Tropical Swap (Key West Capers Book 10) Read online

  Coming back to the subject of her estranged husband’s hair loss, Glenda said, “He blames me that most of it fell out. Says I drove him crazy, made it fall out in clumps from aggravation. Good. I hope I did. I hope the rest of it falls out in the bathtub. Now let’s not talk about Benny anymore. He makes me sick.”

  She leaned far forward in her lounge chair and with quiet fury got back to the task of removing chipped old polish from her toenails with a cotton ball. The laboratory smell of acetone mixed uneasily with the salt air and the muskiness of sun-baked palms. Her father said, “Why do you still bother doing that yourself? Why not treat yourself to a nice spa day? Take the Maserati, go up to the Ritz. Get a massage, a facial, let them do the pedicure.”

  She looked up as if the generous suggestion had for some reason made her angry. “I don’t want somebody else to the pedicure, okay? I don’t feel like having some tiny Asian person messing with my feet.”

  “What do you have against Asians?”

  “Nothing whatsoever. I wish all twenty billion of them long and happy lives. I just don’t feel like having some stranger fucking around with my toes, okay?”

  Ralph Fortuna allowed himself a silent sigh and went back to reading his Wall Street Journal. Glenda was in one of her moods, and when she was like that, you just couldn’t talk to her. He’d learned that long before, but still, it was frustrating. The odd thing was that Glenda also realized she was being childish and impossible; she knew it, and she couldn’t stop. Why? She didn’t act this way with anyone else. With other people she was reasonable and agreeable and charming. With other people she behaved like an adult. But when it came to dealing with her father—and, okay, sometimes her husband—that grown-up stuff went out the window. It was one of those things she just didn’t understand.

  There were plenty of things about Glenda that her father didn’t understand either. Why did she still insist on cursing so much, talking as if she’d never left the street? Why couldn’t she accept the facts of being comfortable, respectable? Pondering the mystery of family and not quite knowing that he was about to speak aloud, Fortuna said, “Maybe I shouldn’t have let you marry Benny.”

  “Ha! Like you could have stopped me.”

  “No. But I could have stopped him.”

  Looking up abruptly from her toenails, Glenda said, “So why didn’t you?” She said this in her usual flippant tone but along with the edge there was genuine curiosity in the simple question.

  “Because I thought it was what you wanted. I wanted you to be happy.”

  Both father and daughter wanted to believe this but neither one quite could. True, Glenda, at twenty-one, had been head over heels with Benny. He was funny and attentive and had a roosterish swagger that she found both sexy and endearingly absurd. Still, it had been her father who’d brought them together, and it was her father’s purposes that were best served by having them marry. A daughter who would always be close by; a son-in-law he basically owned; in all, a somewhat medieval but handy arrangement.

  “Well,” said Glenda, “it hasn’t quite worked out, has it?”

  “There’ve been good years,” her father said.

  There was no way in hell that Glenda was going to acknowledge that just then. She maintained a sulky silence as she tossed aside the cotton ball and moved on to applying fresh polish in a purplish shade of red. She did one toenail, two, and the silence stretched on. The breeze was still and nothing moved in the perfect yard. Tiny wavelets died at the edge of the Gulf but made no sound. The quiet was somehow cumulative, it took on a weird and empty momentum, and at some point, inevitably, it brought Glenda back to her previous complaint. “I’m bored stiff around here! This sitting around a mansion all day, I just don’t get it. You got freakin’ mansions all around you and nobody’s home. Nobody comes out. Nobody uses the beach. What is there, a fucking plague or something? I wish Tasha was here, at least.”

  “Tasha?” said her father. “Who’s Tasha?”

  “The cat. I miss her something awful.”

  A confused or perhaps pained expression flicked across Frank Fortuna’s face before he could erase it. “I thought you didn’t like the cat. I thought it was Benny’s cat.”

  “It was. It is. And I didn’t used to like her at all. Thought she was a stuck-up bitch. But she wore me down, what can I say? That way she purrs, you feel it all through her ribs. Now I miss her like crazy.”

