Jake said: “You do that, and you might be followed all the way to your front door by one of these guys. You’ll be leading them right to your kid. Then they could really give you fits.”
“I don’t believe it. You’re only trying to scare me.”
“Baby, didn’t you just get shown they’re the ones who want to do the scaring? Look, the way I figure it, someone with a hand in this game heard me ask Caldwell all about Thoren and that last day he put in at Bayside Spa. And since that somebody knows Mrs. Thoren wouldn’t call the police in on this, he doesn’t have to be a genius to guess what my angle is. So all he wants to do is neutralize me for a little while. Then Mrs. Thoren collects the insurance money, and he can start bleeding her of it. And it’s not like I was a cop. The blackmailers know that once Mrs. Thoren collects the money I’m off their necks for good.”
Elinor said: “I suppose neutralize means scaring you off. But what makes you so sure they’ll try that again? Why won’t they just shoot you next time?”
“Because they know the insurance company would not only have a good excuse to hold up payment and get a trial postponement, but they’d call the police in on this besides. No, as far as these guys are concerned, the smart tactic is to warn me away. When they see that won’t work they might try to buy me off.”
Elinor’s eyes searched his face. “Could they?”
“What do you think?”
“Oh God, what do I think. If you really want to know, I think you’re looking to get me killed. And when I’m laying there dying, you’ll prove to me it couldn’t happen.”
“That’s my girl,” Jake said.
As they came out of the water, Elinor suddenly clutched his arm. “Jake, that’s him. He’s the one.”
Jake followed the direction of her finger. Squat and enormously bloated, the man stood in shadow beneath the overhanging stairway to the sun deck, partly concealed by one of the beams supporting the stairway. He moved back a step as Jake turned toward him, and a ray of sunlight coming through the steps momentarily gleamed on his hairless skull.
Jake looked around. The beach itself was empty, the only people in sight the scattered bathers riding the swells beyond the sandbar. He moved toward the man, and Elinor tried to hold him back. “Jake, I don’t want to go near him. Please.”
“Stop that. Do you want him to think he panicked us?”
“He did panic me. Please, Jake—” But when he pulled free of her grasp she fearfully tagged along a few steps behind him. He walked into the shadow of the stairway and up to the man. It was searingly hot in the sunlight, here it was surprisingly cool. The man stood watching him impassively. He was a head shorter than Jake, and barrel-shaped.
“My name’s Dekker,” Jake told him amiably. “This is my wife.”
Still no expression showed on the round, beefy face or in the pale eyes. “My name’s Holuby. So what?”
“So it seems Mrs. Dekker had a bad time of it just now. Almost got herself drowned out there.”
What might have been a glint of humor flickered in the pale eyes. “Maybe she was in over her head. That’s dangerous. People got to be careful about that.”
“And that’s a fact,” Jake said smilingly. When he had balled his fist at his side he had left the knuckle of the middle finger protruding beyond the others. He threw the punch short and hard in a straight line, the wedge of the protruding knuckle spiking dead center into Holuby’s massive throat. Holuby grunted. His eyes rolled up so that for an instant only the whites showed. Then he sagged forward and went down on his hands and knees with a thud, his mouth gaping wide, his face purpling, his eyes staring and terrified at his inability to draw breath.
Jake squatted down beside him. He scooped up a handful of sand. “If I shove this stuff down your throat right now, Holuby, you’re finished for good. Just another sad case of drowning. So let’s have it. Was it your idea to rough up my wife?”
A string of spittle trailed from Holuby’s wide-open mouth. His body heaved, fighting for air. Jake thrust the sand under his nose, and Holuby jerkily turned his head from side to side trying to escape it. “If it wasn’t you,” Jake snarled, “who was it? Who put you up to it?”
Elinor said: “Jake, stop it!” She tugged at his shoulder. “Please, stop it. There’s people coming.”
He glanced over his shoulder. Two bathers emerging from the water were veering in his direction. A middle-aged couple, they were looking at the scene under the stairway with frowning concern.
