“What the hell did you do? Fuck his wife and try to kill him?” Katarina asked.
Some women can see right through a man. Maybe it’s because Katarina’s a redhead. Bruce Springsteen was right about a redheaded woman—she can see every dirty thing you do. Uncle Bernie claims I’m attracted to redheads because I lost my beautiful redheaded mother at a young age. I prefer to think about it like Toulouse-Lautrec did. He believed that redheaded women had a distinctive scent that aroused his prurient desires more than blondes and brunettes. Just because the guy’s legs were short didn’t mean he was stunted everywhere—his cock was so big, the prostitutes he fucked called him the “Coffee Pot.”
That little bit of art history was all I managed to get out of Art History 101 before flunking out of college. And I got that from balling the professor, a sorrel filly visiting from the Sorbonne.
“I didn’t see your pretty little tush out there when I was entertaining your guests,” I told Katarina.
“The shoot ran late. But, hey, I got terrific news. I’m going out to Hollywood for a screen test. Isn’t that exciting?”
“Awesome.” I gave her a hug that lifted her off her feet and a big kiss.
“Your mouth tastes like cock,” she said, “your cock. A little residue from that blonde bitch?”
I licked my lips. I tasted like the blonde’s cherry lip gloss. She was testing me, trying to trap me into an admission of guilt. “No way, you’re putting me on. I had a piece of cherry candy.”
“Yeah, and I know what wrapper you found it in.”
“Come on, you can ride back with me.”
“I brought my car—”
“I’ll have it trucked back to the city.”
The few hundred bucks to have the car trucked meant nothing to me. What was important in my mind was that the money bought me a few extra moments of pleasure. I hadn’t worked a day in my life and was proud of it. My trust-account checks came in each month from House of Liberte like clockwork. Bernie wasn’t any genius at making a buck, though he was good and steady, but he had Leo to back him up. Nose to the grindstone, a two-fisted moneyman, Leo was everything I never wanted to be.
Yak, yak, yak, Katarina went on about her screen test as we walked to my car. Hey, I don’t blame her. Her puss has been on the cover of every top magazine in the country, not to mention her pussy on the centerfold of some magazines that are sold in brown paper bags. She came to America from Prague, rising above Eastern European poverty the easiest way a beautiful woman knew. She worked hard, took her career seriously, and did whatever she had to in order to succeed. She had contempt for my work ethic. But what the hell, I wasn’t so crazy about it myself.
“I don’t know if I have the talent. Other models have tried it, they just don’t have the screen magic. A movie camera’s alive, it’s different than posed shots. It’s an animal that eats you up if it doesn’t like you.”
“You’ll make it, you’ve got the talent.”
“You should come out to Hollywood, you can be in movies, too,” she said. “You’re not handsome, but you have seductive eyes, just like that actor on the spaghetti jars.”
It took me a minute to realize the spaghetti-jar guy was Paul Newman. I should be so lucky to be compared to Newman on any level, though I’ve been told I could have stood in for an even older-time actor, one nobody’s heard of today, John Garfield. Except I had a scar down the center of my chin from where I plowed face-first into a tree on my first motorcycle.
We’d be three thousand miles apart if she headed for Hollywood, but Katarina was more of a good-fuck girlfriend to me than a soul mate. Besides, it would give me an excuse to run out to the West Coast more often and check out the action. Maybe I’d buy a place on the beach at Malibu.
My Bugatti had 553 horses. We did zero to sixty in 3.7 seconds. Katarina was pressed back in her seat by the acceleration. When her body caught up with the car, she leaned close to me and rubbed my crotch. “Let’s fuck when we get to your place,” she said. “My period’s coming up and I’m horny.”
What’d I say about speed?
When we reached the Long Island Expressway, I phoned my home recording. “What the hell?” I said, after listening to my only message.
“What’s the matter?”
“That was Big Bertha, Bernie’s secretary. She sounded hysterical, told me to call her right away.”
I called Bertha and she gave it to me right away.
“He’s dead, killed himself.”
