Quarry's Deal (10 page)

21

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THE PSYCHOPATHIC HOSPITAL
at Iowa City was a sprawling one-story brick building on a spacious lawn whose many trees and bushes were apparently tailored to provide a soothing landscape, no matter what the season. Only right now it was no season at all, rather that limbo period between winter and spring, trees gray and skeletal, grass brown as cardboard. Even the few evergreen bushes looked wilted, like a salad that sat out.

We came in separate cars. I had already determined that no one (except me) had followed Tree from Des Moines to the Amana turn-off on Interstate 80. But that didn’t mean somebody, knowing Tree’s patterns, might not drive to Iowa City by some other route and pick up shadowing him there. So Tree parked along the curb of a half-circle drive designed for outpatient pick-up, where you could legally park for thirty minutes or so; and I left my latest rental Ford in a metered stall down the slope of the hill just beyond the hospital. I spent ten minutes trying to see if anybody was here ahead of us, watching, and there didn’t seem to be, but I couldn’t be sure: the University Hospital was across the way, with its large parking lot, where somebody could easily be staked out. My main concern was not wanting to be recognized, not wanting to be seen with Tree, particularly by Lu, who might be sitting in a car in that lot watching right now. Maybe the ten minutes between Tree going in and me following would be enough; that and my rental car and feeble disguise, consisting of glasses and a sweater I’d pulled on over my shirt, hopefully affecting the look of a straight-type college kid. The man of a thousand faces.

Inside was a hallway, with a glassed-in office area off to the left, with a pretty young nurse in it, who Tree was unsuccessfully flirting with when I came in. I was identified as a cousin of the patient; evidently only relatives were admitted. Then the nurse told Tree that Dr. Cash wanted a word with him before the visitation, and Tree went down the hall and knocked on a door on the right and it opened and he went in.

I waited downstairs, in a room full of tables and chairs and vending machines. This room, like the corridor I’d been briefly in upstairs, was as coldly institutional as a tax form. Some lunch room. I’d sooner have a sandwich in the morgue. Which didn’t stop me from feeding some change to a vending machine that sold me a Coke that was all ice and syrup and I drank it anyway.

After that I wandered in the hall a while. This lower floor was apparently in as much use as the upper one, with
rooms labeled various functional things. The ceiling was a maze of exposed electrical wiring and pipes, cheerfully painted over in bland pastel, and would have been enough to make your average fire inspector check in as a permanent guest. The only advantage I could see to having the place set up this way, like a two-story building with the first floor under- ground, was it cut down on people jumping out of windows.

I’d never been in a nuthouse before and hoped this wouldn’t start a trend. But there was somebody here Tree wanted me to see, and I’d decided to go along with him, since it seemed to mean a lot to him . . . but by now I was half expecting Tree to come through a door with a brace of boys in white coats and point his finger at me and say, “That’s the one.”

We had talked money first. I reminded him that in one of our earlier conversations he’d offered double the price of the contract on him. He reminded me that I’d had a gun on him at the time, which, like trying to get a good-looking woman to do what you want in bed, is a situation where a man will say anything.

And then I told him I didn’t want him to double the price, anyway.

I just wanted him to match it.

“What are they paying?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “But I can make an educated guess.”

“Make it, then.”

“Five.”

There was a short silence, and then he said, “Five thousand dollars,” slowly, shaking his head, smiling a little. “A man likes to think his life’s worth more than that.”

“It’s not your life we’re talking about, Frank. Just the opposite.”

He wanted to know how I’d be paid, and I told him a thousand up front, which would do little more than cover expenses. The balance would come only after I’d got some results. And it would be paid half in cash, half in check, so I’d have something to pay taxes on and keep the IRS happy. There were some details about how the check was to be handled that I needn’t go into here.

And he wanted to know what he’d be getting for his money.

I told him he’d already got quite a lot, and explained how I’d followed a woman named Glenna Cole from Florida to Des Moines, where she had been staking him out for five days, and figured she’d watch him no longer than two weeks total before the other half of the team stepped in to finish the job. I didn’t mention that Glenna Cole was his lady bartender at the Barn, Lucille. Or that I had tentatively tagged that house dealer of his with the glasses and sullen manner as the trigger. I didn’t want to lay too much on him all at once. Especially when he hadn’t come across with any cash yet.

