Split Images (1981) (18 page)

"It's funny, I dislike him even more since I met you," Angela said. She was silent for several miles and then said, "Get off at Southern Boulevard. I'll show you where he lives."

They crossed the bridge over Lake Worth and came to Palm Beach. "Now right on South Ocean Boulevard," Angela said. "Just a little way. There. Pull into the drive."

Bryan could see only part of the house through the iron gate and the palm trees lining the drive. "Is that a house or a hotel?"

"Hacienda Daniels," Angela said. "Now we go north."

They backtracked, crossed Southern Boulevard on the beach road and Angela pointed to the Bath and Tennis Club. "From here up to Worth Avenue, about a mile or so, is the very in section, between the Bath and Tennis Club and the Everglades Club.

If you know how much money you have you don't belong here. Robbie's a little pissed off because he's about two hundred feet south of being, quote, 'between the clubs.' The architecture is all either pseudo-Spanish or Mediterranean Mausoleum."

"I don't think you should write the book on rich people," Bryan said.

"Why, because I have a point of view?"Bryan nodded toward a colossal, ornate structure with a slim minaret pointing to heaven.

"What's that?"

"It's somebody's house," Angela said. "Shelter."

Bryan said, "I'd hate to have to vacuum and dust the place."

Angela said, "One old broad used to maintain a staff of fifty--count 'em--fifty servants. She also has eighty-six phones. One for each room. You have to know whose money it is, hers or his. See that house? She was once a baton twirler on the Sealtest Big Top Circus. But as the society writers say, 'She left show business behind.' That one, coming up, the old gal was a silent-film star who happened to marry John Paul Getty."

"You could be a tour guide."

"Yeah, stop the bus and everybody gets out and throws tomatoes."

Bryan said, "You don't sound upset, but you really are. I don't get it."

"I can point out a few hotbeds of fascism too,"

Angela said. "They're not all fascists, but when Jack Kennedy was shot some of the Old Guard actually threw parties."

"Who told you that?"

"A very reliable guy I know here. He writes for the local paper, the Post."

"Well, that was a while ago."

"Nixon was here last month. Greeted like a sav-ior . . . That's Worth Avenue, where all the expensive stores are."

"Where the rich people shop?"

"No, where the tourists shop. Rich people don't spend their money, they invest it in real estate. That's the in thing to talk about at the clubs, real estate."

Bryan said, "Why do rich people make you mad?"

"They don't," Angela said. "I just feel that the way they live, their entire life-style, is irrelevant, it has nothing to do with reality."

"Because they have money and you don't?"

"No. Because their whole goddamn life is based on real estate. Owning things."

"You said that's all your dad talks about. Real estate. Is he rich?"

"No, he wears a string tie and a cowboy hat with his gold-frame glasses, drives a Cadillac, lives in Country Club Estates with a guard, a guard, Bryan, at the entrance and tries hard to sound rich. But he doesn't know how. That's what's wrong with them," Angela said, with her cool edge. "The rich people make their life look so goddamn good we all bust our ass trying to get the same thing."

Bryan said, "If the poor people suddenly became rich would they do it any different?"

"Probably not."

"Are rich people fun to watch?"

"Not especially.""Fun to talk to? Interview?"

"Not at all. They don't say anything. They don't know anything that's going on outside their own walled-in life. They're completely out of touch with reality."

"I'll talk to you," Bryan said. "Soon as I think of something. But first, tell me where the Holiday Inn is."

"The one we're going to is in Palm Beach Gardens," Angela said. "About ten miles north of here."

"Palm Beach Gardens?" Bryan said. "I've never heard of it."

That was the first thing Robbie Daniels said, too, the next morning when Bryan opened the door of Room 205 and there he was, boyish as ever.

"Palm Beach Gardens? I've been here practically all my life, I've never even heard of it . . ."

THE SECOND THING Robbie said, looking over the room, the double beds, one made with its spread intact, the other torn apart, was, "You want to know something? This is the first time I've ever been inside a Holiday Inn. It's not bad at all."

