“When did you have in mind?” I said.
“I’ll leave it to you, Mr. Lipkin.”
“In a couple of days,” I suggested. “There’s some work to do before I pack my denture cream and dressing gown.”
There was a gap.
“A lot of men would take my request a different way,” she said. “You know what I mean?”
“Don’t give it another thought,” I said.
She sighed. “If only there were more men like you.”
“If there were,” I said, “I’d be out of a job.”
Norma Weinberger hung up and I wrote in my notebook to check in at Coral Gables soon as I had time.
On the drive to the Beth Jacob I got to thinking over the information Oscar Letto had left me. Lucky Lee was fast joining Steve in putting himself pretty well in the clear.
· TWENTY-FIVE ·
Harry Drives to Miami Beach
I crossed Biscayne Bay and took the J. F. Kennedy Causeway through North Bay Island, North Bay Village, and Treasure Island to Miami Beach. I made a right onto Collins Avenue where grass grows in scruffy patches out of the dirty pale gold sand on one side and rows of tall tufted-head palms grow on the other. Behind the trees are the hotels. Six miles of them. Same size. Same price. Same everything. The only difference is the name over the entrance. The Beach Hotel. Hotel Beach. They built Miami to come to. From New York when it snows or Oklahoma when they got done barn dancing and cutting corn as high as an elephant’s eye. And they built it big enough and smart enough for visitors to want to come back.
Tourists. A species Darwin missed.
Twelve million people with a suitcase on wheels and nothing that’s as good as they get back home. And that’s just the Jews. They sit on benches writing a postcard home. I could write it for them. We are having a swell time and the weather is great and it only rained the day we arrived and the room overlooks the beach and tomorrow we will be doing the Everglades and the day after Orlando to meet a college kid dressed up as Mickey Mouse.
If I was in the postcard business I’d get a picture of Miami Beach and print the message on the back. All you would have to do is sign your name and stick on a stamp.
Every now and then during the tourist season you’d see someone who was born in Miami. Someone who actually lives there. All year round. Pays city taxes. You’d know them right off. They would be my age and look like somebody who would rather be living someplace else.
I crawled by Loews Hotel and thought about the time when it was just an Art Deco joint called the St. Moritz. Hannah Levinsky had her wedding reception there. 1939. Seventy years before it became the most expensive hotel redevelopment ever on Miami Beach.
Hannah Levinsky. Eyes the color of topaz and rose pink lips that tasted of honey. We had fun together. Hannah and me. That was before she married Roy Burman and his father’s fur business. At the time Hannah got married Burman’s old man had the third biggest tiled bathroom in Florida.
Drivers parking caused a crawl. People with walkers were moving faster.
During the stop–start–slow down I thought some more about Maria. Polite. Honest. Noble. More than pretty. Hardworking Maria Lopez had kind of slipped from my mind a little. All she had was a maid’s salary to send dough back to her father and help pay for her brother’s bail. Maria worked six days a week. I tried to think of a job that she could do one day a week and maybe nights to earn the kind of money she needed. I couldn’t think of one. Not a legal one anyway.
The traffic picked up and I swung right onto Fourth Street and left onto Washington Avenue. I would take another look at Maria. As soon as I had got through checking Amos Moses’s story with Arlen Klein.
· TWENTY-SIX ·
Harry Meets Arlen Klein
Outside Beth Jacob was a palm tree growing out of a tub that someone had decorated with fairy lights and a sign that said Keep Smiling. I parked next to it and crossed the street.
The man who I guessed was Arlen Klein was standing on the bottom step of Beth Jacob. He was holding a bulky leather briefcase and looking at his wristwatch. He wore a Homburg hat, a beketshe and white shirt unbuttoned at the neck. He was wider than he was tall.
“Arlen Klein?” I asked.
The silent reply came with a nod you’d miss if you blinked.
“I am Harry Lipkin. The private eye who called earlier.”
