Miami Noir: The Classics

Street 8 (Excerpt) by Douglas Fairbairn

Little Havana

(Originally published in 1977)

Bobby lit a cigarette, then dialed the number.

“Hello?”

“Mrs. Pérez?”

“Sí—” She sounded terrified.

“Mrs. Pérez, this is Bobby Mead—”

“Señor Mead?”

“Sí. Mrs. Pérez, I have to talk to you for a minute about Oscar. Okay? When he first came to work for me he worked hard, he made deals for me, he sold carros for me, I was happy, he was happy. Now he don’t make no deals no more, don’t sell no carros no more. All he wants to do is argue with people and yell at people, and I’m not happy and he’s not happy. I want you to tell me what’s wrong with him.”

The woman let out a weird sound, like a long low howl, and dropped the phone. In the background Bobby could hear a TV and some kids yelling. Mrs. Pérez came back. “Señor Mead!” she cried. “I tell you what’s wrong with him! Pache! Pache! Pache!”

“Yeah,” Bobby said. “Pache, Pache, Pache...”

“He hate Ramón Pache, Señor Mead!”’

“I know he hate Ramón Pache,” Bobby said. “Why he hate him so much?”

“La Estrella bomb!”

“What?”

“La Estrella bomb!”

“La Estrella bomb?”

Mrs. Pérez was crying. “Sí, La Estrella bomb!”

“You mean the restaurant on Flagler Street that got bombed a few weeks ago?”

“Sí, La Estrella bomb! La Estrella owner Juan y Ricardo Azuela. Juan y Ricardo Azuela my Oscar best friend since long time. Since Cuba time. Since Havana time. Then La Estrella bomb. Ricardo die. Juan no legs no more, no eyes no more. Oscar know Ramón Pache done it, want to tell everybody Ramón Pache done it—”

How he know Ramón Pache done it?” Bobby said.

“Ah, Señor Mead, he know, he know! And now he don’t feel good no more. He’s problem come back. No sleep no more, no eat no more. Same 1968. Chicago. Dr. Martinez give him pills. No good. Still no eat no more, no sleep no more. One year with pills no good. St. Louis hospital one year. Then feel good. No pills. Work Pepsi, Texaco, Sears, feel good. Then he’s problem come back again. Get fire. Go to work Kentucky Fry Chicken. Get fire. Hospital one year more. Come to Miami. Feel good. Work Walgreen, Suave Shoe, Firestone, Dixie Ford. Work you. Feel good. No pills. Work hard. Make money.Then La Estrella bomb! He’s problem come back! Make trouble you! Make trouble Dixie Ford! No sleep! No eat! Talk, talk, talk! Pache, Pache, Pache! I think Dixie Ford gonna fire him! You gonna fire him?”

“I don’t know,” Bobby said. “Maybe.”

“Señor Mead, no fire him!” Mrs. Pérez wailed. “Please no fire him!”

“I don’t need this,” Bobby said. “Entiende? I don’t need no more trouble than I already got. Entiende?”

“Please no fire my Oscar, Señor Mead!”

Bobby listened to her sobbing for a minute. “Okay, okay, I no fire him,” he said.

In the office there was a cluttered desk, a swivel chair behind the desk, file cabinets, miscellaneous junk everywhere, four armchairs, all different, two straight-backed chairs, a battered sofa. In one corner there was a small black-and-white TV with the sound off but on the screen a game show. The walls were covered with old calendars, framed city, county and state licenses and permits and a big photomural of the “Grand Opening” of the lot seven years ago. Tacked to the wall behind the swivel chair was a front page of the Miami Herald with a big color picture of a young girl, tanned almost black, barefoot, with dark blond hair hanging down to her hips, wearing cutoff Levi’s shorts, a white T-shirt that was much too small for her and showed off her perfect braless breasts and her flat tanned belly. She stood on the narrow median in the midst of six lanes of traffic on the Dixie Highway, smiling, in the classic flower-girl’s pose, her legs wide apart, one hand on her hip, the other holding a bunch of carnations high over her head.

Bobby sat at his desk, gazing through the open doors at the lot. After a while he took a bottle of Bacardi out of the bottom drawer of the desk and went out and got a Coke from the machine and made himself a rum and Coke. Then he picked up the phone and dialed a number. The number rang ten times before a guy answered it.

“Is Sara Mead around?” Bobby asked.

“No, she ain’t here,” the guy said.

“Do you know where she is?” Bobby said.

The guy made him repeat the question twice. There was a lot of music in the background.

“Do you know where she is?”

“No, I don’t know where she is.”

“Can you tell me when you saw her last?”

“Saw her last? I don’t remember.”

“Listen, this is important,” Bobby said. “I’ve got to get in touch with her. Do you have any idea where I could reach her?”

“Hey!” the guy yelled furiously. “Get the fuck out of my life, will you? Asking me all these fucking questions! Am I asking you all these fucking questions? I don’t even know who the fuck you are? So fuck off!”

Oscar came to work at a quarter of six. He came into the office and said hello to Bobby, but in a voice so low Bobby could barely hear him, and his face didn’t look brown now but gray, and under the eyes it looked bruised and his eyes were misty. After he said hello he went back out and sat on some concrete blocks that had been piled up against the wall near the door of the garage and he seemed to have shrunk up like a wet dog inside his crisp khakis. Bobby stood in the doorway of the office and looked at Oscar. Jerry and Daryle came out of the garage, where they had been washing up and putting on their street clothes preparatory to going home. They both said hello to Oscar, and he nodded but didn’t look at them. They came over to Bobby and Jerry gestured with his head back toward Oscar.

“He looks like he don’t feel good, Bobby,” he said.

“Yeah, I saw him,” Bobby said.

Jerry and Daryle got into their cars and left, and Bobby went over to Oscar.

“Qué tal, chico?” he said.

Oscar shrugged.

“Are you okay?” Bobby said.

“Yeah, I’m okay, Bobby,” Oscar said.

Bobby didn’t know what to do, so he went back in the office and had another rum and Coke. Then a divorced guy who had been sent by a mutual friend arrived and Bobby spent over an hour trying to work out a deal for him. The guy had lost his job and his car and everything else because of the divorce and now his credit was so bad he couldn’t even get financing for a junker. So Bobby sat there with him, smoking, talking to the guy, squinting in the glare of the overhead light, manipulating the figures over and over again, backwards and forwards, and always coming up with the same answer, no way, and with his stomach killing him because he knew that the net result of all this would probably be that one way or another it was going to cost him money, which was almost always the way it turned out when his friends sent him business, which was why he wished to Christ they wouldn’t send him business.

He finally got rid of the guy by telling him that he would call a private party in the morning who might make him a loan on a car if he, Bobby, would guarantee it, which he said he would do as a favor to the mutual friend, so the guy went away, more or less happy, leaving Bobby with the pain in his stomach, thinking about Oscar again.

He went outside and looked around for Oscar, and saw him now over on the far side of the lot leaning against the front fender of Today’s Special. It was dark now and the wind had shifted around to the northeast and it was turning cold after all.

Oscar had turned on the lights, and the bare white bulbs that hung from the wires crisscrossing the lot danced in the wind. This was always a favorite time of day for Bobby. Everything always looked so much better in the evening under the lights. The cars glistened. You couldn’t see so clearly now all the dings and the scratches and the wrinkles and the rust and the peeling chrome and the recapped tires and the cheap paint jobs, and even the interiors of the cars looked plush and sexy the way they had looked when the cars had been new. Even the junkers improved — they looked devil-may-care, and the big striped umbrella in the middle of the front line of cars didn’t show all the ripped seams and frayed edges in this light, and it wasn’t so obvious that the two buildings on the lot, the office and the garage, were about ready for condemnation.

Bobby had always wanted to decorate the lot with colored lightbulbs and all the plastic propellers and windmills and streamers that he thought added so much excitement to the atmosphere of a used-car operation, but the trouble was that the minute a dealer went beyond plain white bulbs on the overhead wires the city said he was getting out of the realm of safety and into the realm of display, for which he had to get a special permit, and Bobby had never been able to persuade himself over the years that the razzle-dazzle would bring in enough business to justify all the extra expense — and now of course the whole idea was out of the question when he had to cut every corner just to keep his head above water. Still, sometimes be liked to think of how sharp the lot would look with the colored lights and the red and green and yellow propellers and windmills and streamers all spinning and fluttering.

He went over to Oscar.

“Hombre, I have to tell you something,” he said. “I wasn’t going to tell you but now I think I better. I was talking to a guy today. He says you’re in a lot of trouble with some people he knows because of the things you’ve been saying about the FCU and Ramón Pache.”

Oscar looked around. “What kind of a guy?” he said. “A Cuban?”

“No, a gringo,” Bobby said. “He said they’re getting ready to shut you up, permanently.”

Oscar started wiping the back of his hand across his mouth, and he started sweating even in the cold wind. “Who’s the guy?” he said.

“Mike Duran,” Bobby said. “Does that mean anything to you?”

Oscar shook his head.

“I sold him a car once,” Bobby said. “That’s all I know about him. But I have a feeling he knows what he’s talking about.”

Oscar looked at the face on the billboard across the road. “They know how to get you,” he said bitterly. He turned and started to walk away very quickly with his head down and then stopped abruptly and stood making futile gestures as if he had run into a cobweb.

“I want to close up,” Bobby said across the distance between them.

Oscar looked back. “Close up?”

“Yeah,” Bobby said. “Right now.”

“Bobby, don’t do that to me,” Oscar said, returning, looking desperate. “See, I have to be here tonight. I’ve got a guy coming on the Dodge. He was here last night and said he would definitely come back tonight. Then I’ve got another guy coming tonight on the Galaxie, definitely. So I could write two deals tonight. And then I know a guy who likes the Rambler—”

“I want to close up,” Bobby said. “If they want these cars bad enough they’ll come back.”

“You’re afraid they’re going to bomb this place, aren’t you?” Oscar said, his voice quivering, spitting a little over his words. “Same at Dixie. That’s what I mean when I say they know how to get you. See, I got fired at Dixie Ford today.”

“Shit,” Bobby said.

“They gave me two weeks’ pay and told me not to come back. They said it was the economy, but I think they heard the same thing you did today. Now they’re afraid of getting bombed, just like you. When I went home and told Maria she got sick. She told me you called her, what you said — and then all of a sudden, Bobby, I see the truth. The truth is I can’t hurt Ramón Pache even a little bit no matter what I do, but he can hurt me plenty. I can’t got nobody to march with me down 8th Street — they won’t even listen to me when I try to tell them the truth about Pache and the FCU. And I know I can never get close enough to him to shoot him. But he can bomb Dixie Ford and bomb you and kill me and my wife and kids or do anything else he feels like doing. So you know what I do today? I make a very big decision — maybe the biggest decision of my whole life. This is what I decided, and this I promise my wife and now I promise you too — that I will never talk against Ramón Pache no more, never talk against the FCU no more. All of that I throw out of my mind, because what good does it do anyway? From now on, if you will allow me, I will just work hard and try to sell a lot of cars.”

“Yeah,” Bobby said, “but what if it’s too late?”

Oscar frowned and then moved away and leaned against the fender of a car with his arms folded tightly across his chest and his head lowered.

“Want a drink?” Bobby asked.

“Okay,” Oscar said.

Bobby made them each a rum and Coke and they stood in front of the office door with their drinks, watching the cars going by on 8th Street. Three Cuban kids were having a game of tag between the cars at the far end of the lot, and somewhere off in the distance a radio was playing “Cuando salí de Cuba.”

“How do you know Pache killed your friends?” Bobby asked.

“The Death Squad has killed twenty-eight people in the past three and a half months. They were all known enemies of Ramón Pache, like Juan and Ricardo Azuela. So?”

A car drove onto the lot.

“That’s the guy on the Dodge,” Oscar said.

Bobby nodded. “Go get him.”

“And then?”

“Yeah, you can stay open tonight if you want to,” Bobby said.

“Muchísimas gracias,” Oscar said.

“Are you afraid?”

Oscar hesitated. “Yes, I’m afraid,” he said. “But I’m going to pray to God that I can get through tonight okay. And if I get through tonight I’m going to pray to God that they’ll see I ain’t talking against them no more and that maybe after a while they’ll just forget about me.”

“Call me if anything happens,” Bobby said. “And stay in the office as much as you can. Watch TV, keep warm, okay?”

Bobby climbed into a 1967 Lincoln Continental convertible from his back line that had no paint, no seat covers, no muffler, no hubcaps, no top and no valid inspection sticker and drove it across the sidewalk and off the curb and headed east down 8th Street, in the wild Cuban traffic, between the sidewalks crowded with Cubans, past all the brightly lighted Cuban shops and restaurants. Everywhere there were signs and posters and spray-painted graffiti saying VIVA EL FCU! and EL FCU ES LA RESPUESTA! and PACHE! PACHE! PACHE!

Then he was out of Little Havana, climbing the ramp to I-95, then gliding swiftly on the expressway past downtown Miami. The streets below the expressway, shimmering in the pink glow of the sodium vapor lights, were deserted. The people in the cars on the expressway looked down on an empty city flooded with pink light. The narrow river that wound through the city didn’t look like a river from up there but a crack in the earth, into which, perhaps, all the people who were not down there on the streets had fallen. The wide bay in the distance, that separated Miami from Miami Beach, didn’t look like a bay from up there either but a dark plain stretching away to the east.

Bobby took the first Miami Beach exit off I-95 and the ramp came down on the MacArthur Causeway. Then the skyline of Miami was behind him and he was racing along beside the main ship channel of the port of Miami, the cruise ships in a row across the channel at Dodge Island, flags whipping in the wind, searchlighted funnels, people strolling on the decks, colored lights and calypso bands playing on the stern, each ship a bright city of lights in itself. Out in the channel small fishing boats were plunging against the current in the darkness, their masthead lights bobbing resolutely toward the sea buoy miles away. The cars on the causeway hurtled dangerously close to the channel on the big curve where the seaplanes in the Bahama Islands service nested like shore birds by the water’s edge.

At the Miami Beach end of the causeway there were two ways to go — north toward Lincoln Road, Bal Harbor, the colossal condominiums, the convention hotels, the tourists, the bellhops, the front desks, the rental cars, the big money, or south to South Beach, a ghetto that has fiercely resisted change for fifty years and is still resisting but now finally is beginning to lose the battle — where almost everything, the streets, the apartments, the stores, the hotels, is old and shabby, where almost everybody used to be old and Jewish but now there are beginning to be large numbers of Cubans, young and old, and the two cultures seem to stand and gaze at each other dubiously.

When people asked Bobby why he lived on South Beach, he said, “When I was a kid I used to go over to South Beach on the bus from Miami to go swimming because I loved the beach there. South Beach had the best beach on Miami Beach then and it still has the best beach on Miami Beach now. When I was a kid I always thought that when I grew up I would like to live in one of the hotels on South Beach that are right on the beach itself, and the one I thought I would most like to live in was the Seabreeze. So when my daughter Sara wanted to go off and live on her own down in the Grove a couple of years ago I sold my house in Miami and moved to South Beach, and now I’m living in the Seabreeze, and I’m happy there. The same hotels are there that were there when I was a kid, the same stores, the same movies, the same streets, even some of the same people. And I like the people. I feel at home with them. They have what’s called a siege mentality. Everything’s closing in on them, the big-time real-estate operators, the city and county politicians, the federal government, the department of this and the department of that, even the Cubans now, and they all wish all these old Jews would drop dead tomorrow so they could come in and bulldoze every building that stands on South Beach right into the bay and start all over again with the condominiums and the high-rises. But these people are tough. They’ll never surrender. They give ground inch by inch, and they know how to vote and how to sue and how to picket and how to nag and how to kvetch and how to obstruct.”

