Only Make Believe (4 page)

Get hold of yourself,
I thought.
Big deal you’ve never worn a dress. Quit feeling so fucking superior, Mister high-and-mighty hotel manager. You’ve done things that’d make Dr. Kinsey blush. With dozens of men. On Navy ships. In barracks and officers’ clubs. In the Frisco YMCA. On the beach and in Bud’s Jeep. And you’re still here. You know how to operate, you know in your bones that fear and hesitation are worse dangers than ugly words from ignorant assholes. You’re teaching Bud all you know about self-protection in the land of the free and home of the brave. And he’s getting it. So just keep your mouth shut. No snide remarks.

We followed the medics and stretcher down the hall. Phil stood at the open elevator door. “Where’s Carmen?” I asked. “Did he actually go home?”

“He’s in the clubroom. We don’t generally put calls through to staff in there.”

“Find him. Tell him to meet me at the loading dock. Now. Thank you.”

Phil turned toward the fire stairs. Bud blocked his path. “Hold it. We got to seal the room and start asking around. Somebody must of heard something. Who else is on this floor? Do we know if they’re all in their rooms?”

“I can make up a list in two shakes. But all the other guests here on five are in waterfront rooms, on the other side of the building. Mr. DiGennaro asked for quiet, private and the commercial rate. So I gave him that single facing the parking lot. We’re nothing like full, Sunday the week after New Year’s, you know what I mean?”

“OK, Phil,” Bud said. “Go rustle up Carmen for Dan, then send somebody up with tape, a room key, a padlock and some kind of hasp. Dan, you haul ass over to the hospital. Might as well take my vehicle. Fucking bad situation all the way round. And it looks to me like it sure could get worse.”

“Assault-and-battery, you said?”

“Probably an aggravated charge. On one side or the other.”

Carmen started to cry when I told him about Diva. “Oh, no, no. not my debutante, not here in the Caloosa.” Carmen glanced back at the building as I steered Bud’s Jeep onto Bay Street. “I thought we were safe here. Such a nice man, Mr. DiGennaro, and now somebody hurt him so bad? You know, I took La Diva under my wing, did a little shopping, fix up her makeup, call in the hairdresser. Let me tell you, before I got started, the Diva didn’t know mascara from meatloaf. My Tommy, he rehearsed her an hour Sunday afternoon. And the Diva did sing all her music. No pantomime for that girl. Such a triumph, yes?”

Carmen drew a starched handkerchief out of his breast pocket and delicately dabbed his eyes. When we passed under a street light he held up the stained cloth for inspection. “
Mamacita del Guadalupe
, I don’t dare to appear in public until I re-do this face. Poor Diva. Do you think she’ll be all right?”

He reached inside his coat and pulled out a compact and mascara pencil.

“Sounds like you went above and beyond the call of duty,” I said. “Especially on your day off. God only knows.”

“Poor,
poor
Diva! She also tip so very generous, almost enough to pay the month’s rent. She was here once before, late last year. Didn’t open her mouth except to drink two Manhattans. No, she paraded around the hotel in a Veronica Lake wig, black evening dress and purse like a saddlebag. I think maybe she is rehearsing for the role of a Sicilian widow in some community theater. She take dinner in the River Room. Then after, she occupy a table in the club, all by herself. I ask her to dance and she refuse. But before she goes upstairs for the night, she talks to my Tommy, says she’d like to come back and sing sometime. He tell me. I talk to her next morning, over breakfast. Make a suggestion or two. We make final arrangements by phone last week.”

“You’re kidding.”

“You do not read the special requests file? I thought you always do that, never fail. So you didn’t know that Mister Nick DiGennaro had listed what he need in the room, along with wanting to do a female impersonation act with my Tommy.”

“I’ve been busy as hell.”

“This situation gonna keep you and jour jarhead even more busy. Has Bud got some idea who do this thing? Do our brave detective solve the case already, collar a suspect red-handed?”

“You sound like a Sunday night radio show. The attack just happened. Everybody in town’s a suspect in a situation like this.”

“Danny, you know how I like to make my jokes. I trade laughs with Bob Hope and Martha Raye so many times in our soldier shows. But let me tell you something serious—about you and your horse cock.”

