Gold Coast

by Elmore Leonard

  “We sound like we’re married,” Karen said.

  “This is what it’s like, huh? I always wondered if I was missing something.”

  She turned her head on the pillow to look at him. “I think you were miscast. You should’ve been something else.”

  “Yeah, like what?”

  “I haven’t decided yet. But—you would’ve ended up in prison. You’re smart enough to know that.”

  “That’s why I got out of it.”

  “No, I think you’re out of it because you finally realized you never should’ve been in. That’s what I mean you were miscast. Some wild idea influenced you.”

  “Money,” Maguire said.

  “See, you pretend you’re cynical, but you’re not. It wasn’t just money. Maybe the risk, or the excitement.”

  “Maybe,” Maguire said. “I remember telling Andre I could do without anymore thrills. Yeah, maybe you’re right,” his tone thoughtful, going back in his mind and beginning to wonder how he’d got into the life—always one more, just to raise traveling money—and how those years had gone by so fast. He said, “That wasn’t me I was telling you about. It must’ve been somebody else.”

  Looking at him lying next to her in her bed she could say to herself, My God, who is this guy? Or she could say, Somebody I’ve known for a long time. She said to him, “You feel it, don’t you? You said you felt close.” Putting her hand on his hand.

  “Like the other night was years ago,” Maguire said. “Even dinner, the one we didn’t have, seems a long time ago now.”

  “That’s what I’ll tell Marta, we’re old friends,” Karen said, and smiled. “Why do I worry about Marta? Even with Frank, I was never afraid to stand up to him.”

  “I guess you did,” Maguire said.

  “But I was always worried—not worried, concerned, with what the maid thought of me.”

  “Because you think of her as a person and not just a maid,” Maguire said. “Talk about miscast, the lady of the house. I don’t see you that way at all. A lady, yeah, I suppose, the way it’s used. But I don’t see you just sitting around pouring tea.”

  “How do you see me?”

  “Well, like in a sweater and jeans, doing something outside.” He paused. “You want me to tell you, really?”

  “Yes, I’d love to know.”

  “I see us,” Maguire said. “I see us driving through Spain. I see us at a sidewalk table, place with a red awning. I see us looking at somebody, like some tourist, and nudging each other and laughing.”

  She turned to him as he spoke, moving closer and laying her hand on his chest.

  “I see us picking up our maps and a couple bottles of red wine to take with us.”

  “What kind of car do we have?”

  “Alpha Romeo. Convertible, with the top down.”

  “Where’re we going?”

  “Madrid to the Costa del Sol. And if we don’t like it, we’ll go to some other costa.”

  “I think we’ll like it,” Karen said.

  She thought, briefly, But who’s paying for it?

  Then put it out of her mind. She felt safe. For the time being, she could close her eyes without imagining something happening to her. She could picture herself doing whatever she wanted. She tried to imagine the sidewalk cafe and the Alpha Romeo. But she saw herself coming out of a shop on Worth Avenue, Palm Beach, putting on her sunglasses, and someone saying, That’s Karen DiCilia.

  11

  * * *

  “THEN THEY GO BACK TO HER HOUSE,” Jesus Diaz said to Roland. “Then, you know, after awhile, he goes home.”

  Roland was down on the floor in his undershorts doing pushups, red-faced, tight-jawed, counting, “Ninety-five . . . ninety-six . . . Where’s he live?” straining to say it.

  Like the time on the toilet, Jesus Diaz thought. The time Roland, sitting on the toilet, grunting, making noises, had made him stand in the doorway of the bathroom while Roland talked to him.

  “He lives up by Northeast Twenty-ninth Street, in Fort Lauderdale.”

  “One hunnert,” Roland said, getting up, breathing heavily with his hands on his hips. Jesus Diaz tried to read what was printed in red on the front of Roland’s white bikini undershorts, without staring at his crotch.

  “You tell me she met him at the place. So then they both drive to her house?”

  “No, he went in the car with her, the Mercedes.”

  “Then how’d he get home?”

  What was printed on Roland’s shorts, was Home of the Whopper. Jesus Diaz said, “He drove her car home.”

