A couple of seventy-five-year-old born-again in-line skaters sipped their cafe lattes on the terrace at Starbucks. They were both dressed in lurid Lycra. Nearby sat a middle-aged punk with Chiquita banana hair and shiny silver hoops pierced through the visible parts of her body. She wore dark chocolate-coloured lipstick and matching eye shadow and a battered black leather punk outfit, which was her entire wardrobe, her only visible means of support being gravity. She was speaking to herself in tongues and looked happy with life as she sipped her brown-bagged breakfast bottle from its screw-top neck. Beside her a couple of middle-aged theatrical types in cuffed corduroy shorts and Roman sandals with white socks smoked their cigarettes through their middle fingers.
I breakfasted at the Blue Parrot Cafe where gastric Darwinism was at work, the lithe and the hollow-cheeked sitting cheek to jowl with the obese. Grotesquely proportioned body builders were thrown in for good measure. Next to me sat two muscle-head gays cradling their dogs which had long brown pointed ears and noses and spindly legs under rat-like bodies. They called them Ike and Tina.
These were all the early shift. The South Beach trendies would not be seen until the early afternoon, morning exposure being distinctly uncool.
Life still felt good. I breakfasted on lashings of ham, scrambled eggs, toast, fresh orange juice and America’s gift to the world, bottomless cups of coffee. My coolly efficient waitress, Lulu, was in her early twenties and would have looked good as a model, a topless dancer or an actress. She probably was all three in her day job.
The rat-dog toting gays greeted a pair of shih tzus arriving with their owners, two she-Hispanic weightlifters in Superman and Superwoman T-shirts, who made an ingratiating fuss of the waitress in case their grand entrance had gone unobserved. I waved my check and some greenbacks at Lulu to show her I was not skipping town, before leaving them under the salt shaker. She was cradling one of the shi tzus, admiring its pink bandana.
I arrived at the office at eleven. We had the ground floor in a three-storey tropical Art Deco building, built in the late 1930s. Each floor had cantilevered concrete sunshades extended above the windows like architectural eyebrows, which continued round the sides of the building. It was painted in tropical pastel pink, blue and mauve. Two large porthole windows flanked the entrance. The metal and glass double door had a bronzed sunray motif at its centre, encircled in a neon rainbow. I’ve known bordellos in Bangkok that weren’t as brazen.
I went inside to the coolness of the large entranceway, its highly polished terrazzo floor flanked by white stucco walls. A huge Deco clock on one wall had numerals represented by raised and lacquered yellow and orange sunfish motifs. Its hands stood as ever at 5.45, a perpetual reminder of an impending cocktail hour.
Our office was on my right. Behind the reception desk an attractive Hispanic girl in her early twenties was working in front of a computer screen. She had obviously passed Dooley’s tough employment policy of hiring on the basis of headshots and nothing smaller than a C cup.
I walked up to her. ‘Hola. I’m Milo.’
‘Hola Milo.’ She grinned back. ‘I’m Tonique. I’m new here,’ she said.
‘You going to make passes at our staff all day or you here to work.’ The voice was followed by Dooley laughing through animated white teeth salted with gold. His impatient brown eyes said that he’d seen a lot and had thought a lot about what he’d seen. He walked up behind Tonique and put his huge hands on her shoulders.
‘This is the cousin of my sister-in-law who’s here to keep an eye on me.’ They both laughed, looking at each other with a hint of a little more than familial affection.
We shook hands, grasping each other’s forearms with our free hands. We didn’t do embracing with canine intensity, leaving that to the less sincere. I followed him past the reception area into the main office. He wore a guayabera, which was practical for the heat and for carrying his concealed weapon.
Dooley was about six two, with the bulky frame of a rugby front row forward. His moustache was of Saddam proportions. To the unsuspecting, he liked to convey the complacent air of an Hispanic to whom the word mañana conveys less than the usual lack of urgency. Often to their great cost.
I greeted and exchanged holas with the rest of our staff and went into his office. It was on the front corner of the building, with old-style venetian blinds on the oblong windows.
