"We're makin' it too complicated, Sam," Tony objected. "I think we should do it the old-fashioned way. Let Ski Cat pick up Belk and we'll take him shrimpin'." That was their euphemism for taking him out on a boat and beating him until they were sure he had told them all he knew. They could then toss him overboard with a few fathoms of heavy chain somewhere out close to the Gulf Stream.
"Nah! I think that's a waste of time," Sam said. "I figure Belk doesn’t know any more than what's in that file. Barrera is way too smart to trust a drunk with anything very important. She just set him up as a red herring to keep us busy. Without something to tell him when to release the DVD, how could Belk be the fail-safe, even if he had a copy of the real video stashed somewhere else?"
At this point, Jimmy spoke up. "Well, Sam, I think you may both be right. Belk’s a drunk, but he's still a pretty smart guy. Belk knew Connie had called on a cell phone, and so he knew anybody looking for her would come straight to him. So he set up a dummy file, easy to find, with nothing much in it, thinking it would confuse whoever was looking. Then he could have put the real file somewhere else, or maybe he even sent Connie to a different lawyer."
Sam liked Jimmy’s reasoning. "The only way to find out for sure is to ask Belk. You think Ski Cat's bright enough to do that?" he inquired of Tony.
"Ski Cat ain’t got the sense God gave a squirrel," Tony replied, "But he’s mean. Mean, and not scared of nothin’."
"If we use him for this, Ski Cat can tie us to Belk," Sam worried aloud.
"If the law gets hold of Ski Cat, me and Tony are tied to him anyhow," Jimmy argued.
Sam conceded that to Jimmy. They finally agreed to have Ski Cat take Belk shrimping, as they called it, but Sam wanted Jimmy and Tony present on the trip. That way, Ski Cat could do the heavy lifting, but they could hear first-hand what Belk had to say.
Day 11, Midday
Now that the painkillers were wearing off, Connie’s foot hurt badly. The doctor had been by earlier, and finding her lucid, he explained that the X-rays showed no major damage. He went on to say this meant there were no broken bones. There was extensive bruising and tearing of muscles, and getting back to normal would take a long time. Once the initial swelling went down, he planned to put a walking cast on the foot for a few weeks. Once that was removed, she could start physical therapy.
Connie took all this in with some trepidation. She tried to assess what it meant to her plans, but she was still feeling somewhat drugged. She did figure Rick would be getting anxious. If she didn’t tell him something, he might take rash action. There were endless possibilities for trouble, given that he was dealing with the mob. That was hard for Connie to get used to; she couldn’t see Rick mixed up with mob heavies. He was scummy enough, but he was such a wuss that violence seemed beyond him. He’d had a lot of trouble getting through medical school because blood made him queasy. Greed made for strange alliances, Connie thought, not for the first time.
A soft knock at her door interrupted Connie’s wandering thoughts. She looked up to see a pleasant looking, slightly too-handsome young man, and an attractive but brusque-looking woman. Both were in business attire, and both were about her age.
"Now that you're awake, Ms. Barrera," the man explained, "we wanted to look in on you. I'm Earl Gomez from the mayor’s office and this is Anita DeCastro from the City Attorney’s office. We want to express the city’s official regret for the incident on the beach. We don't want you to worry about anything but getting well. You are now an official guest of the City of Miami Beach. We'll take care of all your medical expenses and your hotel as well."
The lady lawyer took over, saying, "We know you're in no shape at the moment to deal with anything beyond getting well, but we'll be around to look in on you when you feel better. For right now, though, if you could tell us where you are staying, we can make arrangements for your hotel bill."
Connie hesitated for an instant, remembering she was registered under an assumed name at the Shelbourne. She quickly decided that was not relevant to her current problem, since they obviously had her identification from her purse. "I'm registered at the Shelbourne under the name of Lucy Rivera, so my ex-boyfriend can't find me," she said.