  Her father said nothing and Glenda bided her time. She really thought he would offer to intervene—intervene as in getting hold of Benny and telling him to give her the cat. He’d occasionally done that sort of thing before. Not that it was what you’d call a healthy family dynamic: The father bossing around the husband, who in turn tried to boss around the wife, who in turn had her ways, generally but not always passive, of getting back at both of them. But this time Fortuna made no move toward getting involved. He went back to his Journal and she went back to her pedicure.

  But at some point her hand began to tremble and she made a clumsy swipe with the brush that put a slash of polish on the knuckle of a toe. “Shit,” she said. “God fucking damn it. This is stupid.” With an unsteady hand she capped the polish bottle and for a moment she silently sat there contemplating her mismatched toenails. “It isn’t just this boring town,” she went on at last. “And it isn’t just the cat I miss. I miss Benny. It’s stupid, I know it is, but I really, really miss him. I want my husband back.”

  8.

  Benny Bufano, who had no idea that his wife was missing him and no great faith that she ever wanted to see him again, was at that moment sitting at the Oyster Bar in New York’s Grand Central Terminal, mostly ignoring the mixed dozen of Blue Points, Malpeagues, and Cotuits in front of him and drawing on a napkin.

  His lunch companion, Mikey Ferraro, had known Benny a long time and was so accustomed to his constant doodling that he barely noticed it anymore. Long on appetite and short on empathy, neither did he notice that Benny, even with a beautiful plate of oysters in front of him, did not seem happy. In fact Benny was miserable. He didn’t want to be in New York. He especially didn’t want to be in New York on a job. Most of all, he didn’t want to be in New York on the particular job for which he’d been summoned. The thought of that job made him queasy, and the queasiness in turn made his plate of oysters seem unappetizing in the extreme.

  Mikey, a giant of a man whose pearl gray suit jacket was stretched tight across his massive back and whose skin was tinged a strange coppery orange from cosmetic attempts at a sunless tan, slurped a Malpeague and mopped his flubbery lips on a napkin. “Here’s what I don’t get,” he said. “The oysters here, they’re the same fuckin’ oysters you get all over town. I mean, these people, you think they have slobs all up and down the coast digging oysters just for them? Same fuckin’ oysters, trust me. But they taste better here, don’t they?”

  Benny forced himself to choke down a Cotuit but said nothing.

  Mikey gulped several more before speaking again. “You like one kind better than the others? For me, Blue Points are still the Cadillac.”

  Benny just shrugged but his face was not designed for hiding his emotions. He had slightly bulging and emphatic eyes whose whites stood out against his suntanned olive skin and that brightened or dimmed with his mood. His wide mouth gave him a hint of dimples when he smiled and thickened his chin when he frowned. As his hairline had receded, it could be seen that his scalp took on a mottled flush when he was upset, and even Mikey eventually noticed that he was upset now.

  The big man put both hands on the counter in front of him and leaned close enough to Benny so that Benny could smell the stuff he used to stiffen up his hair. “Listen, I know you’re ticked off at me, but let’s try to be professional at least. You think I got a choice here? You think I get to pick my spots any more’n you do? You know how the Big Guy does things. It’s your turn in the batting order, you get the job.”

  Quietly but firmly, Benny said, “Nobody should have to do this job. This jo
b should not be done. It ain’t right.”

  Mikey had picked up another oyster. He put it down again. “Right? Since when are things right? Listen, I got some advice for you. Quit bellyachin’, do the fuckin’ job, get it over with. Then get drunk, get laid, and forget it ever happened.”

  Benny kept sulking and drawing and Mikey went back to his lunch. But the fact that his companion seemed to have no appetite finally began to interfere with his own enjoyment of the food, and this he found infuriating. Suddenly, sort of retroactively, his patience was used up and he was very annoyed at Benny. Gesturing with the absurdly small oyster fork that was clutched in his enormous hand, he said, “Will you please quit the fuckin’ doodling and eat? And another thing. You’re not doing yourself any favors being such a pain in the ass about this, having to be dragged up here, having to get the Big Guy’s Miami crew involved…”

  Benny didn’t like the sound of that at all. “The Miami crew? Why the Miami crew?”

