Riding the Rap

by Elmore Leonard

  “Harry told Joyce the guy was Puerto Rican,” Raylan said, and right away saw Torres nodding.

  “Bobby Deogracias—that’s the guy—they call him Bobby Deo. This one, man, I’m telling you is dirty. It used to be we find a guy shot in the head and it looks like an execution? We bring in Bobby Deo. We knew he worked sometimes for the wiseguys, Jimmy Capotorto, when he was around, but we could never close on him. He did that kind of work and he went after fugitives,” Torres said. “Same thing you’re doing.”

  “How about that,” Raylan said. “You think he’s the one?”

  “Could be. How much was Harry trying to collect?”

  “Sixteen thousand five hundred.”

  “That kind of money, yeah, it could be Bobby Deo, it could be anybody. He tells Harry no, the guy didn’t pay him and keeps it.”

  “But he called Harry and told him the guy did pay, and to meet him in Delray Beach.”

  “So he changed his mind. All that money in his hand? What’s Harry gonna do, call the police? Listen, if it was Bobby Deo—anybody hires a guy like that deserves to get ripped off. Harry realizes too late he should’ve known better, so now he’s feeling sorry for himself. You know how he is. Underneath all that old-time hip bullshit he puts on he’s a baby. Hides out so we have to look for him.”

  “Wants attention,” Raylan said.

  “Loves it. He’ll give it a few more days. You don’t find him, he’ll get tired of hiding and come out. Ask him, ‘Where you been?’ He’ll say, ‘What do you mean, where’ve I been?’ He doesn’t show up by this weekend I’ll give it to Missing Persons.”

  “I think you’re right,” Raylan said. “But I still wouldn’t mind talking to Bobby . . . What’s his name?”

  “Deogracias. I remember seeing it on a Corrections release report when he got out. DOC’ll have his address. But whether it’s any good or not . . .”

  “I appreciate it,” Raylan said. “You might run a trace on Harry’s car, brand-new Cadillac. See if it might’ve turned up abandoned.”

  Torres nodded. “I can do that.”

  “And you might run a name for me,” Raylan said, “while we’re covering the bases. A Dawn Navarro?”

  Raylan walked into the cool, tiled lobby of the Santa Marta on Ocean Drive, South Beach; salsa, mambo, some kind of Latin music coming out of the bar. Raylan crossed to the desk clerk, a good-looking young Hispanic in a dark suit, hair shining, rings on his fingers, and said, “Excuse me.”

  The desk clerk was busy working a computer behind the reception counter, his hips twitching to the Latin beat. He didn’t answer Raylan or look up from the screen.

  Raylan said, “I was here one other time. . . .”

  The desk clerk tapped some more keys and then looked at the computer screen to see how he was doing.

  “You might recall I was with a group,” Raylan said. “Bunch of fellas had DEA written big on the back of their jackets?”

  He had the desk clerk’s attention now, the guy looking right at him.

  “We had search warrants, but you didn’t want to let us in any the rooms. You recall that? So we busted down some doors, found who we wanted and took you with us when we left. Remember that time? You give me any shit, partner, I’ll run you in again, handcuffed and shackled. What I want is Mr. Deogracias’s room number.”

  The clerk hesitated.

  Raylan let him.

  The clerk said, “Four oh eight.”

  “Is he in?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “I called, some guy answered the phone.”

  “That would be Santo.”

  Raylan said, “Much obliged.”

  A girl wearing a green Harley-Davidson T-shirt and short white shorts opened the door, barefoot. Cute, but needing to comb her hair and maybe take a bath.

  “I called a while ago,” Raylan said, “asked for Bobby Deo and some guy said he didn’t speak English and hung up on me.”

  The girl turned her head and yelled, “Hey, Santo!” Looking back at Raylan she leaned her shoulder against the door frame, one bare foot on top of the other, and it reminded him for some reason of high school girls back home. She said, “I like your hat,” and even sounded like those girls, this one acting coy, giving him a look.

  A man’s voice said, “Who is it?” and a young Hispanic guy wearing sunglasses appeared out of the bedroom where a radio was playing Latin riffs, a little guy about five-six with his pants open, sticking in his shirttails.

