Tropical Swap (Key West Capers Book 10)

by Laurence Shames

  “Maybe you’ve met before,” Meg said. “In past lives, I mean. Maybe you’re both old souls.”

  Peter said, “Can we please not start with the old souls bullshit?”

  Ignoring the comment, Lydia said, “Yeah, but with old souls everyone imagines they were someone really good before. Gandhi. Mother Teresa. Buddha. This is just the opposite. I looked at him and I saw bad. And I know that’s what he was seeing when he looked at me.”

  “You’re not bad,” Meg said soothingly.

  “Yes I am. Look, I don’t mean evil. I’m nice. I keep my word. But I’m bad. And so’s he. Outlaw bad. Rule-breaker bad. Don’t-mess-with-me bad. If you were bad too, you’d know exactly what I mean.”

  Meg had no reply to that. Peter stroked the purring cat. Lydia squirmed on her chaise. She seemed to find it impossible to keep her ankles from crossing and uncrossing. From somewhere inside her commodious shirt she produced the business card that Sheehan had given her. She held it by the corner, as though for fear that the very cardboard might singe her skin. “I have to see him,” she said. “I have to go to him.”

  Peter said, “I hate to be the one to throw cold water, but you’re in hiding, remember? That’s the deal.”

  Meg said, “You could probably sneak out through the window.”

  “Sure,” said Peter, “isn’t that what windows are for? Coconuts in, fugitives out.”

  Lydia said, “No, I wouldn’t sneak. That’s not me. I’ll talk to Benny, tell him this is just something that I have to do.”

  “Great,” said Peter. “Just tell Benny the Mafioso that you feel this sudden irresistible attraction to the FBI. I’m sure he’ll be very supportive.”

  “He’ll understand,” said Lydia. “Benny and me, after what we’ve been through together, we know each other pretty well.”

  “Of course,” said Peter. “Probably you were old souls together too. Maybe he whacked you in a past life.”

  “He trusts me,” Lydia said. “If I tell him I won’t turn, he’ll believe me.”

  Peter pointed vaguely through the window at the streets beyond. “And what if the wrong person sees you out there? If the wrong person sees you, Benny’s old soul is going to need a new ass, because his current one is toast.”

  “And so’s mine,” countered Lydia. “Look, it’s not a risk-free world.”

  “I’ve noticed.”

  “So liberating to accept that,” Meg put in.

  “He’d be absolutely crazy to let you do this,” Peter said, still fondling the cat.

  31.

  That evening they were four at dinner.

  Glenda ordered in Chinese, and when the food arrived in hot brown bags Meg and Peter had at first, by long habit, reached for the flat wooden chopsticks in their sanitary paper wrappers. But when they saw that their hostess had laid out forks and knives they politely changed to Western utensils. Peter secretly admitted that he had not enjoyed Kung Pao chicken this much in years, without having to worry about peanuts and bits of red pepper tumbling off his chopstick before getting to his face. The sesame noodles could actually be twirled and delivered to one’s mouth in a tidy packet rather than as a chin-tickling mess of dangling strands. Beer was swigged directly from the bottle, rice was spooned straight from the white containers with the thin metal handles. In all, it was a pleasant and convivial family-style meal, at least until the crisis of the final dumpling.

  Slightly deflated and no longer steaming, it sat alone on the plate when Benny and Peter, seated diagonally across from one another at the outdoor table, reached for it at the exact same moment. The tines of their forks touched as in some lilliputian sword fight but then both men instantly pulled back. Benny, as the host, motioned politely for his guest to take the morsel. “Please,” he said. “Have it.”

  “No,” said Peter, “it’s yours.”

  “Really. Go ahead.”

  He gestured for Peter to take the dumpling but Peter didn’t do it. He couldn’t do it, couldn’t get his fork to go so close to where Benny’s fork had just been stabbing. Covering up, he said he really wasn’t hungry anymore.

  Benny looked sad when Peter said that. He’d heard more than self-denial or simple deference in the statement. Gently putting down his own utensil, he said to Peter, “Are you really that afraid of me?”

