Rum Punch

by Elmore Leonard

  Now the guy was looking at Louis holding the pocket of the suit coat pointed at him. He didn’t seem surprised by it. He rubbed a hand over the salt-and-pepper beard stubble on his jaw and said, “Why don’t you take your finger out of there and stick it in your ass while I go get my shotgun.” Shaking his head as he started for the back of the store. Louis got out of there.

  So much for his new start.

  He drove to Max Cherry’s office and let himself in with the key he’d taken from Max’s desk this morning. Optimistic then, feeling close to making his move. What he had to do now was put his mind to it, get serious. Ordell was right, he had nothing to lose. Louis went out to his car and got the tire iron from the trunk.

  This afternoon he had driven all the way down to South Miami Beach, two and a half hours, to the Santa Marta on Ocean Drive near Sixth. The hotel was owned by Colombians and some of them hung out in the bar off the lobby. Louis walked in, saw four of them down the bar, one guy showing the others a dance step, shoulders hunched, hips moving to Latin riffs screaming out of hidden speakers. They looked up to see Louis and back to the guy dancing. That was it. Louis could put on a grin and walk up to them, hand out Max Cherry bail-bond cards. . . . He had come to make sure he was right, that he couldn’t fake it with these people.

  What he did, he turned around and walked up the street of art deco hotels, Miami Vice country, to the Cardozo and sat at a table on the sidewalk to have a vodka tonic. It was no more Louis’s scene than the hotel where the Colombians hung out, but the show was better: all the tank tops and hundred-dollar pump-up basketball shoes. Louis had lived here ten years ago when old retired people from New York sat on the hotel porches wearing hats, their noses painted white, and boat-lift Cubans worked their hustles down the street. Five years ago when it was beginning to change he had returned to rob a bank not ten blocks from here, up by Wolfie’s Deli. Now it was the hip place to be in South Florida. Guys with sunglasses in their hair posed skinny girls on the beach and photographed them. There was no place to park anymore on Ocean Drive. Louis had a couple more vodka tonics. He watched a dark-haired girl in leotards and heels coming along the sidewalk, a winner, and was about to put his hand out, ask if she wanted a drink, when he realized she was a guy wearing makeup and tits. That’s how trendy it was now. What was he doing here? He wasn’t a salesman who handed out bail-bond cards. If anyone asked him what he did he would have to say he robbed banks, even though the last one was almost five years ago.

  What if, while he was in the neighborhood, he stopped by that bank on Collins again? It was the one where the girl handed him the dye pack.

  Louis had another vodka tonic and wrote a note on a cocktail napkin. This is a stickup. Do not panic. . . . He used another napkin to write or press a button . . . He saw he would have to write much smaller to get in or I will blow your head off and something about the money, wanting only hundred-dollar bills and fifties. He started over with a clean napkin opened up and put down what he wanted to say. Perfect.

  But by the time he paid his check, walked several blocks to his car, and drove up Collins Avenue to the bank, it was closed.

  Last week he might have given up. Not today; he was making his move. Looking stupid to the guy in the liquor store didn’t even set him back. It told him to, goddamn it, do it right. Liquor stores, he knew, were never as easy as banks.

  Louis used the tire iron to pry the lock off Max’s gun cabinet in the meeting room with the office refrigerator and the coffee maker. Inside were four handguns and the nickel-plated Mossberg 500, the pistol-grip shotgun with the battery-operated laser scope. Louis felt his image changing as he got serious and chose the chromed Colt Python he knew was Winston’s, a 357 Mag with an eight-inch barrel, big and showy. That should do it, and a couple of boxes of hollow points. But then thought, if he was going for show he might as well go all the way and took the Mossberg 500 too. Even with the laser scope the shotgun would fit under the coat he was wearing as a sporty jacket. Buttoned, the coat was snug on him and had the widest lapels Louis had ever seen. All J.J.’s clothes were like new but out of style, hanging twenty years in closets or packed in trunks while J.J. was in and out of the system. Ordell would never see this coat. Tomorrow he’d go to Burdine’s or Macy’s and get some new outfits. Nothing too bright, like Ordell’s yellow sport coat, he wasn’t feeling that showy. Something in light blue might be nice.

