The Shark-Infested Custard

by Charles Willeford

  I felt a fresh surge of anger toward Mr. Wright. Because of him I had become a voyeur. The fact that it was inadvertent didn’t make me feel any better about the sordid spot that I was in. But what the hell did I expect? That’s what most of the patrons came to the Double X Theater for and, in the next two hours, I would probably see another dozen men come in and jack off. This dismal prospect so unnerved me that I almost decided to give up my post and try something else, but then the door opened again.

  The man who entered had a slight build, and long blond curly hair down to his shoulders. He wore rose-colored Bermuda shorts, tennis shoes with black support socks, and a heavy black denim CPO shirt with the long tails outside the shorts. His skinny white legs were hairless. He crossed quickly to the sink and climbed up on the wash basin. By raising my head slightly, I could see the back of his head above the door as he peered out the opened window. The long locks fluttered slightly as a gust of humid air came in through the window, and I suspected—and acted on it immediately—that this man might be, could be, Mr. Wright wearing a blond wig.

  I flipped the door lock open and jumped down to the concrete floor simultaneously. My cramped legs tingled painfully as the circulation opened up in them again, but I ignored the pain. As I banged the door open, the man whipped about and jumped down from the sink. The long swing I had already started with the tire iron club caught him a glancing blow on his upper arm before his feet hit the floor. He slipped to his knees, grunted, grabbed his upper left arm with his right hand, and tried to scramble to his feet. My next downward blow, with plenty of leverage on it, caught him squarely between his neck and shoulder. His left arm went limp as it was momentarily paralyzed. He opened his mouth to scream, but I stopped him in time.

  “One sound,” I said, raising my pink club again, “and you’ll be one dead sonofabitch!”

  His mouth remained open, and as I looked back at him I could see the gold bridgework in his back teeth. He bubbled, but he didn’t scream or holler. He whimpered involuntarily, but it was caused by the air being forced out of his throat. This was Mr. Wright, all right, with a blond wig. He would have been recognizable—even if he had shaved his black hairline moustache—if I had suspected a wig. But he had retained the moustache; and his wig, now that I knew that he was wearing a wig, made him look obscenely ridiculous. I didn’t recall seeing him earlier. The chances are that I had seen him at the airport, or at the university, but hadn’t given him a second glance. The disguise was perfect. Middle-aged men with long hair and Bermudas are commonplace, especially on Miami Beach, where this kind of outfit is almost a tourist uniform.

  I waited a moment, letting him catch his breath, before I told him to stretch out prone on the floor with his arms in front of him. I lifted his wallet from his left hip pocket, and my .38 pistol from his right hip pocket. His heavy .357 Magnum was in a leather shoulder holster under his left armpit. The loose CPO shirt, with the tails outside the shorts, had concealed it well. When I felt the shouldered gun, I held the muzzle of the .38 at his head, and told him to roll over on his back. With my left hand I awkwardly unbuttoned the shirt, reached in and took the .357 out of the holster. I stuck the heavy weapon into my trousers, and buttoned my jacket in front with my left hand.

  I had moved slowly and cautiously during the frisking and without taking my eyes off Wright’s face. When a man is crazy, and I was convinced that Wright was crazy, the chance of some unpredictable move is great. Even with both pistols in my possession, and with Wright supine on the floor, with his blond curly wig getting damp from the pool of water and urine below the urinal, I was still afraid of him. Perhaps it was a good thing that I was afraid of him. He witnessed my fear, and he was probably equally fearful that I would do something crazy and unpredictable because I was frightened. But this was no Mexican stand-off. I had the .38 in my hand, and my hatred of this man was so intense I was anxious to squeeze the trigger.

  My fury was controlled, however, and I surprised myself with my ability to talk calmly in a natural tone of voice.

  “I don’t want you to say a word, Mr. Wright. We’re going somewhere where we can talk, but until we get there I don’t want to hear a sound from you. D’you understand?”

  He managed to nod.