Angela said to Bryan, "See? What did I tell you?"

She sat at the room-service table in her terrycloth robe having breakfast.

Robbie said to Bryan, "Go ahead. I'll have some coffee with Angie while you get dressed."

"I am dressed," Bryan said.

"I mean for golf," Robbie said.

"I am dressed for golf," Bryan said.

Robbie looked at Bryan's dark blue T-shirt that had the words SQUAD Homicide stenciled on it in white. He looked at Bryan's faded gray corduroy pants and tennis shoes with four blue stripes on them--not three, four--and said, "Oh."As they left Angela said, "Don't worry about me.

I'll find something to do."

They drove off in Robbie's silver Rolls. Robbie said, "How is that, pretty nice stuff?" Bryan told him to be careful and Robbie shut up.

What Bryan did, he noted things he would tell Angela about later.

The Seminole Club. "Ben Hogan once said if he had to play one club all the time it would be Seminole," Robbie said. "Where do you play in Detroit?" Bryan said, "Palmer Park, mostly." A public course. "Oh . . . What do you shoot?" "Low eighties." "How about if I give you twelve strokes?"

"Fine." Robbie gave him an entire yellow golf outfit. Yellow pants, yellow shirt with the little alligator on it, yellow silk sweater. ("I looked like the Easter Bunny.") White shoes with tongue flaps.

Robbie gave him the twelve strokes--the son of a bitch, the sandbagger--and beat him by twentysix. Bryan tried to cheat, moving his ball around in the rough, but the caddy kept watching him. He lost six golf balls, one in the Atlantic Ocean, but took a penalty on only two of them or else his score would have been one-oh-six. He wouldn't tell Angela too much about the game.

He'd tell her about the gingersnaps in the locker room. Strange. And the macaroni and cheese spe-cial for lunch; all the rich guys eating the macaroni and cheese they didn't get at home, eating it like they'd discovered it. He'd tell her about some of the rich guys he met--Angela was right--who talked about real estate in places he'd never heard of. And how he'd met the Chicano-looking guy named Rafael Fuentes who resembled Rudolph Valentino- he seemed to pose--and had a dry, almost bored way of talking with his Chicano accent that had some other accents mixed in, but seemed like a nice guy. Very well mannered. Robbie called him Chichi or Cheech and seemed on familiar terms. The thing was, the guy didn't seem to know Robbie. Robbie asked him, "How's the coke business, Cheech?"

Chichi said, "I no longer have the bottling plant.

It was confiscated."

(Confiscated?)

And Robbie said, "Senor Slick. You know what I'm talking about, Chichi. A little dulce nariz, perhaps?"

Trying to show off. Literally translated, candy nose, but meaning nose candy. Cocaine.

Which Chichi smiled at in his bored cultured way, then snapped his fingers. "A party--where was that? Everyone wanted to escape, to fantasize."

Robbie said, "And you got caught in a cabana, I think it was, going down on the hostess."

"A lovely lady," Chichi said. Bony features creased in a smile of recognition. "Ah, Robbie"-pronouncing it Robie--"now I remember you. The Detroit industrialist with the delicacy of a drill press. Are you still seducing little girls?"

"Only when your sister's in town," Robbie said.

"Nice seeing you again, Cheech."

"Nice seeing you, too," Chichi said. "By the way, I met your wife yesterday at Wellington . . ."

Got him. Bryan caught Robbie's instant look of surprise.

"Ah, you don't know she's here, uh? With that Polish count, what's his name? From Colorado.

The one who dyes his hair white and wears the fringed jackets."

Robbie said, "What difference does it make?"

"I don't know," Chichi said, "Patti is your wife, not mine. She and the count flew in for the polo. I wouldn't worry about it."

Robbie said, "Do I look worried?"

Chichi Fuentes took the question literally and studied him. "No, you look more confused, I think.

