Mr. Paradise A Novel (22 page)

“Or more if the value went up?”

Her dad was a gambler who always had his trade, scissors and a comb. When she was sixteen, talking about getting into modeling, he’d said, “Sweetheart, go to barber college and get a trade first. You ever see me I don’t have money in my pocket?”

Tonight he’d say, “What’s the stock?”

“Del Rio Power.”

“Never heard of it.”

“But you’re not in the market.”

“Not as long as you can bet at a casino.”

“I’m about to look it up. But tell me what you’d do.”

“I’d check to see what it’s actually worth. See, then you have to decide what your price is. If you get caught for stock fraud or forgery, I doubt you’d do more than a year, if that. Get a dress at St. Vincent de Paul to wear to court. What’s the risk of having a sheet worth to you? Assuming you can handle your conscience okay. Think of it as nobody’s money. What’s wrong with putting it in the economy?”

She’d lay it out before him to see what he’d say, not to take his advice.

“Okay, what’s your price?”

Her dad would say, “You kidding? At a million six I’d go for it. Wouldn’t you?”

K
ELLY SAT AT THE
computer in the study with a Slim and a scotch. The stock certificate and statements from Del Rio Power came in a green folder with DRP in an elaborate design on the cover, the folder open now next to the computer. The statements told that the original 5,000 shares of stock were purchased in 1958 at eight dollars a share. Since then the stock had split twice, making Anthony Paradiso the owner of 20,000 shares. A form, signed by Paradiso, would transfer the stock to Chloe Robinette once she added her signature.

Okay, he’d paid forty thousand for the stock forty-five years ago, no doubt on an inside tip. Let’s see what it was worth now.

Kelly keyed in the Web address for the New York Stock Exchange, got the home page, and in the symbol lookup window entered DRP and clicked the quick quote button.

It came back with “Error: Symbol Not Found.”

She said, Uh-oh, entered “Del Rio Power” into another window and clicked search. Now she got a headline that read “NYSE to suspend, apply to delist Del Rio Power, Inc.”

Shit.

She got out of the Stock Exchange and found Del Rio’s Web page through Google. It told her the company was a North American provider of natural gas . . . has a core business
in the production, gathering, processing . . . and was committed to developing new supplies and blah, blah, blah . . . Kelly clicked on market data and got the company’s fifty-two-week history, the price of Del Rio stock one year ago was $81.40 a share, making the whole load worth $1,628,000. She clicked on current value and looked at it, sat back in her chair and said, “Shit,” feeling let down, even though she wasn’t that surprised.

The current price of Del Rio stock was 53 cents a share.

She heard her dad say, “Yeah? What’s wrong with ten thousand six hundred?”

Kelly went back to the Google search list and clicked on a
Business Week
story about “Fraudulent energy trading . . . Could be looking at bankruptcy proceedings . . . Trying to work out a settlement with states where they owe money . . .” and heard her dad calling them a bunch of crooks.

Now she tried to imagine what Chloe would say, hanging in as the old guy’s mistress for almost a year, for what she made in two weeks. She wouldn’t throw a fit. She’d say, “Fuck,” and let it go. But then she might play with it, say something like, “Maybe it’ll come back,” in an innocent tone of voice. Or, “Maybe I should sell before it goes any lower.” Kelly loved her, loved to sit with Chloe, both sunk in the sofa with drinks and Slims, talking about movie stars, about Iraq, Chloe saying, “Throw out Saddam, you get one of those guys wears his turban on the back of his head.” Or she’d say, “It takes a heartless dictator to handle those nuts over there.”

She missed Chloe and her stories about guys trying to act cool and did everything she could not to see her sitting in the
chair in her blood. She would think of Chloe, feel herself moments from tears, and would think of Frank Delsa and the way he looked at her. He was almost always on her mind.

She knew Montez would phone from downstairs on his cell, wanting to come up. When he called, he had to first tell her what the bouncer did. “The man threw me out on the street in my good coat.”

“You sound like it’s my fault.”

“What’d you say to him? Nothing, not a word.”

“You mean I should’ve explained we’re friends, working on a fraud scheme? Getting thrown out of Alvin’s isn’t your problem. You want to know what the stock’s worth?”

He paused before saying, “All right, how much?”

“As of the closing bell today, fifty-three cents a share.”

“Hey, come on—I don’t believe you.”

“Down from eighty-one forty a year ago.”

“You’re playing with me, aren’t you?”

“It comes to ten thousand six hundred. Not worth your time, Chops. You want the stock certificate? I’ll mail it to you.”

Montez said, “Now wait a minute, hold on. I want to talk to you.”

“Go ahead.”

“Come on, babe, buzz the door for me.”

“I would,” Kelly said, “but there’s nothing you can say that I want to hear.”

