Mr. Paradise

by Elmore Leonard

  “I’m home, I always sit in the fuckin kitchen.”

  “Not when I stay with you.”

  “‘Cause Ginny’s in there. We go out.”

  “You don’t worry about her knowing what you do.”

  “I said to her, you tell anybody I’ll shoot you, and I know I can do it.”

  Carl said, “Art, how do the cops know about us? This girl tells what we look like, they draw pictures of us and say, ‘Shit, why that’s Art and Carl’?”

  “Unless,” Art said, “where we got the guns—they’d been used before and that asshole told us they’re cherry.”

  “That’s been bothering me,” Carl said. “Should we have trusted that kid? I can’t even think of his name. But that could be it.” Carl poured Club in his glass, ice melted in the bottom. He pushed the bottle to Art, saying to him, “You notice how much the two girls look alike?”

  “Going by her picture in the paper. Otherwise you wouldn’t know it was the same one in the chair. Yeah, they could almost be twins.” He said, “I’m glad we didn’t talk to her. You gonna talk to the one upstairs?”

  “I’m not having nothing to do with her,” Carl said. “I’m not gonna talk to her and I’m sure as hell not gonna shoot her. How about you?”

  “The smoke wants it done,” Art said, “he’s gonna have to do it.”

  “Would you let him?”

  “What you’re asking now,” Art said, “would I shoot him before he puts a plastic bag over her head. I don’t see any difference in whacking him or the fuckin dopers. See, but I don’t know he has the nerve to do it.”

  “You don’t worry about her saying it was us?”

  “Did you see her the other night? I didn’t. Where was she when she saw us, upstairs? She couldn’t of seen us good.”

  “The thing is she’s seen us now,” Carl said. “She can tell herself yeah, those’re the guys. You know what I mean? But I don’t think the cops need her.”

  “You think it’s the guns,” Art said.

  Carl was nodding. “I think we fucked ourselves buying those guns.”

  There was a silence as Art picked up the bottle of Canadian Club and then paused.

  “How come Avern hasn’t been on us to get rid of ‘em?”

  •

  The bong was no longer on the dresser. “Confiscated,” Montez said. He rolled a joint and lit and handed it to Kelly, saying, “For your pleasure.”

  She shrugged and took a hit. Like the other time.

  Lloyd came with an alexander in a lowball glass, the crystal, he handed to Kelly in the chair and looked at Montez sitting on the other side of the bed, the lamp on, reading about Del Rio Power. Lloyd said to Kelly, “You need anything else?”

  She said, “Tell me what I’m doing here.”

  “That’s his bidness,” Lloyd said, looking at Montez. “I jes work here.”

  “You have a cigarette?”

  “I’ll find you some,” Lloyd said and walked out.

  Montez came around to sit on the side of the bed facing Kelly, in the chair where she had tried to hide in her cinnamon coat that night. Today she wore dark Donna Karan head to toe, sweater, pants and heels.

  “What I have here,” Montez said, “is the paper that transfers the stock to Chloe, filled out, signed by Mr. Paradise. Where you sign it is down here.”

  “Even if the stock was good,” Kelly said, “I’m not gonna commit fraud.”

  Montez said, “Those two white menaces downstairs, they brought you here while they decide how to dispose of you. Understand? They ain’t letting you send them to prison.”

  Kelly said, “But if I sign this, what? You’ll get me out of here?”

  “I didn’t know you have this on you. Since you do, I want you to cash it in for me.”

  “But before you found it,” Kelly said, “you agreed with the two guys, I had to be put away?”

  “You lucky you brought it, huh?”

  “And now I’m supposed to trust you?” Kelly said. “Chloe’s picture was in the paper. She’s the news, and she’s dead.”

  “We wait a while, nobody remembers her name. They look at you and the picture on Chloe’s license—you still have it, the driver’s license?”

  “In my bag. And by the time we get around to doing it,” Kelly said, “Del Rio is out of business and there’s no stock to sell.”

  Montez said, “Why couldn’t the stock go up instead of down? Del Rio Power, man, it’s a giant corporation.”

  Kelly sipped her drink.

