"What bothers you the most?"
"Same thing you're wondering. Is he that dumb?"
"I have to believe it."
"Or does he want you to think he's dumb?"
"He doesn't have to try very hard."
"But what if he's not the guy in charge?"
Torres had to think about that one. He said, "Who, the boat-lifter?"
"Cundo's been around a few days looking things over," LaBrava said. "The note's delivered, he drops out of sight. He gives you Richard to watch. Maybe to keep you busy while he operates."
"I wish we could check him out, see what he did in Cuba."
"He did time. According to David Vega by way of Guilli and Paco Boza."
"You got more informants than I do."
"I don't bust them."
"Maybe you can find out some more about the boat-lifter, what he did."
"Maybe all you have to do," LaBrava said, "is pick up Richard. Are you smarter than he is?"
"Jesus, I hope so."
"Put on a show, like you got hard evidence. Then tell him you'll trade off for the boat-lifter. Richard loves to make deals with policemen. Pick up the boat-lifter and put 'em in a room together. The one that comes out alive gets ten to twenty-five."
"Yeah, or they both walk."
"It's an idea."
Torres said, "You know what I get, listen to you say something like that? What I feel?"
"Tell me."
"You don't seem too worried about the movie star, her best interest."
LaBrava didn't say anything.
"I don't want those guys for 'Attempted,' I want them with the garbage bag in their hand. So what I have to do, I have to keep my eyes on her and on the garbage bag. Never let them out of my sight. That's the only thing I have to worry about. I don't want her to lose her life on account of me and I don't want to look bad," Torres said. "In that order."
Chapter 20
IT WAS LIKE one of her movies.
It came into his mind at different times now because of what Buck Torres had said. "You don't seem too worried about the movie star."
He had to think about that, see if it was true. If it was true then it was because he was getting the two Jean Shaws mixed up. The real one and the one on the screen. He had never worried about the one on the screen because she could take care of herself, or because she wasn't a person who deserved a lot of sympathy. She was often the perpetrator, never the victim. But now she was in something that was like one of her movies and she was the victim in this one and not playing the part of the spider woman or the other woman or the girl with the greedy eyes. This time she was the good girl. Except that good girls were usually blond, wonderfully wide-eyed, fairly chaste, and ended up with Robert Mitchum, Dick Powell...
Victor Mature.
He could see her, a glimpse of her with Victor Mature in a room with barred windows. Blowing cigarette smoke in his face. (Good girls didn't blow smoke of any kind.) The bars casting striped shadows in the bare room. And Victor Mature making his jaw muscle jump but not blinking at the smoke. Not pissed off as much as disappointed. Near the end of the picture... She blows the smoke at him, walks into a courtroom and is sentenced to life in prison. For murder.
She screams at the judge, "I didn't do it! I swear I didn't!" And they lead her off as the newspaper guys are running out putting on their hats and Victor Mature is standing with the good girl now, the professional virgin, in the back of the courtroom, Victor clenching his jaw but with a wistful look in his eyes.
And he remembered Franny Kaufman saying to Jean, after they had seen Let It Ride and Franny was trying to identify another Jean Shaw picture, "Your husband commits suicide... what a guy... and makes it look like you did it." And Jean said...
Jean said, "Oh, that one."
And he had turned from Maurice's bar with a drink in each hand and heard Jean's car windows being smashed.
Like one of her movies?
The movie audience didn't worry about the girl who played Lila in Let It Ride. Poisoned her husband in Nightshade. Had her lover thrown off the Golden Gate Bridge in Deadfall. They could worry about the good girl if they wanted to, but the good girl always won out in the end. The good guy saying to her, "You crazy kid, don't you know it was you all the time? How could I ever fall for a dame like that?" And the dame, out of the picture, is saying, "Swell."
So he had to remind himself: she's the good girl in this one. But this one isn't a movie and doesn't have to end the way movies end. Okay. Except that when he thought of the real Jean Shaw he saw the same confidence, the same quiet awareness that he saw in the screen Jean Shaw. He had to somehow separate the two images in order to be able to worry about her. If there were background-music scores in real life it would be easier to identify her.
