LaBrava

by Elmore Leonard

  “Out of control.”

  “No, even before. But mostly you smile. You look a person right in the eye . . .”

  “You want your wine?”

  “Goddamn pillow. There’s one that’s digging into me . . . There. Next time however . . .”

  “What?”

  “I don’t want to sound presumptuous.”

  “Next time in the bedroom.”

  “The next time you take my picture.”

  “I’ll shoot it now if you want.”

  “I have to tell you something, LaBrava. I love your name—I’m gonna call you LaBrava from now on. I have to tell you, there’s no guy in New York I want to send a self-portrait to. I lied.”

  “Women who want to be shot in the nude, they want their picture taken. It’s okay with me.”

  “That wasn’t it. I wanted to go to bed with you. You know why?”

  “Tell me.”

  “Because I knew it would work. I mean I knew it would be the complete, ultimate act, every part of it first rate.”

  “First rate—”

  “Certain types, when you see the person you just know. You know what I mean? Also I like older guys. You’re not that old, but you’re still older. You’ve been to bed with the movie star, haven’t you?”

  “You can’t ask a question like that.”

  “I know, but the reason I did—well, I’m sure you have, otherwise you’d have said no, you haven’t. I think. But the reason I mention it—”

  “This’s gonna be good.”

  “If it was just for fun and not serious—I mean if you’re not in love with her, and I don’t think you are or you wouldn’t be here. Some guys, it wouldn’t matter, but not you. Anyway, if it was just for fun with the movie star, you weren’t exactly disappointed, but it wasn’t the big thrill you thought it was gonna be either. How do I know that? Because you like it sorta wacky, goof around and have a good time. I knew that just from talking to you. But she’s too much into herself for that. I don’t mean because she’s especially proper or ladylike. I can tell she gets right down to business and it’s more like jogging with somebody than making love. You know what I mean? Of course you do.”

  “You’re sure of that.”

  “Oh shit—now you’re mad at me.”

  “What’m I supposed to say?”

  “What’re you doing now, pouting? Christ—”

  “I’m not doing anything.”

  “I’m sorry. I thought we were pals.”

  There was a silence.

  “We’re pals. Here’s your wine.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You said you thought she was nice.”

  “I do, I like her.”

  “But you think she’s too much into herself.”

  “I get the feeling she’s always on stage.”

  “Not altogether honest?”

  “No, I don’t mean she’s devious. It’s just that she’s never right out in front. Movie stars, they either seem to fade away or James Dean out, but Jean—maybe she’s played so many different parts she doesn’t know who she is anymore.”

  “She always played the same one.”

  “Well, there you are. What do I know.”

  “But you like her.”

  “Sometimes, that quiet way you have of sneaking up—you know what you sound like?”

  “A cop?”

  “You sound like a cop.”

  Nobles told her sometime he’d like to see how it ended, it was just getting good. She asked if he thought the beginning slow. He said no, he meant it was getting even better. It was a real good movie. It was fun to watch her put on that sexy look and work her scheme.

  He said, “Just tell me, do they catch you or not?”

  Jean said, “No, but something happens I never expected.”

  They had talked, going over the plan in detail. Now Jean had him sitting at her desk in what she called her study. It was full of books and framed pictures of guys Jean told him were famous movie producers and directors. Nobles did not know any of them or was able to read the names they signed. One guy, Harry Cohn, she said he’d owned a movie studio but acted more like a gangster than any real gangster she had ever known. She had told Nobles about some of the S & G Syndicate people her husband worked for and they hadn’t sounded very tough to him. They sounded like any dagos that dressed up in suits and snap-brimmed hats and showed off by spending money. That wasn’t being tough. Being tough was doing brutish work as a boy, getting into fights on Saturday night and drinking till you foundered. Being tough was going into dark places with a .357 and a sap and praying to Jesus some nigger would try to jump you. Being tough—shit, it was not poking your fingers at a typewriter that looked like a little toy one.

  He’d told her he didn’t know how to work it. She said he showed her how to use the gun, she’d show him how to use the typewriter. He was suppose to put what she dictated to him into his own words.

