Miami Noir (2 page)
Guy drummed the nub of his red ink pen against his desktop.
“Not more gun dealing,” Guy said. “I’ve had my fill of that.”
“I got so much shit going on I gotta get a bigger appointment book,” Jumpy said. “Name your poison. Something that’ll get me an A this time.”
“I remember one time you mentioned organized crime. That caught my attention. There’s a place in the book I’m working on, I could use some details.”
“The mob,” Jumpy said. Then he looked around Guy’s office at the framed diplomas, the photographs of his kids and wife and two little dogs.
“Might could arrange something,” Jumpy said. “I’ll give you a call.”
“And about that C minus,” Guy said.
“Yeah?”
“I’ll read it again. Maybe I missed something the first time.”
“That’s cool,” said Jumpy. “Maybe you did.”
Jumpy picked Guy up in the Pink Pussycat parking lot at 1 a.m. on Saturday. He was driving a green Jaguar convertible, top down. Chrome wraparound sunglasses and a black aloha shirt with red martini glasses printed on it.
Guy got in, and without a word or look in his direction, Jumpy peeled out, slashed into traffic on Biscayne. Once they’d settled down into the flow of vehicles, Guy smoothed his hand across the leather seat. His long blond hair tangling in the wind.
“Car yours?”
“It is tonight.”
“A loaner,” Guy said, smiling, trying to get with the lingo.
Jumpy looked over. His expression was dead tonight, maybe he was working himself up, or he was nervous, Guy couldn’t tell. That had been his biggest challenge, trying to capture the interior life of a man like Jumpy. Was he constantly on drugs and so blitzed there was no coherent thought rolling through his head? Or was he dumb, just incapable of nuanced feelings or thought? Based on the writing Guy had seen, he was tilting toward the dumb option. Jumpy couldn’t string two sentences together without making half a dozen errors of grammar, syntax, or logic. By the end of a paragraph, Jumpy’s ideas were so insufferably scrambled, making sense of his story was impossible.
Guy was getting good detail from these ride-alongs, some nice asshole-puckering moments of violence, but overall, Jumpy wasn’t giving away a lot about his psychodynamics. What pushed the man’s buttons? Who the hell could tell?
After tonight, Guy figured he’d bail on this whole enterprise. He’d had enough of the street for a while. A night or two like the gun-buy last week could keep Guy satiated for a good long time. His wife, Shelly, had no idea what he was up to. But she could smell the fear on him when he returned, the stink of sweat and cigarette smoke and the prickly tang of danger. And she was beginning to make irritable noises.
So after tonight Guy was done. Cash out, walk away with his winnings. Spend the rest of the semester using this brief immersion in the back-alley world of Jumpy Swanson to fuel his imagination for one more crime novel.
He didn’t know how Jumpy would take it, him making his exit. Or what quid pro quo Jumpy was expecting. C minus was already a mercy grade. And Guy wasn’t about to fudge on his own academic values as payback for a half dozen adventures on the South Florida streets. There would come a day, Guy was pretty sure, when Jumpy would stomp out of his office disgusted with Guy’s failure to give him the secret key to the kingdom Jumpy so passionately and unaccountably wanted. Jumpy Swanson, an author? Oh, get serious.
Jumpy headed north off Biscayne into neighborhoods Guy didn’t recognize. Residential, middle-class, or maybe edging down to lower-middle. The cars in the driveways were mostly midsize, newer models. The houses were dark, probably retirees or working-class folks who’d had their fill of TV movies for the evening and had headed off to the sack.
It wasn’t the sort of neighborhood Guy had been expecting. Though Jumpy had revealed only that his mob friends were eager to meet Guy, a professional writer. Guy assumed the gangsters had the customary overinflated sense of their own glamour and the resulting ambition to have their lives portrayed on the screen, or on the pages of some runaway bestseller.
