The Lonely Silver Rain (17 page)

The last day of January was warm and gentle, with a breeze from the southwest moving the kind of air that makes the snowbirds get off the airplanes and say, "Ah!"

I walked to the hotel and bought a morning paper to go with a stunted breakfast of juice and coffee. Nothing about any Tom Beccali. The murders looked ordinary. A Haitian had drowned his crippled sister in a bathtub. A drunk passed out in his own driveway and his wife ran over him with a Ford station wagon-seven or eight times. A naked secretarial trainee had shoved an ice pick into her supervisor. A crazy had burst into the bus terminal at a full gallop, firing at random blacks with a.22 target pistol, killed one, slightly wounded four. A thirteen-year-old girl had shot a fourteen-year-old boy to death in a dispute about whose turn it was to ride a bicycle. Everyday stuff the kind of thing you read about in every urban paper in the land. Minor characters in the play buying lifetime regret. People scuffling around, trying to make sense out of the mismatched parts of their lives.

I walked over to see Meyer, but he was out and the Veblen was locked up. The chairs had been taken in off the cockpit deck, so it looked as if he would be gone a while. And he hadn't even mentioned going anywhere. So I had not been mentioning where I was going lately. The hell with him. The hell with everybody on every vessel in the whole damn yacht basin and every other yacht basin and boat dock within a forty-mile radius.

When I got back there was a man up on my sun deck. He looked down at me over the stern rail and smiled a- merry smile. "Welcome aboard," he said. He was a brown man with a lantern jaw, blue eyes, dingy teeth. He wore a white shirt open to the belly to show a good rippling of the kind of chest muscles you get from weights. He had three gold strands around his neck. His ears stood straight out like Mortimer Snerd's. He had on blue shorts and running shoes. He had a brown purse on a long narrow shoulder strap. He had a pale brown brush cut and bushy sideburns that came down past his ears. I guessed they were to draw attention from the ears, but instead they seemed to highlight them. When I climbed up to the sun deck and saw him at closer range I could see how the weights had built his arm and leg muscles. He stood about five ten, a very solid five ten.

"And you would be…"

"Let me get a look at you. I been interested in you."

"That's nice. I can't think of anything I want to buy today. What are you selling? Muscle building?"

He kept his smile. "Hey, that's pretty good. My hobby is the old bod. Treat it right and it treats you right. Where can we talk?"

"Right here."

"McGee, let's at least get a little bit under cover. Like over there where you steer this thing. Suppose somebody took a shot at me and hit you instead, after all you've been through."

"Who are you?"

"I'm the Foreman, pal. I'm the Capataz." And as he passed me on the way toward the wheel, he whacked me on the arm. He sat in the pilot seat and left the copilot seat to me. He swiveled around toward me.

"You sent those three clowns after me?" I asked.

"Listen, Rick, Louie and Dean are not the very best in the world, but they're pretty good. I mean, they were pretty good. You did a hell of a job on Sullivan. The bone guy says it was a twisting impact, and the legs were turning as you went over them. So all he could do was freeze both knee joints. Rick is going to walk like one of those electric people, you know."

"Like a robot."

"That's it."

"He happened to get in the way."

"You see a robot coming, duck. He wants you so bad he can taste it. You don't need to worry about Dean Matan. He got taken out in the troubles."

"Why did you come here?"

Still smiling, he said, "There aren't too many places left I can go, you want to know the truth. A lot of things are over for good. Over and done. Browder was a plant. It didn't take too long to figure that out. But what he turned in didn't do much damage. They just change the routes around a little, zig instead of zag. They lose a little that's coming in, and they lose a little in transshipment. But there you are. For the little guys like me, it's nothing much, right? But the boss men, they've gone crazy. There they were, tucked back out of sight, no way to pin a thing on any of them, and they go nuts. I don't know what it is. Why should it make so much difference that Ruffi the actor killed the Reyes kid? Maybe it's because there's been too much money for too long. Or things have been easy for too long. What we got here, you'd think it was Jews and Palestinians. All of a sudden everybody hates everybody. My boss ends up in the back of a car, fried. I get orders to take out the boss of the people who took my boss out, so I did. Now they are working their way down the list. So I hang around, my head is going to roll. I got warned day before yesterday. What is it, something in the air down here? I can't even get to my safety-deposit box. I've got a little over forty dollars. Think of that! Cappy, who had it all made. Who'd believe it?"

