Barto, whom I’d met at Joe Spivack’s funeral, was someone I needed to talk to. Not only had he been a U.S. marshal, he’d also worked for Spivack. He had offered his services to me, and I was about to take him up on that offer.
He picked up on the first ring. “Barto Investigations.”
“My name’s Moe Prager, Mr. Barto. We met at—”
“—Joe’s burial. I wouldn’t forget you. You got Joe’s flag. What can I do for you?”
“I’m not sure yet, but can we meet?”
“Name the time and the place,” he said.
I gave him the address of the Brooklyn store. Although it was unlikely I was being watched, I thought it wise not to draw undue attention by going to Barto’s office. I instructed him to stroll into the store in the early afternoon just like any customer and that we’d take it from there. He didn’t question the arrangements.
The phone rang nearly before I put it back down. It was Larry McDonald. It was unnecessary for him to say anything more than my name for me to know word of our visit to Hallworth had already leaked back to Brightman. In a way, his call was a relief. There would be less guessing involved from here on out, and I could act preemptively.
“Fuck, Larry, I’m glad you called. There’s something we need to talk about.”
“What?”
“I think I may have to postpone my reinstatement for a week or two. I think Wit’s out to cause us all a lot of grief.”
That was met with silence. Good. I couldn’t be sure how much Larry knew of the details of what was really going on or even if he was taking his directives straight from Brightman. The further he was from the truth, the better I liked it. First, it made him an easier target for my manipulations. Second, it let me believe my old friend’s integrity was still intact. And I very badly wanted to believe that.
“What’s this nonsense about Wit?” he asked. “I was calling to tell you that they’re considering reinstating you as a detective second grade.”
“That’s great, Larry, but this other thing’s more important. Trust me, okay?”
“I’ve always trusted you, Moe.”
“Good, but we gotta talk. Maybe tonight. The Hound’s Tooth?”
He did not pause. “Seven o’clock.”
“Seven.”
Wit answered on the first ring. He sounded bright and alive, as if he’d been waiting by the phone all morning for my call. I had no trouble understanding how pumped he must have felt. He was on the hunt, but in danger himself. It was all very primal stuff.
“Word’s back to Brightman already,” I said. “I just got off the phone with Larry Mac. He was calling to let me know they’d up the stakes for my keeping my mouth shut. They’re thinking of reinstating me as a detective second grade. It’s amazing. In the seventies, I couldn’t make detective no matter what I did. Now I’ve made detective and gotten a bump in grade without even being reinstated. At this rate, I’ll make chief by November.”
“And what did you say?”
“That there was something more important going on. That you were out to cause us all a world of trouble. I didn’t mention Brightman by name.”
“And …?”
“We’re meeting this evening to discuss it. I think it’s time to buy those two plane tickets to California, Wit. Don’t forget, book them with a layover in St. Louis or Chicago. Leave a message on my machine with the details.”
“I’ll have them booked for us so the information is out there if anyone is interested. I’ve also called a few people at Esquire and let the name Jeffrey Anderson slip out of my mouth in connection to Steven Brightman.”
“Good. I’ll see you at the airport tomorrow.”
KLAUS WAS A bit confused by my showing up at the store when I was supposed to be preparing for my return to the job. I assured him that it had nothing to do with a lack of confidence in him. Beyond that, I was unwilling to say much else. Wit and I had to strike a proper balance in setting things in motion. While leaving enough of a bread crumb trail for interested parties to follow, we could not afford to leave whole loaves on the ground behind us.
Barto strolled in about a quarter past one and asked Klaus if he could help him select a red wine to have with dinner. I told Klaus to take his lunch break and that I’d be happy to help the gentleman. Klaus rolled his eyes at me and mouthed the word “Cop.” I guess Barto did look a little out of place. He was strictly a scotch and beer man.
“So what can I do for you, Mr. Prager? You were kinda vague on the phone.”
