Hard Case Crime: Dutch Uncle (23 page)

Irish Mike’s tidbit stung Harry. He was wounded, but not because De Steffano had scooped up Julia. All anybody ever did was act according to his character, and Jimmy was always the kind of guy who’d get your girl in bed the second your back was turned. No point expecting him to change now.

But De Steffano’d had a golden opportunity to come clean. Instead, he’d let Harry find out through somebody else. That’s what got him. Julia wasn’t his girl anymore, and what he had to keep in mind, the one thing he did not want out of this life or any other, was Julia Stencyk hanging around his neck like a stone. But De Steffano could at least have told him.

Every bill was due. Phone, three months worth of cable TV, Con Edison. A charge account had been turned over to a collection agency, one of Julia’s financial managers having fallen down on the job.

Harry sorted through Julia’s jewelry box for a pair of diamond-stud earrings he’d bought her during a flush period. He found them easy enough, slipped them into his pocket, and started opening dresser drawers. There was a copy of his birth certificate in here somewhere, and he wanted it.

He should’ve avoided the drawer where she kept her photographs, but he didn’t. There were recent photos of Julia with Jimmy, among the same faces and in the same places that she used to hang out in with Harry. He dug through stacks of snapshots and landed in the Harry era, Harry and Julia with some castmates from her sitcom, all grown up and doing pretty badly. Harry and Julia flanking the old man after a gig. Harry looked pretty drunk in that one.

What do you know, Miami Beach. Harry and Julia entwined on the sand, the ocean rolling behind them. That must have been their first day there. Wait a minute. Behind them, featured in a series of three photographs of Harry and Julia kissing — he recognized this girl, the deep suntan, those shoulders. It came to him slowly. She was the girl from Manfred’s room. Jennifer.

He heard the locks clicking and walked out to the front room to meet Julia, who let out a little yelp and dropped the shopping bags on the floor.

“How did you get in here?” she said.

He held up the picture of Jennifer and said, “How do you know this girl?”

“What are you doing here? You want your stuff? Take it. I’ve been saving it for you.”

“Answer my question,” Harry said. “How do you know her?”

“How dare you go through my things? I should have you arrested right now.”

She picked up the phone and started pushing buttons. Harry grabbed the receiver out of her hand and smashed it against an end table, a contained explosion that sounded like a shot.

“This girl,” he said, “was in Manfred Pfiser’s hotel room on the day he got shot. I made a delivery for him, and when I got back to his hotel, this girl was gone and Manfred was dead on the floor. Who is she and what did she have to do with it?”

Julia said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

She got a cigarette situated between her lips, and sent out the search party for a match. But she didn’t have one. She never did.

“For an actress, you’re a terrible liar.” Harry got up close to her, and dug his fingers into the fleshy part of her arm.

“You’re hurting me.”

He squeezed, and it buckled her knees. “Julia, honey,” Harry said, without raising his voice, “I’m gonna do a lot more than that if you don’t start giving me some answers.” He applied more pressure, then let her go.

“I met her in Los Angeles on a job, and she was in Miami when we were there. Her name is Vicki. She’s an actress.”

The white marks from Harry’s fingers had turned to red.

“What do you know about a guy named Leo?”

“Leo Hannah? They’re friends. He and Vicki and Lawrence Lendesma. They’re Miami people.”

“So you were in on it, too.”

“In on what? Have you lost your mind?”

Harry took a step toward her and Julia put up her hands. “She called me in March. She wanted to know when you were getting out of jail.”

“And you fucking told her?”

The cigarette quivered in Julia’s mouth. She walked over to the stove, held back her brand-new Cleopatra hairdo, and hunched over a burner. Straightening up, she took a deep drag.

“She said Leo wanted to make contact with you, that you two met in jail, and he was looking forward to seeing you when you got out.”

“How did she find out about Leo and me?”

“I don’t know.”

“Julia—”

“I swear to God, Harry, I don’t know.”

Harry brushed past her. All the things he’d wanted to say to her, everything he’d wanted to get back, none of it meant a thing.

Downstairs, Felix was worrying a powder-fed facial tic, his upper lip pulling back to reveal new, managedcare teeth, his jaw pulsing to a beat only he could feel. He was holding the door for a toddling relic in mink.

