Magic City

by James W. Hall

  Stanton sighed. He rose from his chair, went over to Lola, touched a hand to her shoulder, but she cringed, and Stanton removed his hand and returned to his chair and looked at Snake and shook his head.

  Snake shifted his weight on the bench, and a quiet groan escaped him.

  “Are you hurt?” Lola bent forward.

  “The guy threw a bat at me. Same one he used on Carlos. It clipped me in the back. But I’m okay, I’m fine.”

  Lola closed her eyes and sank back into the chair, looking for a moment as if she were going to start weeping again. But she drew a fortifying breath and shook her head in a way that mingled sadness and disgust.

  Stanton said, “Snake, this man. Describe him again. Anything you may have left out.”

  “His name is Thorn.”

  “First name or last?”

  “He doesn’t know,” said Lola. “You’ve asked him that over and over like some stupid cop. Leave him alone.”

  “Guy looks like a boat bum,” Snake said. “Dark tan. Works outside.”

  “About six feet tall?”

  “That’s right.”

  “One seventy-five, one-eighty?”

  “Yeah, late forties, blondish hair. Some kind of blue-collar hero. A roofer maybe, but something tells me that’s not his line of work. The boat shoes. I don’t know, he just has the feel of a dock rat.”

  Stanton gave him a curious look, as if he’d detected the fury in Snake’s voice. Snake was trying to hide it. Act the way he had for those long months after his family was slaughtered. Dead and cold and focused. He’d deal with Stanton King when all the pieces were in place. Hack off his head if he had to. But for now he was staying cool.

  “Carlos had such potential,” Lola said. “But he needed direction. He was lost. So lost.” She shifted her eyes to the grand piano wedged into a corner of the room. An instrument that Snake had never seen opened.

  “We did everything we could for both boys,” Stanton said.

  “Money,” Lola said. “That’s what you did. Your great solution to everything. Pour money on it.”

  True enough, by Snake’s reckoning.

  When he and Carlos each turned eighteen, Stanton presented them with a bank account, replenished it when it was empty. Using Stanton’s political contacts and a chunk of cash, Snake had secured a taxi license and bought his own cab. A few years later Carlos acquired an interest in the porn business. Not the professions Stanton or Lola had in mind.

  Snake had spent the decades roaming the city in his taxi just as he’d done as a boy on his Schwinn, mindless motion. Searching for something, he didn’t know what. Some insight, some human revelation. In the meantime, distracting himself with empty movement, the clamor of the city. Surviving as Cassius did. Falling back, dancing, pushing the big ugly bear out of range.

  In forty years he’d barely lived. He’d had only one lover. Back when Snake was twenty-five. The woman was ten years older, a dentist he’d picked up at the airport. Cindy Marcus. They struck up a conversation, and by the time they reached her South Beach condo, Cindy invited Snake inside. It lasted five years. Two nights a week. Snake in her bed, Snake taking her to dinner and clubs and the beach. Snake going through the motions. Cindy was short and blond and an atheist. Carmen’s opposite. She said she loved him, and kept waiting for him to say the same. Five years. Snake couldn’t bring the words to his lips. Couldn’t lie. He drove his cab, picked up fares, went back to Stanton King’s house each night. When she ended it, Cindy wept and beat her fists against his chest as if trying to bring his heart to life. It didn’t work. Nothing worked.

  Carlos indulged in flesh. Stuck in the soft mud of early adolescence. Fascinated by sex. Spending his nights with strippers and whores. Visiting swing clubs every chance he got, long nights of anonymous sex. Behind his locked bedroom door dirty movies played constantly, the fake grunts and moans of fake ecstasy. Nothing Lola or Stanton could do to pry him loose from his obsession. Carlos was Carlos. Bruised fruit. A boy whose bedroom wall had once exploded. Never the same.

  Stanton tried money, Lola lavished them with affection. Coming into their life a few months after they were adopted by Stanton, she assumed a smothering familiarity with the boys. Tried to befriend them, coax their love. Carlos played along, milked what he could. Cash, toys, later a car, a speed-boat, and clemency for his many transgressions. Snake gave Lola what politeness he could muster and was never openly hostile. But he could never answer her warmth with warmth of his own. That part of him was scooped out, buried in the casket with Carmen’s body.