Now a pause before Montez said, “Turning on me, huh? The money ain’t what you expected.”

“I told you from the start I wouldn’t help you,” Kelly said.
“Why can’t you understand that?” She said, “Listen, Frank Delsa’s on his way over. You want the certificate or should I give it to him?”

“How you explain you have it?”

“I tell him you gave it to me. I’ve told him everything else. What’s the difference?”

Montez said, “You’re fuckin with me, aren’t you?”

“You don’t believe me, look it up. Or I can e-mail you the story, if you want—why Del Rio Power, already in the toilet, is about to go down the drain.”

Montez said, “You gonna hear glass breaking out here, you don’t open the door.”

Kelly reached in her bag for her cell and said to Montez, “And you’ll hear the nine-eleven operator on my cell ask what’s going on.” She said, “I forgot to mention, Delsa has the two white guys staked out. If I were you, Chops, I’d get out of town.”

Kelly heard him say, “You think you done with me?”

She hung up the phone, got Delsa’s card out of her bag and called his cell number and heard his voice say, “Frank Delsa,” in that quiet way of his.

Kelly said, “I’m home and Montez is downstairs.”

D
ELSA STEPPED INSIDE THE
loft and turned to Kelly, her back to the door. He said, “He wasn’t outside,” and hesitated, barely, before she was in his arms and they were kissing in that dark hallway like they would never get enough of each other, her hands slipping inside his jacket, sliding over his ribs. They
kissed and held each other and he told her, “I’ve been wanting to do this since the other night.”

She said, “Love at first sight?”

He said, “Almost. It was when you came out of the bathroom with your face washed.”

“It’s working out,” Kelly said. “I planned to jump you if you came over tonight. I’m not a witness anymore, I’m out of it,” and told him about getting the stock certificate while a homicide cop’s son was rapping—Delsa saying, “Hush”—and about looking up the stock and telling Montez the million six was now ten six and going fast. “You want the certificate?” She said, “I have it,” leading him to the counter in front of the kitchen where the papers were lying.

She asked him what he wanted to drink. He said anything and she poured them each a scotch. They touched glasses eye to eye, put the glasses on the counter and took hold of each other and got into more of that first-time kissing, neither of them getting enough of the other until he whispered to her, “You’re no longer a suspect. But you’re still a witness.”

She stood in her wool socks looking up at him.

“But you don’t care.”

“This is bigger.”

She was nodding. “You’re sure I’m not a suspect?”

“I think you were tempted, so you played it out.”

Still looking up at him she said, “ ‘If you want me to, I’ll love you. I know you better now.’ “

He remembered the key word but not the line he’d have to make positive. He said, “And I’ll be glad to reciprocate,” and had to smile. “Who wrote that?”

“John O’Hara.”

“I thought he was supposed to be good.”

“He was. I love his short stories, especially the ones set in Hollywood. O’Hara drank a lot and was near the end when he wrote this one. It’s called
The Instrument
. But he also wrote
Appointment in Samarra,
about not being able to escape your fate.”

“Like Montez,” Delsa said. “No matter what he does to slip out of this one, he’s going down.”

She said, “I was thinking more of us.”

“I know what you mean. There’s a lot we haven’t said.”

“We’ve barely said anything.”

“See, but Montez still might want the ten six. Try to get you to sign the paper.”

“I’m giving it to you,” Kelly said, “and the driver’s license. There won’t be any way I can help him. But you’re probably right. The last thing he said to me, on the phone, ‘You think you’re done with me?’ “

“That’s all?”

“I hung up on him.”

“That’s why you’re still a witness, I don’t have him yet. Or the two guys. We’ve got the prints of one of them on the same vodka bottle with Montez’. It could put them together at the house—if you’ll testify that’s what the old man was drinking, the Christiania. And I’d like you to look at the two guys in a lineup. If you can put them at the scene that night, they’re done. We’ll pick ’em up if they ever come home. Carl’s wife Connie says he stays with Art a lot of the time. Art lives in Hamtramck with Virginia Novak. We checked, they’re
not married, but have a statue of the Virgin Mary in the front yard holding a birdbath. I’m hoping it was Art’s idea. I didn’t tell you their names, did I? Art Krupa and Carl Fontana. They could’ve met at Jackson, they were both there at the same time. They come out and for the past year and a half they’ve been shooting drug dealers, and then Paradiso.”

“And Chloe,” Kelly said.

“And Chloe. Montez hired them to do the old man. But how did he find out about them? Look at it another way. How did they get the contracts to take out the drug dealers? These two guys wouldn’t ordinarily have much to do with African-Americans. It’s like they have someone who arranges the hits. Like a manager.”

“Or an agent,” Kelly said. “Have you ever heard of that?”

Delsa shook his head. “No.”

