Tropical Swap (Key West Capers Book 10) Page 8

  “We are. We were. But I want to patch it up. We’re meant for each other, Bert, it can’t be any other way. Except I can’t find him. That’s why I called you. Maybe you can help.”

  Bert petted his dog and gallantly said he would if he could. The dog for some reason picked that moment to stand up in the old man’s lap and pirouette, its tiny feet dancing all around his crotch.

  Glenda reached behind her and produced the much-examined coconut that had come smashing into the living room. Handing it over, she said, “I wonder what you make of this.”

  Lydia Greenspan was paying her cab fare. Absorbed in the routine business of counting her change and calculating a tip, she took no notice of the short but thickly built man who just then was sliding out of the driver’s seat of his car and positioning himself between her taxi and the entrance to her building. Oblivious to any danger, she opened the cab door and swung her legs out in that prim and careful way that women do. She closed the door and the taxi pulled away. Benny was on her before she reached the curb.

  He may not have been a killer in his heart of hearts but he was very strong and he had skills. In one quick and fluid motion he wrenched Lydia’s wrist behind her back and with the other hand he pressed the muzzle of his pistol hard against her kidney. Prodding with the gun, pushing with his knees against the backs of his quarry’s trembling legs, he said in a ferocious whisper, “Into the car, Lydia. One sound, one move, you’re dead. Open the door and get in.”

  Oddly numb, numb not as from novocaine but from a paralyzing electric shock, she tried to do as she was told but her body wouldn’t move. Benny pushed and folded her into the front seat. The inside handle had been removed from the passenger door and there was a handcuff latched onto the armrest. Benny slapped the other cuff on Lydia’s wrist, bustled around to the driver’s side, and screeched away. The abduction took ten seconds.

  It took fifteen for Andy Sheehan’s taxi to make the turn across Broadway onto 93rd Street, and by the time it reached the scene the agent could not be remotely sure what he was witnessing. The cab he’d been following had vanished. A car with a Florida license plate was careening onto West End Avenue, heading south. There seemed to be a woman in the front seat of the car, though at the distance of three quarters of a block he could not be sure if it was the same woman he’d been tailing. If it wasn’t, where had his target gotten to so quickly? And if it was, why had she taken a taxi all the way uptown only to head down again at once?

  Sheehan squandered a few precious seconds puzzling it out, then by instinct more than thought he screamed at his driver to follow the Florida car. The driver whooped and grinned and shouted things in Urdu as he hurtled down the street. But the chase, hindered at nearly every corner by West Siders shuffling along with canes and walkers and strollers and cellos, proved futile. Sheehan gave it up at 72nd Street with nothing gained except a tag number, and Benny and his prisoner continued on toward the Lincoln Tunnel and the dumping ground that was New Jersey.

  Bert said sagely, “I make of it that it’s a coconut.”

  “Someone threw it through a window the other night,” Glenda told him.

  The old man sadly shook his head. “Our friends, why are they so primitive in their chosen way of sending messages? Other people, they want to send a message, they write an email, they post a twit on Tweeter. Our guys, it’s always the broken window, the dead fish, the horse’s head. What’s with that already?”

  “There’s writing,” Glenda said, and she twirled the coconut so Bert could see the scrawls.

  He studied them carefully, even running his papery fingertips over the nicks and dents.

  “She dies you die,” Glenda recited. “Who’s she?”

  “Of that I have no idea.”

  “And these little markings here and there. It’s exasperating. She dies and you die? If she dies you die? What the hell does it mean?”

  Bert the Shirt grew somber, leaned back in his chair, and stroked his dog like he was rubbing his own chin to help him concentrate. Finally he said, “I’m sorry, Glenda, but I don’t think it means either of those things. I know your father pretty well. He likes to give people, whaddyacallit, ultimatums. Like two stinking choices, pick one.”

  “So…”

  “So I think it means she dies or you die.”

  Glenda seemed to fend off understanding for a moment, then she swallowed back a nasty taste that had risen in her throat. At last she said, “So you’re saying my Benny comes back a murderer or he doesn’t come back at all?”

  Bert stayed quiet and the question hovered in the warm blue air above the pool.