Bobby had trouble finding a place to park the Continental near the Seabreeze and finally had to squeeze it into an alley two blocks away. Walking back toward the hotel he passed a lot of old people who were moving along slowly and carefully, some of them clinging to each other as if they were on ice. All the little hotels that he passed had verandas, and people sat in rows on the verandas talking to each other and to people going by on the sidewalk, or played cards and dominoes. It was possible to look through the windows of the hotels into the ground-floor rooms, and they were bare, with hot plates on the bureaus, no pictures on the walls, ceiling lights burning, bathing suits hung up to dry on coat hangers in the windows.

The veranda at the Seabreeze was like all the others but the lights were brighter. Out there it was like daylight. The card players and the people sitting in the rows of chairs waved to Bobby as he came up the steps and he waved back to them and went on into the lobby, a garish, windswept room where a few chairs were arranged theater-style in front of a color TV. Two small old women sat in the chairs, as far apart from each other as possible, watching a police show. A terrific wind sailed through the lobby from a door at the far end of the main hallway that opened onto the beach. The wind blew ashes out of ashtrays, rolled up the rug, made newspapers fly out the door, fluttered the notices that were tacked up on the bulletin board next to the reception desk.

Bobby went to the desk and leaned over it to get a view of the geezer minding the switchboard, Lester Katz.

“Katz, any calls for me?” Bobby asked.

“No, Mead,” Katz said, not bothering to look up from his Miami News.

“It’s turning goddamn cold,” Bobby said.

“Yeah,” Katz said, still not looking up. “Next year I’m going south for the winter.”

Bobby lived on the second floor, in one of the rooms that faced the sea. When he stepped out of the elevator the first thing he saw was a big black rat. The rat saw him too but didn’t pay much attention. He was like a cop, going along the hall checking each door to see if it had been left open a crack. He kept right on checking nonchalantly until Bobby threw a shoe at him, and then he ducked into a utility room.

Bobby had to push against the wind when be opened his door and had to hold on to the door firmly to keep it from getting away from him and slamming shut after he got inside. His room was full of the wind, which blew in through a big hole in one of the glass doors that opened on his balcony. His room was much like the rooms he had passed on his way to the Seabreeze, small and bare and decrepit. The difference was that since he was an aristocrat with an oceanfront room he had a balcony where he could hang his bathing suit over the back of an aluminum chair to dry instead of on a coat hanger in a window, and he could lean on his railing and look at the ocean.

The glass doors were caked with salt and everything in the room was sticky with salt, and there was fine sand in all the corners and crevices. Bobby went out on the balcony and picked up his bathing suit from the sandy comer where it had blown after it had dried on the back of a chair. Then he went back into his room and took off his canary-yellow slacks and flowered shirt and hung them up carefully in the closet out of the wind.

He put on his bathing suit and sandals and took a towel and went down the back stairway to the beach. There was no moon and at first he couldn’t see anything ahead of him but the whitecaps out on the black ocean. He slogged through the soft sand toward the water, bent over against the wind and just trying to keep from running into any of the metal wastebaskets and scattered palm trees that he knew were in his way. He beard voices coming toward him and a pack of Cuban kids came out of the night, laughing and yelling, and ran past him, and he only saw them as white blurs for an instant before they were swallowed up in the night again and their voices went with them. Then his eyes got more used to the darkness and he saw the empty lifeguard’s box off to his right and a few old people standing looking at the waves, holding on to their hair or their hats with one hand and with the other holding their coats closed at the throat. The combers rolled in and pounded the beach and rose up in the clouds of foam before falling back. But they were not the great waves of Atlantic City or Cape Fear. For one thing the water at this end of Miami Beach was quite shallow for a long way out, with long sand bars that kept big waves from building up, and besides, far away, past the Gulf Stream, the islands of the Bahamas took the full force of the Atlantic swells and broke them up on their countless reefs.

When Bobby reached the hard wet sand near the water’s edge he stood for a moment looking around. To his left was the line of hotels and condominiums that formed a solid chain of lights along the shore all the way north to Palm Beach and beyond. To his right was South Beach, the ghetto, the old concrete fishing pier, that used to be covered over in the beginning and was the home of Minsky’s Burlesque but now was just the place where mostly old Jews and old Cubans stood all day and maybe half the night trying to catch a fish so they wouldn’t have to buy a fish, then the bright lights of the Miami Beach Kennel Club, and after that a long expanse of empty beach terminating in the jetties with their huge jumbled rocks, between which raced the deep, dark, silent current of the main ship channel.

Bobby threw himself into the waves and when he surfaced at the end of his dive he began swimming straight out to sea. He swam every night when he came home from work in all but the very roughest seas and on all but the coldest days. He knew it was dangerous to swim far out when there were no lifeguards on duty and with the water full of loose timber and orange crates and jellyfish and Portuguese men-of-war as well as raw sewage, but he was a strong swimmer and he was never afraid in the water.

He swam for about half an hour and when he returned to the beach he found that he had been pulled a long way north by the current and he had to trudge back along the beach to his hotel, where he took a shower in fresh water downstairs and dried off. Then, up in his room, he put on a T-shirt and a pair of pants and sat down on the bed and made a call.

“Hello?” A black guy.

“Listen, have you seen Sara Mead around?”

“Who is this?”

“A friend of hers.”

“Well, I don’t know anybody by that name.”

“She said I could call this number.”

“Did she say a lot about me?”

“She didn’t say anything about you.”

The black guy just breathed for a while.

“What’s her name again?”

“Sara Mead.”

“Okay, that one ain’t around.”

“Do you know where I could reach her? This is important.”

“I heard she’s in Nassau.”

“Nassau?”

“Yeah, Nassau. Hey, and listen, if you happen to see her before I do, call me, hear? And I’ll come right over and kick the shit out of her.”

“Why?”

“Huh?”

“Why do you want to kick the shit out of her?”

“Don’t worry about that. Just call me, hear?” The black guy hung up.

Bobby went downstairs and stood on the veranda, and saw Max Lorman wave to him. Max was seventy-six years old and had lost his wife two years before. He was a very formal man, always wearing a matching jacket and tie when he took the air on the veranda. Tonight he was wearing his plaid jacket and tie, with white duck pants and black-and-white shoes. He sat alone, as usual, apart from the rows of chairs and the card players and kibitzers, and Bobby went over and sat next to him.

“Bobby, something funny happened to me today,” Max said. “I was talking to some newcomers and they refused to believe that trolley cars were still running on Miami Beach in 1938. They laughed at me. But you remember, don’t you?”

“Sure, I remember,” Bobby said.

Max chuckled. ‘”Newcomers,” he said. “They think everything was always the same around here as it is right now. The trolley cars turned at Second Street and went past the Leonard Hotel and then circled back to Fifth Street and then from there went back on over the causeway to Miami.”

“The County Causeway, of course,” Bobby said.

Max grinned appreciatively. “Correct, the County Causeway,” he said. “It wasn’t renamed the MacArthur Causeway until the war. And in between trolleys there was the jitneys.”

“That’s right, in between trolleys there was the jitneys,” Bobby said.

“Newcomers just refuse to take you seriously when you try to tell them anything about the way Miami Beach used to be,” Max said. “They refuse to take you seriously when you try to tell them we used to be able to play the horses right there on the beach at First Street. Remember that board room they had right on the beach in the thirties, Bobby? You could come in there in your bathing suit and all covered with sand and everything and nobody said nothing. And there would be a guy up on a stepladder writing in the entries at the Fair Grounds or Aqueduct or wherever they happened to be running at the time, on this big blackboard. The minimum bet was fifty cents and there was a free lunch. No cops to worry about. They could care less in those days. You could just as well have been sitting around Bache & Company as far as those cops were concerned. But these newcomers just look at you when you tell them stuff like that. Tell them that up past Fortieth Street in 1939 there was still only private homes along the beach and see what kind of a reaction you get. Tell them that in 1942 Bal Harbor was just a great big Army camp and see what kind of a reaction you get. But you remember, don’t you, Bobby?”

“Sure, I remember,” Bobby said.

“All that stuff,” Max said dreamily. Then he looked at Bobby. “Say, how old were you in 1942, anyway? I’ll bet you were just a little kid, weren’t you?”

“Yeah, but I remember all that,” Bobby said.

Suddenly Max stood up and excused himself, saying that he had to heed the call of nature. He had to heed the call of nature about every half hour or so, because of his kidneys, which was why he never could stray too far from the Seabreeze.

Bobby had dinner at a little restaurant on Washington Avenue that had a sign in the window saying, The Best Arroz con Pollo on Miami Beach. Then he went on down to the First Street pier. Halfway out on the pier was Senior Citizen Friendship Corner Number One, where about twenty seniors were sitting on the rows of wooden benches listening to a very old guy named Mr. Haber who was up on the stage singing into a dead microphone. The cold wind, which was turning colder all the time, was broken somewhat by the green concrete doghouse behind the stage where Officer Al Deutsch of the Miami Beach Police Department, who was in charge of the evening programs at Friendship Corner Number One, stored the microphone and the amplifiers and the flags when they were not in use. Officer Al, middle-aged, seriously overweight, sweating heavily in spite of the cold wind up there on the stage between the big American flag on the left and the small Israeli flag on the right, in his full uniform and harness, was trying frantically to get the microphone back into operation. But all he could seem to get out of it was an occasional piercing shriek. Mr. Haber, coming to the end of his Jerome Kern medley, either didn’t know that he didn’t have any mike or didn’t care, but his thin voice could barely be heard over the pounding of the waves under the pier.

Just as Mr. Haber wound up, Officer Al finally fixed the microphone.

“All right, everybody,” Officer Al said, “Let’s really hear it for Mr. Haber, who had to work under extremely difficult conditions tonight but still turned in another fabulous performance!”

There was almost no applause but Mr. Haber bowed deeply and thanked everyone anyway. Then Officer Al introduced the next performer, Mrs. Feldman, who wore a long white summer dress embroidered with tiny pink flowers, and blue tennis shoes with white ankle socks. She sang a very short song in Yiddish and was followed by Mrs. Rimsky in a lime-green pantsuit who sang a very long song in Polish and tried to get everybody to come in on the chorus, with no success.

After that, Officer Al took over the microphone and wrapped up the program. “Okay, I guess that’s all for tonight,” he said. “Except to say that I think I can speak for us all when I say that we had an excellent time and certainly enjoyed all the fabulous entertainment. So everybody stay warm and keep out of trouble so I don’t have to come around and arrest you, and, hopefully, we’ll all see each other here again next Wednesday.”

Al Deutsch and Bobby Mead had gone to Shenandoah Junior High together. Then Al had played center on the Miami High teams on which Bobby had played halfback. Now one was a cop who had never made it and the other was a used-car dealer who had never made it.

Bobby helped Al put away the microphone and the amplifiers and the flags and then they went out to the end of the pier, where the old Cubans and Jews were fishing, and leaned against the wall looking at the lights along the coast. Even on a filthy night like this the fishermen had total concentration. The fact that the wind was blowing half a gale and they were wet to the skin from the flying spray meant nothing to them. They kept on reeling in and squatting down in the lee of the wall to bait their hooks and then throwing out their lines again as if they were getting paid a hundred dollars an hour to do it.

There was a commotion when one of the fishermen suddenly got a big strike. The old guy was standing right under a pier light when the fish hit and his face looked white and scared and popeyed as if he was about to have a heart attack, but when anybody went near him to try to help him he snarled at them and yelled at them to keep away. He wore a plastic raincoat, regular brown leather street shoes with no socks, short pants that came down below his knees and looked as if they were really long pants that had been cut off and hemmed, a Miami Dolphins T-shirt with the number 12 and the name GRIESE on the back, and a black beret. The fish on his line must have been very big because it bent his pole almost double, but he was fighting it awkwardly and really didn’t seem to know what he was doing, and then his line broke and his feet slipped out from under him on the slick concrete and he fell down on one knee. Still he wouldn’t let anybody come near him to try to help him, and when people yelled at him that it had probably just been a shark anyway he yelled back at them, “Beat it! Beat it!”

“Big news, Bobby,” Al said. “We took a vote tonight before you got here. We decided to make you an honorary Jew.”

“It couldn’t happen to a nicer guy,” Bobby said.

“Yeah, I knew you’d be real pleased,” Al said. “Well, you live on South Beach, so you should be one thing or the other, a Cuban or a Jew. Listen, would you rather be a Cuban?”

“No, I think I’ll be a Jew,” Bobby said.

“Beautiful,” Al said. “Just think, from now on you can eat belly lox any time you want to, no questions asked. From now on you can dance the hora any time you want to, no questions asked. From now on you can kvetch about the goddamn goyim any time you want to, no questions asked. Is this a fabulous deal or isn’t it?”

“It’s a fabulous deal,” Bobby said.

“Is that why you look so happy?” Al asked.

“Yeah, that’s why I look so happy.”

“Hey, you’re not having second thoughts, are you? Are you sure you wouldn’t rather be a Cuban? Get to eat medianoches any time you want to, no questions asked? Dance the rumba? Bitch about the goddamn Anglos?”

“No, I’ll be a Jew,” Bobby said.

“Hey, nice to have you aboard,” Al said, sticking out his hand.

Saturday Night Special by Charles Willeford

Kendall

(Originally published in 1988)

It started out as kind of a joke, and then it wasn’t funny anymore because money became involved. Deep down, nothing about money is funny.

There were four of us at the pool: Eddie Miller, Don Luchessi, Hank Norton, and me — Larry Dolman. It was just beginning to get dark, but the air was still hot and muggy and there was hardly any breeze. We were sitting around the circular, aluminum table in our wet trunks. Hank had brought down a plastic pitcher of vodka martinis, a cupful of olives, and a half-dozen Dixie cups. That is one of the few rules at Dade Towers: it’s all right to eat and drink around the pool so long as only plastic or paper cups and plates are used.

Dade Towers is a singles-only apartment house, and it’s only one year old. What I mean by “singles-only” is that only single men and women are allowed to rent here. This is a fairly recent idea in Miami, but it has caught on fast, and a lot of new singles-only apartments are springing up all over Dade County. Dade Towers doesn’t have any two- or three-bedroom apartments at all. If a resident gets married, or even if a man wants to bring a woman in to live with him, out he goes. They won’t let two men share an apartment, either. That’s a fruitless effort to keep gays out. But there are only two or three circumspect gays in the 120-apartment complex, and they don’t bother anyone in the building. The rents are on the high side, and all apartments are rented unfurnished. The rules are relaxed for women, and two women are allowed to share one apartment. That rule is reasonable, because women in Miami don’t earn as much money as men. And by letting two women share a pad, the male/female ratio is evened out. So some of the one-bedrooms have two stewardesses, or two secretaries, living together. Other women, who have more money, like school teachers, young divorcées, and nurses, usually make do with efficiencies. If a man wanted to, he could get all of the women he wanted simply by hanging around the pool.

Under different circumstances, I don’t think Don, Hank, Eddie and I would have become such good friends. But the four of us were all charter members, so to speak, the first four tenants to move into Dade Towers when it opened. And now, after a solid year together, we were tight. We swam in the pool, went to movies together, asked each other for advice on the broads we took out, played poker one or two nights a month, and had a good time, in general, without any major fights or arguments. In other words, we truly lived the good life in Miami.

