Harry Lipkin, Private Eye

by Barry Fantoni

  “It must get pretty dull at times,” I said. “Not a lot to do in a place like this when you aren’t cooking blintzes and making old detectives peach juice.”

  “I got plenty to fill my time,” Amos said. “I am helping to build a new synagogue.”

  The surprise on my face registered. Plain as the mustache Dali painted on the Mona Lisa. But I should have guessed. The name. Amos Moses. Obvious. An Ethiopian Jew. The lost tribe of Israel.

  “Some time filler,” I said. “Tougher than collecting early Elvis records.”

  Amos Moses smiled. “A lot tougher.”

  Then he looked at me. His expression said that there was something I should know. Something he guessed I didn’t. He was right.

  “There was a war,” he said softly. “We lived in a place called Beta Israel. It was where the war took place. Genocide. Women were raped. Children were murdered. It seemed like it would never end, but it did. Finally. Through famine. Through armed rebellion. Then came the airlift. Operation Solomon. Around twenty thousand people were airlifted from Ethiopia to Israel. It was the biggest and most successful airlift the world has ever known. Imagine it, Mr. Lipkin.”

  I tried. I failed.

  “Thirty-four planes flew nonstop for thirty-six hours,” Amos carried on. “Almost the entire population of Ethiopian Jews was transported to Israel. But some remained. Mainly the Falash Mura. These people, under threat of death by nineteenth-century missionaries, converted to Christianity. In time they returned to Judaism. The Falash Mura, who now number around two hundred thousand, have had the almost impossible task of rebuilding their lives. Their homes. Their places of worship.”

  It was some lesson. I knew from Moses and the Red Sea. Noah. Job. Old history. From Falash Mura? Nada.

  “Plenty of wealthy Jews around,” I said. “You picked the right spot. Miami’s bursting with them.”

  Amos went and opened the drawer of a small wooden table in the corner of the kitchen. The kind cooks sit at to write out recipes. He took out a bundle of letters held together with a rubber band and placed them in front of me.

  “This is my list,” he said. “Alphabetical. I am up to G.”

  I skimmed through half a dozen replies. Amos had written in the amount donated at the top of each letter.

  “Impressive,” I said. “Guggenheim in particular.”

  “One or two have been very generous.”

  I handed Amos the letters. He put them back in the drawer and then turned off the oven.

  “Sorry, Mr. Lipkin,” he said. “I got to get on with serving supper. But I will keep my ears and eyes open.”

  “Thanks,” I said and put away my notebook. “Nice meeting you, Amos.”

  He came and stood close. “You, too, Mr. Lipkin.”

  I climbed off the stool and we shook hands. I looked into his eyes. They were filled with a long journey. Longer than any journey ever made.

  · NINE ·

  Harry Meets the Gardener

  If old Harry Lipkin took a while getting to the kitchen it took no time at all to locate the gardener. It’s simple. Chauffeurs are in automobiles. Chefs are in kitchens. Maids are in parlors. Butlers are there when you call them and gardeners are in gardens.

  He was on his knees behind a fancy shrub fixing something on the mower. It was a mower you drive. He was mid-sixties. No extra weight to mention and still big in the places it matters. The upper body. Biceps. Thighs. Neck. He was in a worn T-shirt with the arms torn off. His graying hair was held in a ponytail and there were bead bracelets on both his wrists. He had a gold earring running through his right earlobe and a diamond stuck into his left nostril. Every finger had a ring. The only skin showing was covered with tattoos. Skulls. Daggers. Hearts. Dragons. Mermaids. Swastikas. A lot were worn out. Old. Faded. Indistinct. Others looked more recent. Some quite new. On his left forearm there was one that clearly read Kill Mankind to Live.

  “My name’s Harry,” I said over a hedge of thick foliage.

  The gardener stopped working and looked up at me. He wanted more. I walked round the evergreen fence and stood close to him.

  “Private detective. Mrs. Weinberger hired me. I won’t take up a lot of your time.”

  He stood up. Slow. Very slow. Like standing up was the hardest thing he ever had to do.

  “Steve.”

  “Anything else? For the record.”

