The Shark-Infested Custard

by Charles Willeford

  “One thing,” Don said, looking into his glass. “I didn’t mean to pull the trigger. I’m sorry about getting you guys into this mess.”

  “You didn’t get us into anything, Don,” Eddie said. “We were all in it together anyway.”

  “Just the same,” Don said, “I made it worse, and I’m sorry.”

  “We’re all sorry,” I said. “But what’s done is done. Tomorrow, I’m going to report it at the office that my pistol was stolen out of the glove compartment of my car. They may raise a little hell with me, but these things happen in Miami. So I’m telling you guys about it now. Some dirty sonofabitch stole my thirty-eight out of my glove compartment.”

  No one said anything for a few moments. Don stared at the diluted wine in his glass. Eddie lit a cigarette. I finished my drink. Hank, frowning, and looking at the floor, rubbed his knees with the palms of his hands.

  “Eddie,” I said, “do you want to add anything?”

  Eddie shrugged, and then he laughed. “Yeah. Who wants to go down to the White Shark for a little pool?”

  Hank and Don both smiled.

  “If we needed an alibi, it wouldn’t be a bad idea,” I said. “But we don’t need an alibi. If there’s nothing else, I think we should all hit our respective sacks.”

  Eddie and I stood up. “You going to be okay, Don?” Eddie asked.

  “Sure,” Don stood up, and we started toward the door.

  “Just a minute,” Hank stopped us. “I picked up the girl in the drive-in, and bets were made! You guys owe me money!”

  We all laughed then, and the tension dissolved. We paid Hank off, of course, and then we went to bed. But as far as I was concerned, we were still well ahead of the game: four lucky young guys in Miami, sitting on top of a big pile of vanilla ice cream.

  Part 2

  Hank Norton

  He is only trying to frighten me, and he has succeeded.

  4

  I had been running around with Jannaire for almost six weeks before I found out that she was married. At ten p.m., Sunday night, when I started to leave my apartment house, planning to buy the early edition of the Monday morning Miami Herald at the 7-Eleven store a block away, I knew that her husband, Mr. Wright, meant to kill me.

  Dade Towers, the apartment house where I live, covers a triangular block, and the building was constructed to fit all of the lot. Coming toward the building from LeJeune, it looks like the prow of a ship. If you approach it from College Drive it resembles a five-story office building. There is a main entrance on College Drive, with a Puerto Rican blue awning out front, and a telephone system and directory outside the locked door. To get the front door open you consult the posted directory, dial the apartment number, and if someone is at home and if he wants to let you in he pushes a button and a buzzer opens the door. When the door is opened, there is a large tiled patio-lobby, filled with glass and wrought-iron furniture. Beyond the patio is a swimming pool surrounded by a wide grassy border. There are four Royal palm trees inside, and all of the ground-floor apartments on this inner courtyard have back entrances to the lawn and pool.

  There is an elevator in the corridor to the left of the patio-lobby, and if you cross the open pool area to the other side of the building, there is another elevator. This second elevator serves the back entrance, and there is a tiled, lighted foyer here, as well, with a glass door leading out to Santana Lane. There is a streetlight just outside the doorway on Santana, and two steps down to the sidewalk. These steps are covered with green “no-slip” strippings. Across the street, on Santana, there is a large parking lot, but it is rarely used. Most of the residents nose into the curb around the building, parking on College and Santana. The Dade Towers parking lot across Santana Lane, which is required by Miami law, is used mostly by visiting guests, or by residents who have a boat on a trailer, or a camper to park—or in some instances, an extra car.

  My apartment, 235, is directly above the back entrance foyer on Santana. I almost always park on Santana, and if the spaces are all gone, I park across the street in the lot. But I rarely park on College or enter the building by the front entrance. Whoever it was who shot at me knew that I would come out the back way, and they—or he—would know when I was leaving my apartment because the lights in my second floor apartment would be switched off. All of the residents in Dade Towers have an outside door key, and this key fits the front College Drive entrance, the back Santana entrance, and the two fire doors, as well. The locks haven’t been changed in two years, and there are a lot of people in Miami with keys who shouldn’t have them. Laundry men, paperboys, ex-residents, airconditioning companies, bug spray people, and who knows how many residents have passed out extra keys to their lovers, male and female? Nevertheless, as apartment houses go in Miami, Dade Towers is safer than most, and the single women who live here like the security. The building, as I said, is two years old, and so far there has never been a robbery.

