The Bind

by Stanley Ellin

  “It’s the least they can do,” Jake said.

  14

  There was heavy traffic through and around the house in the morning. Miami Beach police and Daystar Islands security men scouting the area, the woman sent by Daystar Service to do housecleaning, a team of gardeners, Milt Webb and his wife, and finally McCloy himself, the ruler of the roost, magnificent in ascot and yachting jacket, come to apologize to these new members of the community for the predawn fuss. And to pettishly make his own investigation of it.

  In the privacy of the kitchen, Jake gave him the same account of it he had already given the police—Webb’s voice loud in the distance, the sound of shots, the phone call to Webb—

  McCloy said challengingly: “But did you yourself see any boat out there that looked suspicious?”

  “You can’t see the waterfront from our bedroom here. Even if you could, it was pitch-dark out.”

  “Then did you hear any boat coming or going at that time?”

  Jake said: “I have to admit I didn’t. What are you getting at? You don’t think Webb imagined the whole thing, do you?”

  “Well, it’s hardly up to me to draw conclusions about that,” McCloy said, but it was clear that he, like the police and security men, already had.

  Nothing roused Elinor through all this. When only the maid was left for company in the house, Jake tipped her heavily to attend to Elinor when she did wake, then packed an attaché case and drove across town to the Oceana Hotel.

  He found it on the oceanfront in the South Beach section of town, a weatherworn, four-storied imitation of Mount Vernon, with a high-pillared veranda facing the street. Elderly citizens sat in a row on the veranda, all wearing sunglasses, all bleakly watching the pigeons and sea gulls that unsociably mingled in the gutter.

  The lobby had an institutional look. At its far end, rows of metal chairs were arranged before a color television set where contestants with weirdly green and lavender faces were playing a quiz game, but nobody was there to watch the set except the sallow young man lounging behind the registration counter. Without taking his eyes from it, he informed Jake that Mr. Magnes was in the penthouse. Take the elevator up to the third, then the stairs up to the roof.

  The penthouse turned out to be a tiny one-room kitchenette apartment set like a box in a corner of the roof, and Magnes received his visitor in a pair of drooping bathing trunks and rubber sandals. Small, potbellied, and spindly-legged, with a fringe of white hair around his bald head, a bulbous nose, and small close-set eyes, he looked like an angry duck.

  “Some Jake,” he commented. “You’re a Jake like I’m a Shaun O’Reilly. You know, I heard about you even before Maniscalco called me up. From the size reputation you got, I thought you’d be an older man. Did Maniscalco tell you my price?”

  “No.”

  “I told him to. For one month, give or take a few days, it’s ten thousand. In advance.”

  “In Monopoly money?” Jake said.

  “I like a man with a sense of humor. Ten thousand in advance. I’ll put your check through my Chicago bank so no smarty bank clerk around Miami can pass the word we’re doing business.”

  Jake said: “I’ve got a better idea. For that kind of money, you can take the case and I’ll work for you.”

  “Very good,” Magnes remarked to his kitchen sink. “Not only a sense of humor, but a real expert at making a poor mouth.” He turned his shoe-button eyes on Jake again. “Sonny, when an Abe Magnes took a case like this, the rule was he split the win money with the insurer right down the middle, and I have a feeling a Jake Dekker don’t handle it any different. Which means you stand to make yourself one hundred thousand real American dollars out of this job. Or am I wrong about that?”

  Jake said: “No, only in the way you look at it. Look at it my way. I’ve already sunk ten thousand into the job. If I don’t come up a winner, I’ll hurt. If I throw in another ten thousand and don’t come up a winner, I’ll bleed. I don’t like to bleed.”

  “Naturally. But I also figure you didn’t make your kind of reputation by taking a case you couldn’t handle. With help. My kind of help.”

  “What kind is that?”