He lifted his watch to his eyes and stared at its face through the inch-thick lenses of his spectacles. They were the kind they prescribe for people with myopia. There was a kid at school who had spectacles with those lenses. He got teased bad. You took off his spectacles and he couldn’t move without bumping into things. We laughed at him. The way kids laugh at deformity. He became a nuclear scientist. Won the Nobel Prize.
“You’re late,” Arlen Klein said as blunt as a butter knife. “And I am a very busy man.”
“There was an accident,” I said. “And heavy traffic.”
He wasn’t interested.
“I get no help,” he said. “I got Rabbi Saltzmann. Some help. I give him a job to do and it takes him a week. A simple job. Send this letter. Make a call. The museum gave him a computer. From new. He sold it to his son-in-law for fifty dollars. I get an hour to eat. Now I got forty-five minutes.”
Klein moved off and I tagged behind.
He had little legs. Little legs that moved extra fast under a hungry body. I struggled to keep him in view.
“There’s a deli a couple blocks down from here,” he called back to me. “Kosher. Saul’s. Saul does lunch for a dollar twenty. Keep up, Mr. Lipkin. Walk fast. They get full early.”
Saul’s was two blocks south of Beth Jacob. There was already a line waiting for takeout but a few tables were still free. The waiter found us a place under a canopy on the sidewalk. I got my breath back and we ordered. Pastrami on rye for Klein. Chicken liver and potato salad for me. Lemon tea for two.
The waiter wrote it down and drifted off.
Klein took off his spectacles and rubbed his eyes. He put his spectacles back on and did his best to look at me.
“I understand that you want some information about contributions to Ethiopia?” Klein asked.
“Rabbi Rifkin figured you would know.”
“Rabbi Rifkin was right,” he said. “If I don’t know about contributions to Ethiopia, no one knows about contributions to Ethiopia. You can take it from me. When it comes to Ethiopian contributions made in this part of the world, there is no one who knows more.”
He let me take it in. If he could have reached he would have given himself a pat on the back.
“Anything on paper I could look through?” I said.
Klein opened his briefcase and handed me a single sheet of paper full of figures.
“These are all the contributions sent to me in the last month,” he said. “I keep a monthly account. The figures you have in your hand are typical of the last three years. I have accounts going all the way back to when we began collecting aid.”
“Impressive,” I said.
Klein jabbed a finger to roughly where I was reading.
“The left-hand column shows the donors. As you can see. Amos Moses sends donations once a month. They are listed in the right-hand column. Every dollar. Every cent. You can see for yourself.”
The order arrived. Klein ate while I scanned the numbers.
“Amos is doing a fine job,” I said and handed back the sheet of paper.
Klein put it away and wiped his mouth with a napkin.
“The world needs a lot more like Amos Moses,” he said and stuck his arm in the air for the waiter to see.
The waiter gestured he’d be right over.
“Take it from me, Mr. Lipkin,” Klein said. “If you are looking for a rotten apple, take my advice. Look someplace else.”
Arlen Klein grabbed his briefcase.
“Got to go,” he said. “Give my best regards to Rabbi Rifkin.”
Klein said nothing more. He squeezed his way into the str
eet and sprinted back the way we came. There was a lot to think over and three dollars forty to pay.
Lee. Steve. And now Amos. Someone should make it into a movie. Crime Without Motive. They could write me a walk-on part as the dumb dick.
I left five bucks on the plate and walked back to my car.
· TWENTY-SEVEN ·
Harry Makes Some Calls
On my way back to Warmheart I thought more about Rufus and Maria. The two suspects I had not checked out.
The maid’s story sounded on the level but the sums didn’t add up. Bail and medicine bite deep into anyone’s salary. Forget making beds and polishing brass six days a week. That pays for nothing. An aspirin and a day out of jail at most.
Rufus looked the part. But all I had was hearsay.
I decided to take a closer look at both of them. And I would do it without them knowing. A tail was the only way. Putting one on Maria would need careful planning. Maids work shifts. Shifts get changed. For all kinds of petty reasons.
