La Brava (1983) (22 page)

They sat on the porch of the Della Robbia talking, in the front corner section next to Thirteenth Street. The old ladies would bend forward to look over because the old man was using a snuff stick and they had never seen one before. LaBrava hadn't either.

It was like the man was brushing his teeth. The twig was about the size of a toothbrush, frayed soft on the end and stained the color of brown shoe polish from sticking it into his Copenhagen and then massaging his gums with it, sometimes leaving it in his mouth like a cigar. LaBrava went over to the Cardozo and brought back four bottles of cold beer. The old man sighed and his metal chair groaned as he settled in, resting his work shoes on the rail.

Miney said, "There's parts of that swamp you'd think nobody but Jesus would dare walk it. Richard, he'd go in there be right at home. Preferred it to his own home I believe account of the way my brother-in-law raised him. See, he believed you whupped boys you made 'em humble. Twist you a half-dozen lengths of hay-baling wire and whup 'em regular. See, my sister, what she did she run a grits mill. Had a old tractor engine tied onto the mill and would grind up was nothing but mule corn, hard as gravel, but it made pretty fair grits and she sold it, fresh grits. See, Richard worked there till finally he left to peck it out on his own, sport around in the swamp and hire out to take folks for canoe rides, so they could watch birds. You imagine? I said to Miz Combs, watch 'em do what? I heard it I wondered if they'd pay to watch me plow a field. First I heard of Mr. John after him was when he killed the eagle. Why did he kill it. Knowing Richard it was to see it die. All right, then here was these two boys working a still I heard from cane skimmings. But that couldn't a been, 'cause the first time they was brought up I knew the judge said it ought to be against the law to arrest anybody could make whiskey good as theirs. Then the second time, with our Richard testifying, swearing in court, they got sent to Ohio. Same as my boy and in the same court. My boy had done his time once. Yes, he bought weed from the shrimpers and sold it to college boys, but he never smoked it once. Now Richard come along and tells on him and some others to Mr. John--only the Lord Jesus knows why--and my boy is doing thirty-five years in a gover'ment lockup."

LaBrava said, "What do you want to do to Richard?"

Miney said, "What do I want to do? I want to put a thirty-ought-six in him, right here." Miney touched the bridge of his nose with a finger that looked hard as bark. "But what I am going to do is put him in the back of my truck rolled in a dirty tarp and take him on home. We'll decide fair. Maybe lock him in a root cellar for up to thirty-five years--how's that sound? Let him out when Buster gets his release."

That didn't sound too bad.

LaBrava said, "You think you can handle him?"

"He's big as a two-hole shithouse and I'm blocky," Miney said, "but once I lay my ax handle across his head I don't expect trouble."

"He's over at the Paramount Hotel on Collins Avenue," LaBrava said.

Nobles walked into the lobby, his head aching with images of things to come, little details he had to remember. Like--Jesus, the typewriter! Already he'd forgot one. He was suppose to have taken care of that on the way down. He saw himself in darkness dropping it off the MacArthur Causeway...

And saw his Uncle Miney in that same moment--Miney sitting asleep with a snuff stick in his mouth, right there in the Paramount Hotel lobby. Nobles felt himself yanked out of that future time and back into a Jacksonville courtroom past, Miney extending his arm, his finger, pointing the Last Judgment at him... He got out of that lobby. Ran up to Wolfie's on the corner of Twenty-first to phone Cundo.

But the little booger wasn't in his room.

Nobles didn't want to go over there. He didn't like the feel of the place, all the foreigners hanging around. So in the next couple of hours he killed time having snacks, corned beef sandwiches, and checking the lobby, each time seeing Miney sitting in the same goddamn chair like he would let moss grow on him if he had to.

Finally, when it was dark he drove over to the La Playa Hotel, checked to see if Cundo had returned--not yet--and sat outside in the car to wait, listening to the jabber of dagos passing on the street. Little fuckers, ought to be sent back where they came from.