Eddie Miller is an ex — Air Force pilot. After he got out of the service, he managed to get taken on as a 727 copilot. Flying is just about all Eddie cares about, and eventually he’ll be a captain. In the meantime (he only flies twenty hours a week), Eddie studies at the University of Miami for his state real estate exam. That’s what many of the airline pilots do in their spare time: they sell real estate. And some of them make more money selling real estate than they do as pilots, even though real estate is a cutthroat racket in Dade County.

Hank Norton has an AB in psychology from the University of Michigan. He has a beautiful job in Miami as a detail man, or salesman, for a national pharmaceutical firm. He only works about ten or fifteen hours a week, when he works at all, and he still has the best sales record in the US for his company. As the top detail man in the field the year before, his company gave him a two-week, all-expenses-paid vacation to Acapulco. He is a good-looking guy, with carefully barbered blond hair and dark, Prussian-blue eyes. He is the best cocksman of the four, too. Hank probably gets more strange in a single month than the rest of us get in a year. He has an aura of noisy self-confidence, and white flashing teeth. His disingenuous smile works as well on the doctors he talks with as it does on women. He makes about twenty-five thousand a year, and he has the free use of a Galaxie, which is exchanged for a new model every two years. His Christmas bonus has never been less than two thousand, he claims.

Don Luchessi makes the most money. He is the Florida rep for a British silverware firm, and he could make much more money than he does if the firm in Great Britain could keep up with his orders. They are always two or three months behind in production and shipping, and Don spends a lot of time apologizing about the delays to the various department and jewelry stores he sells to. What with the fantastic increase of the Miami Cuban population, and the prosperity of the Cubans in general, Don’s business has practically doubled in the last four years. Every Cuban who marries off a daughter (as well as her friends and relatives, of course) wants the girl to start off her married life with an expensive silver service. Nevertheless, even though Don makes a lot more money than the rest of us, he is paying child support for his seven-year-old daughter and giving his wife a damned generous monthly allowance besides. As a Catholic he is merely legally separated, not divorced, and although he hates his wife, we all figure that Don will take her back one of these days because he misses his daughter so much. At any rate, because of the money he gives to his wife, by the end of the year he doesn’t average out with much more dough than the rest of us.

Insofar as I am concerned, what I considered to be a bad break at the time turned out to be fortuitous. I had majored in police science at the University of Florida, and I had taken a job as a policeman, all gung-ho to go, in Florence City, Florida, two weeks after I graduated. Florence City isn’t too far from Orlando, and the small city has tripled in population during the last few years because of Disney World. After two years on the force I was eligible to take the sergeant’s exam, which I passed, the first time out, with a 98. They were just starting to build Disney World at the time, and I knew that I was in a growth situation. The force would grow along with Florence City, and because I had a college degree I knew that I would soon be a lieutenant, and then a captain, within a damned short period of patrolman apprenticeship.

So here I was, all set for a sergeancy after only two years on the force. None of the other three men who took the exam with me was even close to my score. But what happened, I got caught with the new ethnic policy. Joe Persons, a nice enough guy, but a semiliterate near-moron, who had failed the exam for five years in a row, finally made a minimum passing score of 75. So the Board made him a sergeant instead of me because he was black. I was bitter, of course, but I was still willing to live with the decision and wait another year. Joe had been on the Florence City force for ten years, and if you took seniority into account, why not let him have it? I could afford to wait another year. But what happened was incredible. The chief, a sharp cracker from Bainbridge, Georgia, called me in and told me that I would be assigned to Sergeant Persons full-time to do his paperwork for him. I got hot about it, and quit then and there, without taking the time to think the matter out. What the chief was doing, in a tacit way, was making it up to me. In other words, the chief hadn’t liked the Board’s decision to make Joe Persons a sergeant instead of me any more than I had. By giving me the opportunity to do the sergeant’s actual work, which Persons was incapable of handling, he was telling me that the next vacancy was as good as mine, and laying the groundwork to get rid of Sergeant Persons for inefficiency at the same time.

I figured all this out later, but by that time it was too late. I had resigned, and I was too proud to go back and apologize to the chief after some of the angry things I had said to him.

To shorten the story, although it still makes me sore to think about the raw deal I was handed in Florence City, I came down to Miami and landed a job with National Security as a senior security officer. In fact, they could hardly hire me quickly enough. National has offices in every major city in the United States, and someday — in a much shorter period than it would have taken me to become the chief of police in Florence City — I’ll be the director of one of these offices. Most of the security officers that National employs are ex-cops, retired detectives usually, but none of them can write very well. They have to dictate their reports, which are typed later by the girls in the pool. If any of these reports ever got out cold, without being edited and rewritten, we would lose the business of the department store industry receiving that report in five minutes flat. That is what I do: I put these field reports into some semblance of readability. My boss, The Colonel, likes the way I write, and often picks up phrases from my reports. Once, when I wrote to an operator in Jacksonville about a missing housewife, I told him to “exhaust all resources.” For about a month after that, The Colonel was ending all of his phone conversations with, “Exhaust all resources, exhaust all resources.”

So down at National Security, I am a fair-haired boy. Four years ago I started at $10,000, and now I’m making $15,000. I can also tell, now, from the meetings that they have been asking me to sit in on lately, “just to listen,” The Colonel said, that they are grooming me for a much better job than I have already.

If this were a report for National Security I would consider this background information as much too sketchy, and I would bounce it back to the operator. But this isn’t a report, it’s a record, and a record is handy to keep in my lockbox at the bank.

Who knows? I might need it someday. In Florida, the guilty party who spills everything to the State’s Attorney first gets immunity...

We were on the second round of martinis when we started to talk about picking up women. Hank, being the acknowledged authority on this subject, threw out a good question. “Where, in Miami,” Hank said, “is the easiest place to pick up some strange? I’m not saying the best, I’m talking about the easiest place.”

“Big Daddy’s,” Eddie said.

I didn’t say so, but I agreed with Eddie in my mind. There are Big Daddy’s lounges all over Miami. Billboards all around Dade County show a picture of a guy and a girl sitting close together at a bar, right next to the bearded photo of Big Daddy himself, with a caption beneath the picture in lower-case Art type: Big Daddy’s — where you’re never alone... The message is clear enough. Any man who can’t score in a Big Daddy’s lounge has got a major hang-up of some kind.

“No,” Hank said, pursing his lips. “I admit you can pick up a woman in Big Daddy’s, but you don’t always score. Right? In fact, you might pick up a loser, lay out five bucks or so in drinks, and then find her missing when you come back from taking a piss.”

This was true enough; it had happened to me once, although I had never mentioned it to anyone.

“Think, now,” Hank said. “Give me one surefire place to pick up a woman, where you’ll score, I’ll say, at least nine times out of ten.”

“Bullshit,” Don said. “Nobody scores nine times out of ten, including you, Hank.”

“I never said I did,” Hank said. “But I know of one place where you can score nine times out of ten. Any one of us at this table.”

“Let’s go,” I said, leaping to my feet.

They all laughed.

“Sit down, Fuzz,” Hank said. “Just because there is such a place, it doesn’t mean you’ll want to go. Come on, you guys — think.”

“Is this a trick question?” Eddie said.

“No,” Hank said, without smiling, “it’s legitimate. And I’m not talking about call girls either, that is, if there’re any left in Miami.”

“Coconut Grove is pretty good,” Eddie said.

“The Grove’s always good,” Hank agreed, “but it’s not a single place, it’s a group of different places. Well, I’m going to tell you anyway, so I’ll spare you the suspense. The easiest place to pick up a fast lay in Miami is at the VD clinic.”

We all laughed.

“You’re full of it, Hank,” Don said. “A girl who’s just picked up the clap is going to be turned off men and sex for a long time.”

“That’s what I would have thought,” Hank said. “But apparently it doesn’t work that way. It was in the Herald the other day. The health official at the clinic was bitching about it. I don’t remember his name, but I cut out the piece and I’ve got it up in my apartment. He said that most of the girls at the clinic are from sixteen to twenty-two, and the guys and girls get together in the waiting room to exchange addresses and phone numbers because they know they’re safe. They’ve all been treated recently, so they know there’s no danger of catching anything. Anyway, according to the Herald, they’ve brought in a psychologist to study the problem. The health official wants to put in separate waiting rooms to keep the men and women apart.”

“Would you pick up a girl in a VD clinic?” Don asked Hank.

Hank laughed. “Not unless I was pretty damned hard up, I wouldn’t. Okay. I’ll show you guys the clipping later. Here’s a tougher question. Where’s the hardest place in Miami to pick up a woman?”

“The University of Miami Student Union,” Eddie said solemnly.

We all laughed.

“Come on, Eddie,” Hank said. “Play the game. This is a serious question.”

“When a man really needs a piece of ass,” I said, “any place he tries is hard.”

“That’s right,” Eddie said. “When you’ve got a woman waiting for you in the sack, and you stop off for a beer, there’ll be five or six broads all over you. But when you’re really out there digging, desperate, there’s nothing out there, man. Nothing.”

“That’s why I keep my small black book,” Hank said.

“We aren’t talking about friends, Hank,” I said. “We’re supposed to be talking about strange pussy.”

“That’s right. So where’s the hardest place to pick up strange?”

“At church — on a Sunday,” Eddie said.

“How long’s it been since you’ve been to church?” Hank asked. “Hell, at church, the minister’ll even introduce you to a nice girl if you point one out to him.”

“But who wants a nice girl?” Eddie said.

“I do,” Hank said. “In my book, a nice girl is one who guides it in.”

“If that’s true,” I said, “every girl I’ve ever slept with has been a nice girl. Thanks, Hank, for making my day. Why don’t we give up this stupid game, get something to eat, and go down to the White Shark and play some pool?”

“Wait a minute,” Eddie said, “I’m still interested in the question. I want to know the answer so I can avoid going there and wasting my time.”

“A determined man,” Don said, “can pick up a woman anywhere, even at the International Airport. And you can rent rooms by the hour at the Airport Hotel.”

“It isn’t the airport,” Hank said. “As you say, Don, the airport’s not a bad place for pick-ups. A lot of women, usually in pairs, hang around the Roof Lounge watching the planes take off”

“Well I give up, Hank,” I said. “I’ve had my two martinis, and if I don’t eat something pretty soon, I’m liable to drink another. And on my third martini I’ve been known to hit my best friend — just to see him fall.”

“Eighty-six the Fuzz,” Eddie said. “Tell us, Hank.” Eddie poured the last drink into his Dixie cup.

“Drive-in movies,” Hank said.

“I don’t get it,” Don said. “What’s so hard about picking up a woman at a drive-in, for Christ’s sake? Guys take women to drive-ins all the time—”

“That’s right,” Hank said. “They take them there, and they pay their way in. So what’re you going to do? Start talking to some woman while she’s in her boyfriend’s car, while he’s got one arm around her neck and his left hand on her snatch?”

Eddie laughed. “Yeah! Don’t do it, Don. The guy might have a gun in his glove compartment.”

“I guess I wasn’t thinking,” Don said.

I thought about the idea for a moment. “I’ve only been to a drive-in by myself two or three times in my whole life,” I said. “It’s a place you don’t go alone, usually, unless you want to catch a flick you’ve missed. The last time I went alone was to see Two-Lane Blacktop. I read the script when it came out in Esquire, and I really wanted to see the movie.”

“I saw that,” Eddie said. “Except for Warren Oates in the GTO, none of the other people in the movie could act.”

“That isn’t the point, Eddie,” I said. “I didn’t think the movie was so hot either, although the script was good. The point I’m trying to make is that the only reason I went to the drive-in alone was to see Two-Lane Blacktop, and it didn’t come on until 1:05 a.m. Where’re you going to find anyone to go to the drive-in with you at one in the morning? And when I didn’t like the movie either, I wanted to kick myself in the ass.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever been to a drive-in alone,” Don said. “Not that I remember, anyway.”

“Well, I have,” Hank said, “just like Larry. Some movies only play drive-ins, and if you don’t catch them there you’ll miss them altogether.”

“I’ve been a few times, I guess,” Eddie said, “and you’ll always see a few guys sitting alone in their cars. But I’ve never seen a woman alone in a car at a drive-in, unless her boyfriend was getting something at the snack bar.”

“Let me tick it off,” Hank said. “First, if a woman’s there, she’s either with her parents, her husband, or her boyfriend. Second, no woman ever goes to a drive-in alone. They’re afraid to, for some reason, even though a drive-in movie’s safer than anyplace I know for a woman alone. Because, third, a man would be stupid to look for a broad at a drive-in when there’re a thousand better places to pick one up.”

“That’s the toughest place, all right,” I said. “It’s impossible to pick up a woman at a drive-in.”

Hank laughed. “No, it isn’t impossible, Larry. It’s hard, but it’s not impossible.”

“I say it’s impossible,” I repeated.

“Better than that,” Eddie said, “I’m willing to bet ten bucks it’s impossible.”

Hank, shaking his head, laughed. “Ten isn’t enough.”

“Add another ten from me,” I said.

“I’ll make it thirty,” Don said.

“You guys aren’t serious,” Hank said.

“If you don’t think thirty bucks is serious enough,” Eddie said, “I’ll raise my ten to twenty.”

“Add another ten,” I said.

“And mine,” Don said.

“Sixty dollars is fairly serious money,” Hank said. “That’s twice as much dough as I’d win from you guys shooting pool at the White Shark.”

“Bullshit,” Eddie said. “We’ve offered to bet you sixty hard ones that you can’t pick up a broad at the drive-in. And we pick the drive-in.”

“You guys really love me, don’t you?” Hank said, getting to his feet and rotating his meaty shoulders.

“Sure, we love you, Hank,” I said. “We’re trying to add to your income. But you don’t have to take the bet. All you have to do is agree with us that it’s impossible, that’s all.”

“What’s my time limit, Eddie?” Hank said.

“An hour, let’s say,” Eddie said.

“An hour? Movies last at least an hour and a half,” Hank said. “And I’ll need some intermission time as well to talk to women at the snack bar. How about making it three hours?”

“How about two?” I said.

“Two hours is plenty,” Don said. “You wouldn’t hang around any other place in Miami for more’n two hours if you couldn’t pick up a broad.”

“Let’s compromise,” Hank said. “An hour and a half, so long as I get at least ten minutes intermission time. If the movie happens to run long, then I get more time to take advantage of the intermission, but two hours’ll be the outside limit. Okay?”

“It’s okay with me,” I said.

“Then let’s make the bet a little more interesting,” Hank said. “For every five minutes under an hour, you add five bucks to the bet, and I’ll match it.”

Hank’s self-confidence was irritating, but I considered it as unwarranted overconfidence. We took him up on his addition to the bet, and we agreed to meet in Hank’s apartment in a half hour.

We all had identical one-bedroom apartments, but we furnished them so differently none of them looked the same. I don’t have much furniture, but the stuff I’ve got is unique. On Saturday nights I often get the early Sunday edition of the Miami Herald and look for furniture bargains in the Personals. That’s how I got my harpsichord. It was worth at least $850, but I paid only $150 for it. I can pluck out “Birmingham Jail,” but I plan to take lessons if a harpsichord teacher ever moves to Miami. I’m not in any hurry to complete the furnishings; I’m willing to wait until I get the things I want to keep.

