by Sideswipe
“If it was just me, Hoke, you could stay here, I think you know that. But Helen wouldn’t want you to live with us on a permanent basis. Now, I’ve got a little place near the Ocean Mall you can have. I own the apartment house—eight units in all, all efficiencies—and you can have one of ’em. You can live in the apartment rent-free, and I’ll give you a hundred dollars a week to manage them for me. They rent for a thousand a month during the season, and six hundred a month the rest of the year. There’s a two-week minimum on rentals, and it’s three-fifty for just two weeks. Paulson Realtors has been managing the place, but he hasn’t been doing what I’d call a bang-up job. I had me some trouble over there last month. A single man rented an apartment for two weeks, and then moved in six of his buddies from Venezuela. It was an entire professional soccer team, and they almost ruined the apartment before Paulson even found out about them. I need someone on the premises, you see, not sitting in an office in Riviera Beach. If you’re there all the time, you can rent out the units, take care of problems like that, and sort things out for me.”
“Are you talking about the El Pelicano Hotel?”
“It was a hotel, but I had it converted a couple of years back to efficiency apartments. I thought maybe at first I’d make it a time-shared condo, but it works out better as rentals. Those time-share apartments are more trouble than they’re worth. Three of the units are rented out already on annual leases to people working here on the island, and they get a special rate. I’ll drive you over there right after breakfast, and you can move right in.”
“I need to stop at Island Sundries first and buy some sneakers.”
Frank nodded. “This’ll be a better deal for you than working as a fry cook.”
Hoke shrugged. “I really don’t care what I do, Frank. I’m not leaving the island again. I’ll be glad to run the hotel for you.”
“It’s not a hotel now, Hoke. I had the sign changed and call it the El Pelicano Arms. I had the boy paint a brown pelican on the sign, too. It looks nice.”
Hoke had a substantial breakfast of fried eggs, bacon, grits, and biscuits, but the old man ate a single piece of dry toast and a small dish of stewed prunes. In January, the single cool month of the year, Frank sometimes had oatmeal as well; otherwise this was his standard breakfast throughout the year. This was a frugal meal, but Hoke knew that the old man would leave his office in the hardware store at ten-thirty and go next door to Matilda’s Café, eat two jelly doughnuts, and drink a cup of chocolate. Frank did this every working day, and he went to the hardware store six days a week.
On the drive to the El Pelicano Arms, Frank stopped at Island Sundries, and Hoke bought a pair of sneakers, paying for them with his Visa card. Frank drove a new Chrysler New Yorker, and told Hoke it handled a little on the stiff side. For a few months he had driven a Bentley, just because Helen had wanted one, but business had dropped off at the store because the townspeople had thought he was doing too well. So he had sold the Bentley and bought the New Yorker, and business was back up to normal again.
The sign was new, but long strips of ochre paint hung from the rest of the building like the shredding skin of a snake. There was an empty apartment on the second floor facing the ocean. Hoke put his suitcase on one of the Bahama beds, opened the window, and took a long look at the sea, two hundred yards away across the wide public beach. A one-legged man in a skimpy bikini was hopping across the sand toward the water. Three teenage girls in bikinis played a listless game of volleyball, two of them on one side, one on the other of a sagging net. By noon the beach would be crowded with bathers, and all of the parking spaces on Ocean Drive would be foil.
“This is perfect, Frank. It’s only a block away from the Giant Supermarket, and I won’t even need my car.”
“You might feel different in a few days, Hoke. But I’ll get a ‘Manager’ sign from the store and bring it back tonight. You can tack it to your door. There’s a bulletin board downstairs with the rates posted and all, and you can put up a note saying the manager’s living in 201.”
“Anything you say, Frank.”
“Here’s your first hundred in advance.” Frank handed Hoke five twenties. “If you need more now, just holler, and I’ll give you a second advance.”
“No, that’s plenty. Thanks.”
“I’ve got to get over to the store. But I’ll call Paulson and have him come over here with the books and explain things to you.”
“I could walk to his office—”
“You’d better rest easy for a while. I’ll send him over. There’s a black-and-white TV over there, but no phone. I better order a phone for—”
“I don’t want a phone, Frank.”