  Lola’s attempts at maternal passion struck Snake as desperate and foolish, as though she was driven by some emotion more complicated than motherly love. Nor had Snake ever grasped why a woman of such beauty and class would enter such a businesslike marriage with a man she showed no fondness for. What words she exchanged with Stanton were no more intimate than the chitchat of strangers on a bus. Once or twice he’d heard hints of her shady past. Lola the party girl. But he never saw a trace of that woman.

  Across the room Stanton rose and poured himself an inch of scotch and leaned against the mahogany bar.

  “Only got a few minutes, Snake. We need to get your story straight.”

  “I’m not wasting time with cops.”

  “Well, you might have to. If you do, then this Thorn fellow, leave him out. And no mention of the photo. We’re going to call this a robbery attempt. I’ve spoken with the clerk at the store. She’s cooperating.”

  Lola leaned forward to catch their words.

  “The photograph?” Lola stood up. “Where is it? Who has it?”

  “I’m working on that, darling. Be patient.”

  “You and I need to talk, Stanton. Alone.”

  “We will. I promise. But there are things I must handle now.”

  After a moment or two, Lola saw she would get nothing more from Stanton and sat back down with a helpless glower.

  The spotlight blasted against the bayside window. It searched out the slit between the curtains, illuminated the frayed patches where the ancient fibers had worn to velvet cobweb. Then moved on.

  A single lamp on a side table lit the high-ceilinged study. Snake glanced around at the furniture. Same pieces from the night with LBJ. Forty years and nothing had changed. Air the same, same dust circling in the slants of light. Aroma of leather and stale fabric and pipe smoke from Stanton King’s father and grandfather. Same Oriental carpets, heavy mahogany furniture, pool table, deep-set casement windows. Stained glass, crystal chandeliers. Same port and brandy bottles positioned on the shelves of the study exactly as they always had been. Shadowy portraits of Kings going back five generations. The imperial style of a British outpost in the jungles of Malaysia.

  Stanton finished his drink and set the glass aside as the single whoop of a siren sounded outside. Spinning blue lights brushing the heavy curtains.

  “Before we let them in, I want a word with Snake. In private.”

  “Stanton, I have to know what you’ve done. What you intend to do.”

  “Of course. Soon, I promise, we’ll have a long talk. Now please greet our guests and delay them a minute or two.” His tone, coolly dismissive.

  Lola lifted her gaze, staring into the shadows that hovered at the edge of the ceiling. Listening to the racing heartbeat of the chopper overhead.

  She brought her eyes down from the gloom, showed them to the men. As bright and dangerous as shards of shattered glass.

  She stared at Stanton with black hatred until he could weather it no more and turned away.

  “Everything is going to be fine, Lola. Snake and I will put it right.”

  “You’ve never put anything right in your life, Stanton King. Everything you ever touched, you destroyed. Everything.”

  Stanton wouldn’t look her way until she’d given up and marched from the room. With a shaking hand, he reached for the decanter, poured another glass, swigged it and refilled.

  Snake waited for him to swallow the ne
xt slug, then said, “Who’s the man with the diamond ring?”

  “What?” Stanton bumped the glass and spilled liquor on his hand.

  “The man sitting next to you at the fight. I recognized that ring, the clothes, the physique. It’s the man whose fingers I chopped off. He was sitting beside you earlier that evening. What’s his name?”

  “You’re insane, Snake. You’ve lost your mind.”

  “I always wondered if you were involved. Now I know you were. I just don’t know how. Not yet.”

  “This conversation is finished. You’ve crossed the line.”

  “It had something to do with LBJ. The way you brought me in here that night and put me on display. You were trying to win the president’s approval, weren’t you? Because something went wrong. But LBJ didn’t buy it. You fucked up, and that was the end of everything. No more politics. Career over.”

  In the hallway Snake heard the approach of subdued voices—men showing respect for Lola’s loss.

  But Snake wasn’t running yet.

