The Switch

by Elmore Leonard

  The phone rang and he stopped.

  “Excuse me,” Melanie said. She went over to the marble-top dry bar that was open, the louvered doors pushed back to show bottles and crystal, and picked up the phone.

  “Mr. Dawson’s residence.” She waited a moment. “I’m sorry, but Mr. Dawson’s out. Would you care to leave a message? . . . No, I’m afraid you’re mistaken. Mr. Dawson left the island earlier today and didn’t say when he’d return. Good night—” in a pleasant telephone voice. She hung up.

  “I used to be a receptionist for a p.r. guy in Los Angeles. He was a real asshole, a friend of my father’s, but I met some interesting people.”

  “At the moment I’m a little more interested in who just called,” Frank said. He was feeling mellow and didn’t sound drunk, though he showed it when he weaved from his favorite chair on his trips to the bathroom and, coming back, would make a dive at Melanie if she happened to be on the sectional sofa that could be arranged to form a playpen. The apartment was done in shades of beige and neutral raw silk, with touches of wicker and aluminum and graphics Melanie had picked up at the International Village.

  “He really didn’t say anything. He asked for you, then said he knew you were here.”

  “How would he know that?”

  “He’s guessing.”

  The phone rang again, several times before Melanie picked it up.

  “Hello.” She waited, listening, picking at the front of her white caftan. “That’s very interesting, but I can’t very well put him on, sport, if he isn’t here, now can I?” She was losing her receptionist manner. “Yes, it is. And who are you?” She listened again, rolling her eyes now. “I’m sorry, he’s gone and didn’t say when he’d be back. Ciao.” She hung up.

  “He knew my name.”

  “What’d he say?”

  “He said your wife wanted to talk to you. So—”

  “She was on the phone?”

  “No, it sounded like a black guy. He said tell him his wife wants a word with him.”

  Frank was thoughtful, silent now.

  “So what does that tell us?” Melanie said. “They can be faked out. You didn’t pay and they haven’t done anything about it.”

  The phone rang again.

  “I better talk to them,” Frank said. He put his hands on the chair arms to push himself up.

  Melanie raised the receiver and then replaced it, breaking the connection. She said, “What did we decide, Frank?”

  “I know, but—maybe if I talked to them I could find out who they are.”

  “What difference does it make? If you start listening to them—it’s like with hijackers and the PLO and all those guys. You start to give in, Frank, and they’ve got you. You don’t have anything to say to them, do you?”

  “I guess not,” Frank said.

  “I don’t know, I had a feeling,” Louis said. “But you’re the one had it first. Somebody in it you hadn’t planned on, you didn’t know about. I guess that started me thinking.”

  “She pick up the phone, they no way to get past her.”

  “Well, he’s sitting there,” Louis said. “She isn’t doing it by herself. So—what’re they doing?”

  “Seeing if we serious,” Ordell said. “We got to impress it on the man some way. Go down there and sit on him, say look here . . . show him something, huh, like maybe his wife’s baby finger.”

  “He knows we got her,” Louis said.

  “Impress it on him. Hey, we serious.”

  “Either he cares what happens to her or he doesn’t give a shit,” Louis said. “The finger isn’t gonna do anything. He gives us the finger. Stick it.” He didn’t like to hear Ordell talking that way. Maim the woman for nothing, that wasn’t a good idea. That was getting into something else and it would no longer be clean and simple. “But you’re right,” Louis said. “We got to put him against the wall.”

  “So we go down there,” Ordell said. “Leave Richard with her.”

  Richard, Louis thought, Jesus. He said, “If you go, you got this guy Cedric Walker. I mean if you go alone and I stay here. I think one of us’s got to be with her and not just Richard. In fact I’m gonna insist on it.”

  “You want to stay, that’s cool,” Ordell said. “I’ll do it. Me and Mr. Walker.” Ordell thought a moment, watching Louis. “You worried about Richard?”

  “No, we get along. If I don’t have to talk to him.”

  “Then you got nothing to worry about, have you?”

  “No, I’m not worried about anything,” Louis said. “I’ve never been happier in my life.”