  Like Jean said, very slowly, “You know what will happen to you now. You will die. If you don’t—”

  He said, “Wait, hold it.” He kept forgetting to press down the key on the left side, hold it down, to make a capital letter. She told him to type the capital letter over the small letter. It would be all right if it was messy. Nobles said, “Neatness don’t count in a deal like this, huh?”

  “If you don’t leave the money—” She stopped and said, “No, start over. In all capital letters—push the one right above it down and it locks. Here.” She did it for him, leaning over him, giving him her nice perfume smell. “Now, the first line, all in caps, your life is worth six hundred thousand dollars. Go ahead.”

  He typed, YOUR LIFE IS WORTH $—)),)))

  He said, “Shit, I can’t type.”

  She didn’t get mad. She pulled the sheet out and rolled in a clean one, regular tablet paper with lines, telling him not to touch it, and he decided schemers had to be patient so as not to seriously fuck up. She bent over the side of the desk and began writing in the tablet, printing the words faster than he had ever seen anybody write. She said, “There,” when she’d finished, “that’s what the note should say. But you have to put it in your own words.”

  He read what she had written and said, “This here looks fine to me.”

  She said, “Listen to yourself. That’s what I want it to sound like.”

  It didn’t make any sense to him that writing would sound like a person. Writing was writing, it wasn’t like talking. But he did as he was told, fought that dinky typewriter and finished the note.

  Jean said, “All right, read it to me.”

  “ ‘Your life is worth six hunnert thousand dollars,’ “ Nobles began, rolling the sheet up out of the typewriter, remembering not to touch it. “ ‘You have three days to get the money. It must be used money with nothing smaller than a twenty and nothing bigger than a hunnert dollar bill and don’t say you can’t get it. You are worth a sight more than that.’ “ Nobles looked up. “I added that part.”

  “Fine,” Jean said. “Go on.”

  “Let see. ‘Get four thousand hunnerts, three thousand fifties and twenty-five hunnert twenties.’ “ Nobles paused. “How you know the bag’ll hold it?”

  “It will,” Jean said. “Go on.”

  “ ‘You are to put the money in a Hefty thirty-gallon, two-ply trash bag. Put this one in another Hefty trash bag of the same size and tie it closed with some type of wire. Hay-baling wire is good. You will be told where to take the money. If you do not do as you are told you will die.’ I like that part. ‘ . . . you will die.’ Underlined. ‘If you try any tricks you will die. If you tell the police or anybody you will die. Look at your car. You know this is not just a threat. You have two days to get the money and your car fixed. I am watching you.’ Underlined. I said baling wire there, so it won’t come undone. Is that okay?”

  “Good idea,” Jean said. She leaned close to him to look at the note. “You misspelled baling, as in hay-baling wire.”

  “Shit,” Nobles
said.

  “That’s all right, leave it,” Jean said. “But if the police question you they might get tricky and pick up on that word, ask you how to spell it.”

  “Yeah?”

  “There’s no e in it. It’s b-a-l-i-n-g.”

  “That’s balling,” Nobles said and started to grin and said, “Hey, puss . . .”

  “Richard, we have a lot of work to do and I have to get back.”

  He hunched in to look at the note with her. “Hey, what should we sign it?”

  “Well, Cordially, would be nice,” Jean said. “No, that’s fine the way it is. Now we’ll write what you’re going to say when you call, so you’ll have it word for word. You’ll tell me to go to a phone booth, you’ll call me there at a certain time.” Nobles was shaking his head. She said, “What’s the matter?”

  “Nuh-uh, they’re gonna have traps on the phone. Shit, I know that much. I seen the feds do it when I was on the Opa-locka Police, setting up drug busts. They can’t prove what I write, but they can sure as hell get my voice print on a phone. You have to tell ’em where you’re suppose to go, don’t you? Make it look real?”

  “Yeah, you’re right.”

  “By the time you get to Boca they got a trap on the phone booth. It tells ’em right away what number I’m calling from. See, it’s different from a movie. They got equipment now, shit, you don’t have a chance of doing something like that. You might as well give ’em your phone number.”