"That's no problem. We deal with that kind of thing all the time," the lawyer said. "Glad you're doing a little better, and I hope you get well soon," she said, backing out and closing the door.
It occurred to Connie that the City of Miami Beach was at her mercy. She wished she had a real lawyer instead of that rummy she had co-opted for her blackmail scheme. Her situation had promise. Her retirement might be more prosperous than she had envisioned.
She still had to deal with Rick, though. He was almost certain to screw this up somehow if she didn’t keep him calm. If she called him, he could find her, she reasoned. Of course, now that she had her package stashed with Belk, that really didn’t matter.
She was as safe as could be, unless Rick and his compatriots were willing to be exposed. She needed to remember that and quit worrying so much about being found. She had figured all along that Rick would bring in his mob buddies -- he had no other way to get the money. She didn't need to be nervous about them. They would be no more eager than Rick to have her video in the hands of the news media. Rick was certainly too chickenhearted to take that risk, and she thought his associates would view it as bad business.
After working her way through all this, she decided just to call Rick from her bedside phone. The city of Miami Beach would even pick up the tab. She liked that. Connie picked up the phone and dialed Rick’s direct line at the clinic.
Rick was sitting at his desk, doodling, thinking that in a few more days, Mary Lou would be checking into the clinic with the next group of patients. He was worried because Connie was gone. Without Connie, he would have to spend twice the normal amount of time with each patient. Given the demanding nature of Mary Lou’s "weight problem," he was troubled by this prospect. If he could just keep Mary Lou happy, he was sure business would be booming soon.
With just a little time, he could find another color consultant who could play Connie’s role. That color stuff was bullshit anyway, so it shouldn’t be that tough. He’d just have to spend a little time getting the new person acquainted with the core values of Chromatic Nutrition, Inc.
He missed Connie on a personal level, though. She had been his alter ego for a lot of years, now. There was a lot of comfort in their relationship that Rick knew was not going to be found with another business associate. He was getting maudlin when his private line rang.
When Rick answered the phone and heard Connie’s voice, he hoped for just a split second that she had experienced a change of heart. He was sure he could square things with Sam. The guy was so dense that it wouldn’t be too difficult. Rick knew he could come up with something to satisfy the buffoon. Connie’s first words gave him hope.
"Rick, I think I’ve been hasty."
No shit, thought Rick, gaining confidence by the second. She wants to come back, he thought. I’m not going to be too easy on her, though. Make her crawl. He had visions of explaining to Sam what a tough negotiator he had been, to get Connie to see the light.
"I know I caught you with your pants down," Connie went on.
Had she? Rick was trying desperately to remember. All those Mary Lou episodes ran together like a bad dream. No, he didn’t think she had caught him with his pants down. She couldn’t mean that literally.
"In a manner of speaking," he responded, pleased with himself.
Connie continued, "I know you just took out a big mortgage for the house and the business isn't generating any cash yet. I understand that you're in a cash crunch."
Rick thought, she sees me as stable and she knows the business is about to pay off. He employed the power of silence, the way he had learned to do in his courses on interviewing patients.
"I’ve decided there isn’t a real rush, now that I’ve got all my traps in place. Take all the time you need to raise that money. Just don�
��t do anything stupid. I know you don't want that DVD on the 6 o'clock news. Don’t fire-sale anything to raise the half mil; you may need more later. Who knows? I’m thinking a month or so for the first installment, Rick," Connie added, thinking she should be back on her feet by then.
"Connie," Rick started to say, but then he heard dial tone.
"Greedy bitch," he muttered to himself. What was this about "first installment," he wondered. Here he had been ready to forgive and forget. Let her back into his life. Some gratitude she displayed.
But Rick was soon thinking of the positive aspects of this situation. He could still turn things to his advantage. He would tell old "Shrimp Boat Sam" that he had bargained hard and gotten them another three weeks.
