Hard Case Crime: Dutch Uncle (20 page)

In the meantime, she was getting older.

Acevedo pushed herself away from the table. Victoria picked up on her body language.

“I know I’m not old,” she said. “And I was even younger then. I mean my face was getting old, because everybody had seen it. And you wouldn’t believe how fierce it is, the competition. These producers, they can find a hundred girls right behind me to do exactly what I did, all cute, and all younger than me.”

Suddenly, nobody would hire her. She didn’t work for almost a year. They both knew how fast money went when you didn’t have any coming in. And it wasn’t like she’d been thrifty while she was making it.

Victoria had gotten close with an actor from one of her movies, a guy named Lawrence Lendesma, who lived here. Actually, Lawrence was a model, but he was trying to make it in acting. It was what they all did. Lawrence was why she decided to come to South Beach.

Victoria and Mimi landed in Miami on December 27th. But once Lawrence had to deal with her face-toface instead of coast-to-coast, things between them changed. Acevedo rolled her eyes.

“It was Lawrence who introduced me to Leo. We met at a New Year’s Eve party Leo was throwing at his house.”

“Who’s Leo?” Acevedo said, and Martinson shot her a glance that was supposed to remind her to save the questions for later.

But when Victoria looked at him, he said, “Go ahead.”

Victoria hit it off with Leo, and he invited her to stay at the house. He had this big house he was living in all by himself.

It was a good thing, too, because she was very low on money, and a girl who was low on money could get herself into a lot of trouble down here on the Beach. Or anywhere, for that matter.

Leo was nice to her, the way they’re all nice at first, she said, but life around that house got extremely freaky after Leo moved in two of his friends. One of the boys, Alex, she never did get his last name, he was nice. Alex was cute. Victoria liked Alex. But she did not like JP Beaumond. That was the other one. There was something wrong with JP Beaumond, besides the fact that he was short, dirty and mean, and he was always trying to rub his scratchy whiskers against her face. They were together a few times, but he was gross, and one night after she told him no, JP came into her room and raped her.

Victoria Leonard said, “I think I’m pregnant.” She started to cry.

She dug through her dog bag, trying to come up with a clean tissue. Martinson handed her a box and topped off her cup with some more lousy coffee. Mimi, who had recovered from her sneezing attack, licked Victoria’s wrist. They waited. The dog seemed to be waiting, too, for Victoria to regain her composure. It didn’t take long.

“Leo was always talking about his Dutch Uncle.”

Okay, enter the Dutchman.

He had arrived in South Beach right around the time Victoria did, though Leo knew him from before. Some kind of European wheeler-dealer. Throw a rock on Ocean Drive and you were liable to hit a few of them.

“Why did he call him that?” Arnie said.

“Because he was older and he had lots of money and because he was... Dutch?”

Arnie said, “Yeah, but... never mind. Keep going. I’m sorry.”

Anyway, he was looking to make a big cocaine score. According to Leo, Leo put the deal together, but Leo was always talking like he was such a big shot.

It was a night like any other night at Leo’s house. The four of them awake into the morning, snorting cocaine and drinking. Leo brought it up as a joke. Manfred, Leo said, would be the perfect sucker to rip off. He laughed. The boys laughed. Victoria laughed because everybody else was laughing, but she wouldn’t have known Manfred from a bag of apples.

But JP brought it up again. JP had taken the idea seriously. Like very seriously.

Victoria broke small bits off the Kit Kat bar and fed them to Mimi. The dog’s ears pricked straight up for Victoria’s babbling baby talk, and she smacked her tiny chops for those crumbs of chocolate.

It was easy for her to get next to Manfred. She approached him one afternoon on the beach and poured out this sob story, how she was a little lost lamb with a little fuzzy dog, thousands of miles away from anybody who cared about her. She might’ve cried. She was, after all, an actress.

Manfred said Victoria reminded him of his daughter. He had a daughter about her age.

“He was a wreck. He drank too much and he snorted too much, but he had a good heart. He was just a sweet guy, and he was easy to get over on. The whole time, he thought my name was Jennifer, because that’s what I told him.”

He had a very definite agenda of his own for Victoria/Jennifer. This was what people did to you in this life, she said. They used you.

“They will if you let them,” Acevedo said.

