Sunburn (20 page)

"We're gonna be there nice and early," he said.

Pretty Boy yawned, put his feet up on the glove box. "Who gives a shit? I coulda slept another half an hour."

"Half an hour," said Bo, "the trucks woulda started, d'early part a rush hour; we woulda stood here gettin' aggravated."

"An' I don't see why we're flyin' outa fuckin' Newark."

"Ya look at a map," said Bo, as they drove under the second stanchion, "you'd be amazed: different state and all, 'sno farther thanna New York airports."

Pretty Boy didn't care to look at maps; he yawned again. He'd popped a few Halcion to defeat the benedrine so he could fall asleep. The small blue pills hadn't quite worn off, and he didn't want them to.

The geography-minded Bo went back to a previous line of reasoning. "An' dis half-hour thing? Makes a huge difference. Say we're drivin' straight tru. Dis half hour gets us tru Jersey before it's really da worst a rush hour. Rush hour, we're in Delaware, and Delaware, I don't think they got rush hour in Delaware. By da time we hit D.C., rush hour's—"

"Bo," pleaded Pretty Boy. "We ain't drivin' straight tru. So will ya shut up and drive?"

The scarfaced thug frowned at his partner, shrugged, and looked off at the coastline of Staten Island.

But now the handsome thug gave a bent, carnivorous smile. Something had occurred to him that cheered him up. "Dis time we're flyin', Bo. Ya know what that means, Bo? It means we ain't cartin' anybody back wit' us this time."

———

"What about I buy the dog a separate seat?" said Bert the Shirt. He was sitting in his cluttered living room at the Paradiso condo, reclining in his oxblood Barcalounger with the phone perched precariously on the arm.

Bert watched Don Giovanni lying white and rigid on his discolored dog bed in the middle of the discolored carpet. Abandoned squeak toys—a plastic hamburger, a hotdog with rubber mustard— were strewn under the glass-topped coffee table and against the skirt of the old brocaded couch. "This dog," he said, "ya give this dog a sleeping pill, he ain't ever wakin' up."

There was a grudging pause. It was a busy time of year for travel agents. "So shall I book the one ticket, the dog to go as cabin baggage?"

Bert just nodded. In his preoccupation he'd forgotten for the moment that he was on the phone, he had to talk. He squeezed out a yes, and the travel agent fired off a salvo of flight numbers, seat numbers, the terminal to transfer to, which airport bus to take. Bert took in none of it beyond the stark fact that he had to be at Key West airport at seven-thirty next morning.

He hung up the phone. His hand was unsteady and he wasn't really watching; the receiver bumped the base and the whole thing clattered to the carpet. Don Giovanni gave a convulsive quiver at the noise, glanced up at his master, and instantly absorbed Bert's debilitating dread. Standing up on its cushion, the dog did a couple of slow yet frantic pirouettes. It managed to lift a leg just slightly; the effort was like an old man's memory of when he had a jump shot. A single drop of urine dribbled out of the distracted creature.

The chihuahua stepped away and sniffed at the damp place as though the drop had fallen from the sky. Bert got up very slowly and walked stiffly to the bedroom to ferret out some winter clothes.

"Killing," said the Godfather. "Y'ask me what I wanna talk about tonight, I wanna talk about killing."

Arty Magnus spread his cheap blue notebook on his lap and hoped his Adam's apple hadn't jumped too much when he swallowed. He was trying his best to look unshockable. He used his front teeth to pull the cap off his ninety-nine-cent pen, pressed his bare shins against the side of the low metal patio table, and was ready to take notes on rubbing people out.

"Murder. 'Zat OK wit' you, Ahty?"

There was something goading, needling, in the way Vincente said it, and for the first time in a long time Arty felt like he was being tested. He had no idea why—though Joey Goldman had taken him aside when he'd arrived and warned him that it might be a difficult evening. Something was going on within the family, he'd said; the less the ghostwriter knew about the messy business, the better off he was. But Vincente was under a lot of strain. He needed care and he needed diversion. Would Arty stay for dinner? It might not be the cheeriest gathering, but Debbi was cooking sausage and peppers. . . .

