Pronto (2 page)

"Come on, they're listening to all that?"

"McCormick wants to know if what you make and what you tell Jumbo you make are the same thing."

"Guy's out of his mind," Harry said. "What about what my runners bring in? Hardly any of that's recorded. Or some players that're friends and call me at home? What about the different ways people who've come here from other parts of the country, Jersey for instance, place their bets? The language they use. A guy calls, he says, 'I like the Vikings and six for five dimes.' Another guys calls. 'Harry, the Saints minus seven thirty times.' He loses, what's the juice, straight ten percent? If they forget the juice they won't even get close to the gross. I keep the tapes in case there any disagreements after, who owes who, or I go to collect and the guy claims he never made the bet. It rarely happens, because if there is any doubt about what the player is putting down I ask him. Guy calls up, he says, 'Harry, give me the Lions and the Niners twenty times reverse. Bears a nickel, Chargers a nickel. Giants five times, New England ten times if the Rams ten.' That's twice a day Saturday and Sunday I get straight bets, parlays, round robins, over and under, we got the NBA going into action, listen, I even get some hockey. You're telling me this Bureau guy's people are going to get a read out of that?"

Torres said, "Harry, we hear you talking to Jumbo, telling him the totals for the week, how you made out, all that. This one time we hear the two of you talking, we hear Jumbo ask you about a guy, this black dude in a suit, gold chains, that came up to him in the lounge out at Calder? Jumbo's having a drink between races. The black dude says, 'Man, you killed me last week.' Says he dropped ten thousand and paid another grand for the vig. We hear Jumbo ask you about the guy. You recall that?"

Harry took his time. "I told Jimmy it was news to me, right? You heard that? The guy was mistaken, he laid it off somewhere else. I said to Jimmy if he wanted to check my tapes he could."

Torres was nodding. "Yeah, but the black guy, Jumbo says, told him he laid the bet with you, nobody else. Ran into you at Wolfie's and you wrote it down."

"It never happened," Harry said. "I told Jimmy, 'Find the guy. Let him tell me to my face I took his bet.' I don't do business like that, with people I don't know. A player has to be recommended." Harry felt himself getting hot again, the same way he did on the phone talking to Jimmy Cap, all that coming back to him and realizing now what it was about. "I told Jimmy, This guy's setting me up, that's all, and I don't even know why.' Well, I do now."

"The guy's under indictment on a drug bust," Torres said. "He does what McCormick tells him and gets the charge reduced from Intent to Distribute to Simple Possession. See how he's working it? You can't prove the guy didn't put the bet down with you, right? And now Jumbo's wondering how many payoffs you might've skimmed on him. Okay, then another phone conversation we heard, Jumbo's discussing it with one of his guys. He says if the jig had the nerve to come up to him it must be true and tells the guy to handle it. This was yesterday afternoon."

Harry said, "Handle it. That's all he said?"

"He didn't say how he wanted it done, no."

"Who was he talking to?"

"Couple of times he called the guy Tommy."

"Tommy Bucks," Harry said. "Dark-complected guy. He came over from Sicily ten twelve years ago he was Tommy Bitonti."

"That's who I thought it was, Tommy Bucks," Torres said, getting out his pocket notebook. "He gives you that look, Don't fuck with me. Yeah, dark-complected, but the guy's a sharp dresser. Anytime I've ever seen him he has on a suit and tie."

"Like in the fifties," Harry said. "You went out at night to a club you wore a suit or a good-looking sports jacket. Tommy came over -- the first thing he learned was how to dress. Always looks like a million bucks. That's where he got his name, Tommy Bucks, but he's still a greaseball." Harry watched Torres enter the name in his notebook. Tommy, Jimmy, like they were talking about little kids. Harry thought of something and said, "You must've wired Jimmy's place, too, if you heard him talking to other people." And saw Torres look up and then smile for the first time.

"You know his house on Indian Creek? Almost right across from the Eden Roc," Torres said. "We've had him under surveillance from the hotel. We see Jumbo out on his patio, he's wearing this giant pair of shorts -- what's he weigh, three hundred pounds?"

