LaBrava

by Elmore Leonard

  “Sit down and look at my Polaroids.”

  “You take pictures you don’t fool around.”

  “I got about forty today. This bunch is sorta in order, starting at First Street and working up. But I don’t like it around there; so I came up to Fifteenth, decided to work down, get the good stuff first.” She sat next to him among pillows on the floor, their wine on a glass cocktail table. “I want consecutive views. Maybe do the whole street on a canvas about thirty feet wide. The face of South Beach.”

  He looked up at her paintings. “Like those?”

  “That was my Jerusalem spacy period. I wanted to get the spirit, you know, the energy of the sabras, but what stands out? The Mosque of Omar, the part that’s gold. Now I’m into echo-deco, pink and green, flamingoes and palm trees, curvy corners, speed lines. I’m gonna pop my colors, get it looking so good you’ll want to eat it. Hey, how about staying for dinner?”

  “Maurice asked me.”

  “And that star of the silver screen—here she is, Jean Shaw! . . . She gonna be there? I’ll get you yet, Joe.”

  “Will you sell me one of your new paintings?”

  “I’ll trade you one for that shot of Lana showing her depressing tits. That poor girl, I keep thinking about her.”

  LaBrava held up a Polaroid. “She lives right around the corner from here, the Chicken Shack.” He began looking at storefronts and bars along the south end of Ocean Drive. The Turf Pub. The Play House, an old-time bar with photos of Jack Dempsey and Joe Louis on the walls. There were bikers outside this afternoon, in the Polaroid shots. He saw people he knew. A drunk named Wimpy. A pretty-boy Puerto Rican dealer named Guilli. He looked at figures standing, moving in suspended motion. Another one, in shadow, who seemed familiar and he studied the shot for several moments. Another figure, in the sunlit foreground, stood facing the camera with an arm raised.

  “Is he waving at you?”

  “Let’s see. Yeah, I ran into him a couple of times.”

  “This the guy you were talking to, you were sitting on the wall?”

  “You noticed me. I thought you’d be too busy with your movie star.”

  “Is it the same guy?”

  “Yeah, very friendly. A little swishy maybe. He gets into a goof”—she snapped her fingers—“like that. It’s hard to tell when he’s serious.”

  “What’s he do?”

  “He sells real estate. What do you mean what does he do? He’s looking for some kind of hustle, like all the rest of ’em. They deal or they break and enter.”

  He was looking at a hotel now on the north end of the street. “Here we are, the Elysian Fields.”

  He passed it to Franny and she said, “Ten million cockroaches down in the basement holding it up, straining their little backs.”

  He looked at several more hotels, then went back through the shots he’d already seen till he found the one he wanted, a view of the south end.

  “There’s a guy going in the Play House—you can only see part of him, he’s right behind your friend.”

  “The guy in the doorway?”

  “The other one. He’s got on, it looks like a white silk shirt.”

  Franny said, “Oh, the lifeguard. Yeah, I remember him. I don’t know if he’s a lifeguard, but he sure is a hunk.”

  “Was he with your friend, the goof?”

  “Gee, I don’t know. Let me see those again.” She went through the prints saying, “I think he’s in one other one . . . Yeah, here. See the guy I was talking to? He’s got his back turned, but I know it’s him. Standing with the biker. That’s the hunk right behind him.”

  “I didn’t notice him in this one.”

  “No, the biker catches your eye. The beer gut.”

  “His shirt doesn’t look white here. It looks silver.”

  “You’re right. I remember now, it is silver. But it’s not a shirt, it’s a jacket, like the kind jocks wear. Yeah, I remember him now—real blond hair, the guy’s a standout, Joe, you oughta shoot him.”

  “Not a bad idea,” LaBrava said. “Where’s the one you took of your friend? You were sitting on the wall.”

  “You don’t miss a thing, do you?” Franny found it, handed it to him. “This one.”

  LaBrava studied the pose, the Cuban-looking guy fooling with his ear. “What’s he doing?”

