Sideswipe (18 page)

"Yes, sir," James said, and hurried out of the store as the two checkout girls giggled.

That was a week before his twenty-sixth birthday, and before he received the sizable and welcome check from his Aunt Rosalie. Now he had no money, and a lot on his mind.

The Green Lakes Supermarket had suited Troy perfectly when James had driven him out there yesterday to show it to him. After spending fifteen minutes in the store, with James outside in the car, Troy had rejoined him with two apples he had bought. He handed one of the apples to James and bit into the other.

"Lush," Troy had said. Then, gesturing toward the entrance, "It's just like you said, James."

From a professional's point of view, the layout of the store and the location of the market were ideal. Eventually there would be an entire Class B shopping center in the Green Lakes subdivision of Miami, with thirty different stores, but at present only the supermarket had opened, and the rest of the buildings were still under construction. The supermarket would anchor one end, and there would be a K-Mart at the other. The twenty-five-acre parking lot had been completed, but had not yet been striped for parking spaces. The new supermarket was about 250 yards away from State Highway 836, which led to the Miami International Airport cutoff. Troy couldn't have selected a better location, or a better time, for a successful robbery if he had been allowed to design one himself. The employees were new, and security was lax, and as James had said, the safe was supposed to be locked but in practice never was until the store was closed for the night.

When they got back to James's garage apartment, after the quick surveillance of the supermarket, Troy had borrowed the Bajan's last five dollars, taken the Morris Minor, and driven away. James hadn't seen him again until he returned later that night with the woman--

"Pardon me, son."

James leaped two feet off the garage floor and whirled in midair before he landed again. "Man!" he said to Stanley Sinkiewicz, "you shouldn't sneak up on a man like that, man!"

"I didn't mean to scare you none, son. I knocked at the door of the big house in front, but when no one answered I just came around here to the back."

"That's all right, sir." James had recovered his breath. "I live back here over the garage. The Shapiros own the big house, and they let me live here free for taking care of the place while they're up in New England for the summer."

"You're James Frietas-Smith, with a hyphen?"

"Yes, sir."

"You're the fella I'm looking for, then." Stanley stared curiously at James. Stanley had never seen a Bajan before, but the young man, except for the size of his splayed bare feet, looked about the same as any other well-tanned Floridian wearing cutoff shorts and a paint-stained T-shirt. "My name's Stanley Sinkiewicz. Senior," he added. "I'm a friend of Troy Louden's."

"Yes, sir. We been expecting you, Mr. Sinkiewicz. Troy and Miss Forrest have gone over to her motel to get her suitcase. She's moving in with us, too." James forced a smile. "They should be back just now."

"Miss Forrest? I haven't met her--"

"I only met her last night myself, Mr. Sinkiewicz. She's Troy's friend, not mine. If you're parked out front, you better pull into the yard back here and park over there." James pointed to the utility shed.

Stanley nodded. "The grass out front needs cutting. It didn't look like nobody lived here, and I was afraid for a minute there I had the wrong house."

"I'm supposed to cut the grass every two weeks, but I was away on a trip and missed a few weeks."

Stanley got his car and parked it by the shed. He brought his box of clean clothes and toilet articles into the spacious four-car garage, and James tried to take the box away from him.

"I'll take that upstairs for you, Mr. Sinkiewicz."

"I'm not in any all-fired hurry, son." Stanley surrendered the box and looked at the huge paintings stacked against and hanging from the garage walls. "Troy told me you were an artist. I'd like to look at your work, if you don't mind?"

"I don't mind at all." James put the box on the steps that led upstairs to the apartment, and crossed to the easel. "I finished this one just now, but I haven't got a title yet. Sometimes when I can't think of a title I give it a number. But I haven't thought of a number, either."

Stanley studied the painting, frowning with concentration. He put on his reading glasses and moved in a little closer. "I wouldn't know, myself--although it looks a little scary."