"Why did you come here? What do you want with me?"

He didn't seem to hear the question. "The big hassle is over. Annoyed the shit out of the politicians and the developers. Tourism is down already, and all of a sudden all over the country there's news pictures of dead bodies. It has to hurt. So the pressure is on to stop it, but it won't stop it. I mean, it will be a lot more quiet. But it will keep happening for a while. You have to get the scales dead even. After that happens the money machine gets cranked up to full speed again, and the payoffs get made and the product comes in and gets shipped out, and dollars get turned into pesos and sent south. The coke base will come in by ship and they'll keep cooking it into white lady out in those garages in the suburbs, and the money will roll." He turned to look directly at me. "And I need twenty thousand dollars. I think six months will clear things up. I've got a place I can go. When I can come back and get to my box, I'll pay you back thirty."

"I don't have that kind of cash money."

"I think you do."

"If I did, why would I give it to you?"

"It would be a loan, like I told you."

"Absolutely no way."

"You haven't heard about the sweetener. As a kind of bonus, I'll give you young Ruffi. You can sell him to the Latinos. I can't get close enough to them to make a deal without getting myself hurt."

"How would I go about getting close?"

"I can give you a name. You could come out of this in real good shape. Invest twenty and you get back thirty from me plus what you can sell him for."

"How do I know Ruffi will be where you say he'll be? How do I know you'll ever come back?"

"You go through this world looking for guarantees, McGee, you'll live small."

"Where is he?"

"Money in hand, and I tell you."

"Half the money in hand until I see him."

He thought it over for a slow ten count and then said, "Let's give it a shot."

"Button up the shirt," I said, "and take off the jewelry."

"I never b… Oh, hell yes. It's hard to keep from being stupid."

After I got him into the car, I said I had forgotten to get the key to my box. I knew he would stay put. He got edgy whenever he was out in the open. I got the ten in hundreds. Divided the pack into two parts and inserted them into the two flat black packets that Velcro neatly just below my knees.

I drove to the branch bank near the marina where I have a safety-deposit box. I left him in the car in the lot and after the girl helped me unlock the little door, I carried my box into one of their little phone-booth rooms. I have it only because there are a few little items I would not care to have sunk or burned. Pictures of my mother and father and brother, all long gone. Birth certificate. Army discharge. Some yellowed clippings of my brief prowess as a tight end before they spoiled my knees. One theater ribbon, one Purple Heart, one Silver Star with citation for Sergeant McGee. A smiling photograph of Gretel Howard, another of Puss Killian, a few-a very few-letters, a copy of my will, which Meyer keeps telling me should not be in a safety-deposit box. I took the brown envelope in which the will had been, and put the hundred hundreds into it, a stack not an inch thick.

When I got back to the car he looked asleep with his hand over his eyes, but when I opened the door on my side, the blued muzzle of an automatic pistol flicked up and stared at me across his thigh. Then it was gone and he straightened up and said, "Sorry, pal. I thought I saw visitors. Got it?"

"Put away the gun."

"Sure."

"Here it is. Count it."

He held it well below the dash, below the level of his knees. He took two bills out at random, bent forward and examined them very carefully. He sighed, smiled, put them back in the envelope and slid the envelope into the zippered pocket on the back of the brown leather shoulder bag.

"Keep much in the box?"

"Millions," I said. "Untold millions." I've never kept money in the box. Money is expendable. It can always be replaced, one way or another.

"My problem was keeping too much in the box and not enough around loose. But who'd think things would get so jammed up I'm like on some kind of a list?"

"Where to?"

"What we've got to do is get a look at him. You, not me. So you know it's him. We have to do it without making him jumpy, or he'll run, God knows where. It isn't going to be easy. He's maybe up to twenty or thirty lines a day. That's how he got into all this. That stuff makes you think you can do anything and get away with it. He's using enough to make him very hard to figure, but not enough to make him easy to take. Years ago he used to be not too bad of a little kid. But they gave him the moon and the stars. The oldest kid, the favorite."

"Where to?"

