Tropical Swap (Key West Capers Book 10) Page 7

  Peter, chastened, went back to his sandwich.

  After a moment, Bert, giving some ground, went on. “Look, I have no idea what Benny’s up to, I really don’t. But it’s none of your business and, trust me, you don’t want it to become your business. So my entirely friendly and amicable advice is don’t ask too many questions and don’t get involved.”

  Peter certainly saw the wisdom in the old man’s counsel. Except it seemed a little too late to follow it. “But we are sort of involved,” he said. “We’re living in his house. We’re sort of babysitting his wife.”

  Bert gave his head a sympathetic shake. “She’s a good kid, Glenda. Messed up, but who could blame her? Nice that you’ve kind of adopted her.”

  Adopted her? The very notion gave Peter a sharp stab of worry deep in his gut, a little south of where the grouper sandwich was now heavily sitting. “Wait a second. Let’s not make it sound like suddenly it’s one big happy family. She and my wife went to the beach, that’s all.”

  “Nice that you’re standing by her in her hour of need.”

  “Hour of need? You said ten seconds ago we shouldn’t get involved!” protested Peter.

  “Right. But that was before you admitted you already was. That changes everything. You’re already involved, you gotta do the right thing.”

  “I do? Who says I do?”

  “Nobody says it. Everybody knows it. You’re in a situation, you handle it right. Lemme know if I can help. Tell Glenda she can call me anytime. She knows how to reach me.”

  14.

  Behind the closed door of his tiny office with its crappy lighting and crummy desk, Andy Sheehan was showing Lou Duncan the photographs he’d taken earlier that day with a camera in his tie-tack. Mockingly, he said, “You see? You see? There’s your thoroughly modern white collar criminal, your cyber genius, your ultra-savvy market manipulator. I mean, can you believe this shit? She’s handing him a piece of paper.”

  Duncan sidled around the desk to get a better angle on the screen of Sheehan’s beat up and archaic laptop. “Yup,” he said, “it sure looks like she’s handing him something.”

  “Wait, it gets better,” Sheehan said, clicking to another image. “Shit, how do you get this thing to zoom?”

  Duncan took over the keyboard and showed Sheehan for the twentieth time how the zoom feature worked.

  “Okay, stop,” the tall agent said. “There it is. There it is.”

  He pointed at the now blurred close-up of Marc Orlovsky’s face. The grotesquely swollen pixels made it appear that the stock trader’s skin was decomposing and sloughing off, but the action of the image was plain enough.

  “He’s eating the evidence!” Sheehan said with a kind of glee. “He’s chewing, for Christ’s sake!” Then he pointed vaguely toward the office of the younger agent whom he had for some reason decided was his personal nemesis. “Our Boy Wonder is chasing the guy with super-computers or video games or whatever the hell he’s doing, and meantime the guy is getting information and eating it like it’s 1937.”

  Duncan clicked back to a previous image. “Who’s the woman?”

  “No idea,” said Sheehan. “Yet.”

  “Player? Go-between? Decoy?”

  “Decoy, I don’t think so,” Sheehan said. “Not unless Orlovsky has a thing for eating paper. Player or messenger. Ask me again in a day or two. I’ll know more about her than she knows about herself.”

  Back from the beach, Meg and Glenda had showered, rubbed themselves with various après-sun emollients, and reconvened at the shady table by the pool for a refreshing glass of pinot grigio. But as they were toasting their new friendship Meg decided that it was no longer fair or practical to keep from Glenda the disturbing facts about the broken window. Putting down her wineglass, she said, “Excuse me a sec. I need to show you something.”

  In a moment she came back with the scarred and battered coconut. Its greenish husk had been slowly drying out and seemed a bit more bruised and wrinkled than it had the day before. Presenting it to Glenda like a court exhibit, she said, “Someone threw this into the house a couple nights ago.”

  Glenda slowly reached a hand toward the projectile but didn’t seem to want to touch it. In a heartbeat the rosy glow of sunburn began receding from her skin and left her looking blanched.

