“Everything is fine,” I said. “Thanks for your help.”
“Of course,” she said, “always glad to help the police.”
As we went out the front door she called out, “And Deputy, if you want to do something about your problem, come back!”
As I hustled her out the door Cathy looked at me and said, “What problem?”
46
In the car Cathy asked, “Why did you give up so easily?”
“Because,” I said, “we can find out more from just watching her than by pushing her.”
“You mean,” Cathy asked, “we’re going to tail her?”
“Follow her,” I said, “yeah.”
Tail, I thought. Jesus.
A half-hour later Cathy was poking and prodding her arms. Flexing the right one and jabbing the bicep with her finger, she asked, “What problem do I have?”
“None that I can see,” I said truthfully. I mean, considering that she wasn’t a bodybuilder, I didn’t see that she had any problem. She certainly looked better to me than the skinny girl with the orange nails.
“That woman, Angie, she looks good for her age,” she said.
“Not overblown?”
“Not like she was—what, twenty years ago when that calendar picture was taken?”
“I guess.”
She continued to poke her biceps and triceps, flexing her arms.
“Maybe I should start working out.”
I looked at my watch. It had seemed to me that Angie Worth had been working out for some time before we arrived. Surely she must have finished by now.
“Miles?”
“Hmm?”
“I asked you if you thought I should work out.”
“That’s a loaded question, Cathy.”
“Why?”
“You know why,” I said. “Why do women always ask men loaded questions? If I say yes, you’ll think I don’t like the way you look now, and if I say no, you’ll think I’m lying.”
“No, I wouldn’t,” she said, almost pouting.
“Look—” I said, but I stopped when I saw a man approach the car from Cathy’s side. “Hey—”
“Wha—” Cathy said, looking around.
Just as the man at Cathy’s window put a gun to her head, I felt the barrel of one press to the back of mine.
“Miles—” Cathy said, her eyes widening. I guess deputy sheriffs didn’t run into this kind of situation very often. To tell the truth, neither did I.
“Take it easy,” I said. If they were going to kill us, we never would have heard them in the first place.
“Somebody wants to talk to you,” a voice behind me said.
“Who?” I asked.
“You’ll see.”
I looked at Cathy and said, “Come on.”
“No,” the voice said, “not her, just you.”
“Miles—” Cathy said again.
“Easy,” I said. “What about her?”
“She can wait here.”
“Am I coming back?”
“That’s up to you,” the man said. “I got no orders to kill you.”
“Why the gun, then?”
“I don’t know you,” the voice said. “How do I know you ain’t got a gun? How do I know you ain’t jumpy?”
The way the two men were leaning into the car from outside no one could see the guns. It would look like they were just leaning in for some conversation.
“Put your hands on the wheel, high up.”
I did as I was told. He reached in and patted me down expertly.
“He’s clean,” he told the other man. To me he said, “Is there a gun in the car?”
“No,” I said. “I’m not licensed to carry in Florida.”
“Law-abidin’, huh?”
“That’s right.”
“Okay.” The gun was removed from the back of my head. The second man withdrew his gun from Cathy’s head, tucked it away somewhere, and stepped away from the car.
“Okay,” the first man said again, “let’s go.”
“Are you going with them?” Cathy asked, grabbing my arm.
“Why not?” I said. “Maybe I’ll get some answers.”
“What about me?”
“Stay here and don’t do anything.”
“Miles,” she said, keeping her voice down. She leaned close to me and said, “I’m the police! I can’t just let them take you.”
“Cathy,” I said, loud enough for the two men to hear me, “just sit tight, okay? I’ll be back, I promise.”
“Don’t make promises you can’t keep.” She squeezed my arm tightly before letting go.
I opened the car door and said, “I never do.”
I stepped out of the car and closed the door. When I turned to face the first man, I was surprised at how young he was. He probably wasn’t twenty-five yet. Across the car I saw that the second man was the same age.
“Okay,” I said, “lead on. Where are we going?”
“To lunch.”
“I had a big breakfast,” I said, but they ignored me.
They flanked me as we walked away from the car. I turned and looked back once to see Cathy staring worriedly out the front windshield.
They hadn’t frisked her. If they had, I didn’t know what they would have found. Her badge for sure. I didn’t know if she had a gun in her bag today. Maybe she did. Maybe it was the gun we took away from the two Jersey hoods. All I knew was that somebody screwed up, and Cathy was a beneficiary.
They never would have left her behind if they had known she was a cop.
I thought they were leading me to a car, but it soon became apparent that wherever I was having lunch, it was within walking distance.
We went a few blocks and came to a restaurant. The stylized writing on the front was hard to read, but I made out the word Grille. There was also a shield with a lion on it. As we entered I smelled roasting meat. Actually, if I had wanted to have lunch, this looked like a place I might have picked.
“What’s good here?” I asked, only half serious.