Eddie has a crummy place, a real mess, but his mother drives down from Fort Lauderdale every month to spend a couple of days with him, and that’s the only time it’s clean.

When Don left his wife, he took all of his den furniture, and his living room is furnished as a den. He’s got two large comfortable leather chairs, tall, old-fashioned, glass-door bookcases, and a half-dozen framed prints of A Rake’s Progress on the walls. When we’re watching football and drinking beer in Don’s place, it’s like being in some exclusive men’s club.

Hank, because he doesn’t have an office, has almost a third of his living room taken up with cardboard boxes full of drugs and samples of the other medical products his company manufactures. Hank serves as our “doctor.” We get our painkillers, cold remedies, medicated soap, and even free toothbrushes from Hank. Before the strict accountability on drugs started, he could sometimes spare sleeping pills and a few uppers. But not any longer. His company counts them out to him now, in small quantities, and he has to account for the amphetamines he passes out free to the doctors he calls on.

Hank’s apartment is overcrowded with possessions, too, in addition to the medical supplies. Once he has something, he can’t bear to part with it, so his apartment is cluttered. On top of everything else, Hank has a mounted eight-foot sailfish over the couch. He caught it in Acapulco last year, had it mounted for $450 and shipped to Miami. Across the belly, in yellow chalk, he’s written, Hank’s Folly. He still can’t understand how the boat captain talked him into having the sailfish mounted, except that he was so excited, at the time, about catching it. He’s so genuinely unhappy now, about his stupidity in mounting a sailfish, we no longer kid him about it.

When I got to my apartment, I was feeling the effects of the two martinis, so before I took my shower, I put on some coffee to perk. After I showered, I put on a T-shirt, khaki shorts, and a pair of tennis shoes. I fixed a very weak Scotch and water in a plastic glass, and carried it with me down to Hank’s apartment.

The other guys were already there. Don, wearing yellow linen slacks and a green knit shirt, was checking the movie pages in the Herald. Eddie wore his denim jacket and jeans with his black flight boots, and winked at me when I came in. He jerked his head toward the short hallway to the bedroom. Hank, of course, was still dressing, and a nose-tingling mixture of talcum powder, Right Guard, and Brut drifted in from the bedroom.

Eddie grinned, and jerked his head toward the bedroom. “An actor prepares,” he said. “Stanislavski.”

“Jesus,” Don said, rattling the paper. “At the Tropical Drive-in they’re showing five John Wayne movies! Who in hell could sit through five John Wayne’s, for Christ’s sake?”

“I could,” I said.

“Me, too,” Eddie said, “but only one at a time.”

“If you go to the first one at seven thirty,” Don said, “you don’t get out till three a.m.!”

“I wouldn’t mind,” Eddie said, “if we all went and took along a couple of cases of beer. It’s better than watching TV from seven thirty till three, and I’ve done that often enough.”

“Yeah,” I said, “but you can watch TV in air-conditioned comfort. You aren’t fighting mosquitoes all night.”

“They fog those places for mosquitoes,” Eddie said.

“Sure they do,” Don said, “and it makes them so mad they bite the shit out of you. Here’s one. Listen to this. At the Southside Dixie. Bucket of Blood, The Blood-Letters, The Bloody Vampires, and Barracuda! There’s a theater manager with a sense of humor. He put the barracuda last so they could get all that blood!”

We laughed.

Eddie got up and crossed to the kitchenette table, where Hank kept his liquor and a bucketful of ice. “What’re you drinking, Fuzz-O?”

“I’m nursing this one,” I said.

“Pour me a glass of wine, Eddie,” Don said.

“Blood-red, or urine-yellow?”

“I don’t care,” Don said, “just so you put a couple of ice cubes in it.”

Eddie fixed a Scotch over ice for himself, and brought Don a glass of Chianti, with ice cubes.

“The Southside’s probably our best bet,” I said. “There’ll be fewer women at the horror program than at the John Wayne festival. And besides, there’s a Burger Queen across the highway there on Dixie. We can eat something and watch for Hank when he comes out of the theater.”

“Shouldn’t one of us go with him?” Eddie said.

“It wouldn’t be fair,” Don said. “I don’t think he’ll be able to pick up any women there anyway, but it would be twice as hard to talk some woman into getting into a car with two guys. So we let him go in alone. As Larry says, we can watch the exit from across the Dixie Highway.”

Hank came into the living room, looking and smelling like a jai-alai player on his night off. He wore white shoes with leather tassels, and a magenta slack suit with a silk blue-and-red paisley scarf tucked in around the collar. Hank had three other tailored suits like the magenta — wheat, blue and chocolate — but I hadn’t seen the magenta before. The high-waisted pants, with an uncuffed flare, were double-knits, and so tight in front his equipment looked like a money bag. The short-sleeved jacket was a beltless, modified version of a bush jacket, with huge bellows side pockets.

Don was the only one of us with long hair, that is, long enough, the way we all wanted to wear it. Because of our jobs, we couldn’t get away with hair as long as Don’s. Hank had fluffed his hair with an air-comb, and it looked much fuller than it did when he slicked it down with spray to call on doctors.

“Isn’t that a new outfit?” Eddie said.

“I’ve had it awhile,” Hank said, going to the table to build a drink. “It’s the first time I’ve worn it, is all. I ordered the suit from a small swatch of material. Then when it was made into a suit, I saw that it was a little too much.” He shrugged. “But it’ll do for a drive-in, I think.”

“There’s nothing wrong with that color, Hank,” Don said. “I like it.”

Hank added two more ice cubes to his Scotch and soda. “It makes my face look red, is all.”

“Your face is red,” I said.

“But not as red as this magenta makes it look.”

“When you pay us off tonight,” Eddie said, “it’ll match perfectly.”

Hank looked at his wristwatch. “Suppose we synchronize our watches. It is now, precisely... seven twenty-one. We’ll see who ends up with the reddest faces.”

We checked our watches. For the first time, I wondered if I had made a bad bet. If Hank lost, I consoled myself, at least his overconfidence would preclude my giving him any sympathy.

We decided then to meet Hank at the Burger Queen across from the Southside Drive-in. He would take his Galaxie, and the rest of us would ride down in Don’s Mark IV.

Because we stopped at the 7-Eleven to buy two six-packs of beer, Hank beat us to the Burger Queen by about five minutes. Don gave Hank a can of beer, which he hid under the front seat, and then Hank drove across the highway. It was exactly seven forty-one.

We ordered Double Queens apiece, with fries, and then grabbed a tile table on the side patio to the left of the building. The Burger Queen didn’t serve beer, and the manager couldn’t see us fish our beers out of the paper sack around to the side. We could look directly across the highway and see the drive-in exit.

Unless you’re going out to dinner somewhere, eating at eight p.m. in Miami is on the late side. We were all used to eating around six, and so we were ravenous as we wolfed down the double burgers. We didn’t talk until we finished, and then I gathered up the trash and dumped it into the nearest garbage can. Don ripped the tops off three more beers.

Below Kendall, at this point on the Dixie Highway, there were six lanes, and the traffic was swift and noisy both ways. Eddie began to laugh and shake his head.

“What’s so funny?” I said.

“The whole thing — what else? I know there isn’t a hellova lot to do on a Thursday night, but if I ever told anyone I sat around at the Burger Queen for two hours waiting for my buddy to pick up a woman at a drive-in movie—”

“You’d better hope it’s at least an hour and a half,” Don said.

“I know, I know,” Eddie said, “but you’ve got to admit the whole business is pretty stupid.”

“Yes and no, Eddie,” I said. “It isn’t really money, either. You and Don both know that we’d all like to take Hank down a notch.”

Don smiled. “I think you may be right, Larry.”

“I’m not jealous of Hank,” Eddie said.

“Neither am I,” I said. “All I’m saying is that for once I’d like to see old Hank lose one. I like Hank, for Christ’s sake, but I hate to see any man so damned overconfident all the time, that’s all.”

“Yeah,” Eddie said. “I know what you mean.”

Don snorted, and looked at his watch. “You’ll have to wait until another time, I think. It’s now eight twelve, and here comes our wandering overconfident boy.”

Don had spotted Hank’s Galaxie as it cleared the drive-in exit, and Hank, waiting to make a left turn, was hovering at the edge of the highway when I turned to look. He had to wait for some time, and we couldn’t see whether there was a woman in the car with him or not. He finally made it across and parked in the Burger Queen lot. We met him about halfway as he came toward us — by himself.

“How about a beer?” Hank said.

“We drank it,” Eddie said.

“Thanks for saving me one. Come on. I’ll introduce you to Hildy.”

We followed Hank to the Galaxie. When he opened the passenger door and the overhead light went on, we saw the girl clearly. She was about thirteen or fourteen, barefooted, wearing a tie-dyed T-shirt, and tight raggedy-cuffed blue jeans with a dozen or more different patches sewn onto them. On her crotch, right over the pudenda, there was a patch with a comic rooster flexing muscled wings. The embroidered letters, in white, below the chicken read: l’M A MEAN FIGHTING COCK. Her brownish hair fell down her back, well past her shoulders, straight but slightly tangled, and her pale face was smudged with dirt. She gave us a tentative smile, and tried to take us all in at once, but she had trouble focusing her eyes. She closed her eyes, and her head hobbled on her skinny neck.

“She’s only a kid,” Eddie said, glaring at Hank.

Hank shrugged. “I know. She looked older over in the drive-in, without any lights, but you guys didn’t set any age limit. A girl’s a girl, and I had enough trouble snagging this one.”

“It’s a cop-out, Hank,” I said, “and you know it.”

“Suit yourself, Fuzz-O,” Hank said. “If you guys don’t want to pay off, I’ll cancel the debt.”

“Nobody said he wouldn’t pay,” Don said. “But the idea was to pick up somebody old enough to screw. You wouldn’t fuck a fourteen-year-old girl—”

“That wasn’t one of the conditions,” Hank said, “but if that’s what you guys want, I’ll take Hildy home, give her a shower, and slip it to her. I sure as hell wouldn’t be getting any cherry—”

The girl — Hildy — whimpered like a puppy, coughed, choked slightly, and fell over sideways in the seat. “Nobody’s going to hurt you, kid,” Don said.

“She’s stoned on something, Hank,” I said. “You’d better get her out of there before she heaves all over the upholstery.”

Hank bent down, leaned inside the car, and pushed up the girl’s eyelids. He put a forefinger into her throat and then grabbed her thin right wrist to check her pulse. He slammed the passenger door, and leaned against it. His red, sunburned face was watermelon pink — about as pale as Hank was capable of getting.

“She’s dead,” Hank said. He took out his cigarettes, put one in his mouth, but couldn’t get his lighter to work. I lighted a cigarette myself, and then held the match for Hank. His fingers trembled.

“Don’t play around, Hank,” Don said. “Shit like that isn’t funny.”

“She’s dead, Don,” Hank said.

“Are you sure?” Eddie said.

“Look, man—” Hank ran his fingers through his fluffy hair, and then took a long drag on his cigarette. “Dead is dead, man! I’ve seen too many... too fucking many—”

“Take it easy, Hank,” I said.

“What do we do now, Larry?” Don said. Hank and Eddie looked at me, too, waiting. At twenty-eight, I was the youngest of the four. Hank was thirty-one, and Don and Eddie were both thirty, but because of my police background they were dumping the problem in my lap.

“We’ll take her to Hank’s apartment,” I said. “I’ll drive Hank’s car, and Hank’ll go with me. You guys go on ahead in the Continental and unlock the fire door to the northwest stairway. Meet us at the door, because it’s closest to Hank’s apartment. Then, while you three take her upstairs to the apartment, I’ll park Hank’s car.”

“Okay,” Don said. “Let’s go, Eddie.”

“Don’t run, for Christ’s sake,” I said.

They slowed to a walk. Hank gave me his car keys, and I circled the car and got in behind the wheel.

On the way back to Dade Towers I drove cautiously. Hank sat in the passenger bucket seat beside me, and held the girl’s shoulders. He had folded her legs, and she was in a kneeling position on the floor with her face level with the dash glove compartment. He held her steady, with both hands gripping her shoulders.

“How’d you happen to pick her up, Hank?” I said.

“Thursday’s a slow night, apparently,” Hank said. “There’re only about twenty-five cars in there. No one, hardly, was at the snack bar. I got a paper cup from the counter, and went outside to pour my beer into it. Sometimes, you know, there’s a cop around, and you’re not supposed to drink beer at the drive-in, you know.”

“I know.”

The girl had voided, and the smell of ammonia and feces was strong. Moving her about hadn’t helped any either. I pushed the button to lower the windows, and turned off the air-conditioning.

“That was a good idea,” Hank said. “Anyway, I got rid of the beer can in a trash basket, and circled around the snack bar to the women’s can. I thought some women might come out, and I could start talking to one, but none did. Then I walked on around the back of the building to the other side. Hildy, here, was standing out in the open, not too far from the men’s room. She was just standing there, that’s all, looking at the screen. The nearest car was about fifty feet away — I told you there were only about twenty-five cars, didn’t I?”

“Yeah. A lot of people don’t come until the second feature, which is usually the best flick.”

“Maybe so. The point is, nobody was around us. ‘Hi,’ I said, ‘are you waiting for me?’ She just giggled and then she mumbled something.

“‘Who?’ I said, and then she said, ‘The man in the yellow jumpsuit.’

“‘Oh, sure,’ I said, ‘he sent me to get you. My name’s Hank — what’s yours?’

“‘Hildy,’ she said.

“‘Right,’ I said. “You’re the one, all right. I hope you don’t mind magenta instead of yellow.’

“Then she asked me for some of my Coke. She thought I had a Coke because of the red paper cup, you see. So I gave her a drink from the cup and she made a face. Then she took my hand, just like I was her father or something, and I led her over to my car. It was dark as hell in there, Larry, and I swear she looked older — around seventeen, anyway.”

“That doesn’t make any difference now,” I said.

“I guess not. I wish to hell I had a drink.”

“We can get one in your apartment.”

The operation at Dade Towers worked as smoothly as if we had rehearsed it. I parked at the corner, ten feet from the door. Hank wrapped a beach towel around Hildy, an old towel he kept in the backseat, and Eddie opened the car door. The fire door to the stairway, which was rarely used, only opened from the inside. Don held the door partly open for Hank and Eddie, and they had carried her inside and up the stairs before I drove across the street and into the parking lot. After parking in Hank’s slot and locking the car, I shoved Hildy’s handbag under my T-shirt.

I knocked softly at Hank’s door when I got upstairs. Don opened it a crack to check me out before he let me in. Hildy was on her back on the couch, with the beach towel beneath her. She was only about four eight, and the mounted sailfish on the wall above her looked almost twice as long as she did. The sail’s name in yellow chalk, Hank’s Folly, somehow seemed appropriate. When I joined the group, Hank handed me a straight Scotch over ice cubes.

The four of us, in a semicircle, stared down at the girl for a few moments. Her brown eyes were opened partially, and there were yellow “sleepies” in the corners. There was a scattering of pimples on her forehead, and a few freckles on her nose and cheeks. There was a yellow hickey on the left corner of her mouth, and she didn’t have any lipstick on her pale lips. Her skin, beneath the smudges of dirt, was so white it was almost transparent, and a dark blue vein beneath her right temple was clearly visible. She wasn’t wearing a bra beneath her T-shirt; with her adolescent chest bumps, she didn’t need one.

“She looks,” Eddie said, “like a first-year Brownie.”