I told them, you want the best polo, go down to Casa de Campo; you want only to fuck, well, Palm Beach is all right."

They ciao-ed each other with cold smiles and that was that.

Bryan would remember it as pussy time at Seminole: two grown men spitting at each other in the locker room. Was this the way rich guys had it out?

He'd have to ask Angela. But the most interesting part of the day came later. Robbie said why didn't they go to his place, kick their shoes off and have a few? Fairly offhand about it. Bryan said fine. He was already sure Robbie had something in mind and wanted to talk.

Bryan thought of a nun he had in the sixth grade at Holy Trinity whose favorite word was gawk and was always telling the class to quit gawking at the ceiling or gawking out the window at the new freeway excavation. Sister Estelle. She would not have been proud of Bryan Hurd as he walked through the Spanish mansion, through the living room that was larger than the Holiday Inn lobby, and gawked in every direction. Christ. People lived here. Two people. And some servants. He saw a maid in a white uniform and then a guy with his hair slicked back wearing an apron, in the kitchen talking to Walter. Arguing about something. Robbie entered and they shut up--Walter looking past his boss now to Bryan waiting in the hall. Walter staring, with almost a balloon coming out of his head that said, "What's he doing here?" Robbie spoke to Walter for several minutes, holding onto his arm; then came back apologetically, "I'm sorry--" and took the homicide detective upstairs to his study and unlocked the double bolts.

"I was interested--during Walter's court hearingthat colored lawyer asked you if you'd killed anyone lately, you told him no," Robbie said, "and I wondered if in fact you have ever killed anyone."

Bryan said, "I remember reading about one of yours."

It caught Robbie by surprise. "The Haitian?

That wasn't in the Detroit papers, was it?"

"The guy from Chrysler, in the duck blind."

Bryan made a quarter turn on the bar stool, giving the room a glance. What looked like covered light fixtures high on the walls could be video cameras; he wasn't sure. The room was dim except for track lighting directly overhead. He wondered if there was a camera up there. He wondered when Robbie Daniels would get to the point.

"I forgot about Carl," Robbie was saying, standing behind the bar, a sneaker up on the stainless sink. "That was a shocking experience. But the Haitian, that was something else. Guy came at me with a goddamn machete."

"What'd you use?"

"Colt Python. It's my favorite, so I grabbed it.

You want to see it?"

It didn't matter if he wanted to or not. Robbie went over and got it, left the cabinet open and came back hefting the big, three-and-a-half-pound revolver with the ventilated barrel. He seemed to enjoy holding it. When he offered the gun Bryan took it."What do you carry, lieutenant?"

"Regular thirty-eight Smith, Chiefs Special. I had a Colt automatic once, but I had to get rid of it," Bryan said. "I found out it wasn't authorized by the department."

"You found out?"

"Well, I didn't carry it much and I didn't keep up on all the regulations." Looking the Python over, extending it now, Bryan said, "He had a machete, huh?"

"Came at me swinging," Robbie said.

"So you had no choice but to shoot."

"None," Robbie said. "You've never been in that position?"

Bryan seemed to smile. "Not lately."

"I'm surprised, you don't seem interested in guns."

Bryan gestured, a small shrug. "No, not especially." He laid the Python on the bar and picked up his vodka over ice. Robbie hadn't asked him what he wanted to drink; he'd started pouring and that was it: a guy who had been drinking socially, semiprofessionally most of his life and probably felt he could outdrink an Athens Bar city cop any day of the week. Maybe he could. The imported vodka was all right though. Bryan felt pretty good, his mind sharp and clear.

Robbie said, "You see this guy coming at youwho obviously means business--what would you have done?"

"I wasn't there," Bryan said. "I guess nobody was but you. But if you say you had to shoot him, well . . ."

"All right," Robbie said, "how about--a different situation. You don't have to shoot, but you feel justified."

They were getting to it now. Bryan said, "Like some really bad dude, or somebody you're pissed off at?"