The Havana Room

by Colin Harrison

  Jay held up his hands. "Poppy's always gotten stuff screwed up, Bill. He got hit in the head by a sledgehammer when he was a kid. Never finished fourth grade."

  I wasn't convinced. "You notice that Herschel wasn't wearing any socks?"

  "No."

  "Makes you sort of wonder what a guy is doing working out in the cold on a bulldozer with no socks," I said.

  "He was a pretty tough old guy."

  Tough old guys usually keep their feet warm, in my experience, but I didn't press it. "This whole deal is fucked up," I muttered. "From top to bottom. I help you with a real estate transaction and end up moving a dead black guy? Your dead black guy, okay? That pisses me off, Jay." A fleck of my spit hit his face. "Then the police find us? I don't like it."

  Jay held up his hands. "I didn't know Herschel had gone off the edge. Poppy's note didn't say that, right? I know you're worried about it. Don't be. It's fine. Poppy worked it out. He told me this morning. He's known Herschel's family a long time."

  "What was going on out there, anyway?"

  He nodded, anticipating the question. "I asked Herschel to do some grading for me a week ago. The road was all washed out, and we had a lot of gravel on the other side of the property. He and his family rent an old house on the adjacent property. I still have some trucks and that bulldozer in the barn there."

  "What about the police?"

  "I called them this morning," Jay said. "I've known these guys my whole life. It's all right. Herschel obviously had a heart attack."

  "Why is it obvious?"

  "He's sitting there, dead on the tractor. Not a scratch on him. Long history of heart trouble, pericarditis, pulmonary edema. Working in the cold often gives—"

  I didn't want to hear a lot of medical jargon from a layman. "Did they ask you why you were out there on the same night that Herschel died?"

  "Yeah, they did."

  "What did you say?"

  "I told them I'd just finished the deal and I wanted to be sure some grading had gotten done."

  "Which is pretty close to the truth."

  "The first part of that is the truth, Bill. What else could it be? Herschel didn't do his grading on time and then was in a hurry to get started before the snow came too heavy, and then went out there in the cold on the bulldozer and had a goddamn fucking heart attack."

  "And if they come to me with the same question?"

  Here Jay's face went slack and he stared through me, eyes seemingly focused on his own imaginings. He was, I felt, reminding himself of an idea or belief. "I doubt they'll ask you," he said.

  I went on to the question of the deed. "I checked on the records of the building and I think you've got a problem."

  "You do, huh?" Jay scooped up the menus and dropped them into the trash. "I don't."

  "Voodoo LLC is not the current listed owner of the building."

  "Oh, hell, I know that, guy," Jay answered as he examined the building directory. "It's not so complicated. It's just paperwork. You didn't need to check on that." He turned toward me. "But I do need you to talk to a guy for me tonight, actually."

  "Jay, did you hear me? I don't think you own this building."

  "Of course I own this building!" He jabbed his fist against the staircase's newel post, making it shudder.

  "You better explain."

  But that held no interest for him— he was already on his way up the stairs, making them creak under his weight. "It's a corporate shell thing, Bill, no big deal. They do this all the time." His voice bounced off the pressed-tin ceiling high above us. "Really. You should know that, a guy with your experience. I do want you to talk to this other guy this evening, though, be my lawyer again, hold his hand, whatever. Go have dinner with him."

  "Forget it."

  "What?"

  "I'm out." I turned to go. And I should have gone, too, right then, should have stamped my way back down to the snowy sidewalk and not stopped until I had crossed back into some safer country of probability, but Jay came after me and pulled a slip of paper from his breast pocket.

  "This is for last night, for the whole deal."

  "I never gave you a fee."

  "I estimated."

  It was a check for twenty-five thousand dollars. Very generous. Too generous, in fact. Shut-your-mouth money. I handed the check back. "I don't want it. I want out."

  "All right," he nodded. "Fine."

  "But what do I have to do to understand, legally, what happened last night? It seems the title man didn't—"

  "Just go have dinner with this guy for me tonight, and everything will be explained."

  "Who is it?"

  "The seller."

  "The guy who owned this building?"

  "Yeah."

  "So also the guy who now owns your old farm."

  "Right."

  "Why are you set to have dinner?"

  "We weren't. He called me half an hour ago, said he had to hand over a couple more papers. Insisted. I just deposited his check, so I want to be polite. I didn't tell him I couldn't make it. Tonight is impossible for me. You can ask him whatever you want about the paperwork, Bill. He'll explain. Okay?"

  "Just have dinner with him?"

  "Yeah. Ask him anything."

  I shrugged. That was enough for Jay. He stood up. "Let me at least show you the place. We can start in the basement."

  And so we did, then worked our way up. "It's got eight office spaces. I've got several leases to renegotiate and you can help me with that, if you're interested," Jay said.

  "Nope."

