Straits of Fortune Page 3

  None of this, of course, went with the Aerosmith poster on one powder blue wall or with that of Hendrix, Afro high and guitar in hand, on the other, any more than the plush, white teddy bear wearing a red ribbon around its neck went with the woman I recalled. Only a dead man or one not long for the living could have failed to remember at precisely that moment the first time I’d laid eyes on Mr. Bear. Why the first time had to be here with her father asleep and not at her apartment on South Beach, I never figured out, except for realizing I was about to enter a drama whose intricacies I didn’t care to decipher.

  I had driven at midnight through a jungle rain, my companion heart keeping time with the wipers swiping away at the falling flood of water on the windshield. I remembered the expression on the guard’s face as I pulled up to the gate, how he emerged from his booth like a specter. The hood of his poncho covered all of his face except for the white of his teeth as he smiled and waved me through, not bothering this time or any future time to record on his clipboard the odd fact of my lucky arrival. The bastard’s hit pay dirt, he must have told himself. I knew then that I was one of the chosen. It is a good feeling while it lasts—that is, until you find out what it is you’ve been chosen for.

  What I remember next of that night was opening her door without knocking, just as I had been told, and seeing Vivian sitting naked in her bed, casually smoking a cigarette and cradling the teddy bear between her legs as though it were a child, Edith Piaf crooning softly in the background like a sad ghost trying to exorcise her own memory, and the lingering flying carpet of marijuana exhaust floating over her head as I closed the door behind me. It was an opium den with a naked girl and a stuffed bear, both of them waiting just for me. A night, in short, for the record books, and when I drove out before dawn, the guard was asleep in the chair in his booth and a thick fog filled the space between earth and sky, but not nearly so thick as the fog in my mind.

  And now here I was again, not really believing it. Everything came back a little at a time, like the pages of a diary thrown into a fire, then retrieved from the ashes. I went over to the shelf with the stereo and television and slipped in the videotape. I was aware of the element of self-torture involved with what I was doing, aware that I was having my buttons pushed and pushed hard, aware of the yacht silent and white in the sunlight, aware of the money, aware that I was being foolish. I switched on the television and the VCR, then sat back in a yellow beanbag chair that absorbed me like a giant sponge.

  Several times I was forced to turn away from what I saw. There were no trailers to sit through, certainly no cartoons, only a brief, ragged fence of static that morphed into the view of the room. Matson and Vivian sitting at a table in what looked like a hotel room, judging by the generic furniture. They were talking, smoking cigarettes, and there were glasses and two bottles of red wine. I turned down the volume. For some reason hearing her voice was worse than seeing her face.

  Then a second man entered the frame, and I jumped as though he had burst in on me. I didn’t know him. He was well tanned, well groomed, dark-haired, handsome in that perfect way. He seemed to be in his late thirties, a medium-size man in a beige sports jacket and black slacks. He had a military-style crew cut. He walked over to the camera and leaned down and placed his face close to its lens and grinned like an idiot. Then he went over to the table and poured himself a glass of wine and sat down across from Vivian and Matson. Matson held up a hundred-dollar bill to the camera and winked devilishly; then he rolled it into a tube. Each of them did a line of coke off a mirror laid flat on the table.

  After a while they got into it. Vivian slipped off a periwinkle-colored silk dress, and the men began taking off their clothing. Vivian and Matson kept up their chatter as she removed her bra and panties, but the other man looked nervous and uncertain. The cameraman, whoever he was, panned in on his face so that I could see him sweating. Vivian’s eyes looked glazed, and I gave in to the merciful thought that she had to be on something.

  Matson went first. He was tall, rangy, with a hawk nose and a shock of straight black hair that made him look like a rock star. I remembered the times I had trained him, taught him a little tai chi and tried to get him off the coke. He had the arms I had given him, but also the puffed-out gut of a skinny, full-time drinker he had given himself. I watched him and tried to understand that he was dead.