  Steve wiped his hands down his denim pants.

  “For the record,” he drawled, “if I got called something else, I don’t remember it.”

  I thought about suggesting tincture of ginkgo biloba. It is nature’s way of curing memory loss. I read about it once. In the Reader’s Digest. Or maybe it was Sports Illustrated. Either way, I let it go. Steve had the look of a man who remembered and forgot to order.

  I rested up against the wheel hub of the mower.

  “I need to ask you a few questions, Steve,” I said.

  “About?”

  “General questions. About who might be stealing goods from Mrs. Weinberger.”

  “And you figure I will have an answer?”

  “That’s the way it works,” I said. “I ask a question. You give me an answer.”

  Steve took a tan leather tobacco pouch from the rear pocket of his jeans and a packet of King Size Rizlas from another pocket and began rolling himself a smoke.

  “An answer is not knowledge,” he said. “Truth is never the answer. Truth is only the question. Knowledge is found. Never in an answer.”

  It was the old Beat jive, Zen, and hippy jargon all molded into one. It convinces some. A fake swami’s trick. A dollar a hit. The meaning of life. Snake oil. I took out my notebook and pencil to introduce a sense of formality. A cop’s trick.

  “You been in the job long?” I asked.

  He ran the tip of his tongue expertly over the paper’s gummed edge and sealed the weed.

  “Last year I was working in Los Angeles,” he said. “The year before in New Mexico. Anyplace they got a garden.”

  The gardener tucked the stick into the corner of his mouth. Then he pulled out a silver Zippo from his vest pocket and lit the cigarette. The smell was a mix of sweet body sweat and burnt molasses and dead leaves.

  I tried again to get an answer.

  “The question wasn’t where, mister. It wasn’t what. It was how long? In this job?”

  Steve sat cross-legged on the tiled path.

  “Time, man,” he said. “Everyone is so hung up on time.”

  “You got something against it?” I asked.

  “You can’t have something against something that don’t exist,” he said.

  Mrs. Weinberger’s gardener uncrossed his legs and stretched out on his back, staring at the sky. He blew smoke from his lips in a thin stream and watched it curl upward.

  I left it for a minute or two and I tried another way. “When did you take your first salary check?” I asked.

  Steve grinned. Or maybe it was a sneer. One way or another, his mouth did something.

  “Salary?”

  “The money you have left when they take away the tax.”

  He sucked in smoke.

  “Check me over, friend. My pockets are empty. Lined only with the gold of freedom. Freedom from slavery to the dollar.”

  It wasn’t the answer I had expected. Nor understood or wanted. I moved off from the mower and stood over him.

  “Let me get this straight,” I said. “Are you telling me you work for free?”

  He looked at his slow-burning cigarette and knocked ash off the butt with a flick of his little finger. The one with a ring shaped into a silver skull with topaz eyes.

  “No cents. No dollars. No dimes,” he crooned. “I ask only for somewhere to place my head at night and refreshment to sustain the flesh we call our body. What those who have attained enlightenment call the spirit’s temporal home.”

  His gaze drifted toward the garden shed. It was the size of a bungalow. I could see through the open doors all the stuff you
need to kill weeds and cut back the ivy. And there was a single bed. Made up. Ready for someone to sleep in.

  I jerked a thumb at Steve’s temporal home.

  “And that’s part of the deal?”

  He closed his eyes. “A place of spiritual wonder and holiness.”

  There was a long pause. Then Steve opened his eyes and they searched. Like the beam of a lighthouse searches. Far out. Dreamily. Then they stopped searching and found me.

  “Peace of mind, friend,” Steve said. “No one owes Steve. And Steve owes no one.”

  More phony Zen. The philosophy of dope. I looked hard at his forearm. Looking for pinpricks. The tiny holes a needle leaves when you inject your veins with heroin. They would be there. For certain. But I couldn’t see them. No one could. Even a young man with a young man’s eyes. The inky grime of a tattoo that read Kill Mankind to Live was in the way.

  I walked back to the Cadillac, where Rufus was waiting. I climbed in and he drove me home.