  Jean said, “All right, we’ll do it with notes. Instead of a call I receive a note at the hotel, telling me where to go . . .”

  “Find it on the porch, say.”

  “I’ll go to the phone booth in Boca, find another one—”

  “Hold it there. I’m being watched how’m I gonna put the note in the phone booth?”

  “I’ll have it with me,” Jean said. “Make it look as though I found it. Hello—what’s this?”

  “That’d work.”

  “The note tells me to go to my apartment.” She gave him a wink. “Got it?”

  “Gotcha.”

  “I find another note, slipped under the door.”

  “You have it with you too.”

  “Or we write it now and leave it here.”

  “Yeah?” Nobles was thinking. “You know where you go next?”

  “Of course.”

  “Got the whole deal worked out, haven’t you?”

  “Every step. The only change, notes instead of phone calls. I like it even better—they’ll be playing with all their electronics for nothing.”

  “They love it, the feds, all that technical shit. Where’s my little Cuban come in at?”

  “The next stop.”

  “You’re still gonna have a tail on you, you know that.”

  Jean nodded, smoking a cigarette, blowing the smoke out in a slow stream. Boy she was calm.

  “All I’ll need is to be out of their sight for about twenty seconds.”

  “You got the place?”

  “I’ve got the place. I’m pretty sure. But I’m going to look at it again when I leave here.”

  “Cundo’s gonna take it from you by force.”

  “There’s no other way,” Jean said. “But I’ll cooperate, you can be sure of that. Does he have a gun?”

  “Doesn’t like guns or rough stuff. Talks big but being half queer he’s girlish.”

  Jean said, “Okay, we’ll write the notes. We’ll need three . . .” She paused. “You’ll have to take the typewriter with you when we’re finished here.”

  “Yeah, I guess I better.”

  “Drop it in the Intracoastal. That area just before you come to the Hillsboro Inlet, there’re a lot of trees.”

  “It’s a shame, it’s a nice typewriter.”

  “Richard?”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll get rid of it. Or I could sell it.”

  She said, “Oh, Christ.”

  “Just kidding. Don’t you worry, it’s good as done.”

  She was thinking or worrying about something though. This little schemer—boy, she was a sketch.

  She said, “Does your friend Cundo know where you live?”

  “You mean up here or down there?”

  “In Lake Worth.”

  “Nobody does, ‘cept you.”

  “You can’t go there while you’re being watched.”

  “I know it.”

  “Promise?”

  Nobles said, “Hey, you think I’m stupid or something?”

  She thought of handkerchiefs and how simply it was done in the movies: Henry Silva making phone calls with a handkerchief over the mouthpiece, in a time before electronic surveillance; the movie cop using a handkerchief to pick up the murder weapon. Henry Silva had used a second-hand typewriter and dropped it off the side of his boat on their good-luck cruise to Catalina, their last time together before her husband would receive the letter—$150,000 or you’re dead. Impressive enough as a pre-inflation demand; today it would hardly be worth the risk. She remembered her line: “You can’t come near the boat as long as the cops are tailing you.” (Beat) “Promise?” And Henry Silva’s line: “Do I look stupid?”

  Some of it was different, some of it almost exactly the same. One thing she was certain of, it wouldn’t end the way the movie did.

  18

  * * *

  THE OLD MAN SAID it was Joe Stella up in Lantana had given him this address, so he had come on down in his pickup truck. There it was across the street. It had dust-settle on top of that salt stickiness and he hadn’t had no place to wash it, being too busy looking for his sister’s boy, Richard Nobles. The old man said his name was Miney Combs.

  His pickup was parked behind Jean Shaw’s clean white Eldorado.

  LaBrava told Miney yes, he had heard his name from Joe Stella.

  The old man looked like he had lived outdoors all his life, the kind of man who knows where to fish and dig wells, how to fix pumps and tune his truck. He was heavyset with a belly; wore a John Deere hat, suspenders over his gray work clothes, long-sleeved underwear beneath, and carried about him the sour smell of aged sweat.