"Murder," the Godfather repeated. His tone now was not cruel, exactly, but flat with an awful neutrality like that of a desert. "Ya get right down to it, ya cut tru alla bullshit, that's really what da thing hinges on. Murder. Not necessarily ya do it, but ya could do it, you're, like, capable. Ya wouldn't back away from it, an' everybody knows at."

He paused, reached slowly forward toward his glass of garnet wine. The mild air was very still; it had the sweetly tired smell of flowers closing for the night.

Arty said, "So it's the fear—"

Vincente licked his lips, then cut him off. The writer didn't understand the unaccustomed hardness in his voice.

" 'Course it's fear," the old man said. "World runs on fear, ain't ya noticed? But there's fear an'en there's fear. Say I'm gonna beat y'up. You're afraid, it ain't gonna be pleasant, but you'll heal; maybe sometime you'll get even. Say I'm gonna rob ya. You're scared, you're pissed off, but prob'ly you'll make back what I take."

"I kill ya—that's it, the end, it's over. The clock stops. No more chances, ever. Think about it, Ahty.
That's
fear. Ya kill someone, it'see on'y final act. Ya wanna talk about crime, it'see on'y crime that means a damn. Anything else is just a racket, a caper, pissin' around. A rough game, but a game— at most, a warning. Ya kill someone, that's really the on'y serious move, the on'y punishment."

The Godfather sipped wine, then Arty said, "And sometimes you have to punish." He didn't mean to say it; there was something in the mood that pulled it out of him. He heard the words as though someone else had spoken them; they sounded rude, insinuating, and he couldn't decide if they were more like conspiracy or accusation.

But if the ghostwriter was nervous that he'd overstepped, the Godfather didn't seem to notice. He simply nodded with the weary patience of a teacher who's taught the same lesson too many times. "Sometimes ya have ta judge," he said. "Sometimes ya have ta punish." He looked off to the west. Night was stretching toward the edge of the sky, darkness coming down like a sheet being pulled toward the last corner of a bed. After a moment the old man spoke again; the voice was gravelly and barely audible. "And sometimes, maybe a long time later, and maybe indirectly like, the punisher gets punished."

"Hm?" said Arty.

Vincente didn't answer. He reached for his wine, drank some, then pressed his knuckles against his mouth like he was holding something down. "Fuhget about it," he said at last. "I'm bein' a morbid pain innee ass tonight. Fuhget about it, Ahty. What say we try and find a little lighter subject?"

———

Crouched on the far side of the aralia hedge, armed with a long lens whose casing poked unseen between two knobby stems of the tropical weed, Mark Sutton had captured the meeting on infrared film.

When he walked back to the dark sedan where Ben Hawkins was waiting, he was almost shivering with righteousness and excitement. "That fucking liar," he said.

"Who?" asked Hawkins mildly.

"Magnus," said Sutton, settling into the passenger seat. "Friends with the son, my ass. Ben, he's sitting in there with Delgatto, just the two of them, heads together, sipping wine, talking like best friends. He's taking notes, for chrissake."

"He's a newspaperman," said Hawkins. "It's his job."

"That notebook," Sutton said. "Can you imagine what's in that goddam notebook?"

"Forget about it, Mark," the senior agent told him. "Notebook's off-limits. First Amendment."

"But Ben, he lied to us!"

Hawkins could not work up much indignation. "He wasn't under oath. It wasn't even a formal interview."

"He's hiding something."

"Most people are."

Sutton clutched his camera tight against his chest; for a moment it almost seemed that he would kiss it. "Well, now we've caught 'im in the lie."

"Congratulations."

"Ben, you wait. There's gonna be a way to squeeze that guy. And there's gonna be a way to find out what's in that notebook."

———

"No more for me," said Debbi, as she placed her hand over her wineglass, her long red nails cantilevered out across the rim. "New leaf. Workout every morning. No liquor while the sun shines. A little wine at night, three, four glasses tops, and that is it."

Arty was holding the bottle of Dolcetto near her wrist, and now he didn't quite know what to do with it. He glanced around the table. No one's glass but his was empty, so he somewhat sheepishly refilled it. Talking about murder had rattled him; Vincente's smoldering bitterness, suddenly flaring, had left him parched. He knew he was drinking a lot, though the awareness was getting vaguer all the time. He ate sausage; it had fennel seeds that warmed his tongue. The peppers had a tiny bit of crunch left in them, the potatoes were dotted with thyme and were perfect for mopping up the cayenne-tinted oil from the meat. "Debbi, you're a terrific cook," he said.

