by Pavia, Peter
“They will if you let them,” Acevedo said.
It was funny. The boys used her to get at Manfred, and Manfred used her to get at other boys. And he sure knew how to pick them. One of these college kids turned out to be such a complete homo that once she lured him back to the room, he spent the rest of his vacation in Manfred’s bed.
Acevedo said, “I don’t understand. He needed you to help him pick up guys? On South Beach?”
“Manfred said anybody could have the queers here. The ones he went after were supposedly straight. They were straight, all right. Straight to the next man.”
Anyway, Manfred was delighted with the way things were working out. He let her stay in his room. He gave her money and he gave her drugs. He bought clothes for her. Leo’s plan was working like a charm.
According to Leo’s information, the big cocaine deal was supposed to be made in Manfred’s hotel room. As soon as it happened, she was to alert Leo. She was kind of bleary on the details, but one day she saw Manfred shaving pieces off a brick of cocaine wrapped in butcher paper. He had it stashed in a suitcase at the top of the closet. She made the call.
She lied and told Manfred she’d decided to go back to L.A. She packed up her things and went back to the house on Pine Tree. But then she heard that Manfred was dead. She’d been hiding in Key Biscayne ever since.
“I’m not particularly bright, okay? I know that. But I’m sure Manfred’s death had something to do with that cocaine deal, and I think I know who killed him.”
Chapter Twelve
After a few extra lies and a few extra bucks and calling in a favor he wouldn’t return, Leo airmailed Whitney off to Lawrence in Daytona. Whitney had been fun while she lasted, but she cost too much money, and Leo was sick of her. Somewhere along the line, Whitney had gotten hold of the silly notion that she was in love with Leo, which Leo couldn’t blame her for, but worse, she had decided that Leo was in love with her. He might’ve let it slip a time or two in the heat of the moment, but it most definitely was not true. He vowed to be very, very cautious, from now on, what he said to these girls.
Now that Whitney was out of the picture, though, that left a crucial slot that needed to be filled. Leo, who was not a young man who sat on his hands where women were concerned, made a date with his dream girl of the season. She was a tall stack of everything good about Italy, and her name was Valentina.
Valentina seemed to belong to another century. Not the Renaissance, which was what people always said because they didn’t know what they were talking about, but she had a style, a classic old-world beauty that put miles of ground between her and every other person on the Beach. No tattoos, not a single one, anywhere. No metal stuck out of her nose or eyebrows. Her black hair wasn’t dyed. Her heart-shaped face had the saddest cast, as if she had witnessed sorrows beyond description, which Leo was pretty sure she hadn’t, but whatever it was, it was killing him. Leo was far from the only smoothskinned lifestyler attempting to coax the panties off Miss Valentina, so he had his work cut out for him, but that was all right. Nothing like a bit of unfriendly competition to get the blood flowing.
He did a bump out of the jar he had stashed in the freezer, his third of the evening or maybe his fourth, but who was counting? Leo measured a two-finger shot of tequila, cut a wedge of lemon, and shook out some salt on his wrist. A lick, a swallow, a suck of citrus, he was just about ready to go. A reminder: buy a fifth of Cuervo. Make that two fifths.
It’d be absolutely wrong to have tequila on his breath behind the wheel of the Jag. These cowboy cops pulled you over for everything as it was, but they were particularly hard-assed about young guys in expensive cars. Exhaling Jose Cuervo Gold into the face of some gung-ho redneck, very bad mechanics.
While he was scrubbing his teeth, Leo decided his shirt wasn’t working at all, and neither was his pasty, nightclub pallor. Too many late nights taking divots out of his afternoons at the beach. Which is why the white shirt failed him. He looked like an undertaker’s apprentice. The Kid needed some sun.
But now that he’d changed into a mint-green mockturtle that played nicely off his eyes, how could he stick with these black cap-toe lace-ups? Black shoes were like anti-Miami, and what he was shooting for with Valentina was a splash of traditional Beach glamour.
White loafers. White loafers were the key. White loafers and a white cotton windbreaker. Except when he gave himself a final exam, he noticed a chocolate stain near the zipper. Back upstairs one last time for the linen sports coat that originally belonged to his grandfather, a guy who knew a thing or two about looking sharp.
