The Actor's Guide To Adultery

by Rick Copp

  “All right. But I have a very bad feeling, so if you get the slightest hint that someone’s following you . . .”

  “I’ll call the police and then call you.”

  “Okay. What about Juan Carlos? Laurette’s been calling three times a day to see if I’ve heard from you, and if you have any news.”

  I wasn’t ready to fess up to the fact that Laurette’s new husband was shacking up with more Floridians than the number who voted in the state’s ill-fated 2000 presidential election. I needed to find out more about Juan Carlos’s illicit affairs, his relationship with Austin Teboe, and the deadly business he had gotten mixed up in with Javier Martinez. The last thing I needed was Charlie reporting back to Laurette.

  “I haven’t seen much so far,” I said. “But I can say he’s got his fingers in a whole lot of pies.”

  Larry stalked back onto the set, his face covered in powdered sugar from the half-eaten donut in his hand. If looks could kill.

  “Charlie, I’ve got to go. We’re about to start shooting again.”

  I shut off the cell phone and was about to stuff it back into my jeans pocket when the mousy PA ran up to me, stuck out her hand, and said, “Larry wants me to hold on to your phone.” Her eyes pleaded with me not to make a fuss.

  I surrendered the phone without a word.

  Caitlin brought her son back onto the set as an exasperated Larry screamed, “Are we finally ready to do this again?”

  Trying my hardest to be contrite, I turned to Simon, who stepped on the piece of black tape designating his mark. “I’m really sorry I disrupted the take, Simon,” I said.

  He just snorted. And I clasped my hands behind my back until the urge to strangle his fat little neck subsided.

  My scene with Simon wrapped just before lunch, and after grabbing a turkey and Swiss sandwich and a Diet Coke to go, I jumped in the Taurus and drove to Fort Lauderdale in just under twenty minutes. If I was ever going to unearth the mystery of why there was such bad blood between Juan Carlos and Mr. Martinez, the best course of action was to talk to the Miami mobster directly. After placing a call to Casa Construction, I was told by the very curt receptionist that Mr. Martinez was on-site today supervising an oceanfront construction job. She refused to disclose the exact address, but since the city’s downtown area was relatively small, I decided to just drive around until I spotted a couple of guys in orange vests and a few cement trucks.

  A viable alternative to the glittery, fast-paced South Beach, the city of Fort Lauderdale had reinvented itself by pouring over twenty-six million dollars into refurbishing its dreary and dated oceanfront. Now completely revitalized, the city was thriving in the tourist trade. And no doubt companies like Casa Construction were reaping the benefits.

  It took all of ten minutes to lock in on a building under construction. And before I could even find a parking space across the street, I saw a big sign posted out front boasting the newest job by Casa Construction and a telephone number to call if you needed the city’s number one building contractors.

  I stepped out of the Taurus, locked it up tight, and made my way across the street to the site. There were a few workers sitting in folding chairs eating takeout from Taco Bell. I started to approach them when I spotted the two goons pull up in the familiar black Town Car. I ducked behind a giant green earth-mover that had been parked about a hundred feet from the half-constructed building. They walked toward a white aluminum trailer that had been set up to serve as a makeshift on-site office. They rapped on the door, waited a few moments, and then entered. Just as the bigger one went to close the door behind him, I spotted Javier Martinez sitting behind a desk, sipping a Starbucks coffee. He had a strikingly handsome face marred by a scar down his left cheek. He was in his late forties and very fit from what I could tell. The door closed. I knew his goons Laurel and Hardy would never let me get close to the boss, so my best point of attack would be to sneak around to the back of the trailer, wait for his henchmen to leave, and then talk my way in, pretending to be some kind of representative of a company interested in acquiring the services of Casa Construction. That would only work, of course, if Martinez had yet to see a picture of me. I was banking on him knowing I was out there following Juan Carlos, but not knowing what I looked like.

