Skin Tight

20

Maggie Gonzalez said: “Tell me about your hand.”

“Shut up,” Chemo grumbled. He was driving around Queens, trying to find the sonofabitch who had sold him the bad bullets.

“Please,” Maggie said. “I am a nurse.”

“Too bad you’re not a magician, because that’s what it’s gonna take to make my hand come back. A fish got it.”

At a stop light he rolled down the window and called to a group of black teenagers. He asked where he could locate a man named Donnie Blue, and the teenagers told Chemo to go blow himself. “Shit,” he said, stomping on the accelerator.

Maggie asked, “Was it a shark that did it?”

“Do I look like Jacques Cousteau? I don’t know what the hell it was-some big fish. The subject is closed.”

By now Maggie was reasonably confident that he wasn’t going to kill her. He would have done it already, most conveniently during the scuffle back at the Plaza. Instead he had grabbed her waist and hustled her down the fire exit, taking four steps at a time. Considering the mayhem on the ninth floor, it was a miracle they got out of the place without being stopped. The lobby was full of uniformed cops waiting for elevators, but nobody looked twice at the Fun Couple of the Year.

As Chemo drove, Maggie said, “What about your face?”

“Look who’s talking.”

“Really, what happened?”

Chemo said, “You always this shy with strangers? Jesus H. Christ.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Professional curiosity, I guess. Besides, you promised to tell me.”

“Do the words none of your fucking business mean anything?”

From behind the bandages a chilly voice said, “You don’t have to be crude. Swearing doesn’t impress me.”

Chemo found the street corner where he had purchased the rusty Colt.38 and the dead bullets, but there was no sign of Donnie Blue. Every inquiry was met by open derision, and Chemo’s hopes for a refund began to fade.

As he circled the neighborhood Maggie said, “You’re so quiet.”

“I’m thinking.”

“Me, too.”

“I’m thinking I was seriously gypped by your doctor pal.” Chemo didn’t want to admit that he had agreed to murder two people in exchange for a discount on minor plastic surgery.

“If I had known about this dead girl-”

“V ickyBarletta.”

“Right,” Chemo said. “If I had known that, I would have jacked my price. Jacked it way the hell up.”

“And who could blame you,” Maggie said.

“ Graveline never told me he killed a girl.”

They were heading out the highway toward LaGuardia. Maggie assumed there were travel plans.

She said, “Rudy’s a very wealthy man.”

“Sure, he’s a doctor.”

“I can ruin him. That’s why he wanted me dead.”

“Sure, you’re a witness,” Chemo said.

Something dismissive in his tone alarmed her once again. She said, “Killing me won’t solve anything now.”

Chemo’s forehead crinkled where an eyebrow should have been. “It won’t?”

Maggie shook her head from side to side in dramatic emphasis. “I made my own tape. A videotape, at a place in Manhattan. Everything’s on it, everything I saw that day.”

Chemo wasn’t as rattled as she thought he might be; in fact, his mouth curled into a dry smile. His lips looked like two pink snails crawling up a sidewalk. “A video,” he mused.

Maggie teased it along, “You have any idea what that bastard would pay forit?”

“Yes,” Chemo said. “Yes, I think I do.”

At the airport, Maggie told Chemo she had to make a phone call. To eavesdrop he squeezed inside the same booth, his chin digging into the top of her head. She dialed the number of Dr. Leonard Leaper and informed the service that she had to leave town for a while, but that the doctor should not be concerned.

“I already told him I was a witness in a murder,” Maggie explained to Chemo. “If what happened at the hotel turns up in the newspapers, he’ll think I was kidnapped.”

“But you were,” Chemo pointed out.

“Oh, not really.”

“Yes, really.” Chemo didn’t care for her casual attitude; just who did she take him for?

Maggie said, “Know what I think? I think we could be partners.”

They got on line at the Pan Am counter, surrounded by a typical Miami-bound contingent-old geezers with tubas for sinuses; shiny young hustlers in thin gold chains; huge hollow-eyed families that looked like they’d staggered out of a Sally Struthers telethon. Chemo and Maggie fit right in.

He told her, “I only got one plane ticket.”

She smiled and stroked her handbag, which had not left her arm since their breakfast in Central Park. “I’ve got a Visa card,” she said brightly. “Where we headed?”

“Me, I’m going back to Florida.”

“Not like that, you’re not. They’ve got rules against bare feet, I’m sure.”

“Hell,” Chemo said, and loped off to locate some cheap shoes. He came back wearing fuzzy brown bathroom slippers, size 14, purchased at one of the airport gift shops. Maggie was saving him a spot at the ticket counter. She had already arranged for him to get an aisle seat (because of his long legs), and she would be next to him.

