by Sideswipe
“If you wanted an easier job, why didn’t you come in and see me? My door’s open at all times.”
“I have seen you! I’ve bitched about my overload plenty of times, for Christ’s sake.”
“Everybody has a lot to do, Hoke. Didn’t I give you Speedy Gonzalez as an assistant?”
“He spends half his time in gas stations, asking for directions—”
“He’s getting to know the city, Hoke, and you just proved my point. It takes a long time to train a man for homicide work, and that’s why I can’t afford to lose you to some jerkwater little town like Riviera Beach. Hell, you’d die of boredom here. And you’ve already proven you can’t run this little apartment house.”
“How’s that?”
“There was no note on your door saying when you’d be back. And some old redneck from Alabama, who thought I was the janitor, asked me to fix his toilet for him. He said no matter how much he jiggles the handle, the toilet still keeps running. You’d better do something about things like that.”
“Fuck him.”
“See what I mean? Here, I’ve got something for you.” Brownley opened his briefcase, which was on an adjacent chair, and took out a large brown envelope. He put it on the table. “You don’t have to open this now, Hoke, but when you come to your senses again, it’ll come in handy. I put your name down for the lieutenant’s exam next month. You’ll have to write your own essays, on Part Two of the exam, but here are all one hundred and fifty answers to the multiple-choice questions in Part One. With these answers memorized, you should be at the top of the list when the results are posted. Only minority applicants will have any priority on you on the next vacancy. That’s because of Affirmative Action, and there’s nothing I can do about that. But otherwise you should head the list.”
Using his thumbnail, Hoke opened the envelope and took out the Xeroxed answer sheets.
“I said you didn’t have to open it now,” Brownley said. “Memorizing all of those answer sheets’ll take several hours of uninterrupted study.”
Hoke laughed. “Hell, these aren’t the answers, Willie, they’re just letters. Without the questions that go with ’em, they don’t make any sense.”
“They don’t have to make sense, and you don’t need to know the questions. Besides, I couldn’t get a copy of the questionnaire. The right answers have all been blacked in, so all you have to do is memorize them in order. See? Number one is C. Number two is A. Number three is C again. You go over them again and again until you’ve got ’em in your head, like reading them off a blackboard. Hell, you’ve got a month. I give you a beer, and now you want an egg in it, for Christ’s sake.”
Hoke returned the sheets to the envelope. “Why are you doing this, Willie?”
“I want to keep you in the division, and I like you, Hoke. It also occurred to me that I might’ve been working you too hard. But that’s the way it always is, Hoke. People who can do more than other people always get more to do. I’ll tell you right now, though—when your leave is over, I’ll see that you get a lighter load.”
“I don’t want the answer sheets, Willie. When I decide to go for a promotion, which I doubt, I’ll study for it just like everyone else. Besides, I haven’t made any decisions. Let me finish my leave, and I promise I won’t make up my mind till I’ve talked to you first.”
“Fair enough. But keep the answer sheets anyway, in case you have a change of heart.”
“No.” Hoke shook his head. He put the envelope back into the major’s open briefcase and shut the lid. “I wouldn’t feel right about it. Besides, I have a hunch I’d be pretty high on the list even if I didn’t study for the exam. You may not remember, but I was first in my class at the FBI course.”
“I remember. How many years have you got left to go? Exactly?”
“For regular retirement? About seven and a half years.”
“That isn’t too long, Hoke. And if you weren’t a cop in Miami, you’d still have to be a cop somewhere. You don’t know how to do anything else.”
“You might be right. But I can learn.”
“I know I’m right.”
There was a knock on the door. Hoke got up from the table. It was Professor Hurt, and Hoke introduced him to Major Brownley.
“I came up to invite you to dinner, Mr. Moseley, but there’s plenty, so you’re included in the invitation, Major Brownley.” Hurt shook hands with Brownley.
“I’ve got to drive back to Miami.”
“No use going back on an empty stomach. Besides, I’ve got four liters of Riunite on ice.”
