Riptide jl-5

by Paul Levine

  He let the night swallow him, counting the minutes. Traffic was light on South Beach and he liked that. He turned onto Collins and headed north, still killing time. Just past the bridge to Arthur Godfrey Road, lots of cars were jammed up, trying to get out of the Fontainebleau, Miami Beach cops directing traffic. Harry cruised by and caught a glimpse of an older crowd, rich dudes wearing tuxes, their women in long gowns, some carrying floral centerpieces, and the valet parkers going crazy trying to unscramble all the Mercedeses in the lot. Another one of the charity balls finishing up, and Harry imagined himself buying a table for a thousand bucks for the Alzheimer’s Gala, giving away the tickets to his friends, wondering which of the gamblers and con men would like to dance to Big Band sounds.

  Harry slid the Plymouth through a U-turn, tires squealing in front of Seacoast Towers, then headed south on Collins. At Seventeenth he turned right and headed away from the ocean past the Jackie Gleason Theater where the marquee said 42nd Street, and the show must have been over because all the old farts were pulling out of the municipal lot in their Fleetwoods and Town Cars. Again, uniformed patrolmen directing traffic, thank Jesus, all the cops tied up tonight and it’s going to be fat city. He headed toward Alton Road and shivered when he passed the darkened windows of Zilbert-Rubin Funeral Home, which reminded him what the whole damn city was about, a cemetery. He turned south on Alton, passing Lincoln Road on his left. A siren wailed from behind and Harry saw a flashing red light and the adrenaline pumped, but then he saw it was a Miami Beach taxi, an ambulance. Another heart run out of voltage.

  The old Plymouth wheezed and coughed to a stop three blocks from the theater on Espanola Way. Harry parked in front of a two-story apartment house — rentals weekly, air-conditioned — and walked to Lincoln Road. A warm, steady ocean breeze rattled the fronds on a line of queen palms. The sound sent shivers up Harry’s spine. He strolled twice around the block, casing the joint, ski cap pulled down over his ears, nylon backpack hanging loosely from his shoulders. It was nearly one a.m. and the Road was dead. The breeze, a straightaway easterly, pushed discarded newspapers into darkened doorways and against concrete planters.

  Harry walked the deserted sidewalk, pretending to look in the windows. The first time he missed them. Jeez, was he blind, or did they just appear in the pet shop doorway next to the theater? Two of them, slouching against the window, teenagers, skinny in jeans, T-shirts, and running shoes. One had a glove and a bat, the other was flipping a hardball, from one hand to the other.

  Small but mean-looking. Friggin’ Marielitos. No, closer now, he could see one’s shirt had the drawing of a frog, a coqui, and the slogan “I Love Puerto Rico.” A PR and proud of it, Harry thought, like boasting about having the clap.

  Real close now, they eyed Harry. Both were tattooed, green scorpions winding across stringy arms. “Got the time, man?” one said to Harry.

  “Chuck you, Farley,” Harry said, sensing a rip-off. Lift an arm and your watch is gone.

  Harry kept walking, did another orbit of the block and the kids were gone. He ducked into the alley at the side of the theater and quickly found the fire door in back. He paused long enough to put on the rubber gloves he bought at the drugstore, the kind the doctor wears to check your bunghole for the Big C. Then he yanked the heavy door open without a sound. He slid inside, removed the tape from the latch and let the door close, loving the sound of the lock clicking into place. In a moment his eyes adjusted to the darkness. The only lights were the red exit signs, so he took his flashlight out of the backpack and looked for the stairs to the mezzanine.

  The theater smelled of ancient carpeting with too many candies and colas stuck in the woof. The air was musty. The wind slapped a loose shingle against the roof, and Harry listened to the groans from the building’s plumbing. And another sound, too. His own heartbeat.

  His footsteps on the rubber-matted stairs squealed in his ears as he followed the beam of the flashlight, a heavy three-foot Kel-Lite like the cops use to bust your skull. The door to the office was right where the map had shown, and it gave a little to the push, so Harry pried it with the small crowbar, which clawed the cheap veneer but didn’t open the door. What the hell — he gave the door a solid smack with a shoulder and the wood shrieked.

  Another smack, another shriek.

  The flimsy door still stood between Harry and everlasting bliss, so he stepped back, drew his right knee toward his chest and unleashed a kick with his newly purchased lumberjack boots. The bottom hinge tore out of the soft plaster and it was just like in the movies, except Clint Eastwood doesn’t fall on his ass.