“Try the London broil,” the first man said, “with the potato pancake.”
It took me a couple of moments before I realized he was serious.
“Thanks.”
As we entered, the restaurant was on the right, the bar on the left. In the bar I saw a dartboard on the wall, and a sign that said watneys.
From the restaurant portion the maître d’ started toward us, but the first man waved him away.
“Walk into the back,” he said to me.
“Aren’t you coming?”
He smirked and said, “We’re not invited to lunch.”
“Who am I having lunch with?” I asked.
“You’ll know when you get to the back,” he said. “Enjoy it.”
I started away, then stopped and turned.
“Where are you going to be?”
“Don’t worry,” he said, “we ain’t goin’ back after your girlfriend. We’ll be in the bar.”
Call me stupid, but I believed him. I nodded, turned, and walked into the back. He was right. When I got into the back room, I knew who I was having lunch with. She was seated in the back at a corner table away from the other diners. As I approached, I could smell her. She had taken a shower, washed her hair, and looked very different than she had about forty-five minutes ago. She still looked good, but different.
“Glad you could come,” Angie Worth said.
“Your invitation wasn’t one I could turn down.”
“Were they rude to you?”
“No, Angie, they weren’t rude,” I said, testily. “They did their jobs.”
“That’s good to hear,” she said. “I take it you don’t want to play games?”
“I’m tired of games,” I said, sitting down. “Are we really eating?”
“Of course.”
“And what else?” I asked.
“Talking,” she said. “I have some things I want to discuss with you, and I didn’t want any—I want
ed some privacy.”
What she meant was, she didn’t want any witnesses around.
“Your word against mine?”
She smiled and said, “That’s right.”
The waiter came over, and she said, “He already knows what I want. Do you want some time to look the menu over, Miles? Can I call you Miles?”
“Sure,” I said, “and that’s okay. I don’t need a menu.” I looked at the waiter and said, “I’ll have the London broil and a Watneys.”
“With potato pancake?” he asked.
I gave him a look and said, “Of course.”
47
“I think the time has come for us to be . . . frank with each other,” Angie Worth said.
I thought we had already settled that when we agreed that I didn’t want to play games.
“I could have used some of that when we first met, Angie. . . . Can I call you Angie?”
“Why not?” she said. “I didn’t know how . . . persistent you’d be then.”
“And now?” I asked. “Am I getting in your way?”
“If you were getting in my way, Miles, I could simply have you removed.”
“I thought you tried that.”
“Those two?” she asked, referring—I suppose—to the Jersey hoods. “They weren’t supposed to . . . remove you, they were just supposed to scare you off.”
“I don’t scare,” I said. It sounded stupid and macho, even to me.
“I can see that,” she said. “Do you know who my husband was?”
“Some small-time Mafia hood from Jersey.”
Her eyes flashed for a moment, then she got control of herself. At that moment the waiter came and set our lunches in front of us.
“You’re trying to get my goat,” she said after he left. We were far enough away from the other diners that we could not be overheard. “We’re not gonna get anywhere like that. I said we should be frank.”
“I thought you meant that I should be frank and you’d continue to lie.”
“No,” she said. “I was serious. We’re both looking for the same thing.”
“Sandy Meyer?”
Her jaw tightened and she said, “Yes.”
“What do you want with her?”
“We had a . . . business deal, and she reneged on it.”
“And you don’t know where she is?”
“No,” she said, “but she has my merchandise. I want to hire you to find her.”
“I’m already looking for her, for her husband,” I said.
“Him?” she said. “If you think my husband was small time, what about hers?”
I frowned and said, “What about him?”
“He’s a yuppie hood,” she said. “Sitting in his office on the forty-fifth floor trying to do street-level deals he’s not equipped for.”
“How do you know?”
“I told you,” she said. “Sandy and I were in business together. She told me all about him. In fact, the deal we were working on together was originally his.”
I was beginning to get a bad feeling.
“Are you telling me she ripped off her husband?”
“That’s right,” Angie said. “That’s probably why he hired you to find her. He’s trying to salvage the deal, even after all this time.”
“Wait a minute,” I said, putting my fork down. The meat was good, but I had other things on my mind besides lunch. “What kind of deal were we talking about?”
She hesitated and looked around the place.
“Come on, Angie,” I said, “it’s just you and me here.”
“You’re not wired?”
“Your men searched me,” I said. “Come on, you can search me if you want.
“Another time, lover,” she said, flirting but only half meaning it. It seemed like even when she was doing business, she couldn’t shut that part of her off.
“Okay,” she said, “we were dealing . . . a certain kind of drugs.”
“The illegal kind?”
“Not what you think,” she said. “Some steroids, and some designer shit.”
“Designer?”
“You know,” she said, “the kind you usually get from your shrink, like for depression? Uh, Xanax, Prozac, something called . . . Clozaril?”
