Gold Coast by Elmore Leonard
“What’re you trying to say?” She put on a little frown, but it didn’t indicate much concern.
“You’ve got this guy hanging on you,” Maguire said, “but you don’t seem too worried anymore. Like, so what? What’s the big deal? I don’t know if you’ve given up or you don’t care.”
“Guess what he wants?” Karen said. “He finally said it. Everything, including me.”
“See? That’s what I’m talking about. You think it’s funny or what?”
“He said I’ll reach the point where I’ll want to give him everything, because he’ll be my only chance.”
“You believe that?”
“Well—he’s got more confidence than anyone I’ve ever met.”
“He’s got more bullshit, and that’s what he’s giving you. He’s gonna look for the opening, set you up and take whatever he can. And if you’re laying there with your head broken, that’s tough shit.”
“He likes me.”
“He may, but that’s got nothing to do with it.”
“But you see, his self-confidence, that’s the flaw,” Karen said, leaning closer over the table. “What does he base it on? Not much. There’s considerably less to Mr. Roland Crowe than he realizes. Watching you two yesterday—you know what it was like? Two little boys showing off in front of a girl. Arguing about the parrot—I couldn’t believe it.”
“You didn’t get it.”
“No, I assumed you were putting him on, but he was serious. I’d look at Roland. This is the one who’s giving me trouble? I thought of something Ed Grossi told me once, about being concerned with people who turn out to be lightweights.”
“Ed Grossi,” Maguire said. “He told you that, huh? You want some more advice?”
“What?”
“Forget Ed Grossi’s advice. Talk to Vivian Arzola.”
* * *
Roland said to Lionel Oliva, “How can you live in this dump? Goddamn place ain’t any bigger’n a horse trailer.”
“We manage.”
“Get her out of here.”
Lionel turned to the woman cooking something for him on the tiny stove. She edged past them without looking at Roland and stepped out of the trailer. Roland bent down to watch her through the window—big Cuban ass sliding from side to side as she walked out of Tall Pines toward S.W. Eighth Street.
“You want the boat?” Lionel Oliva said. “Take somebody out?”
“Not just yet.” Roland straightened up, making a face as he looked at Lionel. “You drink too much, you know it?”
“I like to drink sometime, sure.”
“You like to live in this stink?”
“I don’t smell nothin’.”
“Jesus, look at the place. You work for me, you’re gonna have to clean yourself up.”
“I work for you now?”
“I want you to see if you can find Vivian Arzola. Her and you both used to pick oranges, didn’t you?”
“Man, a long time ago.”
“Well, go look up some of your old buddies still around. See if anybody’s seen her lately.”
“How come I work for you now,” Lionel Oliva said, “you don’t get Jesus?”
“He went to Cuba, you dink. You were sitting there when he told me.”
“No, he never went to Cuba. I see him talking to a guy in Centro Vasco yesterday.”
“You see him again, tell him to call me,” Roland said. “Tell him I don’t hear from him and run into him on the street, I’ll bust his little bow legs and wrap ’em around his dink head.”
Roland got out of that smelly house trailer. He’d look around some for Vivian; stop in and see Karen, make her day a little brighter. First, though, he was going to go home and pick up a firearm to carry on him or keep in the car. There was too much going on now not to be ready for what you might least expect.
Vivian Arzola said to Jesus, when he returned in the morning, “I have to think about it.”
“Think about what? She wants to help you.”
“How? All I do is endanger myself telling somebody else.”
“Trust her,” Jesus said.
“All right, but only Mrs. DiCilia. If she brings police, I don’t know anything.”
“Her and one other, a friend that’s helping her. This is his idea, but I can’t tell you anything else.”
“You can’t tell me, I’m supposed to tell him everything. All right, the two of them. And you,” Vivian said. “Any more, I have to rent chairs. You see what they do to this place? Sneak out before the first of the month, leave all this crap. Look at the condition, the dirt. Five years I’ve owned this place, I’ve never made any money.”
“What time?” Jesus said.
“Late, after it’s dark. I don’t know, nine o’clock. You drop them off—what kind of car?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“Forget the whole thing,” Vivian said.
“Wait, let me think. Gray Mercedes-Benz.”
“You drop them off. I don’t want the car in front.”
“What else?”
“Tell them I’m not going to the police. If that’s what they want, they’re wasting their time. No police in this. I see a policeman, I don’t know anything you’re talking about.”
“If you say it. Anything else?”
“A gun,” Vivian said.
“What kind?”
“What kind, one that shoots. I don’t care what kind. A big one.”
“Take it easy,” Jesus said. “You got nothing to worry about.”
21
* * *
JESUS, DRIVING THE MERCEDES, dropped them off in front of the pink stucco house on Monegro Avenue within a minute or so of nine o’clock, telling them he would drive around and come back at exactly 9:30.
