Setup on Front Street (8 page)

THE
session downtown lasted about an hour and a half. It consisted mostly of Ortega
talking tough, while practicing interrogation-room tactics he'd seen on
Kojak
reruns.

I ran over my story a hundred times,
denying, of course, that I ever threatened Sully or even leaned on him for
money. For that matter, I claimed that the diamond job was a frame to begin
with, so therefore, there
was
no money.

Even
though I couldn't prove I was asleep at the time of the hit, they didn't have
any hard evidence to hold me on. The pizza delivery boy could put me at Norma's
around nine, and no one could put me on Front Street at one-thirty.

As I
walked out of the station, though, I knew this scene would be repeated in
living color whenever they picked up the slightest lead that they could connect
to me.

≈≈≈

Norma went to visit her mother around noon up on Big Coppitt
Key, about ten miles up the road, so she dropped me off downtown before she
left. I hoofed it down to the South Beach Restaurant for lunch.

It was a nifty little sandblown place right
on the water, over on the Atlantic side, but still kind of out of the way. I
was glad it was still there.

I took a table on the edge of the outdoor
seating area, right off the beach itself. It felt terrific to be sitting there
in the ocean breeze, soaking up the open sunshine.

A complete one-eighty from prison.

There's nothing colder than prison
concrete. The dark desolation...the tense friction.
 
Hardened men scraping up against each other
all the time, the constant looking over your shoulder year in and year out
— it all messes with your mind, you know?

Makes you think sometimes that you're no
better than any of those fucking animals in there. I don't even like thinking
about it.

But now, finally, I was through with it.

Human again.

I removed my sunglasses to look directly
out at the wide, sparkling waters of the Florida Straits. Gazing out toward
Cuba, my thoughts went back to my boyhood.

Back then, the tourists hadn't yet invaded
us in such big numbers, so we were pretty much all by ourselves down here. I
could still taste the salt on my tongue from swimming off Higgs Beach every
morning of the long, tropical summers, as well as every afternoon during the
school year. Then, after shaking off the sand, I'd run to play baseball.

What I'm trying to say is that I was a
pretty normal kid. Back then, the conniver that I would become was still
forming deep down inside me. All the brainwork and the hustles that would
surface later on were dormant, but every so often, I could feel them trying to
push their way out. Even then, I was aware of the angles, trying to twist
everything to my advantage, doing whatever it took to get me one up.

But for those few short years before the
real world would come to claim me, I just wanted to enjoy what little innocence
I had. Could you blame me? I really, really thought that was how it would
always be, all swimming and baseball. Never imagining the cruel surprises life
had in store.

Shows you what I knew.

The cooked vegetables on my plate had all
my attention when she came up to my table.

"Hello, Don Roy."

Her familiar, deep voice hit me hard. I put
my fork down and looked up.

"Rita? Is that you?"

I had to look again. She leaned on the rail
next to my table. The voice was hers, but it came out of a brand new look.

Twenty or thirty pounds had disappeared,
while her long, stringy hair that I remembered had been chopped off and permed.
Its dishwater brown color had turned blonde somewhere along the way, warming up
the icy blue in her eyes. Her sensible white cotton dress clung to her new curves
for dear life, allowing a trace of cleavage to peek through. I noticed beads of
sweat on her neck and upper chest. She'd been walking in the heat. Her open
shoes showed cherry red toenails that matched her manicured fingernails and
lipstick. Long, slender fingers slid a slim cigarette out of its package.

As she stoked it up, I began to sweat a
little myself.

What had BK done to deserve a wife like
this?

"Yep. Nobody but me," she
replied. "Mind if I sit down?"

I motioned toward the other white plastic
chair at my table.

"Help yourself."

She spoke just above whisper level, even
though there was no one around to hear us. "God, it wasn't this hot when I
left the house this morning. It's like the sun just went into overdrive all of
a sudden."

It was hot, all right, and getting hotter
around this table.

"Want something to drink?"

"Actually, I'd love an iced tea."

I thought I saw her squinting behind her
designer sunglasses. I signaled the waitress with the order.

Meanwhile, I couldn't take my eyes off her.
A couple of tiny little diamonds perked up her pierced ears and a tasteful thin
gold bracelet wrapped her wrist. A pretty good-sized diamond perched up high
off her ring finger.

But she didn't really need jewelry.

She looked good all by herself.

I blurted it out. "You're sure looking
good."

She
smiled, then looked down. I saw the beginnings of a blush. Then she reined it
back in.

"I've
tried to slim down a little."

She eyed
me directly again as she spread her arms out a little bit, showing herself off.
Ta-da!

"What
do you think of the new me?"

"I think BK is the luckiest guy in
town. You really look great!"

She aimed a big smile at me, lots of pretty
white teeth. Straight, too.

"Well, thank
you
, sir. But it's
really been hard work, shedding those pounds." She then went into the
story of her makeover. I nodded in all the right places.

The waitress brought the tea. Rita
immediately sipped from it, then exhaled hard, while she held the cold glass to
her neck and throat. Her exhale slid into a low moan, as the glass cooled her
off.

Right then, I remembered my mother doing
the same thing before we got our air conditioner.

It was back when I was still in grade
school.