It was funny. The boys used her to get at Manfred, and Manfred used her to get at other boys. And he sure knew how to pick them. One of these college kids turned out to be such a complete homo that once she lured him back to the room, he spent the rest of his vacation in Manfred’s bed.

Acevedo said, “I don’t understand. He needed you to help him pick up guys? On South Beach?”

“Manfred said anybody could have the queers here. The ones he went after were supposedly straight. They were straight, all right. Straight to the next man.”

Anyway, Manfred was delighted with the way things were working out. He let her stay in his room. He gave her money and he gave her drugs. He bought clothes for her. Leo’s plan was working like a charm.

According to Leo’s information, the big cocaine deal was supposed to be made in Manfred’s hotel room. As soon as it happened, she was to alert Leo. She was kind of bleary on the details, but one day she saw Manfred shaving pieces off a brick of cocaine wrapped in butcher paper. He had it stashed in a suitcase at the top of the closet. She made the call.

She lied and told Manfred she’d decided to go back to L.A. She packed up her things and went back to the house on Pine Tree. But then she heard that Manfred was dead. She’d been hiding in Key Biscayne ever since.

“I’m not particularly bright, okay? I know that. But I’m sure Manfred’s death had something to do with that cocaine deal, and I think I know who killed him.”

After a few extra lies and a few extra bucks and calling in a favor he wouldn’t return, Leo airmailed Whitney off to Lawrence in Daytona. Whitney had been fun while she lasted, but she cost too much money, and Leo was sick of her. Somewhere along the line, Whitney had gotten hold of the silly notion that she was in love with Leo, which Leo couldn’t blame her for, but worse, she had decided that Leo was in love with her. He might’ve let it slip a time or two in the heat of the moment, but it most definitely was not true. He vowed to be very, very cautious, from now on, what he said to these girls.

Now that Whitney was out of the picture, though, that left a crucial slot that needed to be filled. Leo, who was not a young man who sat on his hands where women were concerned, made a date with his dream girl of the season. She was a tall stack of everything good about Italy, and her name was Valentina.

Valentina seemed to belong to another century. Not the Renaissance, which was what people always said because they didn’t know what they were talking about, but she had a style, a classic old-world beauty that put miles of ground between her and every other person on the Beach. No tattoos, not a single one, anywhere. No metal stuck out of her nose or eyebrows. Her black hair wasn’t dyed. Her heart-shaped face had the saddest cast, as if she had witnessed sorrows beyond description, which Leo was pretty sure she hadn’t, but whatever it was, it was killing him. Leo was far from the only smoothskinned lifestyler attempting to coax the panties off Miss Valentina, so he had his work cut out for him, but that was all right. Nothing like a bit of unfriendly competition to get the blood flowing.

He did a bump out of the jar he had stashed in the freezer, his third of the evening or maybe his fourth, but who was counting? Leo measured a two-finger shot of tequila, cut a wedge of lemon, and shook out some salt on his wrist. A lick, a swallow, a suck of citrus, he was just about ready to go. A reminder: buy a fifth of Cuervo. Make that two fifths.

It’d be absolutely wrong to have tequila on his breath behind the wheel of the Jag. These cowboy cops pulled you over for everything as it was, but they were particularly hard-assed about young guys in expensive cars. Exhaling Jose Cuervo Gold into the face of some gung-ho redneck, very bad mechanics.

While he was scrubbing his teeth, Leo decided his shirt wasn’t working at all, and neither was his pasty, nightclub pallor. Too many late nights taking divots out of his afternoons at the beach. Which is why the white shirt failed him. He looked like an undertaker’s apprentice. The Kid needed some sun.

But now that he’d changed into a mint-green mockturtle that played nicely off his eyes, how could he stick with these black cap-toe lace-ups? Black shoes were like anti-Miami, and what he was shooting for with Valentina was a splash of traditional Beach glamour.

White loafers. White loafers were the key. White loafers and a white cotton windbreaker. Except when he gave himself a final exam, he noticed a chocolate stain near the zipper. Back upstairs one last time for the linen sports coat that originally belonged to his grandfather, a guy who knew a thing or two about looking sharp.

