Cold Florida

by Phillip DePoy

  He reached under the bar for it and plunked it down in front of me.

  I dialed.

  ‘Sharon? It’s Foggy. Look, that business we discussed in your office? It does involve the Tribal Council. I’m wondering if someone can dig up a few names for me. You know, who to contact on the Council. Just so I can close up the file and give you that report you were asking me for.’

  Sharon did not even bother to respond. She could tell I was making a play. How she could tell this was a mystery, and it fell under the heading of all the things I did not know about Sharon. But I knew she was writing something down, because I could hear the scratching of one of her razor-sharp pencils on some pad of paper.

  ‘OK, then,’ I said, like she had told me something. ‘I’m coming right in.’

  I hung up and slid the phone toward Fat.

  He looked like he was going to say something, but he didn’t.

  Instead, I said, ‘You’re from New Orleans, right?’

  ‘Born in Desire,’ he confirmed, ‘not far from the Florida Projects.’

  ‘What’s that,’ I asked, ‘the Florida Projects?’

  ‘Public housing,’ he said. ‘Funny, don’t you think? I left Florida to come to Florida.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, without a hint of humor. ‘Funny. So how did you end up in Fry’s Bay?’

  ‘Korea,’ he said. ‘I joined the Army to get away from a woman by the name of Marie. She had a little baby that she said I gave her, and she wanted to give it back. So I went to fight for my country.’

  ‘In Korea.’

  ‘I was only sixteen, but I was big for my size. I stayed over there for two years, got shot twice before they sent me back. Last thing in this world I wanted to do was let Marie get a hold of my Army pension. So I come here to hide out for a little while. Go by the name of Fat instead of Marty. When I left home I was a beanpole. Nobody would ever think to look for me under the name of Fat in a little backwater hole like this. I am cool as a cucumber here.’

  ‘But, my friend,’ I said, ‘it has been nearly twenty years since Korea. That’s more than a little while.’

  ‘Turns out I like it here,’ he said.

  ‘I guess you got along with Pete OK if you’ve been here that long.’

  ‘Yes, well.’ He smiled. ‘There ain’t no Pete, see? That’s what the sign said when I bought the joint.’

  ‘You’re the owner?’

  ‘Shh!’ he said, even though there was not another soul in the place. ‘Keep it down. I don’t like people knowing that. I like to have somebody to blame, just in case there are complaints. “The toilet quit working? Oh, I’ll ask Pete, but he’s pretty stingy with the money, that bastard.” “Bastard,” they say, and then they say, “Thank God you’re here, Fat. Gimme another beer.” See?’

  I had to smile. ‘I do see.’

  For some reason, this made me like Fat a whole lot more – maybe I felt some odd kind of kinship made out of funny nicknames.

  But I was still suspicious of him, completely.

  TWELVE

  Now, despite what I told Fat, I did not go back to the office. On my continuing odyssey, I meandered back to the donut shop. I was still full from the fine fish I got at Yudda’s, but I wondered if Cass, who always seemed to be there, might know more than she was letting on. She always seemed to be a person who saw more than she said.

  So, through the donut door I went, and sure enough, there was Cass behind the register.

  ‘You again?’ she said. ‘In the middle of the day? People will say we’re in love.’

  ‘What do people know?’ I shot back. ‘Some people were saying I was dead this morning.’

  She gave me the once-over. ‘You don’t look that good, but I wouldn’t say you were deceased.’

  The way she said the last word it sounded like diseased.

  I took the first stool at the counter, nearly in front of her. ‘So. Cass. You’ve been here for a number of years now. In Fry’s Bay, I mean. You’ve been acquainted with Lou Yahola for a while.’

  ‘Yes.’ That’s all she said.

  ‘And you know a thing or two,’ I went on.

  ‘Why would you say that?’ she asked me, offended. ‘I don’t know Juke.’

  ‘OK,’ I admitted, ‘I don’t know what that means.’

  ‘Well.’ She pulled her faded blue sweater around herself and shifted in her seat. ‘I don’t like to get a reputation.’

  ‘A reputation?’ I repeated.

  ‘As somebody who knows a thing or two.’ She shot me the fish eye.

  ‘Ah,’ I said, suddenly understanding. ‘Got it.’