“I guess I could have a glass or two with you, but I really have to get back to Miami.”
“Let the traffic thin out a little, Willie,” Hoke suggested. “Eat dinner with us.”
“Beefy Winters is coming, too,” the professor said. “He’s an elephant trainer with Ringling Brothers, Major.”
“He was,” Hoke amended. “But that’ll make four of us, and then maybe we can play some Monopoly?”
“I should go back—” Brownley said. “But I guess I can stay for one game. If we play the short game. The regular game takes way too long.”
“I like the short game myself,” Hoke said.
“Okay,” Hurt said, rubbing his hands together. “I’ve got a dozen Swan-son Hungry Man dinners. What’ll you have? There’s fried chicken, macaroni and cheese, spaghetti and meatballs, you name it. What I’ve found out with Swanson’s is that one isn’t quite enough, but two of them are too much. So what I usually end up doing is heating up two different kinds, and I eat what I want from both of them at the same time. I suggest that you do the same. I’ll pop ’em in the oven, and they’ll all be ready in a half-hour or so. Meanwhile, we can start on the Riunite and the game.”
“You two go ahead,” Hoke said. “I’ll dig out the Monopoly set.”
Major Brownley picked up his briefcase and went with the professor, telling him he liked the kind of dinner with the little square of apple pie better than he did the kind with the little square piece of cake. Otherwise, he said, he didn’t much care whether he ate macaroni and cheese or the ham with the sweet potatoes.
Before joining them downstairs, Hoke took the Monopoly game out of the cardboard box and arranged the property cards so that when he dealt them around for the short game he would end up with Boardwalk and Park Place. Hoke knew that if he played Monopoly against Major Brownley, he would need an edge.
16
It was 10:29 exactly when Stanley Sinkiewicz parked his Honda in the asphalt lot outside the supermarket in the Green Lakes Shopping Center. There were seven cars in the lot, not counting his own—more than he had expected—but some of them, he concluded, belonged to store employees. The uneven façade of unfinished buildings, dark and unoccupied, stretched for almost three hundred yards down the lot before the two-story window-less department store blocked and anchored the northern end. Only the supermarket was lighted. There were dozens of tall street lamps scattered at intervals throughout the lot, but none of the sodium-vapor light clusters was turned on. A few four- and five-foot palm trees, propped up by two-by-fours, had been planted recently in some of the concrete islands in the lot.
Stanley locked his car, and then remembered his cane. Troy had told him to take it with him. The cane gave him a distinguished look, he said—meaning, Stanley supposed, that he’d look like a harmless retiree whom nobody would notice. Stanley unlocked his car, retrieved his cane, buttoned his suit jacket, and walked purposefully toward the glass doors of the supermarket, reviewing Troy’s instructions. Once more he marveled at how Troy had managed to make him a part of the operation, yet had allowed him to remain aloof from anything untoward and not become a part of the robbery itself. The store closed at eleven, but as a general rule one of the bag boys, or the assistant manager, would then stand by the doors to let late shoppers out, but he wouldn’t admit anyone. Stanley’s assignment was to walk into the store at ten-thirty and to shop for small items. He was to keep shopping until te
n-fifty, or a little later than that, before getting into the line at the checkout counter.
“If possible,” Troy had told him, “and it is possible, you should be the last shopper in the line. See that you are before you get into the line. By ten-thirty they’ll be down to only one lane anyway. The other checkers will turn in their trays and leave by ten-fifteen, James says. So all you have to do, Pop, is dawdle. If you overlooked someone, and they get behind you, let them go ahead of you in the line and say you forgot something.”
“Like what?”
“It doesn’t matter. Bread, toilet paper, anything. You leave your cart in place, and you don’t come back until you’re positive you’re the only one left. With only small items to check off, and your cart loaded, it’ll take the checker a long time to ring up all your stuff. When you’re the last customer in the store, I’ll bang on the door. The boy won’t let me in, of course, and that’s when you say to the checker, That’s my son. I forgot my wallet at home, and he’s brought it.’ I’ll wave the wallet at the boy. They’ll see the mountain of groceries in your cart, with some of ’em rung up already, and the boy’ll let me in.”
