Bandits (1987) (16 page)

You remind me of someone.

The tingling stopped.

What we do is serious, our motive. But how we go about it is something else, isn
'
t it? How we look at it, our attitude.

How we look back on it a year from now,
Jack said, and think it was pretty funny. If it works, and if we
'
re not looking back on it from the joint. You have to be optimistic, assume you '
re gonna make it. And you think of it as a game, because then it '
s not as scary.

He could make out lights in her eyes, her lips parted, Lucy beginning to smile at him again. He wanted to ask her who he reminded her of, but Cullen came back in, followed by the housekeeper.

Dolores said, Phone for Mr. Delaney.

Roy
'
s voice said, Crispin Antonio Reyna was convicted in Florida, 1982, of uttering fraudulent checks and did nine months in South Dade FCI.

What
'
s uttering mean?

Like hanging paper, only a higher-class way of doing it. He was brought up another time, falsified his 4473 making a multiple gun purchase, also Dade County. Trying to buy five dozen model 92s Berettas he said were for a gun club. The indictment fell through. The feds tried to get him for running dope from Florida to Baton Rouge, said he was selling it to the students up at LSU. They couldn '
t make that one stick either. Crispin Antonio '
s originally a Cuban. His family moved to Nicaragua in '
59, he was an officer in the National Guard and came here in '
79, to Miami. Franklin de Dios, it says his nationality is Miskito Indian, born in Musawas, Nicaragua. Came to Miami a year ago and was a major suspect in a triple homicide, but was never brought to trial.

They don
'
t sound like they
'
re with Immigration, Jack said.

Except Second District radio cars were told to leave
'
em be. They were assumed to be working as federal agents.

Assumed to be
what kind?

Call Wally Scales and ask him. His number
'
s 226-5989.

Roy, what is he?

He
'
s the fucking CIA, Jack. I want to know what side we
'
re supposed to be on, the good guys or the bad guys.

Chapter
13

THERE WAS NO WAY to miss Little One, even at night, the size of him coming along Bienville from the hotel, toward Royal, where Jack was waiting near the corner. Little One put out his hand and palmed Jack the room key. He said, That fucking Roy. Okay, now we even. Tell him that.

We appreciate it.

You better
'
ypreciate it. Leave the key under the chifforobe, where the maid can find it. See, like the man dropped it. The man '
s mostly drunk, having a good time. He won '
t know.

I may have to go back in.

Come on, Jack.
Little One twisting his head, in pain. You see how far out my neck is right now?

I
'
m not gonna take anything. The guy won
'
t even know I was there. In and out, take me ten minutes.

Yeah, you slick, like all those boys at
'
yGola use to think of themselves, cool dudes. I remember correctly, Jack, was up there you and I met, wasn '
t it?

I did something pretty dumb one time,
Jack said. I should
'
ve known better. This is different. One more time, that '
s it.

Yeah, like the Count say,
'
yOne more once,
'
huh? Only that was '
yApril in Paris '
and this is April in N
'
Awlins, man, gets hot and sticky.

I
'
m not back in business, anything like that.

Just want to check the man out.

That
'
s all. Take a look around.

Man with the Cuban skin and five-hundred-dollar suits. Sweep his room, see if he
'
s got a badge or any bugs '
yfore you start to deal.

Nothing like that.

Jack, when you get back up to the farm, give my best to Smoke and Too Good, and that cute little rascal Minne Mo, if he still there. Lemme think who else . . .

Jack walked through the empty lobby and across one end of the garden courtyard to the cocktail lounge, cream-colored in soft lights, elegant, and not a soul here. The Oriental barman came to life and poured Jack a vodka.