  When Louis walked in the liquor store the second time, the guy with GOD BLESS AMERICA on his T-shirt rubbed his hand over his jaw and said, “Jesus Christ, don’t tell me you’re back.”

  Louis said, “Let me have two fifths of that Absolut,” this time bringing the Mossberg out of the coat from under his left arm, the nickel plate gleaming in the overhead light, the red dot of the laser scope showing the bottles he wanted as he squeezed the grip.

  The liquor store guy said, “You swipe that toy gun offa some kid?”

  Louis said, “See the red dot?” He moved it off the Absolut, squeezed the trigger, and blew out three rows of the cheap stuff. Louis said, “It’s real,” Christ, with his ears ringing. “That’s two fifths of Absolut, whatever you have in the till, and that wad in your hip pocket.”

  He felt good and had some vodka out of the bottle driving up Dixie, on his way to finding a motel, through living at J.J.’s, through hanging around the bail-bond office. . . . And realized, Christ, he had to go back there right now. Put the key in Max’s desk and make it look like a break-in, or Max would know he did it. He should’ve taken all the guns. Max still might figure it out. Four years locked up, he was rusty, that’s all. At least he knew what he had to do. Then keep going, ride it out. No stopping or getting off once you start. Wasn’t that how Ordell said it?

  Something like that.

  Ordell had tried showing his jackboys how to use a tension tool with a feeler pick or what was called a rake—none of these gadgets more than five inches long, they fit right in your pocket—to open most any locked door to a house. See? It was easy once you practiced and got the feel. No, jackboys liked to bust into places. They liked to smash windows or blow the lock out with a shotgun. Their trip was driving a big pickup truck through the front door of a pawnshop or a hardware store: drive in, load up, and drive out again in the stolen truck with some company name on the side. Gun shops put iron posts in the concrete outside the door so you couldn’t drive in. What they would do juiced up was walk in when the gun shop was open, pull their pieces, and go for the assault weapons they loved. It didn’t matter they could get shot doing it, they were crazy motherfuckers. Ordell gave up on teaching them subtle ways to gain entry.

  He brought out his tools only when he needed to use them himself.

  Like this evening, getting into Jackie Burke’s apartment.

  Max drove home seeing her across the table in barroom light, Jackie looking at him the way she did with those sparkly green eyes, looking off at the piano and saying he shouldn’t be allowed to play “Light My Fire.” Saying “Great,” in that same dry tone of voice when he told her she might do a year and a day. Saying “You’re as much fun as the cops,” when he didn’t believe her at first. But pretty soon she was confiding in him and he could feel them getting closer, like they were in this together and she needed him. It was a good feeling. He had watched her eyes to sense her mood. Watched the way she smoked cigarettes and wanted one for the first time in a couple of years. Before they’d left the cocktail lounge he knew something could happen between them if he wanted it to.

  He hadn’t had this feeling in a long time. Never with a defendant.

  Once, during the past two years living alone, he had almost told a woman he loved her. A waitress named Cricket with a Georgia accent. Got that tender feeling one night lying in bed with her, stirred by the way the light from the window softened her hollow cheeks and lay across her small pale breasts. Except the shine was from a streetlight outside, not the moonlight of “Moonlight Becomes You” or “That Old Devil Moon,” and realizing this migh
t have stopped him if good sense didn’t. Cricket sang Reba McEntire numbers with gestures. She sang that old Tammy Wynette song “D.I.V.O.R.C.E.,” would give him a look and say, “Hint, hint.” Cricket made him feel good. The trouble was finding something to talk about. It was the same way with Renee. All those years of not talking. He had tried reading poetry to her when they were first married. If she said anything at all after it was, “What’s that suppose to mean?”