  “You were planning to take it all to the grave, but this picture cropped up, brought it back.”

  “All this time, Snake, you lived under my roof, ate my food, wore the clothes I provided, and you harbored this hatred, these wild fantasies?”

  “I don’t hear you denying it.”

  “It’s absurd. I won’t even discuss such a thing with you.”

  “You saved me and Carlos, brought us into this house. I used to think it was just a political trick, taking in these two destitute boys, just a way to get reelected. But it was more than that, wasn’t it? A lot more. You killed my parents and my sister, then you took me and Carlos in. Why? Was it just guilt? Your pitiful attempt at making amends?”

  “You believed this, Snake, but did nothing, said nothing?”

  “There was a woman that night at my house. I heard her voice. She was in charge. Running the show. That’s her, isn’t it? The one in the photograph. The blonde sitting next to you. What’s her name?”

  “Enough,” Stanton said.

  “Does Lola know what you did?”

  Stanton bowed his head and refused to speak.

  “I promised myself,” Snake said, “that I would find out why Carmen died. And I’m going to do it. I’m finding out what this was about.”

  “Not that you deserve a response to these charges, but I had nothing to do with your sister’s death. I had nothing to do with any of it.”

  “Who was the man with the diamond ring? Who was the blonde? Tell me or don’t tell me, it doesn’t matter. I’ll find out, then I’ll be back.”

  He heard the men speaking with Lola only a few feet from the door. Snake crossed the room, parted the heavy curtains, dragged open the window.

  Outside, the helicopter’s beam raked the grounds, probing the branches of the oak trees, lighting up the swimming pool and cabana.

  The police were at the door, knocking softly.

  “That lady cop that Carlos shot. She knows about the photograph. She’s Thorn’s lover. She’s going to be a problem for you.”

  “Don’t worry about the lady cop. She’ll be dead within the hour.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Thorn ditched Alexandra’s Toyota in a shopping center a mile from the Riviera Motel. The Toyota was the vehicle the cops would be searching for. Not Sugar’s five-year-old white Taurus with a dent in the rear fender.

  Sugarman drove; Thorn sat silent. Buck lay across the backseat.

  “There’s a twenty-four-hour animal hospital on Twenty-seventh Avenue, Knowles Clinic,” Thorn said. “The dog first, then Alex.”

  He looked back at the Lab. The dog was panting. In the motel room before they left, Buck drank a full bowl of water. He wasn’t bleeding anymore from his shoulder wound, but he’d lost the use of his front left leg. Gimping three-legged out the door to the car.

  Thorn hoisted him into the back, and Buck groaned and stretched out.

  “She’s not going to talk to you, Thorn.”

  “Then I’ll talk to her. And she can lie there and listen.”

  “There could be a cop waiting for you to show.”

  “So be it.”

  At Knowles Clinic they were buzzed in by a heavyset Cuban guy. Sugarman handled the paperwork, gave his credit card. Used Thorn’s cell phone as their contact number.

  Buck lay on the tile floor and watched them blankly.

  Five minutes later they were in an examining room. A slender woman came in, said a curt hello, then squatted down in front of Buck and inspected his shoulder. She shook her head and clicked her tongue three times.

  “Gunshot? How’d it happen?”

  “Don’t know,” Sugarman said. “We found him like this.”

  She looked up at Sugar, then at Thorn. She wasn’t buying Sugar’s story and wasn’t much impressed with Thorn, either.

  “His name is Buck,” Thorn said. “You think he’ll make it?”

  “This wound is hours old,” she said. “Lost a lot of blood. I don’t know. If he survives the night, there’s a chance.”

  “He’s a good dog,” Thorn said. “He’s a damn good dog.”

  Buck looked up at Thorn and gave a single thump of his tail.

  “They’re all good,” the vet said.

  Sugarman drove south on Dixie to Kendall Drive and turned west. Twenty minutes. Finally a lull in traffic between one and five in the morning.

  He found a space on the third tier of the parking garage.

  “I’ll be right here.”

  “Ten minutes,” Thorn said.

  Sugarman gave him the room number, directions.

  “Tell her Buck’s going to make it. Be sure to tell her that.”