  ‘The secret to a happy life,’ she sneered, in stupendously unhappy tones, ‘is to let well enough alone. The less you know, the more you stay out of trouble.’

  ‘Yes, all right,’ I said, ‘I guess I would have to agree with that.’

  She nodded once very hard. ‘Damn right.’

  ‘Sorry I brought it up.’

  ‘But I could tell you a thing or two,’ she confided, much softer. ‘You can bet on that.’

  I blinked. I felt it was the least I could do.

  She drew her folding chair a little closer to me, scraping it across the rock-hard linoleum. ‘For instance.’

  ‘Lou Yahola,’ I suggested.

  ‘Exactly,’ she confirmed even more softly.

  She glanced at the door to make sure no one was about to come in, and then leaned across the counter toward my face.

  ‘Lou?’ she said in a whisper. ‘He’s not just a donut cook.’

  ‘He’s not?’ I asked. ‘What else is he?’

  ‘He’s a medicine man.’ Her eyes darted everywhere for a second. ‘I’ve seen him levitate.’

  ‘You’ve seen him what?’

  ‘Float. I saw him float in the air. Twice. Swear to Christ.’

  ‘Here in the kitchen?’

  ‘No,’ she went on, ‘outside!’

  ‘Outside where?’ I began, then I thought better of it. ‘Wait. You believe that Lou Yahola can float.’

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ she said, and her voice was a little spooky, ‘but I’ve seen it.’

  ‘You have.’ I didn’t know what else to say.

  ‘And he’s got other tricks too,’ she swore.

  ‘Cass,’ I sighed, ‘I’m not going to mess with you. This sounds crazy. You sound crazy saying this.’

  ‘Yes, I do,’ she agreed. ‘That’s why I don’t tell anybody. That’s why I don’t like it to get out that I’m a person who knows a thing or two. What happens? When they think you know something, they ask you about it. And when you tell them? They don’t believe it. That’s my lot in life, and I know it. Even when I was young, I knew stuff that other people didn’t know, and I would tell them about it. And they would never believe me. Why the hell do you think I ended up in Fry’s Bay, Florida, in a God damned donut shop? I sang with George Shearing, did I ever tell you that? I was all set to record with him. Nineteen fifty-nine. And then that bitch Peggy Lee muscled in. I told him that she’d leave after one album. And she did! But he didn’t believe me, and by then she’d ruined my chances.’

  I stared at Cass. She had her eyes closed and her eyebrows raised way high and looked about as crazy as you could get.

  ‘Peggy Lee ruined your chance at fame and fortune,’ I said, ‘and dumped you off in Fry’s Bay.’

  She opened her eyes. I wouldn’t have said that she was crying, but her eyes were misty. The look on her face would have broken the heart of the toughest mob guy I knew. ‘Sounds crazy, right? You think I’m not aware of that?’

  So I realized, in that moment, that I wasn’t going to get a bit of help from poor old Cassie. In fact, she was the one who needed help, and more than I could give her. So I did what anybody would do when they accidentally hit a hornet’s nest. I backed away.

  ‘So, it’s a tough break, I’ll admit,’ I told her, mustering a bit of theatrical sympathy. ‘But you make the best of it, I guess.’

&nb
sp; She leaned back with a weird smile on her face. ‘I guess.’

  ‘Anyway.’

  ‘Lou Yahola is in trouble,’ Cass said, without looking at me. ‘He’s drunk at work a lot, but he’s never messed up like this.’

  ‘Like what?’ I asked.

  ‘Like hanging on to a baby and dosing you with Seconal and getting shot up.’

  I nodded. ‘News travels fast.’

  ‘Cops were in here earlier. That asshole Rodney.’ She sniffed. ‘Asked about Lou. Asked about you.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘I didn’t tell them a thing.’

  I took a look around the old donut shop. A cold February day in Fry’s Bay, Florida. The place was warm and smelled like hot donuts, which is a smell you never get tired of. Sure, it’s small. And the clientele was not exactly your finer citizens. But Cass? I liked her, despite her obvious troubles, or maybe even because of the fact that she was nuts. Who could say? I thought to myself, There but for fortune, that’s me. And then I thought, What makes you a big shot? You think you’re not in the same boat? Your office smells like crap and cigarettes, and it’s a quarter the size of this donut shop.