  Disarmed by the directness of the question, Peter gave a nervous little laugh that briefly interrupted his breathing and gave him the hiccups. “No. Well. Um, yes. H’cup.”

  “Thank you for admitting it. It hurts my feelings, but thank you. But why, Peter? Have I ever done anything to do? Ever threatened you?”

  Peter shook his head and hiccupped.

  “You think I’m a violent person? You think I’ll just blow up sometime?”

  Peter did not know what to say. Trying to help out, Meg said, “It’s just because you’re Mafia.”

  Benny nodded sorrowfully. “Okay. Mafia. But what’s Mafia? It’s just a word.”

  “Right,” said Meg. “A scary word.”

  Peter hiccupped. This time it was a loud, two-note hiccup, a bit like a low-pitched hee-haw.

  Mostly to himself, Benny said, “I hate it that people are afraid of me. I’m supposed to get off on it but I hate it.”

  There was a silence broken only by the rasp of crickets and the occasional half-stifled sound from Peter’s gullet. Then Glenda said, “Would anyone like a fortune cookie and some orange wedges?”

  Before anyone could answer, Benny abruptly stood up from the table. The movement was not threatening but there was both frustration and resolve in it. Mopping his lips on a napkin, he said to his guests, “Come with me a minute, please. Don’t be afraid. There’s something I want to show you.”

  Without another word he led the way into the house and through the living room and up the stairway to the master suite. To Meg and Peter it felt quite strange to be there again; it was like returning to a place they’d lived in long ago, except that they’d lived there a mere two days before. They’d first known that bedroom as nothing more than an anonymous chamber owned by strangers, a place to have a vacation. They’d made love in that very bed then hidden behind it poised to throw things when Glenda showed up in the middle of the night. Now they were back to being visitors. It just felt odd. What was so peculiar was that the room itself hadn’t changed at all. It was the same exact same room it had always been, but then again it wasn’t.

  Benny had switched on a light and stood now between the foot of the bed and the closed door of his closet. Somewhat theatrically, he tried to turn the doorknob. “Locked,” he said. “But I’m guessing you noticed that.”

  Meg said nothing. Peter covered his mouth with his fist and tried to smother a hiccup.

  “Hey, it’s okay,” Benny said. “Human nature. Strange house, locked closet. Who wouldn’t be curious?”

  “I’m curious,” said Glenda, who had trailed the group and now was leaning in the bedroom doorway. To Peter and Meg, she said, “He never even lets me see what’s in there.”

  “You least of all,” said her husband, before returning his attention to his guests. “S’okay. Strange house, locked closet. Could be anything, right? Then you hear this strange word, this scary word. Mafia. So then what do you think? Guns? Clubs? Briefcases stuffed with cash? Come on, Peter, talk to me. What do you think is in the closet?”

  “I have no idea,” he stammered.

  Benny paused then said, “Well, I’m gonna show you.”

  Peter felt a sudden clench of panic that instantly cured him of his hiccups. He didn’t want to know Benny’s secrets. He felt in some inchoate way that knowing Benny’s secrets would only mire him more deeply in a situation he’d never wanted to be in. Weakly, he said, “You really don’t have to.”

  “Yeah, I do,” said Benny. “I do have to. I’m tired of hiding what’s inside me, tired of worrying what if people found out. There’s a time to come clean, and I think this is it.”

  Without taking his eyes off his g
uests he sidled over to his nightstand. He pulled open a drawer that seemed to have a false back; reaching past the divider he came out with a key. As he stepped back toward the closet there was a silent, wavelike movement in the room, the women leaning closer, Peter easing back by barely visible degrees. Benny slipped the key into the lock and turned the doorknob. At first all that could be seen were some shirts and jackets arrayed on hangers. Then he switched on a light and stepped aside.

  At the back of the closet stood a large wooden easel, and on the easel was a big sketch pad, and on the page to which the pad was opened was a portrait, done in charcoal and pastels, of Glenda. The lines of the portrait were sinuous and soft, not a hard edge anywhere, the colors pale and almost melting. The eyes were slightly turned down, rather bashfully; the mouth was halfway to a smile but seemed to hold a quiet sorrow, too. For a moment Meg and Peter and Glenda all stared at the picture and no one seemed to breathe.

