by Mike Dennis
He got right up in my face, I mean real close. This was the first time anyone had done that in years and not been knocked flat on his ass.
"Your fucking pal Frankie Sullivan is what this is all about. It seems he went and got his throat slit last night. We found him down on Front Street, face down in the gutter."
He backed off an inch or two, then added, "Funny, I thought you Irish assholes had some kind of secret agreement between you, you know, like, not to kill each other."
Norma shrieked. As for me, my shoulders sagged, while my knees went limp. I almost fell back on the chair behind me.
"Sully … he's dead? You telling me he's dead?"
Ortega turned to his pals and said, "Don't they have some kind of agreement? Where they swear on St Patrick or something?"
They all nodded and smiled at that one.
Then he said, "Look at the fake surprise!" He strutted around the room, mocking my raspy voice. "'He's dead? I didn't know he was dead!' Like you were some kind of innocent fucking citizen. Like you were at a church bake sale while Sullivan was getting his neck torn open."
The other cops chuckled at his performance. The jerkoff should be on the stage somewhere. Anywhere but here.
He put his own face back on as he turned back to me.
"All right, Doyle, how do you want to do this? The easy way or the hard way?"
Words choked in the back of my throat. "I … I swear, Ortega, I … I didn't know anything about this. Sully was —"
"Yeah, I know, he was your closest fucking friend. I hope you reminded him of that while you were turning out his lights." He pointed toward Norma. "Now you say you were laying up in her titties all last night. But you're gonna need a better alibi than that, my man. Much better."
"Ortega, I swear to you, I didn't do it. I had no reason to —"
"Oh, you had reason, all right. He was holding your cut of that diamond job the two of you pulled three years ago. And his wife claims you threatened him with bodily harm if he didn't fork it over. Right there's aggravated assault. A felony in itself. Then, we find him lying in a puddle of blood with a big smile on his neck. And you with an alibi that won't hold up."
He stepped back smiling, satisfied with his own read on this whole thing.
Then he said, "Now how's that for a motive? And what do you think your future looks like now?"
"Look, Ortega, if it happened late at night on Front Street, for Chrissakes, it could've been —"
"Some street punk? Sticking him up for the cash in his pocket?"
"Yeah. Why not?"
He shook his head. "Uh-uh. His money was still on him. Nearly seven hundred clams. And he had no reason to be down there at one-thirty this morning. That was the time of death. He lives — or should I say lived — up on Petronia Street off Georgia. As you leave his bar, I'm sure you know that's in the exact opposite direction from Front Street. And I'm told he always went straight home every night. Unless he stopped off for some pussy from one of his girlfriends. And I doubt any of them live down there."
His partner helped himself to a seat on the couch. Ortega waited for my response to his neatly wrapped-up spin on the whole thing.
I guess he thought I'd just break down and spit it all out for him. You know, how I dragged or suckered Sully into a car and drove him to the other side of downtown, where I knifed him in a fit of rage over the money, then dumped him on the street.
Shows you how this cop thinks.
Like a fucking amateur.
"That's pretty amazing police work," I said right back at him. "Dick Tracy would be proud of you. Or did you get that from reading Sherlock Holmes?"
He turned around to face his club-swinging goons.
Gesturing back toward me, he said, "We got a big man here, boys. Thinks he's the biggest fucking man in the Keys. Truth is, he's just another overgrown punk who thinks he's hot shit."
They nodded on cue, slapping their sticks a little harder into their palms.
For effect, of course.
"You really think I did this?" I asked him.
Of course the answer was yes, and naturally, I knew who really did do it. Or who had ordered it, anyway.
"You ever know Sullivan to go down there after hours?" he asked me. "Was he really that stupid? Or maybe he liked to go down there trolling for whores and coke dealers?"
"Ask yourself this, Ortega. Am I really that stupid? To threaten him, then put him down, and then leave him out in the street? It's a fucking wonder you didn't find a bloody knife right there with my initials on it. Or maybe you think it's still in my pants pocket."
"Oh, you're that stupid, all right. Besides, no one else could've done it. Sullivan was well-liked all over town. No one else had a motive."
The thing was, I couldn't tell this idiot who really did it.
Number one, he'd never believe me.
Number two, he didn't have the balls to go after someone of Whitney's caliber.
The old man was loaded with power in this town, and few had what it took to go up against him. Me, I was an easy target. I had a motive for sure: Sully owed me the money, so I did threaten him. He probably told his wife about it Wednesday night when he got home, then she spilled it to Ortega after getting the bad news this morning.
Bringing Whitney's name up right now was useless.
And accusing him of murder? Killing some nightclub owner that he had no connection to? Forget it.
I had no response.
Ortega had one.
"Get dressed," he said. "We're going downtown."
FOURTEEN
THE session downtown lasted about an hour and a half. It consisted mostly of Ortega talking tough, while practicing interrogation-room tactics he'd seen on Kojak reruns.
I ran over my story a hundred times, denying, of course, that I ever threatened Sully or even leaned on him for money. For that matter, I claimed that the diamond job was a frame to begin with, so therefore, there was no money.