"At least," Harry said. "Maybe three and a half."

"We're watching him, we notice he's always talking on a cordless phone. So we put some people in a boat that's tied to that dock on the hotel side of the creek? They use a scanner, lock in on his signal, his frequency, and monitor the phone conversations, whoever he's talking to. Portable handset, you don't need a court order."

For a few moments it was quiet in the car.

"What you pick up is in the air," Torres said. "You know, radio waves, and they're free. That's why you don't need authorization."

Harry nodded and it was quiet again.

He said, "I appreciate your telling me what's going on. I know you're sticking your neck out."

"I don't want to see you hurt," Torres said, "on account of this asshole McCormick."

Harry said, "Well, I'm not going to worry about it. If it was ten or twelve years ago and Jimmy told Tommy Bucks in those words, 'Handle it,' that would be a different story. I mean back when he first came over," Harry said. "Tommy's a Zip. You know what I mean? One of those guys they used to import from Sicily to handle the rough stuff. Guy could be a peasant right out of the fucking Middle Ages, looks around and he's in Miami Beach. Can't believe it. They hand the Zip a gun and say, There, that guy.' And the Zip takes him out. You understand? They import the kind of guy likes to shoot. He's got no priors here; nobody gives a shit if he gets picked up, convicted, put away. If he does, you send for another Zip. Guy comes over from Sicily, he's got on a black suit, shirt buttoned up, no tie, and a cap sitting on top of his head. That was Tommy Bucks ten, twelve years ago when he was Tomasino Bitonti."

"So you hope he's changed more than his suit," Torres said. He stared at Harry. "You don't look too worried."

"I can always leave town," Harry said.

Torres grinned. "You're a cool guy. I'll give you that."

Harry shrugged. Man, was he trying.

Chapter
Two.

To Harry, Tommy Bucks would always be the Zip: a guy who was brought over to kill somebody, stayed, learned English and how to dress, but was still that person they imported.

He'd be coming anytime now. Or waiting somewhere. Harry, sure of it, was thinking, If you'd gotten out when you were sixty-five...

Someone had picked that age as the best time to quit whatever you were doing and Harry believed now it could be true. By forty you've lost a step, your legs aren't what they used to be, and twenty-five years later all your parts are starting to go. Something he'd never considered until last year when they stuck the tube up his artery, from his groin to his heart, and told him he'd better change his ways. If he had gotten out right after that, last year...

He thought about it not as a regret or with any feeling of panic, but as a practical notion. If he were no longer here he wouldn't have to worry about this Zip coming to see him, if that's what "handle it" meant. This primitive greaseball in a twelve-hundred-dollar suit, no education, spoke with a garlic-breath Italian accent -- though not much of one, considering, and was not as dumb as most of the guys in Jimmy's crew, sitting around their social club. The Zip was coming. The only thing to wonder about, what was he waiting for?

Harry Arno packed a suitcase as soon as he got home that Thursday afternoon, October 29, not with the idea of taking off, not yet, but in case he had to. He packed going from the dresser with shirts and underwear to the suitcase on the bed to the front windows to look down at Ocean Drive three floors below. Every twenty minutes or so that afternoon he'd make a side trip to the bathroom, the idea of the Zip's arrival affecting his bladder. Or a combination of the Zip and a swollen prostate. He'd stand there taking a leak, imagine the Zip walking into the building and he'd shake it and hurry back to a front window. A couple of times he almost picked up the phone by the bed. But if he called Jimmy and told him what was going on, went into how he found out he was being set up... The way Jimmy would see it: "Oh, you're tight with this cop? They offered you a deal?" He could swear he'd never talk to a grand jury, it wouldn't matter. He'd be putting his life in the hands of a three-hundred-pound semiliterate slob who never smiled or had finished high school. Some things about Jimmy Cap you could anticipate. Harry knew that if he ever told Jimmy he was retiring Jimmy would have to say, "Oh, is that right? You quit when I tell you you can quit."

The Zip he didn't know well enough to anticipate. They had never been formally introduced or spoken more than a few words a year to each other. As far as Harry could tell, the Zip didn't talk much to anybody. The other guys in the crew seemed to stay out of his way. Women liked him, the semipros attracted to those guys, or they were afraid not to act as though they did.

