by James Swain
Walking into the Fontainebleau’s lobby, he passed the coffee shop. A menu board was outside. Today’s special was a BLT on whole wheat.
His favorite meal as a kid.
Eat, the little naked chick on his shoulder said.
So he went in and ordered a BLT. Firing up a cigarette, he’d heard a familiar voice from the next booth. Gerry Valentine’s Brooklyn accent was sharp enough to cut bread with, and he’d leaned back and listened.
And heard everything.
More than once, he’d considered shooting all three men right there in the coffee shop. Bang, bang, bang, and leave their brains on the walls. Only, Florida had the death penalty and let condemned men’s heads catch on fire in the electric chair.
So he’d swallowed his rage, eaten his sandwich, and waited.
Eventually, the three men left. Throwing money down, Rico slid out of the booth and made a slow advance toward the front of the coffee shop.
Out in the lobby they stood, plotting his doom. Rico’s hands began to tremble, wanting to do it right then. The three men went outside. Rico watched their movements through the glass front doors.
The valets brought up their cars. Valentine drove a beat-up Honda, the old man a Toyota Corolla. They drove away, and Rico ran outside.
His limo was parked by the door, too big to fit into a conventional spot. He got his keys from the valet and jumped in.
Then he had to make a decision. The Honda had turned left, heading toward the causeway, while the Toyota was going north toward Bal Harbour. Who should he follow?
The old man, Rico decided, just to get him out of the way.
Mabel awoke tied to a chair.
She was in Tony’s office in the back of the house. The blinds were drawn, and she had no idea how much time had passed since the deliveryman had sent her into dreamland. By now, she imagined he’d taken Tony’s big-screen TV and anything else of value and hightailed it back to the hole he’d crawled out of.
A dull, aching throb clouded her vision. The guy had looked like a creep, so why had she let him in? Because she’d wanted to believe he was all right. A character flaw for sure, but one she was not about to give up on. Most people were decent. It was the minority that spoiled things.
She wiggled her chair over to the desk and banged it with the chair arm. The phone, which sat less than a foot away, did not move. Which left what? Yelling at the top of her lungs, she decided.
She was about to do just that when the door banged open.
“Oh, my,” Mabel said.
It was her attacker. He wore a pair of dirty blue jeans, no shirt, no shoes, his long, lifeless hair flopping on his shoulders. His upper torso was lean, the skin covered in angry red dots. He pulled up a chair and sat in it backwards. His breath reeked of marijuana.
“Don’t scream,” he said.
“No, sir.”
“You’re going to help me,” he said.
Mabel found herself staring at his feet. The soles were black, as were all his toes. Tarzan of the swamps, she guessed. “I am?”
“The guy you work for, this Valentine guy, you need to call him, tell him to come home.”
“Then what?”
He took a second too long to answer.
“Then I leave.”
Mabel glanced at the phone on the desk, then shrugged her shoulders.
“That’s easier said than done,” she said.
“How’s that?”
“He doesn’t leave his cell phone on. His number is there on the desk. Call him if you don’t believe me.”
Her attacker scratched his chin. There was not an ounce of fat on his body, and every time he moved, his muscles redefined themselves.
“I can relate to that,” he said.
He went into the kitchen and returned with two sodas that he’d taken from the refrigerator. He untied her arms and gave her one. “Okay, so we wait for him to call. Then you tell him to come home.”
“That could be a while,” Mabel replied.
“Your boss doesn’t care about you, huh?”
The comment caught her by surprise. She’d never looked at Tony’s not calling in that light. Tony was a wounded male, walking around the world without his mate of forty-plus years, and as a result now doing stupid things. But he still cared about her. Because if he didn’t, she’d stop working for him, plain and simple.
That was, if she lived through this.
“He’ll call eventually,” she said. “May I ask you a question?”
He took a long swallow of soda. “Sure.”
“What’s your name?”
“Joe,” he said. “My friends call me Slash.”