  “There’s some writing on it,” Meg went on, and she twirled the coconut so Glenda could see the facet where the message was. As she tried to make out the words and ferret out the meaning amid the smudges and the non-existent grammar, her jaw got tenser and her hands curled gradually into fists. After a pause she said three words. “My fucking father.”

  She stormed off to the guest bedroom and called him up.

  In the Naples mansion, the call came through on the only phone Frank Fortuna actually answered, the one with the special ring reserved for his daughter and for no one else. He picked it up at once. “Glenda,” he said, “where are you? Are you okay?”

  “Where’s Benny?” she countered.

  “The hell with Benny. Tell me where you are.”

  “Where’s Benny,” she said again.

  “Glenda, stop it! Tell me why you just took off like that. I’ve been worried sick.”

  “I doubt it,” Glenda said, though it happened to be true. After a moment she relented. “Okay. Okay. I’m in Key West and I came here because I didn’t want to live one more day without my husband. You got that? You understand?”

  Fortuna couldn’t find an answer for a moment and his daughter raged on.

  “Weird stuff is going on down here. Benny can’t be reached. I got strangers in my house. I got people breaking windows. Just what the hell is going on?”

  Stalling for time, trying to organize his thoughts and come up with a passable evasion, Fortuna said, “I thought you were through with Benny. I thought it was over.”

  “It isn’t over. It’ll never be over. I love him. And if anything happens to him—“

  “Now, honey—“ her father broke in quickly. He didn’t want to hear what she might say next, and Glenda herself didn’t know what the words might be, only that if she didn’t slow down a bit they might be something reckless and perhaps irreparable.

  She took a quick short breath and said, “You’re making him do something bad, aren’t you? I know you are. That’s what everything points to. You promised me you wouldn’t.”

  “I never promised that,” said Fortuna. He fancied himself a man who kept his word, and whenever it was pointed out to him that he had broken a promise his impulse was to revise history as necessary, often by just a slight re-phrasing. “What I promised was that I would look out for him. And I have. For years.”

  “So what about now?”

  Fortuna went silent for a moment. He’d lived and prospered by shrewdly reading people and accurately if cynically appraising situations, and it galled him to realize he’d gotten it so wrong as to where things stood between his own daughter and his son-in-law. Trying to shift some of the blame, he said, “You told me you didn’t want to be with him anymore. You said all kinds of awful things about him.”

  “I’m his wife,” said Glenda. “I’m entitled to.”

  There was a standoff, nothing passing between father and daughter except an occasional soft crackle of static. As the seconds ticked by, Glenda felt herself not softening exactly, but slipping backwards toward a childish pouting helplessness that she absolutely hated. With her father she either hissed or purred, and she’d used up all her hissing for the moment. “Daddy,” she said, “please don’t let anything happen to Benny. Whatever’s going on, please, you have to fix it. You have to make it right.”

  With a sigh that was meant to sound both magnanimous and wise, Fortuna said, “I’ll try my best.”

  But even as he said it he knew he wouldn’t try at all. Things had gone too far to change them now. There was crew morale and respect to be considered. The troublesome Lydia Greenspan had to be taken off the street, and soon. Benny had to finish what he’d star
ted, or rather, what Fortuna had started for him. Unless he botched the job it shouldn’t be that big a deal, it would all blow over, and besides, there really was no other way.

  “Thank you, Daddy,” Glenda purred. “I knew you’d understand.”

  15.

  Benny Bufano was not a morning drinker, but next day, hoping to appease his shattered nerves and to uncover some courage or at least some cruelty deep within himself, he had a big belt of the Kaplans’ Irish whiskey with his muddy coffee. He felt no better and no different after the drink. He realized that in sucking whiskey on the morning of a job he was just going through the motions, doing what he believed a person in his situation ought to do. But it was automatic and it was false. It wasn’t him.