“And you’ll stop the hit?” he said.

“I’ll stop this attempt. I’ll try to.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning I might fuck up and get shot to shit and you along with me.”

“And if you don’t fuck up, Quarry?”

“There’ll still be somebody out there who wants you dead. Who was willing to pay for it once, and’ll be willing to pay for it again.”

He thought about that a while.

Then he said, “Are you saying you can find out who bought the contract?”

“Maybe. Can’t guarantee it.”

“There’d be a bonus in it for you.”

“You’re goddamn right there would.”

“How much do you want?”

“Another five.”

“Looks like you get double after all.”

“You better hope I do, Frank.”

And I asked him what enemies he had, if he could think of anybody who’d pay not to have him around.

“I think I might know,” he said, a light going on in the back of his head somewhere. “I think I know.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know the name, or names I mean. But I know who, generally. There are some people into dope I caused some trouble for.”

“That doesn’t sound like your bag, Frank.”

“It’s nothing like you’re thinking. It’s a situation that’s hard to explain. . . . I think you’ll understand better if you go along with me to Iowa City. There’s someone in the hospital there, the Psychopathic Hospital, that-I want you to meet.”

“Who?”

“My son.”

22

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TREE PUSHED THE
button and pretty soon somebody came to unlock the big iron doors from the inside and we went in and the doors were locked behind us.

Then we were in a vestibule that was really just a continuation of the corridor we’d been out waiting in. A television blared against the wall on the right, and on the left people were sitting on a couch and some chairs, and we were in the way.

So we moved on quickly, in the company of the lanky short-haired girl in untucked blouse and blue jeans who had let us in and was apparently a nurse. She had the expression of a disillusioned social worker: compassion slowly curdling to boredom and worse.

Everybody wore street clothes, except the doctors, and I only saw one of those, briefly. It was an attempt at creating an atmosphere of normalcy, I guess. The large, high-ceilinged room we were now in was another attempt at a normal, even casual environment: couches, coffee tables, easy chairs, lamps, all designed to make you feel right at home. The catch was the furniture seemed to have been picked up at a Salvation Army Store clearance sale, but what the hell. It was better than a snake pit.

Over to one side was a quadrangle of couches where patients lounged, some reading old magazines apparently imported from a doctor’s waiting room, one middle-aged lady writing a letter, a kid in his late teens or early twenties with a guitar in his lap that now and again he looked at but did not play, a gray-haired man doing a crossword puzzle, a woman about thirty with dishwater blond hair and a round face sitting watching the rest of them. Over by the windows were some cardtables, one of which was in use, three people playing Scrabble, a man and two women, all in their forties, the man and one woman playing silently, the other woman rattling on about her children.

The expressions on the faces in the room were mostly blank. Or full of happiness that was false, or sadness that was real. But mostly blank. Empty.

“This way,” the short-haired girl said, with the enthusiasm of a tour guide in a dog food factory.

She led us down a hallway, past a glassed-in office, past a small cafeteria, and into a dormitory area, doors on either side of the hall open and revealing rooms with six or eight beds each in them. We stopped at the last room on the right.

She squeezed out a smile, like that last bit of toothpaste, and said, “Frank’s alone today, Mr. Tree, except for Roger, of course.”

She left, and we went in. The overhead light in the room wasn’t on; it was like an overcast day in there. The beds were covered with dark gray blankets, the word PSYCHO in gray stencil letters across the pillowcases. There were desks wedged in between beds, and some other desks huddled together in the middle of the room, old, scarred wooden desks, but every patient had his own, and in a room that slept this many, that could be important.

Sitting at one of them, by a window, was a boy about eighteen, in a robe.

He was a younger version of Tree. The major difference, besides years, was dark, longish hair. And the nose was a little different, smaller, the mother’s nose, probably.

It was Frank Tree, Jr., and he turned as we came in, and smiled, and turned back to the window.