Guy was always ambivalent about being introduced as a writer. On the one hand, it embarrassed him to be the object of admiration to people who had no inkling what the artistic endeavor was all about. It felt silly to get the little bows of courtesy from illiterates. On the other hand, in an instance like tonight, meeting men for whom crime was a way of life, having some professional connection with the larger world was, to Guy’s way of thinking, like wearing Kevlar. Sure, he was a snitch. But it was all in the open, and for commercial, not legal gains. He’d make sure these guys got a copy of the next book, maybe even put their nicknames on the acknowledgment page. Johnny “The Nose.” Frank “Hatchet Breath” Condilini.
Jumpy wheeled into a yard that was crowded with cars. They were parked in every direction: beaten-up compacts, a brand-new white Cadillac, a couple of BMWs, a pickup truck from the ’60s. Hard to decipher the demographics, but the haphazard parking jobs suggested the occupants had arrived in haste and under the influence of dangerous substances.
There was a peephole in the front door. A cliché that Guy saw instantly he would be unable to use. The man whose face appeared was fat and his greasy skin danced with colored lights. Guy could feel the throb of bass music rising up from the sidewalk, a beat that was as hypnotically slow and primitive as the heartbeat of a dying man.
“Who’s the pussy?”
“I told Philly I was bringing him. He’s the guy, the writer.”
“What’s he write?” the thug said. “Parking tickets?”
“Open the fucking door, Moon.”
The door opened and the wall of music rushed like dark wind from the house. Guy waded past Moon. The man was at least four hundred pounds and he moved with a sluggish wobble like a deep-sea diver running low on air.
“What is this place?” Guy spoke an inch from Jumpy’s ear but wasn’t sure he heard. Jumpy made no response, just led the way across the room.
The living room stretched half the length of the house and through sliding doors looked out on an empty swimming pool and a dark canal. The strobes were covered with colored lenses and Guy was almost instantly seasick. No furniture, no rugs on the terrazzo. Half a dozen mattresses sprawled around the room, where knots of naked people squirmed in the flickering light.
“You brought me to a freaking sex party, Jump?”
The music cut off halfway through his question and Guy’s voice echoed through the room. Someone tittered and there was a muffled groan. A second later, as Guy was still processing his embarrassment, the music restarted, something faster and even louder, and the strobes picked up their pace as well. The air was tainted with chemical smells, booze and weed and other compounds he could only guess at.
Guy followed Jumpy over to a makeshift bar, a long picnic table laid out with iced buckets full of longnecks and pints of gin and bourbon. Jumpy mixed a gin and tonic in a clear plastic cup and handed it to Guy.
“Relax you, put you in the mood.”
He made his own drink, then held up the plastic cup for a clink.
“To improving my grade,” Jumpy said.
“To creating credible characters.” Guy wasn’t backing down on his values for some quick tour of a sleazy hashish den.
Jumpy gulped his drink and Guy followed suit,
mano a mano.
Jumpy led Guy deeper into the house, down a long narrow corridor. This was architecture Guy had seen in dozens of Florida tract homes built in the ’60s. Three bedrooms down that tight corridor, a single bath. Sliding doors on the closets and hard surfaces in every direction. He had never considered such spaces forbidding, but given the present circumstance Guy held back a few paces behind Jumpy, and started to consider his options for escape.
At the end of the hall, the music had softened to a thudding growl. Jumpy halted before a closed door and tapped four times and a voice answered from within.
Jumpy opened the door, then looked at Guy hanging back. “You wanted to meet my people, right? Get down and dirty. Isn’t that the idea?”
Guy felt his fear collapsing into something more extreme. A dark knot of dread. He was not up to this. He felt suddenly trapped, cornered by Jumpy. Conned into deeper water than he’d bargained for. A wave of paranoia rolled and crashed in his gut.
“Philly, meet Guy. Guy, Philly.”
The man was bald and short and his stomach was as tight and perfectly round as a bowling ball. He wore striped undershorts or perhaps pajama bottoms, but was otherwise naked. The room was lit with a vague blue light as though rare mushrooms might be growing in long trays somewhere nearby. It was the master bedroom and was probably half the size of the living room. Its sliding glass door had a view across the canal, looking into the patio of a house where an elderly couple were slow-dancing under paper lanterns.
Philly shook Guy’s limp hand and stepped back to size him up.