  He hadn’t told Renee he loved her in about ten years. He told her a few times when he knew he didn’t love her and then quit. What was the point? She never told him. Not even that much in the beginning when he told her all the time, because he did. She was tiny, she was cute as a bug, and he wanted to eat her up. She never said a word making love. She was afraid of getting pregnant; she said a doctor had told her she was too small and it would kill her, or her uterus was tipped or she was afraid of hydrogen bombs; take your pick. It was okay if she didn’t appreciate his reading to her. It wasn’t romantic poetry anyway, it was mostly Ginsberg and Corso, those guys. He liked them even though he had to face demonstrators in those days with a riot baton, out in the streets being called a pig, and he’d wonder, Wait a minute. What am I doing here? This was before he made detective and liked Homicide so much he was willing to die there. One time he finished reading a poem and Renee said, “You should see yourself.” Meaning a uniformed deputy in dark green reciting poetry, but missing the point entirely that it was one of the Beats.

  He remembered a poem more recently by a guy named Gifford called “To Terry Moore” that ended with the lines,

  Tell me, Terry

  when you were young

  were your lovers ever gentle?

  He remembered it because he had been in love with Terry Moore in the fifties, right after being in love with Jane Greer and just before he fell in love with Diane Baker. This year he had passed on Jodie Foster, only because he was old enough to be her dad, and fallen in love with Annette Bening. He didn’t care how old Annette was.

  Jackie Burke had made him think of the poem to Terry Moore. The last part, “were your lovers ever gentle?” On the way to dropping her off to get her car. Jackie telling him she had been flying nearly twenty years and married twice. Once to an airline pilot “who went to prison with a two hundred-dollar-a-day habit.” And once to a Brit in Freeport, floorman at a hotel casino, “who decided one evening it was time to die.” And that was all she said about them. He thought of the poem because he could imagine guys coming on to her as a matter of course, before those marriages and in between and maybe during, thirty thousand feet in the air.

  She asked in the car as they were coming to the airport if he was married. He told her yes and how long and she said, “Twenty-seven years?”

  Almost raising her voice. He remembered that. Making it an unimaginable period of time.

  He said, “It seems longer,” and in the dark, staring at his headlight beams, tried to explain his situation.

  “We started out, I was already with the Sheriff’s Office, but Renee didn’t like being married to a cop. She said she was worried sick all the time something would happen to me. Also, she said, I put the job first.”

  “Did you?”

  “You have to. So I quit. She didn’t like being married to a cop—she hates being married to a bail bondsman. Nineteen years she’s been telling people I sell insurance.”

  Jackie said, “You don’t look like a bail bondsman.”

  Meaning it, he assumed, as a compliment. She didn’t say what a bail bondsman was supposed to look like. He imagined she meant a sleazy type, fat little guy in a rumpled suit who chewed his cigar. A lot of people had that picture.

  “Renee moved out of the house. She opened an art gallery and has these guys, they look like gay heroin addicts, hanging around her. Twice before, we separated. This time it’s been almost two years.”

  Jackie said, “Why haven’t you gotten a divorce?”

  “I’m seriously thinking about it.”

  “I mean before this. If you don’t get along.”

  “It always seemed like too much trouble.”

  It didn’t now, driving home, putting up pictures of Jackie Burke in his mind. The ones where she had that gleam in her eyes, the look saying, We could have fun.

  Unless she was appraising him with the look, making a judgment, and what it said was, I could use you.

  Maybe.

  Either way it was a turn-on.

  Max pulled into the drive of the house he and Renee had bought twenty-two years ago, when she was coming out of her decoupage period and getting into macramé, or the other way around. The house was an old-Florida frame bungalow being eaten by termites and almost obscured from the street by cabbage palms and banana trees. Renee had moved to an apartment in Palm Beach Gardens, not far from where Jackie Burke lived—according to her Rough Arrest report. He’d leave the car in the drive while he went in the house, planning to go back to the office later. He was surprised his beeper hadn’t gone off while he was with Jackie. Prime time for a bail bondsman was six to nine.