Send Cundo back too when they were through with him.

He heard Cundo's voice before he saw him--like a dago prayer shouted to heaven. The next thing, Cundo was feeling his car, running his hands over it in the streetlight, asking had he hit anything, had he stripped the gears, had he got bugs on it. Try to get a word in about something important. Nobles had to wait and found it was worth it. For once Cundo saw his car was okay the little fucker was so grateful he nodded yes, right away, and kept nodding yes to everything Nobles told him.

Go see Uncle Miney and give him a story. Yes. Tell him Richard's moved and nobody knows where. "Convince him or he'll ruin this deal we got. You understand?" Yes, of course. "Send him on his way or he'll mess us up good." Don't worry. Still looking now and again at his black Pontiac.

"The woman's car's over there at the ho-tel. Eldorado parked on the street." Yes? "Smash the windows with something. Windshield, headlights, 'specially the window on the driver side." Yes, okay. "Later on tonight I'll tell you the rest, what you're gonna do, then we don't see each other for a while. You understand?" Yes. "You gonna miss me?" Of course.

"Something else. Shit, I almost forgot. There's a typewriter in your trunk I want you to throw in the ocean, in Biscayne Bay. You hear me? Not in a garbage can or out in some alley, it's got to be sunk for good."

Yes, of course. Not even asking why--the little booger was so grateful to see his car again.

Sitting in the middle of the sofa LaBrava would lose himself for a time, watching Jean Shaw on the television screen and feeling her next to him. He could turn his head and see her, right there, the same face in profile. In the darkness of the room the two Jean Shaws were nearly identical, pale black and white. But he would not lose himself for long, because Franny Kaufman sat close on his other side and he was aware of her too. He would hear her, soft sounds in response to what she was watching, and feel her leg and sometimes her hand. She was here because Jean Shaw had invited her. Maurice, in his La-Z-Boy, paid no attention to Jean's whispers to be quiet. If he felt like making comments he made them.

"I'm gonna tell you something. Guys that ran dice games never looked like Dick Powell."

"Shhhh."

"I never knew a good-looking guy ran a dice game. I tell you about a guy named Peanuts?"

"Maury--"

"Edmund O'Brien was starting to get fat even then, you notice?"

At one point Franny's voice in the darkness said, "Hey, Jean?" a tone of mild surprise. "I've seen you before... I can't think of the name of the picture."

LaBrava was aware of the silence until Maurice said, "Jeanie, you still know how to deal cards like that?"

Cundo Rey said to the old man he understood from the guy over at the desk, the hotel guy, that he was looking for Richard. Cundo watched this Uncle Miney take the stick out of his mouth, almost gagging as he saw the dirty brown end of it.

"You a friend of Richard?"

Like he was accusing him. From the sound and the look of the man, another strange creature from the swamp, Cundo didn't believe he should tell him yes. He said he knew Richard, he had seen him around here.

The old man said, "Where?" He said, "Take me where I might find the son of a bitch."

They got in the old man's pickup truck and the old man began talking about Richard Nobles, saying he had "fell from grace once he got his ass up against hard work." Saying he had become nothing but a mean rascal who would sell his friends and blood kin to save his own hide, or maybe just for fun--Cundo understanding only some of what the old man said, but getting enough to hold his interest and want to keep the old man talking. Miney saying there was a time he himself was "wilder'n a buck and went looking for women and to do some drinking," but a man had to reach a point where he left that behind him. Richard's appetite was such he must be "holler to his heels." The old man said Richard--maybe what was wrong with him--had never looked up to nobody. He said to Cundo, "Who's you all's hero? People like you."

Cundo had to think. Fidel? No. Well, yes and no. Tony Perez? Of course. Roberto Ramos, if he was still playing in the big leagues. But he didn't know if the old man had ever heard of Tony Perez or Roberto Ramos, so he said, "The President of the United States."

Miney said, "Shit, that scudder--they's people eating nothing better'n swamp cabbage, he don't give a shit."