“This is Mr. High and Mighty? Pardon me, Jump, but he looks like a fucking twit.”
Guy was turning to leave, to run back the way he’d come, jog all the way home if it came to that, when a hand touched his bare ankle, the fingers sliding around the knobby bone and taking a strong grip.
Down in the blue haze on the bedroom floor he saw the girl, naked, with enormous breasts. Her wispy red hair was tangled and dirty, and there was a sloppy grin on her face as if Mindy Johnston had finally entered the gossamer stratosphere she was always writing about.
Guy staggered away from her touch and lost his balance. He shot out a hand to steady himself, but the wall beside him moved away. As Guy lurched toward it, the wall moved again. He flapped his arms like a clumsy tightrope walker, and after another moment found his equilibrium.
The gin and tonic was spinning inside his skull.
“You son of a bitch.” Guy turned and stepped into Jumpy’s face. “What the fuck have you done?”
“Hey, professor, come on in, the water’s fine.” It was a woman’s voice he vaguely recognized.
He turned back to the mattress and saw beside Mindy was Paula Rhodes, a new grad student who’d been struggling to find her place in the program. A bit more mature than the others, a woman who’d written for New York travel magazines and already had a Master’s degree. She, like Mindy, wanted, for some ungodly reason, to write poetry. To sing the body electric.
She had risen up to her knees and was reaching out to Guy with her unloosened breasts wobbling and her eyes on fire with some chemical enthusiasm. Around the room, he made out at least four other students from the program, all of them tangling and untangling like a nest of snakes.
“Hey, I want to thank you, professor,” Philly said. “You got us hooked up with a better class of consumer than we been seeing lately. I owe you, man.”
Moon, the bull-necked gatekeeper, appeared in the doorway. He too was now wearing only his underwear. Saggy white briefs with dark hair coiling out around the edges. In one hand he was holding a silver tray with syringes and rubber straps, and an array of other nefarious equipment that Guy didn’t recognize. In the other he gripped the barrel of the SAW. Eight hundred—meter range, lightweight, just over twenty pounds with the two hundred—round magazine.
Moon presented the hors d’oeuvre tray to Guy, poking him in the sternum with its corner.
“A little hit of research, Guy?” Jumpy said.
The walls of the bedroom were breathing in and out and the lights had invaded the interior of Guy’s chest.
“You used me. You son of a bitch, you used me to take advantage of these kids.”
“I used
you
, Guy? I fucking used
you
?”
Mindy Johnston’s hand snaked inside the leg of Guy’s trousers, her fingers trickling up his calf. Her voice a swoon.
“Come on, professor. Come on, it’s fun. It’s so wild.”
Guy looked across the canal and saw the old couple still fox-trotting to some melody that didn’t pass beyond their walls. He thought of Shelly, his wife of ten years, the way they used to dance in their own living room. Languorous steps, drifting around their barren house for hours at a time.
Jumpy edged to the door, slipping past Moon into the hallway. Moon slid sideways like the bars of a cell locking into place between Guy and the world he’d known.
“Hey, Guy, enjoy yourself, man. Moon’ll show you the ropes, won’t you, big fellow?”
Moon had stashed the tray and gun somewhere and now had a grip on Guy’s right biceps and was injecting some clear solution into a bulging vein in the crook of Guy’s arm. The room was bigger than Guy had originally thought. The ceiling was no ceiling. Where the roof should have been, there were stars, whole galaxies exposed, comets shooting from left and right. A cool solar wind swirling down from the heavens.
“This is what you wanted, right?” Jumpy said from the hall. “Up close and personal.”
There were bare hands on his ankles drawing him down to the quicksand mattress, down into a pit of flesh and crazy-colored lights, a world he’d written about before. But he’d gotten it all wrong. All completely wrong.
M
ama loved to watch those old movies on TV and she used to tell me that since I was born in Hollywood, she’d named me Kate and I was gonna grow up to be a movie star. Like the dumbshit I was, I believed her. But kids are like that and after she left, when I told Daddy what she’d said, he smacked me upside of the head, called me an idiot, and told me that the movie stars lived out in California, not here in Hollywood, Florida.
