The New Black Mask Quarterly (No 2)

Elmore Leonard Excerpt from LaBrava

Reviewing LaBrava, Alan Cheuse wrote: “the sleazy, decadent beach-front façades, mental health stations, go-go clubs and water-soaked immoralities of contemporary south Miami Beach, where antique widows cross paths with young hustlers fresh out of Cuban prisons... Elmore Leonard has the feel of it; he makes us feel it — and the characters, whom we know as much by their dialogue as their actions...”

In the second chapter from LaBrava that follows, Leonard demonstrates this basic element of his talent.

“I’m going to tell you a secret I never told anybody around here,” Maurice said, his glasses, his clean tan scalp shining beneath the streetlight. “I don’t just manage the hotel I own it. I bought it, paid cash for it in 1951. Right after Kefauver.”

Joe LaBrava said, “I thought a woman in Boca owned it. Isn’t that what you tell everybody?”

“Actually the lady in Boca owns a piece of it. Fifty-eight she was looking for an investment.” Maurice Zola paused. “Fifty-eight or it might’ve been ’59. I remember they were making a movie down here at the time. Frank Sinatra.”

They had come out of the hotel, the porch lined with empty metal chairs, walked through the lines of slow-moving traffic to the beach side of the street where Maurice’s car was parked. LaBrava was patient with the old man, but waiting, holding the car door open, he hoped this wasn’t going to be a long story. They could be walking along the street, the old man always stopped when he wanted to tell something important. He’d stop in the doorway of Wolfie’s on Collins Avenue and people behind them would have to wait and hear about bustout joints where you could get rolled in the old days, or how you could tell a bookie when everybody on the beach was wearing resort outfits. “You know how?” The people behind them would be waiting and somebody would say, “How?” Maurice would say, “Everybody wore their sport shirts open usually except bookies. A bookie always had the top button buttoned. It was like a trademark.” He would repeat it a few more times waiting for a table. “Yeah, they always had that top button buttoned, the bookies.

“Edward G. Robinson was in the picture they were making. Very dapper guy.” Maurice pinched the knot of his tie, brought his hand down in a smoothing gesture over his pale blue, tropical sports jacket. “You’d see ’em at the Cardozo, the whole crew, all these Hollywood people, and at the dog track used to be down by the pier, right on First Street. No, it was between Biscayne and Harley.”

“I know... You gonna get in the car?”

“See, I tell the old ladies I only manage the place so they don’t bug me. They got nothing to do, sit out front but complain. Use to be the colored guys, now it’s the Cubans, the Haitians, making noise on the street, grabbing their purses. Graubers, they call ’em, momzers, loomps. ‘Run the loomps off, Morris. Keep them away from here, and the nabkas!’ That’s the hookers. I’m starting to sound like ’em, these almoonas with the dyed hair. I call ’em my bluebirds, they love it.”

“Let me ask you,” LaBrava said, leaving himself open but curious about something. “The woman we’re going to see, she’s your partner?”

“The lady we’re gonna rescue, who I think’s got a problem,” Maurice said, looking up at the hotel, one hand on the car that was an old-model Mercedes with vertical twin headlights, the car once cream-colored but now without lustre. “That’s why I mention it. She starts talking about the hotel you’ll know what she’s talking about. I owned the one next door, too, but I sold it in ’68. Somebody should’ve tied me to a toilet, wait for the real estate boom.”

“What, the Andrea? You owned that, too?”

“It used to be the Esther, I changed the name of both of ’em. Come here.” Maurice took LaBrava by the arm, away from the car. “The streetlight, you can’t see it good. All right, see the two names up there? Read ’em so they go together. What’s it say?”

There were lighted windows along the block of three — and four-story hotels, pale stucco in faded pastels, streamlined moderne facing the Atlantic from a time past: each hotel expressing its own tropical deco image in speed lines, wraparound corners, accents in glass brick, bas relief palm trees and mermaids.

“It says the Andrea,” LaBrava said, “and the Delia Robbia.”

“No, it don’t say the Andrea and the Delia Robbia.” Maurice held onto LaBrava’s arm, pointing now. “Read it.”

“It’s too dark.”