“You’ll need one in case you want to call someone, or if someone wants to call about a rental.”
“I don’t want a phone. I want to simplify my life, like I told you. If someone wants to rent a unit, and one’s available, they can come over here and look at it. I’ll be here.”
“You might like to call the girls, or Ellita.”
“I don’t think so, but if I do, there’s a pay phone over at the mall. If Ellita calls you, tell her to send someone back up with my car. She can get one of the kids in the neighborhood to drive it up. I’ll give him twenty bucks and he can take the bus back to Miami.”
“I’ll call her. Anything else?”
“I guess not. Mr. Paulson’ll fill me in on what I need to know. And thanks, Frank. I think everything’s going to be all right. I don’t want you and Helen to worry about me.”
“I’m sure it will, son.”
The old man left, and Hoke closed the door.
Frank Moseley wasn’t so sure that everything was going to be all right. Hoke had seemed to be his old self again, but he was still a little preoccupied. Perhaps the pills Dr. Fairbairn had ordered made him like that. At any rate, Frank had gotten his son out of the house, and Helen would be pleased about that. This afternoon she had her bridge group coming to the house, and she had been worried last night that Hoke might lurch out into the living room in his urine-stained boxer shorts.
4
Instead of throwing Stanley into the twenty-man tank with the assorted drunks and coke-heads, the jailer put him in a two-man cell with an alleged holdup man named Robert Smith. One of the tank drunks looked hostile, and the jailer thought he might pick on the old man if he found out that he was accused of a short-eyes offense. Stanley had had to take off his belt and remove his shoelaces. He held his pants up with both hands, and he scuffled, dragging his feet as he came down the corridor, to keep from stepping out of his shoes.
Robert Smith, né Troy Louden, was lying on his back in the lower bunk with his hands clasped behind his head. Troy was wearing scuffed cowboy boots, a blue-denim cowboy shirt with pearl snap buttons, and a pair of gray moleskin ranch trousers with empty belt loops. His tooled leather belt and silver buckle were with his other effects in the property room. Troy’s blond hair was cropped short, but he had retained thick sideburns, and they were down to the level of his earlobes. His deep blue eyes were slightly hooded. Sometimes a woman would tell him, “Your eyes are the same blue as Paul Newman’s.” When a woman said this, Troy would always smile and say, “Yeah, but he puts drops in his.” In other respects he bore no resemblance to Paul Newman. Troy was tall and rangy, an inch or two over six feet, with long ropy arms and bulging biceps. His nose had been broken and poorly reset, and the lines that ran from the wings of his nose to the corners of his slightly crooked mouth looked as though they had been filled with coal dust. His wide lips were about the thickness of two dimes. When he grimaced occasionally—he had a slight tic—he reminded Stanley of a lizard. Stanley didn’t mention this, and neither did anyone else, but Stanley was not the first man to notice the reptilian look that appeared on Troy’s face whenever he pulled his lips back hard for a split second, then relaxed them.
The cell was four feet by eight, with a two-tiered bunk bed, and there was a stainless-steel toilet without a seat at t
he back of the cell. There was a steel sink in the back corner, but it only had one tap, and that drizzled cold water. There were no towels or soap. The bars were painted white and were flaked away here and there, indicating that they had been repainted many times. There was no window, and a single forty-watt bulb in the ceiling, covered with heavy wire, lighted the cell dimly. With Troy stretched out on the bottom bunk, there was no place for Stanley to sit, unless he climbed into the upper bunk or sat on the rim of the toilet.
“I’ve got to use the toilet,” Stanley said, after clearing his throat.
“Go ahead. It’s right in front of you.”
“I can’t go with you looking at me.”
Troy closed his eyes; then he put his fingers into his ears. “Okay. I won’t look and I won’t listen.”
Stanley urinated, and then washed his hands and face at the sink. There was a deep cut on his upper lip, and he wished that there were a mirror so he could see how badly it was split. There was a lot of blood on the front of his shirt, but his lip had stopped bleeding.
“Let me take a look at that lip.” Troy didn’t sit up, so Stanley had to bend over the bunk for Troy to examine it.
