Only Make Believe (12 page)

“Yes, and it looks like he didn’t know what he was doing. Carmen stepped in to coach him, shopped for him, called you. Bingo! Mr. Nick is transformed into La Diva. He wears his drag downstairs, sings and parades around, later gets beaten up in his room, dies in emergency. We don’t know if his taste in costumes had anything to do with the attack. We need to find out what happened. Barbers and beauticians know everybody’s secrets. I thought you could help.”

Mr. Patt paused, opened a drawer in the manicure table between us, pulled out a pack of Lucky Strikes, offered me one and, when I declined, lit up. “I don’t feel comfortable discussing my clients. I’m sure you understand.”

“No. I don’t. This isn’t gossip. This is somebody who got killed.”

“I thought you ran a hotel. Do you talk about your guests with strangers? Nobody told me you were a policeman.”

“Nobody told me you were coming to work in my hotel on Sunday. I should have known, and I might have stopped it. But it got by me.” I didn’t have to add,
This time
.

Mr. Patt blew a stream of smoke past my ear. “I do appreciate the extra work the hotel gives me.”

“You’re the best in town, everybody says so. That’s why we recommend you too our guests.”

We understood each other. I could bar him from my hotel if he didn’t cooperate.

Mr. Patt stubbed out the butt. “Hmm, well. Let me tell you first that I don’t generally work on Sundays. And I do assure you this is the first and only time I’ve been called to the Caloosa to do up a male guest. Still, a head’s a head, Hon. Anyway, Carmen said it would be worth my while, and it was.”

“Nobody’s blaming you.” I raised my right hand and opened it like a flower, meaning to tactfully suggest that we were all in it together.

Mr. Patt reached out, took my hand, turned it over gently and inspected the pink, freckled surface. “You need to take care of your skin, Hon. Jergens’ Lotion is good, though it’s on the perfumey side. Nivea might be better for you. I have some French emollient creams I can sell you at a discount. But it’s the same stuff in fancier bottles.”

He held my hand a little too long. I withdrew it. “You and Carmen got the Diva ready for her debut. I’m just trying to talk to people with Caloosa connections. It’s possible he mentioned somebody he was going to see. Or said something to you, anything that might help find the killer. ”

Mr. Patt looked me square in the face. “Too much sun and wind on those fair cheeks and that nose, Hon. You don’t tan, do you? Redheads usually don’t.”

“I was sunburned the whole time I was growing up, sunburned the whole time I was in the Navy. I wear a cap now, when I can remember it.”

“You ought to use zinc oxide on that nose when you go to the beach. It helps a lot.”

Mr. Patt was clearly unwilling to volunteer much.

“I do. And we keep some on the boat, for Yankees. Did DiGennaro tell you why he wanted to look like a woman?”

Mr. Patt lit up another Lucky, blew an impudent smoke ring, then another. “Did he say he wanted to be a woman? No, he didn’t. Did he say he wanted to be with another man or a boy? He did not. I gathered that something about wearing women’s clothes got him excited, though. It was definitely a sex thing. Particularly the undergarments. I hope I’m not shocking you?”

“I run a club-hotel, not a convent. In Japan, I ran a whore house for the U.S. Navy. Keep going, please.”

“My, my.” Mr. Patt touched his chest, mock shocked. It seemed we had connected. “Well, then, for me, it was kind of a challenge—turning a gorilla with sideburns and five-o’clock shadow into Floria Tosca. He’s—he
was
very hairy. Took me an hour to shape his brows and pluck the hairs on his nose and ears. The wig was nothing—ten minutes. The shoulders—ugh, two coats of Nair! The shoulders didn’t even show once the gown was zipped up but he wanted it. And Sunday the weather was cool, so he didn’t sweat too much when we applied the pancake and dressed him.”

“Did he say why or how it felt sexy to get dressed up? Do you think he had a date later, or was going to meet somebody? And it turned sour?”

I was saying too much, talking too fast, trying to put words in his mouth. I took a breath.