  I left my earthmover cover and circled around behind the workers on their lunch break. I tiptoed behind the trailer, carefully making sure not to step on any rocks and debris that littered the site. Once I was positioned in the back, I picked up a discarded pail and set it down underneath a window. Stepping up on it, I raised my head high enough to peer inside. The two goons were both talking at once, presumably filling in their boss on their own surveillance activities. I had little doubt I was a part of the discussion. Martinez’s back was to me, so I had no idea what his reaction was. After a few minutes, Martinez put down his Starbucks cup and waved Laurel and Hardy away. They both nodded, and then turned to leave, bumping shoulders in the small, enclosed space. They both tried going through the tiny door at the same time, almost crushing each other in the process. Finally, with a big sigh, the white guy allowed the Hispanic to pass through first. I couldn’t tell if Martinez had even noticed this little comedy sketch.

  Now was my chance. Martinez was alone. I stepped down off the pail and moved quickly to the edge of the trailer. I peeked out and spied Laurel and Hardy getting back in the Town Car. They drove away. I had to move fast. I thought up a fake name for the company I worked for and a nonexistent building project to bluff my way into Martinez’s office, but before I could take a step toward the small aluminum door, a beefy hand clamped tightly over my mouth and yanked me back behind the trailer.

  Chapter 18

  Whoever it was who grabbed me spun me around and shoved me hard up against the chain link fence that separated the office trailer from the construction site. He kept his hand pressed firmly over my mouth as he hissed in my ear, “Not a word, or we’re both dead.”

  When he was confident I was going to keep quiet, he removed his hand and stepped back so I could finally get a good look at him. He was a big guy, well over six feet, with a shaved head and a dragon tattoo on his left bicep. He looked like a studly action hero cut from the Vin Diesel mode, and even wore a tight Army green tank top, camouflage pants, and black scuffed boots. His handsome stubbled face was dark and tan, a perfect testament to his obvious Latin heritage. He was the sexy, strong, silent type, and boasted a killer body underneath his casual military attire. If I hadn’t known better, I would have sworn I had just walked into the middle of a gay porn video.

  “Who are you?” I whispered.

  “Later. Right now I’m going to get you out of here.”

  “Not until I talk to Mr. Martinez.”

  He looked at me as if I were an idiot. And at the moment, that was exactly what I felt like.

  “You say the wrong thing to Martinez,” he said, “and you might wind up on a one-way cruise to Cuba as fish food.”

  I had heard that line before. It was probably from when I’d guest-starred on Miami Vice in the eighties as a child prodigy chess champion who competes in a high-stakes international tournament against the thirteen-year-old son of a Havana-based drug dealer Crocket and Tubbs were investigating.

  “Trust me,” he said. “Not a smart move. Now come with me.”

  I wasn’t used to being told what I could or could not do. Charlie would certainly attest to that. But my instincts told me to trust this guy.

  He gripped my arm with his enormous, thick hand and steered me toward an alley leading away from the site and to a vast empty parking lot on the other side of a neighboring building. He pulled a set of keys out of his pants, clicked a button, and unlocked a custom-made sleek blue van that was more buffed and built up than he was. He released my arm and crossed to the driver’s side door.

  “Get in,” he said in a gruff, impatient voice.

  “What about my car?”

  “Forget it. Martinez’s meatheads recognized it parked acro
ss the street when they came out. They’re just waiting for you to come back so they can pounce. Now are we going to stand here and jabber all day or are you going to get in my van?”

  I stopped just short of climbing in the passenger’s seat. “You’re not some serial killer, are you? I just had this vision of you knocking me over the head with a crowbar, and me waking up in some carved-out ditch in your basement handcuffed to a water heater.”

  He treated me to a barely perceptible smile. “Relax. You’re safe with me.”

  I decided to go with it and jumped in the van next to him. As he thrust the key into the ignition and fired the van up, he turned and added with a swift wink, “Of course, if you don’t stop looking at me with those ocean blue eyes of yours, I may have to pounce.”

  I was starting to like him. A lot.

  We pulled out and drove south toward Hollywood, Florida, a tiny hamlet wedged between the two larger, more famous cities of Fort Lauderdale and Miami. We drove in silence for a few minutes. I was still reeling from his flattering remark regarding my eyes. Maybe it was a tactic to throw me off balance so I wouldn’t give him any more trouble. I guess the Hairspray T-shirt I was wearing, from the Broadway show, had given my loosely guarded sexual orientation away.

  “So what were you doing sneaking around Martinez’s site?” I asked.

  “Same as you,” he said, keeping his eyes fixed on the road. “Trying to find some answers. I’m a private detective. Name’s Bowie. Bowie Lassiter.”