  17.

  In Elizabeth, New Jersey, not far from exit 13 on the Turnpike, there is an area called Bayway that borders a narrow and reeking inlet known as the Arthur Kill and is a very convincing facsimile of Hell. Sickly flames burn in the cracking towers of oil refineries, giving the clouds an orange cast even in the daytime. Rusty tankers and squat, graceless freighters sit jammed together in fetid water that has a morbid rainbow sheen; cranes arrayed at jarring, random angles poke obscenely at the sky. On the fenced and sunken parcels of land not taken up by abandoned factories, junkyards sprout, their metal mountains of detritus growing ever higher, steeper, until their tops collapse and they rain down debris like cold volcanoes.

  It was into one of these sprawling and chaotic junkyards that Benny Bufano drove the car in which Lydia Greenspan was captive. Near the gate, sitting on a metal chair and smoking a stub of a cigar, a single employee gave him just the slightest nod as he lumbered past into the bowels of the enormous yard. He rattled over potholes and through viscous puddles the color of anti-freeze, past a precinct of eviscerated washing machines and dryers, and stopped at last near a tower of compacted cars—sedans and station wagons squashed down like panini and tenuously stacked like dirty plates on a waiter’s tray. He switched off his ignition, expecting quiet. Instead, the car filled up with the roar and whine of unseen bulldozers and the infernal beep-tones of backing trucks and the screams of scavenging gulls.

  For a moment neither the hit man nor his prisoner said a word. Then Benny said softly, “I’m sorry, Lydia. I’m really sorry. This whole thing kind of sucks.”

  She half-turned in her seat, the handcuffs rattling slightly, and looked toward her captor but not directly at him. Mostly she was gazing without focus at an incongruous plastic figurine of a hula girl in a fake grass skirt that was mounted on the dashboard, and beyond it through the windshield. “I’m from Jersey,” she said. “Did you know that? Crappy little town called East Brunswick, maybe fifteen miles from here. Spent my whole life trying to get away. Now I’m back. Ironic, no?”

  Benny had not been able to bring himself to look at Lydia on the whole ride from Manhattan, but now he did. She was actually sort of pretty. She had soft brown eyes, tender but not frightened eyes. Her jawline was firm, her neck sturdy but graceful, and her lips were pale but full. Not knowing that he was about to speak aloud, Benny said, “Why’d you do it, Lydia?”

  “Do what?”

  “Get involved in this. With frauds and mobsters. Why? For the money?”

  She put the tip of her tongue at the corner of her mouth and thought it over for a moment. Then she said, “No. Not really. I mean, I had a job. Dullest job in the world. Librarian at a law firm. Lawyers would tell me to look up cases. I’d find the case in a big leather book, stick a bookmark in it, hand it to the lawyer. That was it, that was my job. Paid the rent. But this…this I did for excitement. For fun.”

  Benny gestured through the windshield at the crushed cars and the garbage. “Fun?”

  “Yeah,” said Lydia. “For a while. For a while it was the most fun thing in my life. Understand, I’d always been a really good girl. Too good. Didn’t shoplift. Never bounced a check. I woke up one morning, thirty-seven, single, boring job, drab apartment, and thought Why? Why have I been so fucking good? Because I’m a wonderful person? No. Because I never imagined being any other way. I never let mys
elf imagine. From that day on, I started to. It was like a whole new way to be. Breaking rules. Stealing lipsticks. Flirting with danger. It was exciting. One thing led to another and here we are.”

  “This is a long way from stealing lipsticks,” Benny said.

  Lydia shrugged, or half-shrugged with the arm that wasn’t bound.

  Benny drummed softly on the steering wheel. After a moment he said, “So if it wasn’t about the money, why’d you ask for more?”

  “Hey, I’m not stupid. They were making millions with that information. I just asked for a raise.”

  “That was a mistake,” said Benny. He said it not in a tone of blame but of collegial sympathy.

  She looked out at the disembodied fenders and the ruptured engine blocks leaking oil and gave a mirthless little laugh. “Yeah, I see that now.”

