Hard Case Crime: Dutch Uncle (12 page)

“No, fuck you,” Leo said to the driver of the van. He inched the Eldo forward, boxing him out.

The light turned green. Fernandez popped his door open and scrambled onto the pavement.

Leo tracked his orange soccer jersey like a visual SOS, his skinny arms flailing as he dashed across three lanes, scary close to getting clipped by a BMW that didn’t look up until it was almost too late. Let the cocksucker live, he wants to go and get himself killed.

Two motorcycle cops flagged traffic around a wreck. Getting the hint, Leo turned north on SW 12th Avenue, cruising past an archipelago of used car lots, purple pennant streamers flapping above the acreage. Forlorn, buffed-out lemons lay in wait, Spanish words scrawled on their windshields. Creampuff! Leo imagined they said. Original miles!

He kept going north, rolling through the skanky neighborhoods that, if he wasn’t wrong, should take him right into Liberty City. The turf had been poached by the wettest of wetbacks, Salvadorans and Panamanians and Ecuadorians, their pathetic hand-painted letters crammed onto signs outside their restaurants and shops. They ought to be getting a taste, right about now, of what this great country was all about, liquor stores and lottery tickets.

He veered down a street that dead-ended under an overpass. The sun glinted off the silvery key chain that dangled from the ignition. Leo got out of the car.

He noticed a bus stop on the street he turned off of, and he walked back to it, slow, cool, nothing to worry about. It was in front of a building that at one point in its life was the Buenos Aires nightclub. Half its roof was collapsed and the other half had a huge hole burnt into it. The fire that knocked out the club must’ve been an inferno, the kind people died in, but Leo couldn’t remember hearing anything about it. Imagine. Making it all the way from Nicaragua, then getting charred to a crisp, when the only thing you had in mind was blowing your dishwasher money on drinks and the possibility of pussy. It could almost make you sad, if you let it.

A bottle gang was passing the morning pint. They had watched Leo pull down the dead-end street. Now, they were eyeing him up hard. Looking black, talking Spanish, one could’ve had Chinese blood, slashes for eyes that were red and mean, a sinister, odd-looking hombre. Leo lifted his shirt and let the grip of his .25 stick out of his pants, in case anybody was getting any ideas.

The bus drifted to the curb. Leo stood in the stairwell, fumbling with his money. Boarding, he watched the gang fall out in the dead-end’s direction. Buena suerta, he thought. Good luck, amigos.

As a demonstration of his good faith, Leo put out the word that he wanted to return the kilo that was more like two now after Beaumond and Fernandez got done stepping on it. Leo didn’t want to be connected to a batch of blow that was attached to two murders. Way bad karma.

Maybe Negrito felt the same. He didn’t seem too keen on getting it back. But any attempt to think along with Negrito was a lose-lose proposition.

Nestor Alameda contacted Leo and told him El Negrito would meet him in a bar off the Calle Ocho in Little Havana. Leo balked. Two things he wasn’t going to do: Hook up with Negrito anywhere that afforded the slightest bit of privacy, or get into any car Negrito was driving. He countered with a parking lot off Collins. Nestor called him back and said it was a go.

He wasn’t sure why this meeting would be any different than the one they had in the coffee shop, Leo arriving ten minutes early, Negrito already waiting, but he felt weird, a threat in the yellow of the parking lot paint. He got that same throw-uppy feeling he had when he dry-heaved between the cars, and he kept clearing his throat and swallowing, to keep whatever it was down there where it belonged. He really hated to lose the satchel he stashed his film canisters in, but he stayed quiet when Negrito snatched it out of his hand and tossed it in the front seat of his Monte Carlo. The one with the blacked-out back window and the stencil that told you Monte Carlo, in case there was any confusion.

Leo didn’t know what to say that wasn’t going to piss him off, and Negrito didn’t appear to have anything prepared for the occasion. He glared at Leo, wearing no expression at all.

Leo tried this: “I hope you realize I’ve taken care of everything.” He didn’t want to come right out and say what it was he’d taken care of, and anyway, he was pretty confident Negrito knew about it, or Leo wouldn’t be standing here talking to him or anybody else.

“The only reason there was anything to take care of was because you fucked up so bad in the first place.” Negrito’s mouth barely opened enough to let the words out. “That’s what I realize.”