If he were back working his trade he would have looked in, turned around, and walked out to find a big downtown hotel full of noise, full of tourists and people with name tags drinking and having fun in the bar. He '
d become someone else as he felt the glow, breathed the scent of girls in cocktail dresses, girls scouting their own game while Jack looked for ladies wearing respectable diamonds, husbands who brought billfolds out of their jackets or folds of currency in silver clips. He '
d take a few days to sort them out, then ride up in the elevator with a likely pair, get off a floor below the button they punch and run up the stairs to watch them going into their suite. An hour later he '
d try their door to see if they put on the chain. The next day he '
d slip into those rooms while they were snapping pictures in Jackson Square; go through the drawers, their suitcases and bathroom kits, look in their shoes, feel through clothes hanging in the closet. He '
d look at the door chain then. If they used it he '
d remove the chain and replace it with one he '
d brought along that had three or four more links in it. The couple would slip the chain on that night and never notice the difference. He '
d come along later, open the door with his fire key, and be able to reach in and slip off the chain. Then hook it up again on the way out, if it was a better-than-average score and he was feeling good. Or else he could cut it going in.

Do all that, get away with it, and he couldn
'
t tell anyone about it.

He
'
d hear salesmen bullshitting the girls, trying to impress them with how many computers they '
d sold, and he '
d sit there at the bar or reach for something like, Didn '
t you and I do a modeling shoot last year?
Or he '
d tell them he was learning English and put on a half-assed French accent.

He tried it on Helene the first time he saw her in the bar at the Roosevelt, knocked out by her profile, her bare legs crossed beneath a short green skirt, told her he was from Paree, and Helene said, Is that by any chance near Morgan City?

She told him it wasn
'
t a bad approach, it was different, but how far could he take it? Or was his life so boring he had to pretend he was someone else?

He told her, without the French accent, she had the most beautiful nose and brown eyes
he threw in the eyes
he had ever seen and that his life, his profession, was far from boring.

What do you do?

See if you can guess.

Do you live here?

Yeah.

Do you have a lot of money?

Enough.

You sell dope.

I don
'
t sell anything.

You buy things.

No.

You steal things.

Right.

She hesitated. What do you steal?

Guess.

Cars?

No.

Jewels.

Right.

She said, Sure you do.
She said, Really? Come on.
She said, What do you do with them, the jewels?

I sell
'
em to a guy for about a quarter of what they
'
re worth.

She said, I don
'
t know whether to believe you or not,
with a different tone now, softer, hesitant.

Jack turned half around on his stool, looked over the room, and came back to Helene. What
'
re you doing tomorrow?

I work. For a lawyer.

Stop by here during your lunch hour. I
'
m in 610.

What if I
'
m not hungry?

You see the lady in the blue net?

Chiffon.

The guy has on a tux.

What about her?

You see the ring she
'
s wearing?

It was about one-fifteen the next day, the hotel room silent except for faint street sounds, when Helene turned her head on the pillow and said, Jacques, I think I '
m falling in love with you.

Buddy Jeannette had told him, Always look nice and always ride the elevator. You run into somebody on the stairs they gonna remember you,
'
cause you don '
t see nobody on the stairs as a rule. But a elevator, man, you so close to people they don '
t see you.

So Jack rode an empty elevator up to the fifth floor of the St. Louis Hotel in his navy-blue work suit, got off, and there was 501 in the elevator alcove, out of sight from the courtyard below. He stepped over to the door and knocked three times, waited, giving the man plenty of time if he was in there, then used the key to enter the suite.

The fundraiser had left lights on, even the one in the bathroom. Little One told Roy he had checked on the man at seven, phoned to see if he could pick up the room-service table and there was no answer; but the man and two other Latinos were there at five-thirty when Little One said he brought up the champagne and booze and snacks, and a couple white girls had come in while he was there that looked like whores.

The party mess was in the sitting room, bottles and glasses and a tray with a few canap+!s left on it, tiny sandwiches, deviled eggs, and a bowl of melted ice and shrimp tails. There were shrimp tails in ashtrays, napkins on the floor, wet spots on the red carpeting . . . several envelopes on the desk addressed to Col. Dagoberto Godoy, c/o the St. Louis Hotel, postmarked Tegucigalpa, Honduras. The letters were typed in Spanish. Jack saw himself in the mirror over the sofa as he crossed to the phone on the end table. He remembered letters from his dad with the Honduras postmark; he had soaked off the stamps and saved them. There was nothing by the phone; a few shrimp tails.

This was like an afternoon scouting trip, not even close to what the real thing felt like, going in when you knew the people were there in the dark, hearing their breathing and more different kinds of snoring sounds than anyone could imagine.