“I can see it you can see it. Look. You read it straight across it says Andrea Delia Robbia. He was a famous Italian sculptor back, I don’t know, the fourteen, fifteen hundreds. They name these places the Esther, the Dorothy — what kind of name is that for a hotel on South Miami Beach? I mean back then. Now it don’t matter. South Bronx south, it’s getting almost as bad.”

“Delia Robbia,” LaBrava said. “It’s a nice name. We going?”

“You say it, Delia Robbia,” Maurice said, rolling the name with a soft, Mediterranean flourish, tasting it on his tongue, the sound giving him pleasure. “Then the son of a bitch I sold it to — how do you like this guy? He paints the Andrea all white, changes the style of the lettering and ruins the composition. See, both hotels before were a nice pale yellow, dark green letters, dark green the decoration parts, the names read together like they were suppose to.”

LaBrava said, “You think anybody ever looks up there?”

“Forget I told you,” Maurice said. They walked back to the car and he stopped again before getting in. “Wait. I want to take a camera with us.”

“It’s in the trunk.”

“Which one?”

“The Leica CL.”

“And a flash?”

“In the case.”

Maurice paused. “You gonna wear that shirt, uh?”

LaBrava’s white shirt bore a pattern of bananas, pineapples and oranges. “It’s brand new, first time I’ve had it on.”

“Got all dressed up. Who you suppose to be, Murf the Surf?”

There was a discussion when LaBrava went around the block from Ocean Drive to Collins and headed south to Fifth Street to get on the MacArthur Causeway. Maurice said, we’re going north, what do you want to go south for? Why didn’t you go up to Forty-first Street, take the Julia Tuttle? LaBrava said, because there’s traffic up there on the beach, it’s still the season. Maurice said, eleven o’clock at night? You talk about traffic, it’s nothing what it used to be like. You could’ve gone up, taken the Seventy-ninth Street Causeway. LaBrava said, “You want to drive or you want me to?”

They didn’t get too far on I-95 before they came to all four lanes backed up, approaching the 112 interchange, brake lights popping on and off as far ahead as they could see. Crawling along in low gear, stopping, starting, the Mercedes stalled twice.

LaBrava said, “All the money you got, why don’t you buy a new car?”

Maurice said, “You know what you’re talking about? This car’s a classic, collector’s model.”

“Then you oughta get a tune.”

Maurice said, “What do you mean, all the money I got?”

“You told me you were a millionaire one time.”

“Used to be,” Maurice said. “I spent most of my dough on booze, broads and boats and the rest I wasted.”

Neither of them spoke again until they were beyond Fort Lauderdale. They could sit without talking and LaBrava would be reasonably comfortable; he never felt the need to invent conversation. He was curious when he asked Maurice:

“What do you want the camera for?”

“Maybe I want to take a picture.”

“The woman?”

“Maybe. I don’t know yet. I have to see how she is.”

“She’s a good friend of yours?”

Maurice said, “I’m going out this time of night to help somebody I don’t know? She’s a very close friend.”

“How come if she lives in Boca they took her to Delray Beach?”

“That’s where the place is they take them. It’s run by the county. Palm Beach.”

“Is it like a hospital?”

“What’re you asking me for? I never been there.”

“Well, what’d the girl say on the phone?”

“Something about she was brought in on the Meyers Act.”

“It means she was drunk.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of.”

“They pick you up in this state on a Meyers Act,” LaBrava said, “it means you’re weaving around with one eye closed, smashed. They pick you up on a Baker Act it means you’re acting weird in public and’re probably psycho. I remember that from when I was here before.”

He had spent a year and a half in the Miami field office of the United States Secret Service, one of five different duty assignments in nine years.

He had told Maurice about it one Saturday morning driving down to Islamorada, LaBrava wanting to try bonefishing and Maurice wanting to show him where he was standing when the tidal wave hit in ’35. LaBrava would remember the trip as the only time Maurice ever asked him questions, ever expressed an interest in his past life. In parts of it, anyway.

He didn’t get to tell much of the IRS part, the three years he’d worked as an investigator when he was young and eager. “Young and dumb,” Maurice said. Maurice didn’t want to hear anything about the fucking IRS.