  Magnes said: “For one thing, honest. Do I have to tell somebody like you that in our business selling-out comes easy as breathing? And down here the momsers sell you out for bargain rates. I had a stakeout once on a million-dollar phony paralysis case in West Palm Beach. For the three months I was there, I never knew the guy I had on the job with me had tipped them off the second day. And for how much? A lousy hundred dollars. Their sisters they sell to some pimp for fifty.”

  Jake shook his head. “Maniscalco already told me you were strictly on the level. But I need somebody to move around, hunt up contacts, make investigations. And fast. Guaranty wants a release before this thing turns into a court case.”

  “My ten thousand covers all that. And where somebody might be needed for legwork or surveillance, I personally arrange for it, so you’re completely out of the picture. As for contacts, you tell me who you want to meet, and I’ll fix it up. If you want police cooperation—”

  “Not on this one. The people I’m working on probably have a pipeline to headquarters.”

  “All right, then anybody else. And all this is covered by the same ten thousand. That’s the limit you pay me.”

  Jake shrugged. “It’s still too much. But I’ll take you on an agency basis. By the day, plus expenses.”

  “Sonny,” Magnes said with kindly forbearance, “for one thing, in my fifty years in this business I never worked per diem. I am a talent, not a day laborer. For another thing, that ten thousand rates as a business expense for you. Since you’re at least in the fifty percent bracket, you save five grand that way on your taxes. And for a final thing, if you walk out without signing me up, you got nobody else to go to. Nobody at all you could trust on a case this big. So tomorrow you’ll be back here. And the price will still be the same. So if you consider it from all these angles, we can stop fooling around and get to work.”

  Jake considered it carefully from all these angles, then took out his checkbook.

  “Good,” said Magnes. “Now I’ll fix us some lunch, and while we’re eating you can tell me who’s giving Guaranty the finger for a change, and what we can do about it.”

  15

  The telling, and the playback of the tapes, took up the entire lunchtime and more. Then Jake removed the folders from the attaché case, and side by side at the table, he and Magnes went over each page of their contents.

  Magnes closed the folder on the last page. “So it boils down to three possibilities. The Jewish thing, or he got his hand caught in the wrong fly, or he committed a felony. In my opinion, the first one is very thin.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it doesn’t take the wife into account. If she’s paying off now, she knows what he was trying to cover up. For him it would be one thing. But for her it would be something else entirely to cover up at such a terrible cost that she happened to marry a Jew. Still, in this crazy world, who can tell?”

  “That’s how I’m playing it,” Jake said. “All I can hope is that those records Maniscalco’s digging up will give us a lead there. Meanwhile, I want you to check out some other items.”

  “Such as?”

  “First, this Charlie Matthews you heard about on the tape. The guy at the Biscayne National Bank. He’s a family friend, he knew Thoren’s habits, and for two years he was okaying Thoren’s checks for a tremendous cash withdrawal once a month. Now Mrs. Thoren cashes a check like that for the first time, and suddenly Matthews is all hot and bothered. Find out who and what he is, how he lives, if there was any change in his standard of living recently. Then there’s Alfonso Ortega. I want to know just how legitimate he is.”

  “Is he a Cuban?” Magnes asked.

  “Yes, but he settled down here long before Castro’s time. Well-fixed, but the money seems to be mostly his wife’s. She rates near the top of my list because of
what happened between her and Thoren, but I can take care of her myself.”

  “It shouldn’t be hard,” Magnes remarked, “if she’s the hot number you said. But you have to watch out. With your kind of setup here, it could be dangerous.”

  “Not if Ortega’s out of town when I work on her. And he will be. He said something about leaving for Rio this morning.”

  Magnes said: “I don’t mean dangerous on account of him. I mean on account of that girlie you got working with you. I’m talking from experience when I say that’s always a touchy business. You move into a stakeout with a cute little girlie, you go to bed with her a couple of times, next thing she gets all confused in the head, she begins to think she’s your wife. So where she might not even tattle to the opposition for a couple of grand, she’ll do it as soon as you come home with lipstick on your collar. Hell has no fury—you know the saying?”

