Maximum Bob

11

“If the judge can work it for you to go to Starke,” Elvin said to Dale, “that’s fine. I can tell you all about how to jail up there. Only I don’t see it happening. You get to Reception at Lake Butler, I doubt they’ll send you there on a first-time five-year deal. I’m talking about Florida State Prison, what we generally call Starke. Or you could get Union Correctional, over west of there not too far. It don’t matter which though, they’re both shitholes.”

They sat in the living room of the house in Delray Beach drinking beer out of longnecks, the only way Dale liked to have his. It wasn’t much fun though. Dale wanted to leave or turn the radio on loud or shut Elvin up if he knew how.

“Union Correctional, or UCI, is what they use to call Raiford, when they had Old Sparky there. See, wherever the ‘lectric chair is, that’s your state prison. That’s why now it’s at FSP. The difference I noticed my second fall, there aren’t no more real convicts since this crack shit come about. Convicts, they’d sit around talking about jobs, banks they’d held up, argue about how to blow a safe. Now you got inmates instead of cons and these guys are crazy. All they think about is getting dope and getting laid, looking to see who they can turn. See, once you get turned you’re pussy. Inmates, they’ll snitch you for smoking a joint, anything, to get in good with the turnkeys.”

Dale said, “You want another beer?”

Elvin said, “Sit still when I’m talking to you.”

Dale eased back in the sofa, Elvin staring at him.

“What you have to learn is how to ride the rap, do your own time, but get salty quick as you can. You’re in the population you don’t have to be good-looking, you’re a new punk coming in and that’ll get you elected. The first one comes at you and you back down, you’re pussy. What you have to do is boo him up. A nigger, you have to stick him. See, if a nigger has a white boy, even one’s ugly, he thinks he’s a big man. What you do is buy yourself a shank. You can get anything you want in there but a woman. Some pretty good shine we call buck, made of rice or orange juice with some yeast and sugar. We’d have some poor asshole keep it in his cell while it set up.” Elvin paused. “I better show you how to make a shank. I could use a spoon… The easiest kind of weapon to make, you melt the end of a toothbrush and stick a razor blade to it. I cut a dink one time looked at me funny, he’s got a scar now from sixty-five stitches in his face. You won’t kill a person with a toothbrush, but he’ll stay wide of you. Let’s see… Yeah, what you might do till things settle down, stick a book in your pants under your shirt, one in front, one in back, so your belt holds ‘em there? It’ll give you some protection in case a dink tries to shank you. He comes in high on you, going for the throat or the heart, the books won’t do you no good. But most times it goes down is in a crowd and the dink will stay low so as not be seen. There was a boy one time, they’re hurrying him to the infirmary and this one holding the stretcher drops his end and stabs the boy again. So don’t trust nobody till you find out who’s with who, how they hang out together in the yard. Understand? They send you to Starke write me and I’ll give you the names of people can do you some good. It’ll cost you, nothing’s free. But it’s nice to have friends, huh? Listen, where your keys at? I have to go someplace.”

“I have to go someplace too,” Dale said. He wasn’t sure where, but knew he had to get out of here. Out of this house, out of Delray and keep going. He’d been to Orlando to Disney World and Daytona Beach a lot of times, but he’d never been past the Georgia line or to places he’d like to see like California.

“Dale? Where your keys at?”

It was quicker to shoot over to Dr. Tommy’s house from Delray than coming down from Palm Beach sightseeing, like the other night. Elvin took Dale’s pickup north on 95 to Boynton Beach, cut over to Ocean Ridge and it didn’t take him fifteen minutes.

From a dump full of palmetto bugs, called roaches other places, to what Elvin believed was the slickest house he’d ever seen. And yet a little sneak like Dr. Tommy owned it. The house was light-gray brick with white trim and shutters and a white tile roof. It didn’t look to have any size till you went up the drive through palm trees and sea grape and saw it was built into high ground, a lot more house on the ocean side where it had a big flagstone patio, a swimming pool but no diving board-shit-and all kinds of shrubs and palm trees dressing up the grounds. Elvin found this out by walking around the outside of the house and there was Dr. Tommy on his patio reading the paper, a tall drink on the table next to him, the whole patio in shade with the sun off on the other side of Florida.