  “Good. If you had said ‘Yes’ instead of nodding you wouldn’t have got the message. Now you can get up, and put both of your hands into your front pockets. Don’t make any quick moves. I’ve practiced some dry shots with this thirty-eight, and it’s got a very light trigger pull.”

  He got up slowly, and put his hands in his pockets.

  “Okay,” I said. “Now, when we leave the theater, I’m going to have the woman at the box office validate my parking ticket. So as soon as we leave the front door, you stand with your back to the ticket window and look out at the street. If you want to run, fine. I’ll shoot you without thinking about it. But if you want to live, you’ll just stand there, waiting until I prod you from behind. Then we’re going to the parking lot around to the back, and you’ll drive my Galaxie as I direct you. D’you understand?”

  He bobbed his head, and the damp curls shook.

  There was no problem. It was a dark night, and once we rounded the corner and left the streetlights on Arthur Godfrey Road, we left the pedestrians behind as well. I had the .38 in my right jacket pocket, and carried the towel-wrapped bludgeon in my left. Wright walked along slowly about three feet ahead of me. I gave the parking stub to the attendant, and when we got to the car I told Wright to use his key. He had a key all right, and he opened the door and got into the driver’s seat. I slammed the door and walked around to the other side. He reached across and unlatched my door so I didn’t have to use my key. This kind of cooperation, which was unexpected, only served to increase my wariness of the man.

  He wasn’t a good driver, but that was normal. He hadn’t driven my car before, and he was listening to my directions at the same time, afraid to make a mistake.

  I had remembered the Weinsteins, and their now empty Cresciente condominium apartment.

  The Cresciente was on Belle Isle, the first island on the chain of filled islands that made up the Venetian Causeway. Like many of the expensive Miami Beach condos, there was a security man in uniform at the front entrance, and he checked on people who used the visitor’s parking slots. The residents, or owners, however, were free to come down the access alley the back way and drive into their parking spaces beneath the building. Then, by taking the elevator from the parking basement, there was no way for the security man in front to check on their comings and goings. Like everything else in Miami Beach, security is merely another amenity that people pay for without really getting.

  The access alley behind the row of apartment houses was barely wide enough for two cars, but there was enough space to park on a narrow back lawn before we got to the Cresciente, and I told Wright to pull onto it. After locking the car, I told Wright to walk ahead of me. We entered the parking garage from the alley, waited for the elevator and took it up to the twelfth floor.

  21

  There were four apartments on each floor of the Cresciente, so the Weinstein’s had to be 12A, B, C, or D. I remembered that Larry had told me the Weinstein apartment was on the Bay side, which meant that it was either B or C. The name on the door to C, which I checked first was Ralston. I tugged on Wright’s arm, and we went down to B. I. Weinstein.

  “Open the door,” I said.

  “I don’t have a key…”

  “Open the door.”

  “What if I can’t get it open?”

  “Last time. Open the door!”

  Wright took out his keys, and opened a slim silver knife attached to the ring (there were a dozen or more keys on the ring), and flicked out a shiny rod so thin it looked like a chromed piece of piano wire. He fiddled with the lock, poking around inside with the rod, and opened the door in about a minute and a half. I reached inside, turned on the light, and gestured for him to precede me. I closed the door, and put on the c
hain night latch. Then, turning on lamps as we went through the apartment, I pushed him ahead of me into the billiard or snooker room.

  Some, but not all, of the furniture had been covered with sheets, mostly pastel colored sheets in pinks and blues. The snooker table was covered with a green, tight-fitting oilcloth cover. I told Wright to climb into one of the high rattan chairs against the wall. I went around to the other side of the table, flipped the switch on the long fluorescent table light above the table, and looked at Wright for a long moment, wondering where to begin.

  Sitting there in his poorly fitting Bermudas, and wearing black support socks with his tennis shoes, he certainly didn’t look dangerous. In fact, he had given me less trouble than I had expected. I felt much safer with the width of the snooker table between us. I knew what a poor shot I was, so I put the .357 Magnum down on the table within easy reach of my left hand. In case he jumped me and I had to start shooting, I figured that I would be able to get at least one of twelve rounds into him.

