The Lonely Silver Rain (15 page)

That brought the murders into a sharper focus, and explained the money being left on the table when the poker game was invaded. And it darkened considerably the public reputations, posthumously, of men who had given a great deal of time and thought over the years to presenting a picture of good characters and good works.

The violent deaths continued that week. The owner of a fleet of shrimp boats was killed when a car pulled up beside his on Alligator Alley and somebody shot him in the face. A man came screaming down out of the top floor of a highrise hotel on the Beach, the Contessa. He had owned twelve points in the hotel. A commodities broker was found hanging from a live oak tree in his backyard in Fort Lauderdale, with his hands tied behind him. His daughter found him. She was five years old.

And then on Thursday the name jumped out at me. Ruffino Marino. But it was the papa. He had employed additional bodyguards, stationing one in the sixteenth-floor foyer at Sailfish Lagoon, outside his apartment door, and the other down in the lobby by the elevator that served the sixteenth to twenty-second floors.

Somebody had gained entrance to the apartment above Marino's, tied and gagged the occupants, waited until nightfall, climbed from the upper balcony down to Marino's, forced the door, sliced the throat of the elder Marino as he slept, without disturbing Mrs. Marino in the nearby bed, climbed the rope back to the upper balcony, walked down the fire stairs to the parking-garage level and disappeared. Once in the clear they phoned the police so that the people they had bound and gagged could be released. Marino had been a prominent citizen, an investment adviser, with personal holdings in hotels, restaurants, beer franchises, magazine and book distribution, parking garages, linen service and liquor stores. The lengthy story about him said that he had been under investigation several times for possible racketeering, but no indictinent had ever been returned.

The lengthy newspaper account described in great detail the sophisticated security system with its computerized video and audio scanning, its perimeter sensors which could detect all prowlers. In fact, the account did so much marveling about how clever the murderers had been that it was quite clear the reporters believed that some of the fellows operating all that great equipment had been bribed to turn deaf and blind and dumb during the murder. And that, of course, is the vulnerable segment of all foolproof systems, the fools who take care of it.

The picture showed a broad-faced, bullnecked bald man with heavy black eyebrows and a toothy smile so broad it produced a squint. He wore a sport coat and a shirt with an open collar. A thick thatch of gray hair sprouted from the \T of the open shirt, and a medal on a chain dangled against the hair below the wide throat the knife had sought and found in the darkness. The piece spoke of the widow, Rose Ellen Marino, and her work with handicapped children. The four children of the marriage were named, and only Ruffi Junior got any specific mention, as a producer and director of motion pictures and an investor in theatrical properties. It listed the powerboat races he had won.

The weekend papers had editorials about the bloodbath, as did the national news magazines. It had been correctly pegged as a war between the old-time underworld and the new drug barons, after several years of uneasy peace. One newspaper, USA Today,, was perceptive enough to note that the Canadian mobs were probably standing on the sidelines smiling. The editorials bemoaned the existence of the cocaine trade. The dollar value of the business was pegged at one hundred billion dollars, with an estimated one hundred metric tons coming in each year, with no more than six percent of it confiscated by the authorities. There had been seventeen violent deaths over a very few days, which became eighteen when Slusarski died without regaining consciousness. Had they known the connection, they could have counted up to twenty-five-a federal employee, two street urchins, two boat thieves, a Peruvian debutante and an old man in Cannes. It was the prominence and the civic reputation of so many of the suddenly and violently dead which led to so much coverage. The two standard shots were of the smoking remains of a golf cart, and of a side view of the Contessa Hotel, with a dotted line curving down from a high floor to a Germanic X on the pavement. Local television hit a new low in taste with the rernarkable question "And how did you feel, Karen, when you found your daddy hanging from that tree?"

A guest column in The New York Times, reprinted in local papers, was by an ex-employee of the DEA. He said, in part, "It is valuable, small, easy to smuggle. As easy as diamonds, but unlike diamonds it is a fashionable consumable. It is psychologically habituating without being physiologically addictive. It is the smart party snort for the young, middle-class, half-successful, upwardly mobile professional, as well as for the career thief. It can provide a rush of extreme confidence accompanied by erotic fervor and torrents of oratory. It can also rot the nose and encourage suicidal driving habits. It is so expensive it has the cachet of conspicuous consumption at parties peopled by musicians, artists and writers, the sign of a gracious contemporary hostess.

