KW 09:Shot on Location Read online

  “Say again?”

  He did.

  “Spell it.”

  He did.

  “That’s a ridiculous name.”

  “Agreed,” said Paolo. “But it’s funny, whenever people use fake names, like if it’s a closeted guy down here for a fling, they’re almost always really ridiculous. Either like John Smith or something over the top, something made up after a few too many drinks. Like people want you to know they’re playing games. Like look at me, I’m being naughty. People are funny, right?”

  “Hilarious.”

  “Actually,” said Paolo, “I thought that woman was with the show. She seemed so L.A.”

  “I thought so too. She said she wasn’t from there.”

  “Ah, so you spoke with her.”

  “For about two seconds. It was strange. She drew my eye then cut me off.”

  “I know the type,” said Paolo. “Stare at me, be fascinated, but leave me alone. Some weird power game.”

  “Well anyway,” Claire said hopefully, “I guess she’s gone now.”

  “I wouldn’t bet on it.”

  “You just told me she checked out.”

  “Right. But she didn’t look like she was leaving town.”

  “How does leaving town make people look?”

  “Well, usually they’re dressed for sitting on a plane. Which she wasn’t. But okay, leave that aside. It’s more something in their eyes. Like you can almost see their brain switching gears, already forgetting their time down here and thinking about where they’re going back to and what they have to do there. You know, they’re gone before they’re gone. She didn’t look that way. Her eyes were totally still here.”

  Claire considered, then said, “You spend a lot of time observing people, don’t you?”

  “What else I have to do all day? Oh, and one other thing about this woman. Her bag was really heavy. For its size, I mean. It was just a soft little shoulder kind of bag, but it was heavy. And she didn’t seem to like me touching it. I lifted it, you know, just to hand it to her, but she grabbed it away.”

  “Any idea what was in the bag?”

  Paolo shrugged. “You know better than I do what a woman traveling alone might carry in her bag. But it was way heavier than a lipstick, I’ll tell you that.”

  25.

  Bert had worked the phone for a couple of dispiriting hours before he finally reached a sentimental hit-man who agreed to help him out. The problem then was that he helped him out too well, too efficiently. He called Bert back within five minutes and told him that Ponte would meet with him and his friend at seven o’clock that evening. That was barely three and a half hours from the current time and it took nearly that long to drive from Key West to Miami.

  Bert was suddenly in a major hurry. To be almost ninety and in a major hurry is not a healthy combination. Blood pounds in veins whose walls have worn thin. Objects get fuzzy at the edges and floors no longer seem quite flat. Bert blinked away the lightheadedness and called Joey. Joey called Jake. Jake swallowed hard but there wasn’t enough time for fear to really build. He asked if Joey would be coming along. Joey declined; he’d met Ponte before and didn’t care to repeat the experience. Jake said he’d rent a car. Joey said there wasn’t time for that. He should take the El Dorado.

  So it happened that late one January afternoon a ghostwriter from New York, who’d written on many subjects but never crime or criminals, and who in fact had never knowingly met a criminal until the day before, was driving a thirty-year old Cadillac convertible, top-down, muffler rumbling, in the company of an ancient Mafioso and his fussy little dog, en route to a sitdown with a notoriously callous Mob boss, where he intended to accuse one of the boss’s loyal soldiers of an out-of-bounds and cowardly act that he himself, however vaguely, intended to avenge or at the very least unmask.

  Around twenty miles up the Keys, as if he was reading Jake’s own thoughts, Bert said, “Ya sure ya wanna do this, kid?”

  Jake glanced briefly at him, said nothing, kept driving. The tires crunched over the tiny bits of coral debris that always found their way onto the road.

  “Ya want, we can turn around.”

  Jake said nothing for fear that his voice would sound terrified or otherwise bizarre. He just hunkered into the El Dorado’s cushy seat and drove. The sun was behind them, putting fierce glints on certain facets of tin roofs. Tiny inlets inched in from the Gulf; here and there they all but lapped at the edge of the highway.

  “Ya know the rules, at least?” Bert asked.

  Jake admitted that he didn’t.