  The door was swinging on its top hinge, mortally wounded, and Harry scrambled to his feet. He used the Kel-Lite to search the office. First he emptied the desk drawers, messing things around, making it look like a dumb-shit burglar didn’t know what was there. The flashlight picked up something — what was it — a photo. Violet, her buns shoved up in the air, arms squeezed together, eyes tiny red dots from the flash. He put the picture in a pocket of the army jacket.

  Now where’s the cabinet? There, in the corner under a ratty blanket, everything according to plan. He didn’t have the combination to the cheap lock, but he had a crowbar. It took only a moment to pop the latch on the top drawer… sweet Jesus, let it be… seven come eleven… but empty! Oh shit no.

  Second drawer, two tries, the crowbar slipping and scraping off the paint, the flashlight beam skittering off mark as he pried with one hand and held the light with the other. Then the latch gave way and he tugged the drawer… c’mon, baby, oh shit, snake eyes… empty again.

  One drawer left and he prayed because this was his last chance to get out from behind the counter, to fly first-class and play the stock market and order the menu items that said market price and walk into clubs and peel off a Ben Franklin for the doorman.

  He opened the drawer and looked inside. Then he cursed. It was full, but not with neatly folded bonds printed with fine-colored inks, and Harry Marlin was plumb out of drawers and shit out of luck.

  Garbage! Thousands of little slips of paper; all the same size as if shredded by one of those machines the bookies use to get rid of betting records.

  Garbage! The old fool moves his bonds and keeps trash in his office, Harry thought angrily.

  Alone in the dark office, no eagles in sight, his world crumbling, Harry Marlin did not shine the Kel-Lite onto the little slips of paper or try to read the print smaller than a box score in the paper. If he had, he would have been confused, what with words like “redemption” and “successor trustee” and “legal tender for payment of public and private debts.” But he was looking only for eagles and there were none in the cage.

  Harry Marlin opened the back door a crack and peered into the alley. No cars, no people, just blackness and the greenish glow of a mercury vapor light two buildings away. He eased silently outside and the door closed and locked behind him.

  Two steps, no more.

  He saw nothing but felt it. He ducked, tucking his head below his shoulders.

  It slammed into the fire door with the crash of metal on metal, the sound so close it stung.

  Harry stumbled and it came again, not as hard, not as much time for a backswing, but it caught him across the shoulder and sent him to the asphalt, where he felt the gravel dig into his palms, and he saw the shapes now in the greenish light. Two of them with one baseball bat and it swung again, chopping down at him, and he thought of Juan Marichal whacking away at Johnny Roseboro’s head with a Louisville Slugger, but this bat was aluminum, and the kid swinging it was no major leaguer. One of the skinny punks from out front. Harry rolled on his side and the bat pinged when it hit the asphalt near his head.

  It doesn’t hurt much to get kicked in the stomach by a sneaker on the foot of a 130-pound punk. That’s what Harry thought as the second kid started stomping him. The one with the bat bent over, scooped up the backpack and tossed it to his buddy, all in one motion. Good field, no hit, but goddamn it, the crowbar
was in there and he could use it now. Then, as Harry rolled over, his hand touched the round shape of the Kel-Lite which had fallen from the pack and his fingers closed over it, and like the caveman with a piece of bone, he swung at his enemy, a good swing for a guy on his knees and it caught the leadoff batter square on the kneecap and there was a satisfying crack and a high-pitched scream.

  The kid dropped the bat and hopped away on one foot. The other one, the kickless shit, kept the backpack, snatched the bat, and ran after him. Harry dusted himself off and inspected the damage — a tear in his camouflage pants, a searing pain in his left shoulder, and a most beautiftd dent in the Kel-Lite.

  Violet Belfrey listened to the phone ring a dozen times. No answer. Where the hell was he? Sitting in jail spilling his guts? No, the bird brain couldn’t get arrested if he tried. Lost maybe? Or did he lock himself in the theater somehow?

  Everything should be perfect. Sam Kazdoy was sleeping the sleep of the contented, and she had a twenty-four-carat alibi. At the precise time of the heist — if Harry didn’t fuck it up — she was on her knees between the old man’s legs. Christ, it took so long, she nearly got lockjaw.