  Thinking these things made me even more inclined to give Cass a break. So I told her, ‘Thanks, Cass. For not mentioning anything about me to the police, I mean.’

  She looked up at me. ‘You’d do the same for me, right?’

  I nodded, because I would at that.

  I figured I was batting zero. Jody shot at me and got away with it. Cass turned out to be nuttier than a Georgia pecan farm. Lou was gone, Lynette was gone, and the baby who started the fracas was just fine. So what was I doing? I had to wonder, why couldn’t I just leave well enough alone?

  As I stepped outside the donut shop, I was thinking that I might just go home and sleep until, like, Passover.

  Such, alas, was not my fate. At the exact moment I stepped off the curb, lost in thought, a bright red 1965 Corvette squealed around the corner and headed right for me, roaring like a very angry bull.

  I managed to jump out of the way just in time, but the Corvette popped a tire on the curb and there was a mighty brouhaha. The busted tire made it impossible to steer the car, so it careened into the side of the building next to the donut shop – a shoe store that had been closed for a while. The guy driving the car was cursing like a banshee and saying words that even I did not know. He tried to back the car up, but the engine was stalled. He screamed at the top of his lungs and jumped out. I saw him, eye to eye. This made him even more upset, and he rushed me, like he was trying to tackle me. But he was so distraught that I only had to jump a little and he flew past me. As he did, I popped him one in the back of the skull, hard as I could, and he skidded, face down, across the pavement of the sidewalk. His nice grey suit got all messed up, and he didn’t move after that.

  Cass appeared in the doorway of the donut shop.

  ‘What the hell is going on out here?’ she wanted to know.

  ‘A guy tried to kill me with his car,’ I said, ‘and then he got mad at me for not dying.’

  Cass looked down at the mess on the sidewalk.

  ‘This guy?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How’d he get like that?’ She pointed her loafer in his direction.

  ‘He came at me, so I bopped him in the head.’

  She stooped down just a little. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘you shouldn’t have done that. That’s going to make him very mad.’

  ‘I should have let him knock me over?’

  ‘Better that than what’s going to happen when he wakes up,’ she said, straightening up.

  ‘What’s going to happen when he wakes up?’ I had to ask.

  She looked at me hard. ‘He’s going to kill you.’

  I stared down at him. ‘He is? Why? This was his fault.’

  ‘No, you misunderstand,’ she said, backing away into the donut shop. ‘That’s McReedy. His job is to kill people. You should run.’

  THIRTEEN

  I didn’t wait around to decide if Cass knew what she was talking about. Things were clearly moving in the wrong direction – what with people trying to kill me with their cars – and I began to think that maybe I needed a drink to settle my nerves. Maybe I would just quit my investigation and spend the rest of the day in drink. When I drank I got reflective, and I figured I needed a good bit of reflection before I did anything rash. So I headed back to Pete’s for a Hot Tom and Jerry.

  Now, Tom and Jerry was a drink that Fat didn’t know before I taught him how to make it, but on a chilly day it was just the ticket. It consisted of a good portion of heated whiskey, along with a nice dash of bitters. You added a circle of lemon, a pat of butter melting into it, and enough sweet vermouth to make you forget that you were drinking too much whiskey. This was not my recipe for a Hot Tom and Jerry. I got it from a guy named Red Levine when I was a kid in Brooklyn, but that would be another story.

  Suffice it to say that I was looking forward to my Hot Tom and Jerry just as the day began to cloud over and the chill wind picked up from the bay.

  It was still early in the afternoon, but as I walked into Pete’s I could see that the place was doing a selectively brisk business. I counted seven or eight customers at tables and booths. There was only one guy at the bar. Most of these were faces I recognized, though there was no one I knew too well in the crowd. This was perfect to me, because I would not be bugged by someone wanting to be friendly, but I would not be spooked by a joint packed with strangers.

  I took a seat at the end of the bar and Fat shook his head.

  ‘You again?’

  ‘Yes,’ I admitted, ‘I’m getting that a lot today. I have been making a particularly circular path so far.’

  ‘Recidivist,’ he sneered good-naturedly.

