Tropical Freeze

by James W. Hall

  ’Cause up to then the Lord had failed them and doomed them to poverty and a life of misery and sin. He said how him and Bonnie had called out his name on repeated occasions and the Lord had failed to come through. All this while he was looking at the barrel of that gun, watching it tilt down. Every inch of tilt giving him more juice to talk.

  Having a father who’d had a backwoods silver tongue was finally coming to some use. ’Cause he knew how these God-squaders thought, that you con them with their own shit: guilt, hope, charity. Ozzie went on, pushing it farther, saying that just a few minutes earlier, right out here in the parking lot of the church, him and Bonnie had been praying to beat the band. They’d tried calling out the name of the Lord, his secret name of Yahweh. Ozzie remembered the name from all the hundred times his daddy had screamed it out in church and made all those redneck Baptists sweat.

  That priest took them into the church. Led them down front. Salvation by gunpoint, Ozzie was thinking. If his daddy had tried that, he’d have had a hell of a lot more success converting those peabrains.

  That church was a much nicer place than any church Ozzie’d ever been in before. Looked like there might even be a few things around worth stealing. The priest led them down to the altar, had them get down on their knees, and got down himself right alongside of them and said a prayer out loud. His voice choky. Ozzie was thinking, good grief, maybe I’m in the wrong business. Maybe songwriting isn’t my gift after all. Conning preachers might be a whole new direction.

  So the preacher prayed that grace and mercy would come rolling down from the heavens and fill up these impoverished souls and lift their heads and turn their hands to profitable enterprise. All the same hooey Ozzie’d heard his old man spouting, only this guy using a better class of English. Bonnie looking across the preacher’s back at Ozzie, her eyes wide like the Lord was giving her a little feel, squeezing her goodies. And Ozzie winked at her. Maybe the bitch would be more respectful. Maybe finally.

  But she wasn’t. She was there, drinking down the Coors he’d opened, throwing her head back and gulping it. Then she gasped, slapped the can down, and started right back in the same way she’d always done: “They’re going to know right off, asking for three thousand bucks like that, they’re dealing with a numb-nut. A loser.”

  “Three thousand dollars, that’s a shitload of money,” Ozzie said. “What’re you talking about? You don’t know any more about the kidnapping game than I do, what’re you doing giving me orders?”

  “That’s chump change. That’s not diddly. She gets that for a night on TV. She goes to the mall and puts that on her charge card in one afternoon.”

  “So? Then she shouldn’t have any trouble getting it together, should she?”

  “Christ Almighty,” she said. “What else’d you do? You sign your name? Give ’em your address?”

  “Bonnie,” Ozzie said, trying to flex that muscle in his voice again, reaching down into his throat, looking for it, “you just go ahead, keep making fun of me, you hear that. You just keep saying these things. Go ahead.”

  “Yeah, yeah. You’re so tough. You’re such a Johnny Cash roughneck. Jesus, I’m getting out of here.”

  But she didn’t move. She just sat there looking at the empty beer can and not moving. And Ozzie knew she was scared, too. He could see it. She might give him her shit some more, talk her trash, but this was it. The scales had tipped. Ozzie was boss, captain of this goddamn ship.

  “Now next thing to do,” said Ozzie, “is go pick out some phone booths, write down the numbers. Run the people from phone booth to phone booth. You call them, move them to the next phone booth. Make sure the cops weren’t following.” Ozzie thinking, like on “Cannon” or which was it, one he just saw last week? Now what’d the kidnapper done wrong? How’d he get caught? Oh, yeah. The victim got loose, that was it. The guy broke out of the basement where they had him tied to the furnace. Ozzie thinking, well, no problem there. No problem there at all.

  But one problem he was having was he didn’t like the idea of causing Darcy Richards any pain. Course, then, on the other hand, when he had the three thousand and she found out her brother wasn’t coming home, she’d be ripe for some comforting. Take her money, then step in and take her love. Maybe he’d even spend some of her money back on her. Jewelry or flowers or appliances. Things women got lathered over. Ozzie could be mighty generous. All it took to get him going was the right lady.