  Thorn shut the door and fired a finger pistol through the windshield. Sugar didn’t fire back.

  They changed Alexandra’s room. She didn’t ask why. Couldn’t if she wanted to. A disconnect between her brain and vocal cords. They moved her out of ICU into a double room with a hacking, wheezing woman, then an hour afterward moved her into a private one. Her medical plan kicking in.

  Then she remembered her father. The memory bloomed like poisonous haze, choking off the air and light. She remembered him in her arms. His spirit departing. His body losing heft, a flutter in the air. It wasn’t a dream or hallucination. A flicker of energy moving invisibly past her face.

  In the murky light of her hospital room, gravity drew her deep into the mattress. Lungs laboring, heart trudging on. She felt again his body in her arms. The frail weight, his bones as delicate as the stems of wineglasses, an expression on his face, his last look into this world, first glimpse of the next. That second between. Stepping across. She’d seen that moment, the love leaving his face, the yearning and pain, and entering his eyes was a flush of boyish wonder. Something beyond this realm opening up. Leaving her behind. His face full of light, calm, and beauty.

  Filtering in from the hallway was the noise of human traffic. Nurses speaking in normal tones as though the sick and dying, the injured and doped-up, would not mind, or could not object. Business as usual. Their days going on, their gossip, their light banter and laughter, the world Lawton had left behind. The world where his footprints were already disappearing. His scent dispersing so not even Buck could track him down.

  Alexandra felt the drug, whatever it was. Felt the numb flesh enveloping her, lethargy, sadness clogging her veins. She listened to the voices, the electronic pings, the jangle and squeaks of passing carts and gurneys. The pad of shoes. A shadow, then another passing by. Her door was cracked open an inch. A narrow slit of light. Looking out from the dark room into that fluorescent world. The way her father must have done at the end.

  Lawton Collins. A vital man. When she closed her eyes she saw him mowing the yard outside her childhood window. A vision of him pushing the lawn mower back and forth. The smell of fresh-cut grass thick in the air. He was sweating. His muscles showing, the mat of hair on his chest already going gray. Shirt off to the sunny summer day.
She watched him, half naked, in his prime. Back and forth he marched in straight lines. Baggy gym shorts, laceless tennis shoes stained green by years of cutting that same grass.

  He worked in choppy strokes around the legs of her swing set. Halting for a moment to wipe sweat from his eyes, propping a hand against the red metal bar of the swing set, taking a breather, then looking at the cylinder of metal beneath his hand, this apparatus he’d purchased for his only daughter, so she might rise into the sky, kick up her feet, come whooshing back, pushed higher and ever higher by his strong arms. Then her father, Lawton Collins, turned slightly and shifted his eyes to Alex as if he’d known she was watching at her window. He’d felt her gaze.

  He stood there a moment in the sunshine of his manhood. Sweat glistening, resting a hand on the red swing set, the mower idling, air full of grass scent. That was all. A simple look passing between father and daughter on a summer afternoon. But it was everything. That flash across the humid air, that love in his eyes, that half smile of strength and certitude. It was everything he was. His essence. A man sweating in the summer sun, a weekend of chores. Keeping the grass trimmed, his family fed, his daughter reassured that she was safe and well loved, and that any dream she might have, any aspiration, that sweaty man in the yard would do all within his power to help her achieve.

  Alexandra opened her eyes and her sweaty father was gone and the hospital reappeared. She gripped her right hand around the small oval of the cell phone. Before they started the IV, before she was wheeled into surgery, while she was still alert and could talk, could assert herself, “I’m keeping this,” she told the surgeon. “Don’t make me get physical with you.”

  Drawing a laugh from the female doctor.

  So it was there in her hand. The battery running down. It might be dead by now. Under the dazzling lights of intensive care there’d been only two bars left on the battery signal. Probably dwindled away to nothing.

  Not that it mattered. She couldn’t see to dial, couldn’t lift her hand, and if Thorn did think of calling, she couldn’t answer. Couldn’t speak, probably couldn’t even punch the ON button. And the fact was, she didn’t want to talk to him. Not now.