  "All right. Anyway, it's a good location. People like the funky downtown locations. Good restaurants nearby, art galleries." He pointed to a line of ancient screw holes that ran up the center of the wide stairs. They'd been sanded over and filled in with wood putty. "See that?" he said. "There used to be a long metal slide that went down the middle."

  "For finished goods."

  "Right. In the nineteenth century, beaver hats, then chairs. In the early twentieth, it was baseball gloves for a while."

  Now the building housed companies that manipulated symbols.

  We knocked on the door of one small company named RetroTech, and a young Indian man opened it.

  "Is Mr. Cowles around?" Jay asked.

  "He's on the phone," said the man, his accent British.

  "My name's Jay Rainey. I'm the new owner. This is Bill Wyeth, my lawyer. Thought I'd introduce myself."

  He showed us in. It was a small but obviously prosperous operation. Green carpeting, brass desk lamps, oak filing cabinets, major league coffee machine. Information dripped brightly down a handful of screens.

  "You did a nice job designing it," said Jay, looking around.

  "We like it, thank you."

  "Mr. Cowles free?"

  "I'll check."

  He disappeared down a hallway and a moment later returned, followed by a large, well-dressed man who looked like he might have played a little rugby twenty years earlier. "Hello, hello," came a booming British voice. "David Cowles." His eyes passed me and landed on Jay. "You must be the new owner?"

  Both men appeared surprised by the other's size. They shook hands.

  "Glad to meet you," said Jay. "You have a great shop."

  "We try, yes," said Cowles.

  "What do you do?" I asked.

  "Oh, a little of this and a lot of that." Cowles smiled at this oblique answer. "Basically, we build proprietary financial software, we do a little momentum trading in securities, we play the field, we try to jump on and off the train at the right time."

  "Been here long?" asked Jay.

  "Little more than a year."

  "Moved from London?"

  "Yes, in fact." Cowles looked at Jay. "You've checked on us, it would seem?"

  "Nope," said Jay agreeably, "just a hunch."

  "Want to have a look around?"

  "Sure. I did see the office once, with the seller," said Jay. "But I don't think you were here."

  The tour took a fe
w minutes. Behind a desk of family photos, Cowles's office had a good view to the west, filled with the irregular brick buildings of the neighborhood, stovepipes poking over slanting rooftops.

  "Reminds me a little of London," Cowles laughed. "Just a little, just enough to miss it."

  I noticed chewed pen tops on the desk, several calculators, stacks of newspaper clippings, an ashtray filled with butts. Cowles was a worrier, a figurer, and a smoker.

  "You've got, what, a year left on your lease?" asked Jay.

  "Indeed. It's been a good location for us. Even in this economy, we're growing."

  "You want more space in the building?"

  "I don't know." Cowles smiled at me. "Let's see how accommodating my landlord is."

  "The adjacent offices are empty."

  "I know."

  "Though I have one possible tenant."

  "Better fire away then," said Cowles. "We have enough room here."

  Jay studied Cowles's office wall. "You might hear a bit of construction."

  "A lot of noise?"

  "Some noise. I can ask them to minimize it, work on the weekends."

  "We'll appreciate that."

  "Not to worry," said Jay. He pointed at the photos. "Nice family."

  "Yes… thank you," said Cowles, and his eyes fell upon them. There was a shot of a darling girl with dark hair sitting with a baby boy. And separate photos of two women, one older, the other younger and blonde, each posed with Cowles himself. "I know that's odd," he said, seeing me frown. "I lost my first wife some years ago." He picked up the photo of the older woman. "She's— she was my daughter's mum, and so I feel it's all right to keep her picture." His grief was still on his face. "I remarried as soon as I could, for my daughter, really." He turned to me. "You have kids?"

  "Yes, well— yes, I do," I stammered, feeling clubbed in the head. "A son."

  We stood there awkwardly for a moment, three men hanging in separate cocoons of thought.

  "All right then," announced Cowles. "I need to get to work."

  "Did you ever meet the previous owners?" I asked. "They had kind of a funny name?"

  "You mean Bongo Partners," said Cowles. "Oh sure. Bunch of fish-and-chippers, too. They set up their New York City leases in their London office. Helps with the dollars and pounds thing. Decent enough chaps, didn't rob me too badly."

  I was about to ask if he knew of Voodoo LLC but we heard a loud banging at the door downstairs.

  "Maybe someone forgot his key," said Jay. "Better go look."

  We said goodbye to Cowles, and I followed Jay down the wide stairs. At the bottom we could see a figure outside in the winter sun— a short black woman of about sixty in a sensible coat, gloves, and red woolen cap.

  "Hell's bells," Jay muttered. He opened the door. "Mrs. Jones? You came all the way into the city?"

  "Yes, Jay Rainey, I did."

  He held the door open for her. "You want to come in?"