Don began to cry.

“For God’s sake, Don—” Hank said.

“Leave him alone, Hank,” I said. “I feel like crying myself.”

Don sat in the Danish chair across from the TV, took out his handkerchief, wiped his eyes, and then blew his nose.

I emptied the purse — a blue-and-red patchwork leather bag, with a long braided leather shoulder strap — onto the coffee table. There were two plastic vials containing pills. One of them was filled with the orange heart-shaped pills I recognized as Dexies. The other pills were round and white, but larger than aspirins, and stamped M-T. There was a Mary Jane, a penny piece of candy wrapped in yellow paper, the kind kids buy at the 7-Eleven; a roll of bills held together by a rubber band; a used and wadded Kleenex; and a blunt, slightly bent aluminum comb.

As I started to count the money, I said to Eddie, “Search her body, Ed.”

“No,” he said, shaking his head.

“Let me fix you another drink, Ed.” Hank took Eddie’s glass, and they moved to the kitchenette table. Don, immobilized in the Danish chair, stared at the floor without blinking.

There were thirty-eight dollars in the roll; one was a five, the rest were ones. I emptied the girl’s front pockets. This was hard to do because her jeans were so tight. There were two quarters and three pennies in the right pocket, and a slip of folded notebook paper in the left. It was a list of some kind, written with a blue felt pen. 30 ludes, 50 Bs, no gold. There was only one hip pocket, and it was a patch that had been sewn on in an amateurish manner. The patch, in red denim, with white letters, read, KISS MY PATCH. The pocket was empty.

“There’s no ID, Hank,”I said.

“So what do we do now,” Eddie said, “call the cops?”

“What’s your flying schedule?” I said.

“I go to New York Saturday. Why?”

“How’d you like to be grounded, on suspension without pay, for about three months? Pending an investigation into the dope fiend death of a teenaged girl?”

“We didn’t do anything,” Eddie said.

“That’s right,” I said. “But that wouldn’t keep your name out of the papers, or some pretty nasty interrogations at the station. And Hank’s in a more sensitive position than you are with the airline, what with his access to drug samples and all. If — or when — he’s investigated, and his company’s name gets into the papers, as soon as he’s cleared, the best he can hope for is a transfer to Yuma, Arizona.”

Hank shuddered, and sat down at the coffee table beside me in a straight-backed cane chair. He opened the vial holding the pills that were stamped M-T.

“Methaqualone,” Hank said. “But they’re not from my company. We make them all right, but our brand’s called ‘Meltin.’ There’re twenty M-T’s left in the vial, so she could’ve taken anywhere from one to a dozen — or more maybe. Four or five could suffocate and kill her.” Hank shrugged, and looked at the girl’s body on the couch. “The trouble is, these heads take mixtures sometimes of any and everything. She’s about seventy-five pounds, I’d say, and if she was taking a combination of Dexies and M-T’s, it’s a miracle she was still on her feet when I picked her up.” He tugged on his lower lip. “If any one of us guys took even three ’ludes, we’d sleep for at least ten hours straight. But if Hildy, here, was on the stuff for some time, she could’ve built up a tolerance, and—”

“Save it, Hank,” I said. “The girl’s dead, and we don’t know who she is — that’s what we need to know. The best thing for us to do, I think, is find the guy in the yellow jumpsuit and turn her over to him.”

“What guy in what yellow jumpsuit?” Eddie said.

Hank told them what the girl had said, that she was waiting for a man in a yellow jumpsuit.

“Do you think it was her father, maybe?” Don said.

“Hell no,” I said. “Whoever he is, she’s his baby, not ours.”

“How’re we going to find him?” Eddie said.

“Back at the drive-in,” I said. “I’m going to get my pistol from my apartment, and then we’ll go back and look for him.”

“D’you want me to take my pistol too, Larry?” Eddie asked.

“You’d better not,” I said, “I’ve got a license, and you haven’t. You and I and Hank’ll go back. You’d better stay here with the girl, Don.”

“I’d just as soon go along,” Don said.

“No,” I said. “Somebody’d better stay here with the girl. We’ll go in your car, Hank.” I handed him his keys. “I’ll meet you guys down in the lot.”

I went to my apartment, and changed into slacks. I put my pistol, a Colt Cobra .38, with a two-inch barrel, into its clip holster, and shoved the holstered gun inside the waistband of my trousers. To conceal the handle of the weapon, I put on a sand-colored lightweight golf jacket, and zipped up the front. Hank and Eddie were both in the Galaxie, Eddie in the backseat, and Hank in the driver’s, when I got to the parking lot. I slid in beside Hank.

On our way to the drive-in I told them how we would work the search party. Hank could start with the first row of cars, going from one to the next, and Eddie could start from the back row. I’d start at the snack bar, checking the men’s room first, and then look into any of the cars that were parked close to the snack bar. I would also be on the lookout for any new cars coming in, and I would mark the position of new arrivals, if any, so we could check them out when we finished with those already there.

“One other thing,” I said. “If you spot the guy, don’t do anything. We’ll all meet in the men’s room, and then we’ll take him together. There aren’t that many cars, and we should finish the search in about five minutes.”

“What if he isn’t there?” Eddie said.

“Then we wait. I think he’ll show up, all right. My worry is, he might not be alone, which’ll make it harder to pick him up. But there aren’t that many guys wearing jumpsuits, especially yellow ones, so we should be able to spot him easily enough.”

“Not necessarily,” Hank said. “He might be a hallucination, a part of the girl’s trip. Hell, she came with me without any persuasion to speak of, and she would’ve gone with anybody. She was really out of it, Larry.”

“We don’t have to look for the guy, Hank,” I said. “If you think it’s a waste of time, let’s go back and get the girl and dump her body in a canal someplace.”

“Jesus, Larry,” Eddie said, “could you do that?”

“What else do you suggest?”

“Nothing,” Eddie said. “But before we do anything drastic, I think we’d better look for her boyfriend in the jumpsuit.”

“That’s why we’re going to the drive-in,” Hank said.

I took a five and a one out of my wallet, and had the money ready to pass across Hank to the girl in the box office the moment Hank stopped the car. Hank had cut his lights, but I regretted, for a moment, not taking my Vega instead of returning in his Galaxie. The Galaxie, because it was leased by Hank’s company, had an E prefix on the license plate. But because there were three of us in the car instead of only one, it was still unlikely that the girl would make an earlier connection with Hank.

We parked in the last row. The nearest car was three rows ahead of us. As we got out of the car, Eddie laughed abruptly. “What do we say,” he said, “if someone asks what we’re looking in their car for? Not everybody comes to this fingerbowl to watch the movie, you know.”

“Don’t make a production out of it,” I said. “Just glance in and move on. If somebody does say something, ask for an extra book of matches. That’s as good an excuse as any. But look into each car from the side or back, and you won’t get into any hassles. Remember, though, if you do spot the guy, keep on going down the line of cars as before. Don’t quit right then and head for the men’s room. He might suspect something.”

A few minutes later we met in the men’s room. I lit a cigarette, and Eddie and Hank both shook their heads. I wasn’t surprised. I hadn’t expected to find any man in a yellow jumpsuit. In fact, I suspected that Hank had made up the story. And yet, it was wise to get all three of them involved. I had realized, from the beginning, that I would have to be the one who would have to get rid of the girl’s body, but it would be better, later on, for these guys to think that they had done everything possible before the inevitable dumping of the kid in a canal.

“Okay,” I said. “To make sure, let’s start over. Only this time, you start with the first row, Eddie, and you, Hank, start with the back. It won’t hurt anything to double-check.”

“If you really think it’s necessary,” Hank said.

“We’ve got to wait around anyway,” I said.

They took off again. It wasn’t necessary, but I wanted to keep them busy. They didn’t have my patience. These guys had never sat up all night for three nights in a row at a stake-out in a liquor store. But I had. I went around to the back of the snack bar, where it was darkest, and kept my eye on the box office entrance, some hundred yards away. Two more cars, both with their parking lights on, came in. The first car turned at the second row and squeezed into an empty slot. The second car, a convertible, drove all the way to the back, and parked about three spaces to the right of Hank’s car. If you came to see the movie, it was a poor location, so far from the screen, and angled away from it. A man got out of the car, and started toward the snack bar.

I caught up with Hank, and pointed the man out as he came slowly in our direction, picking his way because his eyes weren’t used to the darkness. “I think we’ve got him, Hank,” I said. “Go straight up to him and ask for a match, and I’ll circle around in back of him.”

“What if he’s got a gun?” Hank said.

“I’ve got a gun, too. Hurry up.”

When Hank stopped the man, I was behind him about ten yards or so. He gave Hank a light from his cigarette lighter; then he heard me and turned around. I clicked the hammer back on my .38 as he turned.

“Let’s go back to your car, friend,” I said.

“A stick-up in the drive-in? You guys must be out of your fuckin’ minds,” he said.

“Stand away from him, Hank,” I said. “If he doesn’t move in about one second, I’ll shoot his balls off.”

“I’m moving, I’m moving,” the man said. He put his arms above his head and waggled his fingers.

“Put your arms down, you bastard,” I said. “Cross your arms across your chest.”

When we reached his car, a dark blue Starfire, with the top down, I told him to get into the passenger’ side of the front seat. Eddie, breathing audibly through his mouth, joined us a moment later.

“Okay, Hank,” I said, “the same as with the girl. You drive on ahead, get Don, and have the fire door open for us. Eddie’ll drive this car, and I’ll watch the son of a bitch from the backseat. Okay, friend, put one hand on top of the dash, and pass over your car keys with the other.”

“No dice,” he said. “If you guys want my dough, go ahead and take it, but I ain’t leavin’ the drive-in—”

He sat erect in the seat with his arms crossed, looking straight ahead. He was wearing a yellow jumpsuit, and from the cool way he was taking things I knew that he was the right man. I slapped the barrel of the pistol across his nose. His nose broke, and blood spurted. He squealed, and grabbed for his nose with his right hand.

“Cross your arms,” I said.

He quickly recrossed his arms, but he turned his head and eyes to glare at me. “Now,” I said, “slowly — with one hand, pass over your car keys to the driver.” He kept his right forearm across his chest, and dug the keys out of his left front pocket. Eddie slid into the driver’s seat, shut the door, and took the keys.

“Get going,” I said to Hank, who was still standing there. “We’ll be right behind you.”

Hank walked over to his car. I climbed over the side of the Starfire, into the backseat, and Eddie started the engine.

“Wait till Hank clears the exit before you pull out,” I said to Eddie.

“Where’re you guys takin’ me, anyway?” the man said. “I got friends, you know. You’re gonna be sorry you broke my fuckin’ nose, too. It hurts like a bastard.” He touched his swollen nose with his right hand.

“Shut up,” I said, “and keep your arms crossed. If you move either one of your arms again, I’m going to put a round through your shoulder.”

Eddie moved out, handling the car skillfully. He drove to the extreme right of the row before turning onto the exit road, and without lights. There was a quarter-moon, the sky was cloudless, and we’d been in the drive-in so long by now that we could see easily.

When we reached the fire door at Dade Towers, Don and Hank were waiting for us. I ordered the man in the yellow jumpsuit to follow Don, and Hank followed me as we went up the stairs. Eddie parked the convertible in a visitor’s slot across the street, and came up to Hank’s apartment in the elevator.

While we were gone, Don had turned on the television, but not the sound. On the screen, Doris Day and Rock Hudson were standing beside a station wagon in a suburban neighborhood. She was waving her arms around.

The man in the yellow jumpsuit didn’t react at all when he saw the dead girl. Instead of looking at her, he looked at the silent television screen. He was afraid, of course, and trembling visibly, but he wasn’t terrified. He stood between the couch and the kitchen, with his back to the girl, and stared boldly at each of us, in turn, as though trying to memorize our faces.

He was about twenty-five or — six, with a glossy Prince Valiant helmet of dark auburn hair. His hair was lighter on top, because of the sun, probably, but it had been expensively styled. His thick auburn eyebrows met in the middle, above his swollen nose, as he scowled. His long sideburns came down at a sharp point, narrowing to a quarter-inch width, and they curved across his cheeks to meet his mustache, which had been carved into a narrow, half-inch strip. As a consequence, his mustache, linked in a curve across both cheeks to his sideburns, resembled a fancy, cursive lower-case m. His dark blue eyes watered slightly. There was blood drying on his mustache, on his chin, and there was a thin Jackson Pollock drip down the front of his lemon-yellow poplin jumpsuit. His nose had stopped bleeding.

Jumpsuits, as leisure wear, have been around for several years, but it’s only been the last couple of years that men have worn them on the street, or away from home or the beach. There’s a reason. They are comfortable, and great to lounge around in — until you get a good profile look at yourself in the mirror. If you have any gut at all — even two inches more than you should have — a jumpsuit, which is basically a pair of fancied-up coveralls, makes you look like you’ve got a pot-gut. I’ve got a short-sleeved blue terry-cloth jumpsuit I wear around the pool once in a while, but I would never wear it away from the apartment house. When I was on the force and weighed about 175, I could have worn it around town, but since I’ve been doing desk work at National, I’ve picked up more than twenty pounds. My waistline has gone from a thirty-two to a thirty-six, and the jumpsuit makes me look like I’ve got a paunch. It’s the way they are made.

But this guy in the yellow jumpsuit was slim, maybe 165, and he was close to six feet in height. The poplin jumpsuit was skin-tight, bespoken, probably, and then cut down even more, and he wore it without the usual matching belt at the waist. It had short sleeves, and his sinewy forearms were hairy. Thick reddish chest hair curled out of the top of the suit where he had pulled the zipper down for about eight inches. He wore zippered cordovan boots, and they were highly polished.

“What’s the girl’s name?” I said.

“How should I know?” he said. “I never seen her before.What’s the matter with her, anyway?”

“There’s nothing the matter with her,” Don said. “She’s dead, now, and you killed her!” Don started for him, but Hank grabbed Don by the arms, at the biceps, and gently pushed him back.

“Take it easy, Don,” Hank said. “Let Larry handle it.” When Don nodded, Hank released him.

“Step forward a pace,” I said, “and put your hands on top of your head.” The man shuffled forward, and put his hands on his head. “Here, Don,” I said, handing Don the pistol. “Cover me while I search him. If he tries anything, shoot him in the kneecap.”

“Sure, Larry,” Don said. His hand was steady as he aimed the .38 at the man’s kneecap.

“I’ll hold the pistol, Don,” Hank said, “if you want me to.”

Don shook his head, and Eddie grinned and winked at me as I went around behind the man in the jumpsuit to frisk him.

“Leave him alone, Hank,” I said. “Why don’t you fix us a drink?”

I tossed the man’s ostrich-skin wallet, handkerchief, and silver ballpoint pen onto the coffee table from behind. He didn’t have any weapons, and he had less than two dollars worth of change in his front pockets. He had a package of Iceberg cigarettes, with three cigarettes missing from the pack, and a gold Dunhill lighter.

At his waist, beneath the jumpsuit, I felt a leather belt. I came around in front of him, and caught the ring of the zipper. He jerked his hands down and grabbed my wrists. Don moved forward and jammed the muzzle of the gun against the man’s left knee. The man quickly let go of my wrists.

“For God’s sake, don’t shoot!” he said. He put his hands on top of his head again.

“It’s all right, Don,” I said.

