Kill City USA

by Warren Roberts

  In front a woman sat at a large antique walnut desk, ornately inlaid with enough ivory to have decimated a species of elephant.

  ‘Come in Mr Milo.’ Her voice was flat and cold.

  I walked toward the desk. She didn’t stand, but with an upward flick of her wrist, motioned to Turner to leave the room.

  Cza’s description had done her justice. She had a waxen face of deathly pale, framed by thick long silver hair to accentuate the designer chilling-effect dark lipstick and layered mascara. I’ve known coyotes who would simper before her and then bark in respectfully subdued tones. Her eyes were as warm as cold blue steel above a choker of black pearls with matching long pendant earrings and a black silk Nehru jacket. Long black-buttoned gloves completed the ensemble. A raven on her shoulder was missing.

  Her rasping sandpaper voice came from a sixty-a-day habit. ‘You wanted to see me.’ It sounded like Marlene Dietrich after a night on the tiles with Dean Martin.

  ‘Don’t you know that keeping piranha as pets is illegal in this great state of Florida. It’s because of the damage they could do to the fragile eco-system. The ever-vanishing everglades.’

  She picked up an hourglass and turned it over so the sands poured down like a taxi meter ticking on the last cab to salvation.

  ‘That’s not why you come to see me.’ She was tapping her gloved nails on the desk.

  ‘No. Actually as I’ve been explaining to your very helpful Mr Turner out there, I’m interested in –’

  ‘Cut the crap. I’ve just spoken to Pauli Q. He don’t know who the fuck you are apart from he heard your name from some spic who’s got a beef with him,’ she said, like a guy in Guys and Dolls.

  ‘Actually, I’m thinking of writing a musical movie called Aspects of Death, or The Phantom of the Funeral Home. If you’re interested, this could be a perfect setting. Great publicity. I’ll even throw in a credit for you.’

  She pressed a buzzer at the side of her desk and the door clicked open. Her eyes glinted against the eerie pall of the subdued lighting. It was Tony-winning dramatic theatrical effect, in which wolves would flee and Broadway lighting directors would salaam and salivate. She stared at me for a half-minute, expecting me to react. I didn’t.

  She did. ‘Leave now, asshole. While you can.’ She had a God-given gift of making a threat sound real.

  I went into Southern mode. When in the South and all that. ‘Well. I’m certainly pleased to make your acquaintance, ma’am. It’s a mighty fine establishment you have here. Ya’ll should be very proud of it.’

  She looked away from me and stared at her fish tanks. As their glow reflected in her eyes, one of the glass cases caught my eye. It looked like a trophy case, and on its glass shelves were about thirty more hourglasses of various shapes.

  I had a close look at them. ‘Hobby of yours? Unusual things to collect. Quite eclectic.’

  ‘They ain’t none of ya fuckin’ business. But I promise you they can be. You have any idea who you fuckin’ with here? Or you just natural born dumb?’

  ‘I believe that question’s a rhetorical one, so I won’t bother to answer.’

  Turner nervously took up a position behind me, between me and his boss. He was vibrating like the Albert Hall organ.

  I added from the doorway, ‘You change your mind about the musical let me know. Maybe Crematory Blues would be a better working title. It seems to suit this room. The bluesy ambience. Emotional resonance. Joy and pain. The heart of sorrow, etcetera. I’ll give it more thought and have my person call your person.’

  She was picking up the phone as I left her office. Turner followed me to the Thunderbird and stood with his hands wringing together as I mounted the bike and gunned the motor.

  ‘Be careful on your motorcycle,’ he said. ‘Lots of people get killed on them. We see it here all the time.’

  I put on my shades and rode out of the chill into the living warm.

  7

  The sky was bluer than I’d left it, the storm having changed its mind. I headed toward the office, keeping my eye on the side mirrors for a hearse touting for business.

  Instead, a couple of Harley gangbangers in red bandannas pulled alongside and rode shotgun with me for a while along the I-95, a Harley Rules OK memo, before they accelerated away from my un-American motorbike, cutting in front of me so I could see my reflection in their mirrored Ray-Bans as they looked me over. I could have taken their lumbering machines with a short twist of the throttle on my more potent and lighter bike, but I let them enjoy their moment. I had enough on my mind. And it was now almost a sunny day.