  They sat on the porch of the Della Robbia talking, in the front corner section next to Thirteenth Street. The old ladies would bend forward to look over because the old man was using a snuff stick and they had never seen one before. LaBrava hadn’t either.

  It was like the man was brushing his teeth. The twig was about the size of a toothbrush, frayed soft on the end and stained the color of brown shoe polish from sticking it into his Copenhagen and then massaging his gums with it, sometimes leaving it in his mouth like a cigar. LaBrava went over to the Cardozo and brought back four bottles of cold beer. The old man sighed and his metal chair groaned as he settled in, resting his work shoes on the rail.

  Miney said, “There’s parts of that swamp you’d think nobody but Jesus would dare walk it. Richard, he’d go in there be right at home. Preferred it to his own home I believe account of the way my brother-in-law raised him. See, he believed you whupped boys you made ’em humble. Twist you a half-dozen lengths of hay-baling wire and whup ’em regular. See, my sister, what she did she run a grits mill. Had a old tractor engine tied onto the mill and would grind up was nothing but mule corn, hard as gravel, but it made pretty fair grits and she sold it, fresh grits. See, Richard worked there till finally he left to peck it out on his own, sport around in the swamp and hire out to take folks for canoe rides, so they could watch birds. You imagine? I said to Miz Combs, watch ’em do what? I heard it I wondered if they’d pay to watch me plow a field. First I heard of Mr. John after him was when he killed the eagle. Why did he kill it. Knowing Richard it was to see it die. All right, then here was these two boys working a still I heard from cane skimmings. But that couldn’t a been, ’cause the first time they was brought up I knew the judge said it ought to be against the law to arrest anybody could make whiskey good as theirs. Then the second time, with our Richard testifying, swearing in court, they got sent to Ohio. Same as my
boy and in the same court. My boy had done his time once. Yes, he bought weed from the shrimpers and sold it to college boys, but he never smoked it once. Now Richard come along and tells on him and some others to Mr. John—only the Lord Jesus knows why—and my boy is doing thirty-five years in a gover’ment lockup.”

  LaBrava said, “What do you want to do to Richard?”

  Miney said, “What do I want to do? I want to put a thirty-ought-six in him, right here.” Miney touched the bridge of his nose with a finger that looked hard as bark. “But what I am going to do is put him in the back of my truck rolled in a dirty tarp and take him on home. We’ll decide fair. Maybe lock him in a root cellar for up to thirty-five years—how’s that sound? Let him out when Buster gets his release.”

  That didn’t sound too bad.

  LaBrava said, “You think you can handle him?”

  “He’s big as a two-hole shithouse and I’m blocky,” Miney said, “but once I lay my ax handle across his head I don’t expect trouble.”

  “He’s over at the Paramount Hotel on Collins Avenue,” LaBrava said.

  Nobles walked into the lobby, his head aching with images of things to come, little details he had to remember. Like—Jesus, the typewriter! Already he’d forgot one. He was suppose to have taken care of that on the way down. He saw himself in darkness dropping it off the MacArthur Causeway . . .

  And saw his Uncle Miney in that same moment—Miney sitting asleep with a snuff stick in his mouth, right there in the Paramount Hotel lobby. Nobles felt himself yanked out of that future time and back into a Jacksonville courtroom past, Miney extending his arm, his finger, pointing the Last Judgment at him . . . He got out of that lobby. Ran up to Wolfie’s on the corner of Twenty-first to phone Cundo.

  But the little booger wasn’t in his room.

  Nobles didn’t want to go over there. He didn’t like the feel of the place, all the foreigners hanging around. So in the next couple of hours he killed time having snacks, corned beef sandwiches, and checking the lobby, each time seeing Miney sitting in the same goddamn chair like he would let moss grow on him if he had to.

  Finally, when it was dark he drove over to the La Playa Hotel, checked to see if Cundo had returned—not yet—and sat outside in the car to wait, listening to the jabber of dagos passing on the street. Little fuckers, ought to be sent back where they came from.