  This sense of faking it, of disconnection, unwholesome as it was, carried certain advantages as well. The main one was an extreme dispassionate clarity. Benny might barely have recognized himself, but he grasped in minute detail what needed to be done. At ten-fifteen he began to dress; by twenty-five after his shoulder holster was in place, snugly bearing the cold weight of the never-registered, never-fired 9 mm that Frank Fortuna had provided for the job. At ten-thirty he gathered up his few belongings and made a cursory inspection of the Kaplans’ apartment. A considerate guest in spite of everything, he removed a chest hair from the bathroom sink and rubbed away a moisture ring on the kitchen counter before turning his back on the place and leaving without a shred of fondness.

  Outside on West End Avenue it was freezing cold under a white sky smudged here and there with pasty yellow. Benny’s breath steamed but he hardly noticed. He retrieved his car from its overpriced garage up on Amsterdam and set out on the most delicately-timed aspect of the entire operation: Gaming the alternate-side parking rules. Falling into a line of crawling vehicles as they trailed a street-sweeper whose huge brushes were scratching at the curbs of 93rd Street, he scored a space right in front of Lydia Greenspan’s building, just where, if her patterns held, she’d be stepping out of a taxi within a couple hours.

  Benny switched his radio on, took out his little notebook, and sketched Glenda’s face with a dozen different expressions while he waited.

  On Poorhouse Lane it was another sunny and salt-scented morning but there was a mini-crisis going on. Amidst all the tumult and the upsets no one had got around to buying groceries and the household had run out of milk. No milk for coffee, no milk for tea, no milk for cereal. And no one felt like running to the store. So Peter volunteered to see if the neighbor, Mel, could spare some milk.

  He slipped through the foliage in the side yard and found the toothless old man rocking slowly on his porch. Before Peter had even reached the creaky steps, Mel said, “I see you got a nice car by your house now.”

  Peter said, “Yeah. Glenda came home the other night.”

  “Just Glenda? No Benny?”

  “Just Glenda.”

  The old man sucked his gums and winked. “So you got, like, a ménage going on over there?”

  “No, nothing like that.”

  “Me, I’ve done some threesomes back in the day. Baja. The Azores, twice. Rio. Rio was a sister act. Said they were sisters, at least. Didn’t look that much alike. Marketing gimmick probably. One of ‘em—”

  “I’m sure it was fun,” Peter broke in, “but I was wondering if you could spare a little milk.”

  “Yeah, it was fun. But overrated, y’ask me. Y’ask me, guys do it more for bragging rights than pussy.”

  “So why’d you do it four times?” Peter could not help asking.

  “Guess I liked it. Still, you’re paying double and then it’s like you’re at a big buffet. Lots to choose from, but it’s still one meal. Am I right?”

  “Um, right,” said Peter. “But about the milk…”

  “Oh sure, sure, help yourself,” said Mel, and he gestured toward the ravaged screen door with the silhouette of the flamingo on it. “Kitchen’s straight back. Milk, I use the box kind. Lasts forever. Grab one from the cabinet right next to the fridge.”

  Peter stepped into the house and was immediately enveloped in the funk of mildew and the toasted sawdust smell left behind by gnawing termites. Dim light straggled in through narrow, dirty windows. There were dented pans piled in the kitchen sink and the knob on the cabinet where the milk was was gritty to the touch. It was not until Peter had grabbed the milk and was heading out again that he saw the guns hanging on the wall near the front door.

  There were three of them. They had dings and dents and rust spots here and there. They didn’t match. Guns worried Peter. He knew nothing about them and he didn’t want to know. He glanced at them for just a moment then hurried back into the daylight.

  On the porch again, Mel said, “You like my souvenirs?”

  “Hm?”

  “The semi-automatics. Everybody stops to look at them. How can you not?”

  Peter had nothing to say to that.

  “A lot of these hellholes,” his host went on, “you go ashore, there really isn’t much to do. Get drunk, wet your wood if you’re lucky, buy some souvenirs.”

  “Some people buy t-shirts,” Peter observed. “Refrigerator magnets. Little flags.”

  “Busted weapons, they’re always getting left behind. Most of ‘em, you can buy ‘em for a song. Something’s jammed, a piece or two is missing, whatever. That vintage M-14 is from Saigon when it was still Saigon. The AK-47 I picked up in Algiers along with a nasty case of crabs. The Uzi came from Mogadishu. My pension ever runs out, I’ll sell ‘em on eBay. Someone could probably fix ‘em up just fine.”