  But because so many unauthorized keys are out, I was going to the 7-Eleven for a newspaper. I planned to crumple big balls of newspaper and scatter them around in my bedroom. That way, if Mr. Wright somehow got into the building, and then managed to get into my apartment when I was asleep, he would kick the wadded newspapers in my bedroom. They would whish or rattle into each other, and the sounds they made would wake me. I hadn’t planned on what I would do after I awakened, but the thought of being killed in my sleep, which was one of many possibilities, frightened me. I had been thinking about Mr. Wright’s threat ever since five p.m. and by ten that night I was worried enough to take him at his word.

  The single shot, fired from a moving, dark blue Wildcat, a car that roared out of the parking lot directly across the street as I stood on the steps of the Santana back entrance, missed my head by a good yard. But it was close enough to scatter a few bits of stucco from the wall, and some of these tiny chips stung my left cheek. The driver was making a right turn as he fired. He was driving with his left hand and firing across his body and out the window with his right. The Wildcat was moving about thirty miles per hour, and the car was about twenty-five yards or more away from me when he fired. The pistol sounded like a sonic boom in that quiet back street, and I figured by the sound that it was either a .45 or a .357 Magnum. With a gun that large, the marksman would have to be an expert to shoot accurately under such conditions, and the miss of a full yard, for which I was thankful, was too close to be a warning shot. Whoever it was, and if it wasn’t Mr. Wright it must have been a man he hired (or even a woman), had surely meant to kill me.

  A split second after the shot was fired, which was already much too late, because by that time the car had reached LeJeune, I dived for the sidewalk, crawled into the gutter, and tried to wedge my two hundred pounds under a 1967 red Mustang. I got my left leg and left arm under the car, but that was as far as I could go. As I lay there, struggling futilely to get all of me under the car, I could feel my heart thumping away, and my dry mouth seemed to be full of unwashed pennies. I am thirty-two, and I’ve been in a few barroom fights and in several situations where the danger potential was incredibly high, but this was the first time in my life that I have ever been afraid for my life. As this thought registered, I realized that I was in a vulnerable position. If the gunman circled the block and came back for another shot, here I was, all spread out for him. He could stop his car, aim straight down, taking his time, and…I scrambled to my feet and, running in a half-crouch, the way I had been taught in R.O.T.C. summer camp, I scuttled to the door, fumbled with my keys, and ran up the stairs to my apartment.

  Once inside, I put the chain-lock on the door, and poured a double shot of St. James Scotch into a glass and added one ice cube. The quick jolt, which I downed in two medicinal gulps, helped so much I wanted to drink another. But I didn’t. I needed a cool head, not a befuddled one, to think things out, to figure out what to do next. Mr. Wright was crazy, a psychopath. He had to be. Nobody, nowadays, shoots a man just because he thinks the man has fucked his wife. I hadn
’t touched Jannaire. I had intended to, of course, but that wasn’t the same thing, and besides, I hadn’t know that she was married. If I had known that she was married, I would have made my plans accordingly. She was the most desirable woman I had ever met, and because I wanted her so badly, I had apparently overlooked the telltale signs of her marriage. She had fooled me from the beginning, and for no discernible reason.

  The entire pattern was senseless and illogical, beginning with the electronic dating service, “Electro-Date.”

  5

  Larry “Fuzz” Dolman, who also has an apartment in Dade Towers (319), is a friend of mine, and he became my friend—if not what you would call a close buddy—simply because we both happened to live in the same apartment house. We became friends through the accidental sharing of the apartment facilities. We used the swimming pool, and we played poker in the recreation room. We had both moved into Dade Towers when it opened, two years ago, and over this long period of time (two years is considered as a very long residency in a city of transients, like Miami), we had shared enough common experiences, together with Don Luchessi and Eddie Miller, to be more than just acquaintances.