There was authentic H2O running through the plumbing of this fountain, trickling streams that would’ve made a soothing sound if this warhorse of a mariachi band weren’t camped out in front of it. They must’ve completed their Ocean Drive circuit then migrated up here to Lincoln Road to haul out the exasperated strains of “Guantanamera” for one final flogging before calling it a gig.
The guitarist’s bowling-ball gut had propelled a button off his shirt, and a bunch of the dingleberries that should’ve been should’ve been hanging from the brim of his sombrero were missing in action. It seemed to Leo that some of the profits needed to be re-invested in that costume.
He practically tripped over Valentina’s table. Four people were seated behind four place settings, and Leo found himself shambling up like somebody’s poor cousin. A minion from Valentina’s agency sat to her right. Announcing a photo opportunity, he blinded Leo with a flash from his disposable camera. A frumpy, frizz-haired girl sat across from him, but Leo forgot her name the instant it left Valentina’s lips.
Valentina’s brother was there, too. His name was Paulo, he was preposterously handsome, and to Leo’s horror, he was wearing the exact same linen sports coat as Leo, except his was offset by a deep tan. Al Pacinolooking motherfucker in a white dinner jacket, making Leo disappear.
Paulo was in complete control. He got the waiter’s attention with a smile, and the waiter had a chair under Leo in two shakes, sticking him on the end between Paulo and Valentina. He half-filled a wine glass with Montepulciano and poised to recite the specials.
“I’m actually not hungry,” Leo said. “I just stopped by to say hello.”
“The food is fabulous,” said the agency minion, whose name was Gregory, a butterball queen with a too-round face and a Fred Flintstone nose.
Paulo said, “It is good,” in an accent it was hard to detect.
The menu the waiter handed Leo was in Italian, and it didn’t give up any clues to what the dishes might be in English. He didn’t want to eat, but thought it’d be polite to have a plate in front of him. He took a sip of wine, but he didn’t want that, either.
When the waiter came back, Leo asked for a mozzarella, tomato and basil salad, the tomatoes would go down easy, and a Cuervo Gold margarita, straight up with salt. That’d go down easier. Except he needed to prime it with a shot. He nodded to Valentina, then to Paulo, and went inside to the bar.
All the action was outside. The dining room was deserted and the bartender was manning an empty bar, a short guy in a maroon vest. Leo barked back a tequila and headed toward the bathroom.
He took the opportunity to check his hair. Nothing wrong there. He slid into a stall and sat on the bowl. Twisting his Bullet-gram into the open position, he huffed a bump up his left nostril, and a bump up his right. He washed his hands and tilted back his head, letting some florescence up his nose. All clear. All clear and feeling good about life.
His margarita was on the table waiting for him. Leo sat down and crossed his legs. They felt safe in that position. He was glad to see everybody smoking. Lighting up a cig of his own, he tried to pick up the conversation.
The frumpy chick was a childhood friend of Paulo and Valentina. This was her first trip to the U.S. and she was flying to New York to accompany Valentina on some big modeling job. All this came through Paulo. The frump spoke no English.
Paulo disliked the New York assignment.
“Valentina should be concentrating on her studies,” he said. “What does this prove? That she’s a beautiful girl? Anybody can see that. This fashion business, if you ask me, is shit. No offense, guys.”
He was a bit of a spoilsport, this brother.
“She’s going to be major,” Gregory said. “Major.” Looked like old Greg was getting himself a nice buzz on, that goblet sloshing wine at the end of his pudgy fingers. He snuffed one extra-light cigarette and lit another.
Leo was trying to think of something to say. He licked salt off the rim of his glass and took a swallow, then drew a breath as if to speak, but nothing came out. Oh, well. Fuck it.
Frumpy’s name was Chi-Chi. That was it, Chi-Chi. Paulo was pleading some case in Italian, but Chi-Chi refused to get involved, swabbing a hunk of onion foccaccia around a saucer covered with an olive oil film, her cigarette still burning in her left hand.
One waiter came to clear plates and another followed, shouldering a tray he set on a stand that a third guy opened on the flagstones.