  “Why? Because the Big Guy got tired of your stalling and pissing and moaning so he had some Miami nobody drive all the way down the Keys to deliver a message to your house.”

  “To my house? But I’m here already!”

  Mikey shrugged. “Guess the guy didn’t get the memo. Plus, it was unfortunate that the window that the message went through wasn’t open at the time.”

  “He broke my window? That’s bullshit. Listen, I got innocent people staying at my house.”

  “Maybe you shoulda thought of that before you stalled so fucking long.”

  Mikey went back to his oysters. But the chill was off them and they didn’t taste as good as they had before. Melted ice sloshed as he pushed the platter away from him and he continued to blame the spoiled lunch on Benny. “You’re making problems, man. Think about it. The Big Guy’s got a dozen crew he’s trying to keep happy. He can’t give special treatment to one guy just ‘cause he’s the son-in-law. He does that, he’s got eleven pissed off guys. And who are they gonna be pissed at? You, if you keep acting like some prima donna twat.”

  For a moment Benny said nothing. The room around them hummed with conversation and crackled with the sharp snap of crab legs being broken. Finally, more with sadness than anger, Benny put down his pencil and said, “We used to be pretty good friends, Mikey. I find that kind of amazing now.”

  The mildness of the answer made Mikey realize he’d gone too far. “Look,” he said, “it’s a shit job, I admit it. I wouldn’t be too damn happy to do it either.”

  He paused, hoping Benny would meet him halfway in his attempt at conciliation. Benny didn’t. He was nursing a grievance that could not be halfway mollified, and Mikey finally broke down and addressed it.

  “Okay,” he went on. “Can we talk? About the cat? I know you’re upset about the cat. I don’t blame you. The thing with the cat, that was harsh. But it wasn’t my idea.”

  Suddenly feisty, Benny said, “I don’t care whose idea it was. Why’d you have to—“

  Mikey cut him off with a quick raise of a hand and a lift of an eyebrow and a fast and surreptitious glance toward the entrance of the restaurant. A woman had just walked in. There was nothing at all remarkable about her appearance; she looked a lot like the tens of thousands of other women who milled around midtown on business days. Her hair was brown, just a shade richer than could be called mousy, gathered up at the back of her head so you couldn’t really tell how long it was. Her face was neither more nor less than pleasant, her makeup tastefully but not expertly applied. Beneath a presentable though not stylish cloth coat, she seemed to have an average figure, which is to say she always imagined she would look better if she could drop that last five pounds. She wore appropriate mid-heel shoes whose clicking echoed softly beneath the low vaulted ceiling of the restaurant. Without hesitation she strolled over to the main counter and took a seat that was being saved for her by a man in a navy blue suit.

  “That’s her,” Mikey said simply. “Lydia Greenspan. She’s here most days around this time. The suit, that’s her contact. Him we still need. Him we leave alone.”

  Benny felt sick as he watched the marked woman. His vision blurred at the edges and there was a ringing somewhere deep in his skull. From where he sat, he saw the woman mostly in profile. She had a slightly upturned nose; her ear was small, pegged with a simple pearl earring. He didn’t want to kill her. He didn’t want to kill anyone, certainly not a woman. Killing people was in fact a blank line on his resume. By luck or maybe by a carefully veiled nepotism, he’d always been spared those jobs before. No longer. He watched as the woman shook hands with the man sitting next to her. They shared what appeared to be a bit of casual, collegial conversation and then the man pulled out his phone. He brought up an image, showed it to her, and the two of them laughed.

  “See,” whispered Mikey, “the laugh, that’s part of the ruse. Like he’s showing her a selfie or a picture of his dog or something. He isn’t. He’s passing her the information.”

  The man in the blue suit put the phone away. The target woman stopped laughing and brushed some loose strands of hair back from her forehead.