Sam was wondering what he had ever done to deserve Rick Leatherby as he listened to the dial tone at the end of the tape Jimmy had just played for him. He figured there had to be some legitimate businessmen who weren’t brain-dead. How come he had to get stuck with two in a row who didn’t have enough sense to come in out of the rain? Aloud, he said, "Okay, Jimmy. This is pretty good, I reckon. Broad can’t figure out how to grab the money, with her foot up in the air. Gives us more time to bust up her plans."
"You catch when she said ‘half a mil,’ Sam?" Jimmy asked. "Doc’s tryin’ to take some himself."
Sam grunted his acknowledgment. He thought to himself that Jimmy deserved a better cut of the action. Fat Tony wouldn’t have picked up on that, any more than Sam had. He already knew he couldn’t trust Rick Leatherby. The man was a walking lie. It was the only sure thing about him. Sam and Jimmy couldn’t see that anything changed as a result of Connie’s latest move. The next step was still to have an interview with Mr. Belk.
Charlie Thompson was sitting in Joe’s room at the hospital, filling Joe in on the latest from last night’s surveillance of Ski Cat’s place. "Looks like your buddy, Donald, was right. There's no doubt that they're selling drugs out of that place," Charlie said. "One of our undercover guys made a buy, just to be sure. Some things don’t track, though."
"Yeah," Joe agreed. "What was Tony Cicero doin' there, for one. He's into everything but drugs."
"No sign of Ski Cat, either," Charlie added. "Maybe Fat Tony uses some of those guys for odd jobs or something. Can't believe the Alfanos are into drugs after all these years."
"The housing authority listed someone nobody had ever heard of as the tenant of record, but that means less than nothing," Charlie reasoned. "I think we should keep an eye on the place a little longer. It wouldn’t hurt to see who shows up there over the next few days. The problem is that they might have a source inside the department. The longer we watch, the more likely it becomes that the crooks will find out about it."
"Come on, Charlie. They know we're watching. One of them clobbered me right out in front of the place and hauled me away. That was no random street crime. Somebody saw me watching. If they didn’t know who I was before they hit me, they sure as hell figured it out when they moved me. Ski Cat’s disappearance yesterday was no coincidence, given that it happened right afterward. You know what that means."
"Yeah, you're right," Charlie grudgingly admitted. If the bad guys suspected they were being watched and they continued to deal, it was a certainty that they had put the second string in. Nobody who was important or who knew anything would set foot around that place again. He was surprised that Fat Tony hadn’t gotten the word in time to avoid being seen there. That had to mean Tony wasn't part of the drug operation.
Charlie reluctantly agreed with Joe. If they busted the place at this point, they would find cocaine and money enough for one night’s operation, and a bunch of trigger happy, teenaged dimwits who all thought they were big gangsters. Then the legal system would have to deal with more worthless scum who were too far down the food chain to be missed.
Charlie’s immediate problem was political. The Mayor and the County Commission both wanted a drug bust for the newspapers. The politicians didn’t really care about the quality of the bust or whether or not it was a waste of time in the war on drugs. They just wanted as much action as possible for the airtime it would get on the 6 o’clock news. For their purposes, one drug bust was as good as another.
Ski Cat was driving his Lincoln Navigator to Thunderbolt, wishing that dumb-ass Meatball hadn’t hit the cop. If the cops were suspicious about him before, Ski Cat knew they were certain after that. He had taken a cab from the airport and had the driver detour past Yamacraw on his way to the safe house out on East 53rd street where he’d left the Navigator.
He tried to keep his own wheels away from his "office," especially now that the heat was on. What he had seen from the cab confirmed his worst fears. There were several street people around who didn’t belong there. He knew that the normal complement of winos and mental defectives were locked up at the city jail to make room for the new ones, who no doubt were all peace officers.
Not a big deal, he consoled himself -- the cops could have his whole organization. It wouldn’t take him but a day or two to get going again, once he got through with this Connie Barrera gig. Ski Cat wondered again what she had done as he wheeled the Navigator into the tree-shaded parking lot of the barbecue place on Victory Drive.
