La Brava

by Elmore Leonard

  LaBrava locked the Hefty bag in the trunk of the Trans Am, called the Miami Beach Police to report gunfire on Bonita Drive, just to be sure, and left with only what he had come for, the typewriter.

  Chapter 28

  NOW HE WOULD STAY OUT OF IT as long as he could, or until it was settled.

  He slept late. He didn't answer his phone. He kept very still when there were footsteps in the hall and twice during the morning someone knocked on his door. He did not look out the window at the view that was all ocean views. He did look at his photos and decided he didn't like any of them: all that black and white, all that same old stuff, characters trying to be characters. He said, Are you trying to be a character?

  In the afternoon, which seemed like a long time after to him, there was a knock on the door and he opened it when he heard Franny's voice.

  Franny said, "Where've you been?... Don't you know I miss you and hunger for you?"

  He smiled because it didn't matter what kind of a mood he was in. When he saw her he smiled and knew he would not have to bother choosing an attitude.

  Franny said, "What's going on? The cops were here again."

  He told her he didn't know. He didn't want to learn anything from Franny that might be misinformation or only part of it or speculation. He wanted it to be settled and then learn about it in some official way, facts in order.

  She said, "Something's going on and I'm dying to know what it is. I mean finally we get a little activity around here. Live in a place like this, LaBrava, the high point of the day is some tourist comes in and asks where Joe's Stone Crab is."

  "Or the mailman arrives," LaBrava said. "Let me take you to Joe's tonight, or Picciolo's, any place you want to go."

  He put on the banana shirt after Franny left and looked at himself in the mirror. He liked that banana shirt. He looked at his photos again and began to like some of them again, the honest and dishonest faces, enough of them so that he could say to himself, You got promise, kid.

  Who was it said that?

  Who cares?

  He took off the banana shirt, showered, shaved, rubbed in Aqua Velva--Maurice had told him, "Use that, you must have cheap skin"--put the banana shirt on again and picked up the typewriter case. It was now seven in the evening. It was time. So he went up the stairs to the third floor, walked past Maurice's door to Jean Shaw's, knocked and waited. There was no sound. He walked back to Maurice's door.

  Maurice said, "The hell you been?" Wearing a white-on-white shirt with long collar points, a black knit tie; his black silk suitcoat was draped over a dining room chair.

  Jean Shaw, in a black sheath dress, pearls, stood at the credenza making drinks. She was saying--and it was like a background sound--"Orvis, Dinner Island, Neoga, Espanola, Bunnell, Dupont, Korona, Favorita, Harwood... Windle, Ormond, Flomich... Holly Hill, Daytona Beach. There. All the way to Daytona."

  "You left out National Gardens." Maurice winked at LaBrava standing there holding the typewriter case.

  She turned saying, "Where does National Gardens come in?" Her eyes resting on LaBrava.

  "After Harwood," Maurice said. "Look who's here."

  "I see who's here," Jean said. "Is that my typewriter you're returning?"

  "Sit down, get comfortable," Maurice said. "Jean, fix him one. He likes it on the rocks."

  "I know what he likes," Jean said.

  "Well, it's all over," Maurice said. "You missed Torres this morning. Go on, sit in my chair, it's okay. In fact, I insist." He waited as LaBrava curved himself, reluctantly, into the La-Z-Boy; being treated as a guest of honor. "There's a couple a discrepancies they can't figure out. Like Richard was killed with the Cuban's gun and the Cuban was killed with Richard's gun, only he was killed after Richard was killed," Maurice said, moving to the sofa. "Which has got the cops scratching their heads. But that's their problem."

  Jean came over with drinks on a silver tray.

  "The cops found the money, we got it back," Maurice said. "Far as I'm concerned the case is closed."

  She handed LaBrava his and he had to look up to see her eyes, those nice eyes so quietly aware.

  "The cops can do what they want," Maurice said.

