The Four Corners Of The Sky (30 page)

The slender man stared at her; an intense look brightened in his immense eyes. He sat straight up in the middle of the street.

Mrs. Weimar squeezed his shoulder. “Just in case, sit still!”

“Lady, really, it was an accident. I don’t want you to worry. Here, help me.” He reached for Annie. His legs were rubbery, his head wobbled, his pants had ripped open and were sliding down his hips, but he made it to his feet while the two women held him up. He kept staring with a peculiar expression at Annie. Then, pressing his heart above the flamingos painted on his shirt, he turned to the white-haired Mrs. Weimar. “This was not an accident.”

“You just said it was!”

He gestured gracefully with his hand, pointing at Annie. “I mean her. She is not an accident. She is, if you ask me, a personalized version, say an allegorical, of fate. I am only His sparrow. His eye is upon the big, we might call it, picture.”

The man’s remarks were making Mrs. Weimar uneasy. “You’ve had a concussion,” she theorized.

“I am taking a lesson from this experience,” the slender man told the two women. “Call it what you will—your sign, your karma, or, if you’re like my mother, Christ our Savior, night and day. But in my opinion, as well as that of the Bard, who nailed it with perfection well before our time, destiny definitely shapes our ends.”

“Oh my God,” said Annie. “Rafael Rook?”

“T
ruth is indisputably stranger.” The slender man shook his head so enthusiastically that his hair, glossy black and long, flew out of the string of leather that held it.

“He’s delirious,” Mrs. Weimar said. “Does he make any sense to you?”

“A little,” Annie told her.

Rook held out the woman’s purse as she refilled it. “Mrs. Weimar, just now the hand of Fate gripped your steering wheel and gave it a twist. In consequence of which, I find myself on Ficus Avenue together with this young woman with whom I had an appointment, not in Samarra, which is a great book and overdue at the library.” He hiked up his torn chinos and tried to bow to Annie; the effort obviously drilled a shaft of pain into his scalp for he clutched at his head with both hands.

“Lie down!” insisted Mrs. Weimar.

The man pursed his full lips as if he were going to kiss her. “Mrs. Weimar, this is Lt. Annie Peregrine Goode.”

Annie skidded backwards on her skates in order to look him over. “You
are
Rafael Rook?”

He bowed politely. “Rafael Ramirez Rook, expatriated from the unhappy island of Cuba. On my mother’s side, the Ramirezes of Havana, silversmiths to the finest families for two hundred years. And as my padre would say, neither Hook nor Crook, but Rook, plain Rook, from Miami, four generations, two Orthodox, two Reformed. My grandpapa believed in America and America left him floating in the surf. Bay of Pigs. So-called.”

“You are the man named Rook who telephoned me in North Carolina?”

“With all respect.” He bowed again. “Call me Raffy.”

She skated in a circle around to face him. “Where’s my father? I know he left St. Louis and came to Miami. I know the police are after him and somebody beat him up.”

“What’s going on with you two?” Mrs. Weimar shoved between them. “Are you in on this thing together? Are you going to rob me?”

Annie pointed at her cap. “I’m a naval officer.”

“Anybody can wear a hat!” The woman shook the Cuban by the shoulders. “He’s a con man.”

Backing away, Raffy held up his hands. “Annie, I apologize. I honestly expected your papa to enjoy a reunion with you in St. Louis. It meant everything to him.”

“Sure. Well I was in St. Louis and instead of a reunion, he ran off from the cops and told me to bring something here to you in Miami.”

Raffy’s face took on a crafty look. “Did you?”

Annie’s temper flared. “‘Did I?’ I flew him the
King of the Sky
practically through a goddamn twister to St. Louis. I had to beg a man I’m divorcing to lend me his jet to fly here. A man my dad had just conned into flying
him
to Miami!”

“Jack could always get places.”

“Believe me he
better
die. Where is he?”

“You don’t make any more sense than he does.” Mrs. Weimar backed away. “Who’s dying?”

Raffy gently brought the elderly woman to Annie. “This is the daughter of a friend who is unfortunately…” He pointed behind him at the Golden Days facility. “In here.”

“My dad’s in Golden Days!?” Annie looked at the stucco building. “I came here this morning. They told me he
wasn’t
.”

Raffy explained that Jack Peregrine had been admitted under an alias and that security was tight at the extended care facility because they’d recently received so much bad publicity from local television exposés.