It wouldn’t go down my throat or soak into my brain at first. Bernie dead? Suicide?
“Did she say why?” Katarina asked, after I hung up.
“No, she was too damn hysterical.”
I tried to call Leo, my stepbrother, to see if he knew anything, but he wasn’t in. I felt bad about Bernie. He was an okay guy, not someone I had a warm family relationship with, but more like the older uncle I only saw on holidays. After my father died, Bernie assumed a lot of airs as head of the diamond company my father built. I didn’t mind his airs, not as long as the money came in, but we drifted apart, with the money-trust check and occasional big draws for large ticket items as our only connection.
“Did Bernie have women problems?” Katarina asked.
“No, he was divorced. He had a girlfriend who lives over on Staten Island, but nothing serious. They’ve been going together for ages.”
“Cancer?”
“Not that I know of, he brags that he’s healthy as horse.”
“Oh shit.”
“Oh shit what?”
“Didn’t you tell me Bernie controls your trust?”
“That’s no problem, someone else will do it, probably Leo. He doesn’t like me, but Bernie got a fat fee for handling the money and Leo wouldn’t pass up a buck if it was wrapped around a crocodile’s dick.”
“That isn’t what I’m worried about. Love, money, and the big C.”
“Come again?”
“Love, money, and cancer. Those are the only reasons why a guy bumps himself off. And if he had money problems and was managing your money . . . Win, you may have money problems.”
Money problems? What the hell did I know about that? The only problem I had with money was finding a letter opener to cut open the monthly envelope that came with a Citibank return address.
“Jeez, Win, you look terrible.”
I fought back tears. “Fuck it, there’s been too many deaths during my life. I’m not going to mourn Bernie. I’m not going to mourn anyone again.”
I left Katarina off and called Bertha. She gave me the name and phone number of a cop who was investigating the death, a Detective Leonard. I gave him a call as I drove home. After we went through the preliminaries of who I was and how well I knew Bernie, I asked how Bernie died.
“Went out the window of his apartment,” he said. “Five stories up.”
“Out the window. There’s no balcony out his windows.”
“Not even a ledge you can stand on. He just crawled out and let himself drop. Went down headfirst.”
Jesus. Headfirst. How much speed does a person get up falling five stories? A hundred miles an hour? Two hundred?
“You’re sure it’s a suicide? Could it have been an accident?”
“You cousin-uncle, whatever, wasn’t a small guy. And his windows weren’t big. They pull up, not slide open. He would have had to kind of crawl through the window and let himself fall. It’s not like he could have been reaching for something, slipped, and went ‘oops’ out the window.”
He was right. Bernie had love handles the size of hams. And his apartment windows were old and small. Hell, I doubted he ever opened them. He wasn’t a fresh air kind of guy.
The detective asked me the same sort of questions about Bernie’s health, finances, and love life that Katarina raised. There was a moment of silence when he finished and I filled it with some thought.
“I don’t get it,” I said.
“I know. Suicides are hard for any of us to fathom.
But these people have their back to the wall, they can’t see the forest from the trees. All they know is the problem they’re facing. Suicide is violent and ugly to us. To them it’s a release.”
“No, that’s not what I don’t get. Bernie wasn’t the kind of guy who’d crawl out a window.”
“Bud, you never know till you’ve been there.”
“I’m not talking about his frame of mind, I’m talking about his method. He’d be the type who’d jump into a full bathtub holding an electric heater, even more likely to take pills. The moment he opened that window and looked down to the street, he’d have chickened out, probably puked out his guts.”
I paused, letting the thought sink into my own head before I said:
“You see, Bernie was afraid of heights.”
I had a message on my phone when I got home. It was from my lawyer, asking me to come in tomorrow. His message said he had bad news. I guess he needed to break the news of Bernie’s death to me.
6
“You’re broke.”
I stared at my lawyer like he’d just stepped out of the pages of a John Farris horror story. With a bloody knife in his hand. We were in his office on the fourteenth floor of the Flatiron Building, a building shaped like a wedge of cheese on Fifth Avenue.
