Tropical Swap (Key West Capers Book 10) Page 3

  He broke off to scratch a bug bite and Peter tried without success to place his accent. The reason he couldn’t place it is because Freddy was a seventh-generation Key Wester, one of the thinning breed of true Conchs, and the Conch accent is not quite like any other. It rises here and there with a bit of Cuban lilt, then gets flattened out again with a layer of Southern drawl, which is spiked in turn by certain acidic vowel sounds that are seldom heard south of Boston.

  “Yup, happens,” Freddy said again, warming to his subject. “Weird stuff sometimes. Like one time a couple years ago I had a repair that ended up in court. Two ladies fighting over a dildo. Excuse my language, but that’s what it was, a dildo. Fancy model. Lit up or something. Spun around I think. Ended up as evidence. I had to identify it ‘cause I’d seen it laying there in a pool of glass. That bad boy had some heft to him. Anyway, never know what you’re gonna find when you’re on a mission for Guzman Glass.”

  “Guzman Glass?” said Peter. “That’s your company?”

  “My company?” said Freddy, with a quick self-deprecating laugh. “No, I just work for it. Owner’s Carlos Guzman. You’ve never heard of Carlos Guzman?”

  Meg and Peter admitted that they hadn’t.

  “You spend much time down here, you will. He’s one of the big dogs. Owns a bunch of businesses, a lot of real estate. Some people think he owns the cops and city council too, but that’s not anything you’d ever hear me say.”

  He broke off with a knowing wink then looked more widely around the living room at the off-white-upholstered wicker furniture, the tasteful lamps, the coffee table strewn with glossy magazines. “This is a damn nice house,” he went on. “I’ve always liked this house.”

  “So you’ve been here before?”

  Freddy didn’t quite smother a chuckle. “Oh sure, number of times. I mean, Benny and Glenda, you know how they are.”

  “Actually, we don’t,” said Peter. “We’re just down here on a home exchange.”

  “Ah, I figured you were friends. Guess I oughta keep my big mouth shut.”

  “Why?” asked Meg. “We’re curious about them. Just normal human curiosity. What are they like?”

  Freddy briefly weighed discretion against the joys of chitchat and discretion didn’t have a chance. “They’re a trip,” he said. “Mutt and Jeff. Glenda, she’s about six feet tall. Or maybe she just looks that way in those big high shoes she wears, the kind, you know, that make women wobble when they walk. Big hair, big face, big lipstick. Benny, he’s maybe five foot five, bald on top, not fat but round, powerful, you know, built like the kid no one could tackle in a football game, you went to hit him and just bounced off. They both talk pretty loud, the way New Yorkers do. Guess they need to be heard over the traffic or the subway or something. Anyway, they’re funny, friendly. I come to fix a window, right away they offer me a glass of wine, some cold cuts. Smiling, laughing, couldn’t be nicer. A week later there’s another window. Benny pays me in cash. Never writes a check, never asks for a bill. Takes out a wad of money and pays me. He’s old school, he’s a throwback.”

  Meg and Peter took that in. It was odd to be learning about people while standing in their living room, surrounded by their furniture, their knickknacks, as if their home were some sort of elaborate museum diorama. All that was missing were the informational placards: This was their habitat; note the sophisticated remote controls for the wireless entertainment unit. This whimsical rabbit-eared corkscrew and chrome-plated cocktail strainer were among the tools they used.

  Feeling that he should repay some of Freddy’s information, Peter said, “Well, there might be fewer broken windows from now on. I’ve heard they’re separated, maybe getting divorced.”

  “Really? Wow. I didn’t know Mafia got divorced.”

  Meg said, “Excuse me?”

  “You know, there’s the Catholic thing. And the honor thing. And the family thing. I mean, I guess these guys have girlfriends on the side, they’re hardly home, but you never hear about ‘em getting divorced, do you?”

  Peter’s shoulders had knotted up again. “Wait a second, let’s back up a step. We’re not talking about the social mores of Italian Catholics. We’re talking about the guy whose house we’re living in. He’s Mafia?”

  Freddy shrugged, ran a hand through his upswept hair, backpedaled a bit. “Hey, that’s just the rumor among us working guys. What do we know? Mainly it’s just that he pays everybody cash. Maybe he just doesn’t like banks. Who does? Anyway, it’s probably bulldinky, just another local legend. Forget you ever heard it.”