Mrs. Weimar took a cigarette out of a pink leather case. “I’ll say! After you eat a meal in this place, you’ll go to McDonald’s and feel like the Four Seasons.” She turned to face the building and gave it the finger. “But you’re not in Golden Days to eat, you’re in there to die.” With a long flaring match from a box in her purse, she lit her slim cigarette.

The slender Cuban jumped away from her. “You could set your hair on fire with a match that big. What are you, the Statue of Liberty?”

The old woman puffed contemplatively. “I need to rest. I feel dizzy.” She sat gingerly down on the curb. Raffy sat beside her, tenderly brushing aside a Palmetto bug. “You all right?”

“
You
should ask?” She smoked for a moment.

“My grandpapa loved the Statue of Liberty,” he told her.

Nearby, Annie removed her skates and put on the running shoes that she had tied around her neck.

Mrs. Weimar smoked some more. “Coming into the harbor, this is from Russia, my mama saw the Statue of Liberty from her uncle’s shoulders. Talk about tired and poor, they’d had it!”

Rook nodded. “But it all worked out?”

“Her great-great nephew? Three first-rate delis, two in Manhattan, one in Queens. So her whole life, last Sunday of the month, she takes the Staten Island ferry to pay respects to the Statue of Liberty. They got to be friends.”

“That’s a beautiful story. That’s America.” Rook took her hand. “Feel better?”

She slapped his arm. “Watch it. I’ll tell you one piece of news, Joyce Weimar will drop dead in the street before they’ll dump her in a place like this—” She pointed at Golden Days. “Which is what I told Louise Mischoff. I said, ‘Your son Herb is a shit.’
A chazer bleibt a chaser.
But Herb wanted her money, so he put her in here and he took it.”

Rook nodded sympathetically.
“Gelt gait tzu gelt.”

“
Ah, you’re a rabbi.” She pinched off the cigarette ash, returned the butt to her leather case, and slowly rose to her feet. “You two work out your own problems, I’m late to water ballet.”

Holding up his pants, Raffy ran after her. “Mrs. Weimar, give me your phone number. I’ll call you for dinner, maybe a movie. Or we could go dancing. There’s a nice clean place in Little Havana. I used to play guitar there. Very nice.”

She pushed suspiciously past him. “Not on your life.”

He followed, bowing with a smile when she turned. “Forgive me, Joyce, for offering advice to the wiser sex. But the quality of mercy is not strained through a sieve but more or less dumped on our heads like a bucket of heavenly rain. I paraphrase the Bard.”

She thought a moment then gave Raffy’s nose a twist. “Don’t pee on my back and tell me it’s rain. Still, I see why Louise fell for you. You’re cute.”

Mrs. Weimar drove off at 10 miles per hour in her large white Oldsmobile.

Raffy shuffled back to Annie. “That didn’t work out,” he said mournfully.

“I thought you said you were a musician. Why are you flopping off cars and swindling old women?”

His sigh was itself a melody. “Maybe music’s the food of love, but it was never, in my particular case, so much the food of food. Then I met your papa.”

“Could you make this brief?”

“Brevity—”

“In fact, don’t even talk.” She pointed at Golden Days. “Just get me in there if that’s where my dad is.”

The Cuban, brushing off his clothes, claimed that to get her access to a patient’s floor, he would have to make clandestine arrangements with a friend who worked a later shift. There were complications.

She was not surprised. “What’s my dad even doing back there? I thought he left.”

Raffy glanced all over the sky evasively. Early in the morning, he’d returned home—and he pointed to a modest stucco duplex down the block—to find Jack Peregrine lying on the curb, more or less dead. At first Raffy thought they’d finished him off, but when he put his ear to Jack’s mouth, he could hear him cursing. So he’d rushed him into Golden Days, because it was only half a block from his house and because a nice nurse on staff was a close friend. Chamayra had helped them twice now by faking the paperwork and giving Jack a bed where he could hide out. Still, it was tricky for her to sneak people up to the floor where she’d put him. She might do it for Raffy. It would depend…

“Don’t blackmail me, Rook. I’ll go straight to the police. Who beat him up?”

Jack’s friend could only speculate. “He had more than a few enemies. Don’t we all?”

“No, we don’t,” said Annie. “Not that kind. And you’re sure he’s dying?”

“Terminal, he said.”

Annie scoffed. “He was telling suckers he was terminal ten years ago when he was selling them prime real estate in Savannah, Georgia. ‘I have to sell my house, I’m dying, you can have it for a song.’” She moved closer. “Why didn’t you ever show up at the hotel?”