  She frowned at him and didn't step inside.

  "How did you—"

  "Poppy told me you might be here, so I kept banging."

  "You try the buzzer?"

  "Didn't see no buzzer."

  "You want to come in where it's warm?"

  "No, I don't. I'm going to say my piece and then be done. I don't need much of your time where that is concerned, Jay Rainey, not much time at all."

  So we stepped outside into the cold.

  "This is my lawyer, Bill Wyeth."

  The old woman nodded at me, but it was a disgusted and wary nod, too. "All right then. You've got your lawyer with you. You expecting me?"

  "No," said Jay. "Why?"

  "Funny, 'cause you got a lawyer with you."

  "We were just looking at the building," I said.

  "You knowed I was coming?" she demanded. "Poppy tell you?"

  Jay shook his head. "What can I do for you, Mrs. Jones? I'm sorry about Herschel. I sent some—"

  She waved her hand in his face bitterly. "Jay Rainey, don't start all that with me. I come down here to tell you that you got to do something."

  "Like what?"

  "Something for the family." Her eyes, yellowed and old, didn't blink. "Herschel, he work for your family almost forty years."

  "I know that," said Jay.

  "He kept that farm going all those years things was so bad for your family and when your daddy get sick and then after he die! You was gone most of that time, you don't know how it was."

  "Yes."

  "So now you got to do something."

  "You mean money."

  "That's what I mean, yes. I mean money! Herschel was all we had." She looked disapprovingly at me, a stranger hearing her business. "You know my boys, the two of them, Robert and Tyree, they settled now with families, they the ones who worked with Herschel, but you don't know Tommy and his cousin Harold."

  Jay was silent.

  "They upset."

  "Okay—" Jay glanced at me, trying to sound reasonable.

  "I said they upset and that ain't good!" Mrs. Jones stamped her foot. "They call me this morning and they say they hear about it from Tyree's wife, who say some kind of foolishness about her husband's daddy being left way out there frozen and all, and they pretty angry about that! Something about how the ambulance man had to blow hot air all over him to get him out of that tractor seat." She lifted her chin defiantly at Jay. "That's disrespectful, see, that's saying the man was dying and no one helped him! He was sitting there calling out to heaven in the cold and no one in this world knew nothing! No one cared he was dying alone, dying with no comfort! He dying of his bad heart right there, so bad he couldn't move! Tyree's wife told them all that. She was angry and she was crying and she was mad. Yes, she was! And it made them mad, too, yes, it did. I ain't going to lie about that, not where that is concerned, no I ain't. Them boys is dangerous, Jay Rainey, and they got a reason to be mad, is all I'm saying. Nobody was thinking about him, nobody was worrying about some old black man! Just assuming Herschel was always going to do what he was told no matter how cold it be outside! And your father, he never pay Herschel his Social Security. That's why he still working! And that's why he end up dead! Seventy-three-year-old man have no business being out there in that kind of cold, and the family— we is upset! You hearing me? We is upset! Now Harold, you know he always look up to Herschel. And now Harold, he gotten big, he got some kind of club or something here in the city, he got all kinds of money, and people working for him, and you don't want to cross that boy. He heard about this and I know he ain't happy. That boy has some kind of temper! The things he done, hoo! Don't get me started on that! He come out of prison five years ago and I suspect it was hi s fault, too. I don't like to think about what gets in his mind. Uh-uh, no! That boy is dangerous, I always said." She tightened her lips, and her cheap theatrics were both utterly obvious and entirely convincing.

  "Now then," she went on, sensing her advantage, "you was good to Herschel, Jay Rainey, so I think I owe you a warning in that respect." She waited to see if he understood. Then she addressed me, as if I were implicated, too. "I mean, I can't control them boys. They ain't boys no more, neither. I lost them when they was fourteen or fifteen. They men now. They live here in the city most times." She looked away a moment. I wondered if she might be glancing down the street. "Harold, they say he was lucky to get the time he did, that he beat a man so bad he—"

  "Please tell them we'll work out a fair settlement," said Jay.

  "Huh. They want one hundred thousand dollars."

  "That's a lot of money, Mrs. Jones."

  She looked at me, eyes dark. "So, Mr. Wyeth, tell him."

  I glanced at Jay. "Tell him what?"

  "Tell him it ain't a lot of money. Even a old woman know that! Lots of other things cost more. Lots of problems cost more."

  "Mrs. Jones," Jay said. "Herschel had a terrible heart. How many heart attacks did he already have? Four? I drove him to the hospital once myself. I paid for his doctor, I don't know how many times."


  She pressed her mouth tight and shook her head. "You also asked him to go out there in the cold, do that farmwork."

  "I asked him a week earlier, when it was still plenty warm," answered Jay, his voice tight. "It was maybe four hours of work. I guess he put it off and then the weather got cold."