A couple of large original Cassandre lithos, the Nicolas wine bottle images, were on the wall as was the framed Shakespeare Henry VI lawyer quotation I’d sent him. On a small mahogany period table sat only a telephone, he having reasoned some time ago that you don’t do better investigations behind big desks. There were Art Deco director’s chairs for visitors and a couple of leather couches against the walls. Copies of Combat Handguns and Guns And Weapons For Law Enforcement and Gun Digest were littered over two coffee tables.
Some guys collect stamps. Some trainspot. Dooley collected guns and gun paraphernalia, treating his weapons like family pets.
We sat down. I sat on the couch and Dooley on one of the director’s chairs. He liked to swivel while he talked. Tonique appeared with two small cups of cafe Cubano, an intense full-bodied brew of contraband Cuban coffee and sugar. It is major league high voltage Jolting Joe, not recommended for minor league low-wattage decaffeinates or lapsed insomniacs. Instant coffee Dooley saw as the Antichrist, and decaf was the Prince of Darkness.
‘Cheers and welcome, amigo,’ said Dooley, raising his tiny cup. It looked incongruous in his burly fingers, so he raised his massive pinky to heighten the effect.
I raised mine. ‘Cheers.’
Dooley downed his brew in one brief swallow so I indulged him by swirling and sniffing my cup, then washing the brew round my mouth as if wine tasting. I looked for somewhere to spit it out, before I swallowed.
I said, ‘Your Cohibas,’ giving him a plain cedar cigar box.
‘Thanks, man. My usual supplier’s in the joint and those other sons-of-bitches will sell you Cuban factory-made counterfeits.’ He put them into a built-in humidor behind his desk. ‘You can’t tell till you smoke and choke.’
He leant towards me. ‘So. You behave yourself last night?’
‘I wanted to, but she insisted on being naughty. So what’s a gentleman to do?’ He roared with laughter, spinning a 360-degree rotation in his chair, legs outstretched.
We bullshitted each other for a while and talked a bit about our respective sides of the business. We had a handshake partner’s agreement whereby we loosely shared each other’s profits, or whatever spare cash we had. In fact, I can’t even remember our shaking hands on it. We believed you only put things in writing if you didn’t think they had a hope in hell of working out, like in a pre-nup.
I gave him a précis of my meeting with Jay and the subsequent interlude with Sayers and Irish, and her trip with Jonah to Florida.
‘Good. We sure going to need Jonah.’
‘So. What’s all this about?’
‘Well Houston, we’ve got a problem.’ He stood, and motioned towards the door. ‘Let’s go talk about it over lunch.’
We left the building, into the noonday heat.
4
We walked toward Ocean Drive then turned north on Washington Avenue. Cirrus clouds were surging in the east and harsh sunshine dazzled and ricocheted off the bleached buildings in the soft and salty air. We were a couple of degrees north of the Tropic of Cancer, which bisects the Sahara Desert, an ocean but light years away.
‘My wife’s cousin’s opened a restaurant in the next block.’ He pointed north. ‘It’s doing well.’
We crossed the road and walked eastwards on Collins. ‘Aren’t we going to your cousin-in-law?’ I said.
He laughed. ‘Some other time. She don’t stop eavesdropping and we need some privacy.’
We went into a small restaurant with dining counters against the window and eager eaters at the bar crouched seriously low over their meals. The booths along one wall were vacant. Peeling chrom
e, faded Formica and well-trod linoleum gave it a dingy air, but not the faux-designer ramshackle where the waiter asks you for your star sign before he takes your order.
‘We can talk in peace here,’ said Dooley. ‘And the grub’s good.’ A burly Cubano, with a red-checked tea towel slung over his shoulder had the air of the guy who owned the place. He stepped out from behind the bar to greet Dooley.
Dooley put his hand on his shoulder. ‘Vincente. This is Milo, my half-brother.’
I said, ‘Same father, different mother.’
Dooley nodded. The owner stopped in mid-laugh, unsure if we were kidding. He showed us to a small circular booth at the rear, and Dooley took the seat facing the front of the restaurant. He spoke to Vincente in Spanish, who nodded and walked away. He’d asked for the booths next to us to remain empty.