Elvin said, “How we doing today?”

He didn’t see the Cuban guy-what was his name? Hector. Dr. Tommy was also a Cuban but hard to tell. Neither one of them had what you’d call that true greaser look. This doctor was a shifty booger though. Look at him. Shorts and no shirt, tan and skinny, squirming to sit up straight, putting his nice face on. Some newspapers slid off his lap to fall on the flagstone. Dr. Tommy didn’t seem to notice.

“Well,” he said. “I didn’t expect you so soon. No, I should say I expected you, yes, but didn’t think it would be this soon.”

Getting his meaning straightened out. Elvin didn’t see it changed anything. He pulled a chair away from the glasstop table, a heavy wrought-iron patio set, nothing but the best, settled into the chair’s maroon cushions, then had to turn his head to look up at the house this close. Two floors with an upper deck across the back and stairs coming down from it.

“Being put out of business hasn’t seemed to hurt you none,” Elvin said. “What kind of doctor were you?”

“I still am,” Dr. Tommy said. “Dermatologist.” He raised a finger to his cheekbone. “Those brown spots you have right here should be looked at.”

“You’re looking at ‘em, aren’t you?”

“I mean tested. You have to be careful, you let it go, it could be melanoma.”

“Now you’re trying to scare me.”

“If you don’t worry about skin cancer…”

“I been outside all my life.”

“That’s why you have those spots. But you wear a hat, that’s sensible. What else you want to know?”

Dr. Tommy didn’t seem as nervous talking about skin as he did movies the other night. Elvin put his hat down on his eyes a little more. “I been thinking about what Sonny told me.”

“Oh, the movies?” Dr. Tommy said. “I can hear Sonny. Told you if you got your hands on them, even one, you could make a lot of money. Is that right?”

Smiling now-look at that. Not a bit nervous.

“That was Sonny’s idea, threaten to show my father unless I paid him. But he didn’t have the nerve to do it himself, so he tried to get a young lady to help him. She would do all the work, keep him out of it. But she came to me instead, told me everything. So then I accused Sonny in front of the young lady. He called her a liar and she hit him with her fist, a big woman. Sonny had to protect himself, so he hit her with that iron thing, the poker.”

Dr. Tommy paused to take a sip of his drink right in front of Elvin, not bothering to ask if he wanted one. Elvin wondering, What’s going on here?

Putting the glass down the doctor said, “Okay, he told you a different story. And you believe him because Sonny is a beautiful liar. Am I right?”

Elvin had to readjust his hat on that one, set it looser on his head. “You catch him,” Elvin said, “he’d like roll over on his back with his paws in the air. Give you this sad look so you won’t hurt him too much.”

“You know him,” Dr. Tommy said, “and you don’t know whose story to believe? I’m talking about why that young lady was killed. But really, what difference does it make? You’re more interested in those movies than the truth. I tell you they’re gone, you don’t believe me. It’s why you came back. What were you in for, in prison?”

Shifting his gears all of a sudden.

“I shot a guy,” Elvin said.

“You kill him?”

“Course I killed him.”

“I thought something like that. Okay, so now you come to work a deal on me. But there aren’t any movies, so what do you do now? You want to search my house if you think I’m lying?”

Here was this dink talking right up to him. It took Elvin a moment to adjust, resetting his hat again where it would stick to his forehead.

He said, “Well, we sure got a lot cleared up there, didn’t we?” and looked toward the house.

The doc’s boy, Hector, was out on the upper deck now in his Cuban shirt, leaning on the rail watching them. He had shoulders on him for a little guy, short in the legs but maybe worked out, knew some tricks. He acted like a girl and was an ugly fucker, reminding Elvin of sneaky types he’d known up at Starke.

“If I was to take you up on that,” Elvin said, “look around your place…”

“Yes, if it pleases you, do it.”

“He won’t try and stop me?”

“Who, Hector? What does he care? It’s not his house.”

“What’s he do for you?”