Prozac I had heard of. It got press anytime some psycho taking it pulled a trigger. They blamed the drug when they should have been blaming the person. I had known some people who actually benefited from being on Prozac, but it was the psychos with the guns who got the press. Xanax I was kind of vague on, and I had never heard of Clozaril.
“Okay,” I said, “let me get this straight. Jerry Meyer had a pipeline to designer drugs and was getting set to deal them.”
“Right.”
“And then his wife stepped in and . . . what?”
“Cut him out,” she said. “She got there ahead of him, made the deal, and came south with it. She figured she could avoid him here and unload the stuff.”
“She came to you?”
“Not right away,” Angie said. “She needed operating money, so she started modeling. She had a good figure, and when she started working out it got better.”
“And then she met the photographer, Ray Cortez.”
“Right,” she said. “They started having a little thing, and he sent her to me.”
“Why? For work?”
She shook her head. “He knew my background.”
Obviously, she felt that once having been married to a low-level Mafia hood gave her “background.” I decided to hold my tongue.
“He knew you were moving more than calendars and postcards.”
“That’s right.”
“What about your husband?” I asked. “Does he know?”
“Naw,” she said, shaking her head, “he’s a sweet guy, really. He doesn’t know about my past, and he’s as straight as they come. If he knew I was using the business to move other things, he’d have a fit.”
“Why’d you marry him?”
She shrugged. “He asked me. I was down here, I was lonely, and he asked me. It was after we got married, when I got involved in his business, that I saw the potential to turn a buck.”
She had probably been dealing in stolen property on a low level until Sandy Meyer came into the picture with the designer drugs. I didn’t know how successful Angie Worth was, but she was making enough to hire herself some muscle.
She probably fancied herself the Godmother of the Tampa/St. Pete/Sarasota area.
“So when push came to shove,” I said, “she did the same thing to you she did to her husband. She cut you out.”
“Yeah, only she’s not gonna get away with it,” she said. “If I find her . . .”
“If you find her . . . what?”
“I’ll do what has to be done.”
I’d had enough of her Mafia bullshit.
“Angie, come on,” I said, “you’re not the Godmother, you know.”
“I got background, Jacoby,” she said, sitting forward, “and I still got some connections in Jersey.”
“Yeah,” I said, “I saw what those connections sent you.”
“Hey,” she said, getting annoyed, “if I asked for top people I’d get them.”
“You got what they were willing to send you, Angie,” I said, “probably as a favor to your dead husband. By now, though, they know that you sent their men after a cop. They’re probably not very happy with you back in Jersey right now.”
She sat back in her chair and blinked several times.
“Okay,” she said, “okay, so now I want to hire you. You find her.”
“I’ve been trying to find her.”
“Yeah, well, now we can work together on it,” she said. “I’ll be working with you instead of against you.”
My first instinct was to blow her off, but there were still some questions that needed answering. I sucked down some Watneys before speaking again. It was too good a beer to waste.
“Before I enter into a partnership with you,”
I said, “and since we’re being frank, I’ve got a few pressing questions.”
“Okay,” she said, “you ask and I’ll answer.”
She sat back in her chair and crossed her arms beneath her impressive bosom.
“Well, for one thing,” I asked, “how many people have you had killed lately?”
48
She bunked several times again and then said, “I don’t understand.”
“Angie, since I got to Florida two people have been killed,” I said. “Even if you’re not involved, you must have read the papers or seen it on television, so don’t play dumb with me.”
“You’re talking about Ray.”
“Yes.”
“And . . . who else?”
“A man I first saw in New York, following me,” I said. “The next time I saw him he was in my hotel room . . . dead. The police frown on that sort of thing here.”
“They think you did it?”
“Let’s just say I’m on their list.”
“Well, I didn’t do it—uh, I mean, have it done. I haven’t had anybody killed . . .”
“. . . all week, right?”
She smiled and said, “Not that I couldn’t.”
I doubted it, but I wouldn’t have wanted to test her. She might actually do it just to prove a point. People like that—who have something to prove to others or themselves—are unpredictable. After all, she did have two guys working with her who carried guns. That much I already knew. And if I found Sandy Meyer for her, she might just sic them on her.
I shook my head and sat back in my chair, working on the rest of the Watneys. I believed her when she said she hadn’t had anyone killed; it was the look on her face before she managed to gain control of herself.
“Angie, I can’t work for you.”
“Why not?”
“Because if I find her and turn her over to you, you might . . . hurt her.”
“I want my goods, Miles!”
“If what you say is true, they were her goods to begin with. Maybe she just decided to dissolve the partnership.”
Now Angie sat forward, agitated, and slammed her fist on the table, making the plates jump and one water glass fall over. We both ignored it. Some of the other customers were starting to notice us.
“It don’t work that way,” she said.
Hard Look Page 17