  The girl turned her head again. “He’s looking for Bobby.”

  “What’s he want him for?”

  Raylan saw the guy as one of those tough little banty-rooster types as the girl was saying, “What am I, your fucking interpreter? Ask him yourself.” She moved away from the door in time to the music coming from the bedroom. Raylan took a step inside, glanced around to see a mess of clothes thrown on chairs, towels, newspapers, beer cans on the coffee table. He looked at Santo.

  “I want to ask Bobby if he did a job the other day for Harry Arno. Is he around?”

  Santo zipped up his pants, pulled his belt tight around his waist and buckled it, taking his time.

  “Who is this Harry Arno?”

  “How come,” Raylan said, “you can’t answer a question without asking one?”

  “It’s the way they are,” the girl said. “They think you can’t trust anybody that isn’t like them. Where’re you from anyway?”

  “Right here,” Raylan said, getting his I.D. out and showing his star, “with the United States Marshals Service. I’m not looking to give anybody a hard time. Okay?”

  Santo said, “Bullshit,” to the girl. Or it might’ve been some word in Spanish, Raylan wasn’t sure. There wasn’t any doubt about the guy’s manner, though, turning his back, walking out to the balcony to stand looking off. Some pose.

  “These guys work at being a pain in the ass,” the girl said. “I told you, it’s the way they are. Sometimes I don’t know what I’m doing here.”

  Raylan said, “I was gonna ask.”

  “They become sociable when it gets dark, they dance like crazy.” She began moving in a kind of mambo shuffle to the radio. “We go to clubs in Hialeah.”

  Santo, on the balcony, stood hunched over the metal rail leaning on his arms. Raylan walked out there to stand next to him, thinking all he’d have to do was lift the guy up by his belt and ask again where Bobby Deo was.

  Instead, his gaze settled on Ocean Drive and the strip of art deco hotels in their pastel colors that looked to Raylan like big ice-cream parlors. Hotels with cafés fronting on the street where the trendies stayed in season and girls with string bikinis stuck in their bums came cruising by on Rollerblades; young guys hotdogged on skateboards and photographers posed skinny models out on the beach, their outfits taking weird shapes in the wind. Except that right now it was between the hurricane season and the tourist season and the crowd roaming South Beach were locals and bush-league trendies. It was still a show.

  He heard the girl behind him and said, “It isn’t anything like back home, is it? Wherever that might be.”

  She said, “It sure ain’t, it’s fun.”

  “Santo here your boyfriend?”

  The banty rooster stirred as the girl said, “God, no, I’m with Bobby, when he’s here.”

  “Where can I find him?”

  Santo, turning his head, said, “Melinda, you don’t have to tell him nothing. You hear me?”

  She said, “Hey, fuck off. Okay?”

  Raylan turned to her standing in the doorway. “I only want to ask him about this friend of mine, if he’s seen him.”

  Santo said, “Yeah? What do you show your badge for?”

  Raylan said, “Why don’t you stay out of it, partner?” and looked at the girl again, Melinda. “You know where he is?”

  “He’s working. He won’t be back for, I don’t know, a while.”

  “I don’t have to see him in person, if you have a phone number where I can reach
him.”

  He waited.

  She said, “I might have it someplace.”

  “I’d really appreciate it. This friend of mine, Harry Arno? I’m hoping Bobby knows where he is.”

  “Bobby was working for him?”

  “Yeah, they’re friends.”

  Santo, turning his head again, said, “I never heard of no Harry Arno.”

  Raylan said, “How far’s it down there to the pavement, forty, fifty feet? Keep looking at it.”

  He turned to see Melinda going into the living room and put his hand on Santo’s shoulder.

  “Nice talking to you.”

  She was bent over the desk now looking at notes, scraps of paper by the phone. Raylan came up next to her. “Will he give you any trouble?”

  “Who, Santo? He touches me Bobby’ll kill him.” She straightened saying, “Here it is. He called me once and gave me the number. You want me to write it down for you?”

  Friendly because they had something in common, their accents and, maybe, because there were moments when she was homesick and he reminded her of some farm town or coal camp way off the interstate.

