Virgin Heat (23 page)

Facing her again, he said, "I just don't get it, Angelina," and he felt the vibration of his clenched voice in his gonads. "I just don't understand."

She looked up at him, rearranged her edgy knees, and made a considerable concession. "Maybe I don't understand either, okay?"

He'd stopped expecting her to yield an inch; the frank perplexity in her eyes now disarmed him and gave him hope. He sat on the edge of a lounge next to hers, tried to rid his own voice of its mordant rasp. Almost gently, he said, "If you don't understand, and I don't understand, maybe we're making it more complicated than it's s'posed to be. Desire, Angelina, it's really pretty simple."

"I know about desire," she said, the hardness, unbidden, back in her voice. "I know more about it than you do. Desire's all I've had."

Ziggy's frustrated hands squeezed the flesh above his knees, his freshly discouraged head hung down between his sagging shoulders. "Should we argue who knows more?" he said. "Would that get us anywhere?"

She didn't answer. She looked off at a frangipani tree, at the creamy yellow tucked deep within the bright white petals of the flowers.

After a time, Ziggy said in a tone of seething calm, "This place is driving me crazy. You're driving me crazy. You and me, Angelina, I got no idea how it's gonna end up with us, but I'm telling you, I gotta bust out of here, and soon."

She'd heard the bravado before. Her eyes stayed on the flowers, she scratched an ankle with the bottom of the other foot.

"Angelina, look at me," he said. There was no bombast in his voice, just a quiet urgency. Grudgingly she turned to face him. "Your father," he went on, "he's involved in something down here. Something that's not kosher. You know that, right?"

She hesitated, bit her lip, and nodded. That her father was a criminal, that threats and fixes and plunder had always provided the family livelihood— she'd absorbed that dirty knowledge; but when had she first known it, first really known it? Vaguely, she remembered being a regular kid with what she thought was a regular daddy; then she'd become a strange young woman with a lot of things she couldn't talk about to anyone. But the transition eluded her. Was it gradual or was there one grim buried day when it happened?

Ziggy said, "I'd really like to find a way out of this without sending him away again."

Angelina stared at him, felt her pupils squeezing shut then spiraling open. Her face flushed, strands stood out in her neck. What was he saying to her? Was it a threat? Blackmail? An ugly proposition, silence in exchange for sex?

He saw the affront in her face, said, "I'm not asking you for anything, Angelina. I'm telling you as an old family friend—I'd really like to find some other way."

Embarrassed now, blood trapped in her face, she said, "I wasn't accusing you—"

"Yes you were," he interrupted, a surprising lack of resentment in his voice. "It doesn't matter. I'd like to find another way, and I don't see how I can. No hard feelings if I can't. Okay?"

The stockings were hot, but a lot less trouble than shaving his legs.

As for the lacy bra with its built-in boobs and exaggerated nipples, he practically stopped noticing it as soon as his chest hair had been untangled from the cups. The feel of a rayon skirt softly lapping between his thighs took some getting used to, though he'd insisted on wearing his jockey shorts, and there was great comfort in that scrap of the familiar. The only things that really bothered him were the pumps with their pinching toes and mid-height heels that made his butt stick out for balance; and the auburn wig, whose starchy backing made his bald spot itch like crazy, and whose stability on his sweaty head he didn't really trust.

Big sunglasses with winged frames avoided the need to do his eyes; a few sweeps of Cover Girl, tinged apricot, did a passable job of masking the stubble on his cheeks. Lipstick, a pale coral shade for morning wear, softened the crinkled corners of his mouth. His new ally the drag queen had said, "You're no Joan Crawford, sweetie, but you'll do."

He took a taxi to the Flagler House, forgot to keep his knees together as he exited. He caught the doorman's eyes flicking rudely toward his crotch, trying to chalk up a flash of panties. Men were beasts, he realized.

Now he was skulking through the lobby, his heart thumping so that his left falsie chafed against his chest. Half-deafened by his own clicking footsteps, he moved slowly, his eyes panning without respite. He peeked furtively around potted palms, looking for his brother or his henchmen, wondering if he'd be recognized, waiting for the trap to close.

When he was not immediately grabbed, he sidled to the front desk and asked the whereabouts of room 216. In his nervousness he neglected to disguise his voice, but the clerk, unflappable, barely blinked at the unlikely baritone; he directed the visitor to a bank of elevators.

The doors slid open on the second floor, and the first part of Louie to emerge was the winged sunglasses beneath the auburn wig, big silver frames turning left and right along the corridor. Finding it vacant, he stepped out, took a breath, dragged his heels along the carpet until he found room 216.

Standing before the door, he took a final trembling glance around him, then raised his hand to knock. But his nerve deserted him, he couldn't move his arm. This was it. Either Rose was there behind that door, and he was loved, his life fulfilled, or she was not, and he'd been duped, he might as well be laughed at, used, because his whole life was a travesty. He licked his lips, tasted wax and fragrance. He reached up to mop his forehead, his wrist bumped the wig a little bit askew. He knocked.

His answer was a silence, a pause beyond all measure.

His squashed feet fretted against the carpet, his heart fell in his chest, quivered like a dying mouse against his ribs.

Then he heard the tiny click and slide of a peephole being opened. As sure as a person feels a clammy hand, he felt an eye on him, though he didn't know whose eye it was.

Inside room 216, Rose Amaro, just now waking up from an unsober sleep, was thoroughly confused. Who was this dumpy brunette with the geeky sunglasses, and why was she knocking on her door? Softly but not warmly, she said, "Yes?"

Her husband's voice somehow issued forth from the painted mouth of this unattractive woman. "Rose," it said, "it's me!"