He went in and got a pulled-pork sandwich and a beer to go and drove on down to Thunderbolt. He parked the Navigator where he could watch the river and started in on the sandwich. Ski Cat didn’t work if he was hungry, no matter how hot Tony’s errand was. He had learned early on that you could never tell when your next meal might be, so, if you were hungry, you ate whenever you could get food.
He planned to nab this lawyer when he left his office at 5 o’clock. He wouldn’t have to drag him outside and risk attracting attention. Tony had gotten the guy’s tag number for Ski Cat, and Ski Cat had already seen that Belk’s car was parked in the shady lot behind the office. He had about five minutes. He finished his sandwich and started the Navigator. Two minutes later, he was parked on the driver’s side of Belk’s car. He got into the back seat of the Navigator, on the passenger side. Belk came out a minute or two later.
Day 11, Afternoon/Evening
The video might not be XXX, but Willie recognized hot stuff when he saw it. He had finally gotten bored enough after the lunch hour crowd went back to work to watch the rest of the mystery DVD. He was trying to figure out what he had here. He recognized quickly that the woman made the video to put the heat on a diet clinic run by Chromatic Nutrition, Inc. The pretty Hispanic lady pointed the finger at the guy running the clinic for a recent hit and run accident that left a young local girl dead. She also gave enough information about him making it with some floozy named Mary Lou Willoughby to fry the guy’s marriage, if he was married, and she showed a bunch of charts with numbers and arrows and business names and addresses that she claimed proved the clinic was laundering drug money.
Willie couldn’t really follow all that -- just couldn't focus on all those details. He knew he had the mental capacity to follow all that stuff she was saying, but he’d rather not tax himself. She looked like you could trust her, Willie thought, so he was sure she was right about everything she said.
Willie knew he had something of value. He just had to think through how to use it to his best advantage. He had gone over the register tape looking to see who had rented the DVD that belonged in the case marked #1157 and had discovered that Jonas Belk had rented "Spring Break Gone Bad." Willie thought Belk was therefore the person most likely to have put the mystery DVD in his return slot.
His first thought was to see if Belk would offer a reward for the return of the mystery DVD. Willie pulled out Belk’s customer account agreement. He made several calls to the daytime contact number on the form, but he kept getting Belk’s voice mail. Willie hung up each time. He couldn’t risk leaving messages on people’s voice mail in his line of business. If you embarrassed one of these perverts, that was the end of that customer relationship.
That issue aside, Willie just plain hated voice
mail. He was sure everyone with voice mail also had a real telephone number on which you could reach them, if you were one of the chosen.
He knew about big shots screening their calls. They just had voice mail -- what a stupid term -- on phone numbers they gave to people like him. That way they didn’t have to talk to him unless they felt like it. They even used caller i.d. to weed out his calls -- he was sure of it. Willie knew they could see his call coming and send him to "voice jail," as he called it. They locked him up in there and didn’t let him out until they were good and ready.
Well, Willie was no fool. He would hang up rather than go to voice jail. He had been absently redialing Belk’s number, listening to the message, and hanging up mechanically as he pondered the evils of voice mail. He suddenly heard a real person answer. Damn! He had almost missed his chance.
"Hello, Mr. Belk," Willie said, in what he imagined to be a professional tone. "Are you missin’ anything important, like?"
Belk had been sleeping off a liquid lunch, or trying to, when the phone started its persistent, continuous ringing. One call after another kept intruding on his alcoholic reverie before being intercepted by his voice mail system. He had been trying to remember how to turn off the ringer when some of his pickled neurons and synapses misfired and caused his right hand to lift the receiver. "Damn," he thought. He knew not to talk on the phone when he was smashed. It was a violation of the Canons of Ethics, or something. Anyhow, he thought talking while drunk was a bad idea. He was stuck now, though, because he had unwittingly allowed his mouth to start working without supervision.
Deception in Savannah: A Humorous Novel of Murder, Mystery, Sex, and Drugs Page 16