  He was very thorough with her, as was she with him. Then the other man came over, looking shy and tentative and trying to hide it with the fake smile of a man who would rather be elsewhere. Matson went and sat down and drank his wine while his pal took his turn. The other man was trying extra hard to look lustful, but all he managed to do was look sad and pitiful, like a man who has reached some previously unexplored limit in himself and does not like very much the new territory he’s discovered there. Matson drank his wine and watched them like a man at a movie, like me watching him. But only one of us was a masochist, as far as I could tell.

  I watched far more than I should have. I fast-forwarded until I came to the part where Matson and the blond man dragged the couch away from the wall and bent her over it. The quality of the film and lighting were both very good, but I would have paid money for a few shadows to hide the obvious pleasure I saw on her face.

  It was ugly and degrading and enthralling, and by the time I shut it off and was standing by the window looking out at the yacht, I was feeling like a man who’s roasted himself over a fire while turning the spit himself. I went back to the night when I had walked into a bar after a long drive back from Gainesville, where I’d gone to see an old friend who was dying from cancer. It was an out-of-the-way place, and I was in an out-of-the-way mood. I had gone there for the specific reason of having a solitary drink without having to talk to anybody I knew. The chances of my being there at all on that or any other particular night were so slim as not to be calculable, but I was only there a short while when I saw her and Matson swapping spit in a booth. It was just a month or so after I’d introduced them.

  I don’t remember how I got over to Matson. Possibly I levitated or passed through the ether like a ghost. But I remember well enough how the bouncers there pulled me off him. I remember the shock on Vivian’s face, the livid embarrassment that held for a moment, then collapsed into tears. The bouncers were only doing their jobs. I didn’t want to fight them, but one of them hit me in the side of the head and drew blood, and from that moment on, as far as I was concerned, they were on Matson’s side.

  Then the cops came, as cops will. One of them smacked me over the head with a nightstick and took me away. I had to call the Sheik, another client of mine, to spring me from jail. The only good thing that came out of it was the community service I had to do. I spent the better part of a month showing some retarded kids how to throw a Frisbee at a Jewish recreation center. Those kids were all right, even if their parents were a little leery of me at first. When the administrators realized I wasn’t a complete maniac, they even offered me a part-time job. The pressures of the marketplace didn’t allow me to take it, however, but I still went back once or twice a week or when business was slow, even after I was done with my atonement.

  I was standing by the window staring at the yacht and thinking about all this when I heard the door open behind me. Williams was standing there. I would have known it was him without having to turn around. He was easily the tensest man I’d ever met, and the steroids weren’t helping much either. His eyes had the jaundiced tint of someone who’d been on the juice for way too long, and he was retaining so little subcutaneous water that the muscles of his massive forearms had that telltale snakeskin tautness I’d noticed a lot of down on South Beach.

  “I see you’ve been at the movies,” he said, glancing over at the television screen, now filled with jittery horizontal lines of static.

  I reached over, shut off the set, and popped out the cassette. We stared at one another. I am six feet one and weigh two hundred pounds, but Williams had me by three inches and enough muscle to make a di
fference, plus he’d been trained to fight by the best. Even with the age difference—I was thirty-four—common sense told me I should have been afraid of him, but I wasn’t. At that moment, staring into his grinning face, all I wanted to do was hit him, hit him hard. He knew it, too. He smiled, turned sideways, tugged at the legs of his trousers, bent his knees, and assumed a fighting stance. He cocked his head to one side and then the other. There was a cracking sound you don’t hear much outside a chiropractor’s office.

  “You in the mood for a wee bit of a workout, Jack?” he asked in a fake Scottish accent.

  “When I am,” I said, “you won’t have to ask.” I wondered if, like me, Williams realized how stupid we were being. Then he threw a punch that stopped an inch from my nose. He smiled when I didn’t flinch. He looked offended, disappointed, as though I had refused a gift. I shook my head and walked past him out the door. I had nothing to prove to him. Williams tensed when I passed by him. He followed me as I went down the stairs, but not too closely. The bad vibes followed us both.