"I'm not," she said, "but thanks." She raised her glass and clinked with Arty. In his elevated state he wanted to believe there was something intimate in the gesture, some private and therefore sexy contact. "It's more a survival of the bachelorette kinda thing," she said. "Ya get hungry enough waiting for Prince Charming to sweep y'off to veal marsala, ya learn to throw some things together."

'Too modest as usual," said Joey, trying to create an ease he did not feel. But it was his and Sandra's dining room; in his mind he was responsible for everyone's good time.

"Modesty is a lovely thing in a woman," said Vincente with a courtly nod toward Debbi. He too was engaged in the silent heroics of the dinner table, struggling not to show his troubles and sour the digestion of the others.

"And a very rare one in a man," said Sandra.

Joey gave her a sideways look but no one picked up on the repartee. Like other avenues of talk, this one seemed to dead-end at the most shadowy hint of anything that might perhaps have had to do with Gino. The man had a gift for squelching conversation even when he wasn't there.

Forks clicked on plates, sausages were pierced with juicy little popping sounds. Then Arty said, "So Debbi, how long are you staying?"

She shot a quick shy look at Sandra, then said, "Don't really know. Playing it day by day."

Arty dabbed his lips on his napkin. "Anything special ya wanna do, see, while you're here?"

Debbi shrugged. It was a wonderful shrug, all involving, a little goofy and full of curiosity. Her plucked brows lifted along with her shoulders, her blue-green eyes opened so wide that white showed all around, and the lashes spread so they were pointing almost up and down. "I dunno. The beach, the Sunset Celebration. . . . What else is there to do?"

Arty noticed that his glass had somehow gotten empty again. He filled it, then looked over at Joey and Sandra. "Ya tell her about the Key deer?" he asked.

The host and hostess shook their heads. Somehow they hadn't got around to talking flora and fauna.

"Ah, Debbi," he said. "You'll love this. The way you love animals. ..."

He paused to sip his wine, and in that moment each of them felt, hid, and tucked away a twinge of sweet surprise. Debbi was always surprised when any man bothered to remember anything she'd revealed about herself. As for Arty, it just that instant dawned on him that he was flirting. He hadn't flirted in a long time and he didn't realize he remembered how.

"This deer," he went on, "it's only in the Keys and nowhere else. Smallest deer in the world. 'Bout the size of an Irish setter."

Debbi pictured that and laughed. "You're making this up, right?"

He liked hearing her laugh; he wanted to make it happen more. "Antlers? Little toy antlers. Up north, y'ever see a baby azalea bush in winter, those little twigs? That's what the antlers are like. Fawns look like retriever puppies but with spots."

The redhead pulled her eyebrows in, scanned his face for signs of a hoax. Her skin was getting flushed with the pleasure of uncertainty. She turned to Sandra. "Is he making this up?"

Sandra raised her hands, the gesture said
Leave me out of this
.

"Nah," said Arty. "Thirty miles up is where they live. Place called No-Name Key."

"Now I know you're making it up," said Debbi.

They cocked their heads at birdlike angles and held each other's eyes. A long moment passed as they each tried not to be the first to giggle. Then the air moved, rumbled, got ready to carry sound. The Godfather said very softly, "Ahty, it's true?"

The ghostwriter swiveled toward Vincente. "Isn't this what I've been saying? Yeah, it is."

A small sly smile crept almost imperceptibly across the old man's face. He reached slowly forward for his glass. "Then you should bring Debbi up there sometime," he said. He swirled his wine, looked in turn at the young woman and the young man, tilted the glass ever so slightly in what might have been a benediction. "You're the one should show 'er, Ahty."

It felt late when the ghostwriter climbed somewhat unsteadily onto his old fat-tire bike and pedaled home.

A pocked half-moon was just topping the black and softly rustling trees; away from the tourist haunts downtown, hardly anyone was out, hardly any traffic stirred. The air smelled of iodine and limestone; it was just barely cooler than skin, and Arty savored the feel of it as he weaved among the skulking cats, the stray dogs sleeping against the tires of parked cars.