So I figured that’s where she went. I’m not stupid and I knew she’d been hitting the crack pipe, but I figured they got drugs out in California same’s here. Sometimes now, I have a hard time remembering what Mama looked like. The last time I saw her she’d got so skinny her elbows looked like broomsticks and her hair had gone all patchy, but I try to push those pictures out of my head. She was gone for some long spells before she finally took off for good. That was when I was ten. Six years ago. And still being a dumbass kid back then, I believed for the longest time that she was gonna come back for me.
Daddy and me been living in this trailer at Pattie’s Ravenswood Marina and Trailer Park on a canal by the airport ever since she left. I knew even if she did come back she’d never find me in this shithole. That’s how Daddy wanted it. Besides, she was probably out in California getting high with movie stars. Daddy said we were better off without her, and I thought, yeah, sure, you’d think that.
I knew my daddy got some kind of disability check from the government, and when Mama was still with us, he spent most of his days either outside lifting his weights, the sweat pouring off him, or inside sitting in his chair watching HSN or QVC on a little TV he had connected to the cable on the pole. And he’d drink beer. I still went to school back then, and I had some friends and could go over to their houses, so I wasn’t home all that much ’cept to eat and sleep.
I used to tell my friends my mama was a movie star, that she was gone lots ’cuz she had to fly to places where they was filming, and then finally ’bout how she’d gone out to California to act in a TV show. We moved before any of her movies come out.
Now, Daddy’s got me working in the office at Pattie’s here, though there ain’t a whole lot to do and he gets my paychecks before I do. Says I owe it to him for rent. Not like he buys us much food around here. We pretty much live off Corn Flakes, powdered milk, mac ’n’ cheese, and the occasional catfish I catch in the canal. He’s got an old Chevy pickup that he drives down to Flossie’s Bar sometimes. That’s when I like it here. Nights when he’s gone and it’s quiet and I can pretend he ain’t never coming back. I pretend I’m going to take a taxi to the airport, get on an airplane for Hollywood, California, go find Mama, and become a movie star. But he always comes back. And if he ain’t too drunk, he always comes to me.
The first time, I was missing Mama so much and I cried happy tears when he come in and hugged me and touched me and told me he loved me. It seemed like the first time in my life he wasn’t calling me stupid. And then all of a sudden it was like, what the hell, and he shoved his finger up inside me. I was only ten and just this dumbass kid who didn’t know what the fuck was going on, but he was my daddy and he was telling me he loved me and I would like it, so what was I supposed to do? We was already living at Pattie’s then, and outside the trailer window there’s these tall poles in the distance with red flashing lights for the airport, and I just watched them, trying not to smell his breath, and counted how many times they flashed until he climbed off me. One hundred ninety-seven flashes.
We’d moved to Pattie’s when Daddy got the job managing the dead storage yard. If you wanted to use your boat pretty much, you put it up in the stacks and Fred over on the other side of the basin drove the forklift and slid your boat out of its parking slot in that four-story beehive. But some people had boats and they just never used them. They had broken motors, holed hulls, peeling paint, and all kinds of palmetto bugs crawling all over them. They ended up with Daddy in the dead storage yard. The rent was cheaper. Daddy showed them where to park their crappy old boats and then they paid him their rent and they never come back for months and months. Some of them never come back at all, seemed to me. I saw boats go into that yard, but I hardly ever seen any come out.
The boats in the marina, most of them didn’t look much better than the ones in dead storage. Some had people living on them and they had so much crap piled on their decks, it was like Pattie’s was some kind of big shit machine. You’d get up in the morning, and it seemed like there were more old tires and rusty boat parts and broken beer bottles than there had been the day before. Shit just came out of nowhere.
About half the trailers in the park were boarded up and abandoned. On one side of us there was this old guy. Daddy called him Bud and he just sat out on his concrete slab and drank beer every day till he passed out. He was deaf and he’d never wear his hearing aids, so even if you did try to talk to him, he couldn’t ever hear a goddamn thing you were saying.