"It's a nonobjective painting," James explained, "and some kind of emotion is all you're expected to get out of it. Two years ago there was a German painter staying over on the Saint James coast--that's in Barbados--and I showed him some of my work. He told me I was probably the only primitive nonobjective painter working today. He's the same man who advised me to go to New York and study at the Art Students League. And when we finish our job, that's where I'm going."

Stanley nodded. "You could use a little more study, I guess. I used to do some painting myself. One thing you need's a steady hand." Stanley pointed to a canvas on the wall, a crosspatch of thin vertical red lines and thinner horizontal black lines on a lemon background. "Now that picture over there. You put all them lines on with a straightedge, didn't you?"

"Yes, sir. That was just an experiment, Mr. Sinkiewicz. But even Mondrian used a ruler to get certain effects."

Stanley shook his head. "If you've got a steady hand, you don't need no straightedge. You got any clean canvases and a striping brush? I'll learn you how to do it."

"Yes, sir." James didn't want to have the old con spoil one of his unused canvases, but he didn't want to offend him either.

James removed the newly finished painting from the easel and replaced it with a recently sized blank canvas. "There's a can of brushes on the workbench, Mr. Sinkiewicz. Take any one you like."

Stanley moved to the cluttered workbench. He opened a can of turpentine and held the spout to his nose. He sniffed experimentally, inhaled deeply, and screwed the lid back.

"Do you like the smell of turpentine, son?"

"I don't mind it. But I don't particularly like it."

"One good thing about turpentine. It always smells the same."

"Yes, sir," James said uneasily. "It always smells the same."

Stanley rummaged around in a coffee can full of brushes and selected a short-handled camel's hair brush about a half-inch in width. "This ain't no regular striping brush, but it'll do. A real striping brush is wider, and slants back aways, and the bristles are longer on one side than on the other. I'll just stir up some of this cadmium orange and turpentine, and then I'll show you how to make a straight line without looking at the canvas."

As Stanley mixed the new tube of cadmium orange with turpentine, James scowled and bit his lower lip. The paint had cost him $4.95 in U.S. dollars, and the old man had squeezed out half the tube.

"All right, young fella," Stanley said, his cheeks flushing, "just watch me now."

Stanley held the paint-loaded brush at his side, resting his forearm on his hip, and stared up at the cobwebby ceiling. He took two swift steps in front of the canvas, turned, and winked at James. James's jaw dropped. The bright orange line on the canvas was exactly one-eighth of an inch wide, and straight as a die. The line was as vibrant as a tightly stretched guitar string. It looked to James as if it would hum to the touch, and the old man had drawn this perfect rule in less than a second!

"That's what I mean by a steady hand," Stanley said, with a short laugh.

James clucked and shook his head. "I don't know how you did that, Mr. Sinkiewicz. I couldn't draw a line that straight, even with a yardstick."

"There's a knack to it, son. Here. Take the brush and I'll show you how to hold it. You've got to put the right amount of paint on the brush, too. With a little practice, you can learn how to do it."

For the next forty-five minutes James and Stanley were engaged in painting straight lines. The once-white canvas was an almost solidly colored orange rectangle when Troy Louden pulled into the driveway outside the garage and honked the horn of the Morris Minor. They both went outside to meet him. Troy embraced the old man, hugging him to his chest, and kissed him wetly on the cheek.

"By God, I'm glad to see you, Pop! To tell you the truth, I wasn't sure you were going to pry yourself loose from up there. If you hadn't come today, I was going to call you tonight. You've met James, I see."

"He sure has, Troy," James said. "Mr. Sinkiewicz has been teaching me how to paint a straight line."

"That's nice of you, Pop." Troy frowned at James. "I hope you thanked him."

"Yes, I did."

"It'll take him a while to get the hang of it," Stanley said. "A man can't learn nothing overnight."

Troy punched the old man lightly on the arm, and then snapped his fingers. "Jesus. I was so glad to see you I forgot to introduce you to Dale Forrest. Hop out of the car, honey, and meet Mr. Sinkiewicz."