“It’s the life of a gypsy,” Paulo said, “a vagabond. And it’s dishonest. Those magazines that make her look like a tramp, they give people the idea it’s a glamorous, sexy world they’ll be excluded from if they don’t buy the junk advertised inside. What bullshit.” He was trying to get Leo on his team. “Do you know how many girls are being sent home right now?”
Or, like Whitney, to Daytona. The brother was dead right on that one. This was a very stressful time for the girls, the end of the season. But Leo couldn’t feel too sorry for them. The ones going back to Eugene, or Akron, or Wichita, they’d be back for another crack next year, or they wouldn’t. Whose problem was that? Anyway, his question didn’t apply to Valentina. There were big things ahead for her.
Chi-Chi said something to Paulo, but he wasn’t about to let the subject change.
“Will you please?” Valentina said. “You’re embarrassing me.”
Paulo took a poke at his sister in Italian, and she fired right back, prompting a comment from Chi-Chi, and then nobody was listening and everybody was jabbering at once.
“Hello?” Gregory said. “Family Feud? This is not why we came here.”
“Paulo can’t get over the fact I’m determined to live my own life,” Valentina said, getting in the last word.
Chi-Chi did her best to re-set the tone, getting quiet and tucking into her pasta. “Eat,” she said to Gregory in English, “eat,” like somebody’s grandma.
If there was one thing Leo couldn’t deal with while he was getting his groove on, it was conflict. Gregory and Valentina stared at their plates, and Paulo, his chin jutting, beamed his glare across the table. High tension. Leo didn’t dig it.
Sometimes he wished he could play the Mister Wizard game he used to play when he was a kid. Mister Wizard was a cartoon named after some wise old creature of the forest that had the power to grant wishes. His steadiest customer was a turtle, whose name Leo forgot, an ambitious turtle with big dreams that Mister Wizard would fulfill on a weekly basis.
One time the turtle wanted to be a baseball player, a pitcher just like Leo. So Mister Wizard transported him to some cartoon league where he was facing a team called the Giants, who turn out to be real giants, smacking overmatched turtle ass all over the diamond. It was like Giants 72, Turtle nothing, before the turtle decided he had enough.
At the end of the story, the turtle would go, “Help, Mister Wizard, I don’t wanna be a baseball player” — or astronaut, or private eye or whatever he’d wanted to be that week — “anymore.” And Mister Wizard would rescue him with the incantation, “Drizzle drazzle, drozzle, drome/ Time for this one to come home,” and bring him back to the forest.
What Leo used to do, he was his own Mister Wizard. He would just say to himself, Help, Mister Wizard, I don’t wanna be in the principal’s office — or church, or at Aunt Helen’s — and then, working his own magic, bang, he wasn’t there anymore. He would travel so deep into himself that everything around him became non-existent. He did this right up till the time he was eleven or twelve and told Duane Measler about his game and Duane Measler said Leo was weird. He quit it after that.
A real-deal Mister Wizard situation, this. He was an afterthought, a fifth wheel at the table of the breathtaking Valentina, whose jealous brother was on the verge of undoing a season’s worth of hard work. With a frizzhaired frump who couldn’t hold up her end of the conversation, if there even was a conversation to hold up. And Gregory. Gregory wasn’t even that bad, as far as these guys went. But Leo kept anticipating he’d come up with something witty or even stupid to say to break up the glacier creeping over this scene, and Gregory stayed mute, twirling linguine on his fork.
“I must have a bladder the size of a peanut,” Leo announced. “When you spot that waiter, could you order me another margarita? I’ll be right back.”
He went straight into that stall and snorted two big blasts up both nostrils. There.
Stopping for another quick pop at the bar was a strong temptation, only Paulo was at the bar waiting for him. He said, “Having a good time?”
Leo said, “Uh, yeah?” He wasn’t sure which way he was supposed to answer.
“I’m sorry you had to sit through that. My sister is very beautiful, but she is not very mature. I didn’t mean to make you feel uncomfortable. I was out of line, and I apologize.”
“That’s nothing,” Leo said. “Let’s go back and sit down.”
“All the same, I wouldn’t want you to get any ideas about her.”
Leo said, “Ideas?”