On the other side, the trailer had sat empty for a couple of months ever since old Mrs. Jackson died. I noticed her cat was squalling one day and it didn’t smell too good over there, but I could hear the TV was on inside. She give Daddy a key to her place one time so’s I could feed the cat when she went to see her daughter. I got the key and called out her name, but she didn’t answer so’s I went into her trailer to see what was wrong. She’d died on the crapper in her nightgown with her big cotton panties down around her knees. She’d pitched forward and I found her with her neck bent sidewise on the floor, her eyes open, and her huge fat naked ass sticking up in the air in the doorway of the trailer’s little head compartment. I didn’t even like to look at her trailer no more and Daddy was talking ’bout moving it into dead storage. What was the point? The whole fuckin’ place had become dead storage.
That’s why I was surprised when I got up Saturday morning and saw a truck in front of old Mrs. Jackson’s place and some men was carrying out all the old crap and taking some nice new furniture inside. That’s when I seen Daddy out there wearing jeans and a wife beater, leaning against his pickup and talking to this short redheaded lady who was holding old Mrs. Jackson’s cat, which I ain’t seen since the morning I found the old lady dead. Somebody said it was Mrs. Jackson’s daughter what took the cat, and I wondered if that was her outside talking to my daddy.
When I went out there, I guess the short lady didn’t hear me walk up ’cuz she flinched like she’d been snake bit. The cat jumped to the ground and run off.
“Oh! Child,” she said. “Don’t go sneaking up on people that way. You gave me a fright.” Her voice sounded squeaky as a cartoon character on the TV.
Standing next to her like that, I got the full effect of just how short she was. I could look down on the top of her head and see a line of pink scalp and about an inch of gray hair at her roots.
“You Mrs. Jackson’s daughter?” I asked.
Daddy shook his head and said, “Sorry, ma’am. She’s got no manners. I try to teach her but it just don’t stick. This here’s my daughter Kate. Kate, this is Mrs. Murphy.”
The redheaded lady put out a hand the size of a little kid’s. She was old, though, lots older than Daddy, and heavy makeup was caked on her face, but she probably didn’t weigh no more’n a hundred pounds. When I reached out to shake her hand, she looked scared, like she thought she might catch something.
“Hello,” I said. Her palm was squishy with sweat and she yanked her hand back after one pump. She wore these fake eyelashes like you buy at Walgreens for $6.99. They fluttered at me when she tried to smile.
Daddy said, “Mrs. Murphy’s gonna move into her mama’s trailer. She’ll be our new neighbor.”
For such a little lady, Mrs. Murphy had a good-sized rack on her, and with her low-cut blouse Daddy couldn’t take his eyes off her titties. He kept on talking to her and she kept on backing up, her hands messing with the buttons at the top of her blouse. When her ass hit the side of her trailer, she scooted inside and disappeared.
Daddy sat down at his weight bench and told me to go in and fix him some cereal.
Over the next few weeks I barely ever saw Mrs. Murphy. She mostly stayed inside her trailer, only coming out a few times to drive her little Ford Taurus to the Winn-Dixie to get her some groceries, and even when she done that, she nearly run out to her car like she thought somebody outside was gonna jump out and grab her. One time when she come home in her car, Daddy went over and offered to help carry her groceries but she shook her head no, and she carried those bags up high so’s to cover her chest and her face and she run into her trailer. Daddy laughed out loud.
I seen it all from the windows in Pattie’s Marina office where I went to answer the phones and take folks’ rent checks and mostly just watch TV or jaw with Fred and Pattie. Sometimes I read books. Pattie had a whole bunch of paperback books that folks had left in the office and most of them were pretty good. They were stories about detectives and spies and shit like that. Beat the crap out of watching
Days of Our Lives
with Pattie.
After she’d been living there about a month, Mrs. Murphy come into the office one day to pay her rent. Pattie’d gone out to her boat to sleep off last night’s Jack and Coke and Fred was over running the forklift for some Miami hot-shot. It was just me and her.
“Hey,” I said when she walked in. She didn’t say nothin’ but just pulled her checkbook out of her little handbag and started writing out the check.