  ‘Guilty,’ I allowed, ‘but you can make all my cares and troubles go away.’

  ‘A drink, perhaps?’

  ‘If you insist,’ I told him. ‘How would you feel about a Hot Tom and Jerry?’

  ‘Ah,’ he says wistfully, ‘your Hebrew Manhattan.’

  And with that he set himself in motion on his mission of mercy.

  I settled into a seat at the bar far enough away from the other guy there to be respectful of his privacy. He gave me the nod, a little sadly. I commiserated with a kind of a hapless shrug, and there you were: bar etiquette observed.

  Alas, before Fat could deliver on his promise of the aforementioned elixir, the sky blackened and gave forth with a mighty rumble, the presage of cold rain. Likewise, the doorway of Pete’s Billiard’s Emporium was darkened by the biggest slab of goon I had ever seen. This guy had to weigh two-eighty, and stood close to seven feet tall. He actually had to duck and turn sideways a little just to get through the door. His midnight hair came down to his shoulders, and he was wearing a gigantic silk shirt, un-tucked, and black jeans. Behind him came a dandy in a superior sharkskin suit with a tie that cost six months’ rent. Suit-guy’s hair looked short at first, but then you could see it was actually in a long braid down his back.

  They took over the entire joint just by walking in. They didn’t even look around, neither one of them. They got a bead on me and motored right for my barstool.

  I considered jumping over the bar and scrambling out the back door, because they appeared to mean trouble, but there was Fat, his back to me, entirely blocking even the whisper of such an exit.

  So I took a deep breath, tried to stay calm, and wondered if my relatives in Brooklyn would ever find out what happened to my remains, because I had a very sinking feeling about what was about to happen. The swell dresser was a boss, and the goon was muscle like I had never seen before in my life, and I would have given five to one that I wasn’t going to get out of Pete’s alive.

  I put my hands on the bar so that everyone could see I had no weapon. I let my shoulders sink down, relaxing the neck muscles.

  The goon sat down on my left, and the dandy sat on my right.

  ‘Hey, Fat?’ I s
aid in as steady a voice as I could muster. ‘Maybe you better make three of those.’

  ‘Three?’ he railed, turning.

  When he saw who was sitting with me, he froze, and then all the color left his face. He spilled half my Tom and Jerry because his hand started shaking.

  I turned to the dandy. ‘Unless you’d like something else. I’m having a Hot Tom and Jerry.’

  The dandy smiled. ‘Ask Fat why he’s not going to serve me anything.’

  I turned to Fat.

  Fat said, ‘I’ll give you any goddamn thing you want, Mister Redhawk.’

  Mister Redhawk kept smiling. ‘Well, that wouldn’t be legal, would it, Fat?’ Mister Redhawk turned to me. ‘It’s still against the law in the state of Florida to sell liquor to an Indian.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I agreed, ‘and it’s always been illegal for a Jew to eat pork, but how many bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwiches do I have in a month?’

  ‘I’m not sure that’s comparable,’ Mister Redhawk said philosophically. ‘One’s a government law, the other is a religious observance.’

  ‘No, see, it is comparable,’ I told him. ‘It just depends on whose authority you’re worried about.’

  ‘Ah,’ he agreed, tapping the bar with his knuckles, ‘I was told that you were smarter than you looked. I see that it’s true. You understand what I’m about to tell you before I even open my mouth.’

  ‘Maybe.’ I glanced at Fat. He was still holding the un-spilled half of my Tom and Jerry, and he was frozen in his tracks. ‘Could I have what’s left of my beverage, Fat? I think I’m going to need it.’

  ‘I’m about to tell you, Mr Moscowitz,’ Mister Redhawk said, as if I was not talking to Fat at all, ‘that we live in a morally relativistic universe. And that while you owe allegiance to certain government authorities with regard to your job, you also must follow the dictates of another power.’

  I nodded. I thought it would be best if I kept my mouth shut for a minute. It showed respect. Or at least I hoped that’s how Mister Redhawk saw it.

  Mister Redhawk blinked and, without taking his eyes off me, said to Fat, ‘Are you going to bring Mr Moscowitz his drink, or were you thinking of spilling the rest of it too?’