Kill City USA

by Warren Roberts

  ‘Viva la revolucion,’ I toasted.

  We lit our cigars with long wooden matches, rolling them in our fingers so the ends revolved in the cedar flame. I closed my eyes and sipped the rum.

  It did taste like cognac. Maybe. Well, you gotta use your imagination here.

  Dooley settled the bill by sign language and we walked back toward the office in the steamy sunny heat, silently enjoying our cigars. Only tourists and private eyes were on the streets, mad dogs staying well in the shade.

  Dooley contemplated his cigar’s inch-long ash, then pointed it my way. ‘We been retained to sort this crap out.”

  ‘By?’

  ‘Eventually it’ll come outta Tomas’ hide. Then his pocket. In that fucking order. But for now a friend of his father believes that the Miami Cubans have a lot to lose if this shit ain’t sorted. He went to Tomas ‘cos his son works in Tomas’ office and alerted him that something was up. He’s also his godfather. So. He and some buddies, rich Cubano hombres, have today sent a good faith retainer to our London account. Twenty-five grand. I had it sent there ‘cos I don’t want to be seen to be too closely involved at this end.’

  I was feeling heady. The rum, the sun, the cigar. ‘Twenty-five G is good sorta faith.’

  ‘Mmm.’

  ‘Tomas know I’m here?’

  ‘I told him last evening. We’re off to see him now.’

  We’d reached the cool of Dooley’s office. Dooley opened his safe and gave me my concealed carry Bianchi rig. It sheathed my Sig Sauer P-232, a re-design of my old P-230. It was small, reliable and a reassuring blend of Swiss design and German manufacture, a national combo preferred for ballistics rather than cuisine.

  ‘It’s cleaned, tested and ready to go,’ said Dooley.

  I checked its clip and fitted it back into the rig, clipped to my belt under my untucked shirt. The mini-surge of adrenaline was a better high than my rum and cigar rush.

  He gave me an envelope. In it was my concealed carry license issued by the Florida Department of State Division of Licensing and my Class C private investigator license, which he kept during my absences in London.

  ‘You like my new toy?’ said Dooley.

  He took a pistol out of a case and fondled it. I recognised it from its review in a gun magazine I subscribe to in preference to reading Hello! It was the new Vokker M9 mil combat auto pistol with a distinctive forward sloping grip. Dooley gave me a spiel about its ergonomic design and its short recoil operation and whatever else, without quite having an orgasm. He also gave me a 32-calibre grin, ‘I’m saving it for a special occasion,’ as he dry-fired it against the wall awhile. Maybe he was having an orgasm. But hey, that’s a personal matter.

  Outside, we waited for the air-conditioning in Dooley’s silver Jeep to kick in, then we drove across the MacArthur Causeway toward downtown. Gleaming white cruise ships in port were double-parked like cabs in a rank, near enough to pop over to borrow a cup of sugar, while a Miami PD patrol boat cruised parallel to us at the same speed as our Jeep. A blonde skipper was at the helm like Boadicea in search of Romans, her hair billowing in the breeze under her navy blue PD cap while her chin and surgically-enhanced chest jutted forward as direction finders.

  Downtown Miami looks better in relief than close up, where its uncongenial air is apparent. It’s not user-friendly and has no unifying character. There’s no Madison Avenue or Knightsbridge. And no Central Park or Hyde Park to get mugged in on weekends. No Chinatown or theatre district. No Big Orange to New York’s Big Apple. Its thirty or so blocks bustle with activity during the day. By night its sidewalks are unwalkable, its neighbourhoods unneighbourly.

  Tomas’ office was in the heart of downtown, in Miami’s retort to the Big Apple’s Rockerfeller Center, the Alfred I DuPont building on East Flagler. An Art Deco jewel, it’s a remnant of the optimism of a South Florida past. We took the elevator to the thirteenth floor, which I hoped was going to be lucky for some.

  Dooley buzzed at his office door. No one was at reception. Dooley buzzed again, impatiently. Tomas eventually appeared and unlocked the door. The armpits and neck of his once white shirt were a sweat-swamp, even though the building was cool. Three days’ growth of his beard wasn’t designer stubble. Steamer trunks hung under his eyes.

  He nodded a nervous greeting to usher us in and locked the door behind us.