“What do I do then?”
“When I tell ’em it’s a stickup, you just hold up your arms like any other smart customer, and you’re in the clear.”
“Suppose they ask me later why I said you were my son?”
“You don’t have to worry about that. But if they do, just say you’re old, which is obvious, and that you were confused for a moment when you couldn’t find your wallet. So you thought I was your son. The point is, Pop, I don’t want you involved in this in any way. That’s why I’ve come up with this foolproof method of letting you help us, but one that’ll keep you out of it at the same time. But if you think it’s too much for you to handle, let me know now, and I’ll work out another way of doing it.”
“No, no, Troy, I’m sure that I can handle it. It’s just that… well, after the robbery, what?”
“You can’t leave with us, naturally. So you just stay there, and when the police come you act a little dazed and scared. If you can avoid it, don’t say anything at all. Just pretend that you were overwhelmed by the whole thing, and you don’t remember what any of us looked like. Finally, after they’ve let you rest for a while, tell the cops we were wearing masks and plastic gloves, but you think we were black men from the way we talked. They’ll jump on that idea. Just don’t change your story. Then they’ll let you go.”
“Suppose, just suppose, they ask me why I’ve driven all the way down to the Green Lakes mall in Miami to buy groceries, when I live seventy miles away in Riviera Beach?”
“That’s easy. They won’t ask you that, but if they do, tell ’em you were down here in Miami to see the sights, and you stocked up at this new Green Lakes market because the prices were cheaper down here.”
“They aren’t, Troy. Things are a lot cheaper up in Riviera than they are down here.”
“Christ, Pop, the cops don’t know that! They aren’t going to give you any third degree. You’re wearing a suit and tie, you’re a property owner, and you own your own car. You’re above suspicion. Can’t you see how this all works?”
“I guess so, Troy. But these questions just come to me, and I want to do everything right, that’s all.”
“You’ll do fine. Take off your shoes now, and let James give ’em a good shine. Also, clean out your pockets and give everything to me. I already collected James’s stuff, so he can’t be identified. If you don’t have your wallet on you, your story’ll hold up. Put your traveler’s checks in Dale’s purse, over there on the table. She’ll keep things safe for you, just in case.”
“In case of what?”
“Unforeseen eventualities. Sometimes there are unforeseen eventualities that no one can predict. At any rate, when they let you go—which won’t take long—drive back here to the house. Then we’ll get ready to leave in the morning for Haiti.”
“Maybe it would be best, Troy, if I didn’t go with you. To Haiti. Right away, I mean.”
“Hell, I’ve already got your ticket.”
“You can turn it back in when you leave. I can buy another one later. Pd better go back up to Ocean Pines Terraces first, then I can join you later on. Maya might have some second thoughts, and if I’m missing and she calls the police, they might be out looking for me and then they’ll find you and Dale. But I can go back home for a few days, call my son, and then a few days later I can call him again and tell him I’m going to the islands on a vacation. You know, I can sort of set things up. If I leave my car in the carport, and tell my neighbors I’m going on a vacation, too, nobody’ll look for me.”
“Okay, Pop, if that’s the way you want to do it. Dale and I will be in Haiti waiting for you. By the time you get there, I’ll have a house rented and a room for you. When you get to Port-au-Prince, go to the American embassy; I’ll leave the address there for you. Either that, or I can call you from Port-au-Prince and tell you where we are.”
“Can you phone from there?”
“Sure.”
“I’ve already had my phone disconnected. Maybe you’d better just leave the address at the embassy. How do I find it?”
“Take a cab from the airport to the embassy. Then you hang on to the cab, get our address, and join us. If we don’t have a house yet, we’ll be at the Gran Hotel Olofsson. The hotel doesn’t take reservations, but all of the hotels have empty rooms down there because of the troubles they’ve had. So we’ll be easy enough to find. People have a tendency to remember Dale’s face. You’ll find us all right.”
