Quarry by Max Allan Collins

Author:Max Allan Collins [Collins, Max Allan]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, Mystery & Detective, General, Crime, Mystery Fiction, War & Military, Noir Fiction, Quarry, Murder for Hire, Quarry (Fictitious Character: Collins)
ISBN: 9781935797012
Publisher: Perfect Crime Books
Published: 1985-01-02T08:00:00+00:00

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CYPRUS WAS IN the valley between East and West Hill and was a street which seemed to slash the town in half. Located on Cyprus was the local newspaper’s office, the county hospital, a public high school, a Catholic grade school, half a dozen churches and, just before the street turned into Highway 22, a drive-in movie playing a couple of skin flicks. I didn’t care about any of that. I was on Cyprus not for a guided tour of Port City, but because I was looking for Fuller Street.

Fuller was an offshoot of Cyprus and ran up the edge of West Hill, just as West Third Street ran up the outer edge of the Hill, on the riverfront side of town. Fuller cut through a respectable middle-class residential area, mostly two-story white clapboards that had seen better days but were far from rundown, while West Third crossed through the section filled with near-mansions that were old but not visibly decaying. Raymond Springborn and his wife Linda Sue lived in one of those near-mansions on West Third. Peg Baker lived in an apartment house just off Cyprus on Fuller, in the dip before the rise of the Hill. Between them was Port City.

The apartment house was two-story red brick trimmed in white, white wrought-iron handrails along the upper floor winding down around a wide cement stairway that came up the center front of the building. The structure had a blandly ageless quality: it could’ve been put up twenty years ago or yesterday. The parking lot was bigger than the ten-apartment complex required, and looked as though it might’ve been installed by a landlord who disliked mowing lawns; there were little squares of grass and shrubbery stuck here and there around the concrete lawn, like sprigs of parsley on a big empty plate.

I pulled the rental Ford into the largely vacant lot, only a third-filled now as it was past nine and folks were off to work, these cars remaining being second cars, or belonging to people who worked nights, like Peg Baker. I snuggled in between a station wagon and a Volks and turned off the engine and got out.

The phone book had listed Peg Baker’s address as 121 Fuller, and this was 121 Fuller, all ten apartments of it. Some of the tenants had their names on their mailboxes, six of the ten did anyway, but not Peg Baker. Knowing six of the places weren’t hers narrowed the field, but not enough. And the curtains on those four remaining apartments were all closed, too, in case I wanted to risk getting busted for window-peeking. I could always check with the manager to see which apartment was Peg Baker’s, but the manager lived elsewhere. On the door of a laundry room was a notice giving the manager’s name and address and hours at which to call. The hours were in the evening, but I used the pay phone in the laundry room anyway and tried the manager’s number and a recorded voice asked me to leave a message after the tone and I hung up.

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