  15

  * * *

  MELANIE ROSE TO HER ELBOWS brushing hair from her eyes, the tips of her bare breasts resting on the lounge, and said, “Hey!” to the black guy walking off with her straw bag. She was alone at the pool and saw, now, there were two of them.

  “You mind?”

  “I’m jes going in the shade here,” Ordell said. He took the straw bag with the big blue and pink straw flowers on it to the patio bar beneath the thatched roof and began feeling through it.

  “You can have the money and the Coppertone and the Kleenex, but leave my wallet, okay? I just got the driver’s license. It took me months.”

  Ordell came back with the straw bag in one hand and her keys in the other. He dropped the bag on the cement and sat down on the edge of the lounge, looking at her through his Spectra-Shades. “He upstairs? Or has he still left the island?”

  “Oh,” Melanie said.

  Ordell smiled a little. “Yeah, oh.”

  “It’s the truth, he’s not here. I’m staying at his place while he’s gone.”

  Ordell threw the keys underhand to the other man, a Bahamian. Melanie strained a little higher, turning her head to the side. She recognized the man’s tight gray pants, very tight, with no hips, and the pink shirt, the man walking off through the shrubs toward the front of the building. Cedric, yes. She had met him at Churchill’s or The Pub, one of those places.

  “You getting red marks all over your titties from the chair,” Ordell said.

  “They rub off,” Melanie said. “Listen, I know the other guy. If you want to chat, fine, but if I lose any teeth over this it’s Cedric’s ass, because sooner or later I’ll call the cops.”

  Ordell frowned, hurt. “Lose some teeth?”

  “So we understand one another,” Melanie said. “Or if I’m not around at dinner time and my mother starts worrying. The island isn’t that big you can hide somebody very long.”

  “I found that out,” Ordell said. “I came down here about seven, eight years ago. I had some money to spend, I said hey, go down to a paradise island and have some of those big rum drinks and watch the natives do all that quaint shit beating on the oil drums, you know?”

  Melanie watched him, one eye closed in the sun. She seemed interested.

  “I got to the hotel out at West End,” Ordell said. “I register, ask for my room key. The man say, We don’t have no room keys. He say, No, you don’t lock your room in the Bahamas, mon, we honest people. See, this was some time ago. It’s all changed now. I said to myself, Hey, shit. I look in some rooms during the time I was there. Sure enough, all the rooms, the people leave their stuff on the dresser, some in the open suitcases, some of them stick the wallets and travelers’ checks under the socks, you know?”

  Melanie nodded, one eye still closed. “You rip ‘em off?”

  “Noooo, I didn’t rip nothing. I say to my man Cedric Walker the bone-fisherman I met, Hey, you understand all the bread they is, all the loot laying around here waiting on you? He say, What? I say, Money, honey, sitting on the dressers. He say, Oh. Say, You take all that stuff, mon, where you take it to? I say, You take it home, baby. Give some to mama.”

  Melanie said, “That’s wild.”

  “But he say, No. You got money, you got a new watch, they see it, the police, everybody see it. What you going to do, bury it? So nobody see it? I said to him, Then go some place else—”
<
br />   Ordell looked up. Melanie followed his gaze to see Cedric Walker coming back through the shrubs.

  “Mr. Walker the bone-fisherman,” Ordell said, “he take me all the way to the other side of the island where you see jes rocks there and sand and the waves coming in. Nothing. He say to me, Here. I say, Here what? He say, Here is some place else. Here is as far as some place else is . . . You understand what I’m saying?”

  “That’s wild,” Melanie said. She saw Cedric Walker shake his head. “Didn’t believe me, did you?”

  “Wasn’t I didn’t believe you,” Ordell said. “I had to satisfy my mind. You understand? Now put your top on, we gonna go some place.”

  They drove over to Lucaya in Cedric Walker’s ‘72 Vega, Ordell looking at the hotels and the gambling casino and the cars driving on the wrong side of the parkway, Melanie looking down at the way Cedric Walker’s leg filled out his light-gray pants and the vein that popped in his forearm when he worked the gearshift.

