Jackie Brown (3 page)

Winston said, "you better not get smart with me. Like nothing bothers you. Like not even Mr. Louis Gara, the way you let him waste your time. Let him smoke his cigarettes in here."

"No, Louis bothers me," Max said.

"Then throw his ass out and lock the door. Then call that crooked insurance company and tell them you're through. You don't, they gonna eat you up or get you in trouble with the state commission, and you know it."

"Right," Max said. He turned to his typewriter.

"Listen to me. All you got to do is stop writing their bonds."

"You mean quit the business."

"For a while. What's wrong with that?"

"If you haven't looked at the books lately," Max said, "we've got close to a million bucks out there."

"It don't mean you have to work. Ride it out. See, then when it's all off the books you start over."

"I got bills to pay, like everybody else."

"Yeah, but you could do it if you wanted; there ways. What I think is, you tired of the business."

"You're right again," Max said, tired of talking about it.

"But you don't see a way to get out, so you act like nothing bothers you."

Max didn't argue. Nine years together, Winston knew him. It was quiet and then Winston said, "How's Renee doing?" Coming at him from another direction. "She making it yet?"

"You want to know if I'm still paying her bills?"

"Don't tell me what you don't want to."

"Okay, the latest," Max said. He turned from his typewriter. "I walk in, I just got back from seeing the judge about Reggie, she calls."

He paused as Winston sat down and hunched over the desk on his arms, Winston staring at him now, waiting.

"She's at the mall. Something she ordered, three olive pots, arrived COD and she needs eight twenty right away. That's eight hundred and twenty."

"What's a olive pot?"

"How should I know? What she wanted was for me to drop whatever I was doing and bring her a check."

Winston sat there staring at him, his head down in those heavy shoulders. "For these olive pots."

"I said, 'Renee, I'm working. I'm trying to save a young man from doing ten years and I'm waiting for him to call.' I try to explain it to her in a nice way. You know what she said? She said, 'Well, I'm working too.''

Winston seemed to smile. It was hard to tell. He said, "I was out there one time. Renee act like she didn't see me and I'm the only person in there."

"That's what I mean," Max said. "She says she's working-doing what? You never see anybody unless she's got the wine and cheese out. You know what I mean? For a show. Then you have all the freeloaders. You see these guys, they look like they live in cardboard boxes under the freeway, they're eating everything, drinking the wine . . . You know who they are? The artists and their crowd. I've even recognized guys I've written. Renee's playing like she's Peter Pan, has her hair cut real short, and all these assholes are the Lost Boys. The place clears out, she hasn't sold one fucking painting."

"So what you're telling me," Winston said, "you're still supporting her habit."

"She's got a Cuban guy now, David, I mean Da-veed, she says is gonna be discovered and make it big, any day now. The guy's a busboy at Chuck and Harold's."

"See, what I don't understand," Winston said, "you let a woman don't weigh a hundred pounds beat up on you. It's the same as how you treat some of these lowlife assholes we dealing with. They give you all kind of shit and you go along with it. Then I see you pick up a guy that skipped, some mean-drunk motherfucker and you cuff him, no problem, and take him in. You understand what I'm saying? Why don't you tell the woman to pay her own bills or you gonna divorce her? Or go ahead and divorce her anyway. You don't live together. What're you getting out of being married? Nothing. Am I right? 'Less you still going to bed with her."

"When you're separated," Max said, "you don't get to do that. You don't want to."

"Yeah, well, I imagine you do all right with the ladies. But where she getting hers, off the artists? This Cuban busboy, Da-veed? If she is, that's a good reason to divorce her. Catch her going out on you."

"You're getting personal now," Max said.

Winston looked surprised. "Man, we been getting nothing but personal. It's your personal life has you messed up, one problem pressing on another. The way Renee has hold of your balls, you don't have the strength to get the insurance company off your back. All the money you put in her picture store, paying her bills, you could shut down here and live on it till you start up again clean, with a different insurance company. You know I'm right too, so I'm not gonna say another word."

"Good," Max said. He turned to the Power of Attorney form in his typewriter.

"You take her the check she wanted?"

"No, I didn't."

"She call back?"

"Not yet."

"She cry and carry on like she does?"

"She hung up on me," Max said. "Look, I have to finish this and get out of here."