"A vast and deadly infrastructure provides itfrom the plucking of the leaves of the highland bushes to the tiny gold straw that sucks a line into the delicate nostril of a mayor's mistress in Oregon and makes her eyes sparkle: Within the present context, nothing can stop it. The losses of officialdom are within the limits, say, of spoilage in the vegetable business. It has been brought in by drone aircraft, radio-controlled. It has been brought in by one-man submarine. It has been shot ashore by slingshot from freighters docking at Tampa. Even were importation to be punished by death it would still go on, because the lifetime wages of a laborer can be carried in a single pocket.

'The only possible solution to this deadly trade is to ignore it. Legalize it along with marijuana. Then the infrastructure will sag and collapse. It will no longer be fashionable. Street dealers will no longer hustle new customers on high school sidewalks. And men won't die in the squalid massacres we have seen recently in southeast Florida.

"But maybe it is too late for legalization. The bureaucracy of detection and control has a huge national payroll. Florida's economy is as dependent on Lady Caine as it is on cattle or fishing. Legalization will be fought bitterly by politicians who will say that to do so will imperil our children. Are they not now imperiled?"

Meyer brought that guest column to my attention. He is a newspaper freak. He has'to have an oversized postal drawer instead of a box.

The killings had stopped. On Saturday evening I went over to Meyer's boat and told him I thought we ought to go to a special Mass at St. Matthew's on Sunday, to pay our respects to the dear departed Ruffino Marino, a Knight of Malta.

Ruffi looked directly into my eyes. He was handsomely tanned. He had a very large amount of shiny black hair that curled around his ears, hiding all but the lower lobes. He had long eyelashes, a smallish puffy mouth with the lips parted just enough to reveal the gleam of wet teeth, very white. Black hair was combed across the broad tanned forehead. He wore one eyebrow higher than the other. Sort of quizzical. He had a cute cleft in his chin. He wore a gold choker chain of a size useful for restraining Great Danes. He had long hollows in his cheeks and a fuzzy hollow in his throat. His eyes looked wet, like his teeth.

But the film star did not attend his daddy's Mass. A lot of cops were there, and a lot of burly men in civilian clothes who kept whipping their heads from side to side, looking at everything. A lot of women in veils. A lot of important-looking couples arriving by private limo. Very, very few politicians. Very, very few public figures. Had he died of a coronary on the seventeenth hole at the club, all the politicians would have been there.

We had a third-floor front room in a hotel diagonally across the boulevard from St. Matthew's. The day was clear and bright. We both had binoculars. We looked for people the same size as Ruffi. We looked for anybody scooting in, hiding his face. We watched them go in and we watched them come out, the family last of all. Ruffi hadn't been able to make it.

On the way back in my blue pickup Meyer voiced the opinion that Ruffi might be way off to our right somewhere, wedged into a drum which had later been filled with wet cement, allowed to harden, and rolled off the deck of a coastal freighter. And perhaps a picture of him in the drum, prior to cementing him in, had been delivered in Lima.

"I'm sorry you had to say that, Meyer. I've been thinking it, but I hoped nobody would say it. I mean, it would be a nice thing to know, but damn little chance of getting to know it for sure. And unless I know it for sure, I am going to have to go around flinching at every little noise behind me."

"No sources? Nobody to ask?"

"I thought of Willy Nucci, but last I heard he was retired. He sold the howl and he was going to travel, but he got sick, they say. I think hels still in Miami. Things change a lot faster than they used to. I don't know who to ask anymore."

"Maybe I can find out where Willy is."

"You, Meyer? How!"

"Details of the sale. It had to be a big dollar value. Trace it through public records. Dade County Courthouse records. How long back?"

I had to think about that, and relate it to other things that had happened in my life. "Right about two years, maybe a little less."

It took Meyer all of Monday and half of Tuesday to nail it down. He went there, back and forth, on a Trailways bus. Meyer likes riding buses. He says it is the ultimate privacy. Nobody ever talks to you. You sit high enough to look over the tops of the cars and the bridge railings and see the world. You can read and think. He says tourists on cruises get off their luxury vessels and clamber onto buses, paying large fees to stare at the foreitgn scenery while somebody yaps at them about what they are looking at over a PA system so dreadful they catch one word in three. He says he has seen things out of bus windows so absurd, so grotesque, so fantastic, that riding the bus is sometimes like gliding through someone else's dream.