“You want to spend the night?”

“Yeah, if I can take a shower first.”

She said, “We can do that.”

TWENTY-FOUR

THE COUNTER GIRL TOLD DELSA IT
happened during the break time, going on eleven, between the Egg McMuffins and the Big Macs, “The three dudes come in—I look at the one and think I know him. Yeah, it’s Big Baby, still with the puffy cheeks. He lived down the street from us on Edison. I’m about to call to him, Hey, Big Baby, and surprise him ’cause he won’t remember me from living on Edison. But then I see all three dudes pulling guns, Big Baby taking a sawed-off shotgun from outta his clothes, the two dudes with nines they hold sideways—know what I’m saying?—like they can shoot these guns any way they want. The one dude goes to the back, the other dude has his gun on Mr. Crowley by the french fry station, telling him he wants the money he knows is put somewhere. Big Baby tells us in front—they’s three of us—get down on the floor and don’t move. Right then the one yelling at Mr. Crowley, the manager, shoots him and Big Baby says, ‘What you shoot him for?’
like he can’t believe it. But see, he only shot him in the leg, up here, and the dude shot him is still yelling for the money. See, then Big Baby gets me up from the floor account he’s swearing, he can’t open the fuckin register. I open it and he say to me open the other two while he’s cleaning out the first one. Right then they’s two shots and I see Mr. Crowley fall by the carry-out window and I see the dude aim his nine at Mr. Crowley lying on the floor and shoot him two more times. Now the three dudes are yelling at each other, ‘What you shoot him for?’ ‘You didn’t have to shoot him.’ The dude that killed him saying he wouldn’t give him the fuckin money, and saying they got to get out of here. Big Baby and the other dude follow the first dude out and get in a ’96 Grand Marquis that’s a dark color, but I didn’t see the license good.”

Delsa was listening but thinking of last night, looking through scenes in his head, stepping into the shower and Kelly turning to him, water streaming over her naked body, her perfect breasts, her navel, Kelly smiling at him and laughing out loud as he said, “Heil Hitler,” and to the counter girl, “Do you know Big Baby’s real name?”

She said, “No, I only heard people speak of him as Big Baby, but I never knew why.”

Delsa, seeing Kelly on the bed in lamplight, her arms reaching for him, said, “You didn’t know the other two?”

She said, “No, I didn’t,” and said, “I told you I lived on Edison? The house was on the corner of Rosa Parks Boulevard and my name is Rosa account of I was named for her? I thought I would live there the rest of my life. But what
happen when I was twelve, my daddy lost his job at Wonder Bread and we were evicted for not paying the rent.”

Delsa said, “That’s a shame,” remembering them in bed barely dry after the hurried shower but not caring.

“My mama and daddy’s living on LaSalle Gardens now. It’s nice there, they gentrified it. I live in Highland Park with my boyfriend Cedric, on Winona? He’s valet at the MGM Grand.”

“Later on today,” Delsa said, handing her his card, “come down to police headquarters and we’ll write up your statement. But give me a call first, we might have to do it tomorrow. Is that okay, Rosa?”

She said she guessed she could.

Delsa looked at the manager on the floor thinking there would always be this kind of work. The middle of April the manager would be, what, the one hundredth homicide? About that. Business would pick up in the summer maybe enough to match last year’s four hundred homicides. Delsa had been at it eight years out of seventeen with the Detroit Police, started at the Seventh Precinct in radio cars, went to Violent Crimes and now Homicide. In less than eight more years he could retire on half pay. He’d be forty-five. Then what? Corporate security. He had taken prelaw at Wayne, kept putting off going to law school and now he didn’t care much for lawyers. What he knew was how to investigate a homicide, how to peel open a case and find out who was who, the ones lying to him and the ones telling him things he could use, until finally meeting the suspect and knowing he had him by the nuts, this arrogant guy who could not believe you’d ever take him down, and you present
the evidence and watch his face, watch his fuck-you expression fade looking at twenty-five to life or life without parole. There was nothing like that moment. No guns, no need for them. Just that one time he’d fired his Glock intending to do great bodily harm if not to kill. Maybe he should’ve told the second guy to put it down, the guy with Maureen’s gun, but he didn’t and wasn’t sorry. He said to himself in the McDonald’s on West Chicago, This is what you do. Stick around and you’ll make inspector. The section was due for a white guy running the squads. But now he went back to cutting through scenes in his mind from last night to making love in the first light of morning. Now he was having breakfast in Kelly’s terrycloth robe that was tight on him but felt good. Each time she brought something to the table, the paper, the coffee, the toast, she would touch his face and kiss him on the mouth. He would watch her walk to the kitchen in a heavy wool sweater that covered her black panties and wool socks sagging around her legs and would wait to see her face coming back, looking at him.