“Broke? I’m a millionaire.”
“Were a millionaire.” The lawyer smacked his lips. He reminded me of the funeral director who buried my father. An ankle biter who tries to look sympathetic, but really enjoys other people taking a fall.
“How can this happen?”
“You turned over complete management of your trust to Bernard. He invested unwisely.”
“I turned over shit. My father named him trustee.”
“You outgrew your trust when you were twenty-one. At that point, you had a right to terminate it and take complete control. You chose to leave it in Bernard’s hands.”
He was right. I didn’t want to manage the money. It would have cut time from the disco scene I was into in those days. Besides, Bernie could be trusted. He was family.
“How do I get it—”
“Back?” He pursed his lips and shook his head. I could tell he was really enjoying it. “Bernard didn’t leave an estate, I’m afraid. Besides everything you had, he sold or encumbered everything he had. You can’t get blood from a turnip or money from a deadbeat.”
I’ll bet he made that up all by himself.
“How much can I get if I sell the business?”
“What business?”
“House of Liberte. You know, the one that’s been paying this firm a big chunk of your salary for years.”
“Win, you’re not listening to me. I said you’re broke. The House of Liberte was sold last year.”
“What? What’d you mean? How the hell can it be sold?”
“Your brother Leo bought it.”
“First, Leo’s my stepbrother. Second, he has no right to it, he inherited a diamond business from his own father.”
“He has every right to it. As a matter of fact, I handled the transaction. Bernard needed cash when the investment went sour and Leo gave it to him, in return for the assets of the business. The firm is now called House of Schwartz.”
“This is fuckin’ insane. You’re telling me that Bernie went through my entire inheritance and Leo ended up with it? Shit, knowing Leo, he probably helped put the skids under Bernie. Tell me exactly, what do I have left?”
“You mean other than the loose change in your pockets?”
He saw my face go purple and almost crawled under his desk, no doubt remembering the last time he represented me. It was for breaking a bottle of champagne across a bouncer’s face at a disco. The judge was so impressed that I used a thousand-dollar bottle of Perrier Jouet—and paid for it—he tossed the case.
He cleared his throat and shuffled papers on his desk. “As far as I can see, you have the Bugatti and the mine. Your apartment, boat, stunt plane, Corvette, Harley, and all moneys except what you have in your personal account are liened and will go to the creditors.”
“What mine?”
“The one in Angola.”
“Where the hell is Angola?”
“The last time I heard, on the west coast of Africa. It’s a former Portuguese colony, rich in diamonds and oil. Communists, also. I believe Castro even has Cuban troops there.”
“I know nothing about a mine.”
“How much do you know about the way Bernie ran the company?”
It was a good question and we both knew the answer, but I was in no mood to have it rubbed in. “What’s the deal on the mine? Is it worth anything?”
“I don’t think anyone knows for sure. When the bottom starting falling out from under Bernard’s investments, this diamond mine was the first thing he tried to sell or encumber. No one would give him a dime. Angola’s a war zone and no one wanted the risk. From what you see in the news, Angola’s in constant chaos, with war and revolution. From my written communications with the mine manager, the mine will be shut down in a few months if funds aren’t forthcoming to keep it functioning.”
“I thought a diamond mine was supposed to generate cash, not eat it.”
“I understand that the diamonds being brought out aren’t of the best quality.”
“How the hell did we end up with this shit-hole of a mine?”
“Bernard purchased it for five million dollars. Using your money.”
“Five million dollars! He used my inheritance to buy a diamond mine in a war zone? Was he fuckin’ nuts?”
He shook his head and smacked his lips again. I felt like reaching across the desk and spinning his head on his shoulders.
“Win, as someone who has dealt with people in the diamond business for most of my professional life, I can tell you that there is a very thin line indeed between the big successes and the big failures in any business, but especially in the gem one. When a dealer buys a large stone and has it cut, he never knows if he will end up with valuable gems or a handful of dust and splinters. Bernard took a flyer on a mine. He paid perhaps ten cents on the dollar. Had his gamble succeeded, you would have been extremely wealthy.”