There she was in his mind again with Victor Mature. Blowing smoke at him. Bits of the picture coming back. He believed it was the same Jean Shaw picture Franny had seen and mentioned the other night.
Now it was the morning of the day after the note was delivered. He had not yet seen Jean or Maurice. He knocked on Franny's door, waited, went down to the lobby and there she was surrounded by Della Robbia ladies. At first he thought she was giving them a skin-cream demonstration, using one of the old ladies, Mrs. Heffel, who sat rigidly in front of her.
But she wasn't. Franny was sketching the woman in pastels. She looked up at him and said, "Well, say it, Joe."
He was surprised. "I thought you did hotels."
"Sit down, I'll tell you about it."
At this point he saw the cop across the lobby motion to him: a young, clean-cut guy in plainclothes standing by the alcove that led to the darkroom and the command post in the hotel kitchen. Walking away he heard Franny say, "Hey, Joe, what's going on?"
The young cop glanced around before saying, "Sergeant Torres, I'm suppose to tell you, wants you to meet him at the M.E.'s office, Jackson Memorial."
"For what?"
"They got a floater he wants you to identify."
"Why me?"
The young cop didn't know.
The body of Miney Combs lay naked, autopsied and closed, on a metal tray-table inside a refrigerated semitrailer.
The Dade County Morgue, Jackson Memorial Hospital, had become overbooked since Miami's jump in population, the 120,000 who rode in on the Mariel boat-lift. Some of them were now killing each other. So the Medical Examiner had rented the refrigerated semitrailer to accommodate the overflow. It stood behind the morgue and at one time had displayed the name Burger King on the side panels. But the words had finally been painted over and it was no longer something to write about in the paper.
LaBrava stared at the man's face, bloated, mutilated, no longer a face he would recognize, as Buck Torres told him about gunshot entrance wounds in the back of the head, one through and through, one hollow-nose .38 caliber slug deflected--hard-headed old guy--lodged within the frontal lobe of the brain. The old man's body had been picked up by the Coast Guard on its way out Government Cut on the tide. He had been in the water close to twenty-four hours. LaBrava was called because his name and address were found in Miney Combs' wallet, written in ballpoint pen on a five-by-seven memo sheet imprinted with the name STAR SECURITY, Private Protection Means Crime Prevention. The dead man's pickup truck had been found in front of the abandoned Biscaya Hotel.
His gray work clothes, work shoes, keys, a can of Copenhagen, wallet containing a driver's license and thirty-eight dollars, were in a paper bag wedged between legs that resembled marble tubes about to burst. A white tag was attached to the big toe of his right foot. Torres said no, they didn't find a snuff stick. What was a snuff stick?
LaBrava stared at the bulge of the old man's body, the crude incision from breastbone to navel, and again at the mutilated face.
LaBrava said, "He's Richard Nobles' uncle." He said, "I sent him over there, to Richard's hotel." After several moments he said, "Well, you have a reason to pick him up now, don't you?"
He
could hear himself, his voice, amazed that he sounded as calm as he did. He was not calm inside his body. He felt his waiting period coming to an end.
He went home. Jean's car stood on the street, whole again. He wanted to see her, but he went to the darkroom instead and printed a set of Richard Nobles eight-by-tens. Then sat alone in his living room looking at the former rent-a-cop Franny thought was a hunk. A hunk of what? He wanted to say to Franny, "Look at him closely. Watch him move. Listen to him talk."
Could you lean on a guy like Richard? Scare him? Make him run?
Torres called in the late afternoon and said to stop by.
LaBrava walked down Collins. Was the guy dumb or not? When he reached the La Playa Hotel he hesitated. Was the boat-lifter running it or had he pulled out? LaBrava continued on to the MBPD Detective Bureau, the windowless stucco building built like a blockhouse on the corner of First and Meridian.