  “She let him use her car?”

  “I guess so. He drove it to where he work, that place, Seascape.”

  Roland squinted. “Seascape? The fuck is Seascape?”

  “That kind of porpoise place. They have the shows there.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Roland said. “Seascape, yeah. I believe Dorado owns it, or did. What’s he do there?”

  “The tricks, you know, with the porpoise. Make them jump up, take a piece of fish out of his mouth. All like that.”

  “Well, you go on back and see him,” Roland said. “Take somebody with you to hold his arms.”

  “Today you mean?”

  “I mean right now, partner. Get on it.”

  “Man, I’d like to get some sleep first.”

  “What you need sleep for? Didn’t you go to bed?”

  “I’m just tired,” Jesus Diaz said, and left to go do his job, tired or not.

  Do it right or Roland would chew his ass out, tell him to quit chasing that Cuban cocha. Stay in shape like him.

  Sure, but if he’d said he was awake all night, except for dozing off—sitting in the mangrove bushes across the street so the security car wouldn’t see him—then Roland would say, All night? You mean to say the dink spent the night? Then Roland might go over there and do something to the woman again.

  Man, he was tired though.

  Go home, get the Browning to put under his jacket, just in case. Pick up Lionel Oliva at the Tall Pines Trailer Park; pull him out of bed. Hey, Lionel, you want to beat up somebody for a hundred dollars? How big? Not big. Shit yes, he’d jump in the car. It shouldn’t be hard. The porpoise man didn’t look very strong. Also he’d be tired out after his night in the two-hundred-year-old bed.

  Marta had said, handing the early-morning cup of coffee to him out the side door, “If it wasn’t broken before, it is now.” Saying it, not as a truth, but because she was happy for the woman.

  Jesus Diaz was happy for her also. It was too bad he had to do this to her old friend.

  Maguire said to the crowd on the top deck of the Flying Dolphin tank, “There’s the trick it took us eighteen months to teach him. He lays on his side, raises one flipper and . . . that’s it. You can see why we call him Mopey . . . Dick. Let’s give Mopey a hand. That must’ve worn him out.”

  He had already noticed the Cuban-looking guy in the crowd, lining the cement rail. Yellow shirt, white jacket. The same one Karen had pointed to who’d been sitting at the bar last night. Marta’s brother.

  Maguire, on the aluminum pole, gave them the double hand-feeding with Bonnie and Pebbles, wondering if Marta’s brother was here to give him a message.

  And the other Cuban-looking guy with him, why was he along, what, to watch?

  Maguire asked the crowd, the little kids, if they wanted to see a mouth-to-mouth feeding. They said, “Yeeeeeeeeees!”

  No, he had seen too many like the other Cuban-looking guy. They were bouncers in go-go joints. They hung around sports arenas. Marta’s brother looked like he’d been a fighter; the neck, the trace of scar tissue around the eyes. The other Cuban-looking guy was bigger; he could be a lightheavy sparring partner for a good middleweight.

  “And that’s our Flying Dolphin Show for this afternoon,” Maguire said, and told everyone next, to kindly proceed to the Shark Lagoon area. Hooker was doing the color over there today. Maguire’s next job, in about twenty minutes, was to announce Brad
Allen and then he’d be through. He picked up the bucket of fish sections, looked over at the two guys as he stepped off the platform to the cement deck.

  They were waiting. The only ones still up here.

  Maguire walked toward the stairway. He heard one of them say, “Just a minute.”

  And thought, Your ass.

  He put the bucket down without breaking stride, moving with purpose but not running yet or looking around, down the stairway to the dim second level, the underwater windows of the tank showing dull-green.

  Now run. And if they ran after him, it was absolutely for certain not to deliver a message he wanted to hear. He began running as he heard them on the stairway, his barefeet patting on the cement, their running steps coming after him now, hitting hard, echoing. He ran past the tank windows seeing gray shapes in the water, Bonnie and Pebbles grazing the glass, pacing him as he ran all the way around the circular second level to the stairway again and up to the top deck.

