Florida Straits (5 page)

The only problem was the money.

That, and the way Sandra looked when she got
home from work—pale, dressed in long-sleeved business blouses that
were too warm, her light eyes tired behind the big square glasses,
her fingertips gray- green from counting out fresh twenties. He'd
greet her, tan, in a bathing suit, and after hello there'd be a
pregnant silence. Problem was, anything Sandra said—What's new? How
was your day?—sounded to Joey like a reproach. Not that Sandra
meant it that way. She'd sit down on the edge of Joey's lounge
chair and pull her skirt primly over her knees. She'd take deep
breaths of the jasmine and frangipani, getting the stale aftertaste
of air-conditioning out of her lungs, and she'd try to make civil
conversation. Joey, like a sulky teenager whose true frustration is
that he has nothing to hide, would seem to be hiding behind
one-word answers. His day was fine. Nothing was new.

The thing was, Joey would have liked to talk
to her, but where he was from, there were a lot of things you just
didn't discuss with your girlfriend
. What's new? Well, I tried
to take over the numbers racket today. How was your day? Lousy—a
three-hundred-pound Cuban spit fruit on my shoe.
No, this was
not stuff you told your girlfriend, only your pals. But that
assumed you had pals, and who were Joey's buddy-boys down here?
Peter and Claude? So Joey mostly kept mum. As soon as he could, he
moved the conversation away from himself.

"Sandra," he'd say, "those clothes, they're
too hot. You must be like sweltering. Why don't you buy your-self
some new ones?"

By reflex, Sandra would run her hand along
the fabric of her skirt. "This is O.K. for now. After I get a few
paychecks, maybe I'll go shopping."

"And then we gotta get you tan."

Sandra gave a little laugh. "Never happen."
Then she looked down at the still blue water of the swimming pool,
looked at it as if it were a thousand miles away instead of at her
feet. "I wouldn't mind some time to lay around, though."

There it was, thought Joey. Not an
accusation, not even a complaint. Just the truth. Joey was not
holding up his end, and he knew it.

So, a couple of evenings after his meeting
with Carlos, he went downtown to look into the pimping
business.

He wasn't going to be a pimp. He had
standards about that kind of thing—though it was true that, under
the pressures of idleness and exile, he could already feel his
standards beginning to erode. Still, pimps (by which Joey meant New
York pimps) were an unseemly and amateurish lot. They took drugs
and wore idiotic hats, they squandered assets and drowned
themselves in after-shave, their business acumen was in their dicks
and they had no feel for detail work. They badly needed
organization, and that's where Joey would come in—as a sort of
pimp's pimp, to discipline them like they disciplined the women. It
could be a good thing for everybody, Joey thought. Territory could
be fairly assigned. Arguments and slashings could be kept to a
minimum. Everyone would earn more and the public would be
guaranteed a quality product.

Assuming, of course, that Key West had
pimps.

So Joey went down to Duval Street to
interview some whores. But they weren't where he expected them to
be. Key West, being a place that is literally on the edge, out of
sight of neighbors and off limits to embarrassment, is a town where
people go to misbehave, a tax haven for the libido. The
misbehavior, or attempted misbehavior, is focused near the harbor:
the edge of the edge. That's where the tourist bars are, where
college students hurtle out of Sloppy Joe's, bravely trying to
reach the curb before they barf, where bad music from
weather-warped guitars spills through the glassless windows of
Rick's, The Bull, and Margaritaville. By all logic, that's where
the hookers should have been, ambushing sports made frisky by
tequila.

But the streetwalkers had apparently been
moved out of there, in deference, no doubt, to the more sedate
visitors off the second-rate cruise ships and the occasional
parents who had read the wrong brochure and brought their kids
along. So Joey cruised Duval toward its quiet end, the ocean side,
where souvenir shops closed at six
p.m
.,
where people sat on rocking chairs on the porches of guesthouses,
and where on nights of south wind you could hear water splashing on
the rocks. It seemed a strange place to look for hookers, but that
was where they were.