  She looked at Montez and for a moment or so felt sorry for him. She said, “Why don’t you go hold up a liquor store? You do all this plotting … for what? I’ll bet you anything the best way to make money in crime is armed robbery. You’ve been fucking around with this idea, make a killing off the old man for how long, ten years? Don’t you know those two—what did you call them, white menaces?—are going to name you to make a deal with the prosecutor? You know they’ll be arrested. Frank Delsa said, ‘Those two go around like they’re wearing signs.’ I think you ought to come to some agreement with the two guys that you won’t tell on each other.”

  Kelly sipped her drink.

  “Listen, and make sure they know I didn’t see them the other night. I didn’t, really. Not well enough to swear they’re the same guys who were here.”

  She sipped her drink and again thought of sitting in this chair the other night in her coat, half in the bag, thinking, Are you nuts? Even considering what Montez wanted her to do, a houseful of cops on the scene? Are you fucking nuts? She was easing into that mood now, reminding herself she had to be smarter than these guys, and to keep her eyes open and watch for a way to get out of here. She thought of Delsa and tried to remember details he’d told her about the case. She thought of him and wondered if he’d made the show and where he was now and what he was doing. She did that whenever they were apart.

  She said to Montez, “Is there anyone else involved in this besides the two guys? I mean who you ought to talk to?”

  •

  Montez laid the stock information on the bed, didn’t say a word to her and walked out. Kelly finished her drink and set the glass on the floor. She looked up to see the young black guy standing in the doorway, the room dim with only the lamp on.

  He said, “I have these cigarettes for you Lloyd give me.”

  Kelly said, “Thank Lloyd for me, okay?” and he came in the room to hand her the pack of Slims and a book of matches. She said, “You see the ashtray anywhere?”

  Jerome pointed. “Right there, the end of the bed.”

  “Where I left it the other night,” Kelly said. “I didn’t see it. You can turn the light on if you want.”

  “Don’t matter to me.”

  She opened the pack and popped out a cigarette.

  “You’re related to Lloyd?”

  “I come with the two white dudes.”

  “You work for them?”

  “We looking for a dude has twenty thousand reward on him, but I don’t work for them or ever would. I’m a C.I.”

  “What’s a C.I.?”

  “Confidential Informant.”

  Kelly struck a match.

  “I work for a man with the Homicide police name of Frank Delsa.”

  Kelly was lighting the cigarette. She blew out the match and said to this guy in the dark red do-rag, “Why don’t you hand me the ashtray and sit down for a minute? I know Frank.”

  •

  Montez was at the round table now in the kitchen with Carl and Art. He said, “Y’all still drinking, huh?”

  He saw Art look at Carl while Carl kept looking this way, staring at him.

  “Bitch say to me upstairs she can’t pick you out. Is she shittin’ me? But then I wonder about it. I’m thinking, she’s on the second floor as you run out. She look down from up there, she looking at the top of your heads. Understand what I’m saying? She can’t see your faces, you got your Tiger hats on. What I’m saying, she can’t put either one of you at
the scene.”

  Carl turned to Art. “What he’s saying is he don’t want to shoot her, or put a bag over her head. He’s changed his mind.”

  “There’s no cause to mess with her,” Montez said. “No, I think the one we ought to get over here and have a talk with is your agent, Avern Cohn.”

  29

  AT ELEVEN-FIFTEEN LAST NIGHT DELSA DROVE TO the loft and saw Kelly’s black Volkswagen in the lot and phoned her from outside the building. Her voice said to leave a message. Okay, she didn’t drive. Someone picked her up, one of the other models, and they stopped off or ran into friends and went to a party after the show. He had to remind himself she had a life he didn’t know much about.

  This morning, Sunday, he phoned from the squad room, putting it off until ten in case she was sleeping in, and got no response. He drove to her place again, three miles from 1300, and saw her VW still in the lot. This time he got the manager to let him into the loft. The manager stood inside the door while he listened to phone messages, all from women in the fashion business, all related to the runway show last night. No calls from Montez.

  But yesterday on the phone she told him the last thing Montez had said to her when he called the night before, “You think you done with me?” and she hung up on him.

  It was time to see Montez.