  At the marina, walking along the cement to Mr. Walker’s 20-foot Boston Whaler, Melanie said, “There isn’t any place around here you have to get to by boat.”

  “To get out in the ocean you do,” Ordell said.

  He and Melanie sat aft on green life-preserver cushions while Mr. Walker stood amidships at the wheel, his face raised to the spray, enjoying it, the square bow of the Whaler slapping through the waves as they headed out Bell Channel, passing the charter boats coming in for the day. Melanie didn’t say anything until Ordell stood up and took her by the arms. She said, “What the fuck—hey, come on, don’t!” as he threw her over the side.

  Cedric maintained his heading for a hundred meters or so, then brought the whaler around in a wide arc, into the sundown sky beyond Pinder Point, cut the revs to a low rumble and let the boat drift toward the head of hair glistening in the water.

  When the boat was close, Ordell, leaning on the gunwales, said, “You want to tell me where the man’s at?”

  In the car, driving back to Freeport, Melanie sat in the back seat with Ordell. He said he didn’t mind, she could get him wet. She was a good girl. She was a nice big girl, all clean and shiny from her swim in the ocean. Yes, she could take them to this friend’s house where Mr. Dawson was spending the day, sort of getting away from everything. Or, Ordell offered, they could go back to Mr. Dawson’s place and call him, tell him to come home, huh? That sounded like the way to do it, instead of walking in somebody’s house not knowing who was home. At Fairway, Mr. Walker waited in the car while Ordell and Melanie went up to the beige-and-white top-floor apartment with the playpen sofa.

  Ordell looked around while Melanie put on her caftan and pulled the string bikini out from under it. “Like magic,” Ordell said. “Go ahead, call him.”

  “I’ve got something to tell you first,” Melanie said, “I think’s gonna mess up your scam, but don’t blame me, okay? It’s the timing.”

  “What’s the timing?” Ordell said.

  “He filed for divorce two days before he came down.”

  Ordell waited. “Yeah?”

  “And you tell him he’ll never see his wife again?”

  Ordell didn’t move or say anything.

  “He doesn’t want to see her again,” Melanie said. “You’re doing him a favor. You’re saving him about a hundred grand a year in alimony.”

  “He say that?”

  “He doesn’t have to, I know him. He’s telling himself right now there’s nothing he can do. If you kill his wife it won’t be his fault. You told him not to go to the cops; that’s one out, he can say he was worried about her safety, right? And legally, he can tell himself he’s not supposed to deal with extortionists. So if he does nothing he’s free and clear.”

  “The man come right out and say he want his wife dead?”

  “He won’t say anything. He wants it to happen without his thinking about it.”

  “Now wait a minute”—Ordell had to slow it down—“what if we let her go?”

  Melanie shrugged. “He goes home and gets his divorce.” She paused. “But where does that leave you? He won’t involve the cops, for reasons you undoubtedly know. But she’ll call them in a minute. Then where are you?”

  “She hasn’t seen us.”

  “Come on,” Melanie said, “you don’t know what she’s seen, or what she might’ve heard. You’ve got guys working with you—maybe she identifies one of them, and if the cops’ve got any kind of sheet on you I’ll bet you’re picked up in two days.”

  Ordell kept staring at her. “You ever been busted?”

  “Just dope a couple of times. Possession.”

  “But you know a few things, been there and back, huh? And what you’re wondering most,” Ordell said, “is what’s gonna happen to you.”

  Melanie smiled, giving him an easy shrug, and moved to the marble-top bar. “It passed through my mind You want a drink?”

  “Something with rum,” Ordell said.

  “Rum and coconut and pineapple,” Melanie said and got busy, pouring ingredients and crushed ice into a blender. Ordell came over next to her, put a hand on her hip and let it slide over her nice young fanny.

  “So where are we? Seeing how you’re way ahead.”

  “Well, I presume you’ve looked into simple extortion,” Melanie said. “He pays or you report him to the IRS.”

  “I don’t see we could prove anything.”