The squad room inside was like all the squad rooms he had ever seen in older police buildings: different types of desks and tables bunched in rows to conserve space, a few men at desks who might have been athletes at one time, solidly built, or had the look of career noncoms in civilian clothes. No one wore a shoulder holster anymore; they packed Smiths on their hipbones, short-barreled mags with big grips. In a corner of the room was the holding cell--and this was different than all the others he had ever seen--made of wrought-iron bars, the kind of ornamental grillwork you might find on a Spanish patio.
Buck Torres' desk was in the opposite corner, next to the door that led to the lavatory, the coffeemaker and the four-and-a-half by five-and-a-half interrogation room. LaBrava sat down and Torres pushed Richard Nobles' Advice of Rights toward him, the Miranda sheet.
"We interviewed Richie."
LaBrava saw Richard's initials after each statement on the sheet--the Buck Torres method of avoiding surprises in court. Interviewees read their rights aloud, initialed each one as they went along and signed just below the Waiver of Rights statement. The signature read Richie Nobles.
"You show him Miney Combs?"
"First, before we brought him here. Driving over to Miami he says, 'You guys are making a big mistake. You maybe think you have something'--called me partner--'but you can't touch me for nothing.' "
LaBrava listened to each word.
"We take him inside the truck over there. I'm going to tell you something," Torres said. "It was a shock to him. He wasn't acting, it was a shock."
"Is he dumb?" LaBrava said.
Torres hesitated. "He's not smart enough to fake it."
"You have to be smart to be an actor?"
"Joe, he wasn't faking it. He sees the old guy, he couldn't believe it."
"He identified him?"
"Sure. His Uncle Miney. Surprised. 'What is Uncle Miney doing here?' "
"So you sat down with him in the little room, the closet, and got intimate."
"He says he had no idea the old man was down here. Swears he didn't see him. The desk clerk at Richie's hotel puts the old man in the lobby a couple hours or more the evening of the day before yesterday. But he can't put Richie with him. He can put a little Latin dude with him..."
"Like a boat-lifter?"
"Like maybe a boat-lifter, guy with wavy hair and an earring. But he can't put Richie with him."
"You ask Richie if anybody he knows saw the old man?"
"Sure. He says no. Let's say the Latin dude is the boat-lifter. Okay, I can put him with the old man, but I can't put him with Richie. I want to, man, but I can't."
"You know Johnbull, drives for Central?"
"Guy, he's always pissed off about something?"
"That one. He can put Richie with the boat-lifter. Find out if Johnbull saw the boat-lifter's Trans Am at the hotel the same time the desk clerk saw the Latin dude and if they left together in the car."
"No, they must've left in the old man's truck, because it was sitting at the Biscaya and the old man had the keys. We got latents, all over that truck. Okay now, if it's the boat-lifter, this guy Cundo Rey, we got to get his prints from Volusia County, where they had him on possession of a stolen motor vehicle. That would be pretty nice if we can put him in the truck. Richie swears he never saw it."
"Maybe," LaBrava said, "but he knew the old man was looking for him. Talk to the guy, Joe Stella, at Star Security, Lantana, where Richie used to work. There's no way he can be clean. You're gonna find out he sent the boat-lifter to get rid of him. What do you think?"
"To kill him?"
"That's one way."
"Richie was shocked, Joe. I'm not kidding."
"How many floaters has he seen, gunshot? You can know a person's dead, but when you see him like that... You know what I mean."
"Joe, the guy let us look in his room."
LaBrava was aware of voices in the squad room for the first time, a telephone ringing.
"It was clean," Torres said. "Like he had the maid come in every hour."
"He show you his gun?"
"And his license. He hands me the piece, says, 'Here, you want to check it?' "
"Looking you right in the eye."
"He didn't do the old man, Joe."
There was a silence again, until LaBrava said, "You mind if I suggest something?"
"What?"
"Pick up a guy at the La Playa Hotel named David Vega, he's a Marielito, and ask him about the boat-lifter. See if you can find out if Cundo's got a gun and happened to buy any hollow-nose, steel-jacket thirty-eights. There's a guy at the hotel sells guns and ammo, anything you want."
"How do you know that?"
"I took his picture. Holding a sawed-off shotgun."
"Jesus Christ," Torres said.
"I asked him, 'You don't care who sees your picture?' He's stoned most of the time. He said, no, it would be good for his business."