  “I’d appreciate it.”

  He watched her write the area code, 407, but couldn’t make out the rest of the numbers.

  “You say Bobby’s working. What’s he do?”

  The girl looked up at him, maybe a little surprised.

  “He’s a gardener.”

  Raylan said, “Oh.” And said, “He is, huh.”

  “A master gardener. Bobby learned grounds beautification when he was up at Starke.”

  Raylan took the piece of notepaper she handed him, folded it without looking at the number and thanked her.

  She said, “I sure like that hat.”

  At the door he touched the brim to her. He would think about this girl, remind himself to check on her in a week or so, see how she was doing. In the hall he stopped to unfold the notepaper the way a poker player might look at his hole card the first time, sneaking a peak and hoping.

  And there it was. The same number Joyce had given him for Warren Ganz.

  He used the pay phone in the lobby to call Torres.

  “It’s a small world,” Raylan said. “I’ve already spoken to Bobby Deo without knowing who he was.” And had to explain that. “Now I’ll have to have another talk with him. What about Harry’s car?”

  “Hasn’t shown up.”

  “You get a chance to check on Dawn Navarro?”

  “Nothing in the computer. Who is she anyway?”

  “Certified medium and spiritualist, she’s a psychic, hangs out at a restaurant in Delray, the place where Harry was supposed to meet Bobby Deo.”

  “She knows Harry?”

  “Says she talked to him for a minute. I’ve got her down as the last person to see Harry before he disappeared from the face of the earth.”

  “Or went down to Key West to get drunk in peace. You think she knows what happened to him?”

  “She knows something she’s not telling me.”

  “Dawn Navarro,” Torres said, “she sounds like a stripper. She lives in Delray?”

  “Nearby.”

  “You’re working out of the Palm Beach County Sheriffs Office, for Christ sake, talk to the people up there, ask around. If she’s been up on any kind of charge somebody there will’ve heard of her. Check with Crimes Persons. I have to tell you how to do your job?”

  “I appreciate it,” Raylan said. “Listen, you don’t happen to know anything dirty about a guy named Warren Ganz, do you?”

  “Good-bye,” Torres said and hung up.

  sixteen

  Starting out, Chip had pictured a damp basement full of spiders and roaches crawling around, pipes dripping, his hostages huddled against the wall in chains. He wanted it to be as bad as any of the places in Beirut he’d read about.

  He told Louis and Louis said, “Where we gonna find a basement in Florida?”

  All right, but the living conditions had to be miserable, the worse the better. They could certainly find a place infested with bugs, those big palmetto bugs. Maybe a shack out in the Everglades.

  Louis said, “We gonna be out there with the hostages and the bugs? And the different motherfucking kind of swamp creatures out there like alligators? We already got ants upstairs in the room.”

  All right, then some place with concrete-block walls. Drive in steel staples and hook up chains with two-inch links, the kind they used over in Beirut.

  Louis said, “I don’t know nothing about any steel staples or how you drive them into concrete. Chains with two-inch links—how you bend a chain that size around a man’s ankle? Bicycle chain’s what you use, the kind you chain your bike to a post with so nobody gonna steal it.”

  Chip said they’d feed their hostages cold rice and mutton, hard stale cheese. . . . Spill the food on purpose, the way the guards did over there, and make them eat it off the floor. He favored leaving overripe bananas in the room, out of their reach, the smell becoming worse each day.

  Louis said, “Worse for anybody has to go in there.” He said, “Where we gonna get mutton around here? The same place we get the straw mattresses? Spill the food—who cleans it up, me or you?”

  When he brought in cookies and potato chips and stuff, Chip wanted to know if they were holding a hostage or having a house party.

  Once they saw they’d have to use this place, Louis said, “Chipper, there’s no way to treat hostages like they did in Beirut in a five-million-dollar house in Manalapan, Florida.”

  This morning, Thursday, Louis said, “Almost a week now I been taking the man to the toilet. Have to unchain him, wait for him to do his business and chain him up again.”

  “In Beirut,” Chip said, “the hostages had ten minutes in the morning to wash up, wash their clothes, brush their teeth when they had toothbrushes, and take a dump. Ten minutes. If they didn’t have to go right then but had to go later on? They had to hold it till the next morning.”