  I wasn’t sure how much I should reveal. He could be lying. He could be on Martinez’s payroll and just pretending to be on the same side to find out how much I knew about Martinez’s illegal operations. And once he had drained all the necessary information out of me, he would just slit my throat with the hunting knife that was sheathed in the leather pouch tied to his belt. Man, he was butch.

  “I’m not pulling your chain. Check the glove box,” he said.

  I twisted the knob, and the compartment popped open, revealing a Florida private investigator’s license with a laminated photo. It was definitely him. The picture didn’t begin to do him justice. I tossed the identification back in the box and snapped it shut.

  “Your turn,” he said.

  “I’m Jarrod Jarvis. I’m here working on a movie, and I have reason to believe that one of my costars on the picture has somehow gotten mixed up with Javier Martinez.”

  “Too bad for him,” Bowie said.

  “I think he’s crossed him in some way.”

  Bowie shook his head slowly. “Man, pissing off Martinez is like contracting a fatal disease. It’s not a question of if you die, it’s a question of when.”

  “How do you know so much about Martinez?”

  “I grew up in the area. Everybody knows the family. They’re famous for outfoxing the police, the lawyers, the city, and whoever dares to stand up to them. Javier controls half the businesses in South Florida. I’ve managed to stay out of his way until recently,” he said.

  “Why poke your nose into his business now?”

  “A cousin of mine, Calvin, met Martinez’s daughter at a night club about six months ago. Had no idea who she was. They started dating. She fell hard for him. But then, it slowly dawned on him who her father was, and it scared the hell out of him. He didn’t want to be dragged into the mob, so he pulled back. And it broke her heart. Once Daddy found out that some local kid upset his only daughter, he made it his mission to be damn sure he’d never do it again.”

  “You mean he had him killed?”

  Bowie shrugged. “Don’t know. Calvin just up and disappeared one day. That was three months ago. But there’s a long list of unsolved homicides that the cops are convinced are tied to Martinez’s operations. So it’s a good bet.”

  “I guess your family is counting on you to give them some closure,” I said.

  Bowie nodded, but didn’t say anything else.

  When we arrived in South Beach, I was about to instruct Bowie to drop me off at the drab Ritz Plaza where I was staying, but he veered off to the right and headed down the congested Ocean Boulevard and finally to a dock housing several retro houseboats from the swinging sixties. He pulled the van into a reserved parking space in front of a wide, flat, white houseboat in desperate need of a paint job. There was a deck on top for sunbathing. Stenciled on the bow was QE3. If his gratifying comment about my eyes hadn’t betrayed him, a houseboat named after Queen Elizabeth would have certainly clued me in that all was not completely butch in boy land.

  “Come on in,” he said, waving me inside. “I’ll make us a drink.”

  I dutifully followed, and once I crossed the threshold into the unknown, I found a messy, disheveled, old-fashioned bachelor pad with an unmade pull-out couch bed, empty pizza boxes and beer bottles, and a wide-screen TV that had been left on ESPN. As he crossed to the wet bar, Bowie scooped up the remote and hit the mute button so he could check out the scores while making us cocktails.

  “Scotch okay?”

  “Sure,” I said, looking around and spotting a weathered, creased manila folder that rested on top of the worn, stained couch bed. On the front, someone had scribbled MARTINEZ FILE in pencil that was now smudged. I picked up the folder, flipped it open. There was a small stack of surveillance photos of Martinez leaving his various properties and businesses, dining out at some of South Beach’s finest eateries, meeting with a few prominent city officials. When I reached the bottom of the pile, one picture caught my eye. I froze. A man and a woman in their early twenties playfully frolicked in the Miami surf, blissfully unaware of the shutterbug in their midst. Pulling it out of the folder, I crossed to the bar and shoved it in front of Bowie as he diluted the scotch with a splash of soda and then stirred the drinks with his index fingers.

  “Who is this?” I asked.

  Bowie studied the picture for a second and looked up at me. “That’s Calvin. My cousin.”

  I pointed at the young woman. “And her?”

  “That’s Martinez’s daughter.”

  I stared at the picture. There was no mistaking it. Martinez’s daughter was Juan Carlos’s fragile, emotionally distraught ex-flame Dominique.