  “I don’t know—he uses his hands a lot. Let’s see . . . Oh, yeah. He’s playing with his earring. That’s why I thought he might be gay, but you can’t tell.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “I don’t think he told me. He talked all the time, but really didn’t say anything. Asked me where I live, if it’s a nice place, would I like to have a drink with him—no, thank you—all that.”

  “Did he tell you, by any chance, he’s Geraldo Rivera?”

  Franny paused, about to raise her glass from the table. “Are you putting me on, Joe?”

  “I just wondered. He looks familiar.”

  “You think he looks like Geraldo Rivera? He doesn’t look anything like him. Joe, tell me what your game is? Are you a narc?”

  Dinner at Maurice’s, the picture gallery; fried sirloin and onions in candlelight with a ’69 Margaux. Jean Shaw said, “If this is railroad-style it must be the Orient Express.” Maurice said it was the pan, the cast-iron frying pan that was at least 100 years old he’d swiped out of a Florida East Coast caboose.

  After dinner, sitting in the living room with cognac, Maurice said, “It’s a fact, they go in threes. You want the latest ones? Arthur Godfrey, Meyer Lansky and Shepperd Strudwick, the actor. Jeanie, you remember him? Seventy-five when he died.”

  “Yeah, I read that,” Jean said. “Died in New York. We did one picture together.”

  LaBrava knew the name, he could picture the actor and caught a glimpse of his snow-white hair, a scene in a cemetery. “Shepperd Strudwick, he was your husband in Obituary. Remember? We were trying to think who it was.”

  She looked surprised, or was trying to recall the picture. She said, “You’re right, he was my husband.”

  “Shepperd Strudwick,” LaBrava said. “You wanted to dump him. You got together with Henry Silva . . . Didn’t you hire him to kill your husband?”

  “Something like that.”

  “I know Henry Silva was the bad guy,” LaBrava said. “I remember him because he was in a Western just about the same time and I saw it again in Independence. The Tall T, with Richard Boone and, what’s his name, Randolph Scott. But I can’t remember the good guy in Obituary.”

  “Arthur Godfrey’s on the front page of every paper in the country,” Maurice said. “Meyer Lansky gets two columns in the New York Times, he could a bought Godfrey. Arthur Godfrey gets a street named after him. What’s Meyer Lansky get? A guy, I remember with the FBI, he said Meyer Lansky could a been chairman of the board of General Motors if he’d gone into legitimate business.” Getting out of his La-Z-Boy, going over to a wall of photographs, Maurice said, “I’ll tell you something. I bet Meyer Lansky had a hell of a lot more fun in his life than Alfred P. Sloan or any of those GM guys.”

  LaBrava said to Jean, “I don’t think the plan was to kill Shepperd Strudwick. It was something else. I remember he kept getting newspaper clippings that announced his death. To scare him . . .”

  “Maier Suchowljansky, born in Russia,” Maurice said, “that was Meyer Lansky’s real name.” He traced his finger over a photograph of the Miami Beach skyline.

  LaBrava said, “I can’t remember who played the good guy.”

  Jean said, “Maybe there weren’t any good guys.”

  “Right here,” Maurice said, “this is where he lived for years, the Imperial House. His wife’s probably still there. That’s Thelma, his second wife. She used to be a manicurist, some hotel in New York. Met Lansky, they fell in love . . .”

  “Victor Mature,” LaBrava said.

  But Jean was watching Maurice. “Did you know Lansky?”

  “Did I know him?” Maurice said, moving to anot
her photograph. “MacFadden-Deauville . . . Lansky used to come in there. They all used to come in there. You know what I paid for a cabana, by the swimming pool, so I could run a horse book right there, for the guests? Woman’d send her kid over to place a bet. Forty-five grand for the season, three months. And that doesn’t count what I had to pay S & G for the wire service, Christ.”

  “But you made money,” Jean Shaw said.

  “I did okay. Till Kefauver, the son of a bitch . . . You know who this is? The bathing beauty. Sonja Henie. We used to call her Sonja Heinie. Here’s another spot, the dog track, you used to see Meyer Lansky once in a while. This spot here, the Play House . . .”

