Cat Chaser by Elmore Leonard
Nolen took a drink of beer without opening his eyes. “It’s halfway between them—I don’t know.”
“But you were told to come here, weren’t you? You didn’t follow them here.”
“Marshall gave me a postcard picture of the place, when it had palm trees.”
“De Boya gave it to him?”
“I guess so.”
“He tell his sister to come here? Good place to shack up? Come on . . .”
“Maybe she saw the postcard at her brother’s house,” Nolen said, in pain, persecuted. “She tells the piano player to meet her here ’cause it’s the only place she can think of. How’s that?”
“Something’s going on,” Moran said, “and I’m standing in the middle. Does de Boya think I know his sister? I invited ’em here?”
“I don’t know,” Nolen said, “I really don’t. I was hired to watch Anita.” He sucked in fresh ocean air, still not looking at Moran. “And sort of keep my eyes open.”
“For what?”
“See who comes to visit you.” Nolen glanced at Moran and could not have liked the way Moran was staring at him. “Marshall said—you want his exact words?—he said keep your eyes open for a broad.”
“Go on.”
“With sort of blond streaked hair, good-looking.”
“About thirty-two?”
“Yeah, he said around thirty.”
Moran kept staring at him. “What else do you do for money? Anything you’re told, huh?” He walked off toward his bungalow.
Nolen said, “George?” and waited for him to look around. Nolen raised his beer can. “You got any cold ones?”
Moran looked tired. He said, “Come on,” with a halfhearted wave of his hand.
Nolen followed him inside.
Jerry Shea watched the black Cadillac pull up in front. At first he thought Moran had called for an airport limo. But then realized this car wasn’t any ride to the Miami airport. This was the real thing, a personal limousine with no-glare windows that were almost as black as the car and a driver who wore a buttoned-up dark suit that could pass for a uniform.
Jerry Shea said, “Oh, my God,” out loud.
The driver was the Latino guy who was here last night, the one the other guy had called Corky. Now he was a chauffeur. He stood holding the handle of the rear door, ready to open it.
Now the other one, Jiggs Scully, who had given Moran his card, came out of the passenger side of the front seat. He wore a dark suit and stood pulling up his pants and sticking his shirt in, adjusting himself.
Jerry picked up the phone but didn’t dial.
The driver, Corky, was opening the rear door.
A man about sixty got out. A man with a broad, tight expanse of double-breasted gray suit that he adjusted smartly, pulling the jacket down to appear even tighter. The man was Hispanic but very light and had a certain bearing, immovable, built like the stump of an oak tree cut off at about five nine. He reminded Jerry for some reason of a labor leader, a guy high up in the Teamsters, a Latin Jimmy Hoffa. Though this guy was more polished. That word was in Jerry’s mind because the guy looked like he darkened his hair with black shoe-polish, the way it was shining in the sun, like patent leather.
The man was taking a pair of sunglasses from his inside pocket as he looked up at the Coconut Palms. He didn’t seem too impressed.
Moran was half-dressed, packing his canvas carry-on bag. Two pair of pants, five shirts, a couple of light cotton sweaters . . . he wasn’t sure how long he’d be down there. Four or five days maybe. When the phone rang Nolen looked up. He’d been sitting with his beer, grateful, not making a sound. He heard Moran say, “They’re back?” Then heard him say, “Jesus Christ, yeah, that sounds like him . . . It’s okay, Jerry, I’ll see what he wants.” Moran was looking toward the side window as he hung up.
Nolen said, “What’s going on?” Watching Moran pull on a dark blue sport shirt and move toward the door.
“Stay where you are,” Moran told him. He swung the door open and stopped.
The Irish-ex-cop-looking guy, Jiggs Scully, was standing outside the door, pushing his glasses up on his nose. He said, “George, how we doing? Your team won last night, uh?”
Moran stepped out, pulling the door closed behind him. He started past Scully and stopped.
“Which one was my team?”
Scully gave him a wise grin. “The Lions. You’re from the Motor City, aren’t you?”
“What’d I do?” Moran said.
“I don’t know, George, you tell me. Or tell Mr. de Boya there. He wants to ask you something.”
Moran moved past Scully, buttoning his shirt, approaching Andres de Boya now who stood near the far end of the cement walk, looking out at the beach with his hands locked together behind his back. He turned to watch Moran coming, then squared around again to face the beach as Moran reached him.
“How much frontage you have?”
It stopped Moran for a moment. He opened his beltless khaki pants and tucked in his shirttails, zipped as he said, “The same I had the last time. Was it a hundred and twenty or a hundred and thirty feet? I forgot.”
“You’re talking about a difference of two hundred thousand dollars,” de Boya said to the ocean. His voice was soft, but with a heavy accent.
“Numbers aren’t my game anymore,” Moran said. “How’s your golf?”
De Boya didn’t answer or move a muscle.
Moran wondered what would happen if he kicked the guy ass-over the cement wall into the sand, and walked away. He attempted again to nudge him with, “If you’re looking for your sister, she isn’t here . . . You already know that, huh?”
Hard-headed guy, he refused to come to life.