  Behind me, the heavy, dark green velvet drapes were drawn. The room was so silent I could barely hear the hiss of the airconditioners. They were set high, about eighty, as is usual when you leave your apartment for an extended period of time. As soon as the temperature rose above eighty degrees, the thermostat would automatically kick in the condenser until it got back down to eighty. I would have reset it at seventy, but I didn’t know where the thermostat was. I took off my jacket instead, and placed it on table.

  “Now that I’ve got you here, Mr. Wright,” I said, “I don’t know exactly what I’m going to do with you, but first…”

  “You’re going to kill me,” he said calmly.

  “No,” I said, “I’m not going to kill you, but I’ve got to do something or other, explain the facts to you, or something, to get you off my fucking back. First of all, I didn’t screw Jannaire—your wife.”

  “I think you screwed her all right,” he said, “but I don’t care about that.”

  “If you don’t care about that, why have you been trying to kill me?”

  “I haven’t been trying to kill you, Mr. Norton. I’ve been trying to scare you. If I’d wanted to kill you I could’ve hit you the first day I came to town, and taken the United Breakfast Flight back to Jacksonville. I knew it was a mistake, and I told Miss Jannaire so, but she wouldn’t listen to me.”

  “Miss Jannaire?”

  “That’s right. I don’t have to tell you nothing. I know you’re going to shoot me anyway, but as long’s I’m talking and you’re listening I’m still sitting here. And sitting and talking is still living.”

  “Wait a minute. Why’d you call your wife, ‘Miss Jannaire?’”

  “She isn’t my wife. She’s my employer.”

  “Start from the beginning. I’ve been suspecting a set-up, but it looks worse than I thought.”

  “From the beginning?”

  “From the beginning.”

  “Well, first I got this phone call from my contact here in Miami.”

  “Who was that?”

  “I can’t tell you that. It’s unethical, but I can tell you the rest if you want.”

  “I want. Go ahead.”

  “Well, my contact said he had a contract for me down here, and he give me Miss Jannaire’s phone number to call when I got down here, and my password.”

  “Password? How come?”

  “That way, Miss Jannaire would know it was me, and not some guy trying to sell her dance lessons on the phone or something. So I called her from the airport. I had my bag and everything, and she told me to take a cab over to her apartment. She put me up in her guest room.”

  “When was this?”

  “Two weeks ago. Almost. Twelve days, counting today.”

  “What took you so long to come after me?”

  “We was dickering. I didn’t like the set-up. Then my beeper set got messed up, and I had to drive up to Fort Lauderdale where there was a guy who could fix it. It’s good when it works, but when it ain’t working, it ain’t worth a damn. I paid seven hundred and fifty bucks for it, and I thought at first I was gypped until I learned how to use it. My son and I practiced with it all over Jax, with him driving his car with a head start and me trying to find him until I finally got the hang of it.”

  “Wait a minute, Mr. Wright. What’s the beeper got to do with Jannaire? You’re getting off the track.”

  “Not with the beeper. You see, that’s how I followed you. I planted the transmitter in your gas tank, and then with my sonic receiver I could sort of run you down. It takes a little time, and if you don’t know how to work it, you might as well quit. But I know how to work it, thanks to my son having the patience to drive all over Jax for about six weeks with me chasing him. Of course, with Francis, it was sort of a game with him. But it was just hard, hot work for me. But I found out I wasn’t gypped on the beeper set. I know how to use it now.”

  “Okay. That’s interesting. You could trail me with a sonic beeper. That explains part of the mystery. How’d you get a duplicate key to my car?”

  “From this same guy in Lauderdale. It cost me ten bucks. If I’d had more time, if Miss Jannaire had told me the make of your car and all before I come down, I could’ve sent away for one and got it for five bucks.”

  “Send away where?”