Even though I couldn't prove I was asleep at the time of the hit, they didn't have any hard evidence to hold me on. The pizza delivery boy could put me at Norma's around nine, and no one could put me on Front Street at one-thirty.
As I walked out of the station, though, I knew this scene would be repeated in living color whenever they picked up the slightest lead that they could connect to me.
≈≈≈
Norma went to visit her mother around noon up on Big Coppitt Key, about ten miles up the road, so she dropped me off downtown before she left. I hoofed it down to the South Beach Restaurant for lunch.
It was a nifty little sandblown place right on the water, over on the Atlantic side, but still kind of out of the way. I was glad it was still there.
I took a table on the edge of the outdoor seating area, right off the beach itself. It felt terrific to be sitting there in the ocean breeze, soaking up the open sunshine.
A complete one-eighty from prison.
There's nothing colder than prison concrete. The dark desolation...the tense friction. Hardened men scraping up against each other all the time, the constant looking over your shoulder year in and year out — it all messes with your mind, you know?
Makes you think sometimes that you're no better than any of those fucking animals in there. I don't even like thinking about it.
But now, finally, I was through with it.
Human again.
I removed my sunglasses to look directly out at the wide, sparkling waters of the Florida Straits. Gazing out toward Cuba, my thoughts went back to my boyhood.
Back then, the tourists hadn't yet invaded us in such big numbers, so we were pretty much all by ourselves down here. I could still taste the salt on my tongue from swimming off Higgs Beach every morning of the long, tropical summers, as well as every afternoon during the school year. Then, after shaking off the sand, I'd run to play baseball.
What I'm trying to say is that I was a pretty normal kid. Back then, the conniver that I would become was still forming deep
down inside me. All the brainwork and the hustles that would surface later on were dormant, but every so often, I could feel them trying to push their way out. Even then, I was aware of the angles, trying to twist everything to my advantage, doing whatever it took to get me one up.
But for those few short years before the real world would come to claim me, I just wanted to enjoy what little innocence I had. Could you blame me? I really, really thought that was how it would always be, all swimming and baseball. Never imagining the cruel surprises life had in store.
Shows you what I knew.
The cooked vegetables on my plate had all my attention when she came up to my table.
"Hello, Don Roy."
Her familiar, deep voice hit me hard. I put my fork down and looked up.
"Rita? Is that you?"
I had to look again. She leaned on the rail next to my table. The voice was hers, but it came out of a brand new look.
Twenty or thirty pounds had disappeared, while her long, stringy hair that I remembered had been chopped off and permed. Its dishwater brown color had turned blonde somewhere along the way, warming up the icy blue in her eyes. Her sensible white cotton dress clung to her new curves for dear life, allowing a trace of cleavage to peek through. I noticed beads of sweat on her neck and upper chest. She'd been walking in the heat. Her open shoes showed cherry red toenails that matched her manicured fingernails and lipstick. Long, slender fingers slid a slim cigarette out of its package.
As she stoked it up, I began to sweat a little myself.
What had BK done to deserve a wife like this?
"Yep. Nobody but me," she replied. "Mind if I sit down?"
I motioned toward the other white plastic chair at my table.
"Help yourself."
She spoke just above whisper level, even though there was no one around to hear us. "God, it wasn't this hot when I left the house this morning. It's like the sun just went into overdrive all of a sudden."
It was hot, all right, and getting hotter around this table.
"Want something to drink?"
"Actually, I'd love an iced tea."
I thought I saw her squinting behind her designer sunglasses. I signaled the waitress with the order.
Meanwhile, I couldn't take my eyes off her. A couple of tiny little diamonds perked up her pierced ears and a tasteful thin gold bracelet wrapped her wrist. A pretty good-sized diamond perched up high off her ring finger.
But she didn't really need jewelry.
She looked good all by herself.
I blurted it out. "You're sure looking good."
She smiled, then looked down. I saw the beginnings of a blush. Then she reined it back in.
"I've tried to slim down a little."
She eyed me directly again as she spread her arms out a little bit, showing herself off. Ta-da!
"What do you think of the new me?"
"I think BK is the luckiest guy in town. You really look great!"
She aimed a big smile at me, lots of pretty white teeth. Straight, too.
"Well, thank you, sir. But it's really been hard work, shedding those pounds." She then went into the story of her makeover. I nodded in all the right places.
The waitress brought the tea. Rita immediately sipped from it, then exhaled hard, while she held the cold glass to her neck and throat. Her exhale slid into a low moan, as the glass cooled her off.
Right then, I remembered my mother doing the same thing before we got our air conditioner.
It was back when I was still in grade school.
That summer was particularly hot — though the heat never used to bother me nearly as much as it did her.
One of her boyfriends — I forget which one, but it was one of the ones that lived with us for awhile — told her to get him a beer. Pretty soon she came back from the kitchen with a beer in one hand and a glass of iced tea in the other. He guzzled the beer, then burped loud and long.
But I could see my mother now, as vividly as I just saw Rita, hold that cold glass to her throat, then moan with pleasure. She did it a lot, I guess, but that was the one specific time I clearly remember.