  “Good,” said Peter. “Good idea. Well, I better bring the milk home now.”

  “Yeah, back to your harem.”

  “No, just back to my cereal.”

  He headed down the creaking steps and his host called out to his retreating back. “Hey, y’ever need some help with the ladies over there, don’t forget old Mel.”

  At Grand Central Terminal, Andy Sheehan watched from a discreet distance through a blurring curtain of hurrying people as Marc Orlovsky had another brief rendezvous with the mysterious woman in the simple cloth coat. As before, the agent clearly saw the exchange of information and the archaic spectacle of the stock trader choking down a morsel of paper. But this time, when the momentary tete-a-tete was over, it was the woman that he followed.

  She turned without hesitation toward the west side of the building, her mid-heels clicking softly on the well-scuffed floor. At the Vanderbilt Avenue exit she pushed against a glass and metal door—pushed hard, the way New Yorkers, accustomed to difficulty, to resistance, pushed—and emerged onto the sidewalk. She paused very briefly for a single deep gulp of bracing winter air then headed for the lead taxi in a standing rank.

  Sheehan waited until the target car was pulling away from the curb then slid into the one behind it. Softly but with urgency, he said, “Follow that taxi. Not too close.”

  His driver, who seemed to be recently arrived from somewhere on the Indian subcontinent, was clearly delighted with the request. Swiveling backward and smiling broadly at his fare, he said, “Wow, you mean tail him, like on TV or in the movies?”

  Sheehan pointed forward toward the street, where the other taxi was already half a block ahead. “Yeah, like in the movies. Don’t lose him.”

  The driver, beaming, turned back toward the steering wheel and gripped it tightly. “Follow that car!” he mused aloud. “Step on it, Mac! This is so amazing, so wonderful. I’m just a simple man from a small village. Who could have even dreamed that such a wonderful thing could happen to me here?” He put the car in gear and with a gusto that pinned Sheehan against his seat-back, he shot out from the curb and into midtown traffic.

  16.

  “Due respect,” said Bert, “I’ve never liked your father.”

  He and Glenda were sitting out by the pool, Meg and Peter having discreetly gone out for a bike ride. An afternoon breeze put tiny ripples in the water and the skimmer made a soft sucking sound as the wavelets ebbed a
nd flowed.

  “‘Course,” the old man went on, stroking the chihuahua in his lap, “he never liked me neither. Nah, lemme rephrase that. There came a particular moment in time when he immediately stopped liking me or at least pretending that he liked me and started very obviously hating my guts.”

  “Why?” asked Glenda. “What happened?”

  “Happened?” said Bert. “Nothing happened. It was just something I said to him. I made the basic, fundamental error of telling him the truth. I told him he was a fucking hypocrite. Pardon my French.”

  “You said that to my father?” She couldn’t quite keep a note of awe and maybe vindication out of her voice. She’d never heard anyone except herself say anything but fawning, cautious words to Frank Fortuna. Then again, if anyone would have had the gall to tell him off, Bert d’Ambrosia —known to everyone inside as Bert the Shirt, for his splendid if eccentric wardrobe—would have been the guy. Bert did things no one else would even try, up to and including retiring from the Mob. He’d got out on a technicality: He’d dropped dead years before on the courthouse steps and flat-lined for around ten seconds, thereby fulfilling his oath to be loyal till he died. After that he was once again his own man, free.

  “Yeah, I said that to him,” Bert answered. “Look, there’s nothing wrong with trying to improve yourself. Hey, we all do that. Me, I do crosswords, sometimes I look up big words in the dictionary. Contraindicated. Pusillanimous. That’s different than forgetting who you are, pretending like you never were that guy. What, you play golf, you’re not a goombah anymore? Where’d you come from, fucking Scarsdale, fucking Greenwich? That’s bullshit. Your father didn’t like having that pointed out…But okay, ancient history. What’s going on with you? You and Benny, I hear you’re on the outs.”