  “I know it,” Jake said. “But you leave her to me and just take care of your end. That’s Matthews and Ortega.”

  “Any help around the Thoren house with big ears? Or has this high society over on Daystar started to do its own cooking lately?”

  “No, there’s a husband-and-wife team around the house. Colored. Been there a long time. He’s houseman, she’s cook. Raymond and Olivia Beaudry. When Maniscalco was down here he bought some information from Beaudry about the layout of the house and so on, but when it came to family secrets Beaudry clammed right up. Maniscalco went pretty high in his price too, but it was no sale. We’ll have to leave it at that for the time being. If you approach Beaudry, and he goes right to the Thorens about it, it’ll put them too much on guard. And there are more important things to work on right now. What do you know about Bayside Spa?”

  “It’s in North Bay Village. A fancy diet-and-health place. You pay sirloin prices, and they give you a spoon of cottage cheese and tell you it’s good for your health. Why?”

  “Because Thoren used to go there once a week regularly for a workout, and then he suddenly stopped. I want to know when he stopped. And, if you can dig it up, the reason for it.”

  “True,” Magnes said. “Funny things can happen when the big boys and the little boys get together in a steam room.”

  “It’s not only that. He started paying blackmail between two and three years ago, which doesn’t have to mean he got caught doing something around then. It could have been something that dated from way back, but which nobody thought of cashing in until later. The one sure thing is that the blackmailer made the first contact with Thoren between two and three years ago. And any sharp break in Thoren’s routine—like not going to the Spa any more—could tip us off as to just when and how that contact was made.”

  “It could be,” Magnes said. He musingly rubbed a hand back and forth over his gleaming scalp. “It’s interesting North Bay Village should come into it. You know anything about the place?”

  “No. I don’t know much about any place down here. That’s what I’m counting on you for.”

  “You’re counting on the right one. Wait a minute, and I’ll show you something.” Magnes removed the dishes from the table to the sink, then unfolded a large street map on the table. He ran a stubby forefinger along a line in the center of the map. “Right here in the middle of the bay on the Seventy-ninth Street Causeway, these two islands are North Bay Village. More than any other place in Dade County, this is where the action is. The high-priced action.”

  “Operated by the Mob?”

  “Plenty of it. Where the causeway runs through it, they call the Strip. There’s some independents on the Strip, but in my opinion the best way to get bleeding bowels is to be an independent on the Strip. Anyhow, on the Strip and around it is where you can eat, drink, get a girl, get a boy, get a fix, place a bet, buy a nice new thirty-eight-caliber S and W, and if you’re the nervous type, even hire a guy to use it for you. The last couple times I was go-between for the insurer in a big jewel heist, I got treated to dinner on the Strip so I could pick up the stones right there at the table.”

  “Is Bayside Spa an independent?” Jake said.

  “So they claim. But this Thoren wasn’t the only one who went there for workouts. Drop in any time, and you’ll see some very fancy hoods doing push-ups. Maybe he did business with them. Then one day they told him either he starts paying off or they spill it all to the papers.”

  “Maybe. Do these hoods have any interest in real estate down here? Hotels and high-rises?”

  “Hotels,” Magnes said. “After all, they got to do something with that skim-off money from the gambling out West.”

  “Then they’d have reason to come down on Thoren. He was bucking them with that Civic Planning Association of his. He didn’t have to be doing business with them. All he had to do was step on their toes and get himself framed.”

  Magnes smiled dourly. “Let me enlighten you about something. This is a tourist town and a retirement town. And the characters who put up the hotels for the tourists here and the high-rises for the retired have it so tight by the nuts that they worry about such do-gooders like an elephant worries about getting screwed by a flea. They own the Beach, they do what they want with it, and if you don’t like it, Charlie, go drop dead. Only do it across the bay in Miami, not here, because here we don’t have a cemetery. You got my word that the Mob never was turned loose on Thoren because he bothered the big interests here. He couldn’t. Not one little bit.”