  Bonnie, chewing on the edge of a fingernail, said, “I don’t like this shit. Somebody walking into our backyard and wasting this guy. I don’t like this shit at all.”

  “I been thinking on that,” he said. “It wasn’t any drug dealer or shit like that. They don’t leave behind their bodies. I figured out just who it was killed him. And I know why, too.”

  She was really gnawing on that fingernail now, staring at him, all the bitchiness and backtalking gone out of her. Ozzie loved this. It was just like Johnny Cash. All it took, you had to jab in the spurs, show ’em what balls were all about. And even the Dobermans like Bonnie ducked their heads, stuck their tails deep between their legs.

  “So, who?” she said.

  “Only badass I know around here that’s badder than me,” he said. “Papa John Shelton.”

  “Come on,” Bonnie said. “That old cow.”

  “It was him, I’m telling you. And he did it to show me what’s what. It’s part of the lessons he’s teaching me. Like he was giving me a problem. Whatta you do with a dead guy in your shed? Like in school. Solve this. It’s just like him to do it.”

  “The two of you,” she said. “I don’t know which one is worse. Doing all this macho bullshit. Guys with the real balls don’t have to act tough. It’s the needle-dicks that are always puffing up.”

  Ozzie stood up.

  “Who you calling a needle-dick?”

  Bonnie was silent, wouldn’t even look up. She was gnawing again on that finger. Her and her psychology. Her and her college class.

  A line came to him then. It just whooshed his anger away. He stood up, got the slump out of his back, and took a good breath. He was an outlaw songwriter. He couldn’t forget that. Him and Johnny and Waylon and even that white bread Jimmy Buffet. Outlaws, pirates. Yeah. Yeah.

  The night you called me a needle-dick was the first night of the last of your life.

  It was a horse conch. A big one. Brown and unpolished. It had lodged underneath the dresser beside the bed. Darcy had it sitting on the dinette table when Thorn came back inside, the pistol sitting beside it.

  She turned her face to him and her cheeks shone with tears.

  “Anything out there?” she said, voice scratchy.

  “People next door heard the crash, and a lady, Mrs. Beesting, thought she saw someone running away. Thought it was a black kid, but wasn’t sure. Nothing else. I looked around back, some aralias were broken, but that’s it.”

  “Look at this,” she said. “It’s Gaeton’s.”

  Thorn sat down across from her, and she pushed it over to him. A class ring from the University of Florida. A blue stone.

  “It was wadded up inside this, crammed in the shell.” She flattened out the paper with the palm of her hand. Passed it across. It was torn from a yellow legal pad. A ragged rectangle. In pencil was scrawled: “You want the finger that comes with this and the rest of this dinklebery, you get 3000 dollars of reglar unmarked money reddy by thursday this week at no later than sometime before noon.”

  “Shit, shit, shit,” Thorn said.

  He stood up. He made a slow pass through the living room. He looked at the marksmanship trophy Gaeton had won in high school. The little black-and-white TV, the Naugahyde recliner. He touched Darcy’s tarpon and looked inside the terrarium with one hermit crab living inside a small whelk. There was a round glass-topped table with a navigation chart of the Keys pressed beneath the glass. All the while he was trying to get down a decent breath, trying not to put his fist through anything.

  He came back to the din
ing area. Darcy didn’t look up from the table. She held the horse conch, turning it around in her hands.

  Thorn said, “I did this somehow.”

  “What?”

  “I let him down,” said Thorn. “He asks me to help him, I make it into a joke. Dump Benny into his Jacuzzi.”

  “No, no. You did right, Thorn. This doesn’t have anything to do with you.”

  He sat down across from her.

  “You’re just guessing.”

  “I know,” she said, still handling that conch shell.

  “We should be careful,” he said. “There might be fingerprints on that thing.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “We can’t go to the police.”

  “Darcy.”

  “There’s more going on than you know, Thorn.” She rose and took the horse conch across to a bookshelf beside the TV. She put it on the shelf, adjusted it, making a place for it there, swiped at the dust on the shelf with her palm.