Jake let the sand filter from his hand and stood up. The couple came up beside him and looked down at the figure on its hands and knees gasping like a beached whale. “Gottenu,” the woman said. She pressed her hands to her cheeks. “What happened? What’s wrong with him?”
Jake said: “Nothing serious. He went in over his head and swallowed some water. He’ll be all right.”
The man said solemnly: “Better never to take such chances. Safety first should be the slogan.”
Jake said: “That’s what I just told him.” He pushed Elinor toward the foot of the stairway. “Let’s move, dear. I think we ought to tell one of those pool lifeguards about this.”
She said nothing as she started up the stairs to the sun deck. Halfway up, she suddenly stopped and turned to face him. She said wonderingly: “You wanted to kill him. You would have killed him if those people weren’t there.”
“Like hell I would.”
“He thought so, too. You looked like it. You sounded like it.”
“You ought to know that was an act. Can you think of a better way to make him talk?”
Elinor shook her head. “It wasn’t only that. You were getting even with him for what he did to me, weren’t you?”
“That was incidental. Baby, don’t ever weigh yourself against anything that’s got to do with my job. You’re in for a terrible disillusionment if you do.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. Just because you were hung up on a wife who never really—”
“Oh, for chrissake. I’m frying my brains out in this sun, and you stand there handing me lines from old Barbara Stanwyck movies.” He slapped her hard on the rear end. “Come on, I’ll walk you back to the cabana. You can get dressed and wait there while I have another visit with my pal Caldwell.”
He found Caldwell hard at work on a client. “I want to have a little talk with you, Bert.”
Caldwell continued kneading the body on the table. “Talk about what, Mr. Dekker?”
“Private business. Some place where we can be alone for a few minutes.”
Caldwell gestured at the body. “Yeah, but right now?”
“He’ll keep. This is very important private business.”
The sauna’s office was lushly carpeted, and was equipped with pastel-colored office furniture. Around its walls were autographed photos of glamorous clients.
A young man sat behind the smaller of two desks in the room. When Caldwell said to him, “Just for a couple of minutes, Bubba,” the young man looked Jake over incuriously and strolled out of the room. Caldwell closed the door behind him. “What’s it about, Mr. Dekker?”
“It’s about whatever happened in that rubbing room after I walked out last time. Somebody there heard us talking about Thoren. As soon as left, he asked you what you knew about me. Now you tell me who it was.”
“Me? Nobody said a word to me about you, Mr. Dekker.”
Jake said patiently: “There’s a gorilla hanging around outside name of Holuby. Squatty guy who might go about three hundred pounds, looks like a pro wrestler. Know anything about him?”
“Sure. That’s Lou Holuby. He’s hotel security for the beach and pool area.”
“They’ve got funny ideas about security down here,” Jake said. “This Holuby tried to push me around outside, because somebody in here told him to. And you know who told him to.”
Caldwell heaved a long sigh. “Look, Mr. Dekker—”
Jake smiled. “When I walked out of here before, I forgot and left my wallet on tha
t table where you keep the oil and stuff. I want that wallet now. I figure five hundred bucks cash and a dozen credit cards is too much of a tip for even a big spender like me.”
“What are you trying to do, Mr. Dekker? You know you never left any wallet on that table.”
“That’ll be for the cops to decide. And what do you think they’ll decide when they look under the mat on your rubbing table and find it there?”
“Find it there?” Caldwell’s eyes narrowed. “You phony bastard, you planted it there yourself just now.” He wheeled toward the door, and Jake said: “Whether you dig it out of there and hand it to me in front of everybody, or whether the cops dig it out, it comes to the same thing, Bert. I’m a real sorehead. When I’m robbed I make a loud noise about it.”
Caldwell stood with his hand on the doorknob. “You think that kind of noise would bother me? My record is clean from the day I got down here.” There was no conviction in his voice.