  ‘You know my partner, Milo,’ Dooley gestured towards me.

  Dooley, like me, used partner to mean business associate rather than its hijacked PC usage as the description of a lover. Well, maybe partner in its PC form sounded better than, say, co-copulatrix. Or maybe not. I’d give that some thought some time.

  ‘Course. Been a while. Welcome back to Miami.’ Tomas shook my hand with both of his, his eyes elsewhere. He wasn’t pleased to see me.

  We followed him into a large office where a lot of computer screens had a few people looking at them. He led us into a smaller office at the rear. We sat on sofas around a couple of coffee tables. Tomas levered the caps off a couple of longnecks and put the beers in front of us. He took a mineral water for himself. Dooley and I waited during an uneasy silence for Tomas to speak. He didn’t.

  Dooley did. ‘Milo knows about our problem.’ Our, not your.

  Tomas nodded. He was jumpy, like he’d drunk his body mass in double espresso. He was also on uppers.

  Dooley said, ‘Anything more to tell us?’

  Tomas wished there weren’t. ‘The fuckers called in this morning. They want my answer Monday afternoon. Otherwise –’ Tomas looked at me, palms upraised. ‘What can I tell you.’

  I said, ‘Just tell me from the beginning.’

  He crossed his arms, his legs clamped together, his shoulders hunched, his eyes switched off, body language clear even to the dyslexic. He started to say something but went to the fridge and got a beer instead. He took a long pull from the neck as he caught Dooley’s impatience. ‘Well, after I set up here I was doing just fine. Covering my overheads and making a nice bit on top. Then the first quarter this year I was long on tech stocks even though my gut told me the resurgent bull market wouldn’t last forever. In April the market dived. I treaded water for a few months but then I needed cash to cover margin calls. So I called a few people I knew who might help. It wasn’t the sort of deal a bank would look at.’

  The phone rang and Tomas took the call at his desk. He was agitated and short with the caller. He swore in back-street Spanish then hung up, before switching the phone off.

  ‘I was running scared. Without the money I woulda been wiped out. I’ve some personal guarantees hanging out there, and our house and just about everything else was at stake.’

  Dooley flinched. He hadn’t heard this before.

  ‘I found out one of my salesmen had put some of my clients into some crap stock, promoted by boiler room bandits. The shares bombed and so did my clients’ money. It was a scam – there would have been an SEC investigation so I had to promise to reimburse them. This fucker sold them to friends and relatives of mine as he knew they trusted me – they thought it was me they were dealing with. I now know he was being paid by those guinea fucks and it was a set-up. It was also a shitload of money. I shoulda been on top of it but I wasn’t. It slipped through.’

  I said, ‘That salesman was the one that finally found you the bailout money.’

  He nodded, then a mocking laugh. ‘Right. Just before I fired him I get a call from this Eyetie I acted for when I was at the brokerage house, Paul Quaranto. I got him out of a stock he was heavy on once – saved him a shitload of money before the company went into Chapter 11. I’d forgotten about it but he said he’d heard from the salesman that I needed help and he would now like to be there for me. You scratched my back, now I’ll gouge yours. I met him, we talked a bit and he had the funds wired to me in a couple of days. Manna from heaven.’

  ‘How much was it?’ I said.

  ‘One point five mil. It was wired in two amounts a month ago. One lot from a Cayman Isla
nds bank and the other from Monaco. I covered my margin positions, paid back the scammed clients, and I was left with a little to play with.’

  Dooley interrupted. ‘How else were you planning to cover your margins? Rob a bank?’

  Tomas looked at Dooley to say he didn’t need that question right now. Dooley stared right back to say he did.

  ‘I knew of a couple of IPOs coming up in biotech stocks where I could get in at the off, and I was confident of trading my way out. I still am. Then Quaranto sends two lowlifes to my office. We had agreed a rate of three points a month for the loan, interest only, monthly for twelve months, then a bullet payment for the principal. I agreed to this, providing I could repay early if I had the dough, and he just smiled as he shook my hand.’

  I said, ‘That’s what – thirty-six percent per annum. Expensive money.’

  ‘You take what you can get,’ said Tomas.

  Dooley had his say. ‘That’s…’ He got a calculator from Tomas’ desk. ‘Forty-five grand a month for the interest. You couldn’t have repaid it anyway.’