  · TEN ·

  Harry Gets a New Message

  After talking to everyone I still had nothing worth a page of a report. Not even a paragraph. Each suspect had a motive. Each suspect had access. That was it. My report. Motive and access. It was time I started asking around town to give Mrs. Weinberger something hard to bite on and myself something positive to chase. I needed leads. Contacts. I needed to make a list. Who and what?

  I’d start with Rufus. Check with the gyms. Tommy Field’s would be a good place to start. But more than anything else I needed to get some sleep. Suddenly I was all in. It was time to give Harry Lipkin’s astral body an early promenade among the stars.

  I went to bed well before nine. But I didn’t sleep. The old never sleep much. It doesn’t bother us. We know we’ll soon be getting plenty. I got cramps in my left calf and a lot of what I’d eaten kept coming back up the pipe that took it down. Pickled onions and chopped chicken liver. Sure. I have pills. The packet says take two at night. Before you go to bed. It doesn’t say what to do if you forget. I slept an hour.

  I ate breakfast slowly and didn’t hurry doing anything else. Around noon I perked up a little and called Tommy Field’s Gym. I said I would drop by in an hour. I was halfway to the front door when the phone rang. I’d programmed the answering machine to let the phone ring seven times before picking up. From the first ring to the last takes twenty-one seconds. I would never make it. Five yards of hallway and another three to the desk. I stood where I was and listened to the voice leaving a message. You can do that with my machine. With the volume up. It was my client.

  “Mr. Lipkin. Are you there? It is me. Mrs. Weinberger. Please call me as soon as you can. The thief has struck again. My jade bracelet. I left it on my dressing table last night. This morning it was gone.”

  The machine clicked and went dead.

  There was nothing I could do. A call back would have only wasted my time. Later with the call back. I crossed the front yard to the garage and massaged my Chevy Impala into life.

  I aimed it east across the city.

  A forty-year-old Chevy Impala isn’t a car I would buy. I got given it. I was hired by an Italian called Leo Cardosi. He owned a restaurant on Dania Beach. Casa Cardosi. He ran it with his younger brother Dino. Leo believed Dino was messing around with his wife. One night they got into a fight and Dino pulled a gun. Dino shot Leo dead and the judge gave him life. A week later the restaurant went out of business. Leo’s wife gave me his Chevy as payment. It was all she had.

  · ELEVEN ·

  Harry Meets Eddie Berkowitz at His Gym

  The drive from my little shack in Warmheart to Tommy Field’s gym takes half an hour. Finding a place to park takes a hundred years. I found a spot five blocks away. I put change into the meter and walked the half a mile back along NW Eleventh Street to the gym.

  If you didn’t know Tommy Field had a place to train boxers you’d pass right on by. Tommy’s was spread out above a row of stores. You got to it through a narrow door and up a steep flight of steps. There was no sign outside.

  Tommy was long gone. He passed on the year they elected Ike. His son Tommy Junior ran it for a while. Then the son sold it to Mike Gutti who sold it to the man I wanted to talk to. He was a trainer called Eddie Berkowitz. I’d known him twenty years. Eddie was an ex-pro. His record was 67 wins, 23 losses, 2 draws. Eddie Berkowitz knew how to use a left hook. All but seven of his wins were knockouts.

  I waited to get my breath back from the walk and then climbed the stairs. A pair of swinging doors took me into a light and airy room. A full-size ring filled most of it. Inside the ropes a couple of kids were busy learning their trade. One was light skinned. The other black. Both had fast feet. Fast hands. Jab. Duck. Jab. Duck. The canvas deck squeaked with every move.

  I made my way across the room, passing a flyweight punching a bag twice his size. “Cuba” was written large on his vest. Next to him was an ex-champ in a bright red track suit and brilliant white trainers. The title he won was thirty years ago. When he had hair and a name people knew. He was shouting at the Cuban kid to speed up the combos and keep them coming. Other boxers were just hanging around. Sitting. Sweating. Skipping. All of them were dreaming.

