Gumbo Limbo

by Tom Corcoran

  “You weren’t one of us, friend. We were carrying on Southern tradition.”

  “Which one?”

  “Blockade running. We all had family, going back generations, in the War Between the States, in Prohibition, some other enterprises, using the coastline to dodge the federal government. We carried on our patriotic duty. We just took it too far, is all.”

  Tazzy Gucci had been a fine soldier. He’d carried out his moral duty not to squander free sex, and his patriotic duty to smuggle pot.

  “This limo thing,” I said. “Sounds like you’ve built yourself a future.”

  He raspberried, spraying beer foam onto his lap. I realized how poorly I’d timed my attempt at placation. In Makksy’s hopes, any business would compare poorly to Zack Cahill’s retirement fund.

  He let it slide. “I’m a lucky fucker, anyway. When I hit the prison door, my first bright idea was to open a bar in Panama City. I wanted to call the place ‘Something 4 Everyone,’ numeral ‘four.’ I would give them mud-wrestling, mechanical bull riding, karaoke, and line dancing. My concept was hip as shit. Thank God the bastards in the bank told me to get on out.”

  “Where’re you from?” I said.

  “Between Savannah and Beaufort. Daddy was a South Carolina politician, so things eventually came to him. But we grew up with a ‘53 Ford in our front yard. My parents got an indoor shitter the same year they had me. They let me know they were happier about the shitter.”

  “So you did prison time for carrying on tradition.”

  Makksy looked back out the window. “No, sir. I went to prison for chasing pussy with a brown glass vial full of expensive Bolivian aphrodisiacs, and for keeping my trap shut in nine dif ferent federal depositions. And, indirectly, for importing seventy-five tons of weed.”

  Bright sunshine, air-conditioning coming out a dozen vents in the back of Tazzy Gucci’s mock luxury, his deep-pile rolling paradise. My legs stretched, my feet on a jump-seat cushion. Carefree, for the moment, at least, and out of Key West. An ironic contrast to my arrival on that crowded commuter plane, eating fat-free peanuts for breakfast, forcing myself from the two-thirds-sized seat, stooping to walk the center aisle, running through misty weather to the gate entrance with the scornful woman and the man with the cast on his arm.

  The cast on his right arm.

  The burned-hand man.

  Damn.

  19

  Bad enough, I hadn’t caught the full-arm cast. But I’d looked at the man a dozen times during the flight. After begging Olivia Jones to manufacture the crowd-photo proofs, showing the proofs to Arthur Stapleton, going back to Olivia, staring at her computer monitor, holding up a proof for the dipshit at Blockbuster, locking onto that face, why hadn’t I recognized it? Had the son of a bitch followed me to Orlando, to that dump motel, then to New Orleans? Had he taken the second cab from Louie’s Backyard the night I’d met Abby Womack? Could I look around and find him in a car behind us? Or was he patiently waiting for our arrival at Imperial Limo and Vending?

  Thank three days of pressure for that blunder. And a wide-awake night in a cheap motel. A pure case of sleep deprivation.

  Or had I exaggerated, let core fatigue skew my imagination and put me in a dither rather than peril? Other people injured their right arms, wore casts. I needed to think straight, stay alert and not be spooked, not be lulled into out-of-towner’s sloth.

  One more thought: if the New Orleans meeting five days ago had been too dangerous for Zack to attend, why was I here, walking into hazards I couldn’t even identify? I needed to get beyond this sit-down with Ernest “Tazzy Gucci” Makksy, perhaps learn something, survive the afternoon, then get back to my own turf. For the second time in two days, I told myself to quit playing cop.

  The limo turned off Veterans Highway. Imperial Limo and Vending was a half-block behind a large discount retail store in Kenner, on the edge of a residential section. Removed from the traffic fumes, I caught a whiff of cut grass, a scent almost unknown in Key West. I heard Ray Best speak for the first time, into a phone headset, as he coordinated our arrival with someone in the leasing office. Until he used “y‘all,” twice in a sentence, I would have identified his rapid-fire accent as pure Conch instead of Orleans Parish.

  “I fought for this location, the zoning bullshit.” Makksy sounded proud of his victory. “How could I go wrong? It’s three hundred yards from the Home Plate Cafe. But the neighbors don’t like us. As if we’re a dirty industry.”