Don moved back. I pulled down the zipper, well below his waist. He wasn’t wearing underwear, just the belt. It was a plain brown cowhide suit belt, about an inch and a half in width. I unbuckled it, jerked it loose from his body, and turned it over. It was a zippered money belt, the kind that is advertised in men’s magazines every month. If he had been wearing the belt with a pair of trousers, no one would have ever suspected that it was a money belt. I unzipped the compartment. There were eight one-hundred-dollar bills and two fifties tightly folded lengthwise inside the narrow space. I unfolded the bills, and counted them onto the coffee table.

“That ain’t my money!” the man in the yellow jumpsuit said.

“That’s right,” Eddie said, laughing. “Not anymore it isn’t.”

“I’m telling you, right now,” the man said, “that dough don’t belong to me. You take it, and you’re in trouble. Big trouble!”

I sat down at the coffee table, and went through his wallet. Eddie sat beside me in another straight-backed chair. Hank set Scotches over ice in front of us. He held an empty glass up for Don, and raised his eyebrows. Don shook his head, but didn’t take his eyes off the man in the yellow jumpsuit. Hank, with a fresh drink in his hand, leaned against the kitchenette archway, and stared at the man.

There were three gas credit cards in the billfold: Gulf, Exxon, and Standard Oil. The Gulf card was made out to A.H. Wexley, the Exxon to A. Franciscus, and the Standard card was in the name of L. Cohen. All three cards listed Miami Beach addresses. There was no other identification in the wallet. There was another eighty dollars in bills, plus a newspaper coupon that would entitle the man to a one-dollar discount on a bucket or a barrel of Colonel Sanders’s fried chicken. There was a parking stub for the Dupont Plaza Hotel garage, an ivory toothpick in a tiny leather case, and a key to a two-bit locker. Bus station? Airport? Any public place that has rental lockers. And that was all.

“I’ve never seen a man’s wallet this skimpy,” I said to Eddie.

“Me either,” Eddie said. “I can hardly fold mine, I got so much junk.”

“Which one is you?” I said, reading the gas credit cards again. “Cohen, Franciscus, or Wexley?”

“I don’t like to use the same gas all the time, man,” he said, then he giggled.

I got up and kicked him in the shin with the side of my foot. Because I was wearing tennis shoes, it didn’t hurt him half as much as he let on, but because he was surprised, he lost some of his poise.

“Look, you guys,” he said, “why don’t you just take the money and let me go. I haven’t done anything—”

“What’s the girl’s name?” I said.

“I don’t know her name. Honest.”

“What’s her name? She told us she was waiting for you, so there’s no point lying about it.”

“Her name’s Hildy.” He shrugged, yawned, and looked away from me.

“Hildy what?”

“I don’t know, man. She worked for me some, but I never knew her last name.”

“Doing what?” I said.

“She sold a little stuff for me now and then — at Bethune.”

“Mary Bethune Junior High?”

“Yeah.”

“Did you drop her off, earlier tonight, at the drive-in?”

“No. I was supposed to collect some dough from her there, that’s all.”

“Do you know how old she is?”

“She’s in the eighth grade, she said, but I never asked how old she was. That’s none of my business.”

“So you turned her on to drugs without even caring how old she was?” Hank said. “You’re the lowest son of a bitch I’ve ever met.”

“I never turned her on to no drugs, man,” the man said. “She was takin’ shit long before I met her. What I was doing, I was doing her a favor. She lives with her mother, she said. Her mother works at night, over at the beach, she said. And her father split a couple of years back for Hawaii. So Hildy asked me if she could sell some for me. She was trying to save up enough money to go to her father in Hawaii. That’s all. And the other kid, a black kid, who used to sell for me at Bethune, he took off for Jacksonville with fifty bucks he owed me. I needed someone at Bethune, and I told Hildy I’d give her a chance. She needed the bread, she said. She wanted to live with her father in Hawaii. So what I was doing, I was doing her a favor.”

He ran down. We all stared at him. Beneath his heavy tan, his face was flushed, and he perspired heavily in the air-conditioned room.

“I ain’t no worse’n you guys,” the man in the yellow jumpsuit said. “What the hell, you guys picked her up to screw her, didn’t you? Well, didn’t you?”

“You mean you were screwing her, too?” Don said.

“No — I never touched her. She might’ve gone down on me a couple of times, but I never touched her.”

“What do you mean, ‘might have’?” Don said. “Did she or didn’t she?”

“Yeah, I guess she did, a couple of times. But I never made her do it. She wanted to, she said.”

Don fired the pistol. It was like a small explosion in the crowded room. Hank, standing in the kitchenette archway, dropped his glass on the floor. It didn’t break. Eddie, sitting beside me, sucked in his breath. The man in the yellow jumpsuit clawed at his chest with both hands. He sank to his knees and his back arched as his head fell back. The back of his head hit the couch and his arms dropped loosely to his sides. He remained in that position, without toppling, his face in the air, looking up at nothing, on his knees, with his back arched and his head and neck supported by the couch. Don made a funny noise in his throat. There was a widening red circle on the man’s hairy chest, as blood bubbled from a dark round hole. I stood up, took the pistol away from Don, and returned the gun to my belt holster. The man in the yellow jumpsuit had voided and the stench filled the room. I crossed to the TV and turned up the volume.

“I didn’t—” Don said. “I didn’t touch the trigger! It went off by itself!”

“Sit down, Don,” Hank said. He crossed to Don, and gently pushed him down into the Danish chair. “We know it was an accident, Don.”

“Eddie,” I said, “open the windows, and turn the air-conditioning to fan.”

Eddie nodded, and started toward the bedroom where the thermostat was on the wall. I opened the door to the outside hallway. Keeping my hand on the knob, I looked up and down the corridor. A gunshot sounds exactly like a gunshot and nothing else. But most people don’t know that. I was prepared, in case someone stuck his head out, to ask him if he heard a car backfire. The sound from the TV, inside Hank’s apartment, was loud enough to hear in the corridor. I waited outside for a moment longer, and when no heads appeared, I ducked back inside and put the night lock on the door.

“Larry,” Hank said, “d’you think I should give Don a sedative?”

“Hell no,” I said. “Let him lie down for a while on your bed, but we don’t want him dopey on us, for Christ’s sake.”

Don was the color of old expensive parchment, as if his olive tan had been diluted with a powerful bleach. His eyes were glazed slightly, and he leaned on Hank heavily as Hank led him into the bedroom.

Eddie grinned, and shook his head. “What a night,” he said. “When I opened the damned window behind the couch, I accidentally stepped on the guy’s hand. One of his damned fingers broke.” Eddie looked away from me; his mouth was twitching at the corners.

“Don’t worry about it, Ed,” I said. “You and I are going to have to get rid of him, you know — both of them.”

“That figures. Any ideas?”

Hank came back from the bedroom. “I’m treating Don for shock,” he said. “I’ve covered him with a blanket, and now I’m going to make him some hot tea.”

“Never mind the fucking tea,” I said. “I’m not worried about Don. We’ve got to get these bodies out of here.”

“I know that,” Hank said. “What do you suggest?”

“We’ll put them into the backseat of the convertible, and then I’ll drive his car over to the Japanese Garden on the MacArthur Causeway. I’ll just park the car in the lot and leave it.” I turned to Eddie. “You can follow me in my Vega, and pick me up.”

“Okay,” Eddie said. I gave him my car keys.

“I’ll go with you, if you want,” Hank said.

“There’s no point, Hank. You can stay here after we load the bodies, and make some fucking tea for Don.”

“Wait a minute,” Hank said, “you don’t have to—”

“I don’t have to what?” I said.

“Cut it out, you guys,” Eddie said. “Go ahead, Larry. Get the convertible and park it by the fire exit. I’ll bring the girl down first, but it’ll take all three of us to carry him down.”

“All right,” I said. “Except for the money, put the girl’s bag and his wallet and all their other stuff into a paper sack.” I pointed to the stuff on the coffee table. “And we’ll need something to cover him up.”

“I’ve got a GI blanket in the closet,” Hank said.

Taking the car keys to the convertible from Eddie, I left the apartment.

While Eddie and I wedged the girl between the back and front seats on the floor of the convertible, Hank held the fire door open for us. We covered her with the beach towel, and I tucked the end under her head.

“Shouldn’t one of us stay down here with the car?” Eddie asked.

“No,” I said. “He’s too heavy. It’ll take all three of us to bring him down. It won’t take us long. We’ll just take a chance, that’s all.”

On the way back to Hank’s apartment, we ran into Marge Brewer in the corridor. She was in her nurse’s uniform, and had just come off duty at Jackson Memorial. She was coming toward us from the elevator.

“I’m beat,” she said, looking at Hank. “A twelve-hour split shift. I’m going to whomp up a big batch of martinis. D’you all want to come down in ten minutes? I’ll share.”

“Give us a rain check, Marge,” Hank said. “We’re going down to the White Shark and shoot some pool.”

“Sure,” she said. “’Night.”

We paused outside Hank’s apartment. Hank fumbled with his keys at the door until she rounded the corner at the end of the corridor.

“Go inside,” I said. “I’d better pull the emergency stop on the elevator. You can take it off after we leave, Hank.”

They went inside. I hurried down the hall, opened the elevator door, and pulled out the red knob. There was an elevator on the other side of the building, and the residents who didn’t want to climb the stairs could use that one.

Hank and I, being so much bigger than Eddie, supported the man in the yellow jumpsuit between us. We each draped an arm over our shoulders, and carried him, with his feet dragging, down the corridor. If someone saw us, it would look — at least from a distance — as if we were supporting a drunk. Eddie, a few feet in front of us, carried the folded army blanket and the sack of stuff. It was much easier going down the stairs. I went down first, carrying the feet, while Hank and Eddie supported him from behind. After we put him on top of the girl, in the back of the car, and covered him with the GI blanket, I got into the driver’s seat. The fire door had closed and locked while we loaded him, so Hank started down the sidewalk toward the apartment entrance.

“Look, Eddie,” I said. “Drive as close behind me as you can. If I’m stopped — for any reason — I’m going to leave the car and run like a striped-ass ape. And I’ll need you behind me to pick me up. Okay?”

“No sweat, Larry,” Eddie said. “If you want me to, I’ll drive the convertible. I’m a better driver than you.”

I shook my head. “That’s why I want you behind me, in case we have to make a run for it in the Vega. Besides, I’m not going to drive over thirty, and when I cross the bridge, before the Goodyear landing pad, I’m going to throw my pistol over the side. It’ll be a lot easier to throw it over the rail from the convertible.”

“Move out, then. I’m right behind you.”

I got rid of the gun, leaving it in the holster, when I passed over the bridge, and a few moments later I was parked in the Japanese Garden parking lot. There were no other cars. The Garden itself was closed at night, and fenced in to keep the hippies from sleeping in the tiny bamboo tearoom. But the parking lot was outside the fence. Sometimes lovers used the parking lot at night, but because most people knew that the Garden was closed at night, they didn’t realize that the parking lot was still available. Eddie pulled in beside me and cut his lights.

I got some Kleenex out of the glove compartment of my Vega, and smudged the steering wheel and doors of the convertible. I did this for Eddie’s benefit mostly; it’s almost impossible to get decent prints from a car. Then I got the GI blanket and the beach towel and the paper sack of personal belongings. As we drove back toward Dade Towers, I folded the blanket and the towel in my lap.

Eddie said: “What do you think, Fuzz-0?”

“About what?”

“The whole thing. D’you think we’ll get away with it?”

“I’m worried about Don.”

“You don’t have to worry about Don,” Eddie said. “Don’s all right.”

“If I don’t have to worry about Don,” I said, “I don’t have to worry about anything.”

“You don’t have to worry about Don,” Eddie said.

“Good. If you don’t scratch a sore, it doesn’t suppurate.”

“Hey! That’s poetry, Larry.”

“That’s a fact,” I said. “When you hit Twenty-seventh, turn into the Food Fair lot. I’ll throw all this stuff into the Dempsey dumpster.”

When we got back to Hank’s apartment, Don and Hank were watching television. The color was back in Don’s face, and he was drinking red wine with ice cubes. Hank had found an old electric fan in his closet, and some Christmas tree spray left over from Christmas. The windows were still open, but the pungent spray, diffused by the noisy fan, made the room smell like a pine forest. I turned off the TV, fixed myself a light Scotch and water, without ice, and sat in front of the coffee table. I counted the money, and gave two one-hundred-dollar bills each to Eddie, Hank, and Don, and kept two of them for myself. I folded the remaining money, and put it into my jacket pocket.

“I’ll need this extra money to buy a new pistol,” I said. “I got rid of mine — and the holster.”

“What did you do with it, Larry?” Don said.

“If you don’t know, Don, you can’t tell, can you?” I looked at him and smiled.

“What makes you think Don would ever say anything?” Hank said.

“I don’t,” I said. “But it’s better for none of you guys to know. Okay? Now. If anybody’s got anything to say, now’s the time to say it. We’ll talk about it now, and then we’ll forget about it forever. What I mean, after tonight, none of us should ever mention this thing again. Okay?”

Hank cleared his throat. “While you and Eddie were gone, Don and I were wondering why you had us bring the girl here in the first place.”

“I was waiting for that,” I said. “What I wanted was a make on the girl. I figured that if I could find out her address, I could call her father, and have him come and get her. Either that, or we could take her to him after I talked to him. That way, he could’ve put her to bed and called his family doctor. That way, he could’ve covered up the fact that she died from an OD, if that’s what it was.”

“That wouldn’t have worked,” Hank said.

“Maybe not. But that was the idea in the back of my mind. You asked me why I brought her here, and that’s the reason.”

“It would’ve worked with me,” Don said. “I wouldn’t’ve wanted it in the papers, if my daughter died from an overdose of drugs.”

“Okay, Larry,” Hank said. “You never explained it to us before, is all. I just wonder, now, who those people were.”

“The papers will tell you.” Eddie laughed. “Look in the Miami News tomorrow night. Section C–Lifestyle.”

“Don?” I said.

“One thing,” Don said, looking into his glass. “I didn’t mean to pull the trigger. I’m sorry about getting you guys into this mess.”

“You didn’t get us into anything, Don,” Eddie said. “We were all in it together anyway.”

“Just the same,” Don said, “I made it worse, and I’m sorry.”

“We’re all sorry,” I said. “But what’s done is done. Tomorrow, I’m going to report it at the office that my pistol was stolen out of the glove compartment of my car. They may raise a little hell with me, but these things happen in Miami. So I’m telling you guys about it now. Some dirty son of a bitch stole my .38 out of my glove compartment.”

No one said anything for a few moments. Don stared at the diluted wine in his glass. Eddie lit a cigarette. I finished my drink. Hank, frowning, and looking at the floor, rubbed his knees with the palms of his hands.

“Eddie,” I said, “do you want to add anything?”

Eddie shrugged, and then he laughed. “Yeah. Who wants to go down to the White Shark for a little pool?”

Hank and Don both smiled.

“If we needed an alibi, it wouldn’t be a bad idea,” I said. “But we don’t need an alibi. If there’s nothing else, I think we should all hit our respective sacks.”

Eddie and I stood up. “You going to be okay, Don?” Eddie asked.

“Sure.” Don stood up, and we started toward the door.

“Just a minute,” Hank stopped us. “I picked up the girl in the drive-in, and bets were made! You guys owe me money!”

We all laughed then, and the tension dissolved. We paid Hank off, of course, and then we went to bed. But as far as I was concerned, we were still well ahead of the game: four lucky young guys in Miami, sitting on top of a big pile of vanilla ice cream.