  Finally Benny said, “This is what I do when no one’s watching. This is what I do when I’m alone. Mafia tough guy makes pictures and hides them in a closet. If anybody wants to laugh, go ‘head, I’m okay with that.”

  No one laughed, and Benny, emboldened or just compelled to continue with his self-exposure, stepped into the closet and started flipping pages of the pad. There were images of Glenda in pencil, in ink, in crayon. There were tender, caressing drawings of trees, of flowers, of the cat. “No idea if these are any good,” he said. “I never had any lessons. I regret that. But could you imagine me walking into art school? Scaring people? Ridiculous, right?”

  He gestured toward a shelf where dozens of other sketch pads were stacked. To Glenda he said, “Worked on these day and night after you walked out on me. Didn’t know what else to do. Drawing, it almost made me happy. Distracted me, at least. Then I started letting myself wonder if maybe this was something I could be good at, something I could do. Something other than being a dumb goombah. Something that would make you proud of me, baby.”

  “I am proud of you, Benny.”

  He instantly and secretly teared up at the words but he couldn’t quite accept them. “Nah, I haven’t earned that, I ain’t done nothing to deserve it. I was hoping to open a gallery. You know, see if anyone liked this stuff, if anyone would buy it. That’s what I was talking to Carlos about, renting a place. I wanted it to be a big surprise. Well, I guess I blew it.”

  A moment passed and Benny seemed to get shy again. He switched off the closet light and said, “Okay, show’s over. But Peter, lemme ask you something. You still afraid of me?”

  Part 4

  32.

  At a corner of the parking lot at the Last Resort, there was a small fenced area that once had been a garden. Hibiscus hedges had ringed it; passion vines had wound among and softened the ugly metal rhomboids of the chain-link fence. Those civilizing touches had vanished long ago, and the former refuge was now just a scruffy patch of rough grass intermixed with spiky weeds and broken glass that gave off fractured reflections from the neon signs of the surrounding businesses. Stomped cigarette butts and crushed and faded beer cans were strewn here and there; from nearby lanes and alleys a sporadic cacophony of scooter engines and drunken laughs and shrill arguments warped the air. This was the Key West that upscale tourists seldom saw, the Key West of flaking paint and busted furniture, of drifters, junkies, petty criminals, and it suited Andy Sheehan just fine.

  To Lydia Greenspan’s slight surprise, the tawdry neighborhood appealed to her as well. She found it not so much sinister as indifferent, unapologetic. From the moment she’d stepped out of the taxi in front of the motel, she’d felt somehow unburdened, free. There was a bracing, bristly texture to the neighborhood, an all-encompassing roughness, as though the entire precinct had been gone over with very coarse sandpaper and then left as it was. When Sheehan had met her at the motel entrance and led her to the ruined garden to talk, even the chairs they sat on were rough. The chairs were made of interwoven bands of plastic that had grown brittle and grizzled in the sun; the strands scratched at the backs of Lydia’s legs as she sat there, making her uncommonly aware of her skin.

  Sheehan, characteristically, had begun the conversation with a taunt. “So,” he said. “You’ve decided to come over to the winning side.”

  “I never said that. I said I was coming to offer you a deal.”

  The agent’s response to that was a slight smile and a soft but utterly confident laugh. “Lydia,” he began…but then he paused. It was the first time he had spoken her name, and he was shaken to realize that the feel of it burned his mouth like a too-big gulp of whiskey. “Lydia,” he said again, “here’s something you don’t seem to understand. You don’t offer the FBI a deal. The FBI offers you a deal. Maybe.”

  “And here’s something you don’t seem to understand,” she countered. “I’m not offering the FBI anything. What I’m offering, I’m offering to you. As a private citizen. As a man.”

  There was something in her eyes that made Sheehan squirm in his raspy chair so that the coruscating plastic tugged at his shirt and pants. “Go ahead.”

  “So here’s the deal. I’m going to tell you absolutely everything you want to know about my little escapade in the stock market. And you’re going to swear on your mother that you will never, ever use the information.”