They had left it at that.
During the last few days, there had been a great deal of tension in the apartment. James was so apprehensive, he jumped at the slightest sound, and Troy had given him money to buy rum at the liquor store. James picked at his food, and instead of sleeping at night he sat on the lumpy couch smoking one cigarette after another. He drank Mount Gay rum from the bottle, without even a water chaser. He would finally fall asleep well after midnight. Once James fell asleep with a cigarette still burning between his fingers, and Stanley had seen it just in time. As a consequence, Stanley was afraid to go to sleep until after James had passed out on the couch.
During the daytime, James, because of his trembling fingers, was unable to paint. He spent the day looking at his pictures, wondering what to do with them. After James received his share of the money, five thousand dollars, he figured on driving directly to New York, but there was no room in his little Morris Minor for all of his paintings. He had already packed his paints and clothing in the car, and his plan was to keep driving until he got to Valdosta, Georgia, before stopping at a motel. Finally he asked Stanley for advice.
“What I’d do, James, I’d just leave the old paintings here and forget about them. Let the Shapiros have them. You owe them something for not taking care of the grass and the yard. You’ll be going to school, and starting over again anyway. After you’ve had some instructions, you won’t want to be reminded of your old work. That’s what I think.”
“They’re a part of me,” James said. “I hate to just leave them.”
“I know how you feel. I used to feel the same way after I striped a new car. It was a part of me, I guess you could say, and now it was leaving the line for the whole world to see. But you’ll be painting new pictures in New York, and these old paintings’!! just clutter up your new studio.”
“I won’t have a studio. I’ll just rent a little room somewhere. I’ll have to use the studio at the school to paint.”
“So leave the pictures and forget ’em.”
James nodded grimly and stacked all of his paintings in a corner of the garage. Even so, he would return to the pile from time to time, examining the compositions as if he were trying to memorize them.
Dale kept busy. She washed and scrubbed and cooked plain but ample meals, as well as baking cakes and pies. For breakfast she served them not only fried eggs, but bacon, sausages, and pancakes
. She scrubbed and waxed the hardwood floors of the apartment, then washed all of the windows. She polished the furniture, using Lemon Pledge, and the apartment smelled like a lime grove. She used Bon-Ami and elbow grease and managed to get almost all of the mildew off the tiles in the bathroom.
Troy taught James and Dale how to hold and aim their pistols. There was a .38 Smith and Wesson for James, and a small .25 caliber pearl-handled semi-automatic pistol for Dale. James refused to load his pistol. He remained firm that he would just take an empty pistol to hold during the robbery, but Troy still made him aim and practice dry-firing at a target he drew on the garage door.
“Even if you don’t intend to shoot it,” Troy said, “you have to look like you know what you’re doing. It’s like with the shotgun. People have to think that you’ll shoot. Now Dale, on the other hand, has to keep her pistol loaded because she might have to fire it from the car to warn us when I come out of the market. That way, if someone tries to follow me out, her firing into the air will make ’em stay inside.”
Troy oiled and loaded his shotgun. He bought a khaki windbreaker at Sears, one like James had, and crammed double-aught shells into the pockets.
Sometimes Troy was silent for hours at a time. He would sit in the back yard with his shirt off, brooding, not moving, soaking up the sun.
In the evenings, after dinner, and after Dale had finished cleaning up the kitchen, Troy made her dance for them. She needed to keep in practice, he said, to be ready for her night club debut in Haiti.
Dale was not, in Stanley’s estimation, a very good dancer, but he kept his opinion to himself. Troy tuned to a rock station on the radio, and Dale would gyrate in her G-string, and her bare breasts would bounce up and down; but she was awkward; she stumbled frequently; and she seemed to be out of synchronization with the music, Stanley thought. But Stanley figured that night-club patrons in Haiti wouldn’t be so critical. After all, Dale had a spectacular figure, and as Troy said, she would be wearing a voodoo mask to hide her face.
