Gold Coast

21

JESUS, DRIVING THE MERCEDES, dropped them off in front of the pink stucco house on Monegro Avenue within a minute or so of nine o’clock, telling them he would drive around and come back at exactly 9:30.

Maguire wondered if all this was necessary: like synchronizing their watches, everyone very grim, Karen wearing dark glasses-why? So who wouldn’t recognize her?-but he didn’t say anything. Or comment, make a harmless smart remark about Vivian letting them in with the lights off, taking them back to the kitchen and closing the door to the hall before turning on the kitchen light. Maguire was glad he’d kept quiet. Even seeing Vivian for the first time-not anything like the stylish woman Karen had described in the car-Maguire realized how frightened she was. Vivian looked like she had been on a drunk for several days; combed her hair maybe, but had forgotten about makeup. For the first few minutes they were in the kitchen, he had never seen anyone so tense. Maguire poured the coffee. He lighted three cigarettes for Vivian, while she told them about driving Ed Grossi to Boca Raton and seeing Roland and barely getting away from him.

“Why won’t you go to the police?” Karen asked her.

Vivian said, “Because he’ll kill me. Why do you think?”

“But he’ll be in jail.”

“He’ll be out on bond, he won’t be in jail.”

“Well-the police will protect you.”

“Excuse me,” Vivian said, “but I worked for Ed Grossi twelve years. If they want a person dead, the person’s dead. This is what Roland does, it’s his job.”

Karen said, “To kill people?”

Maguire watched her. She seemed more fascinated by the idea than startled or shocked.

Vivian said, “Yes, of course. He can go to prison and pay somebody else to do it. Or, if he wants to himself bad enough, he waits till he gets out. Don’t you know that? They convict him, I have a nice time for ten years. Then what?”

“They’ve charged someone else with his murder,” Karen said.

“Arnold Rapp, I know that,” Vivian said. “It’s too bad, but I’m not giving my life for Arnold Rapp.”

“It’s almost nine-thirty,” Maguire said.

Karen, seated close to Vivian, looked up from the kitchen table. “Why don’t you go with him? Come back at ten.”

Why? What were they going to talk about? He couldn’t see Karen’s eyes behind the glasses. She sat in the dirty kitchen of the house on Monegro in the Cuban quarter working something out. As though she did this all the time.

Maguire went out to the curb and got in the Mercedes as it came to a stop.

“Where is she?”

“We come back in a half hour.”

Jesus drove off. “I went up to Eighth Street. I saw a guy there he say Roland’s looking for me. Shit. Man, I got to go to Cuba or do something.”

Maguire didn’t say anything, looking at the people sitting in front of their houses and the ones on the sidewalk watching the silver-gray Mercedes-Benz drive by.

“What do you think about Vivian?” Jesus said.

“I think she’s scared.”

“No, I mean do you think she’d pay us something? Why not, uh?”

They picked up Karen at 10. Maguire slid behind the wheel and Jesus got in back as far as S.W. Eighth, where they dropped him off. Maguire cut over to 95 and headed north to Lauderdale. Karen had taken off her glasses. She sat holding them, silent.

“Well?” Maguire said.

Karen didn’t say anything.

“What else you find out?”

“Nothing, really.”

“She still won’t go to the police.”

“The day Roland dies, she will. If the other man is still in prison. He kills people,” Karen said.

“You mean Roland.”

“Yeah. He kills people.”

Maguire said, “Do you want me to stay with you tonight?”

Karen took a long time to answer. She said, “Not tonight, okay? I’d like to do some quiet thinking.”

“That’s the only kind,” Maguire said, keeping it light, but feeling a little hook inside him. Something was going on.

They drove in silence; left the freeway and headed east toward the ocean through light evening traffic, across the 17th Street Causeway and past Seascape, Maguire’s other world, dark. Maguire picturing the dolphins by themselves, surfacing in moonlight within their pools and tanks.

He said to Karen, “When I worked at the dolphin place down on Marathon, ten years ago-I didn’t tell you, did I, I got arrested for willful destruction of property?”

Karen didn’t say anything.

“You listening?”

“You were arrested for willful destruction of something.”

“The fences,” Maguire said. “They didn’t have tanks down there, they had wire fences built out from the shore and the breakwater. Like pens they kept the dolphins in. Different pens that were attached to each other. One night I went out there with some tinsnips and cut the fences.”

Karen said, “You freed the dolphins?”

“Yeah. They swam out to sea.”

“That’s remarkable.” She kept looking at him now.

“Unh-unh, the remarkable thing,” Maguire said, “as soon as they got hungry they all came back to the pens and never left again… They didn’t want to be saved. They just wanted to play games.”