by Tod Goldberg
At a place like the Ace Hotel, where looking the other way is a selling point, you could probably do a whole lot of illegal things, provided you kept the right people paid and didn’t make too much noise. And even then, well, you’d probably be just fine.
The Ace Hotel was located just off Collins Avenue in South Beach, and the local lore was that it was once President Kennedy’s Miami getaway, a place he’d go to meet with Marilyn Monroe and the Mafia and probably Castro, too. It was a small hotel-only four stories-but it made up for its lack of size by offering fifteen two-bedroom villas that faced the Miami Beach canal. It was one of those great mysteries of tourism: Why spend thousands of dollars to sleep in a villa that was likely not as nice as your own home?
“It is that one,” Pablo said. We’d followed him out of the pool area and around the back of the hotel and through the (intentionally) overgrown botanical gardens, which subtly hid the villas from sight. Nothing says “privacy” quite like plants grown to twice their normal size. That and water features burbling away in some hidden crevice-boutique hotels are always big on hidden crevices that contain very small fountains-make celebrities and the very rich feel like they are one with nature.
“Which one?” Sam said.
Pablo pointed in the vague direction of a twelve-foot thrust of fountain grass. “There,” he said. He was still sweating profusely and my glasses kept sliding down his nose, so that he had to continually push them up. He turned to me and handed me a room key card. “Take this,” he said.
“One minute,” I said. He hadn’t said a word since we left the pool and had grown consistently more nervous as we walked, which made me think we were walking into an ambush. “What’s in the villa?”
“Bad men,” he said.
Fiona groaned in exasperation. She reached over and snatched my glasses off Pablo’s face and handed them back to me. They were a bit too damp for my taste. “Pablo,” she said, “I’m not as patient nor as willing to spend money on frivolous information as my two simian friends. So I’m going to need you to speak only in complete sentences now. I know you’re scared of something, but if you aren’t more forthcoming with information, you will actually have a reason to be scared, versus the normal, unfounded fears of your sex.”
“Uh, Fi,” I said, but she waved me off.
Pablo’s sweaty fear was now wide-eyed anguish, so that was a nice change. “The man who rents this room? He tells me not to come and clean. But you understand, if I do not clean the rooms, I can lose my job. They track our security cards, so they always know if we’ve gone in the rooms and villas, you see. So they know. And I cannot lose my job. Do you understand?”
“I understand,” Fiona said. She put her hand on Pablo’s wrist. Very gentle. Very caring. She had that ability for kindness, too, but she could also snap his wrist if she decided she didn’t trust him. “Please, continue.”
“So I wait until I see the man leave and I go and just slide my card in, so it registers. You see? But then the door is open and curiosity, you see, it gets the better of me.”
“Killed the cat,” Sam said, which was entirely the wrong thing to say at that moment.
“I know. I know. I know,” Pablo said. “I find guns. Many, many guns. And much money. Much money. But it isn’t real. The money, that is. I find this out the wrong way.”
“Please, tell me you did not steal counterfeit money and then use it to pay your water bill or something,” I said. Pablo’s eyes got wider, if that was possible. He wiped his face with his sleeve, but he didn’t say anything. Whatever he did with the money, it was the wrong thing to do. “How much did you take?” I asked.
“One thousand,” he said. “I bought a round of drinks at the bar here and paid with a fifty that was apparently not such a good copy. So, so, I try to take the money back, but by that time, I’d already spent maybe five hundred, so I cannot afford to pay back another real five hundred.”
“When was the last time you went into the room?” I asked.
“Three days. I slide my card, but I do not go in. But the men who come and go, they do not look like the kind of people I’d like to anger.”
“And what do we look like?” Sam said.
Pablo stammered for a moment, but then Fiona applied a slight bit of pressure to his wrist, which seemed to focus his attention. “I figure you are good guys, or else why would you want to know what’s happening?”
I handed Pablo back my sunglasses. He needed them more than I did. “Fiona,” I said, “give him your earrings.”
“What?”
“Your earrings,” I said.