The Works by T.J. MacGregor

South Beach

(Originally published in 1990)

I know how it is down here on the beach for the old ones now, what with rising prices and traffic and crime. They’re afraid to go out at night. Their Social Security checks barely cover a month of meals at Wolfie’s. They feel like Miami Beach’s postscript.

The Art Deco craze did it, you know. Ever since folks decided Deco was in again, those little hotels over on Ocean Drive are booming with business, charging prices like I can’t believe, and yeah, people pay them. I mean, seventy bucks for a room no larger than a closet, five bucks for a hard-boiled egg and a slice of bread that’s hardly toasted, two bucks for coffee. The old ones can remember when coffee in these places cost a dime.

There’s a haughty look to the hotels that really gets me too. They stand so prim and proper at the edge of the sea, all spiffed up in pastels, windows so clean they gleam like jewels. The old ones feel like they can’t afford to even walk there, and when they do, shuffling in their tired bones, under the weight of eighty or ninety years of memories, they’re nearly trampled by the youthful crowds rushing to this hotel or that bar.

So I keep my prices low and do what I can. When an old one is troubled or sad, sick or too drunk to stand, I take him or her in. Word has gotten around that Millie’s Place is where you go when it’s gotten bad.

Like tonight, for instance.

Toby wandered in off Washington Avenue a few minutes ago, out of the thick night heat, looking about as bad as a man can look and still be alive. He’s ninety-four years old, with a spine so bent he can hardly lift his head, glasses thicker than his arm, a heart that just won’t quit.

He’s counting one-dollar bills from a tattered envelope with SOCIAL SECURITY ADMINISTRATION in bold black letters across the top. If I remember correctly, he worked nearly half a century for an auto parts plant that merged with another plant, and most of his pension got lost in the transition. His Social Security check amounts to about three hundred dollars a month, and we all know what that buys you in Miami Beach.

“The room’s only six bucks, Toby,” I tell him when he keeps counting out the bills.

“Want a meal, too,” he mumbles, moving his dentures around in his mouth because they hurt his gums.

“Eight bucks, then.”

“And the Works. I think I want the Works, Millie.”

“You’d better be sure. It’s a bit more expensive.”

His head bobs slowly. It reminds me of a beach ball, rising, falling, riding a wave, and I want to stroke it, embrace it, kiss this old, beautiful head. It’s as hairless as a Chihuahua, with a mass of wrinkles that seems to quiver and dance to the back of the skull. Not so long ago, on a rainy afternoon down at the Ace Club, some of the old ones and I gathered around Toby’s head to see if we could read our fortunes in the wrinkles, like they were creases in a palm.

“I’m sure,” he says softly, depositing an old canvas bag on the counter, straining to look up. “How much?” His eyes behind those thick glasses are alarmingly small, almost transparent. I feel like they might disappear at any second.

“Twenty-five. I guess you know what all the fee includes.”

His smile creases his mouth and, like a widening ripple in a pond, touches all the other wrinkles in his face. For a moment or two, his features shift and slide, rearranging themselves. “Sure. I came with Mink, remember?”

Mink: right. She was close to a hundred, small as a toy doll with white hair that had fallen out in spots, exposing soft pink patches of scalp. She had cancer and the radiation or chemo or whatever it was they’d used on her had rotted her from the inside out, but her heart ticked on. She took baby steps, I remember, like a toddler learning to walk, and drooled a little when she talked.

It’s true that decades stretch between infancy and old age, but children and old ones aren’t all that different. Both are afraid. Both have special needs. Both require love. I understand that and they know it.

“There. Twenty-five.” He taps the stack of bills against the counter, straightening them, then slides the pile toward me.

“Sure?”

“Positive.”

“Okay, let’s go take a look at the menu.”

I ring for Sammy to man the desk and he shuffles in, big as a truck and all muscle. He’s not an old one, but he was living on the streets until I took him in and now I don’t know how I’d run this place without him. I’ve never heard him speak. I don’t know if it’s because he can’t or just that he chooses not to.

I come out from behind the counter and Toby hooks his old, tired arm in mine. The kitchen is in the back and while it’s not as grand as the ones in the fancy hotels on Ocean Drive, it feels like home to me. The fridge is always filled with everyone’s favorites — home-baked pies, drumsticks, potato salad, coleslaw, cookies by the dozens.

When I was doing private-duty nursing a long time ago, I made a point of cooking for my patients. They appreciated it. A lot of them were old ones too, and I learned to prepare the food to accommodate dentures, taste buds that had gone as smooth and dull as river stones, noses that no longer worked right. It taught me the importance of spices, sauces, garnishes that dressed the food good enough to make your mouth water.

Toby’s mouth is watering now as we peer into the fridge together, I can tell. He points at what he wants. One of those, one of these, this, that. His finger is curved into a permanent claw from arthritis; just looking at it hurts me. That’s how it is with me and them. That’s how it always is when someone I care for is in pain. It becomes my pain.

“And cookies,” he finishes. “Chocolate chip cookies.”

“They’ve got nuts in them.”

“Soft nuts?”

“Not really.”

“Aw, so what. Nuts are fine.”

Together, we remove the items from the fridge and set them out on the counter. Before I begin preparing the meal, though, I show him to the best room in the house. It’s on the top floor, in back. There’s a skylight over the huge bed, a color TV and VCR, forty or fifty videocassettes for him to choose from, and an adjoining bath with a sunken tub that swirls and bubbles like a Jacuzzi, where fluffy towels, a silk robe, and matching pajamas are laid out. He sighs as his feet sink into the thick carpeting on the floor and sighs again as he eases his tired bones onto the bed and peers up, up into a sky strewn with stars.

“You’ll tell me when dinner’s ready?” he asks, frowning as though he doesn’t quite trust me now.

“I’ll bring it up here. Feathers is going to smell that chicken. You mind if she comes up too?”

“No, no, of course not,” he says, hooking his hands under his head, lost in the stars. He doesn’t hear me leave, but Feathers hears me enter the kitchen.

She’s a white Persian who has a definite fondness for chicken and old ones. She likes to curl up on their chests and knead their soft bones with her gentle paws. I toss her tidbits as I prepare the meal and explain the situation to her. She blinks those sweet amber eyes as if to say she understands perfectly and follows me upstairs when I take Toby his meal. He’s perched on the wicker couch in the black silk pajamas and robe, squinting at the TV, watching Cocoon. It’s a favorite with all the old ones. I set his tray down on the table and pull up the other chair.

Feathers flops across Toby’s feet, covering them like a rug, and he looks down at her and laughs. I can’t remember the last time I heard him laugh and I’ve known Toby for ten or twelve years, since he moved down here after his wife died. I don’t know if he has kids. He’s never spoken of them if he does. But that’s how it is with a lot of the old ones. When they get too old for their kids to deal with them, when there’s talk of nursing homes, of confinement, they get scared and run away. Who can blame them?

“Watch this, Millie,” he says excitedly, stabbing a gnarled finger at the screen. “This is where they swim in the rejuvenation pool.”

I divide my attention between the screen and the chicken, which I cut up into small, manageable bites for him. I pass him a napkin, which he tucks under his throat like a bib, and pass him his plate. He sets it carefully on his lap, impales a chunk of meat, and dips it into a scoop of dressing. His hand trembles as it rises to his mouth. A dab of dressing rests on his chin, but he doesn’t seem to notice it. He chews slowly, thoughtfully, eyes glued to the screen.

“Will it hurt?” he asks, not looking at me.

“Of course not.”

“Are you sure?”

“You were here with Mink,” I remind him. “Did she look like she hurt?”

Mouth puckering around a cranberry: “She always hurt. From the cancer. Or the radiation. From something.”

Physical pain or psychic pain — the difference isn’t that great. Shift your focus and one becomes the other. Mink knew that. “She’s okay now, though.”

“You talked to her?”

“Sure. I talk to her pretty often.”

“And she’s okay?”

“A lot better.”

This is the game we play, Toby and I. We both pretend we don’t know the truth.

“She’s finished with the beach, Toby.”

He mulls this over, nods, dips his fork into the steaming squash. “Can you do me a favor, Millie?”

“Sure, anything.”

He reaches into the pocket of his robe and brings out a sheet of notebook paper. The words on it are printed, almost illegible. I can imagine Toby hunched over at the Ace Club, where some of the old ones hang out, moving a pen up and down against the paper, putting his thoughts in order. I get the point. “Okay,” I tell him, and slip the sheet inside the old canvas bag, which slumps on the floor beside the bed like an aged and faithful pet.

“Can I watch another movie after this one?”

“Whatever you want. When you get tired, just pick up the phone and ring the desk. I’ll be up to tuck you in.”

“Don’t go,” he says quickly. “Stay here with me, Millie.”

I pat his hand. “Let me get a pitcher of iced tea and your slice of pie and I’ll be right back. Was it pumpkin or apple that you wanted, Toby?”

“Both.” He grins mischievously, dark spaces in his mouth where there should be teeth. He’s removed part of his denture.

“Both it is.”

Feathers doesn’t move as I get up; she knows the routine.

From the kitchen, I fetch iced tea for myself and two slices of pie for Toby and some treats for Feathers. In my bedroom, I bring out the Works, running my hands over the smooth, cool leather, remembering. I change into more comfortable clothes, cotton that breathes, that’s the color of pearls. Makeup next. A touch of eye shadow, mascara, blush, lipstick. The way I look is part of the Works. Sometimes the old ones ask me to hold them, stroke them, caress them, make love to them. Other times they just want to listen to Frank Sinatra and dance or they ask me to walk on the beach with them in the moonlight. Their requests are as different as they are, and I always comply. But with all of them, there’s a need for a special memory, an event that perhaps reminds them of something else. It’s as if this memory will accompany them, comfort them somehow, like a friend.

Toby is still watching the movie when I return. His supper plate is clean. His eyes widen when he sees the pieces of pie, and he attacks the apple first, devouring it with childlike exuberance, then polishes off the pumpkin as well. We watch the rest of the movie together, Feathers purring between us on the couch. Now and then, his chin drops to his chest as he nods off, but he comes quickly awake, blinking fast as if to make sure he hasn’t missed anything.

While the movie rewinds, I fold back the sheets on the bed. They’re sea blue, decorated with shells and seahorses, the same ones Mink slept in. “Can we listen to music?” he asks, crouching in front of the stereo on the other side of the room.

“Sure. Whatever you want. Choose an album.”

Harry Belafonte.

Toby gets up from the chair and holds out his arms and I move into them. I’m taller than he is, but it doesn’t matter. We sway, his silk robe rustling. I rest my chin on his head and feel all those wrinkles quivering, shifting, warm as sand against my skin. He presses his cheek to my chest, eyes shut. The lemon scent of his skin haunts me a little, reminds of all the old ones who have come here for the Works. I’ve loved each of them and love them still.

When the record ends, Toby and I stretch out on the king-size bed, holding each other, talking softly, the moon smack in the heart of the skylight now. He falls asleep with his head on my shoulder, and for a long time I lie there just listening to him breathe, watching stars against the black dome of sky above us.

The window is partially open, admitting a taste of wind, the scent of stars, the whispering sea. I imagine that death is like this window, opening onto a pastel world where everything is what you will it to be. Yellow skies, if that’s what you want. Silver seas. A youthful body. A sound mind. A family who cares. A state of grace.

And that’s my gift to the old ones.

I untangle my arms and rise, drawing the covers over Toby. His wrinkled head sinks into the pillow. I bring out the leather case. New York. My old life. The business with the nursing board. Such unpleasantness, really. Like the old ones, I have my secrets. I take the syringe from my leather case and fill it. I have trouble finding a vein in his arm. They’re lost in the folds of skin, collapsed beneath tissue, and I have to inject the morphine into his neck, just below his ear.

And then I wait.

Always, in the final moment, there’s something that seems to escape from the old shell of bones and flesh, an almost visible thing, a puff of air, a kind of fragrance, the soul released. It leaves Toby when he sighs, fluttering from his mouth like a bird, and sweeps through the crack in the window, free at last.

Funny, but the wrinkles on top of his skull don’t seen quite as deep now. His spine doesn’t look as hunched. If I tried, I know I could straighten out his fingers. But the most I do is kiss him goodbye.

I get rid of the syringe. Sammy will take care of getting Toby’s body to the pauper cemetery. There won’t be a headstone, of course. I do have to make some concessions. But the burial will be proper, with an old pine box and all.

I unzip his canvas bag for the sheet of paper I slipped in here earlier and read it over. The list of who gets what is simple; all the names are old ones who hang out at the Ace Club. His belongings are in the bag. I sling it over my shoulder and walk downstairs, where Sammy is still at the desk. He looks up and I nod. He reaches under the desk and switches on the VACANCY sign outside. I take his place at the desk and he leaves to tend to Toby.

Most of the old ones will know about Toby before they hear it from me. They’ll know because the only time the VACANCY sign goes on is when the Works are finished.

Tomorrow when I go down to the Ace, I’ll also pass out my card to newcomers. After all, I’ve got to drum up business just like anyone else. MILLIE’S PLACE. CHEAPEST RENT ON THE BEACH. GOOD FOOD. SPACIOUS ROOMS. THE WORKS.

Small Times by James Carlos Blake

Flagler Dog Track

(Originally published in 1991)

The Loss

There was this guy I knew down in Miami, worked as a ticket seller at the dog track for a short time. Gordon. He had a routine for boosting his take-home. Strictly legit. (Tax-free, too. You tell the IRS everything? Not in this life.) Anyway, what Gordon did was, every time a guy at the window’d ask him what number to play, he’d tell him. Every race there’s guys asking him for the winning number. They figure he’s selling the tickets, he’s gotta know the winners. Only he’d give each guy a different number. Some races he got asked by so many guys, he’d go through all the entries nine, ten times before the windows closed. He was handing out that many winners some races. Sure, a lot of those guys were stiffs; they’d grab their winnings and split without even a thank you. But plenty of them were sports. They’d come back grinning, give him a wink, cut him a percent — anything from a fin to a C-note. End of the night, it added up. Told me he was taking it home in a wheelbarrow. The problem was with some of those guys he gave a bum number. He’d get some hard looks the next time they came to the window, sometimes some hard words. He’d give a tough-luck shrug and try not to make eye contact. Then one night a coupla apes who lost big on the number he gave them laid for him in the parking lot. Real sore losers. Took him off to the last nickel, then stomped him damn near to death. Both legs busted, most his ribs, face all mashed, you name it. He was a mess for months. Went broke on the hospital bills. I hear he’s in Orlando now. Sells insurance.

The Roust

Every man’s got reasons to be bitter, but you can’t give in to them any old time. There Hollis and me were, killing a pint under the overpass and wishing we had another, and this cop car comes screeching right into the lot — damn near runs us over. Shook me so bad I dropped and broke the bottle. There’s just one cop. He jumps out yelling “Spread ’em!” and yanks out his gun and it goes flying out of his hand and bounces smack at my feet. Hollis yells “Get it!” and I do. I hadn’t held a gun since the army. Up go the cop’s hands. I’m shaking and wondering what I’m doing. “Easy now,” the cop says. Hollis tells him shut up. The cop says he’s looking for two white guys just hit the McDonald’s on Third, he can see now we’re not them, give him his gun and we can scram. I’m saying let’s go man, but Hollis is pissed. He grabs a chunk of cinder block and POW! — he spiderwebs the cop’s windshield. He yells “Sicka getting rousted!” Takes another chunk of block and busts the headlights. Pow! — Pow! Yells “Fuck it all!” He’s smashing the car’s party lights, going “Goddam cops! Goddam people! Goddam Terry, you whore!” Terry’s his ex. Now sirens are closing in from all sides like walls, but Hollis keeps pounding the car and cussing a blue streak. Forget running. I hand the cop the gun and we just watch the backups come tearing in. Hollis went down swinging and swearing. I drew ninety days in the county stockade. Hollis got a year and a day at Raiford. Probably spending it brooding on all the goddam things he’s sick of.