"We're going to have to work out something. I won't tell you where, but I'll tell you what. What you've got is an asphalt two-lane road running along the side of a canal. No trees growing close to the canal. Then you've got a wooden bridge that is kind of a hump that crosses the canal. The canal is maybe fifteen feet wide, I don't know how deep. There's a one-story frame house on the other side of the plank bridge, set back twenty or thirty feet. It's got an aluminum carport on one side, big enough for one car. In back of the cottage and on either side is like jungle. Maybe there's a way back through there. I never tried. At night there's a big bright barn light fastened to the front of the house, lights up the whole place. It's got electric and a telephone."

"How do you know so much about it?"

"I stayed there waiting for a man to come home. He was doing ten to life in Raiford and they let him out in a little over six. That was last year. I don't want to get into all the whys and wherefores. Put it this way. It was the kind of scene you have to do it yourself and not put somebody else on it. So I was there with his wife and kid, waiting. It took him four days to get home. She was scared out of her wits he'd be too much for me. She hated the bastard. We kept the kid out of school. The kid had her orders-the minute he arrives, she shuts herself in her room. It went quick and easy and the woman and me, we dragged him way back into the saw grass and water and palmetto and slid him into a gator pond and put cement blocks on him to hold him down. Then we let the kid out and they hugged each other and they both cried, but they weren't crying for old Daddy. They were crying for happy."

"Ruffi's there now?"

"He lets her go shopping while he stays with the kid. She's eleven years old. The woman hasn't dared try anything. I left her my phone number last year. Nice woman. She phoned me from the supermarket ten miles down the road, asked for help. She said he was starting to mess with her kid. I said I'd try, but I didn't tell her that right at that point in time I was trying to figure some way of getting out of my place without getting myself killed. It was staked out very tight. That was yesterday."

"How did she know his name?"

"She didn't. I asked her what he looks like. She told me and said he came in a white Mercedes convertible and it is in her carport with tarps hiding it. It's Ruffi."

"So why don't you go take care of him and pick up his cash?"

"First, because I happen to know he got out without hardly any. It cost him what he was carrying to bribe his way out. Second, I don't know if I could take him. It's hard to tell what a nutcake will do next. And Ruffi is quick and tricky. And he's the one sent me there last year, so he knew the layout."

"So why don't you make a phone call and sell the information?"

"The people that want Ruffi don't buy information from dead people. I'm on the list, so I'm dead. There's some others on the list too, running like hell, or holed up someplace."

"Why did you come to me?"

"Jesus H. Christ, McGee! I happened to find out you told Art Jornalero about Ruffi cutting throats down there in the Keys, and that's what started the whole shit storm. I heard you want him. How should I know? Maybe he killed friends of yours. People living around on boats, the kind of rent you have to pay at places like Pier 66 and Bahia Mar, you have to have some money. I knew where to find you from when they told me you should have an accident."

"What kind?"

"Dean was in charge. He was going to work something out."

"What's the woman's name?"

"Irina Casak. The kid is Angie. The RFD box is out by the road next to the bridge. It says Casak on it in red paint."

"What name does she know you by?"

"Good question. Maybe the way you took my guys out, it wasn't all dumb luck. She knew me as Ben Smith."

"What kind of car does she have?"

"Last year it was a yellow Volkswagen bug, pretty beat up. Maybe she's got the same one now. I don't know. Do you know him by sight?"

"From a publicity still. I wouldn't forget the eyelashes."

"So what we got now, McGeer I take you there and we have to figure out some way you get a look at him without stampeding him. You're satisfied, we come back and you loan me the other ten and I give you the name you can sell him to. You'll have to work out your own arrangements to keep from getting screwed on the payoff. Done right, you'll end up smelling like roses."

So we went to take a look. It took an hour and forty minutes to get there, first south and then west. A lonely road on the edge of the Glades. Lumpy asphalt running string-straight through wetlands past wooded hammocks where the white birds sat on bare trees like Christmas doodads, thinking white bird thoughts.

He told me when to start slowing. We cruised past the bridge and the mailbox at a sedate thirty-five. I saw a yellow beetle pulled halfway into the carport on the left side of the frame house. The house was gray with green trim, and I had a glimpse of a broken rocking chair on the shallow porch, bed springs in the side yard, a swing made of a tire.

"Same car as before, parked in front of his," Cappy said.

Two miles down the road I found a shell road off to the right. It went about fifty feet before it went underwater. I pulled in and turned off the motor. I rolled my window down and heard ten billion bugs saying it was a nice warm day.