“They’re diamond,” she said.
“Did you buy them?”
“They were a gift,” she said.
“From who?”
“From a gentleman who didn’t have quite enough money for a fair-priced assault rifle.”
“Consider it karmic reparations,” I said.
Fiona took off her two rather large diamond studs and handed them to Pablo, who didn’t quite know what to do with them, mostly because Fiona was making noises in her throat like a cornered tiger. It can be slightly disconcerting to those who don’t know Fiona’s noises.
“What am I to do?” Pablo said.
“Go home sick,” I said.
“For how long?” he asked.
“Forever,” I said.
Pablo looked down at the diamond earrings in his hand and then back at Fiona. He plucked up one of the earrings and tried to hand it back to Fiona. “Maybe one is enough?”
“They’re a matched set,” Fiona said.
“Go,” I said to Pablo, “before I change my mind.”
Pablo deposited the earrings in his pocket and then scurried out of sight in what must have been record time.
“Guess it’s true,” Sam said once Pablo was gone, “that you can’t trust the help at hotels not to go through your shit.”
I handed the key card to Fiona. “Why don’t you see if you can accidentally open the door to the wrong villa,” I said.
“And get shot?” she said.
“No one shoots a pretty girl in a bikini,” Sam said. “And besides, with all that oil on you, a bullet would slide right off you.”
“Or I’ll instantly ignite,” she said.
I had a better idea. I called the front desk and asked to be connected to the villa. I hung up after five rings. “There’s no one there,” I said.
“Would you feel better if Uncle Sam was standing next to you with his big, mean gun, Fiona?” Sam said.
Fiona gave both of us one of her patented “I could live a better life without both of you” glares and stomped off toward the villa. Sam and I followed behind her at a slight distance, and then lingered out of sight in the nuclear-treated fountain grass as she approached the door. Though Fiona didn’t have a gun on her-hard to hide a gun in a bikini-I was certain she could handle herself in the face of danger. Plus, Sam was right: No one shoots a pretty girl in a bikini. It just goes against nature.
Fiona slipped the key card in just as anyone might when they’re returning to their villa-which is to say, she portrayed no nerves in the least-and opened the door. I listened for screams or gunshots or even a muffled yelp, but heard nothing. The door closed behind her with an audible click.
A few seconds later, my cell phone rang.
“Darling,” Fiona said when I answered, “why don’t you come back to the room? I’m lonely.”
“I’ll even bring a friend,” I said.
Sam and I checked for unwelcome visitors and then headed to the villa. Fiona stood in the doorway, sipping a bottle of water.
“Where’d you get the water?” I asked.
“The mini bar,” she said. “Just four dollars.”
We stepped inside, and Fi closed the door and bolted it behind us. The villa was decorated just like the rest of the hotel, which is to say, at some point the designers began thinking of the 1970s as a period worth revisiting. For added kitsch factor, the walls inside the vil
la were covered with framed, blown-up photos of B-list celebrities-Zsa Zsa Gabor, Barbie Benton, Ricardo Montalban, the guy who played Potsie on Happy Days-partying in Miami during the period.
“Who would pay to stay here?” Sam said. “I had to live in the 1970s. And let me tell you, it was no vacation.”
“Hipsters,” Fiona said, “love to revisit the time period their parents suffered through.”
The living room and small galley kitchen looked lived-in, but not messy. There were cups in the sink, the garbage had take-out containers and coffee grounds in it and the sofa in the living room was dented from people sitting on it. There were no guns and no stacks of money, at least not in the open. The room was well lit by the sun coming in through a sliding glass door, which opened out to a small patio overlooking the canal. I opened the door and stepped outside. On the patio table was an ashtray overflowing with cigarette butts. Two chairs were pulled slightly away from the table, as well, which told me more than one person had been here.
I came back inside in time to see Sam open up the fridge. “Uh, Mikey,” he said.
“You can have a beer when we’re done,” I said.
“I know,” Sam said, “but you’ll want to take a look at this.”