  She handed him his drink, Maurice on the sofa now, and sat down next to him, placing the tray with her drink on the cocktail table. LaBrava watched her light a cigarette, watched her eyes raise to his as she exhaled a slow stream of smoke.

  "You can't have everything," Maurice said. "I told your friend Torres that, he agreed. You got the two guys you want, be satisfied."

  Her gaze dropped to the typewriter case on the floor next to the recliner, lingered, came up slowly to rest on him again.

  "Torres said they always thought there was a third one. Only why didn't he take the money? Unless he had to get out a there fast once he shot the Cuban and didn't have time to look for it. Richard's gun--you know where it was? In the toilet. Listen, there was even another gun in there, in the toilet, they find out shot somebody else. You imagine?"

  LaBrava said, "Maybe the third one will walk in, clear everything up."

  Jean was still looking at him.

  "I told the cops, be grateful for what you have," Maurice said. "That third one, whoever, did you a favor. Any loose ends--well, you always got a few loose ends. Who needs to know everything? No, as far as I'm concerned--" He gave Jean a little nudge with his elbow. "What is it they say in the picture business?"

  "It's a wrap," Jean said.

  He nudged her again. "Should we tell him?"

  "I don't see why not," Jean said.

  Maurice got higher on the sofa, laid his arm on the backrest. "Well, we decided last night... Jeanie and I are gonna get married." He brought his hand down to give her shoulder a squeeze. "Look at him, he can't believe it. Yeah, as a matter of fact we start talking last night, we couldn't figure out why we hadn't thought of it a long time ago. Make life easier for both of us... We're tired a living alone."

  LaBrava didn't say anything because he didn't want to say anything he didn't mean.

  The former movie star in her fifties looked younger, much younger, sitting next to the retired bookmaker, natty old guy who didn't know he was old.

  "I'm gonna take good care of her," Maurice said.

  "And I'm going to let him," Jean said. She said then, "It's not the movies, Joe." Looking at him with those eyes. "Maury wants you to be his best man."

  He wasn't going to say anything he didn't mean or cover up whatever it was he felt.

  What he finally said was, "Swell."

  Then gave them a nice smile: maybe a little weary but still a nice one. Why not?

  If It Sounds Like Writing, Rewrite It

  (Advice from Elmore Leonard)

  These are rules I've picked up along the way to help me remain invisible when I'm writing a book, to help me show rather than tell what's taking place in the story. If you have a facility for language and imagery and the sound of your voice pleases you, invisibility is not what you are after, and you can skip the rules. Still, you might look them over.

  1. Never open a book with weather.

  If it's only to create atmosphere, and not a character's reaction to the weather, you don't want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead looking for people. There are exceptions. If you happen to be Barry Lopez, who has more ways to describe ice and snow than an Eskimo, you can do all the weather reporting you want.

  2. Avoid prologues.

  They can be annoying, especially a prologue following an introduction that comes after a foreword. But these are ordinarily found in nonfiction. A prologue in a novel is backstory, and you can drop it in anywhere you want.

  There is a prologue in John Steinbeck's Sweet Thursday, but it's o.K. because a character in the book makes the point of what my rules are all about. He says: "I like a lot of talk in a book and I don't like to have nobody tell me what the guy that's talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks... figure out what the guy's thi
nking from what he says. I like some description but not too much of that... Sometimes I want a book to break loose with a bunch of hooptedoodle... Spin up some pretty words maybe or sing a little song with language. That's nice. But I wish it was set aside so I don't have to read it. I don't want hooptedoodle to get mixed up with the story.''

  3. Never use a verb other than "said'' to carry dialogue.

  The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in. But said is far less intrusive than grumbled, gasped, cautioned, lied. I once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with "she asseverated,'' and had to stop reading to get the dictionary.

  4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb "said''...

  ... he admonished gravely. To use an adverb this way (or almost any way) is a mortal sin. The writer is now exposing himself in earnest, using a word that distracts and can interrupt the rhythm of the exchange. I have a character in one of my books tell how she used to write historical romances "full of rape and adverbs.''