Mabel felt a knot tighten in her chest. What kind of name was that? You’re a goner, she thought.
“Mine’s Mabel,” she said.
Tony’s study was the largest room in the house and contained his library of gambling books, a weighted roulette wheel, several boxes of marked cards and loaded dice, a rigged poker table from a gambling club in Gardena, California, and other assorted ephemera.
Slash searched the room, looking for money. Finding none, he began examining the equipment.
The Kepplinger holdout caught his eye, and he took it off the shelf, strapped it to his body, and tried to make it work. The device was used by hustlers to secretly hide cards up the sleeve of a jacket. Tony said it took hundreds of hours of practice to properly use it. After five minutes, Slash ripped the device off his body and threw it on the floor.
Then he noticed the painting hanging over Valentine’s desk. “This must be worth something,” he said, taking it down.
The painting was a reproduction of Caravaggio’s The Card Sharps. It showed three men playing cards, two of whom were cheating. Caravaggio was famous for his paintings of saints and Bible stories, and a museum curator in Italy had hired Tony to examine the work and determine if Caravaggio knew anything about card cheating.
Tony had spent exactly one minute examining the painting. Based upon the hand positions of the young cheater with the plume in his cap, he had determined that Caravaggio was indeed in the know about his subject matter.
“It’s a copy,” Mabel said.
Slash put his fist through it. Then he entered the closet and started opening boxes and shaking them out on the floor. Mabel wondered how long it would be before Slash got bored and decided to kill her. Tony had said that violent people could not stay focused on a subject for any length of time, and Slash was proving this to be true. Eventually he’d run out of things to rip apart and would take out his frustrations on her.
“What the hell is this?” he asked.
“You’ll have to bring it over here so I can see.”
He brought the item over. It was still in its box. Mabel stared for a moment before realizing what he’d discovered. Then had an idea.
“That’s the most amazing cheating device ever made,” she said.
“Cheating at what?”
“Blackjack.”
Slash pulled up the chair and sat in it backwards.
“Do you play?” Mabel asked.
“Used to,” he said.
“Well, the device you’re holding is called the David, as in David vs. Goliath. It’s a blackjack strategy computer. Have you ever heard of card-counting?”
Slash grunted in the affirmative.
“The David does the counting for you. With it, you can beat any casino in the world for thousands of dollars. I’ll take that back. Millions of dollars.”
“Is your boss a cheat?”
“He catches cheaters,” Mabel said.
Slash emptied the box onto the desk. The David was the size of a deck of cards. With it came a battery pack, connector wires, and a special pair of men’s boots with microswitches buried in the toes. There was also a keyboard that was used to “talk” to David while practicing.
“What are the boots for?”
“Each boot has a hidden microswitch,” Mabel said. “You input the cards with your toes.”<
br />
He tried the boots on. They fit. A knowing look spread across his face.
“You know how to work this thing?”
Tony had spent twenty minutes showing her. Mabel didn’t think that really constituted knowing. Only, she wasn’t going to tell him that.
“Why, yes,” she said. “Yes, I do.”
35
Bill Higgins was reading the last section of the Sunday newspaper when Saul Hyman’s rattling Toyota pulled up alongside his rental. The passenger window on the Toyota came down, and Saul said, “Don’t you ever go home?”
Higgins stared at the elderly con man. He’d stayed outside Saul’s condo because he didn’t feel like staying in his hotel room. It was a pleasant day, and he’d read the newspaper from cover to cover while listening to a baseball game in Spanish on the radio.
“No,” he said.
“Tony asked you to watch me, didn’t he?” Saul asked.
“Tony who?”
“Valentine. I just saw him. I gave him enough evidence to put that scumbag Rico Blanco behind bars.”
Bill put his newspaper down. Maybe hanging around hadn’t been a waste of time. A bus had pulled up behind Saul’s car and blared its horn. Saul shook his fist at the driver in his mirror, then said, “Want to come inside for a drink?”