“It wasn’t what he said. And maybe I shouldn’t say
this
. He wore a dance belt under his pink lace panties.”

“What’s that exactly?”

“Like a jockey strap for men dancers, only stronger.”

“What for?”

“To keep things under control. I told you, this stuff made him feel sexy, the panties and girdle, but also the new face.”

“You saw that?”

“We dressed him. You couldn’t miss how he got, what it did to him.”

“He got aroused? Jesus, he didn’t try anything, did he? Show it to you, play with himself, ask you to come back later, play for pay?”

“Now you’re shocking me. Mercy! No, it was strictly business. I did him up, he paid my fee and tipped very generous. I packed my case and went home.”

“And you didn’t see him again?”

Mr. Patt reached for the pack of Luckies, noticed he had a cigarette already lit and withdrew his hand. “Noooo.”

“Where were you Sunday night and Monday morning?”

Mr. Patt turned pale under his tan. “That’s none of your business.”

“I hope not. You just told me he got excited when you had your hands on him. I hope it’s not police business. We’ve got a detective on the case. He may want you to account for your time.”

Mr. Patt stood up, crossed the room, fiddled with a set of hair curlers and turned back to me. “I’ve never been in a whore house, to tell you the truth, Mr. Wright. Navy or otherwise. I have no idea how people talk there. But I don’t like your tone. So! Sunday night. I fed Mother her supper—cold chicken and lima beans with ham and biscuit, as I recall. I took in the new Lana Turner movie—the box office lady, Miss Helen, she knows me, ask her. I drove down to the Tamiami Garage on the southside and filled up the car with high test. Jimbo the pump jockey will remember, you do know the place, don’t you, Hon? Best after-hours truck lot in town? Everybody says so.” He took a breath. “I drove home late, checked on Mother, listened to the news on the radio, brushed my teeth and went to bed. Anything else? Is that enough?”

“Look,” I said. “I’m sorry. A man got beaten to death in my hotel. You tell me there’s a sex angle. I figured maybe it’s all connected.”

“It had nothing to do with me. I was someplace else. And I think I have a client due any minute. So, if you please?”

I stuck out my hand. “No hard feelings?”

He laughed but the laugh had an edge. “I could make a joke. But I think I’ve said enough already.”

He ignored my outstretched hand. I thanked him and left. Translating his account of Sunday evening was a snap: After taking in a movie, Mr. Patt spent the rest of the night doing up truck drivers in a shadowy lot south of town. The alibi might not stand up in court but it sounded solid to me.

Ted Peters, my high school principal, the man who’d gotten me a college scholarship, lived in a riveted aluminum trailer at the end of a cul-de-sac named Dolphin Way. The development, on the outskirts of Naples and closer to the Everglades than the Gulf of Mexico, was named Dolphin Paradise. A reedy canal separated Peters’ Airstream Clipper from a similar model on the opposite bank. The water in the canal didn’t look deep enough for mullet, much less dolphin.

“Always wanted a waterfront view,” Mr. Peters explained, showing me around the pine-and-palmetto-dotted lot. “We’ll build a dock and acquire a yacht when our ship comes in.”

He smiled when he said it.
No hard feelings—
that seemed to be his subtext
. Teacher retirement-pay isn’t much. But we made it, safe and sound. We’re home.

He was short and wiry, with interested eyes behind Coke-bottle lenses, thick white hair and a pot belly that had developed since I’d last seen him. Like many deaf men, his speech had an up-down, loud-soft-soft, musical rhythm. Twelve years earlier, his voice had easily filled Tampa High School auditorium with jokes, advice, schedules and exhortations having to do with decency, righteous living and America first. Now I had to listen closely to catch the ends of his sentences.

“You were the red-headed swimmer, you set some schoolboy records, we sent you to Gainesville, do I have that right?”

I said ‘yes, sir’ but I must have muttered.

“Look directly at me, son. Just talk normally. Took me a while to learn to do this, read lips. Had to take classes.”

“IS THIS BETTER?”

“Don’t shout, son. You still swim?”

“Yes, sir. Try to do a mile every morning.”