“I was collared by that
s.o.b.
Hart! You didn’t get my messages?” Raffy swore that he’d been headed into the Dorado lobby today when he’d been suddenly set upon by Sgt. Daniel Hart of the lying Miami police. The violent young detective had dragged him off in a squad car to his office and grilled him about crimes he’d accused him of committing with Jack Peregrine. Raffy could only suppose that Hart was there at the Dorado because of Annie.

Annie agreed it was likely.

“Oh, muy bueno! Gracias!”

Furious, she yanked him over beside her. “Don’t you dare get sarcastic with me. You’re out of your league. Understand?”

He nodded, eyes wide. “Sí.”

“I still haven’t talked to Hart, gracias to you, Mr. Rook. He claims my father has a sixteenth-century relic that belongs to Cuba. Does he?”

The slender man shrugged. “I hope so. There are Cubans who would smile and smile, as the great Shakespeare tells us, to see eels in Jack’s ribs, if you follow me. ‘Full fathom five.’”

She glared. “Do you and my father own an Cessna Amphibian with the ID ‘N678ST’?”

Again he looked skyward. He appeared to find no more answers there now than earlier. “There is a plane in which we have an interest, whose ID I don’t recall. But ‘own’ is perhaps not the word. Fees may be in arrears.”

“I bet. Talk to me about this gold relic.”

He shook his head emphatically. “I hope it’s the object you’ve brought me? Is it?’’

She said, “I brought a case.”

He looked puzzled. “A case of what?”

“No, a metal courier case.” She said she had found it behind a panel in the fuselage of the
King of the Sky
. “Were you planning to fly with him someplace in the
King
to deliver this case?”

Jack, sighed Raffy, was now unfortunately in no position to fly anywhere and he, Raffy, couldn’t fly a kite much less a Piper Warrior. Carefully smoothing a long thin cigarillo and placing it, unlit, in his mouth, the Cuban added quietly, “Where is this case?”

“Why should I give it to you?”

His large eyes narrowed. “Because I’ll get you in to see Jack, without the cops, who frankly have got a fixation to put your papa away for, well, the rest of his life, pretty much.” He crossed nicely shaped brown slender hands over his shirt. “I swear to you on the honor of the Ramirez family. On the souls of my mother, alive in Havana, and my father dead before his time, and my grandpapa, killed by the son-of-a-bitch
CIA
, I swear I’ll take you to Jack!” He kissed a tiny cross on a thin gold chain around his neck. “I’m not necessarily a believer”—he showed her the cross—“but interested in all possibilities.”

Annie paced a circle around him. “What’s inside Dad’s courier case? It was locked.”

“You don’t know?”

She grimaced sarcastically. “What is it, a million dollars in cash?”

His eyes dilated but he scrunched his thin shoulders up toward his ponytail. “Honestly and truthfully you need to ask Jack.” Scooting sideways, he collected his small knapsack from the curb.

Annie’s frustration heated her like a rash. “Fine! I’ve also got a large emerald of his. Very large.”

The large brown eyes took on a glitter. “With you?”

She shook her head. “Back at the hotel. In the room safe. The courier case is back there too.”

Puffing nervously on his cigarillo, the Cuban walked away from her. With a smoothly languid movement, he opened his knapsack and slipped his hand inside it. “I want the emerald and I want the case.”

“Well, you can’t have either.”

In a sudden move, Rook pulled out a large silver revolver, so long in its barrel that Annie laughed. “Where did you get that thing?”

“My
abuelo
, grandpapa, Simon left it to me, if you want to know.” With the gun, he gestured at her ominously, smiling his sad sweet smile. “God’s truth, I’ve got nothing to lose. Go with the flow, Annie. We’re going to your hotel room and you’ll give me your papa’s property. To quote the Buddha, I think it was, you can’t step in the same river twice. But life has taught me that you can, more or less, by watching where you go, avoid slipping on the dog-doo of our human condition and breaking your neck. Could I use your phone to call a cab?”

W
ithin ten minutes of Rook’s call, a battered taxi appeared in an outburst of black smoke and backfires. A young man drove it, whom Rook introduced as his “cousin” Julio. In exchange for sixty dollars in cash, borrowed from Annie, this young man drove them to the Dorado and allowed Rook to remove a guitar in a black cardboard case from the trunk of his cab.