There weren't many of them. On his first
cruise down the street, in fact, Joey spotted exactly one. She was
so skinny that the tendons in back of her knees stuck out like
bridge cables, and from the way she walked, jittery and woozy at
the same time, Joey decided she was probably too strung out to talk
to. So he parked the car, sat down on the seawall, watched the
pelicans move in and out of the glow of lamps on the pier, and
waited. The air smelled of iodine and wet stone. Joey, to his
surprise, became more rather than less patient the longer he sat,
and he dimly realized how thin the line could be between waiting
for something and waiting for nothing.

After twenty minutes or so, a tall redhead
came sashaying down the street. Her wig was done up in a modified
beehive, her short skirt followed the curve of her hips like the
skin on a banana, and her big earrings glinted under the
streetlamps. There was professionalism and even grandeur in her
slightly knock-kneed gait. Joey approached her.

"Wanna party, handsome?" she asked him. The
voice was breathy and suitably lewd, and it issued forth from a
full, bowed mouth to which a purplish lipstick had been applied
with a surprising degree of measure and restraint.

"I wanna talk," said Joey. "Buy you a
drink?"

"For starters," cooed the hooker. She had a
beauty mark stenciled onto her right cheek, and her eyebrows were
tweezed into a steep arc that suggested constant astonishment.

"Where do you like?"

By way of answer, she took Joey's elbow and
led him down Duval Street. They walked in silence for a block and a
half, and Joey tried not to notice that he was greatly enjoying the
rub of her bust against his arm. She was wearing a magenta brocade
blouse that fit like a corset and gave her a cleavage like a baby's
ass. Also, she smelled good; her perfume was citrusy and clean. She
had style, Joey decided. And poise. In New York she'd be at least a
two-hundred-dollar piece.

She maneuvered him into a place called
Workingman's Tropic. Dim, without music, it was not a tourist
joint. At one end, two guys were shooting pool in a golden cone of
light. The bar itself was dark wood bristling with beer spigots.
Here and there, unkempt ferns dangled from the ceiling. Joey and
the hooker sat down at a wicker table, under a plant. Leaves
trailed down and tickled Joey's neck.

A waiter came over and the hooker ordered a
Kir Royale. Joey asked for a scotch.

"You have great-color eyes," she said to
him, clinking glasses. "Almost like Liz Taylor. I've always thought
bedroom eyes should be dark brown. But that dreamy violet—I'll have
to reconsider." She lapped her drink. "So what would you like to
talk about?"

"I wanna talk about what you do."

She scanned his face for a moment, and then
a look of deep concern crossed her features.
Poor puppy
, the
look said.
Can't function? Just want to hear?
Then the kind
look was replaced by a mock scolding one and accompanied by a wag
of the finger. "I never tell tales on other clients," she said.

"No, no, no," said Joey. "You don't
understand. I don't mean
what
you do, I mean how you do
it."

The hooker giggled, rounded her shoulders to
show off her collarbones, and managed a serpentine squirm in her
chair. "That's an art, baby. That's not something that can be
explained over one drink."

Joey took the hand that was cold from
holding his glass and ran it through his hair. "Look. . .what's
your name?"

"Vicki," said the hooker, managing to make
the word sound like some forbidden body part.

"Look, Vicki, we don't seem to be connecting
here. What I'm talking about is the business side. You see?"

Vicki's mouth came out of its bowed smile,
collapsed for a moment into a confused pout, then hardened to a
thin line; her tweezed eyebrows fell from their inquisitive arc to
parallel the narrowed lips. "No," she said, "I don't see."

At that moment there came an unfortunate ebb
in the noise level of the bar, and when Joey spoke again it seemed
as if he was addressing the room at large.

"What I'm asking," he said, "to put it
simply, is, well, do you have, you know, a pimp?"

"A pimp?" said Vicki, not softly.

The pool players put down their cues. Guys
at the bar pricked up their ears.

"A pimp? What're you, crazy? You little
piece of shit, what do you think I am? You think I'm a common
whore, you little limp-dick shitass?"

Joey reached a conciliatory hand toward
Vicki's wrist, but she yanked her arm away. Then she stood up,
knocking over her chair and spilling the remains of her Kir. "I'm
an artist, you little scumbag. You heartless, gutless, sexless. .
.oh sweet Jesus, how I hate people like you."

