee, reading. When you had your meetings last night? You know it’s just across from where I live.”
“Ah. Sure.” He put on a smile for me and nodded.
She held her hand out. “I didn’t get your name. I’m Annette.”
“Jack,” I said, and shook hands with her.
The prof didn’t offer his hand. But he did ask, with tight politeness, “What are you studying, Jack?”
“Just another English major,” I said. “Nice to meet you, Annette…Professor Byron.”
That seemed to please him, me knowing who he was. “So I don’t need to introduce myself.”
“No, I read your book about Vietnam. I’m a vet myself.”
“How did you like it?”
“Vietnam really sucked.”
“I meant my book.”
“Oh! It was really good.” I of course hadn’t read it. But I figured that was all you needed to say to any writer to make a pal out of him.
And it worked.
“Well, thanks, Jack,” he said, and now he finally held out his hand. “You interested in writing? You can always try out for the Workshop.”
His grip was cold and clammy.
I said, “I hear it’s tough, the competition.”
“Oh yes, definitely.” He nodded toward his favorite student. “But talent, like cream, does rise to the top.”
Some writer, coining a phrase like that.
He was saying, “Annette here is going to be the next Flannery O’Connor.”
“Hey, that’s great.” Who the fuck was Flannery O’Connor?
Must have been somebody pretty good, because Annette was blushing. That’s what I said: blushing.
She nodded and headed out and he followed with no nod to me and I finished my sandwich. The Broker would love that, me talking literature with the target and the client’s kid.
So that afternoon, with the world already growing dark outside my window, I called the Broker from the phone in my room at the Holiday Inn, and left out any report on my luncheon meeting at Bushnell’s Turtle.
“ You’ll be relieved to know,” the Broker said, “ that Charles Koenig has a small one-man private investigative agency in Des Moines, Iowa. He is divorced and has no children and is unlikely to be missed by anyone other than perhaps his landlord. ”
“Cool,” I said.
“And I would doubt that Mrs. Byron hired him in person. She lives in a small college town in Connecticut, where her husband first taught, before his writing career really took off. They, too, are a childless couple.”
“You figure the wife looked for a PI in Iowa who could take on this case. Let her fingers do the walking, or anyway the long distance operator’s fingers.”
“Precisely. Hence, Charles Koenig of Des Moines.”
I believe the Broker is the only person I ever heard speak the word “hence” in a sentence. Or not in a sentence, for that matter.
“So then I should stay,” I said, “and finish what I came to do.”
“I believe so…if you are willing to take a certain risk.”
Well, let’s see. Last night I had dragged a plastic-wrapped corpse down a hill so I could load it in a car trunk and drive to a truckstop and pass the stiff off to some other asshole. Yeah. I guessed I was up for a risk.
“What kind of risk, Broker?”
“You need to keep that meeting.”
“What meeting?…Oh. You mean, the meeting Charlie was supposed to have with the professor’s wife. And, what, I should pretend to be Charlie?”
“Yes. And why not? It’s the lounge in your very own hotel. As you said yourself, how much more convenient could it be for you?”
“Well,” I said, having second thoughts, “it won’t be very convenient if your assumptions are wrong, and Mrs. Byron has in fact met Charlie. You could put me in a position of having to do something else unpleasant. More collateral damage.”
“No. That shouldn’t be a problem. Don’t pass yourself off as Charlie, but as an operative in his employ.”
Actually, that was a good idea. I’d already thought of it, but said nothing, not wanting to burst the Broker’s bubble.
“Quarry, you know what Mr. Koenig was up to. Improvising your lines should be simple; a child could do it.”
“Yeah, well, Christmas is over and all the kids have checked out of this dump, except for me, and I wasn’t in any school plays or anything.”
“You underestimate your abilities, my boy.”
Broker was also the only person who had ever called me “my boy.” No, strike that: my drunken Uncle Pete called me that once, too, when I was six and he slipped his hands in my shorts. See how good I am at this non-fiction novel stuff?
“Okay, Broker,” I said, “I’ll do it. But what do I say to her?”
“Tell her you have the goods on her husband. That you’ll gather all the materials and provide them soon.”
“Listen, what’s she doing here anyway? She’s got an Iowa PI on the job who could report to her where she lives, which is Connecticut. What’s going on?”
“She probably wants to be assured by Mr. Koenig-that’s you-that her husband is indeed the philandering louse she assumes. And she plans to confront him about it, once having seen the evidence.”
“Great. One more cast member in the stateroom.”
“No. There won’t be. You will tell her that you need several more days to collect the evidence. Send her home. Advise her in no uncertain terms that a confrontation with her husband is a mistake. That it will compromise her position in court.”
“Would it?”
“Jesus Christ, young man!”
You guessed it: first time I ever heard that combination of words coming out of a fellow human; and it was a pretty rare outburst of any kind, coming from the Broker.
Who was saying, “What difference does that make? You aren’t really a private investigator working on a divorce case. You are merely trying to manipulate her ass into taking a goddamn hike. Understood?”
“Sure,” I said.
“Call me tonight and we’ll discuss how the meeting with Mrs. Byron went, and we will decide, together, whether or not you should resume your activities.”
“Okay.”
We said goodbye and hung up.
So I had a shower and brushed my teeth and gargled and even splashed on a little Brut. I left off the long johns but my wardrobe was limited-I had a dark gray shirt and some jeans I hadn’t worn yet, and that was the best I could do. I spent an hour in the coffee shop, having a bowl of chicken noodle soup for supper and reading the local papers. I don’t follow sports or world affairs, but the funnies and the movie reviews took some time away.
By a quarter to seven, I was in the lounge, which was about the size of a high school classroom, only all red and black and with a bar in the middle and a little stage and dance floor in one corner. The band wasn’t going on till nine, and a TV up high behind the bar showed Red Skelton doing Clem Kadiddlehopper and laughing at his own jokes. Within minutes, Rowan amp; Martin’s Laugh-In replaced it, the comedy team exuding cheerful irony, and the collision of the two eras was pretty jarring. The sound wasn’t on loud enough for me to make everything out from my booth, but I took in the sight gags and watched the girls in bikinis and body paint dance around and that passed the time.
A sultry alto said, “Hi.”
I looked up and a pretty, and pretty familiar, face was staring down at me: the redheaded bestower of hard ons from the whirlpool yesterday morning.
So she hadn’t checked out; and she had, after all, said she was “sometimes in the bar” here at the Holiday Inn. And now my fantasies were poised to come true, Penthouse Forum here I come, only I was supposed to meet someone else, wasn’t I?
Truth was, I wished I was meeting this blue-eyed redhead. She looked fucking great. Her tower of titian curls on top of that attractive roundish face, softened by the lounge lighting, her shapely body nicely served by a fuzzy yellow sweater, orange toreador pants and off-white heels. She had a yellow clutch purse in one hand and was gesturing to herself with the other, her nails the same orange as her tight slacks.