Quarry's Cut by Max Allan Collins

Author:Max Allan Collins [Collins, Max Allan]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, Mystery & Detective, General, Action & Adventure, Quarry, Murder for Hire, Quarry (Fictitious Character : Collins), Quarry (Fictitious Character: Collins), Vietnam War; 1961-1975, Vietnam War; 1961-1975 - Veterans, Pornographic Film Industry
ISBN: 9781935797043
Publisher: Perfect Crime Books
Published: 1977-01-02T08:00:00+00:00

17

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HER NAME WAS Janet Katz. Her father was Robert Katz, a dentist from Chicago, actually Elmhurst, and he kept a cottage at Twin Lakes, not far from my A-frame at Paradise Lake. Bob Katz was in his mid-fifties and, during the summer, was one of the group of men I occasionally played poker with. As far as he knew, I was a salesman, and on the road a lot. He knew me by the name I used at Paradise Lake, and so did his daughter. And she knew me another way, too.

We spent a night together, at my A-frame, a few years ago. She’d just graduated from the University of Iowa—her father’s alma mater—with a degree in TV and Film, and a naïve assumption she was going to make it big. She was going to direct movies, she said. She was just visiting her folks, at their lake place, on her way to move in with a friend (whose sex she never specified) in Chicago, where she’d landed a job as a receptionist at a TV station, her hope being to eventually get into the production area. And after a while she’d go out to California and make it big.

But she hadn’t gone to California yet, apparently. If she had, she certainly hadn’t made it big. Otherwise she wouldn’t be here, doing the sound for a porno film.

“This is Janet Stein,” Castile said. “Janet, this is Jack Murphy. He’s doing a story on the picture, for Oui magazine.”

We exchanged brief, glazed glances. I made a shrug with my eyes and she tightened her mouth into a sort of smile and it was an agreement not to mention, in front of these people, that the both of us were using phony names.

“Nice to meet you, Janet,” I said.

“Same here,” she said, weakly.

Weakly, that is, considering Janet Katz, no matter what name she was using, had a rich, baritone voice that wouldn’t sound weak on her death bed. It was one of those almost masculine voices that, paradoxically, can make a woman seem all the more feminine. Another woman I knew, named Lu, had a voice like that, and in the case of both women, I liked the effect.

“I hope you won’t consider this a reflection on you, Janet,” I said, smiling, “but I suddenly realize I need to be led to a bathroom. How about directing me?”

Janet smiled back, said she’d be glad to, and Castile, before getting out of the booth to let me by, suggested Janet show me to one of the rooms upstairs.

“You’re as snowbound as the rest of us,” he told me, “so you might as well go ahead and check into this hotel. Each of the rooms has its own private bath.”

I thanked him, and went with Janet, who led me across the central open area of the lodge, the snow-clogged skylight above us, to one of the stairways, where I followed her up to the second floor, into one of the rooms, its tan canvas shade already drawn.

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