Quarry (23 page)

“I didn’t come to answer questions,” I said, “I came to ask.”

“Now look, I don’t know who you are, or who you imagine yourself to be, Mr. whatever-the-hell-yousaid-your-name-was, but . . .”

“Quarry.”

“. . . but I suggest you and your goddamn overbearing manner leave immediately.”

“I suggest we talk.”

“You’re a madman,” he said, teetering between irritation and amusement.

“I’m a businessman. Like yourself.”

“We’ve had business in the past?”

“That’s something else I intend to find out.”

“People who talk in riddles annoy hell out of me.”

“People who act like riddles annoy hell out of me.”

“Your nerve is amazing, I’ll say that for you. Just how did you manage to get in here, anyway?”

“I came with Peg Baker.”

“Peg . . . ?”

“You can forget trying to blame her for me. She’s just a little indiscriminate about who she sleeps with, that’s all.”

“Oh, so you picked her up, got into her confidence and her pants, not necessarily in that order, and used her to get inside my house.”

“Something like that.”

“You must manipulate people well.”

“As a successful businessman you should know all about that.”

“I do. I know all the subtleties of the art. But with you I’ll dispense with subtlety. With you I’ll be blunt. Leave, Mr. Quarry. Leave my house. Now.”

“We have business.”

“I have an office for such matters. This is my home, and my brother-in-law died this morning and this is no time for business.”

“Even when your brother-in-law’s death is the business I want to discuss?”

“What?”

“My business involves his death. His murder.”

“In that case, you won’t mind if I walk over to the desk, pick up the phone and get my good friend Chief of Police Kurriger over here and you can share your business with him. If you do mind, I again must suggest you leave my house.”

“Go ahead and call. Your good friend Chief Kurriger might be interested in hearing about some of the things I know. A lot of people might be interested in hearing about some of the things I know. Your wife, for instance.”

Springborn calmly refilled his glass of bourbon. He poured me a glass and I drank it while I watched him drink his. His gray eyes were unfathomable. “Okay,” he said, “let’s go where we can talk and not be disturbed.”

“Okay.”

He led me out of the den and up the winding stairway. The second floor was dark, shapeless; it was like walking through a cave. Finally Springborn opened a door and flicked a light switch and started up some narrow stairs and I followed him, coming out onto the upper floor of the house, the little box-tower third floor.

In the middle of the room sat a pool table, massive, ageless, its mahogany wood polished and worn and beautiful, and it was as if this table had been here forever and this room built around it only recently. There was indeed a recent look to the room, its walls covered in commercial brown wood paneling of the sort you might see in a remodeled basement; the modern, characterless paneling surrounded the old table  anachronistically, the accouterments of the room as timeless as the table: high-backed, leather-seated chairs; long, yellow-shaded windows with the original woodworking; a tall rack with a dozen cues standing like rifles in a case; and an old map of Port City, as faded as parchment, covering most of one end wall, huge but unimpressive in comparison to the table. Only the white ceiling tile and tubular lighting went along with the paneling; the rest of the room belonged to the table, a relic of days when a man had four and a half by nine feet of room to play a game of pool. The colorful balls were racked and waiting for a game, the expanse of cloth stretching out like a green sea.

Springborn took a cue off the rack, chalked it up. He nodded to me to help myself. I chose one and walked to the table and lifted the wooden frame from around the bright balls, walked down to the other end of the table and fired cue into ball into multicolor triangle, shattering it, scattering balls all over the table, two dropping in, one each in both corner pockets down on the far end. I sank another ball, then missed a tough shot; I was having trouble getting used to the table. It was a good table, it was the mother of tables, but the size was bigger than I had played, and the rails were softer and the nap of the cloth smoother than I was accustomed to.

We didn’t play a game, really. We just took turns, shooting till we missed. He would run three or four or five, then miss when the only open shot was too difficult; he played a simple but competent game, a workmanlike game. Our styles were similar; I was workmanlike, too, though I could run the balls longer, up to six or eight. But we were an even match, and a money game would’ve been close.

Neither of us were pool-hall men. He played with friends, I guessed, up here probably, other businessmen he’d invite over, among whom he was likely considered a top-grade player. I played at home, back at Twin Lakes, at tables in a penny-arcade shop across the street from the beach; I played rotation, mostly, with college kids, most of whom could beat the pants off me.

But it was a way to get acquainted, for Springborn and I, and after half an hour of aimless nonplaying, we knew each other well enough to talk.

I sat down in one of the high-backed chairs, laying the cue across my lap. He continued to shoot, leaning over the table, stroking balls into pockets, stopping now and then to line up a complex shot which he would invariably miss.

He finally sank one of his complex set-ups after several attempts, looked over his shoulder at me and said, “Are you a blackmailer, Mr. Quarry?”

“Not in the conventional sense.”

“Then what are you?”

“I think you know. I think there is a very good chance that you know.”