  Eddie and I were close friends, but Eddie had moved out of the building and was shacking up with a well-to-do widow in Miami Springs. We were still good friends, and we called each other on the phone two or three times a week, but Miami Springs is a long way from the South Miami area, and we rarely got together to do things any longer.

  Don Luchessi, who had also lived in the building for a year, after leaving his wife, had finally gone back to her. Don still detested his wife, or said that he did, but she and the priest and her father and mother and her brother had worked on him, and he finally made the sacrifice and was reconciled. He had an eight-year-old daughter he doted on, a spoiled, fat little girl named Marie, and he went back to his wife because of his daughter—not because he wanted to live with his wife again. No man in his right mind would want to live with Clara Luchessi. Clara would never stop talking, and all she ever talked about was her house and the things that were in it. She never left the house, either. She would never come with Don when he came over to visit Larry and me, and when we went to his house we had to listen to Clara talk about army worms, her glass drapes, a new rug-cleaning process she had discovered, and other domestic inanities.

  And little fat Marie was also there, never more than six inches away from Don. When he was behind the bar mixing drinks, she was back there with him, “helping” him. If he sat down, she sat on his lap. He had a pool table in his Florida room, but she spoiled the games we tried to play. She always wanted to play, too, and Don would let her. If she missed a shot, she cried and he had to comfort her. If she made one, she crowed. She also cheated, and Don let her get away with it.

  Going to Don’s house, which could have been a pleasant diversion, what with his heated swimming pool, his regulation pool table, and his well-stocked bar, was spoiled by his wife and daughter.

  Clara was a great cook, one of the best cooks in the world, but even her wonderful dinners were ruined for you because she had to tell you exactly how each dish was made, and where the ingredients could be obtained. No one else could get in a word, or force her to change the subject. During Clara’s vapid monologue, delivered rapidly in a shrill high-pitched voice, Maria made ugly faces, got down from the table from time to time to play terrible children’s records on the stereo, and greedily finished her food as soon as possible so she could sit on Don’s lap for the rest of the meal.

  There is much to be said for the old-fashioned notion of having women serve the men first, and then eat their own meals at the second table in the kitchen.

  For a full year, the four of us had had some good times together, but after Eddie and Don moved out, Larry and I spent more time together than we would have ordinarily. We went to movies together, rather than to go alone; we went out to dinner sometimes, rather than to go alone; and we sometimes went to the White Shark on Flagler Street to drink beer and play pool. We both loved to play pool, and as partners we were a deadly combination. We invariably won more games than we lost. But we didn’t have much else in common. And the times were becoming more frequent when I preferred going to a movie, or out to eat somewhere alone, rather than taking Larry along.

  Larry had a literal mind, and although I knew him well enough by now to know that he would and did take many things literally, it was a characteristic that one never gets used to completely. His interpretation of movies, for example, was maddening. He was unable to grasp an abstract conception. When we discussed Last Tango in Paris, he claimed that the reason Brando’s wife had purchased identical dressing gowns for her husband and her lover was because she got them on sale. This absurd, practical interpretation of the identical dressing gowns makes Larry seem almost feminine in his reasoning, but there was nothing effeminate about him. He was tough, or as the Cubans in Miami say, un hombre duro—a hard man.

  As an ex-cop, Larry had an excellent job at National Security, the nation-wide private investigation agency. He was a senior security officer, but not a field investigator, although he had a license, of course. He was an administrator, and worked in the Miami office on a regular forty-hour week. He never went out on investigative assignments. He has a B.A. in Police Science from the University of Florida, and his literal mind, apparently, was not a drawback insofar as his work was concerned. He wasn’t allowed to say exactly what it was that he did at National Security, but his work had something to do with personnel assignments, and keeping track of cases and operators in the field. He made about twenty thousand a year, if not more.