He
'
d said to Helene, Did you know women snore as much as men? I
'
ve made a study. Women aren '
t as loud, but they '
re more original. Some of '
em go, '
ychit . . . chit, '
like a little sneeze. Some of '
em go, '
ypissssss, '
on the exhale.
Helene said, You fascinate me, shining her brown eyes at him, chin resting on her hand with the blue stone, the sapphire. He had told her she was the only person in the world, outside of Buddy Jeannette, who knew what he did. She liked that; she hunched her shoulders. He told her he knew he was going to tell her; as soon as they started talking that night he knew it. She said she knew right away there was something different about him, mysterious. She said, It '
s real scary, huh? Doing that.
He said, sometimes, when it was quiet, he would imagine the man and woman lying there listening and that was really scary. She said, That '
s why you do it, huh?
'
Cause it '
s scary.
He said he didn '
t think too much about why he did it. But he did think, every once in a while, that maybe if he '
d gone to Vietnam he wouldn '
t be doing it. Strange? He was turned down when he took his physical, he had mono; then after that was just never called. He told her that sometimes after he left the room with his flight bag and would be standing there waiting for an elevator, that was scarier than being in the room. The best part was when he got to his own room and closed the door, or when he walked out of the hotel, if he wasn '
t staying there. Jesus, the relief. Helene said, Like it doesn '
t have anything to do with robbing people.
He said, well, there had to be something in it for you; you weren '
t gonna put your ass on the line just for thrills. That was part of it, though. Doing it. Yeah, because he never thought of it as . . . you know, just a robbery. Did that make sense? Helene said, I want to go with you. Once, that '
s all. Please?

It took a few weeks to let himself be talked into it. Then spent the next thirty-five months wondering how he could have been so fucking dumb. When he told Roy, Roy said, Jesus, you deserve to be in here. Take a fall just on stupidity alone.

They went into a suite at 3:00 a.m. and weren
'
t even across the room before Helene bumped into something and giggled, Jesus Christ, and a voice said from the bedroom, Who '
s in there?
and a light came on and they ran down the stairs from the fifteenth floor, no elevator ride this trip, and hotel security was waiting in the lobby. Jack opened his eyes wide and said, What '
s this about?
Looked puzzled as he said, You have the wrong party.
Put on a pissed-off look as he said, We '
re staying in this hotel.
The guy in the bathrobe said, Yeah, I '
m pretty sure that '
s them.
Jack told hotel security they were going to hear from his lawyer. Only the lawyer they heard from was Helene '
s, the guy she worked for, a lawyer who specialized in divorces and didn '
t know shit about plea bargaining on a criminal justice level. But that '
s what he did, stuck his nose in and offered them a deal when he didn '
t have to: immunity for Helene if she '
d put Jack Delaney in that hotel room and the cops and the district attorney could '
ve kissed him. They got a search warrant and found his fire keys and an alligator attach+! case with the initials RDB he '
d picked up months before, stuck in his closet, and forgot he had. They tried to hit him with thirty burglaries over the past two years; so Jack and his Broad Street lawyer made their own plea deal. Okay, he '
d give them the thirty and they could close the files in exchange for one Unlawful Entry, look at five years, and be out in three if he was a good boy. Helene said, Jack? I '
m awful sorry.

There were wet towels on the floor in the bathroom, two pair of Jockey briefs, both bright red; five $100 bills rolled tightly together and a 35-millimeter film container of cocaine in the fundraiser '
s shaving kit. His bed was unmade, thrashed apart it looked like, pillows and spread on the floor. There were at least a dozen pair of Jockeys, all that bright red, in the dresser; a Beretta automatic tucked away beneath the shirts.

The good stuff was on the desk in the bedroom, by the phone. Bank deposit slips, a stack of them in different pastel shades. . . . Wait. Some of them were withdrawal receipts. Here was the same amount deposited, withdrawn, and deposited again on different dates . . . and realized there were four or five different Whitney and Hibernia branch banks involved. The guy wasn '
t putting everything into one account. Jack copied the figures, with plus and minus signs, on a hotel memo pad.