Okay, something had changed since the last time they talked.

“I just want you to accept my apology, that’s all.” A rush of bile shot up Leo’s esophagus. He swallowed hard twice, beating it back.

“I don’t give a shit about your apology.”

Not only did his mouth stay closed, his lips hardly moved. How come Leo never noticed this? The guy had an amazing untapped talent for ventriloquism.

“You did what needed to be done. That’s all that matters.”

Good. Well, then, if that was going to be all, Leo’d be on his way.

“And if I have an ounce of trouble with you again, ever,
ever,
you can kiss your ass goodbye. You got that?”

Leo was about to give him a one-word answer like “Understood” when he heard a crack and saw some things that weren’t there. He glimpsed Negrito through tearing eyes. The guy just had a thing for slapping people.

Then Leo caught a punch. The second dug into his kidney. The third connected with his jaw and sent him to the pavement, three punches before he figured out he was being hit. He went down thinking, Man’s pretty fast for a fat guy.

The ringing in his ears had just about quit when Negrito stomped on his neck. Leo heard a voice from somewhere far away say he wasn’t fucking around, but Leo didn’t think he was.

By the end of the month, Sailor Randy’s slowed down. Bryce Peyton cut back security, and Harry only worked the money nights. He still had the money he’d gotten from Sven and Javier, though, and with only half his pay going to the Wind N’ Sand, he was, in fact, accumulating cash.

The big news was, he had a genuine thing going with Aggie. She lived in an apartment complex in Sunrise, and they shopped for groceries and rented videos of blackand- white gangster movies. Harry slept at her place a couple of nights a week.

Aggie liked to cook, and Harry couldn’t get over how cheap you ate when you made your own food. For eight or nine bucks, the two of them were stuffed and had things left over besides, to eat another night.

Aggie’s dream was to be a writer. Harry could identify with wanting to be something other than what you were, but a writer? There was no money in the writing racket unless you hit big with something they turned into a movie. Otherwise, you were wasting your time. And writing took up a lot of time.

She was the theater critic for a weekly arts rag. The gig paid next to nothing, but she did get to see a lot of mediocre theater for free. Harry went with her once, but he was snoring before intermission, and Aggie didn’t invite him again.

The paper had a predictable “anti-establishment” point of view, a way of looking at the world that Aggie didn’t share, but since she was only critiquing bad plays, nobody cared about her politics. As a matter of fact, Aggie was quite the little capitalist, investment newsletters in the mailbox, on the phone with her broker in the morning.

Besides her newspaper duties, Aggie was hard at some secret project stashed in her computer files. Harry bugged her to show it to him. She said it wouldn’t make sense to anybody but her, and when he pressed it, she changed the subject. He guessed this made them about even. She was in the dark about a big chunk of his life, too.

Harry was lounging around one morning, leafing through Aggie’s hundreds of CDs, and she was trying to get rid of him so she could get some writing done, but since Harry didn’t have anywhere to go or anything to do, he was stalling. The TV was tuned to some cable business show and something came up about one of Aggie’s many stock picks. She clicked off the music and un-muted the TV.

“These fucking guys,” Harry said. “Cheerleaders.”

The screen flashed to a dark-haired good-looking guy extolling the virtues of some company Aggie was long in. Buy, the guy said. That made Aggie feel good.

“Harry,” she said, “this guy looks just like you. It’s uncanny.”

His name flashed under his image. Arthur Healy.

“You think you two could be related?”

Harry said, “Uh, yes, I think we could be. He’s my brother.”

“Your brother.”

“I think you heard me right.”

“You never said a word about him.”

“It never came up before. What’s the big deal? He’s on TV all the time. They gotta put somebody on these shows, right?”

“How come you two have different last names?”

Harry was about to say, What are you talking about? But he pulled himself up and said, “That’s a longer story.”

She said, “I’ve got time.”

“I don’t want to talk about him,” Harry said, and when she didn’t say anything, he said, “I just don’t, okay?”

Aggie looked at him like she wanted to say no, but what she said was, “Okay.”

It was a Wednesday night. Aggie had roasted a chicken with garlic and carrots and potatoes, and they were sitting around the remains of the meal, discussing that night’s rental,
Dog Day Afternoon
.