Later, waiting in the boarding area, Maggie asked Chemo if his name was Rogelio Luz Sanchez.

“Oh sure.”

“That’s what it says on your ticket.”

“Well, there you are,” Chemo said. He couldn’t even pronounce Rogelio Luz Sanchez-some alias cooked up by Rudy Graveline, the dumb shit. Chemo looked about as Hispanic as Larry Bird.

After they took their seats on the airplane, Maggie leaned close and asked, “So, can I call you Rogelio? I mean, I’ve got to call you something.”

Chemo’s hooded lids blinked twice very slowly. “The more you talk, the more I want to spackle the holes in that fucking mask.”

Maggie emitted a reedy, birdlike noise.

“I think we can do business,” Chemo said, “but only on two conditions. One, don’t ask any more personal questions, is that clear? Two, don’t ever puke on me again.”

“I said I was sorry.”

The plane had started to taxi and Chemo raised his voice to be heard over the engines. “Once I get some decent bullets I’ll be using that gun, and God help you if you toss your cookies whenIdo.”

Maggie said, “I’ll do better next time.”

One of the flight attendants came by and asked Maggie if she needed a special meal because of her medical condition, and Maggie remarked that she wasn’t feeling particularly well. She said the coach section was so crowded and stuffy that she was having trouble breathing. The next thing Chemo knew, they were sitting up in first class and sipping red wine. Having noticed his disability, the friendly flight attendant was carefully cutting Chemo’s surf-and-turf into bite-sized pieces. Chemo glanced at Maggie and felt guilty about coming down so hard.

“That was a slick move,” he said, the closest he would come to a compliment. “I never rode up here before.”

Maggie exhibited no surprise at this bit of news. Her eyes looked sad and moist behind the white husk.

Chemo said, “You still want to be partners?”

She nodded. Carefully she aimed a forkful of lobster for the damp hole beneath her nostrils in the surgical bandage.

“ Graveline’s gonna scream when he learns about your videotape,” Chemo said with a chuckle. “Where is it, anyway?”

When Maggie finished chewing, she said, “I’ve got three copies.”

“Good thinking.”

“Two of them are locked up at a bank. The third one, the original tape, that’s for Rudy. That’s how we get his attention.”

Chemo smiled a yellow smile. “I like it.”

“You won’t like this part,” Maggie said. “Stranahan swiped the tape from the hotel room. We can’t show it to Rudy until weget it back.”

“Hell,” Chemo said. This was terrible-Mick Stranahan and that TV bitch loose with the blackmail goodies. Just terrible. He said, “I’ve got to get to them before they get to Graveline, otherwise we’re blown out of the water. He’ll be on the first flight to Panama and we’ll be holding our weenies.”

From Maggie came a muffled, disapproving noise.

“It’s just an expression,” Chemo said. “Lighten up, for Chrissakes.”

After the flight attendants removed the meal trays, Chemo lowered the seat back and stretched his endless legs. Almost to himself, he said, “I don’t like this Stranahan guy one bit. When we get to Miami, we hit the ground running.”

“Yes,” Maggie agreed, easing into the partnership, “we’ve gottogetthe tape.”

“That, too,” said Chemo, tugging his hat down over his eyes.

The news of gunshots and a possible kidnapping at the Plaza Hotel rated five paragraphs in the Daily News, a page of photos in the Post and nothing in the Times. That morning New York detectives queried a teletype to the Metro-Date Police Department stating that the victim of the abduction was believed to be a Miami woman named Margaret Orestes Gonzalez, a guest at the hotel. The police teletype described her assailant as a white male, age unknown, with possible burn scars on his face and a height of either six foot four or eight foot two, depending on which witness you believed. The teletype further noted that a Rapala fishing knife found on the carpet outside the victim’s room was traced to a shipment that recently had been sold to a retail establishment known as Bubba’s Bait and Cold Beer, on Dixie Highway in South Miami. Most significantly, a partial thumb-print lifted from the blade of the knife was identified as belonging to one Blondell Wayne Tatum, age thirty-eight, six foot nine, one hundred eighty-one pounds. Mr. Tatum, it seemed, was wanted in the state of Pennsylvania for the robbery-at-pitchfork of a Chemical Bank, and for the first-degree murder of Dr. Gunther MacLeish, an elderly dermatologist. Tatum was to be considered armed and dangerous. Under AKAs, the police bulletin listed one: Chemo.

“ Chemo?” Sergeant Al Garcia read the teletype again, then pulled it off the bulletin board and took it to the Xerox machine. By the time he got back, a new teletype had been posted in its place.

This one was even more interesting, and Garcia’s cigar bobbed excitedly as he read it.