  Louis said, “We ain’t over in Beirut and I ain’t a Shia. I ain’t even trying to pass no more as Abu the Arab, am I?”

  He went upstairs and added ten feet of bicycle chain to the end hooked to the ring bolt. As he was working on it Harry said, “Are you the one?”

  Louis kept his back to the video camera mounted high on the wall, like in a bank. Hunched down over the ring bolt he said, “What if I wasn’t? Man, you keep your mouth shut ‘less I say something to you. All right, what I’ve done, you can feel your way into the bathroom now by yourself.”

  “I appreciate it,” Harry said.

  Louis looked up at him sitting blindfolded on the cot. “Man, you beginning to smell.”

  “What do you expect?” Harry said. “I haven’t washed in . . . how long’s it been, a week?”

  When Louis came down to the study again, to Chip pushing buttons on the remote, the man trying to look eagle-eyed staring at views of his property, Louis said, “Harry needs to wash hisself and shave. He can’t do it with that blindfold around his head. How’d they manage over in Beirut?”

  Mr. Chip Ganz, the authority on hostage-living, didn’t say anything right away. Louis saw he had to think about it.

  “Well, there were different ways. The guy that was there the longest, they moved him around a lot.”

  Louis said, “Blindfolded?”

  “Yeah, they put a cloth over his head and taped it on, the same way we did. They’d say, ‘Death to America’ and give him a slap.”

  “So they spoke to him.”

  “They’d say things like, ‘No move, no speaking,’ but he didn’t know them, so he wouldn’t recognize any of their voices.”

  “Didn’t you tell me this man read the Bible, he played chess?”

  “He made the chess pieces out of tinfoil some of the food was wrapped in.”

  “How could he do that, you say he was blindfolded all the time?”

  “I meant when the guards came in the room. If they caught the guy trying to peek out u
nder his blindfold, they’d beat him up.”

  “So the hostage could take the blindfold off if the Shia wasn’t around.”

  “Sometimes; it worked different ways,” Chip said. “Harry has to be kept blindfolded because he knows us.”

  Louis said, “I’m gonna look around the house, see if I can find something the man can slip over his head when we in there and slip off when he needs to clean hisself up.”

  “What do you mean, something he can slip on and off?”

  “Like take a mask and tape up the eyeholes.”

  “This Bobby’s idea?”

  “Be cool,” Louis said and turned to leave.

  “Wait. Where is he?”

  “Bobby? Getting dressed. We going to see if Mr. Ben King’s ready for us.”

  “Are you serious? You’re gonna pick him up in broad daylight?”

  “I told you about it. We’ll see how it looks.” He turned again toward the door.

  “Louis.”

  He stopped and looked back.

  “Last night you said you knew someone at the bank in Freeport, where Harry has his account.”

  “I said I’m from there, so I might know somebody.”

  “You said you’d mentioned it to me before.”

  “Didn’t I?”

  “Louis, why do I get the feeling you and Bobby are into something you don’t want me to know about?”

  The man was maintaining on reefer, Louis could tell, so he’d seem to be relaxed.

  Louis said, “I tell you things and you forget is all.”

  “You’re changing the whole setup, to the way you and Bobby want it.”

  “What you mean, like the blindfold? Man, we new at this hostage business. Have to see what works here and what don’t.”

  “Louis, what’s going on?”

  The weed making him think he was cool and knew things.

  “Ain’t nothing going on you don’t know about,” Louis said, turning again to the door. “I’ll see you.”

  Chip’s voice raised as he said, “You put a blindfold on Harry he can slip on and off . . . Louis? You know sooner or later . . .”

  Louis was already out the door.

  He went upstairs to the bedroom Bobby was using that used to be Chip’s mama’s room, dark in here with the dark furniture and the heavy rose-colored drapes almost closed. Sunlight came through the narrow opening, across the rose bedspread and the rose carpeting to where Bobby stood at the dresser looking at himself in the mirror. He had on his black silk pants and lizard shoes, no shirt, and was gazing at himself with his arms raised, muscles popped, twisting his ponytail into a knot.