Jake said sympathetically: “So you were tempted once too often. Tough. But maybe the cops’ll be nice about it. Maybe they’ll hold off on an arrest and just run you out of town, if that’s all right with me. On the other hand—”
Caldwell said: “All right, it was Frank Milan. He was one of them looking over the scratch sheet right there. He asked if I knew anything about you, and I said no, and that was the whole thing.”
“You’re sure?”
“Jesus Christ, Mr. Dekker,” Caldwell said desperately, “if you don’t believe me—”
“I believe you. What’s this Frank Milan got to do with Holuby?”
“What do you think? Holuby works here, don’t he? You mean you don’t know Frank Milan owns a big piece of this place?”
“Now I know,” Jake said.
26
At Magnes’ suggestion they met for dinner at a Cuban restaurant on Espanola Way, a place which turned out to be a hole-in-the-wall with barely room for its six tables. Most of the conversation at the other tables was in Yiddish-accented Spanish or Spanish-accented Yiddish.
Magnes listened to the recital of the day’s events while stuffing himself with chicken stew, black beans, and fried plantains. At its conclusion he said: “It’s no surprise you didn’t know about Frank Milan, the way he ducks publicity. He came down here with Owney Madden and Frank Erickson when they put up Tropical Park racetrack maybe forty years ago. He was muscle for them. Now he’s on top of the Mob. Also a very good friend with Meyer Lansky. It shows you how nice people get along with each other down here.”
Jake said: “So he’s on top of the Mob. But what about him running some blackmail as a personal sideline?”
Magnes belched delicately and patted his lips with a paper napkin. He shook his head. “Frankly, I don’t see it. He’s one of those hoodlums, y’understand, who in his old age likes to put on a very high-class front. Golf, the grandchildren in college, the works. For him to get mixed up personally in blackmail makes no sense. With what he got in the bank, he needs that kind of trouble like a loch in kop. A hole in the head.”
Jake said: “He’s the one who sicked Holuby on me. That means he knows about Thoren and the blackmail setup.”
“That much I grant you. Also that you were right when you figured some pro is handling the blackmail. The way I see it, that hick from the Everglades—that sweatbath rubber—was the one who spotted who Thoren really was. But a character like that could never handle it so good, no matter how much larceny he got in him. So what did he do? He cut in some guy from the Mob who could help him make a big-money thing out of it.”
“And that somebody cut in Milan.”
“I still say Milan wouldn’t want any part of it personally. But you have to understand nobody in the Mob could run such a fat concession unless Milan okayed it. That’s why Milan had to know about it. Then you come along and talk about Thoren, so Milan figures to protect the guy running the concession by giving you a dig. If you’re harmless, so ducking the girlie is a practical joke. If you’re not, it’s a warning. And after what you did to Holuby, they know for sure you’re not harmless.”
Jake said: “How far do you think Milan would go to protect his man?”
“Not too far. Killing is out, because then the heat comes on and the publicity. A beating, an auto accident, what happened to the girlie in the water—you could figure on stuff like that. Your hard luck he owns a piece of the Royal Burgundian and hangs around so much with those big ears.”
“Your hard luck too,” Jake observed, “if he thinks it’s worth having me tailed.”
“I know. What’s on your mind, sonny? That because it’s a groisser shisser like Frank Milan, I’ll lose my nerve? I’ll maybe let you down?”
“The thought might have crossed my mind,” Jake said.
Magnes made a gesture of dismissal. “So now you can stop worring about it. If people like Milan bothered me, I’d have been out of this line of work while I still had all my teeth.”
Jake said: “That’s good to know. It means the only thing left to worry about now is how we locate some guy who worked for one day as a rubber at Bayside Spa over two years ago and then took off. He might not even be listed on any of their old employment records.”
“For that matter,” Magnes said, “he could be in Rio right now, with such a nice, regular income from blackmail.”