There was authentic H
₂
O running through the plumbing of this fountain, trickling streams that would’ve made a soothing sound if this warhorse of a mariachi band weren’t camped out in front of it. They must’ve completed their Ocean Drive circuit then migrated up here to Lincoln Road to haul out the exasperated strains of “Guantanamera” for one final flogging before calling it a gig.

The guitarist’s bowling-ball gut had propelled a button off his shirt, and a bunch of the dingleberries that should’ve been should’ve been hanging from the brim of his sombrero were missing in action. It seemed to Leo that some of the profits needed to be re-invested in that costume.

He practically tripped over Valentina’s table. Four people were seated behind four place settings, and Leo found himself shambling up like somebody’s poor cousin. A minion from Valentina’s agency sat to her right. Announcing a photo opportunity, he blinded Leo with a flash from his disposable camera. A frumpy, frizz-haired girl sat across from him, but Leo forgot her name the instant it left Valentina’s lips.

Valentina’s brother was there, too. His name was Paulo, he was preposterously handsome, and to Leo’s horror, he was wearing the exact same linen sports coat as Leo, except his was offset by a deep tan. Al Pacinolooking motherfucker in a white dinner jacket, making Leo disappear.

Paulo was in complete control. He got the waiter’s attention with a smile, and the waiter had a chair under Leo in two shakes, sticking him on the end between Paulo and Valentina. He half-filled a wine glass with Montepulciano and poised to recite the specials.

“I’m actually not hungry,” Leo said. “I just stopped by to say hello.”

“The food is fabulous,” said the agency minion, whose name was Gregory, a butterball queen with a too-round face and a Fred Flintstone nose.

Paulo said, “It
is
good,” in an accent it was hard to detect.

The menu the waiter handed Leo was in Italian, and it didn’t give up any clues to what the dishes might be in English. He didn’t want to eat, but thought it’d be polite to have a plate in front of him. He took a sip of wine, but he didn’t want that, either.

When the waiter came back, Leo asked for a mozzarella, tomato and basil salad, the tomatoes would go down easy, and a Cuervo Gold margarita, straight up with salt. That’d go down easier. Except he needed to prime it with a shot. He nodded to Valentina, then to Paulo, and went inside to the bar.

All the action was outside. The dining room was deserted and the bartender was manning an empty bar, a short guy in a maroon vest. Leo barked back a tequila and headed toward the bathroom.

He took the opportunity to check his hair. Nothing wrong there. He slid into a stall and sat on the bowl. Twisting his Bullet-gram into the open position, he huffed a bump up his left nostril, and a bump up his right. He washed his hands and tilted back his head, letting some florescence up his nose. All clear. All clear and feeling good about life.

His margarita was on the table waiting for him. Leo sat down and crossed his legs. They felt safe in that position. He was glad to see everybody smoking. Lighting up a cig of his own, he tried to pick up the conversation.

The frumpy chick was a childhood friend of Paulo and Valentina. This was her first trip to the U.S. and she was flying to New York to accompany Valentina on some big modeling job. All this came through Paulo. The frump spoke no English.

Paulo disliked the New York assignment. “Valentina should be concentrating on her studies,” he said. “What does this prove? That she’s a beautiful girl? Anybody can see that. This fashion business, if you ask me, is shit. No offense, guys.”

He was a bit of a spoilsport, this brother.

“She’s going to be major,” Gregory said. “Major.” Looked like old Greg was getting himself a nice buzz on, that goblet sloshing wine at the end of his pudgy fingers. He snuffed one extra-light cigarette and lit another.

Leo was trying to think of something to say. He licked salt off the rim of his glass and took a swallow, then drew a breath as if to speak, but nothing came out. Oh, well. Fuck it.

Frumpy’s name was Chi-Chi. That was it, Chi-Chi. Paulo was pleading some case in Italian, but Chi-Chi refused to get involved, swabbing a hunk of onion foccaccia around a saucer covered with an olive oil film, her cigarette still burning in her left hand.

One waiter came to clear plates and another followed, shouldering a tray he set on a stand that a third guy opened on the flagstones.

“It’s the life of a gypsy,” Paulo said, “a vagabond. And it’s dishonest. Those magazines that make her look like a tramp, they give people the idea it’s a glamorous, sexy world they’ll be excluded from if they don’t buy the junk advertised inside. What bullshit.” He was trying to get Leo on his team. “Do you know how many girls are being sent home right now?”