“Don’t you have any say in this?” I asked her.
“Where do you live, McGee?” she asked.
“In a houseboat at Bahia Mar in Fort Lauderdale.”
“Hey, I’ve never lived on a boat! Neat-o!”
“Don’t you have something you’d rather do? Someplace you’d rather go?”
She grinned at me. There was one gold filling, way back. “Shit, man. Everybody has to be someplace.”
Willy said, “It’s a load off my mind. I’ve got everything pretty well straightened out except Briney. And now that’s done.”
“Have you heard me say yes?” I said.
“Jesus, Nooch. Maybe you came on him too fast. Maybe he’s got a girl there to take care of him. Maybe he’s married. Maybe he’s gay.”
“None of the above,” I heard myself say.
“You hear about me, you come get her, okay?” Willy asked. “Briney’ll have cash money to pay her own way.”
“I’ve never seen anybody so enthusiastic,” she said, and walked out.
“What are you trying to do to me, Willy?”
“She sees a dumb bird in a tree singing, it’s the greatest bird ever, singing the best song in the world. It sets her up for hours. She hops up for the sunrise, and it starts off the best day she ever had—every day. She hums to herself all the day long. I turn on the TV, she leaves the room. She says it is like living secondhand. Every morning, every night, she stands on her head in a corner fifteen minutes.”
“Willy, you can’t give people to people.”
“You heard me say I’m dying? A dying guy can do what he wants. You hurt her feelings, right? In ten minutes she won’t even remember. Okay, you had a reason to come here. You’ve never come to see me without a reason.”
“Do you stay in touch?”
“Guys stop by. We do a little talking. I’ve been dropping business, spreading it around, mostly unloading it on the people doing the work. All I got left is a little bit of numbers and some sharking that is being paid off slow. So I know mostly what is going on.”
“So you lost some friends lately?”
“What I lost was some guys I knew.”
“What about Ruffino Marino?”
“One of the ones I knew. Not too bad of a guy. I read once about a cowboy escaping from the Indians. What he did, he walked backward across a sandy place and he had this big leafy tree limb and he brushed out his footprints. That was Big Ruffi. He got big in the Church, and all that. A thousand years ago he was a button man out of Cleveland, doing invitation jobs in Vegas and Pittsburgh and wherever. So he gets to be a big man in the community, million-dollar condo, wife and four kids, the youngest nineteen and all of them out of the house, and they come in and stick him like a pig.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. I heard what people are guessing, though. I heard he tried to put the lid on something Ruffi Junior did. There’s a legitimate crazy. He wants to be some kind of a hero but he doesn’t know what kind. Some girl from a very important South American family that works close with the drug people here, she got herself raped and killed during some kind of drug hustle, and it wouldn’t have happened if anybody knew who she really was. Anyway, Ruffi Junior went to his old man and confessed he’d been a part of the scene. He swore he hadn’t killed anybody, and didn’t know that his pal, Bobby Dermon, was going to kill three people until it was done.
“Big Ruffi was probably sore as boils that his oldest kid was getting into a drug thing after the old man had dry-cleaned the family name. Ruffi Junior had boats, airplanes, fast cars, anything he wanted. The old man tried to put the lid on it. After all, his son hadn’t killed anybody. It was his son’s friend, Bobby. But somehow the whole Latin crowd got word that Ruffi Junior had killed the girl. They came after Big Ruffi and he gave them Dermon.
“They took Dermon someplace and they didn’t kill him. I heard they probably took him to a warehouse where it wouldn’t matter if he screamed, and they hot-wired him and kept plugging him in until they got the very same story over and over, and it turned out it had been Ruffi Junior all along. People think that by then Dermon wasn’t going to live anyway, so they took a Polaroid shot of him, and they sent the photo and the tape to Big Ruffi, and they put Dermon into a condo foundation one of them was building down past Dinner Key. They asked for Ruffi Junior. Big Ruffi said he was gone, and he didn’t know where. Frank Puchero had been involved in the Dermon thing, so they threw a grenade into his convertible. Then Hanrahan was blown up on general principles, and it spread from there. A war, like old times.”