  LaBrava looked over.

  “. . . used to be big with the dog-trackers. Also the fight fans. Fighter from I think Philly, Ice Cream Joe Savino, he used to sell Nutty Buddies in the park, he bought the place about twenty years ago. I don’t know what it’s like now. It’s all changed down there.”

  “But you’d never move,” Jean Shaw said, “would you?”

  “Why should I move? I own the joint—most of it—I got the best beach in Florida . . .”

  “Maury, if I’m actually harder pressed than I’ve let on—”

  “Harder pressed how?”

  “If I get to the point I’m absolutely broke, would you consider buying me out?”

  “I told you, don’t worry about money.”

  LaBrava listened. Watched Maurice come back to his chair.

  “Maury, you know me.” She was sitting up in the sofa now and seemed anxious. “I don’t want to become dependent on anyone. I’ve always had my own money.”

  “This whole area right in here, from Sixth Street up,” Maurice said, “we’re in the National Register of Historic Places. That impresses buyers, Jeanie. We hold the developers off, the value can only shoot up.”

  “But if I need funds—”

  “If we see values start to go down, that’s different.”

  LaBrava listened. It didn’t sound like Maurice, the old guy who loved the neighborhood and would never leave.

  “Five years ago the Cardozo sold for seven hundred thousand,” Maurice said. “Way they’ve fixed it up I bet they could sell it, double their investment. Almost double, anyway.”

  She was sitting back again, resigned. “What do you think the Della Robbia’s worth?”

  “Four and a half, five hundred, around in there. But listen,” Maurice said to her, “I don’t want you to ever worry about dough. You hear me?”

  LaBrava listened. He heard Maurice talking like a man who had money, a lot of it.

  They reached her door. She said, “How about a nightcap? Or whatever might appeal to you.”

  Was that from a movie?

  Maybe it was the way she said it, the subtle business with the eyes. How did you tell what was real and what was from pictures?

  She could surprise him, though—sitting close on the slip-covered sofa with their drinks, something to hold till they had to put them down—she could look vulnerable and come at him quietly with, “Tell me I’m pretty good for an old broad. I’ll love you forever.”

  And his answer to that—like a knee jerk, reflecting his yes-ma’am upbringing—“Come on. What’re you, about three or four years older than I am?”

  She said, looking him right in the eye, “Joe, I’m forty-six years old and there’s not a damn thing I can do about it.”

  Shoving numbers into his mind that would have made her a teen-aged bride in Obituary in the black dress, coming onto Henry Silva, leading him on, the two of them conspiring to sting her husband.

  He pushed the numbers out of his mind by thinking: She isn’t any age. She’s Jean Shaw. And by looking at her face, at the little puff circles under her brown eyes that he loved to look at. If she wanted to play, what was wrong with that? Play. Maybe he could’ve been in the movies too if he hadn’t gone to Beltsville, Maryland, learned how to shoot guns and taken an oath to protect the lives of Presidents and important people. Bob Hope, little Sammy Davis, Jr., Fidel Castro . . .

  He said, “Jean.”

  Within the moment her eyes became misty, smiling but a little sad. “That’s the first time you’ve said my name. Will you say it again?”

  “Jean?”

  “Yes, Joe.”

  “You’re gonna have to be very careful.”

  “I am?”

  “I have a feeling you might be in danger.”

  She said, “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

  Yes, he was serious. He was trying to be. But now even his own words were beginning to sound like lines from a movie.

  He said, “Jean. Let’s go to bed.”

  That sounded real.

  She said, “I’m hard to get, Joe. All you have to do is ask me.”

  That didn’t sound real.

  13

  * * *

  I HAVE A FEELING you might be in danger. All the next day he would hear himself saying it.

  The tone was all right, not overdone, and he believed it was true, she was in danger. But it didn’t sound right. Because people who were into danger on an everyday basis didn’t talk like that, they didn’t use the word.