“You’re on,” Higgins said.
Saul’s condo was about what Higgins had expected. Nothing great. He’d known lots of criminals in his life. Few ended up with much when they got old. He stared at the apartment houses across the street that were blocking Saul’s view of the ocean. Between them, he could see a tiny slit of blue, but just barely. Saul appeared and handed him a glass of ice tea.
“Salud,” he said, clinking glasses.
Higgins took a sip. “Remember when I ran you out of Vegas?”
“Like it was yesterday,” Saul said. “You were very nice about it, as I remember.”
“Don’t think I didn’t consider roughing you up,” Higgins replied.
Saul acted like no cop had ever laid a hand on him. “Why didn’t you?” His guest shrugged, and he said, “Because of my size? I avoided a lot of beatings because I was small.”
“That had nothing to do with it,” Higgins said.
The phone rang. Saul picked it up, listened, then said, “Who sends packages on a Sunday?” He listened some more. “It’s from Tony Valentine? Okay, send the guy up.” He hung up, then said, “Indulge an old man. Why didn’t you?”
“The guy you ripped off had been caught cheating at poker at one of the casinos,” Higgins explained. “The casino looked the other way because he was a high roller. I never liked it, and figured he got his due when you fleeced him.”
Saul smiled. “The arm of justice is long, huh?”
“Something like that,” Higgins said.
“Would you mind telling me what you’re doing in Miami with Tony Valentine?”
“None of your business,” Higgins said.
The doorbell buzzed. Saul said, “Excuse me,” and left the room.
Higgins raised his glass to his lips. Sunlight flooded the room, exposing the old and faded furniture, and he guessed Saul was living on Social Security, with maybe a little something stashed away. Not a lot, but enough to get by. Higgins would be up for retirement himself in a few years. The thought did not thrill him.
He heard the angry retort of a gun being fired, then Saul’s scream. He jumped off the couch, the drink’s ice cubes hit the floor, and his hand reached for a pistol that wasn’t there. Saul came into the living room with blood pouring down his face.
“Run,” he said.
Higgins didn’t know which way to run. Saul bolted past him, followed by a man with a stocking over his face. He was holding a .45 Smith & Wesson and pointed it at Higgins. The next moment, Higgins was lying on the floor, clutching his thigh.
From the rear of the condo he heard the shattering of glass. Then the stockinged man returned. Kneeling, he went through Higgins’s pockets. He rose, holding Higgins’s cell phone, and left the condo.
Higgins examined the wound in his leg. Blood was spitting out like a geyser. Taking off his socks, he tied them together, then crawled into the kitchen and found a wooden serving spoon in a drawer. With the socks and the spoon he made a tourniquet, tied it an inch above his wound, and twisted it until the bleeding stopped.
He found the phone and dialed 911. He told the operator he’d been shot, and stumbled with the address.
“Just hang on,” the operator reassured him.
He limped through the condo, looking for his host. In the back was a guest bedroom, and Higgins peered through the open doorway. Blood was on the floor and bedspread, and the wind blew stiffly through a busted window. The room began to spin, and he realized he was about to pass out.
He took several deep breaths, then forced himself over to the broken window and looked down. Four floors below, Saul Hyman floated in the condo’s rectangular swimming pool, the water clouded with blood.
Laughing, Rico Blanco sped south on I-95. The look on the old man’s face as he’d jumped through the window had been a real keeper. Terrified, but also ashamed, like he’d known deep down that this was what happened to rats. They got drowned.
He turned on the radio. The three o’clock news came on. The day was still young. That had been one of John Gotti’s favorite expressions. They would steal something—a truckload of furs, or a container out of a plane at Kennedy airport, or something off the docks—and the Teflon Don would say, “The day is still young,” and they’d go out and steal something else. A real taskmaster.
His cell phone rang. Rico picked it up, then realized it was the cell phone he’d just stolen. He answered it anyway. The line was filled with static.