The voice, its incongruity, only deepened Rose's confusion. She struggled to wake up. For a moment no thought whatsoever would resolve, then what streaked across her mind was the befuddling notion that, after all these years, it turned out that her husband was a fruit. Had it happened in Key West or had he always been, down deep? Was it something he was born with or had she failed him even more miserably than she thought?

Out in the hallway, exposed to gangsters and relatives, Louie was extremely nervous. "Rose," he said. "Open up. Please."

After an interminable moment, a night chain rattled, a bolt scraped free, the door of 216 fell open.

Rose Amaro stood there in a cotton nightie, her silhouette revealed by silver shafts of daylight streaming in through the partly open blinds behind her. But Louie didn't see the loosening flesh, the contours surrendering, didn't see tired eyes or a jawline going slack; he saw his wife, the woman he had courted and won and loved forever, whose occasional affection was the greatest compliment he'd ever known. He scuffed his pumps across the threshold, closed the door behind him, and moved to take her in his arms.

"You would have?" Louie said, his voice soft but taut with wonder. He took a bold step in his mid-heel shoes, closed the space between them, and held her hard against him.

*

It was sad, how easily Tommy Lucca's enforcers got the drop on Carmen Salazar's bodyguards, how puny the local tough guys seemed when the outside world invaded.

Next to the practiced bone breakers from Miami, the homegrown goons were slow, flabby, indecisive, almost humane. They'd hardly reacted when the out-of-towners bulled through the narrow passage of the candy store and stormed through the doorway at the rear, their hard hands readying their guns. The defenders had fallen back, spontaneously surrendered; there was no fight but only a weirdly dance-like ritual of dominance and obeisance, as Salazar's two guards stood dwarfed by Lucca's men like pawns immobilized by rooks.

A third Miami hood strapped a dazed and silent Carmen Salazar into his lawn chair, swaddling him in a dozen ravels of shiny silver tape. With each wrap, Salazar's usually languorous posture grew more rigid, until finally he sat there squeezed and snug as a sausage. He didn't have time to be afraid, exactly. His thoughts were bleak but resigned: I've made a dumb mistake; I should have realized sooner; I'm dealing with a madman.

Tommy Lucca, twitchy and snarling, paced through the dappled light of the garden so that broken sunshine painted him one moment in stripes, the next in leopard spots. He pointed a finger at his taped-in host, said, "You're fuckin' me. You and Amaro, you're cuttin' me out."

Salazar tried to breathe in deep but the tape was like a second set of cramping ribs. Paul Amaro might kill him if he spilled his secrets. Tommy Lucca might kill him if he didn't. This was what happened when you got ambitious, moved beyond the small safe confines of your garden. "Personal stuff," he said. "Family stuff."

Lucca said, "Do better, asshole."

Foliage scraped. Salazar swallowed, reluctantly told Lucca about Paul Amaro's daughter and his brother, and the video brought down from New York, and the search for Ziggy Maxx.

Lucca paced, stalled, paced again, unsatisfied. "The two of you watch videos. He's looking for his relatives, for a man that everybody knows has not been seen in a dog's age. A bigger crock of bullshit I have never heard."

Salazar tried to move against the tape; the effort made the bonds seem tighter. "I told you, Mr. Lucca, there aren't any guns."

Lucca mugged toward his underlings, showed them he was not fooled for a moment. Then he moved very close to Salazar's chair. Fear sent a sharp pain through the seated man's bowels; he braced himself to be smacked or pummeled but Lucca reached out very slowly, with a mocking gentleness intended to humiliate, and grabbed him by the chin. "Carmen," he said, "I used to think you were bright, that I could work with you. Now I see you're one more second-rate scuzzball, I gotta watch you every second."

He released the other man's face, took half a step away, swiveled toward him once again.

"Carmen, we're gonna do this deal. I want it and we're gonna do it. But I have to tell you, I'm disappointed in you. That it turns out you're the kinda scumbag that would rather take money from a has-been from New York than do right by your people here in Florida."

"I haven't taken any money," said Carmen Salazar.

"Your
neighbors
in Florida," Tommy Lucca said. "Don'tcha have no fuckin' sense a neighborhood?"

Love gives a man courage, or at least makes him feel that he should act courageous.

Uncle Louie, having lain with his wife, having been reminded that she'd missed him, now remembered what feeling strong was like; he resolved to confront his brother Paul. He'd come to Florida to try and make things right for Angelina, to show his family that he had some brains and nerve, that he could be of use. Here, finally, was his chance. Feeling loved himself, he'd make Paul understand Angelina's love for Ziggy, make him see that love was more important than revenge. He'd be the hero by being the peacemaker.

He kissed Rose one last time, gave her the address of his guest house, asked her to take a taxi there and wait for him. Then he got back into the only clothes he had, the bra and stockings, the skirt and the wig, and went out through the lobby, past the pool, and onward toward the tiki wing.

Agent Terry Sykes, alone on stakeout now, Keith McCullough having gone to watch the picket gate of Coral Shores, looked out from underneath his beach umbrella and saw a frumpy aging hooker knock on Paul Amaro's door. Sykes pursed his lips, shook his head, and t'sked. A man of Amaro's power and prestige should certainly have rated a less weatherbeaten chippy.

Inside the room, Angelina's father heard the knock, leaned away from the rolling table at which he was just finishing late breakfast. He wiped his mouth on a napkin, said, "Yeah?"

Louie spoke into the crack between the door frame and the door. "Paulie," he said in a rasping whisper, "it's your brother Louie."

There were quick footsteps. With a reckless and forgetful lack of caution, the door was yanked open, sunlight bleached the walls. Paul Amaro squinted at the man in drag, chewed his lip a second, then said, "Louie, what the fuck?"