Virgin Heat (20 page)

Tired, nervous, and with a cumulative hangover like a lingering flu, she walked around the pool, among the palms and past the thatched roof outdoor bar. She reached the tiki wing and knocked on her relative's door.

Paul Amaro coughed out a gruff, "Yeah?"

Rose groped for poise against the wet and draining heat. She made her voice husky and official, choked off the New York accent. "Delivery for Mr. Martin."

A moment passed, a bolt slid free. The door opened. Paul Amaro stood there in a hotel bathrobe, blinked into the daylight. Then he said, "Rose, you look like hell."

It was true. Her eyes were yellowish and soupy, her skin had the stretched and bluish sheen of rising dough. Her lipstick missed the outline of her lips, got grainy at the edges like something badly printed. She said, "You always knew how to make a girl feel good."

""What the hell are you doing here?"

"You don't look so hot yourself."

He didn't. His eyes were caving in like sinkholes, the flesh around them was pebbled and gray. Blood pressure was tormenting capillaries, his face and neck were tending toward the color of beef. Wearily, he said, "Why didn't you do like I told you, Rose?"

The sun was at its zenith. It beat down on her head and made it pound, seemed to call forth vaporous memories of every Manhattan she'd ever drunk. She tried to sound strong; it didn't work, it came out petulant and whiny. "I wanna help."

Paul Amaro briefly closed his eyes. The woman was a lush and a hysteric and a general pain in the ass. "Ya wanna help, gimme the video and go the hell home."

He held out a meaty hand. It stayed empty. His sister-in-law said, "I'm getting a room."

"Rose, you got no fucking business here. Now gimme the tape, and go."

Just for a moment, she wondered if he would dare to grab her purse or hit her. She was braced, her shoulders tilted bravely forward. She said, "Not without my Louie." Then she pivoted to walk away, spoke across her shoulder, "Lemme know when you wanna watch the movie."

*

A phalanx of rolled-up towels separated Ziggy's side of the bed from Louie's, and Louie had been told that if he crossed the line he would die.

So he really hadn't slept that well. Aside from the fear of rolling over, there was the fact that Ziggy's feet were very near his face, his own feet in danger of tickling Ziggy's chin. Through the night he'd done no more than doze. He'd smelled the fleeting perfume of things that bloomed in moonlight, watched the thin curtain sway like a skirt on puffs of breeze that whispered through the open window.

As was his custom anyway, he rose from bed before the sun was up. He pulled on plaid Bermudas and went down to the quiet courtyard, where he used a rumpled cloth to wipe the heavy dew from a lounge. He sat back like he was at a show and watched the same old miracles that launched the day. Stars dimmed in the sky and in the pool. Hunks of purple cloud bulged out of the blackness in the east; the purple went pink, the first yellow rays spoked through. An unseen hand hurled the morning papers over the picket fence; they landed on the walkway with an authoritative slap. Streetlamps switched off, and only then did one notice they'd been humming all along.

The breakfast cart was rolled out, Louie savored coffee. People appeared, rubbing their eyes. The sun topped the metal roofs and, sudden as a toaster, it was hot.

Around nine, Angelina came down, kissed him good morning. A little while after, Ziggy showed up, grumpy, restless, not yet shaved. There didn't seem to be much to say this morning. They sat around uncomfortably, acquaintances on a group vacation that wasn't working out.

Sometime after ten, Michael and his lover, dressed in jeans and T-shirts that fit like glaze on doughnuts, walked through the picket gate; and, quite suddenly and with no warning whatsoever, what had been merely awkward became insane.

Michael spotted Angelina, waved and moved toward her around the pool. But he'd barely murmured a hello when his partner, having decided to seize the advantage of surprise, looked square at Ziggy and said, "You and I should talk."

Ziggy blinked toward the sun, rubbed his scratchy chin. Caffeine had not yet washed away his grouchiness, and he wasn't that fond of gay people to begin with. He said, "Yeah? And who the hell are you?