Harry had a suitcase and a hanging bag packed now, put away in the bedroom closet. He stood at a window looking down at headlights in the dusk, dark shapes moving, wondering now if he'd forgot anything.

Bathroom stuff. What else?

Jesus, his two passports.

Someone knocked on the door. In the living room.

Harry felt himself jump, in the same moment remembering he hadn't packed his gun, the gun he'd used to shoot the deserter forty-seven years ago and he'd brought home as a souvenir. A U. S. Army Colt .45 sidearm. Wrapped in a towel on the shelf in the closet, not loaded, with the Zip at the door. Harry sure of it.

A black guy in a flowery blue-and-yellow sport shirt came in first, Tommy Bucks behind him in a sharkskin double-breasted suit, a white shirt against his dark skin and a maroon-patterned necktie. Harry stepped aside for them, the black guy looking straight into his face as he came in. The Zip put his hand on the guy's shoulder and gave it a shove, saying, "This is Kennet."

"Kenneth," the black guy said.

The Zip was looking around the room now. "It's what I said. Kennet." He turned on a lamp and stepped close to a wall of black-and-white photographs, saying, "Kennet, who is this guy here? Can you tell me?"

"Yeah, this is the guy," Kenneth said, looking at Harry. "I laid down five dimes each on the Saints and the Houston Oilers and paid him off on Monday, eleven grand with the juice, outside the hotel here. Was a friend of mine with me can testify to it."

Harry said to Kenneth, "You never saw me before you walked in this room," and turned to the Zip. "Ask Jimmy if I ever collect payments outside. My players know where to find me, and it ain't out on the fucking street." He said it again, "Go ask Jimmy," looking at the Zip hunched over studying a photograph.

"What is this one?"

Walking over to him Harry said, "The guy that used to own the hotel lived in this apartment. He was a photographer at one time." Harry looked at the photo. "That's a Georgia chain gang, nineteen thirties. You know, convicts." The Zip nodded. "That one, that's a turpentine camp, same period. The turpentine drips into those buckets? And then they boil it. The old man was commissioned by the government to take these pictures, during the Depression." Maybe the Zip knew what he was talking about, maybe not. Harry was showing the Zip he was relaxed. "Maurice Zola was the old guy's name; I used to know him. He married a woman about half his age who was a movie actress at one time. I've forgotten her name. You'd see her picture in the paper, appearing at a condominium opening. The old guy died, it was only about a year after they were married, and the movie actress sold the hotel to Jimmy Cap and moved away. So then Jimmy got rid of all the old women used to live here and brought in a bunch of hookers. It was like a girls' dorm in here for a while." Harry added a chuckle he didn't feel. "Broads running around with hardly anything on. Now there're only a few still here." Relaxed, talking to be talking, Harry keeping this between him and the Zip. Both on the same side.

"Was out in front I paid him," Kenneth said. "Saw the man at Wolfie's on Saturday and laid the bets down and paid him off on Monday. Out in the park they have there."

The Zip said, "What's this one?"

"You hear this guy?" Harry said. "He never placed a bet with me in his fucking life. I can name all the colored guys I know around here that're players and, believe me, this spook ain't one of them." He looked at the photo he thought the Zip was looking at. "That? That's an elephant on the beach. Used for some kind of a promotion."

The Zip said, "I know a fucking elephant when I see one," turning his head to look at Harry next to him. "Not that picture. The one here."

This close he seemed all nose, the nose dominating his dark face, younger than Harry had thought, early forties maybe, his eyes not so dreamy as partly closed, heavy lids giving him a tough-guy look that worked.

"Those are Jamaicans digging drains in a canefield," Harry said.

"This one."

"Seminole Indians. Or Miccosukees, I'm not sure. Drive out the Tamiami, you'll see them. They give airboat rides."

The Zip walked into the bedroom.

"There're no pictures in there," Harry said. He turned to Kenneth standing by a window. "You know what you're doing to me? You're getting me fucking killed."