The new teletype advised Metro-Dade police to disregard the kidnap query. Miss Margaret Gonzalez had phoned the New York authorities to assure them that she was in no danger, and to explain that the disturbance at the Plaza Hotel was merely a dispute between herself and a male companion she had met in a bar.

Maggie had hung up before detectives could ask if the male companion was Mr. Blondell Wayne Tatum.

Commissioner Roberto Pepsical arranged to meet the two crooked detectives at a strip joint offLeJeune Road, not far from the airport. Roberto got there early and drank three strong vodka tonics to give him the courage to say what he’d been told to say.

He figured he was so far over his head that being drunk couldn’t make it any worse.

Dutifully the commissioner had carried Detective Murdock’s proposal to Dr. Rudy Graveline, and now he had returned with the doctor’s reply. It occurred to Roberto, even as a naked woman with gold teeth delivered a fourth vodka, that the role of an elected public servant was no longer a distinguished one. He found himself surrounded by ruthless and untrustworthy people-nobody played a straight game anymore. In Miami, corruption had become a sport of the masses. Roberto had been doing it for years, of course, but jerks like Salazar and Murdock and even Graveline-they were nothing but dilettantes. Moochers. They didn’t know when to back off. The word enough was not in their vocabulary. Roberto hated the idea that his future depended on such men.

The crooked cops showed up just as the nude Amazonian mud-wrestling match began on stage. “Very nice place,” Detective John Murdock said to the commissioner. “Is that your daughter up there?”

Joe Salazar said, “The one on the right, she even looks like you. Except I think you got bigger knockers.”

Roberto Pepsical flushed. He was sensitive about his weight. “You’re really funny,” he said to the detectives. “Both of you should’ve been comedians instead of cops. You should’ve been Lawrence and Hardy.”

Murdock smirked. “Lawrence and Hardy, huh? I think the commissioner has been drinking.”

Salazar said, “Maybe we hurt his feelings.”

The vodka was supposed to make Roberto Pepsical cool and brave; instead it was making him hot and dizzy. He started to tell the detectives what Rudy Graveline had said, but he couldn’t hear himself speak over the exhortations of the wrestling fans. Finally Murdock seized him by the arm and led him to the restroom. Joe Salazar followed them in and locked the door.

“What’s all this for?” Roberto said, belching in woozy fear. He thought the detectives were going to beat him up.

Murdock took him by the shoulders and pinned him to the condom machine. He said, “Joe and I don’t like this joint. It’s noisy, it’s dirty, it’s a shitty fucking joint to hold a serious conversation. We are offended, Commissioner, by what we see taking place on the stage out there-naked young females with wet mud all over their twats. You shouldn’t have invited us here.”

Joe Salazar said, “That’s right. Just so you know, I’m a devoted Catholic.”

“I’m sorry,” said Roberta Pepsical. “It was the darkest place I could think of on short notice. Next time we’ll meet at St. Mary’s.”

Someone knocked on the restroom door and Murdock told him to go away if he valued his testicles. Then he said to Roberto: “What is it you wanted to tell us?”

“It’s a message from my friend. The one with the problem I told you about-”

“The problem named Stranahan?”

“Yes. He says five thousand each.”

“Fine,” said John Murdock.

“Really?”

“Long as it’s cash.”

Salazar added, “Not in sequence. And not bank-wrapped.”

“Certainly,” Roberto Pepsical said. Now came the part that made his throat go dry.

“There’s one part of the plan that my friend wants to change,” he said. “He says it’s no good just arresting this man and putting him in jail. He says this fellow has a big mouth and a vivid imagination.” Those were Rudy’s exact words; Roberto was proud of himself for remembering.

Joe Salazar idly tested the knobs on the condom machine and said, “So you got a better idea, right?”

“Well…,” Roberto said.

Murdock loosened his grip on the commissioner and straightened his jacket. “You’re not the idea man, are you? I mean, it was your idea to meet at this pussy parlor.” He walked over to the urinal and unzipped his trousers. “Joe and I will think of something. We’re idea-type guys.”

Salazar said, “For instance, suppose we get a warrant to arrest the suspect for the murder of his former wife. Supposing we proceed to his residence and duly identify ourselves as sworn police officers. And supposing the suspect attempts to flee.”

“Or resists with violence,” Murdock hypothesized.

“Yeah, the manual is clear,” Salazar said.

Murdock shook himself off and zipped up. “In a circumstance such as that, we could use deadly force.”

“I imagine you could,” said Roberto Pepsical, sober as a choirboy.

The three of them stood there in the restroom, sweating under the hot bare bulb. Salazar examined a package of flamingo-pink rubbers that he had shaken loose from the vending machine.

Finally Murdock said, “Tell your friend it sounds fine, except for the price. Make it ten apiece, not five.”