“How d’ya like living here at Pattie’s, Mrs. Murphy?”
“Okay, uh, Kate, was it?”
“Yeah. Like the movie star, Kate Hepburn.”
“I’m surprised someone your age would know about her.”
“I’m not stupid, you know.”
“Oh dear, I didn’t mean to say that you were.”
“Mama used to say I have a active imagination.”
“I’m sure you do, Kate,” she said, but she turned away when I looked up at her from the receipt book where I was writing in the number of her check. She had a look on her face like she just tasted milk that had turned.
“You sure do stay in your trailer lots. You don’t work?”
“Well, I did. I’m an administrative assistant,” she said, like I knew what that was, “but I’m currently between positions.”
“What’s that mean?”
She blinked her eyes real fast and those fake lashes looked like moths that just been hit with bug spray. “It means,” she said, and her voice sounded funny, even for her. “It means that I got laid off.” She was stuffing her checkbook back into that little purse of hers and then she zipped the pocket closed like she thought I was gonna reach across the counter and snatch it away from her. “I still have trouble believing it. Four years short of earning a pension. They said I wasn’t quick enough, but that really means they think I’m too old.” She started crying for real and dragged out that word “old” like it had about sixteen letters.
“I’m sorry, ma’am.” I wished I knew what to say. I hated her crying like that. It was goddamn irritating.
“And I keep sending out resumes and the unemployment is going to run out soon. I sold my condo and I’m reduced to living alone in this place.” She looked up at the ceiling like she thought it was gonna just cave in on her that minute, then she snorted up the snot that had started to drip out her nose. I handed her a paper towel from the roll Pattie kept behind the desk.
“Well, Mrs. Murphy,” I said, “living here sure must be lots different from a fancy condo.”
She rolled her eyes. “Don’t I know.”
“Pattie’s Trailer Park’s not exactly what you’d call a good neighborhood. I hope you got plenty of locks on that trailer of yours, ’cuz a pretty little lady like you—”
“What are you talking about?”
“Must make you pretty scared living in a place like this all alone with no one to protect you.”
“Yes, yes, it does. But it sounds like you know something. Has something happened?”
“You haven’t heard?”
“Heard what? What are you talking about?”
“You ain’t heard about the rapist?”
Her eyes grew big and those lashes quit twitching. “Rapist?”
“Yes’m. I figure I better warn you.”
“Around here? Close by?”
“Yes’m. They’re calling him the Trailer Park Stalker in the papers.”
“Oh my Lord.”
I looked down at the greasy countertop, leaned in closer to her, and spoke quiet. “Happened to me. Daddy was down at Flossie’s. He come into the trailer late at night and climbed on top of me and, well, you know. There weren’t a thing I could do. He’s too strong.”
“Oh, you poor child.”
“I wished I’d a had a gun or something. I would’a killed him,” I said, and I meant it.
“Yes,” she said. “I’ve been thinking about that. Getting something for protection.”
I shrugged.
“It must have been so terrible for you. It’s no wonder you dress like that now.”
“Like what?”
“Those clothes—they’re men’s clothes. Those big T-shirts and jeans, and that hair of yours. You know, if you got it cut in a stylish way instead of that mop of snarls, and got your teeth fixed to close up that gap, why, you’d be pretty.”
“Mrs. Murphy, I don’t give a shit about pretty.”
It was about two weeks later, when I was walking over to the office on my day off to get another book to read, that Mrs. Murphy’s door opened a crack and she whispered, “Kate, pssst. Kate.”
When I got to her door, she opened it and pulled me in, slammed the door, and locked it. The inside of the trailer was different now. It was all clean and neat and the furniture looked like it was new and bought all at the same time. There was curtains on the windows with bright yellow sunflowers on them. Against one wall, she had these shelves that looked like miniature boat stacks, but inside each little box was an old-timey doll in a pretty dress.
“Nice place,” I said.
Mrs. Murphy sat down on a couch cushion that was wrapped up in some kinda plastic and patted the seat. “Sit down, Kate, and talk with me for a while. I could use a little company.”