“No, I was very vague on the phone. The truth is I think I have an idea why Joe Spivack committed suicide. It’s why he left me the flag. He wanted me to wonder about that. It was a sort of challenge.”
“That don’t sound like Joe. He wasn’t a subtle kinda guy. If he had something to say, he’d just come out and say it.”
“Even if he was ashamed of himself?.”
Now Barto hesitated. “Maybe then. So why do you think he—”
“I don’t want to say anything about it now, because I would just be guessing. I think I owe him more than a guess. But I’m not going to bullshit you, Ralph, if it turns out I’m right, it won’t be pretty.”
“Joe’s dead. It’ll take more than sticks and stones to do him any harm. And if what you say is true about him leaving you the flag and all, then he wanted you to find out.”
“Okay, so you’re not gonna get squeamish on me?”
“I can’t afford to,” he confessed. “I got ex-wives in two states to support.”
“You said something to me at the bar that day after Joe was buried about Spivack and Associates having financial trouble, but that he refused to let anybody go. Do you remember telling me that?”
“I do.”
Barto went on to explain how last year had been a financial nightmare at Spivack and Associates. Most of Spivack’s staff were old-school investigators, either ex-marshals or ex-cops. They had been slow to adapt to the use of computers and other electronics.
They were seat-of-the-pants types of guys, and Joe Spivack had an aversion to taking divorce work. He felt it was beneath him.
“The Moira Heaton thing,” Barto continued, “now that was the kind of thing Joe loved. But those kinda cases are few and far between. That case kept us going for a time, but by last year even that had petered out.”
“Do you know where Joe got the money to prop up the company after things went south?”
“To tell you the truth, Mr. Prager, I didn’t give a shit where he got it from. When I went to the bank with my paycheck, they cashed it.”
“When you were a marshal, where were you stationed?”
“Vegas, Miami, but mostly New York. Why?” he asked. “Is that important?”
“Maybe. You met Spivack in Miami?”
“No. Up here, but we had mutual acquaintances down in Florida.”
“How would you like a job, Ralph?”
“What’s it pay?”
“Five hundred retainer against your regular daily rates plus all expenses. But you might have to do a little traveling.”
“When I was eighteen, I joined the navy to see the world. There’s plenty I ain’t seen yet and a lot of places I’d like to see again.”
We went back to the office and I wrote him an eight-hundred-dollar check. Five hundred was the retainer. Three hundred was for the trip to Miami.
I HAD TO be careful with Larry McDonald. For one thing, he was a good cop. He’d been a real detective while I’d only played one in my head. He’d sat across from some of the world’s most accomplished liars. Now I was going to sit across from him and feed him a plate of bullshit while trying to convince him it was caviar.
“What’s going on, Moe? You called in today and you’re not even back on the job yet.”
I kept reminding myself not to overexplain. “It couldn’t be helped.”
“So what are we doing here? What could Wit possibly do to give us shit? We haven’t done a fucking thing—”
&n
bsp; “Whose idea was my reinstatement?”
Larry’s face went blank.
“Come on, Larry,” I prodded, not wanting to give him too much time to think. “Who came to you with it?”
“My chief.”
“And do you think your chief snatched this idea out of midair? Somebody with juice whispered in his ear.”
“I didn’t give it much thought, Moe. I was just happy for you.”
“I’m happy for me too, but Wit’s gonna fuck it up for all of us.” I appealed to Larry’s healthy sense of self-interest.
“How?”
“He thinks he has a line on something Brightman did as a kid that will ruin his political career. I was with him in Jersey yesterday checking it out. That was no coincidence today that someone mentioned me getting the bump to second grade. You’re too smart a man not to see the connection.”
Larry got down to business. “Tell me what’s going on.”
“Wit got a lead about some bombshell shit Brightman and this guy Jeffrey Anderson did as kids. We went to Jersey yesterday to talk to this Anderson, but he’s moved out to California somewhere. Wit’s flying to California tomorrow to look for this guy, and I’m going with him. I gotta keep an eye on him. Can you clear a few days for me, postpone my reinstatement for a while?”