I turned a corner. At the far end of the block, the blue emergency-room sign flashed into view. “Shoot, but make it fast, Kimosabe. I can take it.”

“It’s none of my business, Danny, but if everybody in Myers is a suspect, then I got to assume you and the cop are each other’s alibis? Yes? And why I say that? Hmm? You and I know—
everybody
knows—he got back to the Caloosa about the time the Diva was doing her drag act. And everybody knows you two fellas left the club a little later, looking like Bob and Bing on the road to Mandalay, practically arm in arm. And I figure the house cop, he didn’t leave the hotel. Was here sleeping . . . somewhere.”

The ridge on the back of my balls turned hot. But the last thing I needed was to vent my fear and anger on Carmen. “We did a security walk-through.”

“And he slept in a cabana out by the pool? My dear, he’s a Marine, a professional fighter. He kill people for a living, no?”

“We all killed people during the war.”

“Fine, pay no attention. Me, Carmencita, I don’t count for nothing. Don’t listen. I’m oh so very happy to believe that you two war buddies spent the midnight hours counting towels, fully clothed. But for the public record? Maybe you need to come up with a more suitable story, if you get my meaning.”

Carmen was right. People were bound to ask where Bud and I had been and what we were doing when a man dressed as a woman—a presumed sodomite, a man guilty until proved innocent of crimes against nature—was viciously attacked. Bud and I sure couldn’t swear we’d been in bed together. And if Bud was going to investigate DiGennaro’s beating, we probably couldn’t serve as each other’s alibis.

Worry about that later,
I thought.
Deal with the hospital first.

The sour, half-digested beer in my gut rose up and said hello. I burped, immediately felt better and turned in to the emergency room driveway.

I dropped Carmen at the emergency room door and parked the Jeep in a slot marked “Official Use Only.” Bud was already working the case, if unofficially. I figured a ticket on his private vehicle wouldn’t stick.

By the time I got inside Lee Memorial Hospital, Carmen and the night-shift nurses had renewed their acquaintance.

“Smile for me, Mr. Morales,” the younger woman said. “Um-umm! What dentist did you see? He does mighty fine work.”

“And that scarring right through your left eyebrow,” her older associate added. “You cover it so nice. What brand of pancake do you use?”

“When you were with us last time,” the younger nurse continued, meanwhile fitting a blood-pressure sleeve around Nick DiGennaro’s shaved arm, “those pearly white incisors of yours were nothing but nubbins. Um-umm.”

“Bloody stubs they were.” The older nurse drew back the sheet from DiGennaro’s torso, paused at the sight of a hairy, burly man shaved from sideburns to nipples, then applied a stethoscope to his chest as if she’d seen it all before.

Which she had, two years earlier, when the same team treated Carmen after he was beaten and left unconscious in a downtown alley. Carmen’s attacker, a Ku Klux Klan member and would-be enforcer of local moral standards, eventually took a wrong turn and ran into Bud’s fists. At the moment, he was doing five years hard time at Raiford, the Florida state penitentiary.

“You was contused from asshole to appetite,” her partner said brightly. “Glad to see it ain’t you on the gurney this time.”

“Sally, Chet was right. I don’t like this man’s heartbeat.”

The other woman drew the sheet down to DiGennaro’s knees, then flicked it off and into an open hamper.

“What’s this? Black Nylons? Heavens to Betsy. His heart? What’s it sound like?”

Chet, the lead ambulance medic, was propped against the doorframe, clipboard in hand. “We had to cut a whalebone corset off Miss Pansy in the truck, Miss Sally. She wasn’t breathing too good. Corset’s in that there paper bag.”

The second medic backed up his buddy. “We get criticized if we don’t bring ’em in alive. So we was in kind of a hurry to get here, you know?”

“And we didn’t know what we was dealing with, exactly. Looked bad. At first. Older feller wearing women’s underwear. And face makeup, lipstick and all. Nail polish, too. See there?”

“Figured we ought to let ya’ll and the doc decide what to do, you know?”

“Was he conscious when you got to him?” the older nurse asked. “How was his breathing? Regular? Did he complain of chest pain? Cough? Any vomiting? Clutching himself?”