Maguire wondered if all this was necessary: like synchronizing their watches, everyone very grim, Karen wearing dark glasses—why? So who wouldn’t recognize her?—but he didn’t say anything. Or comment, make a harmless smart remark about Vivian letting them in with the lights off, taking them back to the kitchen and closing the door to the hall before turning on the kitchen light. Maguire was glad he’d kept quiet. Even seeing Vivian for the first time—not anything like the stylish woman Karen had described in the car—Maguire realized how frightened she was. Vivian looked like she had been on a drunk for several days; combed her hair maybe, but had forgotten about makeup. For the first few minutes they were in the kitchen, he had never seen anyone so tense. Maguire poured the coffee. He lighted three cigarettes for Vivian, while she told them about driving Ed Grossi to Boca Raton and seeing Roland and barely getting away from him.
“Why won’t you go to the police?” Karen asked her.
Vivian said, “Because he’ll kill me. Why do you think?”
“But he’ll be in jail.”
“He’ll be out on bond, he won’t be in jail.”
“Well—the police will protect you.”
“Excuse me,” Vivian said, “but I worked for Ed Grossi twelve years. If they want a person dead, the person’s dead. This is what Roland does, it’s his job.”
Karen said, “To kill people?”
Maguire watched her. She seemed more fascinated by the idea than startled or shocked.
Vivian said, “Yes, of course. He can go to prison and pay somebody else to do it. Or, if he wants to himself bad enough, he waits till he gets out. Don’t you know that? They convict him, I have a nice time for ten years. Then what?”
“They’ve charged someone else with his murder,” Karen said.
“Arnold Rapp, I know that,” Vivian said. “It’s too bad, but I’m not giving my life for Arnold Rapp.”
“It’s almost nine-thirty,” Maguire said.
Karen, seated close to Vivian, looked up from the kitchen table. “Why don’t you go with him? Come back at ten.”
Why? What were they going to talk about? He couldn’t see Karen’s eyes behind the glasses. She sat in the dirty kitchen of the house on Monegro in the Cuban q
Maguire went out to the curb and got in the Mercedes as it came to a stop.
“Where is she?”
“We come back in a half hour.”
Jesus drove off. “I went up to Eighth Street. I saw a guy there he say Roland’s looking for me. Shit. Man, I got to go to Cuba or do something.”
Maguire didn’t say anything, looking at the people sitting in front of their houses and the ones on the sidewalk watching the silver-gray Mercedes-Benz drive by.
“What do you think about Vivian?” Jesus said.
“I think she’s scared.”
“No, I mean do you think she’d pay us something? Why not, uh?”
They picked up Karen at 10. Maguire slid behind the wheel and Jesus got in back as far as S.W. Eighth, where they dropped him off. Maguire cut over to 95 and headed north to Lauderdale. Karen had taken off her glasses. She sat holding them, silent.
“Well?” Maguire said.
Karen didn’t say anything.
“What else you find out?”
“Nothing, really.”
“She still won’t go to the police.”
“The day Roland dies, she will. If the other man is still in prison. He kills people,” Karen said.
“You mean Roland.”
“Yeah. He kills people.”
Maguire said, “Do you want me to stay with you tonight?”
Karen took a long time to answer. She said, “Not tonight, okay? I’d like to do some quiet thinking.”
“That’s the only kind,” Maguire said, keeping it light, but feeling a little hook inside him. Something was going on.
They drove in silence; left the freeway and headed east toward the ocean through light evening traffic, across the 17th Street Causeway and past Seascape, Maguire’s other world, dark. Maguire picturing the dolphins by themselves, surfacing in moonlight within their pools and tanks.
He said to Karen, “When I worked at the dolphin place down on Marathon, ten years ago—I didn’t tell you, did I, I got arrested for willful destruction of property?”
Karen didn’t say anything.
“You listening?”
“You were arrested for willful destruction of something.”
“The fences,” Maguire said. “They didn’t have tanks down there, they had wire fences built out from the shore and the breakwater. Like pens they kept the dolphins in. Different pens that were attached to each other. One night I went out there with some tinsnips and cut the fences.”
Karen said, “You freed the dolphins?”
“Yeah. They swam out to sea.”
“That’s remarkable.” She kept looking at him now.
“Unh-unh, the remarkable thing,” Maguire said, “as soon as they got hungry they all came back to the pens and never left again. . . . They didn’t want to be saved. They just wanted to play games.”
22
* * *
JESUS DIAZ was taking his suit and some pants to the dry cleaner, getting ready for his trip, whenever it was going to be. He was walking past the place on the corner of Eighth Street and Forty-second Avenue that gave spiritual readings and advice, when the car turned the corner, stopped hard, and the voice said, “Hey!”
Jesus almost dropped the clothes and took off. But it was Lionel Oliva motioning him to come over to the car.
“I thought you went to Cuba.”
“Pretty soon.”
“I got your job. Man, it’s a lot of work.”
“Keep it,” Jesus said.
“What’s he want with Vivian Arzola?” Lionel asked.
Jesus moved in closer, stuck his head in the window, resting his clothes against the dusty car.
“He’s looking for her?”
“He came to the trailer yesterday, insulted me, then hired me to find her. What does the pimp give you for a job like this?”
“Different amounts. What he feels like,” Jesus said. “You have any luck?”