He stood up straight, forgot shooting pool for the moment, holding his cue tight in his fist, erect, like somebody carrying the flag in a parade. “Frankly, I don’t know what you are . . . other than a damn fool. I get the feeling you’re fishing around for something, that you aren’t sure of yourself. You’ve searched out a confrontation with me and now you aren’t quite sure what to do with it.” He shook his head side-to-side, his lips drawn back tight over very white teeth. “And frankly, Mr. Quarry, you scare me a little, with your implications, insinuations about my brother-in-law’s death . . . murder, if you will.”

“Four thousand dollars,” I said.

“. . . what?”

“For four thousand dollars I’ll leave you alone.”

He laughed. “I guess you are a damn fool at that. As you’ve said yourself, Mr. Quarry, I’m a businessman, and I’m not about to buy something without knowing what it is.”

“Let me ask you something, then. Why would anyone want to kill Albert Leroy?”

He shrugged, sat on the edge of the table. “The robbery motive is the one I accept, I suppose. The pack rat’s buried treasure. No one felt malice against Albert, really. He was a harmless enough guy, most people liked him, he had a smile for everybody, even if it was a simpering kind of a smile. I for one will miss him. We used to play pool up here together, Albert and I. He’d come over Sunday, after church, and we’d all have supper together, my wife and I and Albert and the aunts and uncles and cousins who take part in the radio show and the businesses, our weekly family gathering, a forced, silent charade. But after supper Albert and I would come up here and play eight-ball for a few hours, and I’d let him win one out of every three games or so, and the final game I’d let run close, then purposely sink the eight-ball to let Albert win and go home happy.”

I thought back to Boyd’s surveillance report on Albert Leroy: the list of activities hadn’t included visits here. I said, “He came around every Sunday?”

He nodded. “Up until a month and a half ago, when he and my wife had a falling-out, a little family quarrel . . . You know, Mr. Quarry, you do manipulate people well, you have a way of sneaking up on a person . . . you’ve had me talking when you should have been, because if you don’t start talking in a convincing manner about
something
I’m going to toss you out on your ass, and from up here that could be painful.”

I said nothing; I was confused.

“Look,” he said, “just why are you asking questions about Albert, anyway?”

“Trying to establish a motive.”

“A motive for what?”

“His murder. I want to understand why you hired somebody to kill your brother-in-law.”

His face reddened and he got slowly to his feet. He raised the cue as if to strike me and said, “I ought to break this thing over your head! You stun me. You crazy son of a bitch, where do you find the incredible, idiotic nerve to come barging into my house, a complete stranger, and blurt out an insane accusation like that!”

“Maybe you’d feel better about it if you were swinging a wrench instead of a cue.”

He got a puzzled look on his face; had what I’d said really been a non sequitur to him, or was this a mask? He said, “You’re insane. Get out of my house.”

“Not without four thousand dollars.”

He looked at me blank-faced for a moment. Then he started to laugh.

Now I was the startled one.

He said, “I have to give you credit.”

I said, “Credit?”

“You’re good. Better than you should be You know, I ruled Vince out at first, because you didn’t look right, you didn’t seem like the type who’d get involved with him. But this ridiculous attempt to implicate me in Albert’s death . . . who but Vince could come up with something so absurd?” He laughed again, more harshly this time. “You even had me wondering if maybe Peg put you up to this, to force me into handing Bunny’s to her on a platter . . . though I couldn’t really believe Peg would try anything of this sort. But Peg is a friend of Carol’s and could possibly have known about Carol and me, so I was thinking about it.”

I swallowed. I wondered what the fuck was going on. I felt like an actor who had wandered into the last scene of a strange play.

“Vince is just crook enough,” he was saying, “just cretin enough, to try something ridiculous like this . . . what’s the matter, isn’t he satisfied with the cushy job I set him up in? Does he know anybody else driving a hack making that kind of money?”

I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about. We’d been playing a game, both of us, but different games. Suddenly I was filled with doubt. Suddenly I knew Springborn was not the man with the wrench, and that I was digging a nice deep grave for myself by tossing around all those hints about Albert Leroy’s death.

I stood up and said, “Four thousand isn’t so much to ask.”

“No,” he said, “it isn’t. That’s one reason I figure this is Vince’s scheme. A small-time thinker, Vince, a man with extremely limited vision. Let me give you some advice. You seem like a reasonably intelligent guy. I don’t know how in Christ’s name you got mixed up with Vince, whether he’s a friend of a friend, or somebody you met in service, or someone you ran into in a bar, or what. But however you picked him, you picked a loser, Mr. Quarry. Now. I’d advise you to head back to wherever it is you hail from. Do not pass go. Do not collect four thousand dollars.”

“I don’t bluff easy,” I said, aching to go but for appearance sake not wanting to give in too quickly.

“How much do you know about Vince?”

“Not much,” I admitted. Christ, not much.

“You don’t . . . go in for that kind of stuff, do you?”

“What kind of stuff?”