“Am I getting warm?” Moran said. “I’ll tell you something. If you think I had anything to do with her coming here, you’re wrong. I never met your sister before the piano player and I’ve only talked to her once, if you could call it that.”
“How much you want?” de Boya said, out of nowhere.
“For what? My place?”
“I give you . . .” de Boya paused. “Million six hundred thousand.”
“You serious?”
“How much you want?”
“The real-estate guys that call about every week now are up over two million.”
“I give you two million and two hundred thousand.”
De Boya’s gaze came past him and Moran smiled. Was he serious? The man’s gaze continued on, sunglasses like a hooded beacon sweeping the beach; black hair parted in a hard line, showing his scalp.
Moran said, “You want me to go away, Andres? Come on, what’s your game?” He wanted to keep it light and not let the guy get to him. “Whatever it is, the Coconuts isn’t for sale.” And looked out at his beach, at the surf pounding in. “I like it.”
“Why?”
Moran waited; he wanted to be sure.
“I ask you why.”
The man had turned and was almost facing him now. He had asked a question that had nothing to do with real-estate value or numbers and seemed interested in getting an answer.
“I live here,” Moran said. “It’s my home.”
De Boya looked past him, toward the stucco bungalow. “You live in that?”
“I live in that,” Moran said.
“How much you make here?”
“A lot,” Moran said.
“How much? A few thousand?”
Moran said, “I don’t know your sister and I haven’t seen your wife in over a year. I want you to understand that. I never made any moves on your wife. Never.”
De Boya seemed to be staring at him, though might have been sightless behind the sunglasses, the wax figure of a former general.
He said, “Get three offers on real-estate letter paper. I give you a hundred thousand more than the best one.”
Moran looked at him closely. Maybe you had to hit him on the head with a hammer to get a reaction. Moran imagined taking a ball peen and the man’s plastic hair
He said, “You serious, Andres? You want to build?”
“Of course, build,” de Boya said, more animated than before. “What else do you think?”
And maybe that’s all there was to it, though Moran still had his doubts.
He said, “Well, we could sure use another condominium,” turning to look at his property. “There’s room for forty units you go up ten floors. Sell them for around three and gross twelve million. Cost you about eight and a half to build it, say two for the property, add on this and that, cost of tearing down the Coconuts, you net maybe a million, million and a half. I could do the same thing. But it seems like a lot of trouble to go to. I mean what do I get out of it? Pay half to the government. I’m the owner so I live up in the penthouse with a great view of the Atlantic Ocean but have to take an elevator anytime I want to go outside.” Moran nodded toward his bungalow. “I already have a view of the ocean. I got a living room, a bedroom. I got a color TV . . .”
The Dominican former general, cane grower, head of the secret police or whatever role it was that made him rich, stared at Moran. Maybe he understood; maybe he didn’t.
But either way, Moran thought—packed, ready to take off on his adventure—what difference does it make?
He said, “Andres, all I’m trying to say to you is, there’s no place like home and no friend like Jesus.”
Moving away Moran’s gaze came to the two figures standing at the opposite end of the walk, in front of the bungalow, Nolen and the Irish-looking guy, Scully. As Moran got closer he saw they were each holding a can of beer, his beer; Nolen acting, telling a story, Scully grinning, getting a kick out of it.
There you are, Moran thought. You gonna worry about these people?
4
* * *
ALL OVER THE WORLD, Moran decided, the past was being wiped out by condominiums.
There were condos now on the polo grounds west of the hotel, where Amphibious Task Force helicopters had dropped off Marines from the U.S.S. Boxer, the grounds becoming a staging area for Marine patrols into the city. There were condos and office buildings rising in downtown Santo Domingo with the initials of political parties spray-painted on fresh cement, PRD and PQD; but only a few YANQUIS GO HOME now, on peeling walls out in the country, old graffiti Moran had noticed coming in from the airport.
There were young wives of ballplayers sunning themselves at the hotel pool—where the Marines had set up their water purification tanks—the young wives talking about housing and travel while their husbands, down here to play winter ball, took batting practice and went off for a round of golf.
There were no open fields near the hotel now. The gardens were gone, where the first group of Marines had dug in. The Kentucky Fried Chicken place on the corner of Avenida Washington and Socorro Sanchez was gone. The mahogany trees on the street south of the U.S. embassy were still there; the trees looked the same.
They had gone up this street beneath the arch of trees, wide-eyed in the dark, all the way to Nicolas Penson in a war where the street signs were intact and they found their way with a Texaco road map. In the morning they saw people in the streets, crowds of people lining Washington along the oceanfront, like they were watching a parade. They were—waving at the tanks and amtracs. Even with the FUERA YANQUIS signs painted on houses most of the people seemed glad to see them.
The next day, filing back to the embassy, a Marine walking point was shot dead by a sniper; Item Company, at Checkpoint Charlie north of the embassy, drew heavy fire and soon there were snipers working the whole neighborhood, what was supposed to be the International Safety Zone, using bazookas as well as small arms, even old water-cooled 30s that pounded out a heavy sound and at first were thought to be .50-caliber. The Marines moved crosstown, east, establishing a Line of Communication with the Eighty-second Airborne troopers coming into the city across the Duarte Bridge. The LOC held the rebels cornered in the old section of the city and kept the loyalists from getting at them. But it didn’t stop the snipers.