“If it was me,” Troy said, “I’d have a couple of stitches put in. Otherwise, you’re gonna have a nice little scar. Seems to me you’re too old to be brawling anyway. A man your age’ll lose more fights than he’ll win, Pop.”
“I wasn’t fighting. My neighbor hit me, and he didn’t have no call to do it. I was going to explain, but he hit me and then twisted my arm up behind my back while my wife called the police.”
“Did you hit your wife?”
Stanley shook his head. “I been married forty-one years, and I never hit her a single time. Not once.” He said it as though he’d had ample reason to.
“Then why’d your neighbor bust you in the mouth?”
“My wife told him I molested his little girl, and I didn’t do a darned thing to her, nothing at all, but he wouldn’t listen to me.”
“How old was the girl you showed your weenie?”
“I didn’t show her nothing. She showed me, and she’s nine, going on ten.”
“You’re lucky there, old man. If she was eight or under you’d be looking at twenty-five years. But once they hit nine they’re old enough to take instructions in the Catholic church. So eight’s the magic number in most states. But when they hit nine or ten, sometimes you can make a deal with the state attorney. Unless you hurt her. Did you hurt her?”
“I didn’t touch the girl. I was taking a nap out on my back porch, and she came in the screen door and woke me up by putting her tongue in my mouth.”
Troy nodded and made the lightning grimace. “You must’ve seemed irresistible to her, laying there with your mouth open. I had a girl friend once in San Berdoo who used to wake me up by sticking her tongue up my asshole. But she was thirty-five and didn’t have very much else going for her. What did she do then, Pop, pull your pants down?”
“No, she took off her pants, her shorts, red shorts. I was still half asleep, or half awake, and didn’t quite catch on to what she was doing at first. She had a bag of pennies, you see, and she wanted one penny for the soul kiss, and then asked for another five pennies after she took off her shorts.”
“That’s cheap enough, God knows.”
“She said some old man in the park—Julia Tuttle Park—was giving her pennies for doing this, and I guess she thought that because I was old I’d do the same thing.”
“But you didn’t start anything?”
“No, I was asleep, I told you. Then Maya, that’s my wife, came into the house while I was trying to catch Pammi and put her shorts back on. She ran down the block and told Mrs. Sneider. She called her husband at the gas station, and he came over and hit me in the mouth. Nobody would listen to me. I don’t know what Pammi told her mother.”
“Pammi? Short for Pamela?”
“No, just Pammi, with an i at the end and no e.”
“Did you make your phone call? You’re entitled to a phone call, you know.”
“The deputy said I could make a call, but the only one I could think of to call was Maya, and my wife knows I’m in here already.” Stanley began to cry.
Troy got to his feet and told Stanley to sit down on the bunk. He pulled Stanley’s shirttail out of his pants and wiped the old man’s face. “Crying ain’t gonna help you none, old-timer. What you need’s a good jailhouse lawyer. You listen to me, and I’ll help you. Then you can do something for me. Okay?”
“It’s all a big mistake,” Stanley said. “I’d never do nothing to that little girl in a million years. I ain’t even had a hard-on for more’n three years now. I’m seventy-one years old and retired.”
“I believe you, Pop. Just listen a minute. Here’s what’ll happen to you. This father, Mr. Sneider—”
“He’s a retired Army master sergeant, but he leases a Union station now.”
“Okay, Sergeant Sneider. What he’ll do is file a complaint, and then they’ll send you out of here for a psychiatric evaluation. That’ll mean three or four days in a locked ward at the hospital. The doctor’ll listen to your story, just like I did. Psychiatrists don’t say much, they mostly listen, and I have a hunch he’ll tell the state attorney to let you go. Meanwhile, this sergeant’ll be thinking things over, and he’ll realize if this case goes to trial his little girl will have to take the stand. After he and his wife talk about it, they’ll decide they don’t want to put the kid through the trauma of a courtroom appearance. So whether you’re guilty or not, this case won’t go to trial. But how you handle yourself when you talk to the psychiatrist is very important. He’ll ask some very personal questions. How often do you masturbate?”