“Bernie gambled and lost my money, not his own. I take it he went through his a long time ago. So tell me, can I sell this mine?”
“If you can find a buyer. No one in their right mind would pay substantial money for a mine in Angola, not unless they had the guts to actually run it. And knew how to run a diamond mine. I imagine it’s a hands-on business—if you don’t get your hands chopped off in a place like Angola.”
“What in God’s name motivated Bernie to buy the damn thing?”
“They thought he’d do an end run around the De Beers control of the diamond industry. The House of Liberte has never been a sight holder, that small group of diamond dealers who control most of the world’s diamond market under the thumb of De Beers. Your father had a good source of diamonds from an old friend in Lisbon, and Bernie inherited the contact. That source apparently dried up and they got the idea of having his own source for stones by buying a mine. I imagine they thought of themselves as Cecil Rhodes types, the founder of the De Beers empire.”
“A diamond mine in Africa.” I shook my head. Bernie had hardly been out of the tri-state area, as far as I knew. Traveling to the Catskills for weekend fishing and the supper club was the extent of his wanderlust. The mine might as well have been on Mars.
“I might add, the mine came with an extremely positive geological study. I don’t know if the mine’s never lived up to its potential or if the warring factions have kept it from being developed. But for whatever reasons, they initially invested in the mine, and when things started spinning out of control, Bernard kept hedging his bet with your trust funds.”
Owning a diamond mine sounded like Bernie. It would have been an ego thing, being able to waltz around the Diamond Club and showing off diamonds that came out of his own mine. He had the kind of big ego, lightweight mentality that gets his rocks off fr
om getting one-up on people who hardly knew he existed.
“You keep saying ‘they.’ Who was in on this with Bernie?”
“Your bro—uh, stepbrother, Leo, was originally a partner in the mine, but he sold his interest to Bernie a while back.”
“Leo was in on the deal, bailed out before it went sour, and ended up owning my company. Is that what you’re telling me?’
He squirmed. “Leo had an arm’s-length transaction with Bernard—”
“And you handled the ink for the deal, I imagine.”
“Win, I think—”
“Leo’s a prick who’d rent out his mother’s cunt to an army of baboons if he could turn a dime on it. Let’s get down to the bottom line. I have a diamond mine in a war zone that’s hemorrhaging money instead of shitting diamonds, the Bugatti—probably worth maybe a hundred grand wholesale—and pocket change. Is that it?”
“Man to man, Win, I’m sad to tell you, that’s it. And you had better get rid of the Bugatti, because creditors will eventually come after it.”
I got up to leave.
“Bernard had no blood relatives, except for you. What sort of funeral arrangements did you have in mind?”
“Do they still have pauper graves?”
I was at the door when he said, “Win, you’re obviously not aware of it, but Bernard ran up a very substantial legal bill. My senior partner’s been on my back about it. I assured him you were a man of honor and would make sure that Bernard’s debt was paid.”
I laughed all the way to the elevators. There was some justice in this world.
7
I found Leo in the café at the Diamond Club at the building on West Forty-seventh and Fifth Avenue. He spent his day meandering in and out of the offices of diamond wholesalers, talking to them with one side of his mouth while carrying on a second conversation with his cellular phone on the other side of his mouth. The only time he sat down was to eat, his phone in one hand, fork in the other. When he wasn’t eating, pissing, or sleeping, he was making deals.
Leo was built like a stack of rubber tires, with the smaller sizes at the top and bottom—short and wide, with a big, round, basketball-shaped head, fat lips, and the personality of a gnat in a garbage can. Barney the Puke, Katarina’s would-be movie backer, had the charm of a lounge lizard in comparison. Leo’s dislike for me went way back. When I was fifteen, Leo brought home a girl to meet his mother, my stepmother. I invited the girl, a pulpy redhead, into the garage to see my new hog. I was mounted on the motorcycle and she was mounted on me, when Leo walked in on us.
Heat of Passion Page 4