“Don’t worry about it, but to tell you the truth, Moe, it sounds like you’re talking outta your ass. What could this guy possibly have on Brightman?”
“That’s what I’m going to find out.” I stood to leave.
“Don’t you want your drink?”
“No time. Gotta go home and pack. I have a long trip ahead of me.”
He didn’t know the half of it.
Chapter Nineteen
THE FLIGHT FROM La Guardia to O’Hare had been uneventful if not exactly enjoyable. Wit was a nervous flier and had trouble keeping still. The Wild Turkeys didn’t do anything but exacerbate his jitters, and frankly I was glad that we’d made the second legs of our journeys to separate locations. Actually, only one of us had taken that second flight. By the time Wit got to L.A., I was already in Miami.
Miami was a funny place. In some ways it was like the Catskills south. Once the hot vacation destination, it had fallen on hard times in the seventies. Unlike the Catskills, however, Miami was enjoying a renaissance of sorts, but not one built on art and enlightenment. No, the rebirth of Miami was driven by the ultimate cash crop of the decade, cocaine. Miami was the most desirable transshipment point for the bulk of cocaine smuggled into the States from the Caribbean and Central and South America. Florida’s seemingly endless coastline made it a smugglers’ paradise, as the coastline of Long Island had been a boon to bootleggers and rumrunners half a century before. But I wasn’t here about cocaine. I was here about another kind of smuggling, the human kind.
Barto had gotten a good head start and had a fair amount of information by the time I checked into my motel. He’d left a message for me at the front desk. It was dark here just as it would be back in New York, but the harbingers of autumn, the crispness in the night air and the hints of gold in the leaves, were absent. By the feel of the hot, damp night on the skin of my face, it might as well have been mid-July. The dankness that lurked in the peach and teal green corners of my cheap room did nothing to argue me out of the illusion of summer.
There was a knock at my door. It was Barto. During our previous two meetings, I hadn’t bothered taking much notice of him. Until yesterday, he’d been more of a what than a who. He was built like a fireplug, short and squatty. Gravity and years of eating bad food had given him a prominent gut. He had a chubby, almost boyish face. He’d also lost most of the hair on top of his head, though he hadn’t yet faced up to the fact. I’m certain Barto fancied himself quite the miracle worker with how he parlayed the few strands of top hair he had left into a sort of spiderweb covering his bald pate. He probably hadn’t seen himself on videotape recently. It was one thing to look in a mirror and fool yourself. It was something else to see yourself on film.
“You were right,” he said, barely able to contain his enthusiasm. “Spivack flew down here at least three times in the last year. I had some old contacts do a little checking. He spent most of his time in Little Havana, just like you predicted. You want a beer?” he asked, holding up the six-pack he held in his right hand.
“Sure.”
“It’s from some country in Central America, El Salvador or some shit,” he warned, twisting off two caps. “It’s yellow as cartoon piss, but it’s pretty good stuff. Here.”
“Don’t go into advertising, Ralph.”
Not understanding, he shrugged his shoulders. We drank in relative quiet.
“So, Joe was down here that much, huh? Three times.”
“At least,” Barto answered. “Maybe more. I can find out for sure if I go to the field office and have them check.”
“That won’t be necessary. How often’s not really that important. All I needed to know was that he was here. What about Alfonseca?”
That enthusiasm once again spread itself across Barto’s boyish face. “Ivan was one bad little puppy, even back in Cuba. He was in jail by the time he was eleven and came over when Fidel cleaned out his jail cells in the seventies. Florida’s still paying the price for that bullshit. Criminals are the one commodity we don’t need to import, but that didn’t stop his assholiness Jimmy Carter from taking the bastards in like they was fucking engineers and rocket scientists.”
“Maybe President Carter just wanted to keep the U.S. marshals busy.”
“Did he ever. We earned our pay down here, let me tell you.”