Aggie was a huge Al Pacino fan, but it was the plain-looking guy who played the sidekick, John Cazale, who made the movie worth sitting through another time. Aggie couldn’t picture him, but Harry told her she’d know him for sure once she saw him, he was the one who didn’t go to Vietnam in
The Deer Hunter
.

Aggie was clanking dishes around in the sink and Harry said, “I’ll get that,” because that’s what he always said, but she went on washing and he didn’t argue. Back in the living room, he found the remote control between two couch cushions and pinched the TV to life.

The news was on. A DEA spokesman was announcing the largest cocaine seizure anywhere, ever. If it wasn’t the biggest and the best with these guys, it was nothing. The anchorwoman blah-blah-blahed over footage of the haul, half a ton was the claim, DEA agents proudly wearing DEA caps and DEA vests. The picture cut to a head-and-shoulders of the anchoress in a hideous yellow blazer and door-knocker earrings, puffed-up hair frozen in place.

It reminded Harry of the gangster movies where the bad guys always hear the law is after them on the radio. They just happen to be tuned to that station.

And Harry just happened to be tuned to this one.

The anchoress said, “Miami Beach Police today released a composite drawing of a suspect in the March Ocean Drive slaying of a Dutch businessman.”

Cut to Composite Harry sporting the crew cut he’d let grow out, and the four or five days worth of beard he’d had at the time.

“Persons who may have seen this man are strongly urged to contact Miami Beach Detectives at 970-TIPS. Any information will be kept strictly confidential.”

Cut to a promo of the weather. A graphic under the lady’s madly grinning grill teased, Naughty or Nice?

Composite Harry’s features were close enough to real Harry’s, but the eyes, the eyes were scary close, and if you were a cop and you set your lights on Harry, you’d want to talk to him about what happened that night on Ocean Drive. Or if you were a ditzy chick who recognized Harry from Sailor Randy’s, and you were clicking your way around the parallel TV universe, you might be tempted to call that number. Likewise if you were the clerk who wore holey t-shirts to your job, where Harry rented movies.

Chain-smoking through
Dog Day Afternoon
, Harry thought he remembered the movie being funny, but he didn’t get a single laugh out of it. Aggie knew John Cazale, like he said she would, but when she went, “Hey, there’s that guy,” Harry just deadpanned his name. She mentioned he was in
The Conversation
, too. Harry said, “Hackman.”

He was over the shock of running into his composite self on the cable waves. Right now, he was in desperate need of a plan. Before he executed it, whatever it turned out to be, he was going to tell Aggie everything. Most of it. Maybe. At the high cost of lying to himself, he’d enjoyed this four-week breather, but it was worse than dishonest not to think these cozy domestic moments had definite expiration dates. They were about to come due.

She misread his state of mind. When the movie ended she said, “I’ll drive you back to the hotel if you want,” but he didn’t want that. He wasn’t sure it’d be safe.

Aggie went to bed and Harry told her he’d be right in, he wanted to smoke some more and think some more, and after about an hour, when he walked into the bedroom, she was asleep. He slid in next to her and stared into the dark.

He tried to remember the first job he’d pulled. How old was he when they used to duck into supermarkets and drop steaks into the pockets they’d sewn inside the winter coats they wore till May, Harry and Ken Lupo and Gary Paris? Snatching purses from nightclubs they snuck into through side doors? The years ticked by and it all blurred together, Harry getting older and committing different crimes, but nothing really changed. Here he was, thirty-five years old, and he had never, not ever, done one worthwhile thing in his whole life.

Around three in the morning, he finally fell asleep. He dreamed he was in a lineup with Bryce Peyton and Big Palmero. Then Frankie Yin joined them, and so did Cavalero, a detective who rousted Harry for pickpocketing when he was sixteen. It was strange. He knew it was a dream while he was dreaming it. Besides random motherfuckers just shambling in, what tipped him off was he could see through the two-way mirror. Leo stood on the other side of the glass. And Harry could hear him.

“Arrest that man,” Leo said in his cocky voice. “That’s Harry Healy. He’s the one who did Manfred. Murderer,” Leo was saying, pointing a finger straight at Harry. “Murderer.”