"Jesus Christ," Torres said.
"David Vega's the guy you want. If he gives you the gun seller, do whatever you feel like, but ask him about Cundo first. If you can't find David Vega look for a guy named Guilli, he deals out on the Pier."
Torres said, "How do you know all these guys?"
"They like to have their picture taken. But let's get back to Richie. Was he nervous anytime?"
"Once we got here he was cool. Or he acted surprised at everything."
"Acted," LaBrava said.
"Eyes open real wide. Who, me? They all do that. But I think he was waiting to see if I'm going to mention a note or the six hundred thousand or if he knows a movie star."
"You didn't though."
"I can play dumb too. But he knows we know. Last night and this morning he's walking around Collins Avenue, Lincoln Mall, he goes in a place, comes out the back, or all of a sudden he crosses the street against the light. Bullshit stuff. He follows girls a lot, makes the moves, then looks around, wants to make sure he has an audience. He does everything but wave at my guys. I'm finished talking to him about the old man, he says, 'There anything else you want to ask me about?' You see what I mean? He knows. He's telling us he knows."
"You turn him loose?"
"What have I got? Man, if I brought in every suspect fits something like this I'd have to pick up half the neighborhood. I told him to stay close by."
"It didn't bother him?"
"He gives me some you-all shit, he be obliged we get the scudder 'at done it."
"Is he dumb?" LaBrava said.
"Guy's a showoff."
"But is he dumb?"
"I think it could be what you said before. The boat-lifter's running it and Richie's the beard."
"Put a clown suit on him," LaBrava said, thoughtful, wondering. "Got him in the trick bag and he doesn't know it. You think?"
"Could be."
"If he's dumb enough," LaBrava said. "It keeps coming back to that."
"And if the boat-lifter is smarter than he is."
"Or if there's somebody else smarter than both of them," LaBrava said. "Have you thought of that?"
"Maybe I shoul
d talk to the movie star again," Torres said. "See who else's been in her life since she became a widow."
"It wouldn't hurt," LaBrava said.
Chapter 21
PACO BOZA CAME FOR HIS WHEELCHAIR, a happy guy. Lana was back with him. She hated Hialeah, it was like in the country and she was a big-city girl. She loved her photograph. She wanted LaBrava to send it someplace, some magazine, be a centerfold girl. It was early evening and they were out on the sidewalk, the street quiet, Paco wearing his straw hat cocked, about to take off in his wheelchair.
LaBrava said, "You know the big blond guy."
"The Silver Kid," Paco said, "of course."
"I want somebody to deliver a note to him, at his hotel."
"Sure."
"And write it."
"What does it say?"
"I want him to come to the park tonight, 1:00 A.M., across from the Play House Bar."
"Sign your name?"
"No, sign it C.R."
"Just C.R."
"That's the Marielito, the one with the earring."
"Oh," Paco said, "yes, I remember."
"But I have to make sure the big blond guy gets the message and not the police."
Paco said, "Man, you got something going on."
"If I can, I'd like to get hold of a baseball bat," LaBrava said. "But I think the stores are closed."
"You and this guy going to play ball? In the dark? Never mind, don't tell me," Paco said. "I got one for softball, you can use."
"I'll take good care of it," LaBrava said.
Nobles wished he had a car; he'd take the cops on a tour of Dade County, see if they were any good at tailing. Man, he would love to get them up in the Big Scrub, lose their ass in two minutes. This walking the streets, stopping at bars, was getting to be a bunch of shit. One more day he could take off. Tomorrow night sometime.
When he got back to the hotel, about ten, the desk clerk waved and held out a plain white envelope with his name printed on it in pencil. It was not only sealed, there was a hunk of pink chewing gum stuck to the flap. The desk clerk worked his eyebrows up and down as he said a girl delivered it, a little Latin mama. Nobles said, a girl uh? He took the envelope across the lobby, looking at his name that some kid or halfwit might've printed. The message inside, on plain white paper, printed in pencil, said for him to come to the park tonight... and Do not bring police and Do not phone. Signed, C.R.
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