Protectively, Michael said, "His name is David."

"My name is Keith McCullough." He said this while somehow getting a hand in his taut pocket and producing a wallet with a badge.

Michael was staring at his feet, trying to get the earth to firm up beneath them. He said, "A cop. A
cop?!.
You were just using me all this time?"

"I hear that Paul Amaro's camped at a very comfortable hotel a quarter mile from where you sit," McCullough said to Ziggy. "I don't think you can afford to kiss me off."

"Paul Amaro?" Ziggy said. "I don't believe I know a Paul Amaro."

Michael was shaking his head. "A queer Fed! God Almighty, how'd I end up with a queer Fed?"

Ziggy went on, "I used to know a guy named Sal Martucci. He knew Paul Amaro. But this Amaro guy and Ziggy Maxx, nuh-uh, they don't know each other."

"This time around you're brave," McCullough said. "This time you're playing by the code. Last time around you didn't, remember? Paul Amaro, you can bet that he remembers."

"Just using me," said Michael. "Pumping me for all the romantic details. Who's this one, where's that one? You faggot bitch."

McCullough said, "Shut up, Michael. I'm not gay, I've got a wife and kids."

"Ha!" said Michael, loud enough to catch the ears and sympathies of people having breakfast all around the pool. "I don't care if you've got a harem and a flock of sheep. Homo is as homo does, sweetheart, and you're as gay as Liberace."

McCullough turned his back on his former boyfriend. "Paul Amaro isn't down here for the weather," he said to Ziggy. "You're gonna tell me what he's doing here."

"Fine as a guy who's fallen thirty stories off a forty-story building," said McCullough. "Paul Amaro, what's he up to?"

"Lemme ask
you
a question," Ziggy said. "You got a wife and kids, what're you doing fucking guys?"

"And hurting people's feelings," Uncle Louie could not help putting in.

McCullough said, "Ziggy, you're trapped here. Pinned. My guess, you're not a person who likes to feel trapped. Feeling trapped makes your skin crawl. You don't have to like me. I don't have to like you. I'm your ticket out of here. Remember that."

He turned, his tight jeans creaked. He said to Michael, "Sorry I couldn't let you know some other way." And he left.

An unnatural hush followed his leaving, time flattened out like the water behind a big boat that has passed. Uncle Louie absently sipped at tepid coffee. Michael very slowly sat himself down at the foot of Angelina's lounge. "God," he said, "I feel so stupid. How's it possible to be so wrong about a person?

Angelina slid forward, put her arm around her friend, kissed him on the cheek. "Sometimes it's like that," she said. "It'll be okay."

The TV and the VCR were set up on a plastic milk crate in the garden. A long extension cord, orange, snaked away through the gravel and the shrubbery, climbed the cracked step up into the candy store. One of Carmen Salazar's goons pushed some buttons and turned some dials, and Uncle Louie's video began to play.

Pictures of Key West filled the screen, which in turn was framed by a shady background of Key West, and there was something unsettling in the doubling of the place, a little spooky, like those sets of dolls that are gobbled up inside of other dolls. The ocean appeared, as flat and green as the real ocean that was simmering a mere five hundred yards away. Tourist attractions flickered by—Hemingway House, Curry Mansion, Southernmost Point; the machinery suggested they were distant, exotic, touched by some unearthly magic, when, to locals, they were ordinary buildings practically around the corner, shabby monuments in need of paint, obstacles you had to go around to get to a gas station or a liquor store.

The images rocked and bounced and quivered. There was no rhyme or reason to their sequence. Now and then the screen went black or blazed with a painful glare.

Rose, formerly too critical, now felt she had to make excuses for her absent husband. "He hadn't had the camera very long," she said.

Carmen Salazar had promised himself to be nothing but gracious to this relative of Paul Amaro's. "Actually," he lied, "it's very good. He's really capturing the high points."

"But what the hell's it telling us?" Amaro said.