  “Lots of places. They advertise keys in the car magazines. Don’t you ever read the classifieds in the car magazines? You can get a key to any make car and year you want for five bucks. But this guy in Lauderdale, he charged me ten, and I give it to him because of the shortness of time.”

  “All right. Let’s get back to Jannaire. She hired you, somehow, to kill me. Is that right?”

  “No. That’s what I thought it was when my contact down here called me. He told me he had this contract for me, and a contract means a hit, so that’s what I thought. I think she had the same idea when she talked to my contact here, but she changed her mind later.”

  “Who was the contact?”

  “I can’t tell you that. It’s unethical.”

  “Maybe it is, but I can’t help wondering how she found out how to go about hiring a pro killer, that’s all. She’s a dress designer who dabbles some in real estate, isn’t she?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t care what people do for a living. I’ve got my living to make, and they got theirs. I offer a service, and if they can pay, they get it.”

  “How much do you get for killing a man?”

  “Two thousand dollars. In advance. I’ve got more, but I won’t work for no less. And I do it clean. I come in, I find the guy, and I hit him. Like that. Then I’m long gone back to Jax.”

  “Why’d she want you to kill me?”

  “She didn’t say, and I didn’t ask. Besides, she didn’t want me to kill you. She wanted me to run you out of town instead. That’s what caused a lot more delay, you see. It’s one thing to come into town, hit a man—nice and clean—and then get out. But to scare a man so bad he’ll just pick up and leave, that’s stupid. Maybe, in time, I could’ve scared you out. I just don’t know about that now. But even if I did, you’d come back probably. And there was a lot of danger exposing myself to you that way, pretending to be her husband. That’s why I couldn’t say much to you in her apartment. Just the little we talked, you wondered why a woman like that would marry a man like me, didn’t you?”

  “Yes. I wondered about that. But I didn’t think too much about it because I was surprised to find out that she had a husband in the first place.”

  “Well, I ain’t him, Mr. Norton. She might have one someplace, but I ain’t married to her. And I’m glad I’m not, neither. I’m a widower. There’s just me and my son, Francis, and our little grocery store. And that’s what I’d like to go on being; a widower. It was the money, Mr. Norton. I hope you know that I ain’t got nothing personal against you. Tell you the truth, I felt sorry for you, all mixed up with that woman, a woman that don’t shave under her arms or anything.”

  “It doesn’
t reassure me, Wright, to know that you didn’t do all these things for personal reasons.”

  “I know. I just put that in. I know you’re going to kill me, but it won’t make it easy for you if you get to feeling sorry for me.”

  “I don’t feel sorry for you, Wright. I’ve never met a professional killer, or a hit-man before, but I don’t like you personally, Mr. Wright.”

  “I’m not a hit-man all the time, though. That’s the problem. My son and me got us a small neighborhood grocery store, and the big chains’ve made it tough on us the last few years, what with cut rate prices and all. But the last year or so, what with rising costs, we been breaking even again. For the last year, and I could prove it to you if you want, there is hardly any difference in prices. With just me and Francis running the store, we don’t have their big overhead, you see—not with inflation, so…”

  “I don’t care about your damned grocery store. I want to know why Jannaire hired you to kill me, and why she changed her mind, and why she wanted you to run me out of town.”

  “I don’t know. I never hired out to no woman before, so it was different with her. Maybe she got chicken-hearted. Anyway, if I hadn’t needed the money, I would’ve left as soon as she changed her mind. But we got to dickering, and I agreed to do it, with her giving me amateur advice ever step of the way. What I did, you see, was up the price to twenty-five hundred. If you kill a man, that’s it. No danger. But fooling around this way, trying funny tricks and all, the man gets to know you, who you are, maybe, and then he comes after you instead of leaving town. Or, he leaves town, and then maybe he hires a man to hit you sometime. It’s worth more, so I charged more. But she shaved me down to twenty-two hundred. I needed the money, and I would’ve gone back to my flat two thousand, but she ain’t as good at dickering as she thinks she is.”