“Come on, Leo. We’re men. We both know why you’re here. You weren’t expecting Chi-Chi and you weren’t expecting me. You might’ve been braced for the queer, but you’re not interested in him. You’re a lot of cheap things, but you aren’t homosexual.”
“Hey, wait a minute.” Leo’s nose dripped cocaine runoff. He sucked it in and wiped what escaped on the back of his hand. Wow, did he need a drink. What happened to that bartender, the short one in the little red vest?
“Valentina is a rare jewel. If you think my parents raised her to be trifled with by a third-rate, cocainesniffing hoodlum, you’re dead wrong, my friend. I suspect you realize she’s out of your class, but I’m here to reinforce your fears.”
Did this guinea have any idea who Leo was? That he’d straight-up wasted a psycho killer? He started to say, “You don’t know me at all.”
“You’re wrong there, too.” Paulo turned up the wattage on a bright, sinister smile Leo didn’t care for the looks of, not one bit. “You don’t think I know you, but I know you. And I’m warning you. I’m threatening you. Stay away from my sister.”
Paulo turned and walked back to the table, slow, cocky, chest out, just about daring Leo to follow him.
Leo wasn’t biting. After he found the bartender, he hammered down a double, and, feeling more together, took his time with the return trip outside. He left a twenty under the plate he didn’t touch, and said goodnight, giving them three lies where one would’ve been plenty. In the future, a point of form: Never tell three consecutive lies.
Valentina shot her brother a dead eyed-look. Standing to shake Leo’s hand, Paulo pumped that smile for all the malevolence it was worth.
Leo walked the length of Lincoln Road. Turning left on Lennox, then right on 15th to Alton, he covered the last couple blocks to Kilkenny’s, where he should’ve gone in the first place. Leo was grateful, though not at all surprised, to find Jo Ann wearing a pleated mini-skirt and red suede boxing shoes, carrying three Bud Longnecks high on a tray.
Leo had one eye open on a vicious hangover that started at his temples and wrapped around his head like a turban. His lungs ached up through his chest. His nostrils were crusted shut. Opening his other eye, he felt twice as bad. The few clothes Jo Ann had been wearing were in a heap on the floor, and it hurt to look at her red suede boots.
Right. Jo Ann. Jo Ann was snoring directly into his ear, and no matter how long he planne
d on playing dead, who ever was ringing the doorbell was not going to stop. The sunlight honking in through the staircase window seemed to have a sound to it, all mixed up with blasts on the bell, and now, some extra-rude knocks.
Leo opened the door on a pretty, athletic brunette wearing a beige suit and shades. There were braces on her teeth and she was holding a badge. It took him a few seconds to register this, shirtless, shoeless, the top button on his Levi’s unfastened. This cute brunette, who was on the young side, but way too old for trips to the orthodontist, was a fucking cop, and she was at his house. The cops were at his house.
They must have identified JP Beaumond’s body. Though Leo had his JP story all together, and though he’d been waiting for this since the afternoon Stuart A. Homes- Leighton mentioned they’d carted Beaumond’s corpse out of the Glades, a knot of acid churned in his gut.
He said, “Good morning.”
“Good afternoon. Leo Hannah?”
“That’s me.”
“I’m Detective Acevedo from the Miami Beach Police.” She put the wallet with the detective shield in her pocket and took off her sunglasses. Her eyes were the same green as Leo’s, and she was very fair-skinned for a Cuban chick. Maybe her mother was white.
Leo snuck a peek at the coffee table in front of the television, at the plate with the remnants of last night’s blow-fest. He stepped outside and closed the door. “What can I do for you, Detective?”
“On the night of March fifth, a Dutch tourist was murdered in his hotel room on Ocean Drive. You probably heard about it.”
Okay, curveball. She wanted to talk about Manfred instead of JP, and she had to know that Leo knew him, or she wouldn’t be standing here.
“Awful,” Leo said. “Terrible. You know, I knew that guy.”
“Manfred Pfiser. How did you know him?”
“Let’s see, how did I know him? That’s a good question. I just sort of knew him from around, a familiar face from the Beach. You know, bars, restaurants, that sort of thing. Hey, how’re you guys making out with your investigation?”