  The bucket of fish sections was where he’d left it. Maguire picked it up and stepped back from the open doorway, hearing their steps coming up toward him now, stiffened his arm holding the bucket, let the first one come through to the outside, Marta’s brother, and swung the bucket into the face of the other Cuban-looking guy, turning him reeling, took the bucket in both hands, fish pieces falling out, jammed it down over the guy’s head and, still holding onto it, ran the bucket, the guy coming with it to the waist-high rail, hitting the cement as Maguire grabbed the guy’s legs and threw him into the tank.

  Marta’s brother stood watching.

  Maguire moved to the wire gate in the rail that opened to a small platform on the other side, close to the water, where Hooker would go into the tank with his mask and air hose. Maguire waited, looking from the gate to Marta’s brother who was fifteen to twenty feet away.

  “What do you want?”

  Jesus Diaz said, “This is a warning.” He didn’t know what else to say. “Keep away from the woman.”

  Maguire said, “What?” Not sure he heard him right. He looked past the gate to see the other Cuban pulling himself up on the platform. Wet-gray bottlenose heads came out of the water to watch. Maguire waited until the Cuban’s hand reached the top of the wire gate, his face appearing, coming up slowly, and slammed a right hook into the face, sending the man back into the tank as the dolphin heads disappeared.

  “I’m talking about Missus DiCilia,” Jesus said. “Keep away from her or we gonna throw you in that tank for good.”

  Maguire scowled. His hand hurt something awful. He said to Jesus, “You work for Roland or what?”

  Jesus said, “Be smart, uh? Stay away from her.”

  Or what? Maguire thought. He took two steps toward Jesus, saw the man’s hands go behind his back and reappear with a gun, a heavy automatic, Colt or a Browning. The other guy was coming up out of the water again.

  Maguire said, “Well, I got to go.”

  Jesus said, “Don’t work too hard.”

  Maguire went down the stairway holding his sore hand, shaking his head.

  12

  * * *

  “THE FIRST THING YOU BETTER DO,” Maguire said, “is fire your maid, and anybody else around here. How about the brother?”

  “No, he doesn’t work for me.”

  Karen was wearing big round sunglasses and a brown and white striped robe, open. Maguire couldn’t see her face, her expression, as she looked at him and then out across the lawn; but he could see her brown legs and firm little belly and the strip of tan material almost covering her breasts. Maguire wore jeans and a shirt over his red Seascape T-shirt. He had come here from work and now, on the patio, he was trying to make Gretchen go away so he could concentrate on Karen.

  She said, “I can’t believe it. Marta’s been here as long as I have. I think she was seventeen when we hired her.”

  “Give her a reference then,” Maguire said. He’d push Gretchen away and she’d come back to him, thinking he was playing.

  “I can’t just fire her.”

  “Can you get rid of her for awhile? Send her on an errand.”

  “She did the grocery shopping yesterday—”

  “Tell her you need some Spaghetti-O’s, something. We’ve got to get her out of here.”

  “For how long?”

  “An hour anyway.”

  Karen got up and went into the house.

  Maguire watched her. She didn’t seem worried or upset. She didn’t have nervous moves or do anything with her hands. Andre Patterson would try to sign her up.

  Maguire had told her about Jesus Diaz and the other one coming to see him, not telling her all of it, but making a point of the warning. That was clear enough, wasn’t it? Jesus worked for Roland. If they knew things about Karen that Marta could have observed, then Marta was telling them. And if they knew things Marta couldn’t have known, then the house was bugged or there was a tap on the phone. Probably a tap. Karen had said, “Really?” quietly interested. Was she different again? She seemed different every time he saw her.

  There was a newspaper on the umbrella table, part of the Miami Herald, the “Living Today” section. Maguire reached for it. It wasn’t today’s “Living Today” though. It was last Sunday’s, and he didn’t immediately recognize the woman in the photo. Karen DiCilia and a man, her former husband—yes, somewhat familiar to Maguire from newspaper photos years ago—Frank DiCilia. Both dressed up, both wearing dark glasses, coming out of someplace, a doorman standing behind them.

  The headline said, WHAT IS KAREN DICILIA’S SECRET? A smaller line, above it, said, WIDOW OF MOBSTER WON’T TALK.