That summer was particularly hot — though
the heat never used to bother me nearly as much as it did her.

One of her boyfriends — I forget
which one, but it was one of the ones that lived with us for awhile — told
her to get him a beer. Pretty soon she came back from the kitchen with a beer
in one hand and a glass of iced tea in the other. He guzzled the beer, then
burped loud and long.

But I could see my mother now, as vividly
as I just saw Rita, hold that cold glass to her throat, then moan with
pleasure. She did it a lot, I guess, but that was the one specific time I
clearly remember.

Also, she was wearing some kind of white
clingy thing like Rita had on now. It might've been just a slip or a nightgown
rather than a dress, but it gave off a similar look.

On Rita, however, the whole thing was
arousing.

I wasn't ten years old anymore.

While I
was trapped in this memory for quite a few seconds, I glimpsed the beach.

No one
seemed to be moving much. Small waves lapped gently at the shore and the light
breeze tried hard to cool things down. Someone's radio played
Like A Virgin.

"Did you know I was in this little out-of-the-way
spot?" I finally asked. "Or did you just happen to walk all the way
down here?"

I glanced around the place. Not many
customers. They appeared to be mostly tourists, a couple of spring breaker
types, along with a foreigner or two, right off the beach, most of them still
in swimsuits. No locals.

She smirked a little as she drank some more
iced tea.

"I was in the pharmacy up on the
corner and I saw you walk by. I heard you were back in town. How's it
going?"

What a question. "Well, I was doing okay
until early this morning. Someone killed Frankie Sullivan last night and they
think I did it."

It happened too late at night to make the
morning paper, so I wondered if she knew about it.

She showed no surprise as she drew deep on
her long, thin cigarette. The breeze from the ocean blew away the smoke but not
the heat.

"Well, did you do it?" she asked.

She took off her shades, penetrating my
eyes with hers.

"You know I didn't. I wouldn't."

That was all I wanted to say on the
subject. But she had a little more to add.

"It was all because of BK and his
gambling, wasn't it."

The way she put it, it wasn't really a
question.

I took a sip of my own iced tea. It needed
more lemon.

"What's the deal, Rita? What do you
know about all this? And why are you here?"

I squeezed the last of the lemon juice into
the tea.

She crushed out her cigarette. "I
never knew you too well, Don Roy," she said, as if she were letting me in
on a big secret, "but I knew who you were. I knew a little about
you."

She reached into her purse for her
cigarettes. Pulling them out, she shook another one out of the package.

"Even though you were a couple of
years ahead of me in high school, I'd heard about you, and like I said, I knew
who you were. I knew that in school you were always into gambling and things
like that. Then after I graduated, and for years afterward, I'd see you around
town from time to time and you never seemed to be working. You know, you were
always walking around in the middle of the day...that kind of thing."

I was more than a little surprised that
she'd been keeping this kind of watch on me for so long. Flame leaped from her
gold lighter, firing up her cigarette and throwing a yellow glow onto her face,
while her lively eyes bored into mine. The way she did it, it was straight out
of a movie. Lauren Bacall zapping Bogie with those come-on eyes from behind a
lit cigarette.

Making his dick hard.

"You ever have a regular job?"
she asked.

"Rita, what's this all about?"

"Just tell me, did you ever have a
regular job?"

"Well...not really."

"Why not? I want to know why you never
went out and looked for a job. Just like everyone else."

"What are you, writing my life story
here?"

"Just answer me. Why didn't you get a
job?"

"Why do you want to —"

"Just
… answer … the question."

I caved. "Because it was easier not
to."

I felt like the final witness on
Perry
Mason
, blurting out my confession just so she would quit badgering me.

"Easier not to? Why was it
easier?"

"Rita, what's —"

"Why was it easier?"

"Why do you want to know?"

"Will you answer me, for
Chrissakes!"

"Because … well … because there's me,
and then there's all of them."

Finally, she leaned back in her chair, then
crossed her legs, satisfied she'd gotten the answer she wanted.

"You mean you never really felt like
you were a part of regular society here, right? You felt you had no real shot
by jumping in the water and rolling along with the prevailing tide, swimming
around with everybody else. Being employed was part of that scene, and since
you wanted no part of it, you had to get by some other way. Am I right?"

In a way, I was really put off by all of
this shit — this was none of her business — but in another way, it
twisted my head around.

And it tweaked my curious bone like only
raw truth can.

The way she put it, it was, well, right on
the money. Like she really understood. Besides, I was caught up in all her
intensity, especially when it broke through in that deep, sexy voice of hers.

"Yeah, you're right," I replied.

"Well, you want to know something? I
felt the same way. Oh, I never gambled or anything like that, but I moved here
with my parents when I was thirteen. My father was career Navy, and he eventually
retired down here. So we stayed."

She paused for a little effect, downing the
last of her iced tea.

"And because I wasn't a Conch —
you know, born here — I was always on the outside of things in high
school. You know how that goes. But one day, I met BK and I did what it took to
win him over. I mean,
whatever
it took."

I caught
the drift.

She
looked away from me, out toward the ocean. A gigantic cruise ship had appeared
on the distant horizon, fresh out of some Caribbean port. Gazing absently at
the ship, she twirled a few short strands of hair near the back of her neck.