“Good people don’t change. I remember you as a hard worker. Serious about getting an education, bettering yourself. Your parents were dead, isn’t that right? You lived with an uncle? He worked on the river, the docks, something like that?”

“Close enough. Uncle Bob owned a charter boat. Took tourists out fishing.”

“No wonder you were such a little water rat. I hope you like fish.” He led me inside. Mrs. Peters, dressed in a starched, frilly apron over a freshly ironed housedress, had coffee perking, the fold-down table set with her best china and fried snapper, potato salad and biscuits ready to serve.

I didn’t have to ask many questions. Dr. Peters remembered Nick DiGennaro very well and not fondly. He talked while we ate.

“Never heard of him until after the war. You know I started out as a math teacher, came down here from Georgia Tech in 1925, during the land boom.”

He told me, with more detail, the same story Kenneth Yeomans had—that DiGennaro had driven local people out of business in a pricing war.

“DiGennaro even used his own family,” Peters concluded. “He took his boy out of Catholic school and put him in public—Manatee Junior—but left the daughter with the nuns at St. Stanislaus. That way, if questions arose, he had a foot in both doors. Could claim his family used whatever kind of books he was plugging.”

“I met the son,” I said. “He was at the hospital the morning his daddy died.”

“What did you think?”

“Hard to tell. He’d been drinking and tried to cover it up. Couldn’t keep his stories straight, lied and didn’t seem to know it. Called the sheriff on his own, tried to horn in on the investigation, go over the head of the officer in charge.”

“Doesn’t do to pull boys out of parochial and throw them into public. They come in feeling like bad sheep, like they’re being punished, thrown to the wolves. Can take two or three years to put a boy that age back together.”

“Well, you think Chuck—the boy—do you think he could be mad enough at dad to, uh—excuse me, Mrs. Peters—to beat him to a pulp? Kick him in the you-know-whats?”

Mrs. Peters covered her mouth with her napkin. Ted Peters put up his hand in a stop-sign gesture. “In some kind of drunken rage, you mean? No, never heard of anything like that. Not with a middle class white boy. Not unless he was psycho.”

Mrs. Peters stood and started to clear the table. “Thought you had it all figured out, didn’t you, Dan?”

“Actually no. But the detective on the case is thinking along those lines.”

Peters handed his plate to his wife. “Before anybody nails the boy to a cross for sneaking a couple of beers and telling fibs, I would suggest that your detective friend check on two grown men. One, of course, would be Don Lowery. Don still lives in Bradenton, as far as I know. He’s broke, bankrupt, put everything he had into trying to save his company, Sterling Books. His wife left him for another man. He probably deserves to hold a grudge.”

“And the other?”

“Jerry Dukes, Nick DiGennaro’s former business partner. I read in the paper sometime ago that he was charged with attempted bribery of a public official. Had to do with the Hardee County schools. He pleaded no contest and paid a fine.”

“Was he forced to sell out to DiGennaro?”

Ted Peters tapped my hand with the ends of his fingers. “Listen, hear me out. I know the public official involved real well. Bonnie McGraw. She was assistant purchasing agent for Hardee schools. Started out at the Tampa school board office. Lost her Hardee position over the Jerry Dukes scandal, of course. Turns out she’d been on the take since she worked with us. The girl got caught and wanted to save herself. She was prepared to testify against Dukes.”

Mrs. Peters picked up the cream pitcher and wiped the bottom with a kitchen towel. “There was talk she was also mixed up with Mr. DiGennaro. Some way.”

“Talk might be all it was, dear one.”

“We saw the poor thing at an educators’ convention in Ocala last year,” Mrs. Peters added. “She’s a sales representative for a sanitary supplies company now.”

“Sells bleach and toilet paper for a living,” Peters said, his tone making clear his opinion of such a fate. “Believes Nick DiGennaro secretly turned them in.”

“To cut his old partner out of the business?”

“People are moving to Florida every day, Dan. They’re having kids. There’s a fortune to be made selling school books. How angry would you be if you lost half of all that money?”