So far it was telling them nothing. Here was a glimpse of the harbor, a sailboat full of people going snorkeling. There went the laundromats with the names that Louie found so droll. Foliage rustled, it was hard to tell if it was in the garden or the soundtrack.

Then, with no transition, the scene jumped to a bar, an open-air place, at twilight. Matches rasped; glasses tinkled. A smoky mirror, partly blocked by ranks of stately bottles, was edged with tangles of grabbing vine. Just for an instant, the wobbly camera skated over the barkeep's turning face, revealed dark hair, olive skin already stubbly, a feisty guarded mouth.

Salazar said, "Whaddya know, there's Bigtime."

"Bigtime?" Paul Amaro said, with no particular interest. By the time he said it, the bartender's face was gone, the screen was filled with his hands instead as they layered liquors in a pony glass.

"Guy who works for me," Salazar casually explained. "You met him yesterday. Ziggy."

"Ah," said Paul Amaro, watching the barkeep's tics and swoopings as he built the drink. "Why ya call him Bigtime?"

Salazar gave a little laugh. "Ya know, I can't even remember how it started."

But by now Paul Amaro found he couldn't move his eyes from the television. A vague unease, like yesterday's, a feeling of inchoate wrongness, had started churning in his gut. "Try," he said.

Salazar felt a little scolded, rubbed his chin. "When he first came to me for work, he dropped these hints, you know, of bigger things he'd done, important people that he knew."

Amaro leaned far forward in his lawn chair, squeezed one hand tight inside the other. "Like what?" he said. "Like who?" On the screen, the stripes of booze were mounting to the top of the pony glass.

"Never got specific. You know how people are. They're dying to have you know something, and they know they shouldn't tell you."

The frame froze in the instant before the camera abandoned the bartender's face, caught him in a look of scowling sorrow. Stopped, the image was grainy and distorted, swaths of it moved out of register like strata on a hillside. Paul Amaro studied it less with his eyes than his belly, took the measure of this stranger's face by the way it tugged his innards, mocking and insistent as a half-remembered dream.

There was a long silence.

Rose broke it, her voice as sharp and sudden as a tooted horn from the back of a resting orchestra. "Angelina," she said. "The way she hugged Louie when she said good night. I just remembered how she hugged him. The way she thanked him, like he'd done something so terrific for her."

Paul Amaro sat there, hunched forward in his chair, fists clamping down on nothing. Foul stuff was rising in his throat and he was not sure he could speak. He stalled a moment, pointed a thick finger at the tortured image on the screen. "I wanna find that guy," he said.

Salazar, for the moment blind to the direness of the request, said lightly, "That's easy as a phone call."

"No phone call," Paul Amaro said. "I wanna go to his house. And you're lending me a gun."

*

"Now do you believe that something's going on?" said Keith McCullough, not even trying to keep the note of gloating triumph out of his voice.

His boss's answer was circumspect and bland. Manny Links cradled the phone against his ear, tapped his unlit pipe against his palm, said, "Might be something. Might be nothing much."

"Nothing much?" said the undercover man. He was back in his motel room, looking out the window at the parking lot where spaces were marked off by opposite diagonals, like the skeletons of fishes. "Manny, Ziggy Maxx, okay, Ziggy Maxx is nothing much. But Paul Amaro's here on business. That's not nothing much."

"So what's the business?" asked the supervisor. Exasperated, McCullough said, "I don't know what the business is."

"Exactly."

"That's what Ziggy Maxx is gonna tell us."

In Manny Links's cubicle in North Miami, there was a thoughtful pause. "You know," he said, "I've been in this business nineteen years. I'm trying to think, in all that time, has there ever been a case where an informant ratted out the same guy twice?"

Links put his pipe in his mouth, yearned briefly for the halcyon days when he used to burn tobacco in it. "Keith," he said, "if this guy turns again, that means he has to change identities again. How many times can we cut and paste this one poor bastard's face?"