  The Colonel was swimming laps in the pool when I walked out onto the patio. Williams trailed me, a few feet back, still not getting too close, as though he sensed my mood. I wasn’t the same man who had arrived here a short while ago. I had switched tracks halfway through the film, and I wasn’t so sure I wanted to switch back. Still, despite my frame of mind, something didn’t jibe about the blackmail angle, at least not as it pertained to the video I’d just watched. My gut feeling was that it was just a ploy to distract me. Unfortunately, it had worked.

  The Colonel saw me out of the corner of his eye, swam past me to the shallow end, and walked briskly out of the blue chemistry of the water. I waited off to the side for him. Williams handed his boss a black silk robe, which the old man promptly wrapped himself in, tying off the sash at the middle. He said a few words to Williams, who glanced over at me with a grin, then turned and headed off toward the garden. The old man went and sat down again at the table, and I went and sat across from him. A bottle of Johnnie Walker Black had appeared on the table, and he poured a bit of it into a glass and drank it straight down in one shot.

  “Williams doesn’t like you very much, does he?” the Colonel asked, looking at his empty glass.

  “No,” I said. “I don’t suppose he does.”

  “I wonder why.”

  “You should ask him,” I said.

  “What did you think of the film?”

  “That’s a stupid question.”

  He thought that over for a moment. “It’s been a very long time since anyone referred to me as stupid.”

  “You’ll need to get used to it if you think I believe that your daughter killed someone over a film, even one like that. I suppose you’ve seen it.”

  He shook his head. “I’ve seen enough ugliness in my life, Jack. I took her word for what was on it, hers and Williams’s. I told you. She did it to protect me.”

  “If she really did shoot Matson,” I said, “then protecting you was probably only part of it. I’m betting she just lost her temper and popped a cap into him. I’m not buying this loving-daughter crap.”

  “He was going to send copies of his little masterpiece to everyone I know, people in Washington, people who matter. She didn’t want that to happen, and she took the matter into her own hands before I could stop her.” He looked across at me. “Do you want her to go to prison for killing that scumbag?”

  “She might get off. It’s happened before, and you’ve got the money to make it happen.”

  “I don’t want to take that chance, and I don’t want the publicity. I just want the whole thing gone as quickly as possible. A hundred thousand dollars, Jack.” His eyes brightened, and his voice rose into a tone of false triumph, all for the benefit of my proletarian perspective. He made that much while brushing his teeth.

  “Why not get Williams to do it?” I asked. “He works a lot cheaper than that.”

  “There’s a slight chance that if you’re careless, you’ll be caught. If that were to happen to Williams, I’d be drawn into it. I can’t risk that.”

  That didn’t sound quite right for some reason; then it hit me. When it came to moving quietly through the night, there wouldn’t be too many people better at it than Williams. Compared to him, I would be an amateur. The Colonel would know that as well as anyone. It was early, but I poured myself an inch of scotch to cover my thinking time. I could almost feel him trying to read my mind.

  “Williams could’ve been out there and back a half dozen times by now,” I said after taking a sip of my drink. “And you and I both know it.”

  “I need Williams here,” the Colonel said. “With me.”

  “Why? Sure, he’s cute, but you could spare him for a few hours, couldn’t you?”

  “Matson had friends, and I have reason to believe that the house is being watched. Williams is almost psychic when it comes to things like that. He refuses to leave my side.”

  “If that’s true,” I said, “then Matson’s friends must also realize that something’s wrong on that boat. It’s been there long enough. Why haven’t they gone out there to investigate?”

  “It may be that they already have, possibly at night. If that’s so, they’re probably waiting for my next move, see whether I’ll call the police. They may be expecting me to send Williams out to take care of things, in which case I’d be here alone.”

  “I’ll tell you what,” I said. “I’ll stay here with you while big bad Williams goes out and does the dirty work. How’s that sound?”