  He remembered the guy who wholesaled funny twenties standing up in federal court hand at his throat—the judge banging his gavel—and saying, “Joe, Jesus Christ, all my life I been in shit up to here, but never, never would I a thought you’d be the one’d push me under.”

  The Miami street cop assigned to paperwork, typing memos, said, “I gotta get back out there, put it on the line with the fuckups, or I’m gonna be sniffing whiteout for my jags.” A week later the Miami street cop, still doing paperwork, said, “Whatever happened to splitting heads, kicking the shit outta assholes? For the fun of it. Is the game still going on or what?”

  The Dade-Metro squad-car cop, drinking Pepsi out of a paper cup, said, “The guy had the piece, he was pressing it against me—into me, right here, under the rib. He pulls the trigger, click. He pulls the trigger, click. He pulls the fucking trigger and I come around like this, with the elbow, hard as I can. The piece goes off—no click this time—the fucking piece goes off and smokes the guy standing at the bar next to me with his hands up. We get him for attempted, we get him for second degree, both.” The Dade-Metro squad-car cop said, “Did you know you rub a plastic-coated paper cup like this on the inside of the windshield it sounds just like a cricket? Listen.”

  Buck Torres said, “Who is this guy? Do we know him from somewhere before?”

  “That’s what I want to know,” LaBrava said, “if he has a before. Put him on the computer and we’ll find out. But I can’t believe he hasn’t.”

  Buck Torres had been a uniformed Dade-Metro cop the time LaBrava was assigned to the Miami field office, United States Secret Service, taking pictures at work and play. Torres had showed him life on the street. They had finished off a few hundred beers together, too. Sgt. Hector Torres had transferred and was now supervisor of Crimes Against Persons, Miami Beach Police. He always wore a coat and tie—his men did too—because he would never speak to the relatives of a deceased person in shirt-sleeves.

  They left the Detective Bureau—the one-story, windowless, stucco annex on the corner of First and Meridian—walked across Meridian to MBPD headquarters—the official-looking brick building with the flag—punched “Richard Nobles” into the National Crime Information Center computer and drew a blank.

  “So, he’s a good boy,” Torres said.

  “No, he isn’t,” LaBrava said, “he’s a sneaky kind of asshole who likes to come down on people.” Hearing himself falling back into police patter.

  “Yeah, but he hasn’t done nothing.”

  “I think they pulled his sheet, gave him a clean bill. He was a federal snitch. You gotta have a diseased mind or your balls in somebody’s hand to do that kind of work. Check the DEA in Jacksonville when you aren’t doing anything.”

  Torres said, “Should I care about this guy or what? What do you wan
t me to do?”

  “Nothing. I’m gonna do it.”

  “Let me see—then you want me to say nice things about you, you get picked up for impersonating a police officer.”

  “Or pick the guy up, maybe. You still have ‘Strolling without a destination’ on the statutes? In case he sees me and becomes irritated. See, what I’m doing, I’m trying to stay ahead of the guy, be ready for it when it comes.”

  “Be ready for what?”

  “I don’t know, but all my training and experience tells me something’s gonna happen.”

  “Your experience—you guarded Mrs. Truman.”

  “That’s right, and nothing happened to her, did it?”

  “You’re serious?”

  “I’m serious.”

  “Then you better tell me more about the sneaky asshole,” Torres said.

  Paco Boza said a wheelchair was better than a bike. You could do wheelies, all this shit, also build up your arms, give you nice shoulders, the girls go for that. Also, sometimes, it was safer to be sitting in a wheelchair than to be standing up with some people. They respect you sitting in a wheelchair, yes, and some people were even afraid, like they didn’t want to look at you. He loved his Eastern Airlines wheelchair.

  Though it didn’t seem to be doing much for his arms and shoulders. His arms became skinny cords as he collapsed the chair and strained to carry it up two steps from the sidewalk to the hotel porch. He said he wanted to leave it where it would be safe. He was going to Hialeah for a day or two.

  “I do you a favor,” Paco said, “you do me one. Okay?” Grinning now, being sly.