He went back to his slice.
From the other side of the table, Lydia spoke up. “So the deal is I have to disappear. Which, frankly, I think is really pretty cool. I mean, what would I be disappearing from? My life before was dull, dull, dull. Then finally I have a little fun and it almost gets me killed. But if I disappear, if I just start over, then it’s all fun, all adventure. I’m ready for that. I’m psyched.”
“Wow,” said Meg. “Disappearing. Starting fresh. It’s almost like reincarnation.”
Peter rolled his eyes.
“But without having to worry,” Glenda put in, “about coming back as a duck or something.”
“But where will you disappear to?” Meg asked.
Lydia glanced deferentially at Benny, who was just then reaching for a second slice of pizza, meatball this time.
“We’re working on a plan for that,” he said. “Talked about it on the ride down south. There’s a few details that still need ironing out. So the main thing in the meantime is that we’re all on the same page about hiding Lydia. Everybody good with that?”
25.
Later, in the privacy of the guest bedroom, Peter whispered, “Everybody good with that? Hell, no, I’m not. We’re going to end up getting busted as accomplices or accessories or something.”
“Accomplices to what?” asked Meg.
“Who knows? Nothing good.”
“I think it’s exciting. How many people, they go on vacation, nothing happens, it’s like they never went away. Here, something is happening.”
“What? What’s happening? A Cosa Nostra slumber party that we’re stuck in the middle of. Waiting for this little pizza-chomping Houdini to make a woman disappear.”
Meg was about to reply but was pre-empted by a loud meowing at the bedroom door. She and Peter tried to ignore the squealing sound but then it came a second time and a third. Before he could stop her Meg had opened the door, and before he could dodge the contact the cat had run in and rubbed against his ankle. Peter did a little hop-step to get out of the way and the cat rubbed against his other ankle. Looking down, trying to skip backwards, he said, “How do the little fuckers always find the person who can’t stand cats?”
Meg looked down also and said, “What is it, Tasha? You want a drink? Come on.”
She gestured to the cat and started heading toward the kitchen but the cat just sat there looking up adoringly at Peter.
“Shit,” he said. “This is so perverse.”
“Maybe she sees things that people can’t. Maybe she sees your aura.”
“Don’t start with the aura bullshit, okay?”
The cat was purring now and tracking Peter’s every juke and feint so it could keep its thrumming ribcage against his leg. Finally, secretly flattered in spite of his seeming chagrin, he walked Tasha to the kitchen and watched with a smile that he hoped no one saw as she curled her tongue to drink water from the faucet.
Parked under a majestic Poinciana tree at the end of Poorhouse Lane, Andy Sheehan had watched the pizza delivery man come and go, then waited until lavender evening had become indigo night to get out of his car and have a look around.
The first thing he did was to stroll with no particular stealth toward the vehicle he’d seen receding down West 93rd St. and careening onto West End Avenue, presumably carrying away the woman he’d been tailing. He examined the outside of the car, which was entirely unremarkable. Then he produced a tiny flashlight and looked at the interior. On the floor of the back seat there were some food wrappers and coffee cups, the detritus of a long and hurried drive. On the dashboard stood one of those plastic hula girls whose hips sway and whose grass skirt moves with the motion of the car. On the passenger-side door the inside handle was missing; from the armrest dangled a pair of handcuffs. In the narrow bluish beam from the flashlight, the cuffs looked cheap and rather flimsy, not much sturdier than toys, but adequate to keep a kidnapped woman where she was.
Sheehan switched off his light and stood there in the street. From somewhere behind him a streetlamp hummed and cast a pink-orange glow; moths capered all around it, their faint and flickering shadows dappling the light. Seeing the handcuffs, the agent had felt a pang, but he couldn’t quite make out what the pang was all about, and the lack of sureness rattled him. Could it be remorse that he hadn’t done more to rescue the woman who’d clearly been kidnapped and might very well be dead by now? Some splinter of doubt that he’d handled the situation as a good cop should handle it? Or just frustration that possibly he’d lost the key informant in a case that could make him a hero? And why wasn’t he more certain how he felt? Maybe it was just fatigue. Or loneliness. Or the heavy, hazy air of Key West that tended to blur hard edges, that took some of the snap out of brittle creeds.