  I got back to the office around noon. Dooley had left to supervise a cellphone fraud surveillance in Hialeah. Tonique told me Tomas had been trying to call me. He called again a minute or so after I entered the office.

  His greeting: ‘Milo, what the fuck you been up to.’

  I said, ‘And a fine day it is to you, too.’

  ‘Fuck all that. I’ve had Quaranto on the phone. I’d left him a message this morning that I wanted to bring you to our meeting.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Next thing he calls ranting about you being at his funeral home in the Gables and what in hell you doing there. I couldn’t tell him why because I didn’t know.’

  ‘Then you must have sounded convincing.’

  His heavy breathing paused, then, ‘So what the hell were you doing there?’

  ‘Wanted to have a mooch around. Maybe get his attention. Know thine enemy and all that stuff. It seems to have worked.’

  ‘Listen. It’s my life you’re screwing with here. I just hope you know what the hell you’re doing.’

  I said, ‘’Course I do,’ trying to make my lie sound convincing.

  ‘He wants me there at eleven tomorrow morning. I told him I’m bringing you along. He said that’s at your risk so I guess you’re invited as well. I’ll pick you up at 10.30, at the hotel. And Milo…’

  ‘What?’

  More heavy breathing, then he hung up.

  Jonah called to say he and Jay would be at the hotel late that afternoon. I left a voice message for Dooley and caught a cab back to The Shelborne. I didn’t trust the hotel valet with the bike, having earlier watched him wave-surf a shiny red Corvette across the speed bump outside the parking area.

  I decided to have late lunch at the pool. I showered first to wash what I could of the morning’s visit off me. But I needed something more abrasive than I had in my toilet bag. Maybe some sandstone picked off the beach later.

  I found an empty deckchair and a waiter and ordered a steak sandwich with all the trimmings and a side of cold beer.

  A group was returning from the beach to the hotel. Two girls led the parade. Judging by the gear they were toting they’d been on a photo shoot. Their iodine tanned legs pranced across the hot sand. The tall one wore a finely latticed red string vest forged by the heat to the curves of an otherwise bare torso. Her even taller companion wore fishnet tights wrapped around her neck as a sun-scarf, their feet bashfully resting on her nipples which protruded like the headlamps of a 1929 Model A. As they got nearer it seemed that their brief bikini bottoms disappeared between their legs to places that only their gynaecologists knew about with certainty. Alone and palely loitering I stood there watching them shimmer away, withering spectrally as they moved into the hazy heat.

  My appetite whetted, I ate, then swam a dozen or so lazy pool lengths before moving to a deckchair in the shade to doze. I was woken by icy cold on my chest. It was two bottles of beer and Dooley. We went and sat at a table near the coffee shop.

  ‘I’ve spoken to Tomas,’ he said. ‘I gather you made a bit of an impression in the Gables.’

  ‘I met the Bride of Dracula. The Count wasn’t in.’

  He eyed one of the models I’d seen earlier, as she sashayed along the rim of the pool. ‘She as intimidating as they say she is?’

  ‘Which one you talking about?’

  He gave his attention back to me. ‘La Viscione.�
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  ‘Take her to your local necrophilia society’s Necropolis Night. She’ll be a hit.’

  ‘I’ll keep it in mind. So you’re meeting with Quaranto tomorrow.’

  ‘So I’m told.’

  ‘He has a house in Key Biscayne. I’ve spoken to some guys who know the place. I hear he likes to have sit-downs at his pool on the seafront. Maybe thinks it’s less likely he’ll be bugged there.’

  ‘I’d like some cover.’

  ‘Already done. I’ve a compadre with a fifty foot gin palace. A Bayliner. I’m putting a couple of my guys on it, and it’ll hang off his jetty during your meeting. Quaranto’ll think it’s the Feds. Might stop him doing something foolish.’

  ‘With Jonah onboard as well,’ I said. ‘It will.’

  We drank beer and watched women until Jay and Jonah arrived about four. Jonah gave Dooley and me low-fives in greeting, so Jay did likewise. She was learning the way of the street fast. Jonah and Dooley spoke for a while in Cuban Spanish. Jonah probably spoke Urdu as well. Nothing surprised me about him.