  “Now she’ll sit a couple minutes,” Mikey went on, “then slip off to the ladies’ room and write the tip down on a little scrap of paper. She’ll come back, eat a little something, then she goes upstairs and meets the other contact under the big clock. She passes off the scrap of paper, leaves the building on the Vanderbilt Avenue side, and grabs a taxi up to the West Side, 93rd Street, where she lives. That’s probably your best chance to nail her, when she’s going home. Got it?”

  Benny said nothing. He was staring blankly at the woman’s cloth coat and the bundle of hair at the back of her head. He wished she didn’t look so ordinary, just like somebody’s sister or somebody ahead of you in the supermarket line.

  “So it’s your gig now,” said Mikey. “Scope it out, handle it your way. But don’t wait too long. Your cat’s looking awfully skinny.”

  “You’re not feeding her, you son of a bitch?”

  “Bad enough I had to drive all the way to Florida to kidnap the fucking thing. Buying cat food’s where I draw the line. Good luck, Benny.”

  9.

  In Key West it had been such a perfect afternoon and evening that Peter Kaplan had at moments nearly forgotten to be worried.

  After lunch he and Meg had rented bicycles for their expected though by no means certain two week stay and had ridden them at a sightseeing pace along the broad promenade that flanked the ocean. Coasting pelicans had tracked their progress; young couples riding tandem on laboring motor scooters had honked and waved; even the grizzled men who loitered on the seawall in shredded jeans and faded bandanas, nipping at cheap booze, looked up and smiled as they passed. The sun shone, the palms swayed, the whole town seemed entirely benign if slightly goofy; how could anything really bad possibly happen here?

  Sunset and dinner took Peter’s tentative foray into the carefree to a yet higher level. Watching from the end of White Street Pier, he and Meg had held hands as the orange sun first skimmed the horizon then seemed not so much to sink as to melt into the sea, leaving behind a spreading sheen that went from pink to lavender to indigo. Dinner was at a beachside restaurant called Casa Carlos and was accompanied by a more than acceptable bottle of wine and a rather decadent shared dessert that proved to be the perfect prelude to the lovemaking that had been so inconveniently squelched earlier in the day.

  In all, it had been a splendid few hours of vacationing, and by the time Peter had flossed his teeth, checked his scalp for hair loss and his face for possible basal cells, and nestled into bed with his wife, who was already sleeping, serenely and profoundly, as she always did, his attitude had been quite thoroughly if provisionally adjusted. Home exchanging, he thought; it was supposed to be an adventure, right? You never knew exactly what you’d find, what might happen. That was part of the fun. A broken window; a flying coconut; a host with Mafia connections: Why not try a little harder to chill out and accept those oddi
ties and mishaps? Why not embrace them? They were the stuff of vivid memories and amusing stories to share with friends back home.

  This new and easygoing frame of mind lulled Peter into a delicious slumber that lasted until around one a.m., when he was awakened by what seemed to him to be a noise downstairs.

  It wasn’t a loud noise. In fact he wasn’t quite sure he’d heard anything at all. But something must have registered because he felt a small squirt of adrenaline that rendered him instantly alert. What he thought he’d heard was a metallic sound that was crisper and dryer than the humidly rustling sounds of tropical night. The sound might perhaps have been the tiny collision of a key or a pick with a lock, the rubbing ca-chunk of a deadbolt sliding in its groove. The sound was followed by something less heard than very faintly felt—the subtle whoosh that happened when a door was opened and a whole house exhaled through a vacant frame.

  Peter lifted onto an elbow and cupped an ear to listen. His heart had begun to race a bit and to feel a little bit confined inside his chest, but he wasn’t yet in full-on emergency mode. He didn’t want to panic, didn’t want to backslide into automatic worry. Most night sounds, after all, were innocent and harmless, even comforting—fronds scratching, small shy creatures on the move in darkness, houses sighing and porches settling as they shed the heat of day. Probably he’d heard nothing but sounds like those. His heart rate slowed again and he began to lower his head back toward the pillow.