  The old man lived in a penthouse apartment in Bal Harbour, a hundred blocks north of South Beach. The windows looked straight over the Atlantic and the view at night was overwhelming blackness. No stars or moon tonight and from the balcony that jutted over the beach, the world was painted with tar.

  Violet sat on the balcony so she could use the cordless phone with no chance of waking the old man. Not that he was about to stir. Probably sleep till, whadatheycallit, Hahnoocha, the Jew Christmas. She had dialed her apartment every ten minutes since two o’clock. Harry was supposed to be there, a flock of eagles in the bag. An ocean breeze sent the old man’s brass chimes pinging into each other in a discordant cacophony. In another two hours, some pink would show over the Atlantic. Where the hell was he?

  “Hullo.”

  “Harry! What happened?” She lowered her voice. “Didja get ‘em?”

  “Nothin’ to get, Vi. He musta moved them to a safe-deposit box, just little slips of paper in the bottom drawer. All I got to show for the night is a shoulder that hurts like hell, had to beat the shit out of two greasers who — “

  “Little what?” Violet asked.

  “Huh?”

  “In the bottom drawer…”

  “Garbage!” he said, spitting it out. “A million little slips of paper.”

  “All the same size?”

  “Yeah. So what?”

  “With lots of little writin’ on ‘em?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You brought ‘em home, right?” Violet asked, her voice pleading, hoping, praying.

  Silence.

  She knew it. He would find a way to fuck it up and he did. “Harry!”

  “No, Vi baby, I left them there. They looked like garbage,” he said defensively.

  “Them’s the kew-pons, dickbrain!” Violet shouted through the phone, forgetting about the old man sleeping on the other side of the glass door. “Them’s what you turn in to git the money. He musta clipped a bunch of them in advance.” Violet heard a rush of air into the phone, as if Harry had taken a shot to the gut.

  Silence again. Violet waited, thinking, staying calm, trying to use her new knowledge of high finance to assess the situation.

  “I didn’t know,” Harry whined. “You told me to look for eagles, for packages that fold up like a road map.”

  Harry sounded as if he might cry. He had let the birds slip through his fingers. Now he was out of control.

  “Calm down, Hany. Just drag your ass back there and get them kew-pons.”

  “Can’t, Vi. The fire door’s locked now. And I lost the crowbar. I can’t get back in.” Harry was in no mood to try again, to maybe run into the punks or six of their cousins.

  “Goddamn it, Harry, you fucked it up, now you fix it. Once the old man sees there’s been a break-in, he’ll move ‘em quicker than shit through a goose. The key’s in my jewelry box in the bedroom. Just walk the fuck in the front door like you owned the place.”

  It was easier the second time, just as Violet said it would be. No backpack this time; Harry carried a large plastic garbage bag that he stuffed with little slips of paper. Back at the apartment Harry built a mountain on the kitchen table. A dozen coupons floated to the floor. Let ‘em go, walking-around money.

  In his excitement Harry didn’t notice what was missing from his jacket pocket, didn’t even remember picking it up in the first place, so much had happened that night. But in the alley behind the theater, on the gravel-covered blacktop, amid flattened popcorn boxes and the unidentifiable flotsam of a city’s byways, was the unsmiling, red-eyed, Polaroid face of Violet Belfrey, arms squeezing breasts together, bottom arched skyward.

  The sun was on its way up, sizzling in the Atlantic. The clouds were silver turning pink. The wind had died as it clocked around to the south, and the brass chimes on Sam Kazdoy’s balcony hung straight and still. Violet, sleepless and puffy-eyed, dialed her own number.

  Harry let it ring six times. Let her think about it. Bitch came down too hard on me tonight. Been bustin’ my chops. I’m the one had his dick on the chopping block. Twice. Coulda gotten killed by those friggin’ greasers. Would have, except one swung a bat like a rusty gate and the other kicked with spaghetti legs.

  Awright.

  Enough.

  Now I’m calling the shots. He picked up the phone but was silent.

  “Harry. Harry. Answer me. You got ‘em?” “The eagles have landed,” Harry Marlin said firmly, sounding very much like a man who had the world by the balls.

  CHAPTER 7

  Linebacker Drill

  Doctor Charles W. Riggs used a stubby thumb to push his lopsided glasses up the bridge of his nose, cleared his throat, scratched his bushy beard, and said, “Diethylstilbestrol.”