  “First rule: Be polite. Call him Mr. Ponte. Don’t talk tough, you’ll sound ridiculous. Don’t ever mention the police. Got it?”

  “Got it.”

  “Second: Very important. Always remember the whaddyacallit, the psychology of the situation. Ponte’s a dick. A selfish bastard. But he’s seen the Godfather movies. They all have. So he likes to see himself as like some kinda sawed-off Marlon Brando, a righter of wrongs. Kiss his ass on that, he’ll like it.”

  “Got it.”

  Jake waited for additional advice, but Bert said nothing more. After a few minutes the younger man glanced over and saw that his passenger had fallen asleep. His head had rolled back against the cracked leather headrest and air was whistling peacefully through his enormous nose. The dog was napping too, serene in the fragrant paradise of its master’s lap.

  At the foot of Seven Mile Bridge, the El Dorado roared against the incline like an old propeller plane on a shallow takeoff. Jake was halfway to Miami.

  ---

  Three short three blocks from The Nest, in an alley off of Whitehead Street, there was a guesthouse called Hannah’s Hideaway, whose quaint pale-yellow Victorian exterior, with its chastely curtained windows and elaborately innocent gingerbread, served either as camouflage for, or ironic comment regarding, the highly permissive and varied goings-on inside. At this secretly rollicking hostelry, the tall blonde woman with the amber sunglasses was now checking in.

  Once again she used an assumed name, though this time a far less colorful one: Jane Evans. Once again she laid down a substantial deposit in cash and once again she declined to show a credit card or driver’s license. It was Key West and it was a tough economy and no one could afford to turn down business.

  Having registered, she strolled through an oasis of a courtyard toward her room. Nude men, glistening like ducks on a rotisserie, lay sun-crisped on poolside lounges; their oiled body hair flashed like tinsel too near a lamp and about to catch fire. A pair of tattooed women luxuriated in a hot tub, rubbing tension from each other’s shoulders, cooing in a language that seemed to be Sanskrit. The sensual hijinks seemed to mean nothing to the tall blonde woman. She kept a steady pace as she passed the pool and let herself into a small cottage behind a low hibiscus hedge.

  She locked the door behind her, pulled the curtains tightly shut, and sat down on the bed, cradling her small bag between her knees. Reaching in, she produced a small silver picture frame closed up with a garnet clasp. Carefully she opened it so that it would stand up on her bedside table. In the frame was a photo of a handsome young man. He carried a surfboard under his arm and seemed just that moment to have emerged from the sea. His hair was wet and stiff with salt, droplets shone on the faint stubble of his chin. He both did and did not resemble the woman who so lovingly displayed his picture. His features were his own, but the structure of his face — the placement of the eyes, the angle of the jaw — might almost have been traced from hers.

  Reaching into her bag a second time, she came out with a gun. It was not a ladies’ gun and it was not a fancy gun — just an ugly, stubby .38 Police Special with a dull blue-black finish and a few scuffs on the butt. She’d bought it second- or third- or fourth-hand from a shop in East Los Angeles, and she’d chosen it because it was like the one that the young man in the photograph had used to kill himself.

  She lifted the gun, placed the muzzle gently, almost caressingly, in the soft hollow
beneath her ear, as she imagined the suicide must have also done. Then she pulled it away and sighted down its short barrel at the idle TV set in a corner of the room. Teasing herself with a phantom squeeze of the trigger, she made a dry clicking sound at the back of her throat, then put the weapon in her room safe and went outside to have a swim.

  26.

  “What’re you, some kinda wannabe detective?”

  “No, Mr. Ponte. Not at all.”

  They were sitting in the boss’s enormous office. Behind the wall of windows, a lingering pink dusk was painted on the sky above Biscayne Bay; the water underneath it was lifted in shallow folds and spattered with color like a dropcloth. Jake and Bert had been met at the twenty-second floor landing by a pair of bodyguards, then passed along to a second team of goons who’d stopped them in an anteroom and patted them down. This was a quite different pat-down from the bashful tickle-sessions Jake had occasionally experienced at airports. Here it was meaty hands clawing at his armpits, gasping at his legs, poking into the crannies of his groin and probing the cleft between his buttocks. By the time he was passed along to the inner sanctum he felt like he’d had some sort of deranged massage.