  Fitting, in New Orleans, that the value of Imperial Limo and Vending lay in its proximity to food. I noted an abundance of PARKING FOR TENANTS ONLY signs.

  A wide door lifted as our limo neared the building; two black men in white long-sleeved shirts and navy trousers removed a steel-gate apparatus from the garage entrance. Serious theft deterrent. A token exterior redesign—an awning, trellises, bordering planters—had failed to mask the four-bay building’s gas station origins. Sun fought through industrial skylights to illuminate a dust haze in the service and storage spaces. I smelled Turtle Wax, rear-axle grease, Go-Jo.

  Makksy led me through a thin metal door into a short dark hallway with a rippled linoleum floor. The walls were old, inexpensively paneled, the ceiling a collection of discolored and mismatched acoustical tiles. An instrumental version of a Sinatra ballad came through tinny speakers hung from nails just shy of ceiling level. New Orleans, music everywhere. My nose told me that other businesses, a seafood operation among them, had come and gone before Imperial. Makksy’s small office smelled like fifty years of cigarette smoke. He motioned me toward a small swivel chair on casters. I leaned my carry-on bag against his desk.

  He settled into a high-backed, leather executive model. “My son-in-law may already know some of this stuff. Most of it, I’d just as soon not talk in front of anybody. It’s not just my business being aired out. It’s other people’s, two directly, and a couple more after that.”

  “More and more as the days go by. You said I wasn’t included in the scams because I wasn’t a Southerner. Why trust me now?”

  “Longevity. And I got no choice. I suspect you’re up to speed on a lot of this stuff. So I’m not gonna hold back. I’m gonna tell you what I think’s going on. Then you tell me what you’ve seen happening.”

  “Is it going to get us anywhere, or is this opinions only?”

  “We’ll see about that, won’t we?” He lit a cigarette and blew smoke away from me. With no circulation in the room, it would get around to me soon enough. “I’ve only told two people in my life. My daughter—you’ll meet Angel.” He waved at the door. I took his gesture to mean that Angel was in the building. “She was the second one. The first one is harder to explain. He got killed in a car wreck the day he got out of jail.”

  “You talked in prison?”

  “I had a heart attack in there. Christ Almighty, I was thirtyeight. If it was serious enough for me to have a heart attack at that age, I knew I was gonna croak.” That statement prompted a deep drag on the Marlboro. “I didn’t want my daughter cut out of that damn what-cha-ma-call-it, retirement fund. So I made the worst mistake a man can make. I asked a fellow prisoner to take her a message. This dude had done every type of crime ever invented. Somehow, between his juvie busts and probations and violations, the bastard went to college. Even then he was boosting construction equipment and semis. He once stole a truck crane, used it to lift the roof off a motorcycle store. He hoisted twelve motorcycles out of the store and into a stolen stake truck. But, I tell you, if he hadn’t been in my unit, two rooms down, I would’ve gone nuts for, day to day, no one to talk to. Fuckin’ nuts. So at college he learned how to steal stock certificates. His father was a preacher in central Florida. This guy would scam elderly parishioners into investing with him. Promise sixteen percent return on their money. The first year and a half, two years, they’d get sixteen percent, they’d keep pouring their life savings. into his plan. Suddenly it all collapsed on the guy. The poor old bastards were cleaned out. So, in cour
t, he promised he’d pay ’em all back, once he got out. Of all people to tell about this thing, I tell this guy. The day he got out, I kissed the deal good-bye. Then, timely as hell, he gets whacked, rear-ended by a drunk trucker on his way home to Kathleen, Florida.”

  “Do we assume he told someone, before he got out, before he died?”

  “Who knows. He may have wanted it all for himself.”

  “What was his name?”

  “Richard Abbott.”

  “Any chance he faked his death?”

  “That’d be handy, wouldn’t it? Him owing all those people. But let’s shift gears, bring this up to right now. Here’s what I think is happening. Your friend has made himself unavailable. To me, that’s a bad sign. We told him, when we gave him that briefcase, if his investment took a crap, no hard feelings. We said, ‘Please don’t be a crook.’ But we didn’t say, ‘No hard feelings,’ after that. So what I think we got, our boy squandered a shitload of our cash over the years. I think he’s blowing a smoke screen, this disappearance. Like, what’s he gonna claim, it got ripped off at the delivery stage, and not the investment stage?

