“So I work from the inside again,” I said.
“You are the only one of my boys I would trust with such an assignment. Such a responsibility.”
“Right, ’cause I’m unique and shit.”
He smiled small and shrugged big.
I sighed. Narrowed my eyes at him. “Fifty for stopping the hit from going down,” I said, “and another fifty for the guy behind it.”
He took a moment to consider that, and another nod, more definite, followed.
“You can tell Boyd it’s a go,” I said.
The Broker stood, smoothed his suede jacket. “You can tell him yourself, Quarry. He’s already in Memphis... would you like to join me at the Lake Geneva Playboy Club for supper? I’m a key holder.”
So was I, but he didn’t need to know how sophisticated I really was. I got into more respectable attire and let him buy me a meal. When we were served by a Bunny who I’d dated and banged, I kept it to myself.
He didn’t have a corner on all the secrets.
Three
I flew out of Mitchell in Milwaukee again, a ninety-minute flight to Memphis International. As was my habit, I took a cab to the nearest sketchy-looking used car dealership, where I could pay cash and get title to match my phony ID (John R. Quarry) no questions asked. The sunny if humid weather encouraged me to go a little flashy, so I paid two grand of the Broker’s money for a pale green ’69 Mustang convertible.
The ride to downtown Memphis, mid-afternoon, took only twenty minutes. I’d been here before, on one of my first jobs for the Broker, but that was almost five years ago. The area was still mostly a desolate, boarded-up place whose hard times had gotten harder after the murder of Martin Luther King; but it was starting to work its way back. I parked on South 2nd and, in my gray t-shirt, jeans and tennies, strolled to the Rendezvous and the best ribs in town, after which I walked it off on the riverfront.
That took me through Tom Lee Park, where a massive new bridge with M-shaped arches loomed. The gray shimmer of the Mississippi was undisturbed but for a paddlewheeler brimming with tourists. Tom Lee, by the way, was an African-American dock worker who saved the lives of thirty-two passengers when a steamboat sank in 1925. If that paddlewheeler started to go down, the odds of me diving in to start saving people weren’t so good. I mean, I’m a hell of a swimmer, but I would never dream of stealing Tom Lee’s thunder.
I retrieved my Mustang and headed for the address the Broker had provided, which was a bit of a head-scratcher. That years-ago Memphis job had taken me to the Highland Strip before, to remove a drug dealer (presumably for one of his competitors), and that the area might include a budding publishing empire seemed hard to fathom.
The Highland Strip had been a virtual extension of the University of Memphis campus for a very long time. Last trip I’d been told that before the late sixties, Highland Street near Southern Avenue had been a typical shopping district — grocery, hardware, jewelry store, barber shop and so on. What pulled the students in was a record store called Pop-I’s, where campus hippies began to gather. Soon funky restaurants, head shops and clothing stores began popping up, boutiques like Sexy Sadie and the Jeanery, restaurants like the Taj Mahal and The Café, plus The Cue Ball, a pool hall with an opium-den vibe. By the time of my visit here five years ago or so, the Highland Strip was strictly a hangout for freaks, longhairs, tie-dye tees, bell bottoms, and bare feet.
But as my Mustang prowled the Strip of today, with afternoon trailing into dusk, I saw a mix of empty boarded-up storefronts and new businesses, conventional ones not unlike the ones the hippies had driven out. College kids still walked the streets, but they just looked like students, not users looking to make a connection.
My destination turned out to be another defunct store in this neighborhood trying to work its way back to normalcy. The faded red-brick building was two stories, the white-paint-lettered ghost of café floating above boarded-up double doors between plywood-covered storefront windows.
On the corner directly opposite was a three-story tan-brick building whose bottom floor, under a dark brown overhang, bore a fieldstone facade with beer neons glowing in its windows. Above the overhang, a sign extended from the side of the building like an arm signaling a turn, with red neon pulsing CLIMAX CLUB, smaller letters saying COCKTAILS. This substantial but hardly ostentatious structure did not look like the home of either a publishing empire or a nightclub that might have inspired one. But that’s exactly what it was.
I parked the Mustang, putting up its top, on the street around the corner from the stakeout. The apartment over the dead café was accessed on the cross-street side of the building. The door was locked, but I had a key courtesy of the Broker. Travel bag in hand, I went up unlit, creaky, musty stairs to a claustrophobic, equally creaky landing, and knocked three times, like Tony Orlando but louder.
Footsteps behind the old paint-peeling door came my way and stopped.
“Me,” I said to the paint-peeling wood.
Boyd peeked out, confirmed my claim, and let me in.
“Welcome to my world,” he said with a sour smirk, scratching his head of curly brown hair.
This wasn’t a room at the Flamingo.
We stood in something that had been a kitchen, and, as if to prove it, an old refrigerator hummed in wheezy indignation about having to stay at it after so many loyal years of service, while blistered white cabinets hovered over a once-white counter like suspects in a lineup. A gray Formica table with paint stains and a couple of gold-and-gray chairs, their vinyl upholstery splitting, completed the less-than-inviting display; all the other appliances were missing in action, their shadows on the wall as if in the aftermath of an A-bomb.
Boyd was in a ribbed red long-sleeve shirt and black-and-red plaid pants. He surveyed the scene like an alien who had landed in the midst of ancient ruins.
His mouth pursed beneath his mustache. “Why do we put up with this shit?”
I shrugged. “The money? Rest of the joint this inviting?”
“Take the tour and see.”
The place was, or had been, a furnished apartment. A hallway off the kitchen fed two bedrooms to the left, each with a double bed and an excuse for a nightstand. With a shiver, Boyd said that the mattresses had been bare and he’d gone to J.C. Penney and got us sheets and blankets and pillows. Sometimes having a gay partner comes in handy.
I stowed my travel bag in the unclaimed bedroom; between it and Boyd’s quarters was a working john with a shower stall, which was the pad’s only redeeming feature. Someone had cleaned it, almost certainly Boyd.
The living room seemed spacious, or maybe that was just because it had so little in it — a threadbare green-sparkleupholstered couch to the right, a matching chair over at left. The walls were pale yellow swirly plaster, the carpet a urine-yellow shag, and the thought of what might be hiding down in there was a little chilling.
By the row of four front windows, Boyd had set up his surveillance. We were lucky the windows weren’t boarded up, though two of them were broken, the glass held in place by their frames and duct tape; mustard-color curtains had been left behind.
“Also from J.C. Penney,” he said, gesturing at the khaki folding camping chair, angled to the edge of the window farthest right. His stakeout post.
He’d also gotten himself a cooler and a small portable television. The portable radio I recognized as one he’d brought from home; it was on an easy listening station, Jack Jones singing, “Wives and Lovers.” Also from home were the binoculars, which rested on top of a spread-out newspaper near his chair — he would not set those on that questionable carpet — as did his Smith and Wesson .38 long-barreled Model 29 revolver.