“We think he was kicked,” the first medic said. “Take a look at that thigh.”

“We tried to examine him
down there
,” Medic two said. “In the groin area. That’s when he came to, pretty much. Shouted and all.”

“Acted like he thought we was feeling him up.”

“Had to give him a needle. Or he’d a fought us. Hurt as he was.”

“Is,” the sidekick corrected. “Is bad hurt. Can he hear us, Miss Sally? Poor fruit bastard.”

“What did you give him? Morphine?”

The medic nodded.

“His heart rhythm’s irregular,” the younger nurse said. “Go fetch Doctor Willis. We need him in here now. Get on the horn. Now!”

Chet made a show of coming to attention. “That dad-blamed intern better not be hiding out in the laundry room again. Should I look there first?”

I stared at the naked man on the table, aware that he was my guest, that I knew almost nothing about him—and that hell had definitely broken loose. From tits to Nylons, Nick DiGennaro was hairy and solid as a he-bear, olive skinned and evidently strong if not overly muscular. Under the harsh surgical lights, every curled hair and wrinkled detail of his scrotum and darkly hooded penis stood out like brushed metal and painted wire.

Only hours earlier, he’d been performing at the Caloosa Club’s piano bar, masquerading as a Roman contralto, pursing his lips and patting his gloved fingertips together like a real woman playing a dramatic role. Hell, he’d fooled me. Aside from his vaudeville act, he’d simply registered as an overdressed, unhappy widow, a gal out on the town cashing her dead husband’s hard-earned retirement checks.

The older nurse opened a cabinet and pulled out an oxygen mask. “Just find us a doctor. Now!”

Carmen, slumped on a stool, his face in his hands, jumped when she slammed the cabinet door shut. When I touched his shoulder, he shivered. “Makes it all come back so bad,” he whispered. “How much they hate us—the men. Not all of them, but so many, you know? Even club members, men of the world, they act oh so polite. And the others—they can’t say what they want. They too scared and angry to ask.”

I knelt beside Carmen. “This guest was a … ?”

Carmen shook his head. “No, he—no, not exactly. I have to think.”

Out in the hall, a bell rang. “Calling Doctor Willis. Doctor Willis. Calling Doctor Willis. Doctor Willis to ER. Doctor Willis to ER. Code Red, Doctor Willis.”

DiGennaro coughed, then groaned. “Oh, Mary, Mother of God.” He shifted his hips, moved his arms and tried to cover his nakedness with his hands. “Fuck. I’m fucked. How bad am I? Sister? Sister?” The words were slurred and garbled but understandable.

The older nurse turned to Carmen. “What’s his name, Mr. Morales? First name, if you please.”

Carmen moved to DiGennaro’s side. “Nick,” he said, touching the hurt man’s arm. “Nicholas DiGennaro. Lives in Bradenton. With wife and a family. Nick, call him Nick.”

“Nick!” the older nurse cried. “Nick, you’ll be fine. Nick, can you hear me?”

Carmen leaned down, closer, whispered, “Or Diva? Miss Diva Capri?”

DiGennaro stared back at him, moaned, raised his hands. “Friggin’ pervert. Told him no. Wrong idea. No touching. Another curtain call only. Not that kind of—”

And then he raised his head, gasped and tried to clutch his chest with both hands. The older nurse pushed Carmen out of the way. “Nick,” she shouted, applying the oxygen mask to his face. “Try to breathe. In. Out. In. Out.”

DiGennaro shouted back, but not at her—shouted at the pain in his chest. It was the kind of despairing, agonized cry I’d only heard only once before: when a shipwrecked sailor floating near my lifeboat in the Pacific Ocean in July 1945 was hit by sharks and torn apart.

“Ahh. Nnn—no! Nnn—ahh! Fuuuh. FUUUH!”

A pear-shaped young man in a wrinkled white coat and physician’s mirror rushed into the room, shouting at no one in particular. “Why didn’t you call me? Why didn’t the operator let me know?” He glanced at Carmen and me. “You two! Out! Now!”

“Breathe, Nick.”

“Where’s the chart? Don’t you have a chart? What’s this? Stockings? Is this patient a man or a woman?”