"Don't let me disturb you."

Max started typing again.

He heard Winston say, "Hey, shit-" and looked over to see him standing at the desk now holding his coffee mug.

"That goddamn Louis, you see what he done? Put his cigarette butt in here. I'm gonna punch him right in his smokin' mouth."

Max turned back to the form, GLADES MUTUAL CASUALTY printed across the top. He said, "I know how you feel. But when you hit an ex-con who's done three falls, they say you better kill him."

3

Ordell asked one of his jackboys to get him a car with keys in it and leave it in the Ocean Mall parking lot over by the beach. The jackboy asked him what kind of car he wanted. Ordell said, "One has a big trunk with a shotgun in it."

He liked jackboys because they were crazy. They made their living ripping off street dealers for their blow and change and busting into crack houses with assault weapons. Jackboys liked Ordell because he was cool, not some homey everybody knew; the man was big-time from Detroit, had different women he stayed with as it suited him, and could deliver you a full-automatic weapon on two days notice. So now some of the jackboys worked for Ordell, picking up special kinds of guns he needed to fill orders. The one who was getting him the car, Cujo, called him that Tuesday evening where he was staying with one of his women to say it was there waiting, an Olds Ninety-Eight, 12-gauge in the trunk.

Ordell said, "The car, if it's clean now it won't be after."

Cujo said, "It don't matter. Bread, it's stole. Was a brother had it that's dead from the other night. You hear of it? Policeman shot him both in the front and in the back. We try to get him from the house, but he bled out on us so we left him."

"I saw it in the paper," Ordell said. "The cop told them yeah, when a man is shot sometimes he'll spin around on you, it ain't unusual, and that's what happened. But where did he shoot him first, in the front or in the back?"

Cujo said, "Yeaaah . . . that's right, huh?"

You could mess with a jackboy's head, get him to I think what you wanted, their brains cooked from doing crack.

Ordell thanked him for the car and Cujo said, j "Bread? They's a piece underneath with the keys, case you want it. Belonged to the brother was shot for dead."

Ordell had three women he kept in three different homes.

He had Sheronda living in the house on 31 st Street off Greenwood Avenue, in West Palm. Sheronda, a young woman he'd picked up coming through Fort Valley, Georgia, one time on his way back from Detroit. There she was, standing at the side of the road, no shoes on, sunlight showing her body in the wornout dress. Sheronda cooked good collards with salt pork, black-eyed peas, chicken-fried steak, cleaned the house, and provided Ordell with grateful pussy, anytime day or night, for taking her out of the peanut fields. There was nothing in this little redbrick ranch that told what Ordell did for a living. About once a week he'd have to explain to Sheronda how to set the alarm system. She was afraid of getting trapped in the house, not able to get out with grillwork covering the windows.

Simone, a cute woman for her age, sixty-three years old, was from Detroit and knew all about alarm systems and liked the bars on her windows. Ordell had her living in a stucco Spanish-looking house on 30th Street near Windsor Avenue, not two blocks from Sheronda's, but without them knowing about each other. Simone put weaves in her hair and believed she resembled Diana Ross. Her pleasure was to sing along with Motown recordings and do the steps and gestures accompanying the Supremes, Martha and the Vandellas, Gladys Knight and the Pips, Syreeta Wright, all the oldies. Whenever Ordell let Simone take him to bed, it was ten times better than he thought it would be. Simone could write a book on the different ways to please a man. Ordell would store guns temporarily in this house, semiautomatic weapons like TEC-9s purchased legally by "straw buyers" that Simone hired to do it, mostly retired people. Give an old woman the cash plus twenty bucks to buy an assault rifle. None of the straw buyers knew about Ordell, at least not by name.

He had his white woman, Melanie, living in the apartment in Palm Beach Shores, located at the south end of Singer Island, only two blocks from the public beach. Melanie was the fine big girl Ordell had met in the Bahamas when he went there to see the husband of the woman he and Louis had kidnapped. Melanie was only about twenty-one then, making her thirty-four or so now, but had hustled her tail all over the world taking up with rich guys. She had been with the husband of the kidnapped woman, but when Ordell looked for him he was hiding and she wouldn't tell where he was. So Ordell, what he did was have his friend Mr. Walker take them out in the ocean in his boat and Ordell threw Melanie over the side. They went off a ways, circled around back to where Melanie's blond head was bobbing in the water, and Ordell asked her, "You want to tell me where the man's at?" She was a show. Told Ordell after she would help him score off the husband of the kidnapped woman 'cause she liked him, Ordell, better. She said also 'cause she didn't want to end up in the fucking ocean.