  Sheehan came out with another brief laugh, but it wasn’t quite as confident this time. He felt that the conversation was somehow getting away from him, that at some point he’d lost momentum and control and he didn’t know quite when. “And why would I even consider a deal like that?”

  “Oh,” said Lydia casually, “I could think of a few reasons. First, it’s the only deal I’m offering. Take a pass on it and you’ll find out nothing.”

  “Don’t be too sure of that,” the agent said. “Finding stuff out is what I do.”

  “Right. I get that. You want to be the smart guy, the first to know, the guy who figures all the angles and puts it all together. But why? So you can tell your bosses and get a pat on the head and maybe even get your name in the paper for a day or two?”

  Sheehan let that pass and they just eyed each other for a moment. Somewhere the sound of a siren was rising and falling. From inside an anonymous motel room came a propulsive creaking of bedsprings. Exhaust fumes from unmufflered scooters mixed with the overripe musk of browning flowers and made the air narcotic and thick.

  “But okay,” Lydia went on, “here’s another reason. If you don’t take the deal, I can promise you you’ll never see me again. Would that bother you at all, Sheehan?”

  She leaned just slightly toward him as she said this. He imagined he could smell her hair. He remembered her bare shoulders, the teasing, goading way she rounded them. He dimly understood that the question she’d asked was the most dangerous of questions and that if he answered it at all he was already well on his way to being finished as a cop. He heard himself say softly, “Yeah, it would.”

  Lydia leaned back, let her rough chair scratch at her. She smoothed her lap and her hands lingered on the tops of her thighs. “It would bother me, too,” she said. “So let’s talk about what might happen if you do take the deal.”

  Sheehan stared at her and found himself mimicking her posture. His hands were on his legs and he distinctly felt the outline of each finger as it pressed down on his flesh.

  “If you take the deal,” she went on, “I think what might happen is that you’d go to that liquor store across the street and buy us a pint of bourbon. Then maybe we’ll sit here drinking it, taking turns from the bottle, just looking at each other. Then I think you might take me to your room and we’ll see if things work out as fabulous as I think they will. What do you say, Sheehan? Deal?”

  33.

  Later, her head on his chest and their torsos forming a kind of arch above the valley in the middle of the sagging bed, Lydia was saying, “The thing is, the scam was just so simple. I can’t believe there aren’t other people pulling the same thing.”

 
“Probably there are,” said Sheehan, with a bland acceptance that surprised him. “So tell me.”

  She lifted up on an elbow and kissed his shoulder before continuing. “I was recruited into it by an old friend,” she said, “a guy who’s a paralegal at a firm that handles mergers. Big mergers. The kind of deals that move the market. Takeover targets go up twenty, forty, sixty percent as soon as word gets out. Attorneys at that firm can’t have any contact with brokers. Closely watched by the SEC, and if there’s anything fishy, probably by you guys too.”

  “Definitely by us,” the agent put in, but even as he said us he noticed with a pang that he didn’t quite feel like part of the Bureau anymore. He still had his badge; he still had his gun. But a sense of separation, of dereliction had already started to settle in. It was an empty feeling but not necessarily a bad one; it felt less like a betrayal than like a difficult but honest goodbye that had been simmering for many months.

  “There’s a log of every phone call, every email,” Lydia went on. “But that’s for the attorneys. Who cares if some lowly paralegal who happens to have access to the files has lunch now and then with another lowly paralegal whose firm is in an altogether different business?”

  “So that’s where you come in? The second paralegal?”

  “Right. Librarian for a boring firm that does estates and trusts. Nothing whatsoever to do with Wall Street. So I get the tip, pass it to Orlovsky. Orlovsky does some quick-and-dirty research to cover his ass, make it look like he’s playing fair. He executes a few big trades, looks smart, makes a bunch of money. Easy as pie.”

  “So Orlovsky’s the linchpin?”

  “That’s what I thought, until I made the mistake of asking for more money. Then I found out there’s a very nasty guy behind Orlovsky who’s forcing him to run the scam. A big client who lost a ton of dough in the downturn a few years ago and wants to make it all back in a hurry.”