  Chapter 19

  After three more scotches, the shock of Dominique’s family tree began to wear off, and I was swimming in a sea of confusion. I may have uncovered some dirty secrets involving Juan Carlos’s ill-fated love affair with the daughter of a Miami crime czar, but I still wasn’t any closer to solving the murder of Austin Teboe. Charlie’s friend had told him Teboe was once a chef on board Martinez’s yacht, but had left his employ under a cloud of secrecy. Juan Carlos and Teboe met working at the Nexxt Café on Lincoln Road. Was it just a coincidence that Juan Carlos’s coworker had worked for the father of his one-time girlfriend? Was it Teboe who had introduced them? The only thing I was pretty sure of at this point was the reason behind the rumored hit Martinez put out on Juan Carlos. Dominique was an emotional powder keg, and the blame for her recent breakdown rested squarely on Juan Carlos’s shoulders. If I were Martinez, I’d hire an assassin to rub him out too.

  Bowie folded up his mess of a sofa bed, and the two of us sat side by side on the dusty, worn, patched-up converted couch, our feet resting on the cracked and scuffed coffee table. I polished off the last of my scotch.

  “So why would Juan Carlos be stupid enough to accept a movie role down here in Florida knowing Martinez and his men are just lying in wait to off his ass?” Bowie asked.

  “Someone must be protecting him,” I said.

  “ Domini que?”

  “Maybe. But one minute he’s made her suicidal and the next they’re cooing and kissing like newlyweds. It’s hard to get a good read on her. Although he’s certainly got some kind of guardian angel looking after him,” I said. “Actually, he’s got a lot of little angels around him. The guy gets more action than the backroom of a Bangkok massage parlor.”

  Bowie laughed, drained the last of his own scotch, and grabbed the nearly empty bottle of John
nie Walker Black Label off the coffee table. I covered the rim of my glass with my hand.

  “Please,” I said. “One more and I won’t be responsible for my actions.”

  “Works for me,” Bowie said as he playfully tried to fill up my glass again.

  He was smart and swarthy and funny and sexy, and I knew it was time for me to get the hell out of there. I set my glass down and stood up. “Think it’s safe to go retrieve my car now?”

  A disappointed look flashed over Bowie’s face, but he quickly replaced it with a smile. “Should be. But I’ll take you there just to make sure everything’s cool.”

  “You okay to drive?” I said.

  Bowie nodded, grabbed the keys to his van off the cluttered wet bar, and we headed out.

  I felt a pang of guilt as we drove north back to Fort Lauderdale. Bowie and I had hit it off, and I could tell there was some simmering chemistry between us. He was definitely interested. So why didn’t I mention I was already involved with a terrific guy back in Los Angeles? Charlie and I had been enjoying a wonderful, fulfilling monogamous relationship for the past three years, and I never once had the urge to jeopardize it in any way. But it gnawed at me that I didn’t bring him up. Not once. What did that mean? Fortunately I was sober enough not to do something stupid that I would live to regret despite the not-so-subtle hints from my handsome, musclebound host.

  I was paralyzed by my attraction to Bowie and how bad it made me feel, so he did most of the talking on the twenty-minute drive back to my car. I learned that he’d been born into a large Cuban family in the heavily Latino-populated city of Coral Gables. He figured out he was gay when he was fifteen and on the football team and wasn’t too anxious to let go after tackling an opponent. When he got out of high school, he dabbled in a couple of careers before joining the Navy to ease some of the burden his parents had in supporting such a big brood. He wound up joining the Seals and partook in a number of top-secret missions worldwide before he fell victim to the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy. He got involved with an officer and felt no obligation to hide it from anybody. The officer, though, turned out to be married with four children, a fact he kept hidden from Bowie. To save himself from a discharge, the officer reported Bowie as a homo, and he was promptly drummed out despite a stellar record. So much for a wobbly, ineffective policy to protect our gay military personnel. Most critics claim it’s even worse now than before “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” Bowie moved back home, got his private detective’s license, sank his life savings into buying the QE3, and opened up his own shop. His gumshoe work had been paying the bills for five years. Except when he took on cases for free like finding his cousin Calvin, who may or may not have fallen victim to Martinez’s dirty doings.