“Please, tell me it’s a human head,” Fiona said.
“No,” Sam said, “just a lot of dead presidents.”
Stacked inside the fridge and the freezer were bundles of bills: twenties, tens, fives and ones and nothing larger.
I pulled out a stack of twenties and examined it. They were pre-1996 bills, which meant they didn’t have the plastic security strip embedded into the fabric of the bill, nor the extra details such as Andrew Jackson’s hidden watermark photo or the shifting color palettes.
I licked my thumb and ran it across the face of the bill. Surprisingly, no color came up. Surprising since these were clearly counterfeit bills, but ones that would easily pass in the circles where they were likely to be passed-in bars and clubs, the streets, maybe even foreign countries-though certainly not in banks. It was doubtful they’d even be accepted in a soda machine.
If you’re going to make your own American currency, the first thing you need to know is that in all likelihood, you’ll get caught. After you get caught, you’ll go to federal prison, and after you’re released from federal prison, you’ll be audited for the rest of your life by the IRS. If you’re still going to make your own American currency, you need to have access to a high-density printer, rag paper and the ability to compress your paper with tons of pressure in order to make it as thin as the common dollar. An automobile wrecker would do the trick.
And then? Then you’ll probably still get caught, because if you’re dumb enough to try counterfeiting currency, you’re probably not smart enough not to spread the money around to people or businesses who might take notice of your fake bills, because even the best fake bill just doesn’t feel like a real bill. Nor does it smell the same. There’s no way to replicate the process an actual bill goes through from the mint to your wallet, nor is there a way to re-create the wear and tear of the bill’s life span-the average fifty dollar bill lives for a decade, a twenty for half that time.
Junior-or his people-had been smart enough to use rag paper, and it looked like they’d had some success pressing the paper, too, as it had almost the right consistency. And by putting the money in the refrigerator and freezer, they’d even managed to add moisture to the bills, which helped seal in the aging chemical they’d apparently used, too. It wasn’t terribly sophisticated, but it was decent enough to fool someone who didn’t know any better or, more than likely, someone who just didn’t care.
“Not bad,” I said. I tossed the bundle to Fiona. “Go get yourself something nice.”
“Like twenty years in prison?” she said.
“In your hands, as a foreign national,” I said, “I’d say you’d be looking at closer to thirty.”
“How much would you say is in here?” Sam said.
I counted thirty stacks in the fridge-there was also a half gallon of milk, the remnants of a Caesar salad, a six-pack of Coke and five Stellas-and at least twice that many stacks in the freezer. “A couple hundred thousand,” I said.
It was enough to pay some bills, but it wasn’t a real operating budget. No reputable dealer of anything the Latin Emperors would want-like drugs or guns or antiaircraft missiles, if they really wanted to diversify their business interests-would be fooled by the fake stuff. This was money to be spread around the bottom rungs of the ladder.
“You two might want to look at this,” Fiona said. She’d walked down the short hallway that led from the living room and now stood in the entryway to the first of the two bedrooms. “And maybe don’t touch anything else.”
Sam and I walked down the hall and peered over Fiona’s shoulder into the room. There was a stripped bed in the center of the room, surrounded by two night-stands, both of which had been knocked over. At the foot of the bed were the sheets and linens. They were stained with blood.
“I don’t suppose that’s just the latest spring style,” Sam said.
I nudged the ball of sheets with my foot, looked to see if there was something other than blood-like a head or an arm-but there was nothing solid.
“Anyone who bled that much,” Sam said, “probably isn’t bleeding anymore.”
“Hard to say,” I said. “It could be from more than one person.”
“That’s a pleasant thought,” Fiona said.
“Wait here,” I said, and stepped into the room so that I could examine the bed. If someone had been murdered on it, the mattress would be soaked, too, but that didn’t appear to be the case. The room also didn’t smell like death, which was a good sign. It doesn’t matter if you die pleasantly or die violently; if you die in a room, you’re going to leave a lasting olfactory sensation.