A thick blue vein was standing out on
Vicki's neck, and her lips were quivering in the effort to shape
more words. None came, only a ferocious exhalation that seemed to
rattle her teeth. Finally, with a green flame of loathing in her
eyes, she reached into her blouse, pulled out a tit, and threw it
at Joey. It was made of hard rubber, and it hurt his ribs as it
bounced off them. The tit landed on the table, wobbled a moment
like a twirled coin, and came to rest nipple side up. The
red-tinted nub stared at Joey like a blind but accusing eye.

"
Marrone
," he said.

The bouncer had arrived. He had a shaved
head that was a smaller outcropping of his neck, a single sapphire
earring, and he cleaved to the notion that the regular customer was
always right and the first- time visitor always wrong. He lifted
Joey out of his chair with such deftness that Joey almost didn't
notice he'd been levitated.

"Hey, bubba," he said, casting a sad glance
at the ersatz bosom on the table, "can't you see you're upsetting
the lady?" His face was close to Joey's and his breath smelled of
nachos.

"Little misunderstanding is all," said Joey.
His arms were pinned to his sides.

"It happens," said the bouncer, and he gave
Joey a sympathetic squeeze that made him burp up some scotch. "So
why don't you just apologize, then go away and never come
back."

Joey looked across the table at Vicki, half
of whose bosom was still heaving with rage. Apologize? Apologize in
public? Apologize in public to a transvestite whore? He, the son,
albeit illegitimate, of Vincente Delgatto? In New York this would
never happen. But this was not New York, and it had gotten through
to Joey that not one person in Workingman's Tropic was on his side.
In a flash of pained and utter befuddlement, he was not even sure
that
he
was on his side. "I'm sorry, Vicki," he managed to
say.

The bouncer eased his grip and Joey filled
his lungs.

Vicki straightened her wig, stuck out her
chin, and mustered as much dignity as her empty bra cup allowed. "I
accept," she said regally. "But only because you've got such pretty
eyes. You little douchebag."

—
7 —

So all in all, it had not been going well
for Joey, and as he sat poolside in his shaving robe and
sunglasses, he pondered the narrowing range of his options. The
bitch of it was that at every moment it seemed to him that he was
very close to getting something started. All it took was for the
first piece of the puzzle to fall into place. An income
opportunity—
any
income opportunity—would allow him to go out
and hire some muscle, and he'd be set. Or if he could somehow get
some muscle behind him, the income opportunities would create
themselves.

But how did you start? And how low could you
go? Already Joey had faked car trouble on U.S. 1 so he could flag
down a supermarket truck and propose to the driver that maybe a few
hundred pounds of sirloin steak should fall out the back; the
teamster had answered by producing a crowbar from under the
driver's seat. Next, Joey had casually broached the question of
insurance with the proprietor of a local surf-and-turf emporium;
the restaurateur said he would check his policy and came back from
the kitchen whispering to a pair of slathering Dobermans with stud
collars. No one in Key West seemed the slightest bit afraid of
Joey, and he found this disconcerting. It made him secretly suspect
that even in New York no one had been afraid of him, only of the
yeggs he ran with.

"Sandra," he asked one night in bed, "do you
think I'm like, what's the word, intimidating?"

Sandra Dugan was not a woman of wide sexual
experience, but the most basic of intuitions told her that if you
cared about a guy, you didn't giggle at him when you were between
the sheets. Instead, she seriously appraised his face. It was
boyish, no getting around it. The blue eyes were lacking in threat,
the half-curly hair was lamblike in spite of Joey's efforts to keep
it slick and tough. Only the cleft in the chin suggested the
possibility of violence, and the cleft in the chin was barely
visible. "No, Joey," she said, "I wouldn't call you intimidating."
Then, to soften the blow, she asked a somewhat disingenuous
question. "But why would you wanna be?"

Joey measured his need to talk against the
tenets of his code. He couldn't say he wanted to look scary so he
could shake guys down. "Ya know," he said, "just so I could, like,
persuade people to do things for me."

"People do what they want," said Sandra.
"You want people to do things for you, Joey, you have to make them
want to."