I didn’t see the big guy, at first, standing over in the far corner like a suit of armor, though looking back I don’t know how I could have missed him. Seven feet tall and two or three feet wide. You could’ve hung a billboard on him. He had on a gray tee-shirt that said IOWA on it and brown slacks and white tennis shoes a family of five could’ve kept their belongings in.

“Is that Roger?” I asked Tree. Quietly.

“That’s Roger,” Tree said.

And Roger was currently shuffling over toward us like the Frankenstein monster coming to shake his creator’s hand.

Which is exactly what he had in mind: shaking our hands. He shook Tree’s first, as he seemed to recognize him, and made a sound that didn’t resemble any word I know of. When he shook my hand, he made no sound, not even that of bones breaking. Truth is, while he had a hand like a catcher’s mitt, Roger’s grip was anything but powerful. Limp is the word.

But limp or not, he held on, longer than any sane handshake should, and I had to pull free, grinning back at him as I did, my grin every bit as mindless and shit-eating as his, not wanting to make an enemy of anybody seven feet tall, even if he did shake hands like a dress designer.

“Roger,” Tree said, very friendly, “I’d like to talk to Frank Jr. alone now, please.”

Roger thought about that a while. He narrowed his eyes, which were wide-set and an eerily beautiful shade of green, in a face with otherwise large, irregular features that seemed to have exploded into being, like a kernel of popped corn. Despite that, it was a young face. Roger couldn’t have been older than twenty.

And right now he was pointing a thick finger at me, and looking at Tree, puzzled, saying, “Ah low?”

Alone.

“This is a friend of mine,” Tree said. “I’d like him to stay and talk to Frank Jr. with me.”

And Roger nodded his head, his shaggy black hair flapping like a cheap wig, and shambled off.

“Retarded, of course,” Tree explained.

“I didn’t think this place was designed for that kind of thing.”

“He’s a special case. He gets violent.”

“Terrific.”

“They have him sedated, now. He’s gentle as a kitten.”

“Yeah, but does he know that?”

“There’s one person he’d never hurt, in any circumstance, and that’s Frank Jr. It’s pathetic, really, the way he’s taken to Frank.”

I’d almost forgotten about Frank Jr., who was still sitting silently at the desk, staring out the window.

“Roger is Frank Jr.’s protector,” Tree said, in a tone that mixed melancholy and irony. “Doesn’t let Frank out of his sight. Always stands nearby, watching him, guarding him.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I’ve asked Dr. Cash and he doesn’t understand it, either. Maybe it has something to do with Roger feeling sorry for Frank Jr.”

That didn’t make much sense to me, but I didn’t ask him to explain. I was getting uneasy, talking about Frank Jr. like somebody who wasn’t around. The fucker was a few feet away from us, sitting at a desk, listening to everything we said, even reacting a little, if I was reading my body language right.

Tree took a tentative step toward the boy.

“Son?” he said.

The boy was silent.

“Dr. Cash tells me you joined the exercise group this week. He says you’re hanging right in there. I can’t . . . can’t tell you how happy that makes me.”

The boy turned and smiled, almost imperceptibly, and turned back toward the window.

“Looks like you’re putting on some weight. That starchy hospital food, I suppose. Good thing you’re taking up that exercise thing.”

The boy was silent.

“It’ll be getting warm soon. Maybe we could get out and play some tennis together. Dr. Cash says there’re some courts near here, and we could use one, if you like, when it warms up.”

And it went on like that, for fifteen minutes, Tree struggling painfully to maintain the one-sided, small-talk conversation, while his son sat staring, reacting occasionally, usually with that small smile, but nothing more.

“Well,” Tree said, finally, with reluctance, in relief, “gotta go now. See you next Monday. I . . . I love you, son.”

The boy turned and nodded and turned away. Roger waved to us in the hall as we left. He was on his way back to Frank Jr.’s side.

I didn’t ask Tree anything till we were out of there, iron doors shut behind us, in the cool outer corridor of the hospital.

“He never says anything?” I asked. “He just sits there and looks out the window and smiles now and then?”

Tree’s eyes were glazed. “You don’t know how much those smiles mean to me. It’s taken him four months to get that far.”

Half an hour later, in a bar in downtown Iowa City, Tree told me the story.