  “If you say so,” Jake said. “But he was being blackmailed by experts. Big-timers. And where the Mob moves in, they have a vested interest in any kind of operation like that.”

  Magnes said: “This I don’t deny. Where you could be wrong is figuring that the blackmailer has to be big-time. A good juicy blackmail setup is something anybody can come across by accident and take advantage of. He can be the little pisher who lives next door and happens to look in your window when the shades are up. If you get stuck on the idea this one has to be a big-time operator only, we could waste a lot of energy walking up the wrong hill.”

  “If he could sweat blood out of a guy like Thoren for over two years,” Jake said, “he was a big-time operator. Thoren had the brains to plan his suicide like a master and the guts to go through with it when the time came. That means that if at any time he had the least chance of killing the blackmailer and getting away with it, he would have killed him. And the fact that he couldn’t do it means the blackmailer was right up there in the big leagues. So much so, he’s even got Mrs. Thoren pinned down now. And no little jerk next door thinks in terms of ten grand a month.”

  “On the other hand,” argued Magnes, “what kind of big-leaguer comes right up to the house in a boat to collect his payoff? If the cops were laying for him, they could have grabbed him right then with the ten grand in his pocket.”

  “I didn’t say she met him to make a payoff. That was made the day before, right after she drew out the money. What she met him for was because her brother made such a stink about the money being withdrawn. She must have arranged for a meeting with the blackmailer to talk over the problem this brought up. And some other problems. Maybe her husband could hand out that kind of money every month without anybody taking notice, but she sure as hell couldn’t. And that insurance money she’s been counting on still hasn’t been paid to her. My guess is that she either asked the guy to allow extra time before the next payment or to cut the payments down.”

  “Well,” Magnes said, “maybe you’re right. But how come you’re so sure the payoff was made yesterday? Especially after that boat showed up the way it did.”

  Jake said: “Because that’s the pattern. Look it up, and you’ll see most of these operations run to form. When payoff day comes, you get your instructions, you put the money together, you drop it when and where you’re told, one right after the other. Why the hell would any smart blackmailer want to give you time to think it over, maybe set up a stakeout, maybe have all that dough hijacked while you’re carting it around? The game he’s playing, he’s not calling fo
r any huddles, he wants the ball snapped right away.”

  “Sometimes,” Magnes said. “Not always. Still, in this business, what can you do but play the percentage? So now tell me what’s the percentage on finding any blackmail note in that sailboat? In my opinion, he got rid of those notes as soon as he read them.”

  “Except the last one,” Jake said. “The odds are that he had it with him when he was out in the boat all day, thinking things over. Whether he finally destroyed it or not out there remains to be seen. I want to see for myself before I give up on it.”

  “Does that mean you’ll make another try at the boat tonight?”

  “No, I’ll hold off a day or two until the excitement around there cools off a little. One last thing. Are there any gay bars running wide-open around here where Thoren might have gotten himself nailed?”

  “Right now, no. Right now you need to ask around a little for that kind of action. Two, three years ago, which is what really counts, yes.” Magnes leaned over the map and pointed. “The two widest open were right here on Alton near Lincoln. You can see for yourself it’s a very quick jump between there and the Daystar Islands.”

  “What happened to those places? Business troubles or the cops?”

  “The cops. Now and then, you understand, we get a terrible rush of morality to the head in Miami Beach. Especially some of those clean-cut-type hotel operators who hate to see customers waste money some place else when they could have an expensive bottle from the bar and a pretty little fegeleh sent right up to their room on request.”

  “What happened to the guys who ran those two places? Is there any way you can get in touch with them?”

  “One, I think, went out to California. The other runs a TV sales and service place somewhere on Washington Avenue. Him, I can look up easy. In his own way, a very nice boy.”

  “Nice enough to keep his mouth shut if you ask him to?”