  He followed her outside. Dogs were still barking. The sky clear now, scattered with stars. Venus was bright in the west. The Big Dipper full of black sky. It looked frigid up there tonight, the stars smaller and farther away than usual. He stood outside the door of her trailer, both of them looking up at the sky.

  “I’m calling Sugarman,” he said.

  “No.”

  “You don’t trust Sugarman? Oh, come on.”

  “Sure, I trust Sugarman. But it wouldn’t stay with the local police. Kidnapping, they have to turn these things over to the FBI.”

  “Well, so much the better.”

  She shook her head. Thorn followed her as she walked carefully down the darkened dirt lane that ran through the heart of the trailer park. Blue television light flickered across their path.

  Thorn walked silently beside her out to the Bomb Bay Marina. She sat on the cement seawall, and he sat beside her. Only a couple of pickups were in the parking lot of the Bomb Bay Bar. The jukebox was playing a Merle Haggard song, its lyrics whipped apart by the sea breeze.

  “Last January, Thorn, I started getting worried. The way Gaeton was acting after he quit the FBI. He just dropped out of sight. He wouldn’t answer my calls.”

  Her hair was streaming behind her. The water slopped against the rocks just below the seawall. She was looking ahead into the dark wind, only one faint buoy light off to the east interrupting the night.

  “I got Malcolm Donnelly from WBEL. He’s a new investigative reporter. I got him to call the FBI and inquire about the circumstances of Gaeton Richard’s departure, supposedly a story on attrition in the local office. No comment. No comment was all he could get.”

  “Gaeton was working for Benny at that point?”

  “Yeah. He went right from the bureau to Benny. Quit in January and Benny’s boy in February.”

  Now it was Emmylou Harris. Thorn couldn’t make out the words, but it was something sad. No amount of wind could distort that. Palm fronds batted against a nearby streetlamp, the light fluttering.

  “So, I called a guy I used to date. He’s with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. They collaborate with the FBI sometimes, corruption cases, some drug cases. He’s got regular access to the FBI computer files. Well, I had to lie like hell to him, but he called up Gaeton’s employment records for me.”

  She turned to look at Thorn then. He hadn’t realized what this was costing her. But there, in the ragged light, he could see how pinched her eyes had become, the strain in her mouth. Those soft lips, rigid now.

  “Yeah?”

  She was staring at Thorn as if she were just discovering who it was she was confessing to. Maybe a little amused, surprised. Her face softening slightly. She took his hand and gave it a fierce squeeze.

  She said, “There was no record of his quitting.”

  “Well …”

  ‘Hold on,” she said. “There was no record of him at all. Nothing. He’d been expunged. No such person as Gaeton Richards. Blink, he’s gone.”

  Thorn was quiet. He felt her grip slacken.

  “It’s what the bureau does when they’re investigating the Mafia.”

  “The Mafia? Down here?”

  “Or investigating themselves,” she said.

  17

  Darcy said, “weekends I’d wait till Gaeton went out and I’d drive down to Islamorada, rent a skiff, and camp out on the flats just off Benny’s place, pretending to fish.”

  She was pointing her toes down to the water that sloshed against the seawall, stretching them as if to make contact. Thorn held her hand, feeling the current, the blood magnetism growing between them.

  “I bought the longest telephoto lens I could find. And I sat out there with the camera mounted on the fishing platform, hiding it under a fishing hat, and I took shots of people coming and going at Benny’s. Most of them were fuzzy, blurred. It’s hard on the water, bobbing even a little, long distance like that. But a few of them were OK.”

  She stopped and faced Thorn.

  “Do you think I’m crazy? Doing something like that?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Somewhat crazy.”

  “Well, good,” she said. “One of us should be sane.”

  “Let it be me.” Thorn said. They were joking, kind of. But Thorn wondered now about Darcy’s grip, how tight it was.

  She said, “Well, the few prints that were clear, that showed people’s faces, I took them around and showed them to people I know in the news business. On the QT, of course. I pretended I was helping somebody at the station do some background checking on a story. But that didn’t get much. I found out that a couple of the guys were ex-cops from Miami or Fort Lauderdale. Guys that worked with Benny, hanging around the pool.