A thick chill dampened the twilight, the top third of the Empire State Building glowing pale through the settling fog. People swarmed on the sidewalks, umbrellas up, but the mist in the air was hardly like rain.

Harry felt sick, and leaned against the wall of a building for support. What was going on? Leo and Julia... Vicki, who he’d only met once, and Jimmy De Steffano, who he’d known all his life... was there anyone who wasn’t going out of their way to make him suffer? His own father couldn’t get rid of him fast enough, for god’s sake.

An image came to him then, Aggie at the bus station, just before she slapped him, asking “All I want to know is, where do I fit in?” And then the answer he’d given her.

The tears were bitter. He let them go.

Nobody took the trouble to give the boy a name, just two initials that didn’t stand for anything. It wasn’t the first time Martinson encountered this phenomenon, or even the second, and it wasn’t all that much of a phenomenon around Campville, JP Beaumond’s birthplace, a roach turd on the map a short shot east of Gainesville.

Five feet, four inches, one-hundred and fifty-nine pounds, his mean, dull eyes struck a near-perfect match with his mouse-brown hair. These mugs were snapped before Beaumond went to jail the last time. His record indicated he had a tattoo of a rebel flag on his left shoulder, and a chunk of meat gouged out of his left thigh, most likely an old stab wound.

His first run-in with the law came at age nine, when for no reason that was mentioned, JP slit the throats of six of his neighbor’s chickens, and the neighbor pressed charges, along with the county chapter of the ASPCA. Beaumond’s family was ordered to make restitution for the birds.

A few years later, the underage JP snuck out of a package store with a pair of Colt 45s, the bottled variety, then broke one of them over the head of the clerk attempting to apprehend him. This led to a brief hospitalization for the clerk, and a juvie bid for the ambitious JP, now moving up in the world, at a detention home outside of Middleburg. He earned two county bounces for a B&E and an assault, respectively, and did his first state jolt at the not-so-tender age of eighteen, after the deceitful JP borrowed his brother-in-law’s car, then neglected to bring it back. Two years on the inside, six weeks out, the unlucky JP had a return engagement at the Big House for selling three-and-a-half grams of cocaine to an undercover policeman in St. Augustine.

Which brought them pretty much up to the present, although in JP Beaumond’s case, everything was past for him now, and there wasn’t going to be any future. Somebody made certain of that when they shot him twice with a .25 caliber pistol and rudely pitched his body into a canal in the Everglades.

Hardly a week went by that some law enforcement agency wasn’t pulling a stiff out of that grassy river, a body some tour guide or fisherman found floating. Arnie thought by now even the dimmest bulb realized this feed-the-guy-to-the-alligators crap never panned out. An alligator would not eat a man unless he was starving, and being absolute boss of his neighborhood food chain, the alligator was never starving. Lazy, yes. Cowardly, yes. Hungry, no. All the same, somebody out there must’ve been feeling a bit peckish: Beaumond had a big bite taken out of his side.

It was a thoroughly unprofessional dump job. The victim’s wallet was in the hip pocket of his pants, and it contained twenty-seven dollars cash, a suspended Florida driver’s license, and another one from Georgia, assigned to Clement Snipe. It had JP Beaumond’s picture on it. Also, Visa, Master, American Express, and Automobile Association of America cards, all in the name of Theodore Kistler.

It was too bad Beaumond was dead. Martinson wasn’t sorry the world was minus one Campville native of JP’s standing, but he would’ve liked to talk to him. He must have finally pissed off the wrong guy. Leo Hannah, for instance. Or this Alex character Victoria Leonard was covering up for. Plenty of other people, too. But Arnie Martinson was in no way obligated to investigate the murder of this piece of shit, a Dade County headache all the way down the line.

Lili was rarely in this part of town after dark, and she was getting a good dose of why. The sidewalks were clogged with noisy Italians, Germans with seven-figure Swiss bank accounts, and blonde bunnies who seemed like they’d been raised in Midwestern towns but were too frail to be farm girls. Hip-hugging corduroys showcased their narrow figures, exhibiting brown bellies and pierced navels. Every fifty feet or so, one would uncork a mind-bending whinny, and throw her arms around another girl who looked just like her and happened to be approaching from the opposite direction.