The Holdup

We hit this convenience store last Thursday night nearly did us in. The routine went just fine at first. Rankin braced the redhead chick at the register while I watched the doors and kept the others covered. Rankin worked smooth and quiet as always. Red went big-eyed but quick started sticking it in a paper bag. The two guys holding hands by the ice cream freezer were freaked out but they stood fast and kept their mouths shut. So did the big Cuban momma holding her little girl against her legs. They couldn’t keep their eyes off the gun. That’s why I use the .44 — they remember the cannon better than my face. But this guy in a Dolphins shirt’s got his head in the deli cooler and doesn’t know what’s going down. He’s already chomping on a sandwich when he turns around and catches the scene. Next thing you know he’s on the floor, choking and turning blue — and all I can think is how in Florida if somebody dies for any reason in a felony it’s murder. Rankin sees what’s happening, says “Damn,” and drops down to work on the guy. Who’s now purple. Eyes rolled up, tongue bulging out. Rankin hugs him from behind and gives one hard squeeze after another. Everybody’s watching like it’s TV. I’m about to wet my pants. Suddenly this glob of sandwich flies out and splats on a Fritos bag. The guy starts sucking breath like an air brake. We split fast. And come to find out we scored sixty-two bucks. Jesus, this business. I usually have me two beers every night. That night I put down a dozen.

The Odyssey by Elmore Leonard

Miami Beach

(Originally published in 1995)

Joe Sereno caught the Odyssey night clerk as he was going off: prissy guy, had his lunch box under his arm.

“I saw it this morning on TV,” Joe said. “So there was a lot of excitement, huh? I thought the cops’d still be here, at least the crime scene guys. I guess they’ve all cleared out. You hear the shots? You must’ve.”

“I was in the office,” the night guy said.

Joe wondered how this twink knew he was in the office at the exact time the shots were fired. What’d he think, it was soundproof in there? But the cops no doubt had asked him that, so Joe let it pass and said, “It was the two guys in one-oh-five, wasn’t it?”

“I think so.”

“You’re not sure?”

The night guy rolled his eyes and then pretended to yawn. He did things like that, had different poses.

“Fairly respectable-looking guys,” Joe said, “but no luggage. What’re they doing, shacking up? Maybe, maybe not. But I remember thinking at the time, they’re up to something. The TV news didn’t mention their names, so there must not’ve been any ID on the bodies and the cops didn’t think the names they used to register were really theirs. Am I right?”

The night guy said, “I wouldn’t know,” acting bored.

“Soon as I saw those guys yesterday — they checked in as I was getting ready to go off — I said to Mel, ‘Let me see the registration cards, see what names they gave.’ He wouldn’t show me. He goes, ‘Registering guests is not a security matter, if you don’t mind.’” Mel, the day guy, sounding a lot like Kenneth, the night guy.

“I didn’t have time to hang around, keep an eye on them,” Joe went on. “I had to go to another job, a function at the Biltmore. They put on extra security for this bunch of Cuban hotshots meeting there. I mean Cuban Cubans, said to be Castro sympathizers, and there was a rumor Fidel himself was gonna show up. You believe it? I wore a suit instead of this Mickey Mouse uniform, brown and friggin’ orange; I get home I can’t wait to take it off. Those functions, you stand like this holding your hands in front of you, like you’re protecting yourself from getting a hernia, and you keep your eyes moving. So” — he gestured toward the entrance — “I saw the truck out there, the tan van, no writing on the sides? That’s the cleanup company, right?”

“I wouldn’t know,” the night guy said.

Little curly-haired twink, walked with his knees together.

“Well, listen, I’ll let you go,” Joe said, “and thanks for sharing that information with me, it was interesting. I’ll go check on the cleanup people, see how they’re doing. What room was that again, one-oh-five?”

It sure was.

There was furniture in the hall by the open door and a nasty smell in the air. As Joe approached, a big black guy in a white plastic jumpsuit, latex gloves, what looked like a shower cap, goggles up on his head, blue plastic covering his shoes, came out carrying a floor lamp.

Joe said, “Joe Sereno, security officer.”

“I’m Franklin, with Baneful Clean-Up.”

“Baneful?”

“The boss named it. He tried Pernicious Clean-Up in the Yellow Pages? Didn’t get any calls.”

Joe said, “Hmmmm, how about Death Squad?”

“That’s catchy,” Franklin said, “but people might get the wrong idea. You know, that we doing the job ’stead of cleaning up after. This is my partner, Marlis,” Franklin said, and Joe turned to see a cute young black woman approaching in her plastic coveralls, hip-hop coming out of the jam box she was carrying.

“Joe Sereno, security officer.”

“Serene, yeah,” Marlis said, “that’s a cool name, Joe,” her body doing subtle, funky things like it was plugged into the beat. She said to Franklin, “Diggable Planets doing ‘Rebirth of Slick.’ ‘It’s cool like dat.’”

“‘It’s chill like dat,’” Franklin said. “Yeah, ‘it’s chill like dat.’”

Franklin bopping now, going back into the room.

Joe followed him in, stopped dead at the sight, and said, “Oh, my God,” at the spectacle of blood: on the carpet, on two walls, part of the ceiling, a trail of blood going from this room into the bathroom. Joe looked in there and said it again, with feeling, “Oh, my God.”

“Like they was skinnin’ game in here,” Franklin said. “Shotgun done one of them at close range. The other one, nine-millimeter pistol, they believe. Man got shot four times through and through — see the holes in the wall there? They dug out the bullets. Made it to the bathroom, got three more pumped into him and bled out in the shower. Thank you, Jesus. We still have to clean it, though, with the green stuff, get in between the tiles with a toothbrush. We thankful the man came in here, didn’t go flop on the bed to expire.”

Joe said, “Man, the smell.”

“Yeah, it’s what your insides get like exposed to the air too long, you know what I’m saying? Your viscera, it’s called. It ain’t too bad yet. But if you gonna stay in here and watch,” Franklin said, “better breathe through your mouth.”

Joe said, “I think I’ll step out to the patio for a minute.”

The two secretaries from Dayton, Ohio, their bra straps hanging loose, were out by the pool already, this early in the morning, to catch some rays, working at it, not wasting a minute of their vacation. Joe took a few deep breaths inhaling the morning air to get that smell out of his nose. On the other side of the pool, still in shade, a guy sat in a plastic patio chair smoking a cigar as he watched the girls. Guy in his sixties — he’d be tall with a heavy frame: his body hadn’t seen much sun, but his face was weathered. Joe believed the guy was wearing a rug. Black hair that had belonged to a Korean woman at one time. A retired wigmaker had told him they used a lot of Korean hair. This one looked too dark for a guy in his sixties. Joe had never noticed the guy before — he must’ve checked in yesterday or last night — but for some reason he looked familiar. Joe went back in the unit, ducked into the bedroom and picked up the phone.

“Sereno, security. Who’s in one-twenty?”

The day guy’s voice said, “Why do you want to know?”

I’m doing something wrong, Joe thought. I’m failing to communicate. “Listen, it’s important. The guy, there’s something about him isn’t right.”

“Like what?”

“I think he’s using the Odyssey as a hideout.”

“Is this the guy with the Steven Seagal hairpiece?”

“You got it.”

“Just a minute.”

The twink was gone at least five minutes while Joe waited, trying to breathe through his mouth. Finally he came back on.

“His name’s Garcia.”

Franklin was working on the ceiling with a sponge mop; he would come down off his metal ladder and squeeze into a pail, then take the pail into the bathroom and dump it in the toilet. Marlis was scrubbing a wall with what looked like a big scouring pad, moving in time to the beat coming from the jam box, kind of spastic, Joe thought, but sexy all the same.

The two looked like they were dressed up in moon suits they’d made for Halloween: the white plastic coveralls, goggles, respiratory masks, covered head to toe. The smell of the chemicals they were using was even stronger now than the other smell. Joe got a whiff and started coughing as he asked Marlis what it was they cleaned with.

She said, “The green stuff for a lot of heavy, dried blood; the pink stuff when it isn’t too old and hard to get off.”

“Girl,” Franklin said, “your head keeps touching the wall and I see some hair sticking out.”

“I’ll fix it in a minute.”

Marlis had on rubber gloves that came up her arms. She said to Joe Sereno, “See these little specks here in the wall? They from the man’s skull, little tiny fragments of bone. Sometime I have to use pliers to pull them out. This dark stuff is the dude’s hair. See these other holes? They from the shotgun.” She funked around, doing steps to the music as she said to Franklin, “Coolio, for your pleasure.”

Franklin listened and said, “Ain’t Coolio.” Listened some more, said, “You got your Cools confused. It’s LL Cool J, no other, ’cause that’s ‘Hey Lover.’” He paused, looking past Marlis to a framed print on the wall. “Girl, is that like modern art on there or something else?”

Marlis went up to the picture for a close look and said, “It’s something else.”

Joe looked at it and said, “Oh, my God.”

He watched Marlis remove the print and drop it into a red bag. “Ain’t worth cleaning. Anything has body fluids, tissue, poo-poo, you know, anything biohazardous, goes in these bags. We give them to a company takes care of medical waste to get rid of.”

“You missed a speck there,” Franklin said, pointing at the wall.

“I’m still working on it, baby.” Lowering her voice, she said to Joe, “He don’t like to see me talking to other men.”

“Are you and him married?”

“You’d think so to hear him.”

“I was wondering, is there any money in cleanup work? You don’t mind my asking.”

“We quoted this job at fifteen hundred. Hey, how many people can you find to do it? Another reason it’s a good business, recessions don’t bother it none. This one here looks worse’n it is. Doesn’t smell too bad. You work where a body’s been decomposing awhile, now you talking about smell. Like old roadkill up close? You go home and take a shower, you have to wash out your nostrils good. The smell like sticks to the hairs in your nose.”

“What’s the worst one you ever had to clean up?”

“The worst one. Hmmmm.” She said, “You mean the very worst one? Like an advanced state of decomp has set in? The body’s in a dark, damp place and dung beetles have found it?”

Franklin said, “Girl?”

“I’m coming,” Marlis said. She got a scraper, like a big putty knife, from a box of tools and went back to work. She said to Joe, “It dries on here it’s hard to get off.”

“What is that?”

She was scraping at something crusted on there. “Little piece of what the dude used to use to think with. His brain, honey. He maybe should’ve thought better about coming here, huh? Two dudes die and nobody even knows who they are. Least it’s what I heard.” She looked over at Joe Sereno standing by the closet door, staring at the knob. “Don’t touch that, baby.”

“It looks like candle wax,” Joe said, “but I don’t see any candles in the room.”

“It ain’t wax,” Marlis said, “it’s some more the dude’s gray matter. Gets waxy like that outside the head. See how the wood’s splintered right above it? That’s from skull fragments shot in there. This one dude, I swear, is all over the room.”

“You just do murders?”

“Homicides, suicides, and decompositions.”

“How about animals?”

“Once in a while. We cleaned up after a woman poisoned her dogs, fifteen of ’em she couldn’t feed no more. It smelled worse’n a dead manatee laying in the sun too long.”

Joe perked up. “There’s a manatee over on the bay was shot. You hear about it?”

Joe thought he saw a look pass between Marlis and Franklin on the ladder as she said no, she didn’t think so.

“A pretty friendly creature,” Joe said, “used to play with that old woman who was killed. Marion something?”

“McAlister Williams,” Marlis said. “Yeah, I’ve heard of her. Hundred and two years old and still swimmin’ in the bay.”

Joe said, “And there was that guy tried to jump the drawbridge and didn’t make it.”

“Name was Victor,” Franklin said, down from the ladder, heading for the john with his pail. “Actually was a scuba tank I understand flew out of a truck, hit the man’s car and blew him up. Totaled ’em both. Yeah, we heard about that. ‘Cool like dat.’” He said, “So-Lo Jam,” and right away said, “I take that back.”

“You better,” Marlis said.

“That’s from Cold Chillin’, so it has to be Kool G. Rap. Yeah.”

Joe had to wait, not having any idea what they were talking about, before saying, “How about that disaster at Club Hell? I was working there that night. It was horrible.”

“Nobody had to clean that one up,” Franklin said, coming out of the john, “the sharks took care of it.”

“Come here for a minute, will you?” Joe motioned them over to the sliding glass door that led to the patio. “See that guy sitting by the pool? Over on the other side. Who does he look like?”

“I can’t see him good,” Franklin said.

“Take your goggles off.”

Franklin squinted now, eyes uncovered. He said, “I don’t know. Who?”

Marlis came over and right away said, “The dude with the cigar? He looks like Castro. Either Castro or that dude goes around thinking he looks like Castro. You know what I’m saying? Mickey Something-or-other’s his name. Yeah, Mickey Schwartz.”

“Wait a minute,” Franklin said, still squinting. “What Castro you talking about?”

“Castro, the one from Cuba.”

“They all from Cuba.”

“What’s his name — Fidel,” Marlis said. “Fidel Castro. Shaved off his beard.” She paused and hunched in a little closer to Joe and Franklin. “Shaved his beard and must’ve shaved his head, too, ’cause the man’s wearing a rug.”

“That’s what I thought too,” Joe said. “But whose hair does the rug look like?”

Now Marlis squinted till she had it and said, “Yeah, that high-waisted cat kung-fus everybody he don’t shoot.”

Franklin said, “I know who you mean. That kung-fu cat with the big butt. Doesn’t take shuck and jive from nobody. But listen to me now. If that’s the Fidel we talking about here, there’s a man will pay a million dollars to see him dead. Man name of Reyes. It would be easy as pie to cap him sitting there, wouldn’t it?” He looked at Joe Sereno. “I mean if it was your trade.”

“Tempting,” Marlis said, “but safer to clean up after. Celebrity, be nothing wrong with doubling the fee.”

Joe was thinking. He said, “You suppose a hit man killed these two in here?”

“Hit men as a rule,” Franklin said, “don’t make this kind of mess. One on the back of the head, use a twenty-two High Standard Field King with a suppressor on it. We’ve followed up after hit men, haven’t we, precious?”

“We sure have,” Marlis said. “Lot of that kind of work around here.”

Joe Sereno said, “You don’t suppose...” and stopped, narrowing his eyes then to make what he wanted to say come out right. “In the past few days I’ve run into three homicides, counting these two, and a fourth one they’re calling an accident looks more like a homicide to me. I have a hunch they’re related. Don’t pin me down for the motive, ’cause I don’t see a nexus. At least not yet I don’t. But I got a creepy feeling that once these two are identified, it will explain the others. I’m talking about the old woman, and a guy named Phil. And, unless I miss my guess, it all has something to do with that man sitting over there smoking a cigar.”

“Unless,” Marlis said, “the dude over there is the Fidel impersonator, Mickey Schwartz.”

“Either way,” Joe Sereno said, “ID these two and this whole mess will become clear.”

A look passed between Franklin and Marlis.

Joe caught it and thought, Hmmmm.