  After introductions, Jay left with Dooley to his house. She wanted to stay with us but I thought she’d be better off with him and his family. It would be safer, plus she’d have Dooley’s wife Gloria for company. And besides, Eva might arrive in Florida again.

  I’d arranged for Jonah to have the room next to mine with a connecting door. He checked in and we went to the cocktail bar.

  ‘It’s good to be here, bro,’ he said. ‘Jay’s A-OK, man. A-OK. But her friend. She’s a ball-breaking spitfire.’

  I laughed. ‘What happened? That doesn’t sound like a friend of hers.’

  ‘She hadn’t seen her in a while, but had rented her house to her while she was looking for a shack of her own. This bitch had once hooked-up with some fucking rich Greek shipping tycoon who was dying of something. Probably an aversion to her. They got married, he died and she was Mrs Fucking-Rich-Widow with a foul mouth and a fouler attitude. Man, I’d go to her john just to get some fresh air. I was spending more time in there than a tourist in Tijuana.’

  I got the picture. ‘How’s Jay coping with the other shit of hers?’

  ‘She’s cool, she’s a good woman. And man, I think she has defuck-ing-signs on you,’ he said, pointing his finger at each emphasised syllable to make his point clearer. ‘Nothing I told her about you seemed to change her mind.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  I got back to reality and brought him up to date. His expression remained impassive throughout, like it always does. He was a card-carrying man at peace with himself.

  He grinned. ‘Man. Us against the Mob. I sure wish I’d paid more attention during those Godfather movies.’

  We had dinner with Dooley, Gloria and Jay at his cousin-in-law’s Cuban restaurant where animated Miami Cubans were infused with the inbred complexities that shape the Cuban psyche. They were glad to be in Miami, but they thrived on the Machiavellian machinations of El Jefe and did their best to make reports about Castro from Havana, however insignificant, seem intriguing. Their conversations were full of risqué innuendo and double entendres, all part of the hedonistic culture of people who don’t take their pleasures sadly.

  We finished our coffees and broke up about midnight. Jonah and I caught a cab back to the hotel.

  Dooley called first thing in the morning to arrange for Jonah to get to the boat. It was going to be off Quaranto’s dock at 11 am. I went with Jonah up to the gym and worked on upper body strength on the chest press and pec fly machines at a leisurely pace for a while, then we spent thirty minutes playing one-on-one basketball. We had the gym to ourselves at that time on a Sunday morning, and didn’t say a lot to each other. He left the hotel at nine for the boat and I was picked up at 10.15.

  Tomas drove a bright red Chevy off-roader. I caught the stale cigarette smoke as I climbed into it. He lit up another as soon as he started the engine, shrugging his shoulders to own up to his addiction, and not give a shit about my approval.

  We drove south before turning onto the Rickenbacker Causeway then across Virginia Key which was showing the after-effects of the most recent hurricane. The water here was bluer than Miami’s, whose irregular skyline could be seen at our rear. We drove past Australian pines, sea grape trees, bougainvilleas, tropical almonds, papayas and date palms. Yeah, I did the SAS botanics course, in the hope of seeing more of the tropics than the desert.

  Key Biscayne seemed a far cry from Brooklyn and Manhattan as a habitat for mobsters. Richard Nixon had probably started their drift south by bringing the winter White House there in the early seventies. They were simply carrying on a fine tradition from the days when the Key was a hideout for smugglers and pirates plying their Caribbean commerce.

  Quaranto’s home was in the higher-rent district of Biscayne Bay, belying again the adage about crime not paying. Tomas pulled up a couple of hundred yards from his house. It was in a street of opulent decadence. Probably old money, which in Miami can mean made last week. On the way I’d told him about Dooley’s plan for the boat. He was shit-scared Quaranto would think he’d been talking to the Feds.

  He said, ‘You have a gun?’

  ‘Of course.’

  He took a deep breath. ‘I think you should leave it in the car.’

  ‘No way. Let’s just see what happens. Then we’ll make it up as we go along.’

  He slung me a look of despair.