“Oh, the laundry, cleans the bathrooms, makes my drinks.” Dr. Tommy looked up at the deck. “He wants to know what you do for me.”

Elvin saw the guy up there hunch his shoulders, still leaning on the rail. He said something in Spanish. Now the doctor said something back to him and Elvin looked over to see him smiling.

“What’re you talking about?”

“He said if we have to serve time, this is the place to do it, that’s all. A private joke.”

“Guy like him, if he wasn’t so fuckin’ ugly he’d do okay in the joint.”

“Hector loves me,” Dr. Tommy said. “I could ask him to shoot you, I believe he would, yes. Hector is very emotional.”

Elvin said, “Convicted felon, you have a gun in the house? That could get you in trouble.”

All it did was get the doctor smiling again.

“You’re still looking for a way to work some kind of deal on me,” Dr. Tommy said. “Okay, you want, call the police. Tell them I have a rifle my father gave me. I was fourteen years old and he took me to hunt wild pigs. You know what happened? He caught me shooting flamingos. From that time when I was a boy he started watching me.”

Maybe this guy was a retard. Elvin said, “What’d you shoot flamingos for? You can’t eat ‘em, I don’t think.”

“Why? What difference does it make? Fuck the flamingos. Fuck you, too. You want to call the police, tell them I have a rifle? Uh, tough guy?”

Elvin said, “What’s wrong with you?” The guy acting strange, his eyes getting a funny look, while his voice was fairly calm.

“Or would you like to use it?” Dr. Tommy said. “You have the experience, uh? You’re looking for a score… I’m serious now. You listening?”

“Yeah, I’m listening.”

“I’ll pay you to kill a man. What do you say?”

What Elvin said was, “How much?”

And it got Dr. Tommy smiling again, the dink easy to tickle, saying now, “You’re my man, Elvin,” becoming pals all of a sudden. “I knew it as soon as you walked in the other night. You don’t care who, only how much.”

“If the price ain’t right,” Elvin said, “what’s there to talk about?”

The doctor nodded his head, his smile gone but his eyes shining as he gave the figure.

“Ten thousand.”

That didn’t sound too bad. Get half up front.

“To kill the man,” Dr. Tommy said, “who ruined my life.”

It didn’t look too ruined to Elvin.

“I can’t work, I have to sell my possessions to live. My paintings, works of art…”

Getting a good buck, too, if he had ten grand laying around the house. “We talking cash for this job?”

“Yes, of course.”

“You been thinking about it long?”

“More than thinking, finding out about him. Where he lives, where he goes to drink, the women he sees. Hector is my eyes while I’m a prisoner.”

Whatever that meant. Elvin said, “Well, shit, you ought to know where he lives.”

“But it could be too late,” Dr. Tommy said. He bent over in his chair and started gathering up the newspapers he’d dropped, Elvin noticing he had The Miami Herald, the Sun-Sentinel… The doctor handed him one saying, “Here, on the front page of the Post. You must have seen it.”

Elvin took the newspaper. The second he spotted the picture, that bony face grinning out of the page, he said, “Jesus Christ, this is the guy we’re talking about? Judge Gibbs? I thought you meant your daddy.”

“He’s already dead.”

Elvin said, “And didn’t leave you nothing, huh? On account of you shot that flamingo and been generally fucking up all your life. I forgot for a minute there it was Gibbs convicted Sonny and nailed you on the dope charge. He’s the same one sent me up.” This was getting good, realizing he had his own pay-back motive now besides money. Why hadn’t he thought of it? “The other day this same judge give my young nephew five years for nothing. You met him, Dale Crowe Junior?”

Dr. Tommy was waiting, staring up at him.

“Have you read the paper? I ask that assuming you can read.”

Elvin gave him a look, narrowing his eyes. “You think I don’t know how?”

“Well, for Christ sake do it, will you?”

Elvin found the column, read partway into the story that asked if the judge was gator bait and stopped.

“There’s somebody already tried for him?”

“That’s the question, why I wonder if it’s too late,” Dr. Tommy said. “If I thought of it, how many others have too? Are thinking about it right now?”

“Shit,” Elvin said, “you want Bob Gibbs you might have to get in line, huh?”