In any case, he’d never been one for long bouts of introspection, and he soon turned his attention to the neat and stately house in front of him. Its deep porch was dark. Inside, random lights were on, throwing yellow parallelograms of brightness here and there through open windows. Sheehan scanned the property to find the best vantage point for peeking in; he chose a side yard that the house seemed to share with an unlit and possibly derelict shack next door. Stepping carefully over the inevitable debris of tropical gardens—the crunching tangles of fallen fronds, the slip and slide of giant rotting leaves—he made his way to a patch of shadow that offered a view into what seemed to be a downstairs bedroom.
Inside, a very ordinary-looking man of forty-five or fifty was doing what appeared to be a flailing and arrhythmic little dance that hinged his hips jerkily backwards while his shoulders asymmetrically lifted nearly to his ears. Shifting his viewpoint just a little, Sheehan saw that the man was trying to avoid contact with a cat that was slithering insistently around his ankles.
Cautiously slinking to the next haven of shadow, the agent peered into a modern gracious living room. Sleek off-white furniture was arrayed in conversational groupings. High-tech audio and video components were elegantly stacked on chrome shelves. A woman in a blue sundress was sitting on a sofa, looking at a magazine.
Sheehan’s breath caught and his heart sped up when he saw her. Without doubt she was the woman in the cloth coat from New York, and yet she looked so different here. Before, her hair had been so tightly pinned as to be nearly invisible; now it dangled down across her neck and fringed along the curving line of her shoulders. Before, her face had been closed up and blank; now her eyes seemed wide and candid, her lips were slightly parted and seemed expectant, playful. In the cloth coat, her body had been indistinct, generic, but now, in the sundress that didn’t quite contain her, her figure could be seen in its specificity and ripeness. She tapered from the bosom to the waistline and yet there was a hint of ampleness and comfort in her sides. Her knees were crossed and presented just a hint of dimples, like a baby’s knees; the hem of the sundress lay lightly against the skin of her thighs and there seemed to be pleasure in the soft collision of fabric and flesh.
Sheehan watched her for some moments and almost admitted to himself that he was watching her now not as a cop but as a man—an unseen man standing in the dark and watching a woman bathed in a pool of lamplight who did not know she was being watched. He looked at her a furtive moment more then slunk away through the covering dimness and back to his car.
26.
At nine a.m., mid-morning in many places but quite early for Key West, there came a knock at the front door.
The knock caused a slight panic and a scramble inside the house. Despite the conversation about hiding Lydia, there’d been no discussion, still less a drill, about how this should actually be done in case there was a visitor. So now everything was confused improvisation. Lydia herself sprang up from the sofa where she’d slept, pranced barefoot toward the guest bedroom just recently vacated by Meg and Peter who’d gone to the kitchen to scare up some breakfast, and hid herself in the closet. Glenda quickly gathered up the sheet and pillow from the sofa and stuffed them into the liquor cabinet. Benny came trun
dling downstairs from the master suite in a blue silk bathrobe, smoothing what was left of his hair and trying to compose his features into an everything’s fine expression. He glanced behind him to double-check the room, took a deep breath, and opened the door.
Before him stood Mel, the dirty old man who lived next door. “Benny,” he said, “you’re back.”
“Yes, I am.”
“And Glenda’s back.”
“Yes, she is.”
“So…things are good?”
“Things are good.”
Mel got the twinkle in his eye that always appeared when he was working a conversation around toward his favorite subject. “Like, really good?”
“Really good. But listen, Mel—“
“Even though you brought another woman home with you?”
By reflex Benny said, “No I didn’t.”
Mel’s watery pale eyes swam and glinted in their sockets. “That’s your story, you stick to it. I’ll just forget I saw you coming up the walkway with a brunette, leaning all over each other and looking like you just rolled out of the sack.”
“Oh, her,” Benny improvised. “She was a hitch-hiker. I gave her a lift is all.”
“And I’ll bet she gave you one, too. Funny, I saw her go in but I never seen her leave.” As he said this, Mel tried to peek around Benny’s thick torso to see into the house.
Benny shifted his bulk left and right by small gradations to glut up as much of the doorway as possible. Then he said, “Listen, Mel, it’s good to see you but I got a meeting I gotta get to. Is there something--?”
