Hard Case Crime: Dutch Uncle (6 page)

“How’d you make out?” Fernandez wanted to know. He was puffing the tobacco part of the Newport.

“Not too good,” Leo said, grabbing his lighter and sparking a Marlboro. “The Quiet Man is reported to be totally pissed off, and I’m supposed to meet El Negrito in a little while.”

Though the central air was set at sixty-five degrees, the sight of all that coke and the scales and the baggies scorched Leo with a hot, dry feeling. He wondered if he was coming down with something besides a chicken heart.

“What’re you gonna tell him?” Beaumond asked. He was using a yellow sandbox shovel to blend baking soda and cocaine. He dumped a heaping tablespoon of the jarred powder into the batch.

Leo said, “What is that shit?”

“Procaine,” Beaumond said. He stuck a pinky into the glistening heap that wasn’t yet cut and swiped the finger over his gums. “Gives ’em that sting they expect. The numbness. Masks the other cut.”

He had a down-home panhandle twang. He was Alex Fernandez’s buddy from Leo forgot where, and as Leo watched Beaumond’s fat, bone-white arm working the shovel, he wondered how it was that Beaumond had been staying in his house so long.

“The bigger the count, the less we step on it,” Fernandez said. “Fifty-fifty an ounce, sixty-forty a half, so on down the line, to grams. But that’s the smallest we’re doing. Grams.”

Fernandez had unraveled into a full-on fashion victim, sporting white hip-hugger bellbottoms, and a belt that fastened with a circular buckle. His long-collared shirt was unbuttoned, a pattern of crimson and gold revealing a stripe of hair in the center of his chest. Rocking a blown-out afro, doing that 70s thing from a few years ago. There was an oily sheen on his forehead and nose. The last few drags of that Newport hung from his lips, and he was generating a rancid, chemical smell.

“Grams,” Leo said. “You guys are doing grams. A kilo of top shelf rock, and you’re gonna knock it down till you’re dealing what, ten percent product?” Welcome to Amateur Hour, with your host, what was that guy’s name? Not Arthur Godfrey. Some old-timer like that. “The whack you’re selling, who’s gonna come back?

“Don’t need ’em coming back,” Beaumond said. “Move it down to Big Black Mule and Statsonic, three, four in the morning. Snowbirds. Who’s gonna see ’em again?”

Beaumond’s face was shaped like an upside-down pyramid, the low, wide forehead giving way to a flattened cranium. He reminded Leo of the guy on the descent of man timeline, the one a generation or two away from the dude who first walked upright, not quite monkey, not quite man yet, either.

“Tell you the truth,” Leo said, “I don’t give a shit what you do with it. This — ” He waved his cigarette at the table and cut himself off.

Beaumond said, “You never answered my question, Leo. What’re you gonna tell Nigger-ita?”

“Negrito,” Leo corrected. “I think he knows I was in on it, but I’m gonna deny everything.”

Fernandez said, “You think that’ll work?”

“What choice do I have? I don’t know about you guys, but I’m too fucking young to die.”

Beaumond finished bagging an ounce. He sealed it with two strips of tape. “Never woulda happened a’tall, ’cept that German queer hadda go and get brave on us.”

“Dutch,” Leo said. “Manfred was Dutch.”

Beaumond took a rat-tail comb out of his back pocket and dragged it across his hair. The comb made a ripping noise as it tore through his split ends.

Leo knew Beaumond was lying. He couldn’t imagine Manfred doing anything but surrendering the second he saw the gun. He would’ve been scared, and no matter how fucked up he was, he wouldn’t have done anything reckless. He liked his life too much to have it end over 2.2 pounds of totally replaceable white powder.

Vicki tapped on the sliding door, stark fucking naked. After Leo hurried over to let her in, she sprinted through the kitchen on her toes, through the dining room and up the stairs, trailing water, cradling Mimi, seized with a spasm of modesty.

Her footsteps faded. “We have got to do something about that girl,” Leo said. “She’s nothing but a liability.”

Beaumond said, “A what?” He was looking at Fernandez.

“Vicki’s cool,” Fernandez said. “She can hang.” He wiped some oily sweat on the back of his hand, and shook another Newport out of his pack.