  5. Keep your exclamation points under control.

  You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose. If you have the knack of playing with exclaimers the way Tom Wolfe does, you can throw them in by the handful.

  6. Never use the words "suddenly'' or "all hell broke loose.''

  This rule doesn't require an explanation. I have noticed that writers who use "suddenly'' tend to exercise less control in the application of exclamation points.

  7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.

  Once you start spelling words in dialogue phonetically and loading the page with apostrophes, you won't be able to stop. Notice the way Annie Proulx captures the flavor of Wyoming voices in her book of short stories Close Range.

  8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.

  Which Steinbeck covered. In Ernest Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants'' what do the "American and the girl with him'' look like? "She had taken off her hat and put it on the table.'' That's the only reference to a physical description in the story, and yet we see the couple and know them by their tones of voice, with not one adverb in sight.

  9. Don't go into great detail describing places and things.

  Unless you're Margaret Atwood and can paint scenes with language or write landscapes in the style of Jim Harrison. But even if you're good at it, you don't want descriptions that bring the action, the flow of the story, to a standstill.

  And finally:

  10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.

  A rule that came to mind in 1983. Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them. What the writer is doing, he's writing, perpetrating hooptedoodle, perhaps taking another shot at the weather, or has gone into the character's head, and the reader either knows what the guy's thinking or doesn't care. I'll bet you don't skip dialogue.

  My most important rule is one that sums up the ten.

  If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.

  Or, if proper usage gets in the way, it may have to go. I can't allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the narrative. It's my attempt to remain invisible, not distract the reader from the story with obvious writing. (Joseph Conrad said something about words getting in the way of what you want to say.)

  If I write in scenes and always from the point of view of a particular character -- the one whose view best brings the scene to life -- I'm able to concentrate on the voices of the characters telling you who they are and how they feel about what they see and what's going on, and I'm nowhere in sight.

  What Steinbeck did in Sweet Thursday was title his chapters as an indication, though obscure, of what they cover. "Whom the Gods Love They Drive Nuts" is one, "Lousy Wednesday" another. The third chapter is titled "Hooptedoodle (1)" and the 38th chapter "Hooptedoodle (2)" as warnings to the reader, as if Steinbeck is saying: "Here's where you'll see me taking flights of fancy with my writing, and it won't get in the way of the story. Skip them if you want."

  Sweet Thursday came out in 1954, when I was just beginning to be published, and I've never forgotten that prologue.

  Did I read the hooptedoodle chapters? Every word.

  -- Elmore Leonard

  First published July 16, 2001 as "Easy on the Adverbs, Exclamation Points, and Especially Hooptedoodle" in the "Writers on Writing" recurring feature in The New York Times.

  Martin Amis Interviews "The Dickens of Detroit"

  The Writers' Guild Theatre, Beverly Hills, January 23, 1998. Sponsored by Writers Bloc; Andrea Grossman, Founder.

  Martin Amis:We're welcoming here Elmore Leonard, also known as "Dutch." And rather less formally, "The Dickens of Detroit." It is an apt description, I think, because he is as close as anything you have here in America to a national novelist, a concept that almost seemed to die with Charles Dickens but has here been revived.

  I was recently in Boston visiting Saul Bellow, and on the shelves of the Nobel laureate, I spied several Elmore Leonards. Saul Bellow has a high, even exalted view of what literature is and does. For him, it creates the "quiet zone" where certain essences can nourish what he calls "our fair souls." This kind of literature of the Prousto-Nabokovian variety has recently been assigned the label "minority interest." There is patently nothing "minority interest" about Elmore Leonard. He is a popular writer in several senses. But Saul Bellow and I agreed that for an absolutely reliable and unstinting infusion of narrative pleasure in a prose miraculously purged of all false qualities, there was no one quite like Elmore Leonard.