A battalion officer told them, “You got your Friendlies and you got your Unfriendlies.” He told them most of the snipers were hoodlums, street gangs who’d armed themselves when the rebels passed out guns the first day. These people were called tigres but were not trained or organized, not your regular-army rebels. The tigres were out for thrills, playing guns with real ones. “So don’t fire unless you’re fired on.” That was a standing order.
Wait a minute. You mean there’re rules? Somebody said, “We’re here, man.” Two Marine battalions and four Airborne. “Why don’t we go downtown and fucking get it done?”
The question was never answered. By the end of the first month of occupation nineteen U.S. military had been killed in action, one hundred eleven wounded.
Moran said to his driver today, in the early evening sixteen years later, “I have a friend who was here with the Eighty-second, the paratroopers. He believes we could have gone into the rebel area, the old section, and ended the whole thing in about fifteen minutes.”
“Yes, I believe it, too,” the driver said.
“You were here?”
“Yes, I always be here.”
“What side were you on?”
“This side.” The driver, who was an old black man with Indian cheekbones that looked as though they had been polished, tapped his steering wheel. “Three taxicabs ago, the same Number Twenty-four. Chevrolet, but not new like this one.” They were in a ’76 Chevrolet Impala, Moran in front with the driver, the windows open, Moran now and again smelling wood smoke and the smell would take him back to that time.
“You were glad to see the Marines?”
“Yes, of course. To have peace. I drove pressmens from the United States. Yes, we come to a corner, a street there, we have to go fast or those rebel fellas shoot at you. One time the bullets come in this side where you are, they hit here”—he slapped the dashboard—”and go out this way past me, out the window.” The driver’s name was Bienvenido. He was born in 1904 and used to Marines from the United States. He said to Moran, “You want to see where Trujillo was killed, yes?”
“Tomorrow,” Moran said.
“And the old quarter, Independence Park.”
“Tomorrow,” Moran said. He was silent a moment and then said, “Do you know a woman by the name of Luci Palma?”
The driver thought about it and shook his head. “No, I don’t think so. Luci Palma . . .”
They followed the drive into the grounds of the Hotel Embajador, past the front lawn where the American civilians had waited with their luggage to be evacuated. Moran said, “Will you do something for me?”
“Yes, of course.”
Moran took a piece of notepaper from his shirt pocket and unfolded it. “I want this message put in the newspaper. In Listin Diario or El Caribe, I don’t care, whichever one you like better. All right? Tell them to put it in a box. You know what I mean? With lines around it. So it’ll stand out. Okay?”
“Yes, okay.”
“In English.”
“Yes, in English.”
“Just the way it’s written here. Okay? See if you can read it.” He handed Bienvenido the piece of notepaper with the hand-printed message on it that said:
CAT CHASER
is looking for the girl who once ran over rooftops and tried to kill him. Call the Hotel Embajador.
Room 537.
Moran waited for the driver to ask him a question. Bienvenido stared at the notepaper, nodding his lips moving.
“You understand it?”
“You want a girl to call you?”
“The girl I met when I was here, before.”
“Yes.”
“She’ll recognize ‘Cat Chaser.’ If she sees it.”
“Yes.”
“That was the code name for my platoon. When I was here. I was Cat Chaser Four, but she’ll know who it is. I mean if she’s still here.” It didn’t seem enough of an explanation and he
Bienvenido was nodding again. “Yes, I understand. You want this girl. But if you don’t find this girl, you want another girl?”
Mary de Boya watched Moran enter the lobby. She watched him pick up his key at the desk and cross to the elevators. She was aware of an instant stir of excitement and in her mind, concentrating hard, she said, Look this way. She said, Moran, come on. Quick. Look this way!
The elevator door closed behind him; he was gone.
Maybe she was expecting too much. It was dark in the hotel cocktail lounge. Even if he’d looked over he might not have been able to see her. Or their telepathy was rusty.
A few years ago Mary de Boya could stare across the lounge at Leucadendra and make Moran feel her eyes and look at her. Moran could do the same. In the dining room or the club grill she would feel it. Raise her eyes to meet his and something would pass between them. Not a signal, an awareness. They could smile at each other without smiling. Raise eyebrows, almost imperceptibly, and make mutual judgments. Aloud they could make comments removed from reality that would whiz past her husband, his wife, and they would know things about each other that had nothing to do with their backgrounds, both from the same city. That was a coincidence, nothing more. Though it was handy if needed, when Andres drilled her with his secret-police look and wanted to know what they’d been talking about. “Detroit.” When in fact they’d been talking about nothing in particular, nothing intimate, nothing sane, for that matter, “Detroit” was the safe answer. “We just found out both of our dads worked at Ford Rouge, but George lived on the northwest side and I lived downriver, in Southgate.” The look between them had remained harmless. Still, each knew it was there if they wanted to make something of it.
Mary smiled thinking about it now, realizing she missed him.