  Tomas was breathing heavily and wanted Dooley elsewhere. ‘Then these goons arrive giving instructions for a transfer of forty-five K. They say I agreed to three points a week, not three a month. I tried to call Quaranto but he wouldn’t talk to me. So I paid forty-five grand on account and demanded a meeting. We met this weekend and he made me an offer all right.’ Tomas laughed ruefully.

  I said, ‘Where did you meet?’

  ‘Naples on the Gulf Coast.’

  See Naples and die.

  ‘I was told to drive to a Holiday Inn just south of there last Sunday and wait near reception for instructions. After an hour I was paged and got a message to go to another Holiday Inn, a few miles away. This spaghetti head was waiting for me.’

  ‘You know him?’

  ‘No, but he sure knew me. He took me to an empty room and told me to wait for a minute. The phone went after thirty minutes and I went to another room. They were all in there. I was scared shitless.’

  ‘They?’ I said.

  ‘Paul Quaranto, Ernie Moresco, Ricky Bezzant and the heavy who’d met me outside. He waited in the hallway.’

  ‘They check you for wires?’ I said.

  ‘Even better. They shove me to the bathroom and get me to strip. I get back into the room butt-naked and they give me a Holiday Inn towel. Budget sized. It hardly went round. I had to keep holding it up. I was waiting for a gloved finger up my keister just so they could be sure. It was fucking surreal.’

  He took a couple of measured deep breaths.

  ‘Quaranto started this speech about debt and honour and saving face and respect. Talked about his love of family and did I love my family and did I want to bring them into all of this. And his goons…’

  ‘Tell me.’

  He gave a nervous laugh. ‘This could not even have been directed by Scorsese. It was too fucking weird for that. These retards were sitting there reading Incredible Hulk comics.’

  ‘So they don’t belong to Mensa.’

  ‘One’s got street smarts. Bad fucker. That’s Ernie. Ricky, the other macaroni is a guy who couldn’t find his ass with a Geiger counter after a barium enema. Just does what he’s told.’

  I said, ‘What was Quaranto’s deal?’

  ‘He has big plans for technology scams. Kept saying that with computer technology there are now more ways to find the suckers out there than ever before. And to capitalise on them. We’re living in the golden age of the web, he kept saying. He was on cyber heat. It’s a once in a lifetime chance. Credit crunch-proof. Said there’d been nothing like it since prohibition. Called it an electronic redistribution of income, with a straight face. That he was a visionary. Coming out of retirement to seize this golden goose. So he wants some Hispanic partner who’s known and trusted in the Cuban community…’ He paused for breath. ‘So he can broaden his horizons. And if I co-operate he renegotiates the debt.’

  ‘Co-operate?’

  ‘Become a boiler room. Pump and dump worthless small cap stock through my company. Calling card fraud. You name it. He’s some sort of born-again IT gangster.’

  I said, ‘How was it left?’

  ‘I was scared shitless and just wanted to get the hell outta there. I felt even more vulnerable just wearing a towel. The whole thing was just fucking crazy. So I said I’d think about it.’

  ‘His reaction?’

  ‘He gave me his fuck you smile and said I should know that the consequences of me refusing were too terrible to even contemplate. He’s given me until Monday next week. Then he –’

  I helped him out. ‘What?’

  ‘Made me put the rooms on my Amex card.’

  I laughed. So did Dooley. These guys had more front than Brighton Beach.

  Dooley’s cell phone rang in time to stop Tomas from sobbing in humiliation. He spoke for a while in Spanish.

  Dooley looked at me. ‘You free this evening for dinner?’

  I nodded and he spoke briefly before he finished his call.

  ‘You are meeting my friend Cza at 8.30. But you are gonna keep your blood supply north of your trousers. She’s a looker, she’s a good friend of ours, and she’s with the Feds, so she will shoot it off with government and my approval if you misbehave.’

  I got his point. And didn’t tell him that few things turn me on as much as good looking girl packing loaded gun.

  ‘She’s going to give you some background on these creeps.’

  ‘You coming as chaperone?’

  Dooley stood. ‘No. She can talk more freely without me there.’

  I turned to Tomas. ‘Let’s keep in touch. Remember we’re here to help you. So keep us in the loop. And don’t do anything or agree anything with these assholes without telling us first. You got that?’