  “People like this,” Benny said, “asking for a raise, it’s a no-win situation. If you get it, the boss is pissed, he starts thinking about ways to do without you. If you don’t get it, then he thinks you’re pissed and he starts worrying about your loyalty. Starts worrying you might turn. That’s why we’re here, Lydia. You made him worry.”

  “Understandable,” she said. “I get it.” Then, with an almost clinical coolness, she added, “Maybe I got it all along. Maybe I was pushing my luck, asking for trouble. Death wish. Game of chicken. That’s possible.”

  Benny kept drumming very lightly on the steering wheel, the rhythm never changing. “So would you have?” he asked. “Would you have turned?”

  “I wasn’t planning on it, no. Down the road, who knows what I would’ve done? This being bad, it’s new to me, it’s not like I have it all thought out…But how about you? The things you do, the tough guy stuff. It just comes naturally?”

  Benny looked down at his thick strong hands and said very softly, “No. Not really.”

  After that neither of them said anything for what seemed a long while. Outside, gulls cackled and machinery clattered and sulfurous smoke drifted up to mingle with the clouds, but inside the car the awkward silence stretched on. Finally, Lydia said, “I’m getting cold and there’s a really nasty smell around here. Maybe we should sort of move this thing along.”

  Benny said nothing and he didn’t move a muscle. Lydia swiveled as far as she could and looked more full on at him than she had before. “Hey,” she said, “you’re crying.”

  The hit man didn’t answer, just shook his head so hard that the tears flew sideways from the corners of his eyes.

  Lydia said, “Come on, pull yourself together. I’m the one who should be crying. Wait, I think I have a Kleenex in my purse.”

  She managed the clasp with one hand and gave him the Kleenex. He dabbed at his eyes and then he blew his nose and thanked her.

  She said, “You’re welcome. No offense, but I think maybe you’re in the wrong line of work.”

  He nodded but kept on silently weeping.

  “Cheer up,” she said. “It’s nothing personal. I understand that. This had to happen. It’s the way things were meant to play. For both of us. Come on, let’s get it over with.”

  She managed something almost like a smile and gestured with her lifted chin toward the driver’s side door. Benny struggled for a deep breath that stuttered and wheezed against the pressure of his quiet sobbing. Then, finally, he slipped out of the car and moved on unsteady legs to Lydia’s side. He opened her door, unlocked the handcuffs, and walked her through the stink and the clamor to a place on the far side of a mountain of cars where no one would see the execution.

  Moments passed. Gulls screamed. Machinery clanked. When two close-together gunshots finally rang out, their pop and whine added only a paltry and fleeting extra noise to the ceaseless and infernal din.

  18.

  On their rented bicycles, Peter and Meg had meandered among the flaking, whitewashed tombs and mold-darkened, leaning headstones of the above-ground cemetery; through Bayview Park with its mix of daytime drunks and aging tennis players patched-up with knee-braces and adhesive tape; then across White Street, a funky boulevard that smelled like Cuban coffee and drying laundry, toward the ocean. Against a soft breeze that held a tang of iodine, they pedaled up along the promenade, finally pausing to sit down a while on the knee-high seawall out beyond the airport. Pelicans cruised past them, seeming to mimic incoming planes. Small rays scudded along, sucking up tiny crabs from the muddy bottom and blowing out puffs of silt through their gills. Terns dove, sudden sprays of translucent fish arced above the surface, and then, just opposite from where they sat, a large car with purple-tinted windows abruptly pulled up at the curb.

  The passenger door opened; a blast of Latin music and a gust of pine-scented air-conditioning escaped. A big man in fighter-pilot shades stepped out. He wore what appeared to be diamond earrings and his hair was of the length and thickness found in the grass of putting greens, though it was jet black and seemed to have been oiled. He wore tight gray pants and a shiny shirt whose buttons stretched across his chest. He walked up quite close to Meg and Peter and said, “Nice day.”

  The man’s thighs were at the level of their faces and his bulk was nearer than was comfortable. Meg and Peter said nothing.

  “Not too humid,” the man went on. “Some nice clouds here and there.”

  He gazed and pointed briefly at the sky then grabbed Peter by the shoulders and pushed him into the ocean.