But he came back with the information that I could find Willy Nucci in #4 at 33 Northeast 7th Street. The compangy that had made the sale had been WiNu Enterprises, from whom Willy, as a private citizen, had purchased the first mortgage. The mortgage money was paid into Willy's account al a branch of the Sun Banks. When cash withdrawals were made, a young woman with a limited power of attorney would bring Willy's check to the branch bank and be given the cash.

On Wednesday the thirtieth, I picked up a rental Buick from my local Budget outlet and drove down. I felt better in the rental than in the blue truck. Miss Agnes was too conspicuous and too well known. I wondered if I should get rid of her. And also unload the Busted Flush and the Munequita. They were signs and symbols of my lingering adolescence. I could make do with rent-a-car, rent-a-boat, rent-a-girl, rent-a-life. Anything busts, mister, you get hold of us right away and we come over and replace whatever it is. You can buy full insurance coverage right here, so you'll never have another worry. Lose a friend and you can replace him or her with a working model, same size, age, education and repartee. Lose or break yourself and we will replace you too, insert you right back into the same hole in reality from which you were ejected.

It was a smaller street than I expected, and it wandered aimlessly under old trees. Number thirty-three was old Moorish, a faded orange-yellow with vines crawling on it, looking for cracks. There was an ornamental iron fence around the small yard, and a walk that bisected the yard and went up three steps to two doors under an overhang. One and two "are on the left, three and four on the right. Beside the four was an arromw pointing up, and a button. I pushed the button.

A, woman's voice came out of the little round speaker. "Whizzit?"

"McGee. Travis McGee to see Willy Nucci."

"Sec." In a little while the door buzzed and I went in and up narrow stairs. There was a window of fixed glass at the top of the stairs, looking east, looking across a broad reach of bay toward the concrete puzzle of Miami Beach. Down below was a walled garden, beautifully tended.

I tapped on the door and a big girl let me in. She was a standard-issue plastic pneumatic blonde with wide happy blue eyes, sun-streaked hair, snub nose, smiling mouth and a suggestion of overbite. She wore a white knee-length T-shirt, and across her substantial breasts were the big red letters M A S C 0 T.

"Aren't you the big one!" she said. "Come on in."

"We make some kind of matched set," I said.

"Get off that already!" Willy said in a frail voice. He was grinning at me from a nest of bright pillows on an oversized couch. I hoped I hadn't revealed the shock I felt upon seeing him. Willy has always been a small man, pale and scrawny. Now he looked about as big as a starving child. His hair was gone and the yellow skin was pulled tight to the skull shape. We had done a little business from time to time in years past. He had always been cool, remote, careful. I was one of the very few who knew that he actually owned the hotel he worked at.

Now here he was, grinning at me, delighted to see me-a character change. The handshake was like taking hold of a few little breadsticks.

"Pull up a chair, McGee. Tell me what you're doing for laughs."

"Come to think of it, I haven't been laughing very much lately, Willy."

"Having no fun?"

"Not very much."

"Then you're not thinking good. There's a Hungarian proverb: Before you get a chance to look around, the picnic is over. What'll you drink?"

"A beer would be fine."

"I got Carta Blanca."

"Better than fine."

"Briney, get my friend McGee a Carta Blanca, love."

She left the big room. I looked around at it. "Great place here, Willy."

He shook his head. "I was going to live great. Everything I wanted. The timing was terrible."

"I heard you were sick."

He grinned at me, a merry grin. "What I'm doing here is dying. Right before your very eyes. I was getting chemotherapy, but I finally had them stop that shit. The only way I could be halfass comfortable was smoke pot all day, and that fogged up my head so I couldn't keep track of anything. Where I got it is in the pancreas, and I don't even know what that is or what it does. Or used to do."

Briney brought the beer in a big frosty mug. I said, "Thanks, Briney. What does that stand for?"

"Well, it was Brenda and then Brenny and then I got hung up on surfing and I was out there all day riding waves and so it was Briney. Like salt."

"California meat," Willy said in that whispery voice. "Stuff Greenberg sent her to me as a free gift. You ever meet him? No, I guess you wouldn't. She owed him one and he owed me one, and so it goes. What I'll do, McGee, if you're going sour, I'll will her to you."

"Human bondage is against the law," I said. "McGee," he said in his tiny voice, "she's had nurse training. We had her twenty-fifth birthday party last week. She's healthy as horses and she can cook anything you can think up, and she keeps this place clean, and she loves to eat and sleep and cook and dance and sunbathe."