  I thought we might begin at the beginning, and talk about your early years as a writer and how you got started. In my experience, everyone at the age of fourteen or fifteen (or a bit earlier) starts to commune with themselves and to keep notes and to keep a diary. It's only the writers who go on with that kind of adolescent communion. Was it like that for you? Did you get the glimmer quite early on?

  Elmore Leonard:Let me ask first: Do you think if I lived in Buffalo, I'd be Dickens? [Laughter]

  Amis:"The Balzac of Buffalo," perhaps. [Laughter]

  Leonard:I had a desire to write very early on but I didn't. I wrote just what I had to write in school compositions and things like that. It wasn't until I was in college after World War II that I wrote a couple of short stories. The first one because the English instructor said, "If you enter this contest" -- it was a local writers' club within the University of Detroit -- "I'll give you a B." I've always been inspired in this somewhat commercial approach toward writing. [Laughter] Which is why I chose Westerns to begin with.

  In 1951, I decided to look at the field. I looked at the market, and I saw Westerns in The Saturday Evening Post, Collier's, almost everything from the Ladies' Home Journal down through men's magazines and pulps. There were then at least a dozen pulps still in business, the better ones paying two cents a word. So I decided this was a market. What with all of these magazines buying short stories, this was the place to start. And because I liked Western movies a lot, and I wanted to sell to Hollywood right away and make some money, I approached this with a desire to write but also to make as much money as I could doing it. I didn't see anything wrong with that at all. I think the third one sold, and that was it. After that, they've all sold since then. But then the market dried up, and I had to switch to crime.

  Amis:You were also, as I understand, writing commentaries for educational films and industrial movies.

  Leonard:Yes, industrial movies about air pollution, building highways, Encyclopaedia Britannica, geography, and history movies. I did about a dozen of those -- the settlement of the Mississippi Valley, the French and Indian War, the Danube, Puerto Rico. I think they were twenty-seven-minute movies. I did that right after I had left an ad agency where I was writing Chevrolet ads, which drove me crazy. Because you had to write real cute then. I had a lot of trouble with that. I could do truck ads, but I couldn't do convertibles at all. [Laughter] So I go
t out of that. But I still had to make a living. So I got into the industrial movies and a little freelance advertising.

  Amis:But the breakthrough was Hombre, was it not?

  Leonard:Yes, the sale to the movies. Because the book itself I wrote in '59, and by then the market was so weak. I was getting $4,000 for a paperback, for example. And that one sold for $1,250, and it took two years to sell it. I didn't get that much for the movie rights, either, four or five years later. That was when I got back into fiction writing.

  Amis:How do you feel when a book of yours goes through the treadmill of being turned into a movie? It's happened to me once, in my first novel, The Rachel Papers, and I thought, "Whatever they do to it, the book will still be there."

  Leonard:I believe that. There's no question about that. I'm not concerned with how closely it's adapted. I just hope it's a good movie. For example, Rum Punch to Jackie Brown. Quentin Tarantino, just before he started to shoot, said, "I've been afraid to call you for the last year." I said, "Why? Because you changed the title of my book? And you're casting a black woman in the lead?" And he said, "Yeah." And I said, "You're a filmmaker. You can do whatever you want." I said, "I think Pam Grier is a terrific idea. Go ahead." I was very pleased with the results, too.

  Amis:And how about Get Shorty? That must have felt like another breakthrough.

  Leonard:It was. It was the first contemporary story of mine that I really liked on the screen. And I said to Barry Sonnenfeld, the director, "But you're advertising this as a comedy." And he said, "Well, it's a funny book." And I think it did have my sound, and it had Barry's look. Because I could hear my characters on the screen, and I think the reason it worked was because they all took each other seriously and didn't laugh. There weren't any nods to the audience, any signals to the audience with grins or winks that that was a funny line. It was up to the audience to decide. This was the first question I asked Barry. I said, "When you shoot, I hope you don't cut to reactions to lines." He understood that, of course.