I opened a door to what I assumed to be the en suite bathroom, and instead discovered the Latin Emperors’ money factory. There were several printers, lap-tops and reams and reams of paper scattered on the floor and into the exceptionally large walk-in closet, which housed an automated paper cutter.
I looked inside the machine and found the reason why there wasn’t anyone about today and why there were a bunch of bloodstained sheets: Two fingers, cut off at the middle knuckle, sat among a stack of freshly cut five-dollar bills.
“Sam,” I said, “did you say that Father Eduardo has Honrado creating its own newspaper?”
“They hand it out to all the community centers,” Sam said. He and Fi were still in the hallway. “And I think once a month it comes stuffed inside the Herald. Why?”
“I’ve got a feeling the Latin Emperors might have some printing needs.”
I made sure the paper cutter was unplugged and then called in Sam and Fi for a look. Fi took a quick glance but didn’t seem overly interested. Sam, however, spent a good, long time staring at the mess.
“You have a theory, Sam?”
“I’m just curious why they didn’t have K-Dog do some of this stuff,” Sam said. “Seems like he’d at least know how to do it without losing important body parts.”
“Maybe he actually is trying to stay straight?” I said.
“Maybe.” It didn’t sound like Sam believed himself. “Poor guy,” Sam said eventually. “I’m gonna guess the Latin Emperors don’t offer workmen’s comp.”
“Unlikely,” I said.
“So I guess we’re looking for a three-fingered man now?” Fiona said.
“No,” I said, “I think the man I need to talk to is Barry.” Things were starting to make a lot of sense. Father Eduardo wasn’t just getting blackmailed; he was also about to be the victim of a hostile corporate take-over. And I had a feeling that this wasn’t a plan originally hatched by Junior Gonzalez, since the scope of it had suddenly begun to take on a grander scale. Something maybe a “consultant” might have had some input on.
“Will you be torturing him for information?” Fi said.
“No,�
� I said. “Knowing Barry, I think he’s probably torturing himself as it is.”
“Too bad,” she said. “It’s been so long since I’ve been given the opportunity to interrogate anyone. One of my rarely utilized skill sets.”
That gave me an idea. “Sam,” I said, “I want you to take Fiona down to Honrado, point out where our scarred friend works and then let Fiona interrogate her.”
“Abduct and interrogate?” Fi said, ever hopeful.
“Use your best judgment,” I said, which was probably a mistake.
9
Not much really annoyed Fiona. Oh, there were the little things-men who didn’t open doors anymore, bullets jamming in expensive automatic weapons, undercooked fish-but by and large she thought that the best way to live was to be mildly cynical, but not actually to the point that every small injustice became an issue. Dealing with Michael had made her aware that even the stupid things men did-and they did plenty-could be mitigated by occasional acts of nobility.
Chivalry didn’t excuse stupidity, of course, but it went a long way toward reminding Fiona that at base, men were just slightly above chimps in terms of their emotional development, and thus needed to be rewarded when they did something vaguely human.
Even Sam needed positive reinforcement periodically, which is why she told him, as they sat parked next to each other across from the Honrado campus, waiting for the woman with scars on her neck and face to depart for lunch, that though she was unsure of what she was about to do, she was certain she didn’t need him wasting any more of his precious time on her. She’d be fine. He should go off and do whatever it was he did when he wasn’t tracking down leads or shooting guns or drinking beer poolside or, well, whatever.
“Fiona,” Sam said, “Michael told me to make sure that if anything went down, you had backup.”
“What could possibly happen between me and some girl?” Fi said. “You think some girl is going to cause me a problem, Sam?”
“Well, no, no, clearly,” Sam said, “but, uh, I guess what I’m saying is that maybe I should stick around in case, uh…” Sam didn’t finish. He didn’t need to. The problem with Sam and Michael was that they believed her when she said she wanted to shoot everyone and blow up everything. Six or seven percent of the time, she didn’t mean it literally. But she’d been placed in so many situations recently that could have been solved with a well-placed explosive charge that it just seemed so silly that now everyone was so into diplomacy.