“Ten,” Roberto repeated, though he was not at all surprised. To close the deal, he sighed audibly.

“Come on,” said Joe Salazar, unlocking the door. “We’re missing the fingerpaint contest.”

Over the whine of the outboard Luis Cordova shouted: “There’s no point in stopping.”

Mick Stranahan nodded. Under ceramic skies, Biscayne Bay unfolded in a dozen shifting hues of blue. It was a fine, cloudless morning: seventy degrees, and a northern breeze at their backs. Luis Cordova slowed the patrol boat a few hundred yards from the stilt house. He leaned down and said: “They tore the place up pretty bad, Mick.”

“You sure it was cops?”

“Yeah, two of them. Not uniformed guys, though. And they had one of the sheriff boats.”

Stranahan knew who it was: Murdock and Salazar.

“Those goons from the hospital,” said Christina Marks. She stood next to Luis Cordova at the steering console, behind the Plexiglas windshield. She wore a red windbreaker, baggy knit pants, and high-top tennis shoes.

From a distance Stranahan could see that the door to his house had been left open, which meant it had probably been looted and vandalized. What the kids didn’t wreck, the seagulls would. Stranahan stared for a few moments, then said: “Let’s go, Luis.”

The trip to Old Rhodes Key took thirty-five minutes in a light, nudging sea. Christina got excited when they passed a school of porpoises off Elliott Key, but Stranahan showed no interest. He was thinking about the videotape they had watched at Christina’s apartment-Maggie Gonzalez, describing the death of Vicky Barletta. Twice they had watched it. It made him mad but he wasn’t sure why. He had heard of worse things, seen worse things. Yet there was something about a doctor doing it, getting away with it, that made Stranahan furious.

When they reached the island, Luis Cordova dropped them at a sagging dock that belonged to an old Bahamian conch fisherman named Cartwright. Cartwright had been told they were coming.

“I got the place ready,” he told Mick Stranahan. “By the way, it’s good to see you, my friend.”

Stranahan gave him a hug. Cartwright was eighty years old. His hair was like cotton fuzz and his skin was the color of hot tar. He had Old Rhodes Key largely to himself and seldom entertained, but he had happily made an exception for his old friend. Years ago Stranahan had done Cartwright a considerable favor.

“White man tried to burn me out,” he told Christina Marks. “Mick took care of things.”

Stranahan hoisted the duffel bags over his shoulders and trudged toward the house. He said, “Some asshole developer wanted Cartwright’s land but Cartwright didn’t want to sell. Things got sticky.”

The conch fisherman cut in: “I tell the story better. The man offered me one hunnert towsind dollars to move off the island and when I says no thanks, brother, he had some peoples pour gasoline all on my house. Luckily it rain like hell. Mick got this man arrested and dey put him in the big jail up Miami. That’s the God’s truth.”

“Good for Mick,” Christinasaid. Naturally she had assumed that Stranahan had killed the man.

“Asshole got six years and did fifteen months. He’s out already.” Stranahan laughed acidly.

“That I didn’t know,” Cartwright said thoughtfully.

“Don’t worry, he won’t ever come back to this place.”

“Y ou don’t thinkso?”

“No, Cartwright, I promise he won’t. I had a long talk with the man. I believe he moved to California.”

“Very fine,” Cartwright said with obvious relief.

House was a charitable description for where the old fisherman lived: bare cinderblock walls on a concrete foundation; no doors in the doorways, no glass in the windows; a roof woven from dried palm fronds.

“Dry as a bone,” Cartwright said to Christina. “I know it don’t look like much, but you be dry inside here.”

Gamely she said, “I’ll be fine.”

Stranahan winked at Cartwright. “City girl,” he said.

Christina jabbed Stranahan in the ribs. “And you’re Daniel Boone, I suppose. Well, fuck you both. I can handle myself.”

Cartwright’s eyes grew wide.

“Sorry,” Christina said.

“Don’t be,” Cartwright said with a booming laugh. “I love it. I love the sound of a womanly voice out here.”

For lunch he fixed fresh lobster in a conch salad. Afterwards he gathered some clothes in a plastic garbage bag, told Mick good-bye and headed slowly down to the dock.

Christina said, “Where’s he going?”

“To the mainland,” Stranahan replied. “He’s got a grandson in Florida City he hasn’t seen in a while.”

From where they sat, they could see Cartwright’s wooden skiff motoring westward across the bay; the old man had one hand on the stem of the throttle, the other shielding his eyes from the low winter sun.

Christina turned to Stranahan. “You arranged it this way.”

“He’s a nice guy. He doesn’t deserve any trouble.”

“You really think they’ll find us all the way out here?”

“Yep,” Stranahan said. He was counting on it.