  “You’re good, Jack, but you’re not Williams.”

  “Funny, but for some reason I take that as a compliment.”

  “Are you afraid?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Williams stays here. As I said, if Williams were to be caught, it would lead back to me. That’s not something I can afford at this stage of my life.”

  “And if I get caught? They’ll think I killed him.”

  “Your alibi is that I called you here to ask if you knew where my daughter was. I told you I thought she was on the boat. You went out there and found the body and decided to sink the boat and spare an old man the trouble of bringing the police into it. They’ll dig the bullets out, but they won’t match with any gun you own. We won’t mention the film, of course. That would give you too much of a motive.”

  “So who killed him, then? That’s the kind of question the police tend to ask.”

  “A man in Matson’s business makes plenty of enemies. The Russian mob has moved into the smut business in a big way. Matson ran afoul of them. I know a lot of judges, and I’ll get you a good Jewish lawyer. You have no record, and you used to be a cop. On top of that, I’ll double your fee.”

  “How do you know I can even drive a boat like that?” I asked.

  The Colonel smiled. “Let’s not be obtuse, all right? You know damned well I had you checked out long before you showed up here. You used to work for Captain Tony, right? Taught you everything he knew about repossessing boats. You have a captain’s license—expired, but I’ll overlook that, considering the circumstances. You and he even got shot at a few times. Once, down in Veracruz, you even got locked up for a few days. It seems the Mexicans thought you two were thieves.”

  “Coming from them, that was pretty hard to take.”

  He was talking about the time Captain Tony and I had been asked to return a thirty-foot sailboat that belonged to a stockbroker whose numbers had gone bad. The broker had sailed down to Acapulco to get away from it all, but he hadn’t gone far enough. Now he was in a prison up in central Florida, doing time for insider trading. After the FBI caught up with him, the Mexicans wanted to keep his boat. The bank had disagreed with that and called in Captain Tony. It was good money, but we had almost gotten killed.

  “I understand you have a kayak,” the Colonel said.

  “That’s right. So?”

  “You’ll need it to get back once the boat sinks.”

  “I’d have to take
that boat out at least five or six miles, into the Gulf Stream. That’s a long way out.”

  “You’re making excuses, Jack. We’re wasting time on all this. Are you going to do it or not?”

  “The thought of jail fails to intrigue me, Andrew.”

  “I don’t see why. You’d be able to lift weights all day long. Now, look: We can bullshit here all day, Jack. Yes or no?”

  I looked across the table at him and shook my head. I stood up. The Colonel seemed crestfallen, deserted, as though his best hope had left him. All I wanted to do was get out of there, away from all of them, but the look on the Colonel’s face ate into my resolve.

  “You don’t expect me to believe the blackmail story, do you?” I asked. “And don’t give me that crap about your friends getting the video. First of all, you don’t have any friends, and second of all, if you did, you wouldn’t give a rat’s ass what they thought. Besides that, nobody who knows Vivian thinks she’s been in a convent the past ten years, so why don’t you tell me why she really shot Matson?”

  The Colonel looked me over carefully and nodded approvingly.

  “You’re a good man,” he said. “I’m sure if you hadn’t shot that other officer, you’d be a detective by now. You’re right, the smut wasn’t the only reason, but it’s the only one I’m prepared to provide you with right now—that and a hundred thousand dollars.”

  “Where’s Vivian?” I said. “Maybe she’ll tell me what’s going on here.”

  “I don’t know where she is.”

  “I hate calling you a liar twice in the same day, Colonel, but I’m kind of getting used to it. Save your money for your daughter’s lawyers. By the time they’re through, a hundred grand won’t even pay their bar bills.”

  I stood up. The Colonel gazed at me and shook his head slowly. Then he stood and, despite the fact that it was not his habit, extended his hand. The gesture caught me off guard.

  “Sorry I brought you out here, old friend. No hard feelings,” the Colonel said. He wore the faint smile of a man who is trying hard to be brave.