Stanley shook his head. “I don’t do nothing like that.”
“That’s the wrong answer, Pop. Tell him once or twice a week. If you tell him you don’t do it at all, he’ll put it down on his report that you’re evasive. And in shrink jargon, ‘evasive’ means lying. How often do you have relations with your wife?”
“None at all. Not since we came down to Florida, and that’s been six years now. I still wanted to at first, but Maya said she wanted to retire, too, just like me, so we just quit doing it. I wasn’t all that keen myself, to tell you the truth.”
“For Christ’s sake, Pop, don’t tell the analyst that. Tell him once a week, at least. Otherwise, he’ll think you’re abnormal and you need little girls for an outlet.”
“I don’t need any little girls! I never touched Pammi. I told you that already.”
“I know that, but you’ve got to tell a shrink what they want to hear. You’ll have to persuade him that you have a normal, regular sex life.”
“Maya’ll tell him different.”
“He won’t talk to her. She’s not accused of anything; you are. Apparently she believes what she thought she saw, so she’ll be on Sneider’s side. You understand what I’m talking about?”
“I think so. But it seems to me that Pammi, if she tells the truth, could clear all this up in a minute.”
“Of course she could. But she’ll want to cover her own little ass. Little girls lie, big girls lie, and old women like your wife He, too. Come to think of it, all women lie, even when the truth would do ’em more good. But you’ve got an honest face, old man, and the psychiatrist’ll believe you when you lie.”
“My name is Stanley. Stanley Sinkiewicz. I don’t mind being called Pop, because that’s what they used to call me on the line at Ford, but I don’t much like ‘old man.’”
“Okay, Pop, fair enough. My real name’s Troy Louden, but I’m signed up in here as Robert Smith. Let me finish telling you what to do, and you’ll be out of here in no time. Stick to the same story you told me, but keep it simple. Maybe, when one of the detectives questions Pammi, she’ll break down and tell the truth. But whether she does or not, it’s still your word against hers. I realize your wife says she saw something, but all she saw was you trying to put the girl’
s shorts back on. Right? Admit this much, and that’ll probably be the end of it. But I can guarantee you that you won’t do any time if this is your first offense. This is your first offense, isn’t it? You didn’t get caught with any little girls before?”
“I never did nothing with a little girl, except when I was a little boy, and I never got caught then. I worked on the line at Ford all my life, and most of the time I was sick at night from smelling paint and turpentine all day.”
“You haven’t got a record, then?”
“None. I never been in jail before.”
“Then you’re in the clear, Pop. Feel better?”
“I think so.” Stanley nodded. “My lip still hurts though.”
“I can’t do anything about that. But when you get out, you should get a doctor to take a couple of stitches in it. Or, if they send you to the psychiatric ward in the morning, ask the nurse to get it sewed up for you. If I had a needle and thread I’d do it for you myself.”
“You know how to do things like that?”
“Sure. I’m used to taking care of myself when I get hurt. I’m a professional criminal, a career criminal, and when I get hurt on the job, or someone with me does, we can’t go to a doctor—not a regular one, anyway. I’ve set bones, and I even took a bullet out of a man’s back once. If I hadn’t, he’d of been paralyzed.”
“How come you’re in jail, Troy?”
“Call me Robert, Pop, while we’re in here. Robert. After we get out, then you can call me Troy. Remember I told you I’m signed in here as Robert Smith.”
“Sure, Robert. I’m sorry. I’m still upset, I guess.”
“No need to be. You’ll get out of this okay, Pop. But to answer your question, I’m a professional criminal, what the shrinks call a criminal psychopath. What it means is, I know the difference between right and wrong and all that, but I don’t give a shit. That’s the official version. Most men in prison are psychopaths, like me, and there are times—when we don’t give a shit—when we act impulsively. Ordinarily though, I’m not impulsive, because I always think a job out very carefully before I get around to doing it. But I misjudged this truck driver this morning. I thought he was a little simple-minded, in fact, just because of the way he talked. But he turned out to be devious. He didn’t have much education, but apparently he had more native American intelligence than I gave him credit for—Somebody’s coming.”