“Well, yeah, there is. That’s why I’m here. You had a Peeping Tom last night. Course, with what you got going on in there, who could blame a guy for peeping? Anyway, I thought you’d want to know.”
Benny’s face instantly darkened; the top of his bald head flushed a throbbing pink. “When was this, Mel? What time?”
“Not real late. Nine-thirty, ten. Guy was parked a long time under the big tree. Then he sort of sized up the house and snuck into the side-yard. Looked in one window, just quick, then moved on to another. Living room, I think. Might’ve been the same window that got busted with the coconut a few nights ago. Lot of action at that window. He stood there quite a while, like he was seeing something really good.”
Mel smiled at that. Benny didn’t. “Wha’d he look like?”
The neighbor shrugged. “Couldn’t see all that much detail. But he was tall. Seemed clean-cut, not like some neighborhood dirtbag or run of the mill pervert. Walked back to his car—“
“What kind of car? Caddy? Benz? Beemer? Was it black? Dark windows, anything like that?”
Mel got just slightly flustered at the sudden urgent questioning. “Well, I’m not real sure. But no, I think it was just, you know, an average kind of car, maybe gray or silver, something like that.”
Benny allowed himself a very brief and very tentative moment of relief. He doubted anyone working for Frank Fortuna would be driving just an average car.
“Anyway,” Mel went on, “he got in, took one last look and drove away. Just thought you’d want to know.”
Carlos Guzman was a small, lean, natty fellow with a bifurcated pencil moustache shaped so that the two halves arced up toward his nostrils in the middle. His black hair was neatly parted. The pleats in his gray silk trousers lay perfectly flat and his linen guayabera was buttoned to the throat. Seated at his desk between two hulking bodyguards, one of whom was the brute who’d pitched Peter off the seawall, he looked somehow like a slender volume of poetry coddled between two giant bookends. For a long moment, before he said a word, he just glared at Benny with a gaze that was as cool and steady as that of an owl. The gaze wasn’t an angry look but there was disapproval in it. Finally he said, “You disappointed me the other day. I thought I was dealing with a businessman.”
Benny squirmed in his seat because he knew deep down that he was not a businessman, though he hoped to be one someday. He was trying to learn how. He’d put on a shirt with a very tight collar for this meeting, and even a tie. He tried to mimic Carlos’s elegant manners and easy but authoritative posture, but the effort made him perspire even in the chilly air-conditioned office and he could feel his shirt growing damp along his spine. He said, “I’m sorry, Carlos. I was called out of town on a very urgent matter. A high-stress kind of thing. I just forgot about our meeting. I blew it. I’m sorry.”
Carlos gave a slight nod, which seemed to be as far as he would go in accepting the apology. He said, “And now you’d like to resume our negotiations. You have such confidence that the opportunity is still available?”
In spite of himself, Benny leaned forward and put his elbows on Carlos’s desk. He knew it was a sloppy pose, unbusinesslike, but he couldn’t really help it, it’s who he was. He said, “Actually, I wanted to see you about something altogether different. Something very pressing. Can we talk?”
He glanced very quickly at the two bodyguards but Carlos made no gesture to dismiss them and his gaze never wandered from Benny’s dampening and gradually flushing face. After a clumsy pause he cleared his throat and went on.
“I have a friend, a woman, who needs to disappear. I’m hoping you can help her get to Cuba, arrange papers so that she can stay there.”
“Stay there? How long?”
“I don’t know. Maybe forever. Or till she can make other plans.”
“This friend, she has a passport? Money?”
“Right now she has nothing. She left home very suddenly. She can’t go back. I’ll cover the cost.”
Carlos didn’t smile at that but his moustache moved a little and something just slightly mocking came into his voice. “You will? Or your father-in-law will?”
Benny’s scalp flushed a shade darker at that. “I will. This has nothing to do with him.”
“Ah,” said Carlos, and he paused to consider. For the first time he pulled his stare away from Benny and looked through the window of his office. The office was on the third floor of one of the harbor-front buildings Carlos owned. Below, berthed in orderly marinas, were big fishing boats and sailboats, their gleaming tuna towers and masts seeming to nod politely in greeting each other as the vessels rocked ever so slightly in the breeze.