“That’s what it was,” Lionel said. “You know she owns some houses to rent. I was talking to this guy used to know her, lives in the Grove. He said yeah, this house of Vivian’s on Monegro was vacant for a month. But then he saw a light on, and he thinks he saw her go in there the other day. So I went over, I look in the window. There she is in the hall, going into the kitchen or someplace. I knock on the door, no answer.”
“She probably don’t want to see anybody,” Jesus said.
“Stuck up, owning all those houses,” Lionel said. “Fuck that, I’m not going to bother with her.”
“I wouldn’t,” Jesus said.
“Let Roland see if he can talk to her.”
“You tell him yet?”
“Yeah, I just called him a few minutes ago.”
Ten-fifteen, another fifteen minutes before show time, Brad Allen was addressing his “gang”—Lesley, Robyn, Hooker, Chuck, and Maguire—sitting around on the lower grandstand benches, while Brad, in pure white, stood between them and the pool. The main-show dolphins would surface and watch them from the holding pens along the side. Brad half-turned to point across the pool to the deck that served as the stage.
“What we’ll do, we’ll light some paper in some kind of shallow metal container. Maguire, you’ll still be backstage. Wait there after the intro. So you’ll ring the firebell.”
Seascape opened at ten. There were people on the grounds already looking around, coming past the roped-off grandstand area and looking in, wondering what all those kids in the red T-shirts were doing sitting there. No, they weren’t all kids, were they?
Robyn said, “Brad, it’s a dynamite idea, but do you light the paper and you’re the one that yells fire?”
“No, you’re right,” Brad said. “You light the paper. That’s good thinking, Rob. And I’ll be distracting the audience, my back turned to you.”
Maguire saw Jesus Diaz approach the chain across the entrance and the sign hanging from it that said: THIS AREA CLOSED UNTIL SHOWTIME, Jesus looking at the sign and then looking in anxiously at the group sitting in the grandstand. Maguire raised his arm. He stood up.
“Sit down,” Brad said.
“I got to talk to that guy for a minute.”
The others were turning to look up at Maguire and then over to the Cuban waiting by the chain.
“Sit down till we get this straightened out,” Brad said. “I turn around, I see it and yell, ‘Fire!’ Cue for the firebell. No, wait’ll I say, ‘This is a job for Smokey the Dolphin.’ Yeah. Then ring the bell. Then Hooker? You’ve got the hat on Dixie, right?”
“Right,” Hooker said.
“Maguire, sit down.”
“I just have to see the guy a minute.”
“When we’re through,” Brad said. “Okay, Hooker—you give Dixie the signal.”
“Right.”
“She comes over, gives a couple of tail flaps—”
Maguire was staring at Jesus, trying to read his mind.
“—and puts out the fire.”
“He knows where she is!” Jesus called out to him.
Maguire was moving.
“Where you going? . . . Maguire!”
Brad and the “gang” watched him hurdle the chain—brush the sign with his foot, causing it to jiggle—and take off with the Cuban.
“Any idea where he’s going?” Brad asked.
“He probably don’t know himself,” Lesley said. “He’s weird.”
Virginia Hill was really Virginia Hauser, or Virginia Hill Hauser; but no one referred to her by that name. She was Virginia Hill, who told the Kefauver Crime Committee in 1951 that men kept giving her money because they were friends. Period. She didn’t know exactly how much she had. Yes, she knew Bugsy Siegel, he was one of the friends. No, she didn’t know what he did for a living.
Karen wore a white scarf over her hair (tied in back), sunglasses, and a beige and blue striped caftan that reached to the brick surface of the patio.
She said to the fea
“As Tina Noor.”
“You’re married.”
“Yeah.”
“But you don’t think of yourself, ever, as who you used to be?”
“Yeah, but that’s exactly the point. I’m not really that person anymore.”
“Well, we’re different,” Karen said. “You want to sell magazines, and I want to maintain my identity. Karen Hill. Don’t you think it sounds better?”
“It’s a nice name,” Tina Noor said, “but no one knows who Karen Hill is.”
“I do.”
“I mean everyone’s familiar with Karen DiCilia. You were in the papers again when Ed Grossi was killed. People are interested in what you think about . . . what it’s like to be associated with those people and live a normal life.”
“A normal life,” Karen said.
She moved to the umbrella table, reached into a straw beachbag and brought out a pack of cigarettes. Tina’s eyes remained on the bag, lying on its side, open now. She looked at Karen lighting the cigarette, Karen sitting down in one of the deck chairs. Tina’s eyes returned to the straw bag.
She said, “Is that a gun in there? In the bag?”
Karen nodded.
“Can I ask why you have it?”
“Why does anyone have a gun?” Karen said.
“I mean, of course for protection; but do you feel for some reason your life might be in danger?”
“I’m Karen Hill, I was born in Detroit, Grosse Pointe. I’m forty-four. I was married to Frank DiCilia five and a half years. I never asked him what he did. I never asked him why he had a gun. That particular gun, as a matter of fact.” Karen paused. “But now I know.”
“Would you tell me?”
Karen drew on the cigarette, the smoke dissolving in the afternoon glare. Karen seemed unaffected by the heat, though she was perspiring beneath the caftan, and when the writer left she’d go in the pool . . . come out, shower, it would be time for cocktails. Wait for someone to come.