Or much about LaBrava’s marriage, either — during the same three years — to the girl he’d met in accounting class, Wayne State University, who didn’t like to drink, smoke or stay out late, or go to the show. Though she seemed to like all those things before. Strange? Her name was Lorraine. Maurice said, what’s strange about it? They never turn out like you think they’re going to. Skip that part. There wasn’t anything anybody could tell him about married life he didn’t know. Get to the Secret Service part.

Well, there was the training at Beltsville, Maryland. He learned how to shoot a Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum, the M-16, the Uzi submachine gun, different other ones. He learned how to disarm and theoretically beat the shit out of would-be assassins with a few chops and kicks. He learned how to keep his head up and his eyes open, how to sweep a crowd looking for funny moves, hands holding packages, umbrellas on clear days, that kind of thing.

He spent fifteen months in Detroit, his hometown, chasing down counterfeiters, going undercover to get next to wholesalers. That part was okay, making buys as a passer. But then he’d have to testify against the poor bastard in federal court, take the stand and watch the guy’s face drop — Christ, seeing his new buddy putting the stuff on him. So once he was hot in Detroit, a familiar face in the trade, they had to send him out to cool off.

He was assigned to the Protective Research Section in Washington where, LaBrava said, he read nasty letters all day. Letters addressed to “Peanut Head Carter, the Mushmouth Motherfucker from Georgia.” Or that ever-popular salutation, “To the Nigger-loving President of the Jewnited States.” Letters told what should be done to the President of the USA, “the Utmost Supreme Assholes” who believed his lies. There was a suggestion, LaBrava said, the President ought to be “pierced with the prophet’s sword of righteousness for being a goddamn hypocrite.” Fiery, but not as practical as the one that suggested, “They ought to tie you to one of those MX missiles you dig so much and lose your war-lovin ass.”

Maurice said, “People enjoy writing letters, don’t they? You answer them?”

LaBrava said usually there wasn’t a return address; but they’d trace the writers down through postmarks, broken typewriter keys, different clues, and have a look at them. They’d be interviewed and their names added to a file of some forty thousand presidential pen pals, a lot of cuckoos; a few, about a hundred or so, they’d have to watch.

LaBrava told how he’d guarded important people, Teddy Kennedy during the Senator’s 1980 presidential campaign, trained to be steely-eyed, learned to lean away from those waving arms, stretched his steely eyes open till they ached listening to those tiresome, oh my, those boring goddamn speeches.

Maurice said, “You should a heard William Jennings Bryan, the Peerless Prince of Platform English, Christ, lecture on the wonders of Florida — sure, brought in by the real estate people.”

LaBrava said he’d almost quit after guarding Teddy. But he hung on and was reassigned to go after counterfeiters again, now out of the Miami field office, now getting into his work and enjoying it. A new angle. He picked up a Nikon, attached a 200-mm lens, and began using it in surveillance work. Loved it. Snapping undercover agents making deals with wholesalers, passers unloading their funny money. Off duty he continued snapping away: shooting up and down Southwest Eighth Street, the heart of Little Havana; or riding with a couple of Metro cops to document basic Dade County violence. He felt himself attracted to street life. It was a strange feeling, he was at home, knew the people; saw more outcast faces and attitudes than he would ever be able to record, people who showed him their essence behind all kinds of poses — did Maurice understand this? — and trapped them in his camera for all time.

He got hot again through court appearances and was given a cooling-off assignment — are you ready for this? — in Independence, Missouri.

After counterfeiters?

No, to guard Mrs. Truman.

A member of the twelve-man protective detail. To sit in the surveillance house watching monitors or sit eight hours a day in the Truman house itself on North Delaware. Sit sometimes in the living room looking around at presidential memorabilia, a picture of Margaret and her two kids, the grandfather’s clock that had been wired and you didn’t have to wind — which would have been something to do — listening to faint voices in other rooms. Or sit in the side parlor with Harry’s piano, watching movies on TV, waiting for the one interruption of the day. The arrival of the mailman.

“Don’t get me wrong, Mrs. Truman was a kind, considerate woman. I liked her a lot.”