  “I’ve met some of those,” Thorn said.

  “And then there were one or two guys I recognized. Miami business people, bankers, a district manager for Merrill Lynch, people Benny does security work for. Business entertainment stuff. He was just having his big accounts down for a crab salad and a water panorama, a look at some nude girls. Keys fun and games. But then I got something. It came out of far left field.

  “The man that develops my prints is Haitian, lives in Little Haiti, runs a small lab. I go there ’cause it’s cheap and near work. Anyway, his name is Jules, and Jules says to me, when I go in two weeks ago to pick up some prints, that I’m hanging around some not so nice people. I go, what? And he says, this mulatto with the blond Afro stepping into the hot tub with the two white ladies. He is Claude Hespier. This Hespier guy, he’s the most recent one. Like all the rest of them, near as I can tell he stays at Benny’s two weekends, and he’s gone.

  “So Jules is there looking at me funny. He says Claude lived in the mountains on some kind of plantation. Jules’s sister-in-law, Lorraine, worked for the man, cleaning house. So Jules heard what this guy was up to, knew who came for lunch at his house, lots of stuff. Hespier was some kind of enforcer for the Haitian drug connection. He did a lot of local work around the islands, murdering snitches, do-gooders. Anybody that might have had any moral fiber left.”

  She was staring at Thorn. He could tell his expression must not be what she wanted to see.

  “Yeah? I’m listening,” he said. “It’s a hell of a coincidence, though. This guy does your photos knows a guy in them.”

  “You don’t believe me.”

  “I believe you.”

  “So what’re you saying?”

  Thorn wasn’t sure what he was saying. He just shrugged. Darcy dropped his hand.

  “Never mind,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Never mind any of this. I’ll just do this alone. It’s too weird. Even you, Thorn, you think I’m making this up. You think I’m on some kind of wacko trip.”

  “No, I don’t. I just think it’s strange. A coincidence, that’s all.”

  “Well, it is a coincidence. Of course it is. But I checked it out. I went to Haiti.”

  “You went to Haiti?”

  “Last weekend. I flew
down there, and I met Lorraine. She’s got five children, a pig, and no job anymore. Lives down the mountain from Pétionville where Hespier was. His house is closed up, and all the furniture’s gone, the cars. The place is stripped bare. Weeds in the swimming pool.

  “Then I was at the airport about to fly back to Miami, Lorraine showed up. She signaled me to come over to the women’s bathroom. She was panicky, looking around for eavesdroppers. All in a rush she tells me that Hespier had been a very evil man. She had never told anyone this. The things she knew about him. It would be a great relief to her to tell anyone.”

  “What?” Thorn said.

  “Well, for one thing, he was a cannibal. He ate pieces of his hits. He made Lorraine cook stews for him.”

  Thorn took her hand from her lap. The wind was stirring her hair. Light from the parking lot was giving her skin a golden gleam. Off in the mangroves to the south a nighthawk was bleating. It should have been a romantic moment. It should have made his heart lift, his throat clench.

  “And there’s more.”

  “I can’t wait.”

  “Well, she said Hespier was a computer nut. He talked over the phone with it all the time. And that he had a deep longing to come to America. He loved to watch American movies. Especially Tracy Seagrave movies. He watched one of them almost every day.”

  “Name rings a bell.”

  She rolled her eyes, shook her head.

  “She died ten, eleven years ago. Before she died, she split her time between Palm Beach and Palm Springs.”

  “You’ve done a lot of homework.”

  “Thorn, most people know Tracy Seagrave,” she said.

  She gazed at the marker light. Thorn watching her profile.

  “Why didn’t you just put all this in Gaeton’s lap?”

  “I was scared he was in it somehow. Either undercover or gone over to the other side. Either way he would’ve blown up if he’d known I was snooping.”

  “What other side? You don’t know anything’s wrong with Benny. He’s a schmuck and sleaze, but that’s not illegal. All you know is there’s a guy named Hespier that somebody says is a killer and a cannibal who shows up at Benny’s place for a couple of days. I don’t see anything there, any conspiracy.”