“Hey, Bill, it’s Tony Valentine,” the voice said.
So the guy he’d shot in the leg was also part of this. Rico wished he’d killed him.
“You’re a dead man,” he told Valentine.
Then he tossed the cell phone out the window and laughed some more.
Five minutes later, his own cell phone rang. Rico looked at the caller ID. It was Jorge. Rico gritted his teeth. Jorge was never supposed to call him, especially on his cell phone where it might be overheard. Soon the ringing stopped. He drove until I-95 ended and became Dixie Highway.
He took Dixie into Coral Gables and drove to an apartment complex. The complex straddled the line between dumpy Little Havana and ultrapricey Coral Gables. That was what you got in south Miami. The haves and the have-nots.
He went to the first building and took the elevator to the fourth floor. Jorge looked surprised when he opened the door and saw Rico. Jorge was dressed in his underwear, his six-foot-six body filling the doorway.
“I told you never to call me,” Rico said.
“Yeah, well, I got a problem,” Jorge said, ushering him in.
The apartment was trashed, the walls covered with Miami Dolphin cheerleader posters and a naked Pamela Lee stained by food. Jorge’s roommate, Lupe, slept on the couch, the TV bathing him in artificial light. He was two inches taller than Jorge, and his legs stuck comically over the edge. They went into the kitchen, and Jorge shut the door.
“It’s like this,” Jorge said. “I got this girlfriend, and she—”
Rico cut him short. “You need money?”
Jorge looked sheepishly at the floor. He was from Brazil, where men were supposed to act like men and not have to ask for things like money. “Yeah,” he whispered.
“You knock her up?”
“Uh-huh.”
“How far along is she?”
“Three months. She wants two grand for you-know-what.”
Rico hid a smile. Jorge was twenty-four and talked like he was twelve. A boy in a man’s body. “You’ll have all your money tomorrow.”
“All of it?”
“That’s right. Once the game is over.”
“Who we playing?”
“Duke.”
Jorge’s eyes li
t up. The kitchen door swung in. Lupe entered, his Frankenstein hair standing on end. God had made him menacing-looking, and he stretched his impossibly long arms as he yawned, then slapped Rico good-naturedly on the shoulder, sending him sideways into the stove.
“You gonna give Jorge heeez money?” he asked.
“Tomorrow,” Rico said, clutching his arm. “You’ll get all your money tomorrow. Both of you.”
“What he talking about?” Lupe asked.
Jorge retrieved a basketball from behind the refrigerator and began dribbling it behind his back. Lupe had no education and relied on Jorge to fill in the blanks. They were both dumb as paint, and getting them accepted into Miami College had cost Rico a small fortune.
Jorge stopped dribbling the basketball and tossed it across the room. Missing Rico’s nose by inches, it landed with a loud fhap! in one of Lupe’s enormous palms.
“Tomorrow we play for real,” Jorge said.
36
Driving to the Micanopy casino with Gerry, Valentine called Bill Higgins’s cell phone and got a frantic busy signal. He didn’t like it when people threatened him, but his son said, “Pop, it was probably just a crossed connection. Happens all the time with cell phones.”
“The guy called me a dead man.”
“Welcome to south Florida.”
They found Gladys Soft Wings waiting for them inside the casino’s lobby. She wore her emotions on her sleeve and looked mad as hell. Tapping her wristwatch, she said, “Where have you been? The elders have been waiting a half hour. This is unacceptable.”
Valentine nearly told her to take a hike. He didn’t have to be doing this. He had his case against Rico. Running Bear’s problems no longer figured into the equation.
“You want us to leave?” he asked.
She glared at him. “You’re kidding, right?”
“Not at all. I don’t need you, or your crummy attitude. And I don’t need your tribe’s money, which, by the way, I still haven’t accepted a nickel of.” Valentine thought he saw steam coming out of her ears. He ducked around the corner into the men’s room. When he returned, she looked better, and he said, “Do we understand each other now?”