  He broke off, seemed to remember something, then started peering around the room at the level of the floor moldings. “You babysitting the cat?”

  “Cat?” said Meg. “No, there’s no cat.”

  “No way we could babysit a cat,” Peter added. “I’m really allergic.”

  “Guess Benny took the cat with him,” Freddy mulled.

  “To our apartment?” Peter said. He suddenly sneezed at the mere idea of it. The thought of a cat in their apartment was almost as bad as the thought of a corpse in the little alcove where the globe was. He’d get asthma. He’d get hives. He’d itch so bad that his wrists and ankles would bleed from the scratching. “No, our listing specifically says no cats allowed.”

  “Me, I usually don’t like ‘em either,” Freddy said. “This is a pretty cool cat, though. Fancy. Burmese, I think. Yellow eyes. Won’t drink water from a bowl, only from a faucet. You have to get the drip just right or it shows you its ass and walks away. One time I came over, I was kind of high, I admit it, and I just watched the cat drink water from the faucet, the way it timed the drops. Forgot all about the stupid window. But all right, lemme get to work. I’ll see if I’ve got the right size on the truck.”

  Meg said, “You want a deposit or a credit card or anything?”

  “Nah,” said Freddy. “Benny’ll pay me whenever he gets back. Benny’s good for it.”

  6.

  “I can’t believe he brought a cat,” said Peter. “Brought a cat to our apartment.”

  They were sitting at a fish joint over on Caroline Street, a place called JB’s Grouper Wagon. The establishment had started, some decades earlier, literally as a wagon, a portable kitchenette that the original JB, a hulking fellow with an extravagant red beard, had pushed around on shaky wheels salvaged from a shopping cart. He’d had an ice box, a deep-fat fryer, an aluminum pan piled with a subsiding mound of shredded lettuce, some slabs of doughy Cuban bread and three or four bottles of hot sauce; that was it, except for the stacks of grouper filets straight off the boats. Like most places in Key West, JB’s had gotten gentrified in recent years. But gentrification is relative, and in this case what started as a wagon had now become a shack. It had a roof but no walls. There was a counter where you put your order in and a kitchen behind a flimsy divider. Archaic license plates, mostly from the southern states, were nailed up here and there on posts. There was a rail at barstool height that paralleled the sidewalk and a few picnic-style slatted tables. The lunch rush had died down by the time Meg and Peter had arrived and they’d been able to score one of those.

  Meg pulled some paper napkins out of the dispenser and tried to wipe a blob of dried ketchup off the table. “We don’t know that he brought the cat,” she said. “There are a lot of other places the cat could be. The cat could be in a cat hotel. The cat could be at a friend’s house. Or maybe the wife, this Glenda, ended up with the cat. I think that’s a lot more likely. A breakup, the wife usually gets the pet, the kids. That’s how it usually works, right?”

  Peter stuck with his own line of thought. “The listing very clearly says no cats. Small, short-haired dogs okay. Children, inquire. No cats permitted. Owner allergic. That’s clearly what it says. If he brought a cat, I’m filing a complaint. I’m putting it in feedback.”

  Meg said, “That’ll show him. I’m starving. You?”

  Peter in fact was too worried to be hungry, but he’d ordered a fish sandwich with r
ice and beans because he was afraid that if he didn’t he’d start losing weight.

  His wife said, “Think I’m going to have a beer. You?”

  Peter nodded absently and Meg went back up to the counter. By the time she came back with two Coronas Peter had added another item to his portfolio of dread. “Shit,” he said, “you know what I think? I think he’s using the cat as bait.”

  “Bait?”

  “To lure the wife to the apartment. Look, it makes perfect sense. He knows she’s in New York. He knows she loves the cat. He calls her up, says you want to see the cat, come to 680 West End Avenue, apartment 5J. She shows up all happy with a ball of yarn or a velvet mouse or whatever people bring a cat, bends over to pet it, and he knifes her in the back. Bye-bye Glenda. He slips out, and now we’ve got not just a dead body in our apartment but an orphaned cat, too. That’s great. That’s just great.”

  A waitress brought the sandwiches. They were piled high with lettuce, tomato and onions. Meg squashed hers down to a manageable thickness and a squib of aioli trickled out the side. This was a new wrinkle. The original JB would never have heard of aioli.