  The man I wanted to talk to had his office at the back. Next to the changing rooms and showers. I padded along a wall decorated with posters of great fights. Some Tommy Field had promoted. I read the names. Rocky Marciano. Willie Pepp. Joe Louis. Jack Dempsey. Sugar Ray Robinson. Floyd Patterson. Ezzard Charles. Archie Moore. Roberto Duran. Muhammad Ali. Benny Leonard. If you sang them, they’d sound sweeter than the Song of Solomon.

  I knocked on the office door.

  “Come in and make yourself at home,” a voice called.

  I did as I was told.

  Eddie Berkowitz was sitting at his desk. He was medium height and had never put on more than a couple of pounds since he quit the ring. He wore his silver hair in an inch-high crew cut and showed plenty of tan on his big arms. In all the years I had known him Eddie Berkowitz had never changed his style of dressing. He wore a cotton pique polo shirt tucked into casual pants. He kept it simple. Like the way he lived his life. Like the way he once boxed.

  “Good to see you, Harry,” Eddie Berkowitz said and pointed to a vacant seat. “What’s on your mind?”

  “Rufus Davenport,” I said. “The name mean anything?”

  He gave it some thought. Then he shook his head.

  “Tell me more, Harry.”

  “He drives the widow of a onetime New York hat maker called Weinberger,” I said. “Someone is stealing from her. Most of the stuff is small-time. Trinkets. House keys. Even a cheap fan. But the last I heard they have taken some jade.”

  Eddie gave a low whistle. “That’s serious money.”

  “A thousand bucks an ounce. More once it’s been carved.”

  “And you figure Rufus Davenport for a suspect?”

  “That’s why I am here,” I said. “He told me he fights professionally. To make the extra. If I can put a tick against Davenport’s story I could maybe eliminate him.”

  Eddie got up and went to the water cooler in the corner of the room. He pulled a paper cup from the stack.

  “I never heard of the name Rufus Davenport,” he said. “To box you have to register. The Boxing Federation will give you a license. They print a list I know backward. Not only in this state but in most of the others.”

  He poured water into a cup and raised it. Like he was offering me some. I put up a hand to mean no. Eddie drank the water and threw the empty cup in a trash can.

  “Could he fight under another name?” I asked.

  Eddie went back to his chair.

  “Maybe,” he said. “But I haven’t met a boxer yet who doesn’t want to see his name in headlines. Anonymity. It’s for writers. Poets. People like that. Not fighters.”

  “But it is possible?” I said. “He could be Bombshell Baxter? Hollywood Maninsky?”

  Eddie raised an eyebrow.

  “Pos
sible but unlikely,” he said. “I’ll check with an old southpaw who hangs around the gyms. Barney Bates. He drops by here from time to time. He might know something.”

  There was a clock on the wall behind where he was standing. It reminded me I was on a meter.

  “Something else,” I said and fished in my pants for some loose change. “The Cuban kid punching the bag. He needs to work on his lower body.”

  Eddie stared at me.

  “Tell him to run the five blocks to where I parked my Chevy and thumb change into the slot. He’s got three minutes.”

  · TWELVE ·

  Harry Drives to the Four Aces Casino

  An hour later I was crawling north to Sunny Isles Beach in a long line of slow-moving traffic. I had no idea if Rufus Davenport could fight like he said. I only knew his name wasn’t registered. Six kids need a lot of everything. His salary would be stretched. Every extra cent would help. A jade bracelet would mean a lot of extra cents.

  But Rufus Davenport wasn’t the only suspect.

  My next stop was Maria’s good brother. From him I needed to find out more about the bad one. And the truth about Maria.

  Halfway to the Four Aces Casino I realized I was far too early. Casinos catered to the night trade. Gambling and dining. If I showed up now the only people there would be cleaners and telephone receptionists. I took my foot off the gas and poked the nose of my Chevy in the direction of Milton’s Deli.

  The place was full. Everyone in town. Eating. Talking. Not a seat anywhere. Milton put me in his office. I sat at the table he used for a desk and ordered strawberry cheesecake with a glass of lemon tea. And I also said that I needed to use the phone. Milton told me he couldn’t remember a time when I didn’t and to help myself.

  While he was out of the room I called directory assistance. The voice on the end of the line gave me the number of the Four Aces Casino and thanked me for using the service. I dialed what I had written down.