The waiter brought our menus. American-Cuban food. Dooley ordered Caesar salad, grilled grouper and frijoles negros, and Evian. It sounded good to me so I did likewise. When elsewhere, do as the elsewheres do is my golden rule.
Dooley was deep in thought, so I sipped my mineral water, thinking how good a glass of chilled dry white would taste. He wasn’t about to broach the silence, or order a wine, so I said, ‘What’s up, amigo?’
He let my question hang around awhile before he said, ‘Milo, when you’re a Cuban and you marry a Cuban, it ain’t like you Anglos. We marry each other’s families as well. That’s the worst part of the nuptials. But you don’t think too much about it at the time.’
‘C’mon D. You’re a family man.’
‘I know. But family includes my shit-for-brains brother-inlaw.’
I knew Tomas. I’d met him just after he’d graduated from one of the Ivy League east coast universities, at Dooley and Gloria’s wedding. He was dating Gloria’s sister at the time. At the reception he’d told me how rich he was going to become.
‘I met him. Just out of college. Laid-back guy. I figured he took sedatives as a stimulant.’
He gave a flicker of a smile.
‘He went from college into a small Florida brokerage house. Then one of the big boys headhunted him, and he was making loadsa do-re-mi and buying the adult toys. A Porsche, Harley Road King, beachfront condo, my sister-in-law as a trophy wife, etcetera. Jesus, his annual bonus was about my yearly earnings,’ said Dooley, shaking his head. ‘He’d some pretty colourful clients, mostly suffering from an acute overdose of moolah. Wealthy ex-New York Jewish divorcees he referred to as housekeepers. They’d divorced their husbands and kept the houses. New Jersey Italians, all in drainage consultancy with money to burn. Tomas reckoned the only drainage they did was plugging people full of holes. Plus the nouveau riche Colombians who gave new meaning to lack of taste. And man, he just kept making ‘em richer.’
I said, ‘Sounds like some penis envy about to creep in here.’
‘You mean dickhead envy?’
‘So he dip his fingers in the till or what?’
‘Let me backtrack. SEC rules made it hard for him to trade on his own account when he’s putting clients in and out of various deals ‘cos he’s working for a big company with cats who don’t want to go to jail, so he decides to do it on his own and say fuck you to the SEC and ethics and legal crap. So he hangs up his own shingle.’
‘When was that?’
‘A couple of years ago. He takes a lease on an office in downtown Miami. Employs long-legged sales chicks with skirts up to their snatches plus some smart-assed Big Swinging Dicks and he’s up and running. The big enchilada. Takes him a while to get going but the market flies and so does he. Seems to know what he’s doing for a while there. Recommends his clients, including me, to liquidate their stocks before one of the mini-crashes, and he has some grateful customers. He wheels. He deals. The cash register just keeps chinking away in his roller coaster dreamland.’
I said, ‘You invest with him?’
‘A little, but some of the companies he touts are shit-buckets. Take Coca Cola for instance. I know its products and they’ll probably be around for my lifetime, and my kid’s. But these letmetakeyourmoneyandspendit.com companies run by nineteen-year-olds ain’t my speed. I wouldn’t sleep at night knowing they’d spent my dough. I’d rather tuck it into a Brazilian lap dancer’s G-string. Even if she ain’t going to use it to save the rainforests.’
The waiter brought our lunch to the table and chatted in quickfire Cuban Spanish with Dooley.
Dooley nodded him to leave. ‘My sister-in-law Jennifer gets worried about him and their relationship. He’s working night and day and acts like a zombie when he’s at home. I try to talk with him but he keeps saying he needs just twelve more months. Then he and the family’ll be on easy street.’ Dooley laughed. ‘He’d been from A to D, he says. Now it’s just EZ.’ Dooley moulded his rice into a circle with his fork, until his attention was diverted. He stood up and walked to the front of the restaurant to greet a diner. Some brief chat and he returned to the table.
His fork sculpted his rice again, a triangle this time. Then a square. ‘He’s stressed to the eyeballs. Jennifer’s spending a lot of time with us, and Tomas less with her. Things start to get a bit normal toward the end of last year, and Tomas seems more in control. We spend Sunday lunches or dinners together and it’s getting like old times,’ he said.
Sunday family lunches. Not in my memory bank.