The duty chief had said, “Look, there’re guys would give an arm and a leg for this assignment. If you can’t take pride in it, just say so.”

He glanced at Maurice sitting there prim, very serious this evening. Little Maurice Zola, born here before there were roads other than a few dirt tracks and the Florida East Coast Railway. Natty little guy staring at this illuminated interstate highway — giant lit-up green signs every few miles telling where you were — and not too impressed. He had seen swamps become cities, a bridge extended to a strip of mangrove in the Atlantic Ocean and Miami Beach was born. Changes were no longer events in his life. They had happened or they didn’t.

One of the green signs, mounted high, told them Daytona Beach was 215 miles.

“Who cares?” Maurice said. “I used to live in Daytona Beach. First time I got married, October 10, 1929 — wonderful time to get married, Jesus — was in Miami. The second time was October 24, 1943, in Daytona Beach. October’s a bad month for me. I paid alimony, I mean plenty, but I outlived ’em both. Miserable women. In ’32, when I worked for the septic tank outfit and wrestled alligators on the weekends? It was because I had the experience being married to my first wife.”

“What about the lady we’re going to see?”

“What about her?”

“You ever serious with her?”

“You’re asking, you want to know did I go to bed with her? She wasn’t that kind of girl. She wasn’t a broad you did that with.”

“I mean did you ever think of marrying her?”

“She was too young for me. I don’t mean she was too young you wanted to hop in the sack with a broad her age, I mean to get married and live with. I had all kinds of broads at that time. In fact, go back a few years before that, just before Kefauver, when I had the photo concessions and the horse book operation. I’ll tell you a secret. You want to know who one of the broads I was getting into her pants was at the time. Evelyn, at the gallery. She was in love with me.”

“I don’t think you’ve introduced me to any who weren’t.”

“What can I say?” Maurice said.

“How old’s the woman we’re going to see?”

“Jeanie? She’s not too old. Lemme think, it was ’58 I gave her a piece of the hotel. Or it might’ve been ’59, they were making that movie on the beach. Frank Sinatra, Edward G. Robinson... Jeanie was gonna be in the picture, was why she came down. But she didn’t get the part.”

“Wait a minute—” LaBrava said.

“They wanted her, but then they decided she looked too young. She was in her twenties then and she was gonna play this society woman.”

“Jeanie—”

“Yeah, very good-looking girl, lot of class. She married a guy — not long after that she married a guy she met down here. Lawyer, very wealthy, use to represent some of the big hotels. They had a house on Pine Tree Drive, I mean a mansion, faced the Eden Roc across Indian Creek. You know where I mean? Right in there, by Arthur Godfrey Road. Then Jerry, Jerry Breen was the guy’s name, had some trouble with the IRS, had to sell the place. I don’t know if it was tax fraud or what. He didn’t go to jail, anything like that, but it cost him, I’ll tell you. He died about oh, ten years ago. Yeah, Jeanie was a movie actress. They got married she retired, gave it up.”

“What was her name before?”

“Just lately I got a feeling something funny’s going on. She call me last week, start talking about she’s got some kind of problem, then changes the subject. I don’t know if she means with the booze or what.”

“You say she was a movie actress.”

“She was a star. You see her on TV once in a while, they show the old movies.”

“Her name Jeanie or Jean?”

“Jean. Jean — the hell was her name? You believe it? I’m used to thinking of her as Jeanie Breen.” Maurice pointed. “Atlantic Boulevard. See it? Mile and a half. You better get over.” Maurice rolled his window down.

“Jean Simmons?”

“Naw, not Jean Simmons.” Maurice was half-turned now, watching for cars coming up in the inside lane. “I’ll tell you when.”

“Gene Tierney?” Laura. He’d watched it on television in Bess Truman’s living room. “How’s she spell her name?”

“Jean. How do you spell Jean? J-e-a-n.”

Jean Harlow was dead. LaBrava looked at the rear-view mirror, watched headlights lagging behind, in no hurry. “Jeanne Grain?”

“Naw, not Jeanne Grain. Get ready,” Maurice said. “Not after this car but the one after it, I think you can make it.”