  In the Miami paper, taking up the top half of the page. He didn’t know how he could have missed it.

  The story below, with before-and-after shots of a woman, said, TWENTY-YEAR WAR ON FAT TAPERS OFF IN VICTORY, and maybe Aunt Leona had cut it out of the paper. There were usually things cut out of the Herald by the time he got it Sunday evening.

  “Widow of Mobster . . .” Jesus, he bet she loved that. The photo with Frank was dated four years ago. She looked the same.

  “Why would an attractive forty-year-old widow, comfortably situated, chic, outgoing . . .”

  Forty years old?

  And that was four years ago.

  “. . . give up her independence to marry a former (?) Detroit mob boss relocated in Fort Lauderdale’s fashionable Harbor Beach area?”

  Maguire’s eyes moved down the columns. Background stuff. Formerly Karen Hill. Married to an engineer. Daughter an actress.

  “Since Frank DiCilia’s death, Karen has become virtually a recluse, seldom venturing out to the fashionable clubs or attending the charitable benefits that used to be de rigueur for her.

  “Turn to Page 2D Col. 1”

  Maguire turned.

  “Woman of Intrigue”

  And a current shot of Karen in a pale bikini, hands on her hips, white sunhat and sunglasses, a grainy photo that had been blown up or shot from some distance.

  Maguire looked out past the lawn to the seawall, where she might have been standing in the photo.

  The hands on hips defiant rather than provocative. The soft hat brim straight across her eyes behind round sunglasses. Nice shot. The slim body somewhat slouched, but in control; yes, with a hint of defiance.

  A phrase caught his eye. “The mystery lady of Isla Bahía,” and he thought, It’s a good thing she doesn’t live on Northeast Twenty-ninth Street.

  It didn’t look as though the reporter, a woman, had learned much about her. There seemed to be more questions than facts. Maguire was still reading the piece when Karen came out.

  She said, “Oh,” for a moment off guard.

  “I didn’t know I was with a celebrity,” Maguire said. He held the newspaper section aside, looking up at her.

  “You didn’t?” Karen said. She took the paper from him and folded it into a small square, hiding something thousands of people had already seen.

  “That’s a nice shot of y
ou in the swimsuit.” The same one he was looking at now, the robe hanging open, very thin waist, tight little tummy curving into the tan panties that crossed her loins in a straight line. Maguire moved in the canvas chair, reseating himself.

  “It was taken here, wasn’t it?”

  “From a boat. I didn’t know it was a news photographer.”

  “They’re starting to move in on you.”

  She looked at him, but didn’t say anything. Her expression almost the same as the one in the photo.

  “The woman that wrote it,” Maguire said, “why didn’t you tell her what’s going on?”

  “How could I do that?”

  “Why not? Get it out in the open.”

  “Don’t you think I’d look a little stupid? The dumb widow involved in some Sicilian oath.”

  “Well, you’re not dumb and it is happening, isn’t it? What I’m thinking, you expose Roland and maybe he’ll go away.”

  “And expose Karen DiCilia,” Karen said. “Would you like to read about yourself, involved in something like this, in a newspaper?”

  “I don’t know,” Maguire said, “if I thought it would do the job.”

  “I have to handle Roland,” Karen said, “if Ed Grossi doesn’t.” She folded the newspaper section again and shoved it into the pocket of her robe. “I gave Marta the evening off.”

  “Good,” Maguire said.

  “She didn’t want to go.” Karen was watching him now from behind her sunglasses. “I told her we wanted to be alone. It doesn’t matter now what she thinks, does it?”

  “It never did,” Maguire said.

  He located the telephone line coming in from the street, through the mangrove trees, to the house, and pointed to the piece of metal clamped to the line, an infinity transmitter. A second line ran from the terminal point at the house to a corner window and entered Marta’s room between the brick and the window casing.

  In the room itself the line led to a voltage-activated recorder beneath Marta’s bed. Maguire explained it—part of an accumulation of knowledge picked up along the way to nowhere; though sometimes bits and pieces came in handy.