Cundo asked him what he wanted Richard for and Miney said, "You shake him out of the tree and I'll take care of the rest." Yes, as Nobles had said, it sounded like this old guy could make trouble for them. Cundo gave him directions. Take a left. Take another left. They were on Ocean Drive now coming up on the Della Robbia from the south.

Cundo touched the old man's arm. "You see that white Cadillac there? That's Richard's car."

Jean got up to turn the lights on. It was her show, she had insisted on turning them off. Maurice, trapped in his recliner, extended his empty glass, and LaBrava got up to make drinks, remembering a Bogart line to the question, "How do you like your brandy?" Bogart, as Sam Spade: "In a glass." In that frame of mind after seeing Jean's picture. Hearing Franny say, "Well. I loved it. I loved your part especially. Lila. She was neat. Wonderful situation, if she wins the money she loses the guy, but she has to go for it. Say the line again."

Jean: Let it ride?

Franny: Yeah. Like you did in the movie.

Jean: Let it ride.

Franny: Perfect. I love it.

LaBrava poured drinks with his back to the room, listening to movie voices.

Franny: I wasn't sure, but I had the feeling Lila was getting a little psycho.

Jean: No, not at all. It's more an obsession. She's in a hopelessly corrupt situation, she's disillusioned, but you know she has to play the game.

Franny: It's the lighting and composition-GCo

Jean: That's part of it, the ominous mise en scene.

Franny: I mean if she's not psychotic then it's the look of the picture, the expressionistic realism that gives that feeling.

Maurice: You two know what you're talking about?

Jean: You do see a change. She's essentially content in the beginning, an ordinary young woman...

Franny: I don't know. I think subconsciously she's looking for action. Like in that other picture I saw of yours...

Jean (pause): Which one?

Franny: I only saw like the last half, but the character was a lot like Lila. Your husband's gonna die, he knows it and also knows about this shifty business you have going with the private eye-GCo

Jean: Oh, that one.

Franny: So he kills himself, commits suicide--shoots himself and makes it look like you did it. I mean, what a guy. He was a lot older than you.

LaBrava turned with Franny's and Maurice's drinks. In almost the same moment, with the sound of glass shattering outside, he was moving toward the nearest of the front windows.

Cundo Rey used the blunt side of the ax head, smashed the windshield of the Eldorado first, hitting it three times thinking the whole thing would shatter, fly apart, but it didn't; the ax punched holes and the windshield looked like it had frost on it, ice. He smashed the headlights, one swing for each, and remembered Richard saying the driver side window too, 'specially for some reason. He swung the ax like he was hitting a line drive and that window did shatter, fly all apart.

"Let's go, man. Come on."

He had to shove the old man, still looking out the back window of the truck, to get him to drive off. "Left. This street, left. Keep going... Go past Collins Avenue. Go on, keep going." The old man didn't know what was happening.

"Somebody's gonna call the police."

Listen to him. "That's why we want to get away from here."

"That was Richard's car?"

"Yeah, see, now you know he isn' going to leave. He has to get it fix."

"But where's he at?"

"I'm going take you where I think he is."

"Why's he leave his car there?"

"He has a girlfriend, you know, live by there."

"Well, if his car's setting there--"

"No, he leave it on the street there." Jesus Christ. "See, is more safe for the car there than where he live. Yeah, he leave it there all the time."

"We going back to the ho-tel?"

"We going to another place where I think he is." Jesus, this old guy with his questions. "You know, where he like to go sometime. We maybe have to look for him different places."

The old man turned the snuff stick in his mouth as he drove. They went over Thirteenth Street to Alton Road, on the bay side of South Beach, turned left and drove in silence until Cundo told him to go slow, to turn right on Sixth Street and then left on West Avenue. "Right here. Stop," Cundo said. "The Biscaya Hotel. Yes, this is good."

The old man was looking up at the building enclosed behind a chainlink fence. "I don't see no lights on in there."