“Now it’s quiet?”
“I hear it is quiet but it is tense. Big Ruffi got it for trying to put the lid on and not telling them where to find his kid.”
“Why all the others?”
“Why not? All it ever was was a working arrangement. When it starts to come apart, then people get what maybe they asked for in other deals a while back. Maybe short weight or short money—just a suspicion, not enough to rock the boat for. Once it opens up you pay back old scores. And new ones.”
“Anybody have any idea where Ruffi Junior is?”
“Nobody knows. Maybe he’s in Toronto, or maybe he’s in Tampa. Wherever he is, he’s scared shitless. He’s sending out for food, booze and broads.”
“He wasn’t at the Mass.”
“So I heard. Nobody thought he’d be there, but they covered it anyway. You were there?”
“I kind of want him.”
“Do yourself a favor. You get a line on him, don’t dirty your hands. Call me and I’ll get the word to the right place.”
“It’s a little more personal than that.”
“Why should it be personal?”
“I got to the three people he killed before the law did.”
He smiled and shook his head. “You are a nutcake like Ruffi Junior. Not the same kind, but just as nutty. What are you? The Spotless Avenger? Whyn’t you go find work in a comic book? Ruffi is a sad sorry little creep who can’t walk past a mirror without stopping and smiling at himself.”
“Okay. Maybe, if I find him, maybe I’ll call you.”
There was a sudden twist of pain on his face, a spasm of one arm. He smiled again. “Don’t take too long. Go get Briney.”
I found her in the kitchen. She hurried to him. “A bad one, kid,” he said. She trotted out of the room and came back with a hypo kit. She flipped his robe open, turned him to expose a wasted haunch and shot him, scrubbed the place with cotton dipped in alcohol.
Willy said apologetically, “It’s spread to places where it hurts. Listen. McGee. You’ve got everything. Don’t piss your life away because you got some kind of blues. Honest to God, I never started to live until I found out I was dying. You promise you’ll come get Briney?” His voice was getting slurred. She was where he could not see her, bobbing her head violently at me, frowning.
“Who am I to turn down something like that?”
“Atta boy. That’s using the old …” And the next inhalation was a snore.
She walked over to a chair and dropped into it, crossed her arms, lowered her chin to her chest. I saw one tear fall to her lap. She raised her head and gave me a sweet sad smile. She spoke softly. “He was really glad to see you. I’m glad you came. I hope you’ll come back soon. Please. He is not all that glad to see some of the other people who visit him. Some of them are very weird. Some of them, I have to leave the room while they talk. Thanks for telling him you’d come after me.”
“A pretty strange offer.”
“He’s a funny old guy. He thinks I’m some dumb little kid he has to find a foster home for. Stuff is an old buddy of his. Stuff heard he was very depressed and he’d have to have around-the-clock nursing or go into a nursing home to die. So he sent me like a present. Only what he did was give me round-trip airfare and ten thousand dollars to come cheer Willy up, make him feel part of life again. It took a little while but I nudged him out of it. He can accept dying now. We talk about i
t. He’s beginning to think of it as some kind of an adventure. A trip. He hates the needle because it takes him out of it, takes away some of what he has left. He hates to sleep at night. He talks to me about the old days. He hasn’t got anybody else in the world. That must really be hell on wheels, to have nobody at all. He says he wasted his whole life and if he gets another life to live, it’ll be different.”
“I’ve never heard of a better present.”
She shrugged. “So you do what you can. I gave him Demerol, so he’ll be out four hours. Do come back.”
She took me to the door. I looked back at her and said, “People are always giving you presents and then taking them back.”
She winked at me. “Ain’t it hell?”
Seventeen
When I walked into the lounge of the Busted Flush my phone was ringing.
Millis said, “Trav? My God, I bet I’ve called you thirty times. A friend of mine is here and he would like you to talk to him.”