  Tomas nodded unconvincingly. He walked us to the elevator in silence. His hands were deep in his pockets and he shrugged resign-edly in farewell, more stressed than a chameleon on a kilt.

  We traded the cool of the building for the Miami heat. Dooley dropped me off at the Shelborne where tourists were returning from wherever tourists return from. After a shower, I put my rig in my room safe and went down to the pool. It was crowded. A drunken ape with an Atlantic Falcons cap and a beer belly cascading over his shorts kept falling off the edge of the pool and losing his hat in the process, much to the delight of his shit-faced mates, their sweaty beer guts broiling in the sun – a bunch of RV salesmen who’d met their sales quotas for last month. Paper umbrellas from the empty glasses on their table were festooned on their caps.

  I decided to go to the gym, so I went back to my room and changed into my sweats. My message light was flashing. It was Jonah saying he and Jay had arrived safely on the Gulf Coast. He left a number for me to call him back.

  I got a plummy voice on an answer machine. ‘Hi, I’m Carrie. I’m either at the beach, the bar, or in London or Venice, or skiing maybe. Life is hell. Speak now and I’ll get back to you when I can.’ I left a message, wondering how long Jonah would cope with the owner of the voice. Or she with him.

  I took the elevator to the top floor gym. It was deserted.

  Working out is one of the times when I don’t think about sex. If I had an analyst, maybe she could tell me why. I’m not sure what the other times are. I’d give that some thought. When I pump iron I think about business matters. Quality Sherlocking time. So today it was stock scams. Loansharks. Holiday Inn towels. The stupidity of Tomas.

  I warmed up on the treadmill for thirty minutes and did an hour in fifteen-minute bursts on the multi-gym machine, working on lower and upper body strength. The air-conditioning was off so I soon worked up a nine on the Milo sweat index. I would finish the workout when I reached nine point five. After some concerted up-tempo two-handed rhythm on the speed bag, my cutout switch flipped. I’d hit the red line. Bingo.

  Back in my room I rinsed my body under the shower then ran a bath adding some salts and oils, compliments of the hotel. I lay b
ack in the savoury steaming water and closed my eyes. Now I could think of other things.

  5

  I put on a dark blue linen suit and a blue T-shirt and looked in the mirror. Nah, it was too Sonny Crockett. So I switched to a light blue linen shirt and navy strides. Suitably crumpled. For some reason I nearly always wear shades of blue. Light, dark, navy, denim, you name it. At turquoise and blue seersucker I draw the line, leaving those to Alabama attorneys and used car dealers in Essex. In my distant past a lover had said that blue suited me. Went with my eyes, or was it my risqué jokes? I forget. What’s the analyst going to make of this colour fetish? Resistant to change? The blues? A melancholic complex? So who gives a shit.

  I left the hotel at eight. We were meeting at Pacific Time restaurant in the Lincoln Mall. It was a fifteen-minute walk down Collins Street, then into Lincoln Road where the open-air mall started just past Washington Avenue. It was a sideshow of the trend conscious where athletic bodies did their posturing night and day and the long-legged rollerbladers treated the pedestrians as slalom gates.

  I arrived early at the restaurant so I sat at the bar and waited for Cza. I ordered a Heineken, from the neck. The restaurant was starting to buzz, trendily-clad patrons arriving en masse. Its midnight blue ceiling got the Milo colour code seal of approval, but the designer naff-yellow-faux-distressed walls were a shade too jaundiced for my taste. Despite Tomas’ problems, life felt good; the beer was cold, and I was waiting for an attractive woman bearing loaded gun. And getting paid for my time. By my second beer I was wondering when it got any better.

  I kept my eye on the door. People without reservations were being turned away. Normally a good sign for a restaurant, although in this town, who knows?

  Dead on 8.30 a dark-haired girl arrived at the maitre’s station. He appraised her at arm’s length before giving her a hug, then pointed her towards me at the bar. She was tall, with a toned body that had spent a lot of time in a gym. A red V-necked sweater clung to a navy skirt which showed a lot of her ice skater’s legs, leaving much room for creative contemplation. Her dark hair was Holly Golightly short, stylishly brushed back above her ears, on which large black pearls were framed in gold.