“She sucks my dick good,” Beaumond said. He had his sandbox shovel in the coke. He lifted some up and vacantly dropped it back in the pile.

“Look,” Leo said, “the party’s over here. We’ve got some serious fucking trouble on our hands. She’s gotta find some other place to stay.”

Beaumond’s narrow eyes turned to yellow-brown slashes. “There’s where you’re wrong, dude. My Victoria ain’t going nowhere.”

His Victoria. So it was like that, was it? Okay.

“Anybody leaving this house, it’s gonna be you. Want you to keep that right here.” Beaumond stabbed an index finger into the center of his forehead. “Don’t fuck with me.”

He screamed the word fuck. Leo flinched. He said, “Take it easy, big guy.”

Leo figured Beaumond probably thought he’d be easy to get over on, with his soft skin and his high-fashion cheekbones, but Leo wasn’t about to get vic’d by this white trash piece of shit, not in a million years.

There was something about him Beaumond didn’t understand. Leo was as tough as he needed to be. Let Beaumond think he was squishy. This was the way he lulled you to sleep when he was pitching. Blockheads muscled up to the plate to dive into pitches, all macho and shit, trying to pull everything, the way they saw major leaguers do it on TV. Leo stayed outside, outside, tossed one in the dirt, then — how ya doing? — buried his fastball in your ear. That was the danger of underestimating Leo.

Beaumond hadn’t blinked since he handed up his warning, the muscles in his neck tense, his jugular blue and pulsing. Leo looked at him, at the place where he had touched his forehead, and pictured a smooth round bullet hole squirting blood, Beaumond tipping over backwards in his chair, his Wal-Mart sneakers and his graying socks dangling in the air. It was going to be his pleasure.

There was a way out of this, Leo told himself, definitely a way out, if he just kept his cool, if he didn’t panic and let the situation get the best of him.

The situation. All baseball was situations. All of life was situations, too. He was on to something here. He’d have to think it through when he had some time. When he had some time and his head cleared and he wasn’t worried about whether Negrito was going to take him for a ride to the Glades and feed him to the fucking alligators.

At the corner of 17th and Washington, Leo coughed and gagged and lowered his head between the bumpers of two cars. He heaved a few times, but nothing came up. When his eyes stopped watering, he peered out from behind his shades, hoping he wouldn’t see anybody he knew. Because there were tons of people heading back from the ocean in the dying afternoon light, the streets buzzing with girls in bikinis and beach wraps.

The Barbarossa announced its existence in indigo neon, a ten-year-old update that did nothing to distinguish it from a half-dozen other restaurants within walking distance. The place was usually empty, though on occasion the overfed Cubans who ran the joint would be forced to set down their cigarettes and coffee, or beer, depending on the time of day, and actually maneuver their fat asses around the tables. A waitress wiping the counter moved toward the window that opened onto the sidewalk, where somebody was signaling for something to go.

The tables were fitted with lilac-shaded linen, and glass tops with cracks and chips that cost the owners zero credibility with their budget-minded clientele. Each one was adorned with a plastic vase that held a single paper flower, and every chair had a laminated placemat in front of it, fun facts over a map of Florida, Spanish on one side, English on the other.

Negrito’s name was Ramon Santiago, and he wasn’t Cuban or even Colombian as Leo first suspected, but was born in a banana republic down that way, Ecuador or Venezuela, something like that. Leo never asked and Negrito did not offer extra specifics about himself. He was a nephew of Miguel Santiago, better known as El Negro, which was how he got his nickname. Leo didn’t know where they came up with this Big Black-Little Black business. Negrito and his uncle were both medium-toned Latin guys.

Negrito was hogging a booth that probably fit eight. The table was clear except for that paper posy, a small saucer, and an espresso cup he was drinking from. He was alone. Leo wasn’t sure if this was a good sign or not, whether Negrito’s uncle or one of his thugs weren’t going to slip up behind him and strangle him with a piano wire, like in
The Godfather
.

Negrito was about thirty. He wasn’t more than 5’6”, a rock-solid fat guy who never touched a weight but would bury the biggest Body Tech blockhead in the sand and cut off his head if he was in a bad mood, and Negrito was never in a good one. He looked like he’d gained a few pounds since the last time Leo saw him.