“Put him on.”
“No. He wants you to come here.”
“Who is he?”
“He goes sailing in the mornings.”
“Oh. Well, sure. Give me a half hour.”
When she let me into the duplex, the sea through the great windows was a soft shade of gray and there were streaks of rose and pink in the eastern sky, the afterglow of the unseen sunset behind us. They had not yet turned on the lights. Jornalero struggled up from a deep chair to shake my hand. He seemed to have lost the flavor of confidence and authority. His voice was softer, subdued. Millis brought drinks and turned on a low lamp on the table between our chairs. Our chairs were at right angles to each other. The light winked on the ice in his drink as he raised it to his lips. It left his face in shadow. Millis sat off to my left in darkness, sat yoga-fashion on a low square table surfaced in squares of ornamental tile. I had the feeling that she sat off to the side like that when Jornalero was keeping her, when he had asked men to come to the place he rented for her, to talk their business in safety.
“Was it what you hoped would happen?” he asked.
“I didn’t know what would happen.”
“A craziness,” he said. “Madness. Hatred. I have lost valued friends. Friends of many years. I’ve sent my wife far away, just in case. There isn’t any meaning to it anymore. Tit for tat. That’s all it is. You kill my friend, I kill your friend, you kill me, my brother kills you. Did you know it would be like this, McGee, when you told me about Ruffino’s boy?”
“I didn’t. Browder did.”
“Who is Browder?”
“An undercover agent with the DEA. He hoped it would be like this. He’s dead.”
“Why would anybody hope for this? Fathers and sons. Husbands.”
“He said that if you shake the tree, the ripe fruit falls out. He told me the law can’t touch you, Mr. Jornalero. He said you might possibly be indicted for violating laws about foreign currency exchange, but probably never convicted in any way that would stick.”
“Then he is the one who told you about the mules?”
“That’s right.”
“I wondered. That was a long time ago. I am three and four times removed from any of that. I am a legitimate businessman.”
“But you launder the cash.”
He didn’t answer directly. He seemed to be looking off into the distance, into the final fading streak of rose. “Sometimes it comes in cardboard boxes,” he said. “Thirty and forty at a time. Supermarket boxes. Lux soap. Shredded wheat. Grapefruit juice. Sealed with silver duct tape. Fives, tens, twenties, fifties, hundreds. Just thrown in and packed down and they had no idea how much was there. They take my word. My word is always good. I’ve got two girls who do nothing but sort it, count it and band it. They won’t have much to do for a while. Not for very long, though. Then it will start flowing again. It has to come somewhere. It has to come to a safe place.”
“Three percent?” I asked.
He sighed. “Three to some. Four to others.” He turned toward me and his tone changed. “My damned fool countrymen did a number on Tom Beccali last night.”
“Who is he?”
“A prominent area businessman. Like me. Like Ruffino. I told them enough was enough. It’s over. Forget it. But they thought the scales were out of balance. He won’t be missed for some time. He travels a great deal. He is at the bottom of the ocean. The police don’t know that, and the news people don’t know it, but they know it. And I’m the logical response. Millis said I have to have your permission.”
“For what?”
“He wants to be my house guest for a few days, maybe longer.”
“I have no say in the matter. It’s up to you.”
“It was the only place I could think of,” he said.
“Why my permission?” I asked Millis.
“Arturo used the wrong word,” she said. “I meant more like advice. Could it be a bad idea?”
“Who knows you’re here?” I asked him.
“No one outside this room. And two men downstairs.”
“But there are people who know you two used to be friends?”
“Yes. Quite a few.”
She broke in. “But the security here is good. I can tell anybody I’m alone here. He’ll stay out of sight. What do you think, Travis?”
“It’s up to you. But don’t the security people downstairs know his name?”
“I used a different name.”
She stirred uneasily. “Fortez,” she said. “One hell of a shock.”