"We can't risk going by more than one more time," I said. "I didn't know there's no neighbors at all. Who would have a reason for stopping there?"

"Mailman, meter reader. Look, maybe the easy thing to do is you take my word he's in there, and sell him."

It was momentarily tempting. The shabby house in the swampy setting had an ominous look. And I didn't want to sell Ruffi to the people who would take him out too quickly. I wanted to sell him to the law, for ten cents' worth of satisfaction. I wanted to untie the knot in my necktie. I wanted Ruffi to make some ineffectual attempts to maintain his ego and his vanity in jail.

We had passed the supermarket and shopping plaza ten miles back the other side of a village. So I headed back there as soon as I found out Cappy could remember Irina Casak's phone number.

The plaza was anchored by a big Kmart. As I sat brooding in the car, Cappy began to get impatient with me. "What's going on?"

"Deep thought. She have television?"

"Little old black-and-white RCA."

When I told him the plan, he didn't like it at all. The second time around. he thought better of it. The third time I told him, he made minor changes. I would turn around after I came across the bridge and park heading out, and I would leave the Buick keys in the ignition. He assured me before I phoned her that there was just the one telephone:

"Hello?" she said, her voice soft and hesitant.

"Irina, this is a friend of Ben Smith. I want to help you. Is the man there?"

"Yes."

"Can he hear you?"

"I don't think so."

"You tell him you ordered a color TV from Kmart and it has just come in and they are coming out to deliver it in an hour."

"But I…"

"You ordered it two months ago. I'm bringing it out."

I heard a man's voice in the background. "What's going on."

She turned to him and said, "The Kmart is sending out my new color TV."

"Tell them you don't want it."

"But I ordered it…"

He came on the line. "She changed her mind."

"It's all paid for, Mr. Casak. I'm the manager of the television and electronics department here at Kmart and I have to come out that way on personal business and I thought I could kill two birds with one stone instead of having Mrs. Casak come in here to get it. It's our best table model, guaranteed parts and labor for six months. A really beautiful reception even in fringe areas like you have out there."

"Well… okay. Bring it out. Leave it on the front porch."

I had counted on boredom to sway him. He was used to a wider world. I didn't know what his plans were, but I imagined he wanted to stay right there until the trail was cold, and then go whizzing away in his little white car.

I took back the cash from Cappy to buy the set, $439 plus tax or $460.95 with tax. The clerk gave me a cash receipt form and a claim slip to present at Customer Services near the loading dock. Cappy grumbled about giving up the money. He said there was no way I was going to get into the house.

I found a place to pull off the road on the way back. The big cardboard carton was in the Buick trunk. An inch bigger and the trunk wouldn't have closed. I opened the carton and got the set out, then took it out of the clear plastic that sheathed it. I put Cappy's flat little.32 automatic in the plastic sack where it would be close to my right hand when I reached down into the carton and lifted the set out, with the screen facing away from me. Cappy didn't like that part either. I had made certain there was a full clip and the safety was off. I had fired once into the woods to see how it felt. It had a nasty, flat, cracking sound. He said it was a spare, all he could pick up when he left in a hurry, and he didn't like it either. He said it was Czech, and badly made.

I set off again with Cappy on the floor in back. I rumbled over the private plank bridge, turned around in the yard and parked with the front wheels inches from the bridge. I got out, whistling, and walked around to the trunk and opened it. Whistling is disarming. It can't be done with a dry mouth. I had to gnaw at the inside of my cheek to get enough spit to whistle.

I lifted the carton out and carried it to the porch, put it down beside the front door and knocked. I knocked again and again. "Oh, Mrs. Casak! Mrs. Casak?" I called, and thumped the door.

"Go away!" yelled Ruffino Marino, Junior.

"She has to sign the delivery slip."

"Sign it yourself, dummy!"

"But I can't do that. Mrs. Casak has to sign." The door opened just enough for her to slip out. "Just sign right here," I said cheerfully, putting the cash receipts on the carton and handing her a balipoint. I pocketed the receipt and dipped and lifted the set in its plastic sack out of the carton. "Will you get the manual and guarantee out of the carton, please, Mrs. Casak? Thank you. Now we have to make sure there's nothing wrong with the set. It wasn't checked at the store. It's better to check them out at the customer's home. Open up, please."