Also, she was wearing some kind of white clingy thing like Rita had on now. It might've been just a slip or a nightgown rather than a dress, but it gave off a similar look.
On Rita, however, the whole thing was arousing.
I wasn't ten years old anymore.
While I was trapped in this memory for quite a few seconds, I glimpsed the beach.
No one seemed to be moving much. Small waves lapped gently at the shore and the light breeze tried hard to cool things down. Someone's radio played Like A Virgin.
"Did you know I was in this little out-of-the-way spot?" I finally asked. "Or did you just happen to walk all the way down here?"
I glanced around the place. Not many customers. They appeared to be mostly tourists, a couple of spring breaker types, along with a foreigner or two, right off the beach, most of them still in swimsuits. No locals.
She smirked a little as she drank some more iced tea.
"I was in the pharmacy up on the corner and I saw you walk by. I heard you were back in town. How's it going?"
What a question. "Well, I was doing okay until early this morning. Someone killed Frankie Sullivan last night and they think I did it."
It happened too late at night to make the morning paper, so I wondered if she knew about it.
She showed no surprise as she drew deep on her long, thin cigarette. The breeze from the ocean blew away the smoke but not the heat.
"Well, did you do it?" she asked.
She took off her shades, penetrating my eyes with hers.
"You know I didn't. I wouldn't."
That was all I wanted to say on the subject. But she had a little more to add.
"It was all because of BK and his gambling, wasn't it."
The way she put it, it wasn't really a question.
I took a sip of my own iced tea. It needed more lemon.
"What's the deal, Rita? What do you know about all this? And why are you here?"
I squeezed the last of the lemon juice into the tea.
She crushed out her cigarette. "I never knew you too well, Don Roy," she said, as if she were letting me in on a big secret, "but I knew who you were. I knew a little about you."
She reached into her purse for her cigarettes. Pulling them out, she shook another one out of the package.
"Even though you were a couple of years ahead of me in high school, I'd heard about you, and like I said, I knew who you were. I knew that in school you were always into gambling and things like that. Then after I graduated, and for years afterward, I'd see you around town from time to time and you never seemed to be working. You know, you were always walking around in the middle of the day...that kind of thing."
I was more than a little surprised that she'd been keeping this kind of watch on me for so long. Flame leaped from her gold lighter, firing up her cigarette and throwing a yellow glow onto her face, while her lively eyes bored into mine. The way she did it, it was straight out of a movie. Lauren Bacall zapping Bogie with those come-on eyes from behind a lit cigarette.
Making his dick hard.
"You ever have a regular job?" she asked.
"Rita, what's this all about?"
"Just tell me, did you ever have a regular job?"
"Well...not really."
"Why not? I want to know why you never went out and looked for a job. Just like everyone else."
"What are you, writing my life story here?"
"Just answer me. Why didn't you get a job?"
"Why do you want to —"
"Just … answer … the question."
I caved. "Because it was easier not to."
I felt like the final witness on Perry Mason, blurting out my confession just so she would quit badgering me.
"Easier not to? Why was it easier?"
"Rita, what's —"
"Why was it easier?"
/> "Why do you want to know?"
"Will you answer me, for Chrissakes!"
"Because … well … because there's me, and then there's all of them."
Finally, she leaned back in her chair, then crossed her legs, satisfied she'd gotten the answer she wanted.
"You mean you never really felt like you were a part of regular society here, right? You felt you had no real shot by jumping in the water and rolling along with the prevailing tide, swimming around with everybody else. Being employed was part of that scene, and since you wanted no part of it, you had to get by some other way. Am I right?"
In a way, I was really put off by all of this shit — this was none of her business — but in another way, it twisted my head around.
And it tweaked my curious bone like only raw truth can.
The way she put it, it was, well, right on the money. Like she really understood. Besides, I was caught up in all her intensity, especially when it broke through in that deep, sexy voice of hers.
"Yeah, you're right," I replied.
"Well, you want to know something? I felt the same way. Oh, I never gambled or anything like that, but I moved here with my parents when I was thirteen. My father was career Navy, and he eventually retired down here. So we stayed."
She paused for a little effect, downing the last of her iced tea.
"And because I wasn't a Conch — you know, born here — I was always on the outside of things in high school. You know how that goes. But one day, I met BK and I did what it took to win him over. I mean, whatever it took."
I caught the drift.
She looked away from me, out toward the ocean. A gigantic cruise ship had appeared on the distant horizon, fresh out of some Caribbean port. Gazing absently at the ship, she twirled a few short strands of hair near the back of her neck.
She said without thinking, "There were a lot of Conch girls after him, you know."
"Well, you must've done something right, because you've been together for a lot of years now."
She waved that off as her eyes returned to mine. Her voice modulated downward to hiss level.
"Together, shit! You think I'm Barbra Streisand, all googoo-eyed over Robert Redford? You think we're living happily ever after in some fairy tale? What else could I look forward to in this town? What was I going to do, marry a lineman for City Electric? And go to my grave worrying about rent? Shi-it. Not this daddy's girl."