  Washing down the first bite with some beer, she said, “You know what I think is kind of funny?”

  “Funny? I don’t think any of it’s funny. I think we’re in big, big trouble.”

  “What I think is kind of funny is that you’re more concerned about the cat than about the fact that the guy might be a Mafioso.”

  “Hey, I’m concerned about that too,” said Peter, a little bit defensively, as if he’d been remiss in some aspect of his worrying. “I’m concerned about that plenty.”

  “Too many onions on this sandwich,” said Meg, tugging a few translucent rings out from the mix. “Anyway, it’s probably just a rumor.”

  “Or not. Little bald tough guy with a big showy wife. Hot temper. Wads of cash. I mean, if the shoe fits—“

  “We don’t know he’s a tough guy. He’s got a Burmese cat. How tough can he be?”

  “Killers often have a soft spot for animals. Look at what’s his name, the Birdman of Alcatraz.”

  “That was a movie,” Meg said.

  “Based on a true story,” Peter insisted. “But okay, leave that on the side for now. Look at everything else about the guy. Big house in Key West. How’s he pay for it? Does he have a job? I doubt it. Guys with jobs can’t just pick up and go to New York on a whim. This guy went last minute, right?”

  “So did we,” Meg pointed out. “Maybe the guy’s a literature professor.”

  “Ha. Have you seen one single book in the house?”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact I have. Fifty Shades. On a shelf on the wife’s side nightstand.”

  “Great. They break some windows then they spank each other.”

  “All I’m saying is that you can’t jump to conclusions about people. I mean, a little detail here and there and you assume the guy is some bigshot Mafio—“

  She did not complete the word because at that instant she heard a gravelly voice behind her say, “’Scuse me, ma’am.”

  Wheeling toward the soft but quietly insistent sound, she saw a very old man with a chihuahua on his lap and a fish sandwich on the table in front of him. The old man had an enormous fleshy nose and a lavish head of white hair tinged slightly yellow at the ends. He had a large and mobile mouth, black eyes set deep in papery-looking sockets, and he was wearing a turquoise linen shirt with navy blue piping and a monogram on the left chest pocket.

  “I couldn’t help overhearing your conversation,” the old man went on, “and while I personally am in no way not to any degree bothered or disturbed by it, I thought it might be a good thing if I mentioned that there might conceivably be other people who could take, um, let’s call it umbrage or offense at having certain things talked about so publicly in such a, well, let’s say public tone of voice, and so, just in the hope that maybe I could spare you any possible whaddyacallit, any unpleasantness or discomfort while you’re on vacation, I wanted to suggest in a very friendly way that maybe you should talk a little softer. That’s all I have to say. ‘Scuse me for butting in.”

  Peter studied the old man as he spoke—studied him through the lens of his ready paranoia—and quickly concluded beyond a reasonable doubt that he was Mafia too. The big collar and top-stitching on his shirt; the elevated rambling that failed to mask what was clearly an Outer Borough accent. Christ, was everybody Mafia in this town? Where the hell had they landed? Camden, New Jersey? Providence, Rhode Island? Feeling it would be prudent to show respect, Peter began fumbling for an apology.

  The old man peaceably lifted a wrinkled and long-fingered hand. “Hey, nothing to be sorry for. Like I said, I didn’t take one iota of offense. Taking offense about every little thing, it’s a waste of time and energy, and let’s face it, I don’t have that much of either. Anyway, my name’s Bert. This here is Nacho. He’s whaddyacallit, hyper-allergenic, he won’t bother your allergies.”

  “You heard that too?” said Peter. “About the allergies?”

  “Still got pretty good hearing. Say hello, Nacho.” He gently took the chihuahua’s tiny paw and made the dog wave it. The dog, apparently tired of the waving routine that was repeated each and every time its master made some new acquaintance, yawned widely then snorted. “Anyway,” Bert said, “nice to meet you both.”

  The three of them shared benign though not exactly natural smiles and then Bert began to swivel slowly back toward his own table. Halfway turned, he said, “But ‘scuse me, this individual you were speaking of, the one with the cat and the wad of cash and the wife toward whom he might or might not possibly harbor some ill-feeling and violent intentions, I’m curious. Would you like to tell me what this individual’s name might be?”