  “Once I got out, I told my daughter about this. But she’s got no reason to butt in. It’ll all trickle down to her, no matter what, like this limo business. So I don’t know how my boy Omar got to Key West. He was not a man I admired. I wouldn‘t’ve trusted Omar to borrow a ballpoint pen. I do not like murder, but in a practical sense the world is better off with Omar gone. But if this whole deal is a smoke screen, and Omar was part of it, killing Omar jumped it up a level.”

  I nodded my agreement.

  “Now it’s your turn.”

  I told Makksy about my search for Zack, my involvement with the Omar investigation, the break-in at Spence’s apartment, and Jesse’s fears about the arrangement with Zack. I mentioned the phone bugs, the burned darkroom, and the appearance and shooting of Abby Womack. I assured him that I had known nothing of their deal with Zack until now; I also assured him that my sole interest in the matter was Zack’s welfare, and that was founded on my offhand promise to Claire to be his “guardian angel.”

  I waited for Makksy to butt in, add factual snippets, to piece together my info with some gem he knew but hadn’t considered. He offered nothing. I asked him what else he knew about Omar “Joe Blow” Boudreau.

  Makksy looked agitated. He mumbled, pretending to be overwhelmed by the confusing events in Key West. He stood and walked toward his closed door. “Lemme get to Omar in a minute. I gotta handle some bullshit in the garage.”

  “Mind if I use your phone?” I wanted to call my answering machine. I also had a sudden urge to call Teresa Barga.

  “Sure. Sit there.” He indicated the chair behind his desk.

  Halfway into dialing the access number for my phone card, I hung it up. Brain fade, for the second time in a day. I’d just told this man about two telephone surveillance bugs. What about his phone?

  I’d wait, get to a pay phone. Unless Makksy had made arrangements for me to stay longer than planned. Or never leave at all. What was that country song about the fledgling entertainer who dreamed of riding in a long black limousine? He’d gotten his wish on the way to the cemetery.

  I let my eyes wander around the office. Several small framed photos were grouped at one end of Makksy’s desk. One showed Makksy and an attractive woman his age, both in redwood chairs, tall drinks in hand, on a deck above a lake. They leaned toward each other and mugged for the camera. The picture next to it was Ray Best, the surly son-in-law, with his arms around two young women. Both of them tan, smiling. One had dark hair and the other …

  … the other young woman was Sammy, short for Samantha, Captain Sam Wheeler’s dedicated light-tackle student. Sammy’s hair was shorter, but she didn’t look more than a year or two younger. A marina or yacht club in the background.

  I reached around the desk for my carry-on, found my mini-zoom camera, guessed minimum distance for close focus, and snapped a picture of the picture. I hurried two more at different angles, for insurance, then returned the camera to my bag and sat back in Tazzy Gucci’s chair.

  Shuffle the cards again. No doubt in my mind that Sammy’s presence in Key West offered a clue I needed. I had two choices: make a big deal of it immediately, or spend the flight back to Key West dissecting the whole mess. No matter what, I would warn Sam Wheeler. I needed to find a pay phone fast.

  Makksy reentered his office a half-minute later. I tapped the group photo. “Your daughters?”

  “I’ve only got one. Muffin’s the one with dark hair. The other girl—sort of a coincidence—is Buzzy Burch’s daughter, Samantha. They called her Sammy when she was little. She and Angel were inseparable when they were seven, eight years old.”

  “Angel?”

  He smiled and pointed back at the photo. “That’s Angel. Her nickname’s Muffin du Jour. Long story, when she was a little girl. The girls had a reunion, a couple years ago. Sorta fizzled. They’re different people now. You might say Sammy and Ray didn’t hit it off too good.”

  “Where’s Samantha these days?”

  “Last I heard, college in Gainesville. Working her way through, waitressing in a Benihana.” Tazzy Gucci reached across his desk and handed me a thin fan of hundred-dollar bills. Five of them.

  “Not necessary,” I said.

  “Hey, friend, you paid your way here. If this works out for the good, which I don’t have my heart set on, I may owe you more than that.”

  What’s that old line about an IOU with a big I and a small U?