  “What then?” Ponte went on. “Lemme guess: You’ve got a wrong to right and you think I’m Marlon Brando.”

  Jake could not help glancing at Bert, and Ponte shrewdly followed his eyes.

  With a laugh the boss said, “I knew it! I knew that line of bullshit would come from the old man! Good ol’ Bert the Shirt. Love ya, ya old bastard. Here’s how to get around Cholly Ponte: Make him feel like Marlon Brando. ’Cept Bert, you’re the last guy in America who still believes in that Crusader Rabbit shit. The rest of us, we’re just trying to make a living and get through the day. But okay, kid, you’re here. Tell me what’s on your mind.”

  Jake fumbled a moment, trying to decide where to start, and during that interval Ponte suddenly noticed the chihuahua nestled in Bert’s lap. “Bert,” he said, “you got a new dog.”

  “Same dog.”

  “Same dog my ass. That other dog’d be like forty years old by now.”

  “Same dog.”

  There was an effort toward certainty in Bert’s voice but a slight veil of confusion in his eyes, and Jake cut in to try to rescue him.

  “Mr. Ponte,” he said, “the other day there was an accident down near Key West. A woman got run over by a speedboat.”

  “Broad from the TV show, right? I think I saw something on the news.”

  “Right.”

  “Ya hosin’ her?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “The broad who got run over. Ya boinkin’ her?”

  “No. She’s just a friend. An acquaintance, really.”

  “So what’s it to you she got run over?”

  “I saw it happen.”

  “Yeah. So?”

  “It just wasn’t right, that’s all.”

  “Lotsa shit ain’t right. What of it?”

  Jake squirmed, intensely aware of the large thug positioned behind his chair, and carefully considered his phrasing. As he was considering it, Bert jumped in to help him out.

  “My friend here, he ain’t makin’ any accusations, but one of your guys, Ace his name is, used to be this woman’s boyfriend till she threw him out on his ass, so we’re wondering if maybe in any slight or incidental way he might have been involved in her misfortune.”

  “That’s not an accusation?” Ponte said. “To me it sounds a great deal like an accusation.”

  “Okay, it’s a little like an accusation,” Jake admitted. “But it’s no reflection on you, Mr. Ponte.”

  Unfortunately, at that moment Bert drifted off into one of his tangential thoughts that came blurting out an instant off the beat. “Though of course he would’ve had to get a boat from somewhere.”

  Ponte’s face hardened. The change at first was nothing more than a slight adjustment to the crinkles at the outside corners of his eyes. He said, “Bert, we’re old friends and all, but watch yourself.”

  Undaunted or perhaps just oblivious, Bert kept tracking his own line of thought. “I mean, a guy at Ace’s level, he’s not gonna have a half-mil speedboat to call his own.”

  “Shut up, old man. I mean it.” The boss was glaring now and pointing a thick finger at Bert’s face.

  Softly, Jake said, “Can we please back up a minute, Mr. Ponte? Forget the accusations. All I’m asking from you is to help me find Ace so I can talk to him.”

  At this simple comment the thug behind Jake’s chair began to laugh. His laugh was a sporadic, high-pitched titter like an oboe with a splintered reed and it was wildly incongruous coming from his massive body. Jake could not help swiveling toward him and saying, “What’s funny?”

  “You wanna talk to Ace. That’s funny.”

  Ponte seemed to welcome this touch of levity and forced himself to smile along. “How much you weigh, kid?”

  “One-sixty, one-sixty-five.”

  “You lift weights, anything like that?”

  Jake just sat there feeling rather insubstantial.

  “I didn’t think so,” Ponte said. “Ace goes two-fifty. I’ve seen him bench press three-twenty-five. I’ve also seen him break a guy’s arm so bad that he could scratch his elbow with his thumb. If he had a thumb. And you just wanna have a friendly little chat with him about whether he almost killed his girlfriend?”

  Jake had trouble coming up with a reply.

  Ponte paused a moment then resumed. “You don’t talk to Ace. I’ll talk to Ace.”