  “No, but you could probably dump a shitload of trouble on him and some very bad publicity.”

  “What’s that worth?”

  “Well, first of all you’re out of your skull asking for a million bucks. He may have it, but there’s no way in the world you could get that much transferred without the Bahamian government getting involved. I mean somebody in the government, in finance. They’ll tie you up so tight with authorizations and fees, you’d be lucky to get a few thousand off the island, if that.”

  “It’s snowing out,” Ordell said.

  “Hey, you’re not getting it anyway, you might as well quit dreaming and be realistic. So okay, it looks like a bummer. But maybe—and that’s all I’m saying—maybe you can still get something out of it. I mean you’re this far, it’d be a shame if you didn’t.”

  Ordell rubbed her nice can gently. “Is this my new partner I’m talking to?”

  “I’d just as soon keep it you do your thing and I do mine,” Melanie said. She handed him a frothy drink in a brandy snifter the size of a bowl. “I don’t know what my thing is yet. It may be long term, I may settle for a little scratch and move on, I don’t know. But I’m willing to cooperate with you because I like you and because I don’t want to end up in the fucking ocean. It’s that simple.”

  “Cooperate how?” Ordell sipped his drink, leaving a trace of white froth on his mustache. Melanie wiped it off with the tip of her finger and licked it.

  “I was thinking something like—how about if you disappeared for a hundred grand? I think I could talk something around that figure and get him to think it’s his idea. For his peace of mind.”

  “Isn’t a million, is it?” Ordell said.

  “No, it isn’t a sack of wet shit either,” Melanie said.

  “I got a partner, few others, have to pay them their wages.”

  “Well, how you handle that, it’s up to you. You could pick up the money—you could be in Paris the same day, let your friends collect unemployment. That’s up to you,” Melanie said. “The only thing he would have to be sure of before, I mean Mr. Dawson, he’d have to be sure he’s never gonna see his wife again.”

  Ordell put the drink down on the marble top and passed the back of his hand over his mouth, taking his time.

  “For the hundred grand,” Ordell said, “you’re not saying disappear. You’re saying kill the man’s wife.”

  “Unh-unh. I’m saying, when he learns his wife’s dead, you get a hundred grand. Maybe even a hundred and a half. I’m not saying you have to do it,” Melanie said. “Isn’t there someone you could call?”


  16

  * * *

  THURSDAY MORNING, the first couple of times Ordell phoned Richard’s house, Louis answered and Ordell hung up hearing his voice. The third time he called, by then about twelve-thirty, Richard answered. This was the Freeport-Detroit conversation:

  Ordell: Finally. Where’s Louis?

  Richard: I’ll get him—

  Ordell: No! Richard, wait! . . . Richard? Listen, I’ll tell you and you can tell him. It’s all set, man. It’s done. You gonna be able to go to California, Richard.

  Richard: Boy, that’s good to hear. It’s all set, huh?

  Ordell: Yeah, taken care of. Home free, man.

  Richard: Somebody called twice, and hung up. We don’t know who it was.

  Ordell: Don’t worry about it, it’s cool, Richard. Listen now what I want to tell you. Listen very carefully, Richard. It’s the most important thing has to be done.

  Richard: Just a minute, I’ll be right back—

  Ordell: RICHARD!

  Richard: I got to turn the fire down under the cabbage.

  (Ordell waited in the phone booth in the lobby of the King’s Inn, ten dollars worth of quarters stacked on the metal shelf.

  (The way Ordell saw it, Louis would be against the idea. In fact, Louis would kick and scream if he even knew about it. So why cut him in? Louis was a nice person, but it was a different whole new deal now. He had to tell Richard something to tell Louis. Then he had to get Richard to do the job and not fuck it up. All this over the phone in the hot phone booth. It wasn’t going to be easy. But whoever said picking up a hundred and fifty grand was? That going to Paris, France, sounded pretty good, you know it? Send Louis a postcard . . . )

  Richard: Hello?

  Ordell: Your cabbage all right?

  Richard: It was boiling over, but I got it.

  Ordell: Louis upstairs, Richard?