But Rufus Davenport was an easy ride. All I had to do was buy a ticket and watch him fight. He said he was good. It wouldn’t take me long to find out. Ten seconds of round one.
Back in my office I called Eddie Berkowitz at the gym. Before he passed away my friend Abe Schultz got me a phone you can walk around the house with. No cord. Abe didn’t do too much toward the end of his life. He didn’t do too much in the beginning. Or in the middle. Abe was just a nice guy. Good-hearted and well meaning. If he had a job it was to be around. A baseball game. A day at the track. You called Abe and he’d come. Wherever he was.
The place got better when Abe was there.
While I waited for someone to answer at Eddie’s end, I took my phone to the window.
Some people watch passing clouds to kill time. Or butterflies. I watch the Feldmans. They were heading off for an early bird supper. It was the evening they went to Mario’s Pasta and Pizza Hut. Not Gino’s Piazza and Pasta House. Mario’s. The pizzas were better. A lot better. I heard Mrs. Feldman tell her husband. More than once.
I also ate at Mario’s when my dentures felt up to it. His pizzas were only so-so but I liked him. After six vodkas I liked him a lot.
Mario was born in the Ukraine. His real name was Igor. Before he came to the USA Igor had never eaten a pizza. He’d never even heard of pizza. And he sure as hell never cooked one. But it didn’t bother him. To Mario a pizza was a flat lump of dough with burned edges that just about fits on the plate and is covered with tomato sauce and hot sausage and melted cheese you can’t chew or cut, and if you didn’t want to eat it sitting down in his place he’d pop it in a cardboard box with his name printed on the top and you could heat it up when you got home and eat it sitting in front of the TV. A pizza. It’s a pizza. Nothing to it. Everyone except an Italian would agree with him.
The Feldmans were in line at the free bus stop along with two dozen other starving Jews who hadn’t eaten anything since lunch. Apart from the two slices of apple cake and maybe a little fruit salad.
Warmheart ran its own free bus service for citizens over sixty. So that meant everyone. Muriel Feldman had the arrival and departure times etched deeper into her head than the ink on a treasury bill. It arrived outside their place. Once a day. Five days a week. At four twenty-eight on the nail.
“Nothing to pay, today,” Imran, the driver, would grin when they climbed aboard. “Free bus. Free country.”
Imran from Iran. His father was a professor of mathematics. Imran once told me that his father had said in public that girls should be educated same as boys. The police threw him in jail. Seven years ago. One day Imran and his pals would change all that. Call Iran by the old name. The name they used when Persians created buildings and music and art and literature and sciences you couldn’t put a price on. Some place. Persia. Then.
Finally someone answered the phone at Eddie’s end. The man who answered wasn’t Eddie.
“Yeah?” the voice said.
“I’m a friend of Eddie,” I said.
“And?”
“There’s a boxer called Frank Dunlop.”
“And?”
“I need to know when he is next fighting?”
“You gotta name, bud?”
“Lipkin.”
“Hold the line.”
I looked at the minute hand on my wall clock. It moved five times before the voice came back.
“I got a list here. Eddie left it on his desk. In case someone by the name of Lipkin called.”
“Eddie’s not there?” I said.
“It’s his grandson’s birthday. Eight years old.”
“Kids.”
“Kids.”
“And Dunlop?”
“Fighting tonight.”
“Do you have an address?”
“I got a list.”
“Does the list say where?”
“He’s on the undercard. Second fight.”
“And where is it? The second fight?”
“Same place as the first.”
“And that is where?”
“Naples.”
“Do you have the name of the venue?”
“The White House Hotel.”
“And the time?”
“Eight on the dot.”
I made a note. “Thanks.”
“Sure.”
“Say hello to Eddie.”
“Sure.”
“Tell him I hope he had a nice day with his grandson.”
“Sure.”
We hung up. I took another look at the minute hand on my clock. If I set off right away I would easy make Naples by the time Frank Dunlop climbed through the ropes.