  We drove until we pulled into a driveway then stopped outside a large wrought iron gate. A drive of sun-bleached paving stones edged past a dollar-green lawn that looked like artificial turf, but wasn’t. Or maybe was. A dozen shades of Mexican flame and pepper vines covered the walls on either side of a white stone house, with burnt-orange Spanish tiles on the roof. Two large windows were shuttered. There was a continuous sound of rushing water. I looked around but couldn’t see a waterfall, so maybe it was artificial water. Muzak water. Maybe mineral. This was South Florida after all.

  Tomas pressed a buzzer at the gate. He was jittering more than a go-go dancer. After about ten seconds as I was leaning over to press the button again against Tomas’ wishes, a voice answered and Tomas spoke into a speakerphone. The gates opened and we pulled up in front of a double garage beside the house.

  I followed Tomas up the stone steps to the entrance. The heavy Art Deco front door was made of burnished steel and framed a lavishly decorated floral motif in bronze and chrome. A huge Chinese gilded lion’s head was hinged so it could double as a doorknocker, and its brightly illuminated red eyes blinked intermittently. It was sheltered by two mock-Grecian fluted columns which supported a sloping cornice, under which was a frieze of two Roman gladiators in combat with swords and shields, painted in fuchsia pink, black and gold. A doormat was inscribed in Neapolitan street slang Fottiti Federale, aimed at Italian speaking Feds. Its upraised-finger message also pretty clear to those whose Italian was restricted to ordering take-out Dominos.

  The overall farrago suggested that the architect had either been dropping acid or was from the Boy George school of design. Or else he was following instructions with an offer he couldn’t refuse.

  The door was opened by a West Side Story Jet. The outrushing air-conditioning blew richly-flavoured aftershave into our faces. A gold ‘A’ hung on a heavy chain around his neck.

  ‘Hi Rick,’ said Tomas.

  The Anvil chewed noisily in reply with his lips wide open and he motioned us in, keeping his ferret-like eyes on me. He was fidgety, loosely snapping his fingers to music played through invisible earphones. Or he was contracting St Vitus’ dance. We walked into the black marble walls and floor of a reception area.

  He turned towards me. ‘Youse come heavy?’

  Youse. Well, there were two of us. I said, ‘A man told me this is a dangerous neighbourhood.’

  ‘Turn around,’ he said and moved toward me.

  I held my ground and he put his face into mine.

  ‘We’re here to talk to your boss,’ I said. ‘Not start a war.’<
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  He eyeballed me for a while, estimating, then contemplating, his forehead wrinkled like a map of downtown Kampala while he performed the mental equivalent of reading while moving his finger along words on a page. At the end of a paragraph he turned to leave.

  ‘Wait here.’ He pressed a button beside the front door to close the outside gate and he left the room. He wasn’t gone long.

  ‘Follow me.’

  He turned, and we followed him through a large living area to the back of the house. On the polished marble floor were skins of every sort. Tiger, bear, leopard, lion, and other highly endangered species ransacked from nature. Even a panda. Trophy heads were on the wall, including a white rhino, its aphrodisial horn reduced to a stump. A large smoked glass coffee table was supported by four elephant feet with golden toes. The rest of the room was over-chandeliered and over-gilded, a mix of styles from vulgar kitsch to just crapulously vulgar. It demonstrated yet again the Milo theory of the inverse proportion of ill-gotten money to good taste. For additional safari effect, the walls were painted in black and white zebra striping where they weren’t mirrored floor to ceiling. These guys thought being in South Florida was living in the jungle. Lining part of a wall was a bookcase with unread books of the sort you bought by the yard.

  I looked around for a telephone receiver in the shape of a lobster. Instead, in a large glass fish tank a flash of neon electric-blue caught my eye. I moved closer, to see a large hairy leg straddling the corpse of a humungous cockroach, or palmetto bug as they say here. It had probably died of fright.

  Ricky was pleased I’d seen the six-inch-long tarantula. ‘A Cobalt Blue. From Thailand,’ he said, pronouncing Thai as thigh. ‘Stroke it if you like.’

  I gave him his moment then we went out onto a terrace. High bleached white walls flanked a swimming pool and led down to the sea. I could see a jetty at the water’s edge but no sign yet of Dooley’s pal’s boat.