Stanley had seen the woman in the car the moment he had stepped out of the shady garage, but he had hurriedly looked away again. As Dale Forrest advanced toward him timidly, holding out her limp right hand, Stanley forced himself to look at her face again. The young woman had a voluptuous figure, with long straight legs. She wore greendenim clamdiggers and a short-sleeved white silk blouse with the top three buttons undone to reveal her cleavage. Her heavy breasts, without a brassiere, strained against the thin silk. Her skin was a golden bronze, and her hair was almost the same shade, although bright highlights shimmered at the crown. Her long thick hair softly framed her face, and there Dale's beauty stopped.

There were four knobby irregular bumps on her forehead, as if someone had been beating on her with a hammer. Instead of eyebrows, Dale had two hairless dents above her eyes, both of them crisscrossed with red scars where stitches had recently been removed. She had filled in these crescent-shaped depressions with black makeup, which made them more obvious. Her nose was crushed almost flat, and the left nostril was partly missing, as if cut away with a razor blade. Both of her sunken cheeks contained rough and jagged scars, and some of these holes looked large enough to contain marbles. Her jaw had been broken, and reset off-center, and her tiny recessed chin jutted to the right at a puzzling angle. Although Dale still had her lower front teeth, her six upper front teeth were missing, and her gummy smile was like a grimace of intense pain. Stanley recognized that the grimace was a smile, but when he looked at it he felt like crying. Her scarred and puffy lips reminded him of the sewn end of a sack of potatoes.

"I'm happy to make your acquaintance, Mr. Sinkiewicz," Dale said. She shook Stanley's hand, then dropped behind Troy as if she were trying to hide.

"Likewise," Stanley said, clearing his throat.

"James, boy!" Troy said. "Where'd you put Stanley?"

"We haven't been upstairs yet, Troy. But I thought I'd give him the bed out on the porch, if that's all right with you?"

"That'll be fine. Get Dale's bag out of the car."

The six-bedroom, two-story house faced Biscayne Bay, and the Shapiros, the elderly couple who owned it, spent three winter months there every year. They had, at one time, kept the garage apartment as servants' quarters, but they no longer employed live-in servants, even when they were in residence, so the garage apartment hadn't been redecorated for more than ten years. Even so, the garage, like the bayside house, was constructed of the coquina stone that was once quarried in the Keys, and its exterior showed almost no deterioration. All of these residences along the bay, put up in the late 1920s, when there had been a good view of Miami Beach, were built to last, and they had. In return for staying on the premises, and for looking after the grounds, James Frietas-Smith had the rent-free use of the apartment and garage, with his utilities paid for by the Shapiros.

The empty garage below the apartment was huge, and with all four doors swung up against the ceiling there was ample light for his painting. The apartment above, however, was shabby, filled with discarded furniture and other items from the large house in front. In addition to the screened porch on the east side, furnished with a sagging three-quarter-sized bed and several odd pieces of antique furniture, there was a living room, a bedroom, a bathroom with a tub but no shower, and a kitchen large enough to include an old-fashioned breakfast nook, as they were called in the 1950s. The view from the porch and from the breakfast nook provided a good prospect of the bay. All of the rooms were large, with high, paneled ceilings. The pink wallpaper, with tiny rosebuds of darker pink in the design, had pulled away in various places and hung down in scattered tatters. A musty, nose-tingling odor of dust, mildew, and stale bacon grease pervaded the rooms, and there was no air conditioning. There was a large overhead ceiling fan in the living room, but it didn't work any longer.

"You can have the bedroom, Pop," Troy said, "if you don't want the porch, but Dale and I don't mind it in there, and you'll have a better breeze on the porch at night."

"Whatever you think, Troy."

"Good. The bathroom's at the end of the hall next to the kitchen, and I'll have James put some clean towels in there for you. You don't mind sleeping here in the living room, do you, James? You can sleep on the Empress couch."