  Peter didn’t fall off the seawall all at once. Recoiling from the shove, he strained to grip the concrete with the backs of his legs while whirly-gigging with his arms for balance. He lost altitude a little at a time and ended up slithering more than falling into six inches of softly lapping water. The water was bathtub warm from reflected heat and a little slimy with weeds and algae. Peter sloshed around in it for just a moment as he tried to rise on legs that had turned to jelly from fear and outrage. Then, standing ankle-deep in the ocean and resting his wet forearms on the seawall, he said in a pinched and rasping voice, “What the hell’d you do that for?”

  “You’re friends with Benny Bufano. I saw you leave his place.”

  Meg had sidled protectively, defiantly, between the big man and her dripping husband. “We’re not friends,” she said. “We’re just staying at his house.”

  This didn’t wash with the big man, who apparently was unfamiliar with the home-exchanging concept. “Tell him it’s very rude to stand someone up for a business meeting.”

  “Look,” said Peter, “we can’t tell him anything. We’re not in touch with him. We don’t know anything about a business meeting. Why does everybody keep giving us messages for Benny?”

  The big man had no interest in the broader question and kept on with his own line of thought. “Carlos Guzman is a busy man,” he said. “Wasting his time is just not a good idea.”

  The name sounded vaguely familiar to Meg, though at first she couldn’t place it. Then, after a moment she said, “Guzman as in Guzman Glass? Carlos as in Casa Carlos?”

  “And many other businesses as well,” the big man said with a sort of dog-like pride. “For a little cabron like Benny to blow off a meeting with Carlos, not even to call, that was very, very rude.”

  Meg didn’t argue the point but she still felt she held the higher moral ground. She put her hands on her hips and pointed toward her husband standing in the water. “And pushing someone in the ocean, that’s polite?”

  At that the big man smiled, showing a gold tooth in among the others. “Lady,” he said, “you I like. You got some fuego. So listen, you just tell your friend Benny he needs to apologize about the meeting. That’s all. A nice apology, an explanation, Carlos will listen.”

  With that, he turned and walked back to the car with the purple-tinted windows. Peter waited until the vehicle had driven off before clambering back over the seawall on his belly.

  “Glenda Bufano. Glenda Bufano. That name mean anything to you?” asked Andy Sheehan.

  He’d run the Florida license plate and now was standing in Lou Dunc
an’s office, which was just as cramped and crummy as his own, but made less dreary by assorted photos of Duncan’s wife and kids. Sheehan, long divorced and childless, kept nothing personal on his desk and shelves.

  “Um, offhand, no,” said Duncan. He said it rather distractedly because he was doing some work of his own at the time. Sheehan seemed not to notice this.

  “Eighteen Poorhouse Lane,” he went on, “Key West, Florida.”

  Duncan said nothing and kept trying to get some work done.

  “Just wish I could be sure it was the same woman in that car,” Sheehan mused. “I think it must have been. But why?”

  He started pacing back and forth in front of Duncan’s desk. The motion created a slight breeze that rustled the other agent’s papers.

  “It makes no sense,” he went on, “unless…Unless she was in that car against her will.”

  At that Lou Duncan finally looked up. “Against her will, as in kidnapped?”

  “Maybe.”

  “You saw a woman being kidnapped and you didn’t send out an APB?”

  “I didn’t see it. I’m saying maybe. Besides, I send out an APB, what does it accomplish?”

  “What it accomplishes,” said Duncan, “is that maybe it saves this woman’s life.”

  That didn’t seem to count for much in Sheehan’s reckoning. In his certain and unwavering view, the woman was a criminal, end of story, she deserved what she got. Then again, alive she might prove very useful as an informant. But only if properly managed. “Right,” he said, “and some rookie patrolman makes the bust and handles it badly and blows the thing wide open and there goes our case against Orlovsky.”

  “Our case?” Duncan said. “Your case. Except it isn’t, remember?”

  Sheehan had started pacing again. “Bufano, Bufano. Wasn’t there some low-level guy named that? Years ago. Never had anything on him, just knew he was associated. Lenny? Bobby? Something like that.”