So here was Melanie after keeping in touch, running into her in Miami . . . Melanie still up for a hustle anytime. She didn't cook or clean too good and, for all her talk and acting sexual, was only average in the bed. (Ordell wondered should he send her over to Simone's for some lessons.) The fine big girl had in thirteen years become bigger, show tits grown to circus tits but still okay, tan, always tanning her body out on the apartment balcony facing the ocean. Ordell used this place sometimes for business, would have his big blond woman get off her butt and serve drinks while he showed his gun movie to buyers from Detroit and New York City. Mr. Walker, over in Free-port, had a print he showed to buyers from Colombia.

The jackboy, Cujo, had called here a few moments ago to say the Olds Ninety-Eight was waiting. Ordell still had the phone in his hand. He punched a number in Freeport, Grand Bahama.

"Mr. Walker, how you this evening?"

Melanie looked up from Vanity Fair, the magazine she was reading on the sofa. She went around in cutoffs and had her fine brown legs tucked under her.

"I got Beaumont out. Cost me ten thousand. I get it back, but don't like having it out of my sight." Ordell listened and said, "Was yesterday. I had to do some thinking, reason I didn't call you right away."

Melanie was still watching him. Ordell looked over and she lowered her eyes to the magazine like she wasn't interested. She'd be listening though, and that was fine. He wanted her to know some things without knowing everything.

"You way ahead of me, Mr. Walker. I had the same thought." Cedric Walker had been a two-bit fishing guide with a whaler till Ordell showed him where the money was. Now the man had a thirty-six-foot Carver with all kinds of navigational shit on it. "You understand, the drunk driving alone violates Beaumont's probation. It wouldn't matter he had the pistol on him . . . That's right, they bring up the machine gun charge again. Means he'll be facing ten years and what he gets for the concealed weapon on top of it. That's what the bail-bond man said. . . . No, I let him put up the bond. Max Cherry . . . Yeah, that's the man's name. Sounds like one a calypso singer would have, huh? Maximilian Cherry and his Oil Can Boppers . . . What? No, I can't see it either. They keep him overnight he's pulling his hair out. I'd send him home to Montego if it didn't cost me the ten. . . . No, there's nothing to talk about. Mr. Walker? Melanie says hi." Ordell listened again and said, "She'll love you for it, man. I'll tell her. You be good now, hear?" and hung up the phone.

Melanie, the magazine on her lap, said, "Tell me what?"

"He's sending you a present. Be in the next delivery."

"He's a sweetie. I'd love to see him again."

"We could fly over sometime. Go out in his boat. Would you like that?"

"No, thanks," Melanie said. She picked up her magazine.

Ordell watched her. He said, "But you know the boat's always there."

Two A.M., Ordell left the apartment and walked up to Ocean Mall, a bar named Casey's where people went to dance, a restaurant, Portofino, some stores, some fast-food places, not much else in this block-long strip facing the public beach. The parking lot was back of the mall, only a few cars left in the rows, all the places closed. He got in the black Olds Ninety-Eight, found the keys and a .38 snubby under the seat, fooled with the instruments to find the lights and the air, and drove out of there, over the humpback bridge to Riviera Beach, a two-minute trip.

Ordell believed if you didn't know Beaumont's house you could ease down these dark streets off Blue Heron till you heard West Indian reggae filling the night, music to get high by, and follow the beat to the little stucco dump where Beaumont lived with a bunch of Jamaicans all packed in there. They'd keep the music on high volume while they maintained their crack binge-only this evening, peeking in, they appeared to be doing reefer, crowded in the room like happy refugees, having some sweet wine and dark rum with the weed. Go in there, start to breathe, and be stoned. It most always smelled of cooking too. A messy place-Ordell had wanted to use the bathroom one time, took one look, and went outside to relieve himself among trash barrels and bright clothes hanging on the line.