  •

  Last night Kelly asked Jerome how he knew Frank Delsa. Jerome was self-conscious and didn’t look at her directly telling about the shooting at Yakity Yak’s he’d witnessed and how he became Delsa’s C.I. and how he ran into the two hit men at the house Orlando tried to burn down account of the three bodies in the basement, one of ‘em cut up into six pieces. Kelly said, “Six?” Jerome said the arms and the legs were four, the head five and body was six. He said people forgot to count the body.

  Kelly said, “If you work for Frank Delsa and the two hit men are here, why don’t you slip out? Tell Delsa the ones who killed Mr. Paradiso and my friend Chloe are here?” Jerome said Lloyd told him it wasn’t none of his bidness. He said he had to go and left, closing the door. Kelly got up and locked it. She didn’t know what she was supposed to do. After a while she stretched out on the bed in her Donna Karan sweater and pants, and a little later heard the faint sound of voices in the hall. Someone rattled the doorknob. At 2 A.M. she opened it and looked down the hall toward the staircase. She saw Jerome down there in an easy chair he’d got from one of the rooms. She walked toward him, got close enough to see he was asleep, but he woke up as she started down the stairs and told her she was supposed to stay in her room.

  In the morning the chair was still there but Jerome was gone. This time she got to the bottom of the stairs and was startled to see Carl sitting in the foyer in one of the upholstered straight chairs. Carl said, “Go on in the kitchen you want some breakfast. Lloyd’s in there.” He said, “I’m gonna talk to you later on.”

  She said, “About what?”

  He said, “The situation.”

  Montez was at the round table in the alcove with a cup of coffee. She said to him, “Would you mind telling me what’s going on?”

  Montez said, “We gonna have a sit-down here and get things straightened out.”

  “When?”

  “We got to get somebody first. You want some coffee? Lloyd brewed a pot.”

  “Where’s Jerome?”

  “The gangbanger? I guess he’s sleeping.”

  Lloyd came in and asked if she’d like a glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice. He could fix her eggs if she wanted.

  “I’ve been kidnapped,” Kelly said. “I’m being held against my will, and I get fresh-squeezed orange juice?”

  “They do it at the market,” Lloyd said. “Six-ninety-five a half gallon. It’s nice and cold.”

  Kelly said okay, orange juice and coffee, and turned to the window. It looked like it would be a nice day.

  Montez finished his coffee and left.

  •

  Nine o’clock Sunday morning Montez and Carl sat in Lloyd’s car parked on 14 Mile Road at the south end of Bloomfield Hills. They watched the front yard of Avern Cohn’s house, on the corner of Crosswick and 14, through a line of shrubbery, waiting for him to come out and pick up his newspapers, the Detroit News and Free Press in a plain plastic bag, the fat New York Times rolled up in a blue one.

  Montez had wanted to stay home to keep an eye on Kelly. Carl was afraid she’d talk him into letting her go and he wanted to speak to her first, reach some kind of an understanding. Art wanted to come so he could walk in Avern’s house, shoot him and walk out. He said what was there to talk about? Carl felt if they scared Avern enough he’d keep his mouth shut. This deal was now way out of hand; he wasn’t shooting anybody ‘less they got paid. Montez had asked, before, how he knew where Avern lived. “I said if he didn’t tell me, we wouldn’t make a deal with him to do contracts. He said, ‘Why you want to know?’ I told him so I’d come to the right house he ever fucked us over.”

  Carl said to Montez now, “We don’t talk to him in the car. Don’t say a fuckin word.”

  “How come?”

  “He’s gonna act surprised, want to know what’s going on. You start in with him, the son of a bitch’ll talk us out of what we’re doing. He’ll be scareder we don’t say a fuckin word. He comes out to get the newspapers I’ll quick pull into the drive. I’ll grab Avern and throw him in the car, you pick up the fuckin newspapers.”

  That was how it worked. Avern came out in a pongee bathrobe, narrow blue and yellow stripes, showing bare legs and black velvet slippers with gold crests on them. Carl jumped out of the car and grabbed him, but had to yell at Montez to pick up the fuckin papers.

  They brought Avern in the back way to the kitchen. Kelly looked at the guy in the striped pongee bathrobe, his skinny white legs, and said to Carl, “I bet this is your agent, Mr. Cohn.”