The sneakers that encased each and every one of their feet made Lili’s pumps feel like mukluks. She looked like somebody’s maiden aunt with her wavy hair, mannish and out of it in this blue blazer over the white button-down shirt. But she wasn’t competing with these girls, she was at least ten years older than most of them, and she wasn’t doing a night on the town, she was working.

Though it was before eleven, there was a line outside the Calabash. A velvet rope divided patrons from a doorman holding a clipboard. He was wearing a pinstriped suit and a pair of black and white wingtips, a grey hat with a snap brim that dove down over his left eye. His hair needed to be cut. The gel that held it together was failing. He took shallow puffs from a gold-filtered cigarette, chatting with a grim, steroid-bloated bouncer. Lili felt the nervous energy radiating out of him like a stink.

She tugged the collar of her white, button-down shirt, then walked right up and badged him.

He said, “How you doing tonight?” His skin reflected the violet neon of the club’s sign.

“I’m looking for somebody named Alejandro or Alex. Tall, thin, mid-twenties. Probably Cuban.”

“I know two guys named Alex,” the doorman said. “One’s a French guy who owns a restaurant on Alton Road, and the other one is married to my sister. They have two kids and they live in Sarasota.”

He reached over and unclipped the rope to let four people pass, then re-attached it. When the bouncer pulled the door open, Lili looked in and saw the club was deserted. The line was getting longer. Why were they making these people wait?

“He hangs around with a guy named JP Beaumond,” Lili said, and saw the doorman’s eyes flash on the name. He took two quick steps toward the stanchion, where he raised the rope again, letting in six more bodies.

“Beaumond, huh? Don’t know him.” He walked to the curb, his heels clicking, and flicked his gold-tipped cigarette into the street. He patted his pockets for the pack. He was lying.

“I’m going to go in and see if any of the staff can help me.”

“No problem,” he said, glad to be rid of her. “Be my guest.”

He signaled the bouncer, who opened the door, and Lili stepped into a cloud of music and swirling, cobalt light. The name Calabash must’ve been picked from a hat. There was no discernable theme in here, and the overpowering air-conditioning, coupled with the absence of a single stick of furniture, made the club feel as cold as it looked.

It was an enormous square, like a low-ceilinged aircraft hangar. The few souls inside threaded the emptiness like they were waiting to meet a guide. If they were scouting out a place to blend in, there wasn’t one. And nobody to blend in with, except maybe the hardball security crew deployed in strategic spots around the floor.

The bar was built of concrete and corrugated steel, a forbidding hulk that hummed with an industrial wasteland vibe. Three bartenders stood behind it, doing nothing but folding their arms against the chill.

Lili keyed in on the balding one wearing black jeans and a black t-shirt that said Calabash, South Beach in tiny letters where a pocket would’ve gone. Six feet, one forty, light build. He ran his hand over his scalp, smoothing his wispy hair back-to-front.

“What can I get for you?” He rested his elbows on the bar. His skinny arms matched the rest of his body. Lili showed him her badge and asked about a tall, Cuban kid named Alex.

“Not by that name,” the bartender said. He leaned in, his head close to Lili’s, to holler over the blare. “I try not to bother too much with their names. It gets like that when you’ve been at this as long as I have.”

He straightened and blew out a sigh. Lili smelled vodka on his breath.

“What about a guy named JP Beaumond?” Lili showed the bartender his mug shots.

“Oh, yeah,” he said. “Him, I know. We threw him out not too long ago, caught him selling coke in the bathroom. Little piece of swamp trash about four feet tall. Extremely bad news. He’s well known to the bouncers on the Beach, I mean, enough so they’d keep him out of a joint.”

“Then how come your doorman didn’t know him?”

“Did you show him the pictures?”

Lili didn’t answer. The doorman had hinked on the name. Maybe he had something working with Beaumond.

“Because Ralston knows everybody. But if I was looking for this creep, I’d try the Switching Station. They don’t do much with models or trendies, but they draw a late-night crowd of local skanks. Might be a bit early but it’s worth a shot. And if you strike out there, go to Loby’s Ron-Da-Voo.”

The dealers who were holding scattered away from the unmarked, city-owned vehicle that was as much of an advertisement for Beach law enforcement as any patrol unit. Lean, brown-skinned teenagers, their long, slow legs took them in various directions as Martinson rolled up to the curb.