“I don’t think so. From what Caldwell told me, he was a genuine yokel. Not the kind to roam too far from home. But that won’t mean anything unless you can get into those employment records at the spa and dig up who he is. You know the exact date he put in his one day there—January twenty-fifth—so all you have to do is look up that day. You can get to those records, can’t you?”
“I’ll get to them,” Magnes said. “But what’s the chances of this yokel telling you all about Thoren while his mobster partner is holding a gun to his head?”
“Better than even, if I can get enough on him. If I can really get evidence that he’s a blackmailer, I can probably make a deal with him. Either he tells me the whole thing, or I tell the cops what I know.”
Magnes pursed his lips. “That’s some tightrope you’ll be walking. Do I have to give you a little reminder, you won’t only be putting the squeeze on him but also on that mobster partner of his?”
“You don’t. Right now all you have to do is find out who the yokel is and where he is. Anyhow, from the way Caldwell made so much of this guy being a swamp rat who’d stick close to the Everglades, it looks like whatever crime Thoren committed must have been committed around there. It narrows it down that much at least.”
“You think so? The Everglades covers a terrible lot of territory, sonny.”
“Not for people to live in, from what I’ve heard. Can you dig up a contact who knows his way around it?”
“Naturally. But first I got to find out who that rubber was, so at least we’ll know who we’re looking for that likes to live with alligators in the front yard. I’ll see if I can get into those employment records at Bayside first thing tomorrow.”
Jake said: “And what about that Civic Planning Association Thoren was tied in with? Did you get any more on that? And Ortega’s business?”
“Some. Ortega’s business, at least from the books, looks legitimate. Export–import, but mostly export. That Association is legitimate around the edges.”
“A front for something?”
“Well, it’s supposed to be for making Miami Beach beautiful, but it’s strictly for making Daystar Island people happy. It’s like a private little club, with McCloy and some others from Daystar Number One and Number Two running it. So if there’s bother about more taxes for the Islands or open housing or anything like that, they put the pressure on. They get some big politician to make a speech at their meeting and hand him a couple of grand for it which is really a payoff. One thing they don’t like is outsiders should mix in their business.”
“They sound like Thoren,” Jake said.
27
Elinor opened the door to let him in
, then slipped its chain back into place. She looked angry and a little disheveled. She said: “That Kermit must be psychic or something about his timing. You just missed him. He’s all I needed after that Holuby monster.”
“Did he give you a bad time?”
“Medium bad. Trouble was I wasn’t sure how you wanted me to handle him. I mean, mostly I can handle somebody like that, but I didn’t know how much you’d want me to put him down.”
“Not so much that he’d steer clear of us afterward.” Jake looked at his watch. It showed a quarter past nine. “How long was he here?”
“About an hour. He said he came over to ask us to supper there tomorrow. When he found out you weren’t in he made himself right at home.”
“That’s interesting,” Jake said. “The supper part. Now why would his mama hate us so much one day and then okay an invitation like that the next day?”
“Maybe because the blackmailers told her who you really were, and she wants to get together with you about it.”
“At a dinner party?”
Elinor said: “Then I don’t know why. And don’t think it was easy keeping it straight in my mind that I wasn’t supposed to know she was sore at us. I almost said something to Kermit about it before I remembered. And that damn monitor was still tuned in on their phone when he walked in here. I thought it was you, so I answered the doorbell without turning it off. If anybody started talking over in the Thorens’ dining room, Kermit would have heard it on the monitor for sure. Man, I was real shook up until I could get inside and cut it off. And he must have thought from the way I was shook up that it was because of him and his curly hair. After that, there was no holding him.”
Jake said: “You mean the recorder’s been dead for the last hour? We don’t have anything on tape from Mrs. Thoren’s room for that whole time?”
“Look, I just explained to you—”
“Sure you did. Now just get hooked in on Mrs. Thoren’s phone quick. Did they say anything at dinner worth hearing?”
“No. What did Magnes have to tell you about that Frank Milan?”
The Bind Page 14