The Wrong Quarry by Max Allan Collins Page A

notice. That was a byproduct of forced suffocation.
    Anyway, by eleven-thirty the housekeeper was rolling her cart back into Cabin 12. She didn’t look at all put out about it. If people have seen enough in their time, they can get pretty hardened, I guess.
    I thought about calling Vale to let him know the heat was off, but I didn’t want to discuss that kind of thing on the phone. Face-to-face was called for, and I wasn’t up to it right now. I was beat, suffused with the kind of tiredness you feel when you’ve been working hard and the stress had lifted.
    So I kicked off my sneakers and flopped onto the bed in my clothes and fell asleep in seconds. No worries about being bothered. The Holiday Inn was a class joint, DO NOT DISTURB hangers and everything.
    * * *
    The dance studio was just a black shape in a late afternoon already turning to night. Cold again, if not as much so as last night, though I’d left my fleece-lined jacket behind, substituting a camel sport jacket; I’d also replaced the sweatshirt and jeans with a light blue long-sleeve shirt and chinos. There was a chance I would run into parents at the studio, dropping their girls off for private lessons. From here on out, on my Stockwell sojourn, I was a journalist, and needed to class my look up a tad.
    Vale was expecting me. I had called from a pay phone and said I needed to stop over—was five-thirty all right? He’d said his lessons started at seven, and I said this shouldn’t take long. Could he have my five grand handy?
    The slender dance instructor let me in the front door after I knocked and identified myself. His handsome, narrow, hoodedeyed features had an apprehensive aspect, probably because I’d jumped him the last time he’d answered my knock at these doors.
    I smiled easily, said, “Everything’s cool. Nothing to worry about.”
    A white grin flashed under the Tom Selleck mustache, in the orange-tinged tanned face, and he sighed in an almost comic weight-of-the-world manner. “Good to hear, good to hear.”
    He was back in his black tee, tights and Capezios. As he led me into the half of his quarters where we’d spoken before, he gestured toward the kitchenette. Some rye bread and cold cuts and cheese slices were on a plate on the counter.
    “I was just getting ready to fix myself a sandwich,” he said. “Can I make you one?”
    “No thanks. Why don’t we sit down? You might not want to be eating when I make my report.”
    Following my assurance that everything was cool, this threw him a little. I meant it to.
    “Oh,” he said. “Okay.”
    We sat as before, me on the brown-leather couch under the framed Broadway posters, him on the edge of the nearby matching comfy chair.
    “The man sent to kill you is out of the picture,” I said.
    “By which you mean...?”
    “I’m going to spare you the details. You don’t need to know any more than that.”
    He swallowed. Smoothed his mustache with a thumbnail. He seemed to be trying to decide whether to be relieved or unnerved, and settled for a bit of both. “I can’t know who it is was, or...?”
    “Less you know the better.”
    He thought about that, brow furrowed. “You said there were... were two of them.”
    “Yeah. The guy watching you, the last week or so? He left town yesterday, after his partner arrived.”
    “Oh.”
    I nodded. “They exchanged information, in a public place actually, and the surveillance man headed home. I followed him long enough to make sure.”
    He was frowning again, confused. “You...you indicated you would have to remove both of them.”
    “I know. And I may still have to. He’s a loose end and loose ends sometimes need tying off. But I didn’t want to leave the more dangerous half of the team out of my sight for long. And, Roger, that guy was very goddamn dangerous.”
    He swallowed like a kid in the middle of getting the facts of life from his father. “Really?”
    “Yeah. You got a bargain at ten grand. If I’d have known who was