  Part of Larry’s personality problem, although Larry was unaware of any problem, was his inability to taste anything. Something was awry with Larry’s taste buds. He was unable to tell the difference between sweet and sour. Everything tasted just about the same to him. One night when were both at Don’s house, Larry took two bites out of a wax pear, picking the pear out of a bowl on the sideboard and biting into it without asking Clara if he could have it. The point is, he took the second bite before complaining that “this is the worst goddamned pear I ever ate.”

  The fruit looked realistic, all right, and anyone could have made the same mistake in the dim dining room, but no one with any taste at all would have taken the second bite. Larry would have gone on, in all probability, and eaten the entire pear if Don and I hadn’t started to laugh. Clara, of course, didn’t laugh. The wax fruit was quite expensive; she had purchased it from Neiman-Marcus’ Bal Harbour store. On another night, he ate a colored soap ball in Don’s bathroom. There was a full glass of these pastel soap balls in there, and he thought he was eating a piece of candy. He didn’t stop to consider that it would be peculiar to keep a jar of candy on a shelf beside the bathtub.

  At any rate, Larry’s lack of sensuous taste extended into tastelessness in other matters; in the clothes he wore, in his speech, and even in women. But there was nothing wrong with his olfactory organ. He had a keen sense of smell, which is unusual when something is wrong with your taste buds, and in a way, somewhat baffling when you consider that if he could smell the soap, and recognize the smell, why would he eat it under the impression that it was a piece of candy? All he could come up with in this instance was that “It smelled good enough to eat, so I thought it was candy.”

  When we went out together to eat, either for lunch or dinner, he invariably ordered a club sandwich. A club sandwich is easy to eat, of course, and it has all of the life-sustaining ingredients: turkey, ham, cheese, bacon (sometimes), lettuce, tomato, mayonnaise, three pieces of toast, and usually, pickle and potato chips on the side. At any rate, that was the reason Larry gave for always ordering a club sandwich.

  I was sitting by the pool with a beer when Larry joined me, about five-thirty one evening. He told me that he had sent in a coupon and a check for ten dollars to “Electro-Date.”

  “What for?” I said. “There’re about seven single women in Miami for every single man now. It�
��s ridiculous to pay ten bucks for an electronic date. All you have to do is…”

  “I know,” he said. “I have a book with names and phone numbers, and if I got on the horn, I could have a woman join us here at this table in about ten minutes. But that isn’t the idea.”

  Sitting there, with a secret widening grin, Larry was hard on my eyes. His silk shirt, stained with sweat, was yellow, and his Spanish leather tie was the color of dried blood. His textured hopsack jacket was orange, and his hair, Golden Bear styled, was haloed by the low sun with a 1930s rim-lighting effect. He took off his jacket, and draped it over a metal chair.

  “All right, Hank,” he said, “let’s look at the evidence. If I made a phone call, and arranged a simple date—dinner, a movie, and then back to my apartment for a couple of drinks and a piece of ass—how much would it cost me?”

  I shrugged. “About fifty bucks. It depends on where you have dinner, and the number of pre- and post-prandials you drink.”

  “Not necessarily. When you drive to Palm Beach every month, and you stop for a Coke and a hamburger, how much do you put down on your expense account?”

  “Seven or eight bucks, something like that.”

  “Right. And you’ve made at least a three-fifty profit.”

  “About that, but on my expense account I’m entitled to a six-dollar lunch. If I take a hospital administrator to lunch, I can get away with a twenty-dollar tab, or, with drinks, even more.”

  “Exactly. So if I spend forty bucks on a simple date, and forty bucks is the irreducible minimum nowadays in Miami, and I can charge off the date to my expense account, wouldn’t you say that I could get away with an over-all tab of fifty or sixty?”

  “Sure. But a personal date, even with an electronic service, will be hard to slip by your office comptroller.”

  “You’re right, Hank. Impossible, in fact. But not by the Internal Revenue Service. I can take the cost of the date off my income tax.”