‘He starts to get edgy again. Jennifer says they argue about money for the first time and about anything else that comes to mind. Then,’ – he played with the rice again – ‘on Sunday late he calls me to say he wants to see me in my office early Monday. I could tell it was serious. I was only worried it was something to do with his marriage.’
Dooley took a long swallow of mineral water from the neck. ‘I wish it had been a family matter. As in our family. That, I mighta been able to sort out.’
‘So what’s he been up to D?’
An uneasy smile. Then a shrug. ‘He’s into a local mobster for one point five mil.’
We traded stares. ‘Tell me.’
‘He’s been day-trading on his own account, and he says he’s been hit by the downturn in the market since the beginning of the year. He’s been chasing his losses but the market hasn’t picked up. And some fucker in his office sells his clients some bucket shop paper you can’t even wipe your ass with. So, he’s suckered into taking some money from the local mob. And he takes it without reading the fine print.’
‘What fine print?’
‘This.’
Tomas lifted his guayabera to show me his .38.
‘And?’ I said.
‘They’ve – the Eye-talian lenders – made him the proverbial offer he can’t refuse. He gets an extension on his loan if he fronts for these douchebags on certain deals. The whole thing was a set-up. To scam him to rent him then own him. They need a Miami-Cuban shop window. It helps in this Cubano town. This was their chance to window-dress their hairy asses full of shit to a wider public.’
‘Their shit being stock scams.’
‘You got it.’
‘He repaid anything?’
‘A little of the interest.’
‘What they charging him? The vig.’ I’d heard the expression used on TV.
‘Three points a week.’
‘Er… That’s about one fifty plus percent per annum.’
‘Yeah. They’re not too hung up with state usury laws. Tomas said they promised three points per month but they beg to differ. Without the begging bit. Don’t matter much. He couldn’t pay monthly interest whatever rate. And they say their normal rates are more than that. Five points per week and up. Seems like he got their interbank rate. As published by the Sicilian Fed from time to time.’
I said, ‘Yeah, right. Mob interbank. I see it listed every day in the FT. Right under short-term gilts.’
He paused. ‘And that’s not all. They’re blackmailing him. The shares promoted by the fucker in his office were bucket-shop scams. He says this guy was in their pocket. That it was done
behind his back. He knew nuttin’.’
Dooley pushed his food round some more. Then he laid his upraised fork on his plate and switched back on.
‘Seems there were two bogus companies they’d set up. They sold its shares through a boiler room they operated. Then through him. This employee forced a bundle on his clients. They say they’ve got people to testify he was in on the deal from the start.’
‘Was he?’
Dooley shook his head slowly, then thought a little and shrugged. ‘I think – I hope – he was just suckered. Dumb fuck he is.’
‘His wife know all this?’
‘She left a couple of days ago to stay with a friend in LA ‘cos things ain’t great in their household. Tomas told her he needed to be alone for a while. What she certainly don’t know is the fuckers come to see Tomas yesterday, to give him a photo of her dropping the kids off at school recently.’
‘You know these guys?’ I said.
‘Only by reputation. He’s been dealing with two ex-Brooklyn wiseguys. Ricky Bezzant and Ernie Moresco. They’re soldiers for an ex-New York mobster, Paul Quaranto. A one-time capo. Spending his retirement in the sunshine but keeps his finger stirring the shitter ‘cos he likes the stink.’
‘These mob guys – they don’t fool around.’
‘You’re not kidding. And if la mierda really hits the fan, it’ll blow into a lot of faces,’ he said. ‘And not just Tomas’. His father-in-law, my father-in-law, is a judge in this town. So the gringo press would love this story. To get Cuban judge and mobster in the same headline. Plus lotsa others would like their big dicks in this pisspot.’
The waiter came with coffees. And two snifters and a bottle on the table.
Dooley held the bottle toward me. ‘This is twenty-five-year-old Cuban Havana Club rum which fell off a fishing boat. Good tides that day brought it into shore.’ He joined in the waiter’s laughter. ‘Close your eyes and it almost tastes like cognac.’ He offered me one of his Cohiba Siglo IVs. ‘Un cigarro habano perfecto.’
Kill City USA Page 4