  Carl watched Avern raise his eyebrows and slide onto the bench next to her saying, “And you must be Kelly Barr.”

  •

  Delsa pulled up behind a gold Mercedes convertible in the drive, a young couple getting out, going to the door. The girl in her twenties, nice-looking, turned to Delsa as he approached them.

  “Hi, I’m Allegra, Tony’s granddaughter, and this is my husband, John Tintinalli?”

  The guy who sold bull semen. Delsa recognized the name and said, “Frank Delsa,” as he shook their hands. Allegra rang the bell again. As they waited Delsa imagined Montez spotting him through a window and going out the back.

  When the door finally opened there was Lloyd in a dress shirt but no tie smiling at Allegra, saying it was good to see her again.

  She said, “Lloyd,” hugging him, “do you know Mr. Delsa?”

  Lloyd’s smile faded and came back again and he said, “Yes, indeed, I know all about Mr. Delsa,” looking at him now. “I bet you want Montez.”

  “I sure do,” Delsa said.

  “Lemme see can I find him.”

  Lloyd walked away and Allegra said, “I love Montez, he’s so cool.” Now she was looking at the paintings in the foyer, talking about them with her husband, Delsa listening, Allegra saying she loved them and asking her husband if he loved them—two paintings of dark woods with shafts of light coming through the trees; the third one an ocean at night, the same kind of shafts of light coming through dark clouds. Her husband said he liked them okay.

  Lloyd was coming back now wearing his white butler coat and bow tie, looking at Delsa, serious, Lloyd’s attention on him as he came through the hall from the living room. He said, “Montez be with you in a minute.”

  Now Allegra was asking Lloyd what he knew about the paintings. Lloyd said, “They always been hanging there’s all I know. The man from DuMouchelle come and look at ‘em but didn’t tell me nothing.”

  “Well,” Allegra said, “he told me they’re the very early work of a Hungarian painter named Dizsi Korab. He used to live in Greektown and is hot right now in New York with his streaks of light. These early ones could be worth qui
te a bit. But that’s not why I love the paintings and want to take them with us, to California. Lloyd, we’re moving.”

  He said, “Well, yeah, it’s your house, take what you want.”

  “No, it’s your house,” Allegra said, “we’re giving it to you, if we can have the paintings.”

  Lloyd said, “You giving me this house?” Not sounding too sure of it.

  “And everything in it except the paintings,” Allegra said. “The other night you looked so at home, so cozy with your lady friend, Serita?”

  “Yeah, she works over at Blue Cross.”

  “Are you serious about her?”

  “I can’t make up my mind,” Lloyd said.

  “The other night when we stopped in, you were so nice to us. I said to John, ‘You have your new business—do we really need to sell the house?’ He said, ‘Not if you want to give it away.’ John’s anxious to get out of Detroit.” She turned to him as he brought a deed out of his inside coat pocket and handed it to her, Allegra saying to Lloyd, “It’s a Quit Claim Deed, dated and notarized, so all you have to do is sign it and have it recorded.” Now she looked at the deed. “‘The grantor,’ that’s us, ‘for and in consideration of one dollar, convey and quit claim to the grantee,’ that’s you, and we’ve added, ‘and everything in it except the three Korab paintings in the foyer.’” Now she was hugging Lloyd, Lloyd looking over his shoulder at Delsa, his eyebrows raised.

  John Tintinalli lit a cigarette and stood looking around for an ashtray. He walked into the den and Delsa followed him, saying with kind of a smile, “Your father-in-law tells me you deal in bull semen.”

  “I did,” John said, turning to look Delsa over. “What’s your opinion of Tony?”

  “He’s a defense lawyer,” Delsa said, “and I’m a homicide detective. But we get along okay.”

  “You’re working on the old man’s murder, uh? You know who did it?”

  Delsa nodded. “It won’t be long now.”

  “To answer your question, I did broker bull semen, sold the company and bought a vineyard out in Sonoma. A bunch of ‘em are going bankrupt and I made a pretty good deal.”

  “What I wondered,” Delsa said, “was how you get the semen.”