  The court reporter squeezed her eyes shut and tried to take it down phonetically on her Stenograph. Winston P. Hopkins HI, two years off the Andover-Princeton-Yale express, studied the 173 questions he had prepared in longhand on his yellow pad. His first solo deposition.

  “Dethel still…” Hopkins muttered.

  Jake Lassiter sat at the end of the polished teak conference table. His job was to watch Winston Hopkins depose the plaintiff’s expert witness and fill out a scorecard on his performance. Law firm bureaucracy.

  The plaintiff’s lawyer, Stuart Zeman, leaned back and dozed. Manicured and immaculately groomed, he wore a fifteen-hundred-dollar suit of beige silk. The wages of representing the widowed and crippled. His client, a beefy Air Force sergeant with a brush cut and tiny ears, tugged at the choking collar on his dress-blue shirt and loosened the regulation knot in his solid black tie. They were gathered in the thirty-second-floor deposition room at Harman amp; Fox, a hallowed, dark place where many thousands of hours have been billed at enormous rates.

  The bearded pathologist paused and chewed on his cold pipe. His testimony, delivered in deliberate, measured cadences, resembled a lecture by a well-prepared professor to a class of nitwits. “Diethylstilbestrol is synthetic estrogen, commonly called DES. Thirty years ago, doctors prescribed the drug to pregnant women to prevent miscarriage. A generation later, the women’s daughters began dying from cancer. Instead of protecting the female offspring, technology was killing them. That’s what happened to Gladys Ferguson… the late Mrs. Gladys Ferguson.” Doc Riggs nodded across the conference table in the direction of Sergeant Claude Ferguson, USAF, the widower and father of a baby boy.

  “But how can you be sure of that?” Winston Hopkins whined. The young lawyer had removed his suit coat to reveal paisley suspenders against his white-on-white custom-made shirt. The left cuff was emblazoned with a monogram in blue script “WPH.” Fighting the boredom, Lassiter scribbled imagined middle names across a legal pad. Percival… Pilkington… Plimpton. “Her cervical cancer could have been caused by a host of things, could it not?” Hopkins asked.
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br />   Dr. Riggs gave the young lawyer a kind, forgiving smile. “Given the history of Mrs. Ferguson’s mother using DES, given Mrs. Ferguson’s age and the fact that she acquired cervical cancer following childbirth, statistically there can be little doubt. I have concluded to a reasonable degree of medical certainty that the DES was the causa causans, the initiating cause of the cancer. But for the DES, she would not have contracted cancer, and hence, she would not have died.”

  The sergeant’s face was puffy. A single tear gathered, then rolled down a cheek. Seeming not to notice, Winston Hopkins stormed ahead. “But for the DES, Mrs. Ferguson might never have existed, correct?”

  “How’s that?” Dr. Riggs asked.

  “Her mother might have had a miscarriage without the drug.”

  “No sir!” Riggs yanked the pipe from his mouth and gestured toward the young lawyer. “That’s the irony here, the damned tragic irony. DES never worked, never prevented miscarriage. If a woman was going to carry to full term, she’d do it with or without the drug. Gladys Ferguson would have been born, fine and dandy, hale and healthy, without that damned DES. As a drug, it was totally useless except to poison one’s female issue.”

  Jake Lassiter looked up from his doodling. If they had been in a courtroom, the spectators would have oohed and aahed, the reporters would have scribbled notes, and Marvin the Maven would have smacked his gums. It was one of those moments when a witness drives a stake through the heart of your case. Give Doc Charlie Riggs a second chance, and he’ll give that stake another whack.

  “One moment, please,” Hopkins said, pretending to review his notes while trying to regroup without peeing on his Italian kid leather loafers. If the kid took on Doc Riggs again, the savvy old coroner would probably spank him and send him to bed without his dinner.

  A lifetime of experience on the witness stand, thirty-two years as medical examiner of Dade County, now retired and living in a fishing cabin on the edge of the Everglades, Doc Riggs was as sharp as ever. He had dueled with the city’s best criminal defense lawyers, savvy street fighters who could eviscerate a weak or confused witness. But they never got to Charlie Riggs. He had never botched an autopsy. Never lost a tissue sample, never failed to weigh, measure, or test the right organs, fluids, and gristle. A small man with dark, unkempt hair and a full beard, Charlie Riggs looked at the world through eyes that twinkled with a mixture of boyish delight and lethal wisdom.