He leaned toward me, putting his empty glass down. “Mr. McGee, even if I had known it would all go this far, I still would have had to pass along your information about young Ruffi. There were some doubts about it for a time. But not after his friend Bobby Dermon was … interrogated. They flew down to the Keys in a float plane Ruffi borrowed from a friend. They both boarded that boat. The man who’d made the buy had hidden the money and the product and he tried to negotiate a better deal. They tied him up and questioned him. Dermon kept the women from trying to leave. Once they found the money and the shipment, they raped the women. Ruffi killed both the women. Dermon suffocated the man by jamming the money into his mouth. Her uncle in Lima now has the full story. I wanted to talk to you to tell you nobody wants you dead, not anymore.”
“How about Ruffi?”
“He will be found. Sooner or later. There is a reward. A big one. And so the interest is high. He is the rabbit in the forest with ten thousand wolves.”
“Nothing that happens is going to resurrect Billy Ingraham,” I said.
“Or many, many others,” Jornalero said.
“But Billy was an innocent bystander,” I told him.
“Innocent people and guilty people are killed every day. Stray bullets in small wars. Fog on the Interstates. If innocence could keep us alive, my friend, we’d all be saints.”
“I’m sure Billy would be very comforted to hear that, Jornalero, especially from the lips of a man who’s made it big in the world’s dirtiest business, an unctuous, well-dressed, high-living son of a bitch who may have even convinced himself he isn’t doing anything rotten. All you do is make all the rest of it possible by keeping it profitable.”
“Trav!” Millis said sharply.
“I do a lot of good in the world,” Arturo said. “The rest of it is a small favor for old friends.”
I grinned at him. “I know. Somebody has to do it. Right? Now your hide is at risk too, Artie. I hope they find you.”
“Goddamn it!” Millis said. “Who are you to get so Christly? From stuff Billy told me about you …”
“I never told you I was perfect. Have a happy reunion, kids.”
• • •
After I was back aboard my refuge, drinking by a single low light, with Edye singing along with the Tres Panchos in the background, I mourned the sappiness of my exit lines. I had used old Arturo to get myself off the hook, and then took some swings at him. Somewhere there are intelligent and highly skilled des
ign engineers working the bugs out of ever more deadly weapons—lasers to blind armies, multiple multiple warheads, flames that stick to flesh and can’t be extinguished, heat beams to fry the crews inside their tanks. And they pack up the printouts and turn off the computers and have a knock with the guys on the way home to the kiddies. Somebody has to do it. Right?
Night and gin and music—the right setting for peeling off the thin clinging layers of bullshit and finding one’s way down closer to the essential self. I had let loose on Jornalero because I had been disturbed by the feeling of the relationship between him and Millis. A residual fondness, a product of years shared. And that of course could be peeled back to reveal a dissatisfaction with myself for having sought out sex with her. That first time was by her invitation. From then on by my design. The proceedings had been very skillful, orgasms noteworthy, pleasure intense. But I had not gotten one millimeter past the surface gloss of those tilted green eyes. Though our actions had elicited a wide range of sounds and responses from her, from little yelps to earthy groans, she was just about as real to me as would have been one of those blowup pneumatic ladies Japanese sailors tote aboard for the long freighter trips and stow in little satchels under the bunk until needed. They now make them with microprocessors, little motors, long-life batteries and voice boxes: Crever people.
So, as Edye sings of her corazón, peel back another leaf. I had wanted the curiously impersonal relationship with Millis because I did not want to set up any new emotional debts or obligations. I wanted no involvement in any significant dimensions. I wanted Millis as a receptacle.
So, recharge the glass with more ice and Boodles, change the tape and go back and peer under the next leaf. Why no emotional involvement? Because there was nothing left in the inventory. Nothing left to give. I had said “forever” too many times to too many people. I had spent my stock. I was bankrupt.
With the next leaf pulled back I discovered that the bankruptcy was what was souring the look of my world. That led me back to Willy Nucci’s concern and advice.
The Lonely Silver Rain Page 16