· TWENTY-EIGHT ·
Harry Sees Rufus Davenport aka Frank Dunlop in Action
The White House Hotel was one of thousands strung out alongside Highway 41. They began in southern Florida and fizzled out in Michigan. When they built Highway 41 I was in short pants. The White House Hotel was nothing but a vacant lot covered in grass stubble. Rusted junk and palm trees. Now it was a thirty-four-story glass tower with three pools, five hundred rooms, six restaurants, nine conference rooms, twenty tennis courts, a health spa, golf course, helicopter pad, a parking lot the size of Tasmania, and staff that spoke every language but American.
I parked and bought a ticket to the Henry Kissinger Conference Room, where they were staging the fights.
The ring was set up in the center of around fifty tables covered in white linen and dinner plates and silver baskets full of bread rolls. In the ring the local bantamweight with bloody cuts above two shut eyes and a busted mouth heard that he had won by a majority decision.
A tall blond waitress with a lot of leg on show wandered over and asked if I wanted a drink. I ordered a blended Scotch neat and made myself comfortable. I didn’t want a blended Scotch. A lemon tea would have been a whole lot more welcome. But lemon tea at the ringside? It’s like the Fastest Gun in the West asking the barman for milk.
“Blended Scotch neat coming up,” the waitress said without a smile and headed toward the bar.
I sat on a chair near a table where a group of a hundred and fifty Japanese were taking photos. Yoshi smiling. Hiroki smiling. Kaito smiling. One day the world will end. The Eiffel Tower will go. The Leaning Tower of Pisa. The Statue of Liberty and the Taj Mahal. Gone. All of it. The wonders of the world from Ayers Rock to Elvis Presley’s grave. Dust. Everything. Well. Almost everything. Someplace there’d be a Japanese tourist smiling.
My drink arrived. I needed it. The long drive had left me beat. I wasn’t looking for a long night as well as the long drive home.
I sipped the liquor and watched the emcee introduce the next two contestants. He read the names from a scrap of paper.
“In the blue corner,” he crooned into his mic. “Frank ‘The Fist’ Dunlop. And in the red corner. Mike ‘Killer’ Bollinger.”
No one cheered. No one clapped. No one noticed.
The bell went. And that was it. The first punch Rufus lande
d was an upper cut. Right hand. It was thrown from just below his chest and traveled six inches. The glove carrying 234 pounds ripped through Bollinger’s thin defenses and smacked him full on his chin. He dropped. Faceup. Eyes wide open staring at nothing. Jaw slack. Gum shield gone. Body limp. Not even a twitch. The referee counted ten with the fingers of both hands and waved the bout over.
There was no mistake. The boxer I had just seen working was everything he said he was. I did some simple accountancy. The standard purse for an undercard out-of-town fight is two hundred and fifty bucks. The manager takes fifty. That leaves two hundred to take home to the wife and kids. Sure. Two hundred bucks is not the same as two grand. But boxing is legal and stealing jade isn’t.
I took out my notebook and scratched Rufus Davenport, also known as Frank Dunlop, off the list.
I looked at my watch. It was just after nine.
I thought about dropping by Norma Weinberger’s for a little late-night snooping but my eyes were growing sleepy and the bits of me with arthritis were waking up. Finger joints. Toes. Hips. Elbow. Back. Top and lower. My painkillers were in the bathroom cabinet.
I paid the tab and drove home.
· TWENTY-NINE ·
Harry Plans to Tail Maria
I put the Chevy in the garage and my hat on the hook. I hung my jacket under my hat. I changed my brogues for my house shoes and undid my tie. Then I went to the kitchen and made a glass of lemon tea and carried it through to the sofa. After a couple of sips I realized I was too tired to drink it all. I went back to the kitchen and emptied what I hadn’t drunk into the sink and washed the glass and placed the washed glass on the stainless-steel draining board alongside the pile of clean pans and pots and cutlery and cups and saucers and all the other stuff I use to cook and eat. I then put the house to sleep and went to bed.
Harry Lipkin, Private Eye Page 9