  Again Jake found no ready words and Ponte went on as if airing out hurt feelings. “That’s right. Me. I’ll deal with it. You think I’d condone that kind of shit? You think that kind of shit would fly with me?”

  Seeming to emerge from a trance, Bert said, “See. I told you he was old school. I said he was.”

  Ponte ignored him and said to his goons, “Any a you cheese-dicks know where Ace is?”

  There was a silence in which an array of uncertain and guilty glances panned across the room. Finally one of the thugs walked over and whispered something in Ponte’s ear.

  Ponte said, “Ya sure?”

  The goon nodded that he was.

  Ponte said, “That doesn’t sound good.”

  The goon shrugged.

  Ponte said casually, “Too late, kid. Your little mercy mission. Sweet idea, I respect it, but too late. Guy says Ace headed to Key West an hour ago. Said he had some unfinished business to attend to.”

  Without realizing he was getting up, Jake found himself halfway out of his chair. The goon pushed him back down into it again. “Mr. Ponte, he’ll kill her. Someone’s got to stop him.”

  Ponte raised his hands, fending off responsibility.

  “You said you’d help! Two minutes ago. You promised.”

  “Don’t tell me what I promised. That is never a good idea. I said I’d talk to him. I didn’t say I’d chase him up and down the state of Florida. I got a business to run here. Priorities. I got people to see.”

  “And that’s more important than someone getting killed?”

  Without hesitation Ponte said, “Way more.”

  Jake bit his lower lip and squeezed the arms of his chair. “Okay. Okay. I’ll find him myself. I’ll deal with him myself.”

  Once again he started rising from his chair and this time the bodyguard let him. Ponte shot him a sort of valedictory glance and said, “I wish you well, kid. I really do. You got Blue Cross?”

  27.

  Jake gunned the engine of the El Dorado.

  The car was still parked in front of Charlie Ponte’s condo, not in gear, and of course it went nowhere. Still, there was a kind of release in high-revving the archaic old V-8, hearing the roar, feeling the quiver of the chassis as the gas exploded in the cylinders and the pistons slammed in their exigent rhythm, straining the rivets in the engine block. The brief and rising roar suggested assertion and decisiveness. Then it dwindled into a softly clattering purr as the motor returned
to idle, and Jake sat there in the driver’s seat feeling rather helpless. “Shit, Bert,” he said. “Guy’s got an hour head start. Now what do I do?”

  Sitting somewhat slumped on the passenger side, Bert contemplatively stroked the head of his chihuahua as if he was rubbing his own chin. “Broad’s still inna hospital, right?”

  “She gets out tomorrow morning.”

  “That’s okay then,” the old man said. “Nothin’s gonna happen while she’s inna hospital.”

  “You sure?”

  “My age, I ain’t sure of nothin’. But I’m pretty sure. I’d say we got all night to find him.”

  “We?”

  “Hey, I don’t sleep good anyway. Ya gotta be awake, ya might as well be doin’ somethin’, right?”

  Jake didn’t so much consider the comment as absorb it. Might as well be doing something. Well, of course. Doing anything. Action! That was the key, he realized--the key to beating back helplessness, refreshing his resolve. Just do something, then do something else, and something else again, until decisive action became a habit and a reflex that might actually lead to results and maybe even pass for courage. He put the giant car in gear and, showing off for no one but himself, burned rubber as he headed back down the Keys.

  ---

  By that time, Charlie Ponte’s enormous desk was almost entirely covered in money.

  The money had been poured forth from a black satchel carried by the boss’s next appointment, a very handsome man whose perfect salt-and-pepper hair rose and fell in elegant, old-fashioned finger waves. The bills were all crisp new fifties neatly bundled into stacks of twenty. There were two hundred packets in all, and the payment represented a small fraction of what Ponte would realize from a relatively modest investment in an independent film that had caught on. He stared down at the cheery profusion of cash and smiled. He had never lost his zest for making money and in this he was a fortunate man. “These Hollywood deals,” he said, “when they pay off they pay off good.”

  “Nature of the business,” said Handsome Johnny Burke. “High risk, high reward.”

  “The reward part I like,” said Ponte.