“This woman who needs to disappear,” he resumed at last. “Why?”
“I’d rather not say.”
Carlos folded his hands. They were perfectly manicured and there seemed to be clear lacquer on the fingernails. “I respect your discretion,” he said, “But I do not do business blind and I can not accept that answer.”
Benny blinked, licked his lips, and sweated.
“She’s wanted by the authorities?” Carlos asked.
“No,” said Benny, which was true as far he was aware.
“A domestic situation? A jealous husband? A love affair gone wrong?”
“No. Nothing like that.”
Carlos unclasped his pretty hands and lay them flat across the desk. “Benny,” he said, “I don’t have time to sit here playing guessing games with you. If you want my help you have to tell me why this person needs to flee.”
Benny frowned and looked down at his lap. He was chagrined to see the wrinkles in his bunched up pants and the way their bottoms failed to reach the tops of his socks. He’d so badly wanted to handle this meeting well, coolly, professionally, and now he felt the last small chance of that slipping away. His voice rose in pitch though not in volume, and he weakly blurted out, “Carlos, please. She’s a nice person and if she doesn’t leave she’ll die. That’s all I can tell you. Isn’t that enough?”
The neat man’s face revealed nothing of whether it was enough or not. He lifted his hands from the desk, slowly bent his elbows, and lightly tapped the pads of his fingertips together. “Come again tomorrow,” he said at last. “I’ll think it over.”
He looked toward the window once again and Benny knew the meeting was finished. Secretly, he tried to smooth the front of his trousers and to tuck his shirt in more se
curely before rising from his chair and heading for the door.
27.
“Oh hell,” said Lydia, having tried on several bathing suits offered on loan by Glenda and Meg, none of which could quite accommodate her curves. “These just don’t work for me. Anybody mind if I go topless?”
“Make yourself happy,” Glenda said. Meg just shrugged and headed out to the pool with her yoga mat. Peter was already out there, reading. The cat lay contentedly on the cool flagstones in the shadow of his lounge chair, and when he thought no one was looking Peter would reach down and scratch the cat behind the ears. Every time he did it, the cat would blink its yellow eyes, throw its head back and yawn with pleasure, then nestle its skull against Peter’s palm, asking to be scratched some more. When Lydia came out and removed the oversized tee shirt that she’d borrowed, Peter tried to be grown-up, almost European, and not to stare for more than a second or two.
It was a stunning late morning in Key West. The earlier haze had lifted, leaving behind a fresh-washed blue sky dotted with little teases of white cloud that shrank and vanished even as you watched. Moment to moment the sun grew warmer, the reflected heat more enveloping, caressing; the breeze came in random puffs that brought different aromas every time—sometimes the sharp brine of nearby sea, sometimes the musk of fleshy flowers stretching open for the day.
Meg finished her yoga and started doing aerobics in the pool. Lydia joined her, and the two of them stood waist-deep in the shallow end, hands braced on the bordering tiles, kicking in unison like aspiring Rockettes.
The breeze increased just slightly. From the surrounding palms came the restful and familiar sound of rattling fronds, a rhythmic scratching, like maracas. Then the sound went off the beat. A new sound—a muffled crack, then a gradually rising ripping noise, as of heavy fabric being rent—filled the air as a spent frond bent double and began with somehow tragic slowness to peel away from the supporting trunk. The dying frond creaked, paused, seemed for an instant to steady itself, and then it could be seen that among the brittle tendrils a pair of human hands were grasping and flailing and a pair of human legs were kicking and clasping, trying desperately to hold on. The frond drooped further, its angle against gravity grew more and more improbable, and finally it fell, carrying its passenger along with it. It landed on the tall dense hedge that went all around the Bufano’s pool and yard, and when it hit, a man rolled forth from the wrecked foliage as though emerging from a chrysalis. He bounced off the top of the hedge, snapping small twigs as he tumbled, and came to earth at last in a loamy bed of pansies and impatiens around five feet from the pool. With impressive dexterity and presence of mind, he spun in the dirt and extracted a small-caliber revolver from the waistband of his pants as he scrambled to his feet, assumed the brace position, and shouted, “Everybody freeze!”
Tropical Swap (Key West Capers Book 10) Page 11