“But did Ivan and Spivack ever cross paths?”
“I won’t be able to tell you that until tomorrow or maybe the day after that.”
“And the middleman,” I wondered, “any luck there?”
“I got my feelers out on that. I got a friend or two still works down here. There’s plenty of ways to funnel money back to families left behind in Cuba, but a big amount like you’re talking requires someone with contacts inside the government there and the community here. Those kinda people don’t grow on trees, Mr. Prager. Little Havana’s bigger than it used to be, but it’s still a tight community. We’ll find the middleman.”
“Okay, Ralph, I’m pretty beat. We’ll talk tomorrow.”
“You want another beer?”
“No thanks. Buenas noches,” I wished him in my grade-school Spanish.
“Viva la revolución. Viva Fidel. Viva—”
“Good night, Ralph.”
RAIN WAS TAP-tap-tapping on the glass-slat-and-aluminum windows when I got up the next morning. It was a gray tropical rain, heavy and fast with a sun chaser. I ate breakfast across the street from the motel in a waffle house. I was in the mood for a waffle. I hadn’t eaten one in years. But when I noticed that the waffle irons hadn’t been cleaned since the Bay of Pigs, I opted for eggs. There wasn’t anything for me to do now until I heard from Barto, so I asked the woman behind the counter where the closest car rental was. I had a friend who lived not too terribly far away, a friend I hadn’t seen in quite some time.
The ride up to Boca Raton was pleasant enough, and finding the Millennium Village retirement complex was easy. I’d asked directions at the supermarket when I stopped to buy a bottle of vodka and some pastries. The problem was, I hadn’t called ahead. I don’t know. I guess I really wanted to see the look on Israel Roth’s face when I strolled into his condo unannounced.
“Who’s there?” he screamed impatiently as I knocked at his door. “What, you trying to take the door off the hinges?”
I kept knocking. “Special delivery.”
“Stop already with the knocking. Nothing’s that special.” He flung back the door.
“Hey, Mr. Roth.”
“Mr. Moe!” He might have been in his seventies, but he hugged like a college wrestler.
“Izzy, you’re crushing the rugelach.”
“Come in. Come in.”
I put
the goods down on the coffee table and gave him back a proper hug. He had reminded me of my father when we’d met two years before in the Catskills. Time had done little to change that, but I liked Israel Roth for who he was, not for who he wasn’t. We exchanged the expected small talk about his health and my family, carefully avoiding any discussion of the incident that had brought us together in the first place. He wanted to know if Katy was still depressed over the miscarriage. He was thrilled to hear the answer.
“So, Mr. Moe, you came an awfully long way to bring me a box of Publix rugelach, which, to tell you the truth, taste like rolled-up cardboard with jelly filling.”
“I notice you’re not complaining about the vodka.”
“Complaining! Who’s complaining?”
Though it was early afternoon, we had a shot or two of the vodka.
“So, you didn’t answer my question about this unexpected visit, Mr. Moe.”
“What question? I didn’t hear a question.”
“What is this, Jeopardy, for chrissakes? You have to put things in the form of a question or you get the buzzer?”
There was no avoiding it, so I told him. He took it calmly, if not gladly. No amount of cruelty or calculation surprised him. He had seen firsthand the very worst of man. He had witnessed the systematic slaughter of his family and friends and breathed their ashes into his lungs. Though no longer capable of tears, he was not unmoved by the suffering of others. He had not let the inhumanities he’d suffered turn him dead inside. It was one of the things I admired about Mr. Roth. I didn’t know if I was that strong.
“You’re going to meet with the man who funneled the money back to Cuba?”
“I hope so. This ex-marshal I hired seems to know his way around down here. Apparently, Joe Spivack—”
“The one that killed himself?”
“Him. He didn’t cover his tracks that well. Within hours of getting in himself, Barto found out Joe’d flown down to Miami at least three times in the last year. I guess Spivack never thought anyone would connect the dots.”
The James Deans Page 20