I stared at him and then at her. "You're serious?"

"What am I going to do?" he said. "I send her back to Stuff, I'm ungrateful. Almost everybody I know is a mean bastard except you. You are mean too, but in another kind of way than the other guys. And if you're not having any fun, she'll be a nice change for you."

"Don't you have any say in this?" I asked her.

"Where do you live, McGee?" she asked.

"In a houseboat at Bahia Mar in Fort Lauderdale."

"Hey, I've never lived on a boat! Neat-o!"

"Don't you have something you'd rather do? Someplace you'd rather go?"

She grinned at me. There was one gold filling, way back. "Shit, man. Everybody has to be someplace."

Willy said, "It's a load off my mind. I've got everything pretty well straightened out except Briney. And now that's done."

"Have you heard me say yes?" I said.

"Jesus, Nooch. Maybe you came on him too fast. Maybe he's got a girl there to take care of him. Maybe he's married. Maybe he's gay."

"None of the above," I heard myself say.

"You hear about me, you come get her, okay?" Willy asked. "Briney'll have cash money to pay her own way."

"I've never seen anybody so enthusiastic," she said, and walked out.

"What are you trying to do to me, Willy?"

"She sees a dumb bird in a tree singing, it's the greatest bird ever, singing the best song in the world. It sets her up for hours. She hops up for the sunrise, and it starts off the best day she ever had-every day. She hums to herself all the day long. I turn on the TV, she leaves the room. She says it is like living secondhand. Every morning, every night, she stands on her head in a corner fifteen minutes."

"Willy, you can't give people to people."

"You heard me say I'm dying? A dying guy can do what he wants. You hurt her feelings, right? In ten minutes she won't even remember. Okay, you had a reason to come here. You've never come to see me without a reason."

"Do you stay in touch?"

"Guys stop by. We do a little talking. I've been dropping business, spreading it around, mostly unloading it on the people doing the work. All I got left is a little bit of numbers and some sharking that is being paid off slow. So I know mostly what is going on."

"So you lost some friends lately?"

"What I lost was some guys I knew."

"What about Ruffino Marino?"

"One of the ones I knew. Not too bad of a guy. I read once about a cowboy escaping from the Indians. What he did, he walked backward across a sandy place and he had this big leafy tree limb and he brushed out his footprints. That was Big Ruffi. He got big in the Church, and all that. A thousand years ago he was a button man out of Cleveland, doing invitation jobs in Vegas and Pittsburgh and wherever. So he gets to be a big man in the community, million-dollar condo, wife and four kids, the youngest nineteen and all of them out of the house, and they come in and stick him like a pig."

"Why?"

"I don't know. I heard what people are guessing, though. I heard he tried to put the lid on something Ruffi Junior did. There's a legitimate crazy He wants to be some kind of a hero but he doesn't know what kind. Some girl from a very important South American family that works close with the drug people here, she got herself raped and killed during some kind of drug hustle, and it wouldn't have happened if anybody knew who she really was. Anyway, Ruffi Junior went to his old man and confessed he'd been a part of the scene. He swore he hadn't killed anybody, and didn't know that his pal, Bobby Dermon, was going to kill three people until it was done.

"Big Ruffi was probably sore as boils that his oldest kid was getting into a drug thing after the old man had dry-cleaned the family name. Ruffi Junior had boats, airplones, fast cars, anything he wanted. The old man tried to put the lid on it. After all, his son hadn't killed anybody. It was his son's friend, Bobby. But somehow the whole Latin crowd got word that Ruffi Junior had killed the girl. They came after Big Ruffi and he gave them Dermon.

"They took Dermon someplace and they didn't kill him. I heard they probably took him to a warehouse where it wouldn't matter if he screamed, and they hot-vvired him and kept plugging him in until they got the very same story over and over, and it turned out it had been Ruffi Junior all along. People think that by then Dermon wasn't going to live anyway, so they took a Polaroid shot of him, and they sent the photo and the tape to Big Ruffi and they put Dermon into a condo foundation one of them was building down past Dinner Key. They asked for Ruffi Junior. Big Ruffi said he was gone, and he didn't know where. Frank Pochero had been involved in the Dermon thing, so they threw a grenade into his convertible. Then Hanrahan was blown up on general principles, and it spread from there. A war, like old times."