  He sat in the smaller swivel chair. “I remember one other thing,” he said. “It’s not important, but it’s always stuck in my mind. We were all snobby as hell. There were all these groups of scammers—the gang I hooked up with, from Columbia, South Carolina, the St. Pete boys, the honchos from Virginia, the crew from Georgia. The off-loaders all lived in Annapolis and Martha’s Vineyard, and Hilton Head. But we were the ones who believed in fine wines instead of tequila shooters. We bought Rolex watches, expensive sunglasses before sunglasses were expensive. Instead of buying new BMWs, we went for vintage Mercedes-Benz convertibles. We owned classic wooden sailboats instead of those fiberglass ones we sent south for product. So, anyway, we did our deal with your pal Zack in a room at the Pier House, we went to the Chart Room. We all wanted to champagne-celebrate, a toast to our deal. But Teddy, the Chart Room bartender, didn’t have any cold champagne.

  “So we walked down Duval to Fitzgerald’s, that first-floor bar in the La Concha. Buzzy Burch wanted Perrier Jout. All they had was Dom Perignon. So we made a decision, a case of reverse smuggler snobbery: we wound up drinking Budweiser.” Makksy paused to reflect on it. “Maybe that’s what made me think the deal was cool. No complications down the road. We could make an agreement and laugh at no Perrier Jouet, and click Bud bottles to seal the deal. A funny moment.”

  Tazzy Gucci did not smile.

  I said, “Back to Omar.”

  “He worked here for two weeks in 1997. He made a move on Muffin and Ray threatened to kill him. My opinion was that Ray would die trying, so I gave Omar three thousand dollars and suggested he might want to seek employment closer to downtown. End of story. We done here?”

  “If so,” I said, “you’ve confirmed my expectations.”

  “Splendid. What’d you expect?”

  “That you’d avoid facts. What’d you give me? Anecdotes and opinions.”

  He looked me straight in the eye. “Ain’t that a shame. One man’s Shinola is another man’s shit.”

  “What’d they call guys like you in jail? Wasn’t the term ‘one-way motherfucker’?”

  “Never heard that one. They called me ‘stand-up.’ I never gave up a soul.”

  “Makksy, you told me yourself, there’s a chance you started all this bullshit by running your mouth to what’s-his-name, the grandma stock swindler. Maybe you should come down to Key West and help put out the fire.”

  “I’m pretty sure the house alread
y burned right the fuck to the ground. Can we give you a ride back to the airport?”

  “There’s a flight at three-thirty.”

  He checked his watch. “We’ll get you there.”

  Ernest Makksy was still a classy guy. He was wearing Gucci shoes and a Rolex watch. And he was letting me out alive.

  20

  “I’ll stay here on Veterans Boulevard. The stop-and-go’s quicker than I-10.” The driver—Wicker—spoke with a Midwest accent. The New Orleans twist had failed to migrate into at least one resident’s speech. “Boss man said, number-one, class-A treatment. Anything you need, you speak up, all right.” Wicker was in his mid-sixties, a full head of silver-gray hair, a beer guzzler’s paunch, his face doughy, probably from alcohol. He smelled like department-store cologne. But he drove smoothly, with foresight, confidence. A pro, an experienced chauffeur. The Buick Park Avenue had new-car smell and backseat amenities: the day’s New York Times, the Times-Picayune, a USA Today. A cooler stocked with bottled water, fruit juices, beer. A telephone. A Kleenex dispenser. A courtesy lamp. Tazzy Gucci ran a tight ship.

  I felt like I’d been running in tight circles, like a character in Hitchcock’s The Birds, being attacked from all sides and above by flapping wings and shrieks and beaks and talons. Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.

  Except for Teresa Barga, my sweet refuge, every person I’d dealt with, for four days and six hours, was connected to the craziness. In the background, because it could have been my imagination, was the stranger with the burned hand and shot shoulder. I also forced from my thoughts the momentary zing that my chauffeur was Omar Boudreau’s father or brother, that he might turn the Buick into a swamp express. I flashed on that old song about the gators eating you and skeeters getting the leftovers. But the driver dutifully followed the signs, the pictures of airplanes and arrows that led to the airport.

  “You had a fine visit with us in the Crescent City, sir?”

  I ignored him. My focus: Samantha Burch’s father had been in prison since she’d been in elementary school. She’d been putting herself though college by schlepping at a Benihana in Gainesville. The rich mommy story was bogus. Her first charter with Sam had coincided with Cahill’s call from Sloppy Joe’s. It had been no coincidence.