He had a head like Rex the Rottweiler, and his eyes were set way apart like Rex’s, but the animal he most resembled was a hyena, no neck, the head sprung straight from shoulders knotted tight with muscle. His fat cheeks made his thin-lipped mouth look smaller. Handsome, no. But his strong chin saved him from being homely.

He sipped his coffee. He looked Leo up and down. He set the cup on the saucer. After what seemed like a long time, Leo just standing there, he said, “I suppose you think you’re pretty slick.”

Leo could hear him breathing through his nostrils, snuffling like he had a cold. He said, “Why would I think that?”

“Shut up, Leo. Shut up and sit down. You arranged a delivery. That delivery was made. Then they guy who took the delivery got smoked in his hotel room.” His English had no accent. “You gonna tell me you don’t know anything about this?”

“Well, no. I saw the papers. And it was on TV. They said it was, I knew it was Manfred.” He waited for Negrito to say something, but Negrito kept quiet, so he added, “The guy I arranged the delivery for.”

“You thought this would be good for my business? My uncle’s business? Using us as the set-up men in your peabrained scam?” He smoothed the corners of his mustache.

“You know I, I mean I...”

“We’ve got friends, Leo, all kinds of friends, and you know what our friends told us? They told us none of our product was found in the man’s room. Now that’s odd. What happened to our delivery? That’s what I don’t understand. Maybe the guy was able to flip the whole kilo between the time our people left and the time the murderer arrived. Hey, maybe the cops stole it. Maybe the package grew wings and flew across the street into the ocean. What do you think?”

He wasn’t waiting for answers, Negrito getting downright rhetorical.

“Or maybe, just maybe, somebody who had inside information on this deal let his friends in on his secret, and they got themselves an idea. Let’s steal it. C’mon, who’s gonna know? Negrito’s too stupid to figure it out, so let’s tie his operation to the murder of a man who was no trouble to anybody. Bring a blast furnace of heat right down on Negrito. Let’s make an asshole of Negrito. Fuck El Negrito.”

“I swear to Christ and on my mother’s grave I did not rob that guy and I had nothing to do with his murder.”

Negrito raised his fist and swung it down in an arc, slamming the table top. The cup jumped off the saucer and tipped, spreading espresso out on the glass. That earlier nausea Leo was feeling crept further down his intestinal tract. He was struck with the overwhelming urge to shit.

Negrito took a breath and collected himself, letting the red go out of his face. “This is a complicated situation, Leo, but all life is situations. Some you can get around, and some,” he paused, and Leo wasn’t liking the sound of this silence, “you can’t.”

“Man, that is so weird,” Leo interrupted. “I was just thinking that exact same thing —” He was about to say “on the way over” but Negrito cut him off with a ringing slap that made his eyes water up again.

“I’m responsible for this particular situation. That’s lucky for you.” He was totally calm, not a note of emotion in his voice. “Because if it was up to my uncle” — he shrugged to show Leo there’d be nothing he could do — “or the Quiet Man, forget about it.” He shook his head. Slowly. “You hear me?”

“I think I do,” Leo said.

“You might never be completely forgiven,” Negrito said, “but I’m gonna give you the chance to right this wrong. And if I were you, I’d be hoping Negrito was pleased with my solution. Understand what I’m saying?”

Leo understood. He was getting a reprieve, but it wouldn’t last long. He wondered if the solution Negrito was referring to meant he was supposed to kill Fernandez, too, but his voice got smothered with fear, and he didn’t want to seem so stupid he had to ask. This was the difference between Negrito, a genuine tough guy that people were afraid of if people were smart, and that shit bucket JP Beaumond, always fronting how tough he was. Negrito didn’t need to act crazy or dangerous because he
was
crazy and dangerous.

It wasn’t that long ago, two, three days, Leo’s luck was running hot. He thought about it, walking back to where his car was parked. He was calling the shots, sketching the plan for Beaumond and Fernandez, finding out when Harry would be getting out, sending him to Manfred. Admittedly, meeting Harry in the first place had been pure, unconscious providence, but figuring out how to take advantage of it — that had all been Leo, and he’d been on fire. So when had it all gone to shit?