  Meg and Peter took a brief meeting with their eyes, then Meg said in a newly cautious undertone, “Benny Bufano.”

  “Ah.” Bert’s face was as unreadable as Hungarian.

  “You know him?” Peter asked.

  Bert elected not to answer that. Continuing his slow swivel, he said, “Me and Nacho, we’re here most days. Lemme know if I can do anything for you. I’ll leave you to finish your lunch. Buon appetito.”

  Part 2

  7.

  One hundred and ten miles away by water, twice as far by road, in a very different sort of outpost on the Gulf of Mexico, Glenda Fortuna Bufano was giving herself a pedicure and saying, “Jesus Christ, it’s dull around here.”

  She had not so far been murdered by her husband, certainly not in the Kaplans’ apartment in the little alcove where the globe was. She was a thousand miles from New York, though it’s true that she had fled there a month or so before when she’d stormed out on Benny, or rather when she’d wobbled out on platform shoes that made her ankles hurt. But New York in winter hadn’t worked for her; no place would have worked for her, given her confused and miserable state of mind; and after a few weeks of gray skies, festering resentments, and gnawing regrets, she’d bolted again, this time to her father’s grand estate in Florida. Now, still in a mood somewhere between a snit and a funk, she was working on her toenails while gazing past the lip of the cobalt-tiled infinity pool, across the faultless lawn and beyond the dunes dotted with sea oats to the flat green expanse of the Gulf.

  “It isn’t dull,” her father disagreed. “It’s peaceful and quiet and safe. What’s wrong with a little peace and quiet?”

  “Nothing. When you’re dead.”

  The father gave his leonine head an amused and indulgent shake. He was an almost handsome man, with flinty eyes, a chin with a hint of a cleft, and a broad nose with a slightly flattened bridge. “Ah, Glenda. My baby. So much like your late mother. Always bitching.”

  The daughter seemed to take this as encouragement. Her wide dark eyes flashed, her carefully shaped eyebrows lifted into a steeper arc, her broad wry mouth curled in vigorous complaint. “And the Italian food down here,” she went on. “How can they even call it Italian? Where’s the rosemary? Where’
s the garlic? Where’s the taste? Calling it Italian food, that should be illegal. Maybe I should’ve stayed in Manhattan. Cold as hell but at least you can get a decent piece of bread. And why the hell do they call this cemetery Naples anyway? You know what they should call it? They should call it Michigan. They should call it fucking Ohio. Fucking Canada.”

  Glenda’s dad, Ralph “the Fortune” Fortuna, tried to muster a tone of disapproval, but that was something he’d never quite been able to pull off in regard to his beloved only child. “That language, Glenda. Where did you pick up that language?”

  “Where? How about around the dinner table, where you used to bring home all those wavy-haired goombahs, one of which, with your blessing as I recall, became my asshole of a husband.”

  Almost nostalgically, Fortuna said, “Benny did have wavy hair back then, didn’t he?” Then he raised a finger and went on with something approaching sternness. “But that was a long time ago. Things were different then. I was different then. Very different.”

  This was something Ralph Fortuna badly wanted to believe. He’d come up from the street, and though he claimed as people always did that he was not ashamed of that, he certainly didn’t advertise it either. He’d started his career in Staten Island as a low-level Mob associate who, by virtue of his loyalty and zeal, was soon promoted to made man. He’d profited from the traditional rackets--gambling, extortion, finagling no-show jobs--and within a few years, by a standout combination of ruthlessness and cunning, was out-earning nearly all of his contemporaries. He had his own crew by thirty-five and was quite a rich man by forty. At that point he decided it was beneath his dignity to get his own hands dirty, and that’s where it all got sort of hazy.

  Fortuna, in recent years thought of rather vaguely as a businessman/investor, had never for a moment stopped being a criminal; but he’d become far subtler about it and he wanted to believe that the really messy and brutish parts of his career had been the work of an entirely different person. This brash, crude, violent Ralphie Fortune—who could he possibly have been? Certainly not the well-tanned and conservatively dressed gentleman who played golf at charity events with the elite of Naples, who owned a waterfront mansion with ten guest suites and a dozen marble bathrooms, and who for years had secretly hired tutors to improve his diction.