  He opened the glove box to get his .38 Airweight. Whenever it was out of his hands for a period of time he liked to check it; this evening, make sure it was his gun the guard at the Stockade had handed him. He felt inside, then leaned across the seat to take a look. The gun wasn’t there. No one had touched the car while they were in the hotel cocktail lounge or the alarm would have gone off. They came out, he opened the door for Jackie. She got in, he closed the door and walked around to the other side. . . .

  Maybe the look said, I can take care of myself.

  10

  It was the kind of building had all outside doors on balconies and at night you’d see these orange lights on every floor up and across the front of the building. Jackie’s apartment was on the fourth level you got to by elevator, then into using the thin little tension tool and feeling around with the feeler pick until you heard the click. Nothing to it. Ordell had checked the kind of lock it was the first time he came here. . . .

  Through a little hallway that went past the kitchen into the living room and dining-L. The bedroom and bath were to the left. He remembered she had it fixed up nice but kind of bare-looking, mostly white, drapes over the glass door to the balcony. Ordell pulled the drapes open and could see better, light coming from outside. He sat down on the sofa to wait. Sat there in the dark calculating how long it would take Max Cherry to drive out to the Stockade and bond her out, give her a ride home. . . . Unless she had to get her car. He felt like smiling at the way Max Cherry had accepted the watch as his take for the bond. This place looked cold. Fixed nice, but like she could move out in about ten minutes. Not like a place you called home, with all kinds of shit laying around. He reached over and turned the lamp on.

  No sense frightening the woman, come in and see a man sitting in the dark, maybe scream. Best to keep her calm, not expecting harm. See how she behaves first, if she was nervous talking to him. Man, who could you trust these days? Outside of Louis. See? Thinking of Louis right away coming to mind. Knowing him twenty years as a man would never tell nothing on you. Had that old-time pro sense of keeping his mouth shut. Even thinking of himself as a good guy basically, Louis would never snitch you out. Louis could be worth a cut of the score. Not a big cut, more like a nick.

  Ordell waited.

  Got tired of it and went to the kitchen, found the Scotch, and put some in a glass with ice from the refrigerator. Hardly any food in there, the woman getting by day to day. Orange juice, Perrier, half a loaf of bread. Some cheese turning green. Some of those little cups of nonfat yogurt with fruit in it, the woman watching her weight. He didn’t see she needed to worry about getting fat, she had a fine body on her. One he’d wanted to see but couldn’t ever get her in a mood to show to him. He’d touch her, tell her, man, she was fine and she’d look at him like . . . not stuck-up exactly, more like it was too much trouble to get it on and she had her laundry to do. Maybe tonight if she came i
n scared and saw she had to please him . . .

  Yeah, it should be dark. Ordell turned the light out in the kitchen, took his drink to the living room to sit down on the sofa again, and switched off the lamp.

  He waited.

  Finished the drink and waited some more.

  At least it was comfortable. He felt himself starting to doze off, eyelids getting heavy . . . eyes opening then, quick, Ordell full awake hearing her key in the lock, Jackie home at last. There she was now in the light coming through from the balcony, her bag hanging from her shoulders, trying to remember—look at her—if she had closed the drapes or left them open. Slipping her keys in the bag now . . .

  Ordell said, “How you doing, Ms. Jackie?”

  She didn’t move, so he got up and went over to her, seeing her face now, no color to it in this light. He came up close and put his hands on the round part of her arms below her shoulders. “You looking fine this evening. You gonna thank me?”

  “For what?”

  “Who you think got you out of jail?”

  “The same guy who put me in. Thanks a lot.”

  “Hey, you get caught with blow, that’s your business.”

  “It wasn’t mine.”

  Not sounding mean, looking straight in his eyes, like to say it was his fault. Ordell had to stop and think. He said, “Hey, shit, I bet it was the present Mr. Walker was sending Melanie. Yeaaah, he’s the one musta put it in there if you didn’t. Hey, I’m sorry that happened. I ’magine they asked you all kind of questions about it, huh? And about all that money? Want to know where you got it?”

  She didn’t answer him.