Setup on Front Street (7 page)

WILSON
Whitney lived out in Key Haven, the closest thing there is to a suburb around
here. It's actually on Stock Island, the first island up from Key West.

Living up there gives you a lot more space
than you can get in town, and of course the taxes are a whole lot less because
it's outside the city limits. Before moving up there, he occupied a huge family
home on William Street right in the middle of town, but instead of selling it,
he gave it to BK and Rita somewhere along the line.

I guess he was afraid his ancestors would
put a curse on him if he ever sold the house to a non-Whitney.

After a brief stop at the hospital to drop
Milton off at the emergency room, we pulled into the driveway of the big man's
house. Up on the veranda, the driver opened the big double doors to the house,
motioning for me to go in.

The place was relatively new — what I
mean is, it wasn't as old as a lot of the houses back in town.

The way it looked when you walked in, I
mean, you just knew that someone with major bucks lived there. Gleaming tile
floors gave the whole place a wide-open, Mexican look, and fancy lighting
fixtures stuck out from every corner. Sunlight rushed in through big front
windows and adjoining open rooms, making everything look airy and inviting.

As I walked through the foyer, I caught the
smell of some heavy meat dish simmering back in the kitchen. A uniformed Cuban
maid dusted a big, black grand piano in the living room. She was pretty in the
way that only Latin women can be.

I wondered if she thought this was the best
she could do in life.

The driver led me into a dim study where
the old man sat, shuffling papers around on his desk. Thick green curtains
covered the windows, allowing only a sliver or two of sunlight to peek in.

A floor lamp provided some light. It wasn't
enough.

A big, matching leather couch and chair set
took up one corner of the room. Behind the desk a floor-to-ceiling bookcase
stretched across the wall, filled with leather-bound books in sets, where they
all looked alike. The other walls had lots of plaques and shit, just like with
Sully.

What's the deal here? Once you get a little
respect, you're supposed to plaster it all over your walls?

"Thank you, Bradley," he said.

The driver left the room, shutting the
door.

"Please sit down, Don Roy."

Without offering a handshake, he pointed
toward one of two comfortable-looking leather chairs opposite the big desk. I
sat in the other one.

"My son tells me you and he were in
high school together, is that right?"

He appeared to be pushing seventy, but
looked a long way from frail. He was not the least bit overweight, and his
posture was erect. His eyes were vigilant, overcast-gray, like his full head of
hair, while his voice brimmed with strength and authority.

"That's right. We graduated the same
year."

"I
thought I knew everyone in his class, but I don't remember you."

"You wouldn't. I didn't make much of a
splash."

But
he
had a big presence, I had to
admit.

He was one of these guys who was used to
having power and plenty of it. Kind of a natural-born top dog. He generally got
his way with everyone he came in contact with.

Especially the lower species like myself.

"Well, be that as it may … I'll come
right to the point."

He shifted in his chair a little more
toward me. I caught it.

"You are not to interfere with my
son's gambling or with the manner in which he pays his debts. Do you
understand?"

"Provided your son doesn't expect my
woman to prostitute herself for the sole purpose of giving him the money."

His voice softened. "Don Roy, look. My
son likes to gamble. Maybe a little too much, I'll admit, and maybe I've been
too lenient with him. But from what I understand, they're seeing each other … they've
been friends for quite a while...so let's just let it go for now.

"It's like I told BK this morning, Mr
Whitney, I'm taking Norma out of that place, and she's through paying his
debts."

His teeth clenched just a little while his
head moved forward, but he was trying to keep his voice at an easygoing level.
He wasn't succeeding.

"I know you just got back home after
being away for several years," he said. "Things change when you stay
gone like that. Sometimes the change isn't to your liking."

He leaned back a little in his expensive
chair and relaxed his shoulders, his fingers interlaced in front of him on his
stomach.

"Let's look at this the way it really
is," he went on. "I know my son fooled around with her for awhile
before all this … before she … started helping him out. He showed her a good time
for a couple of years and … well, now she's just paying him back, is all."

I could tell he liked that one. The smug
SOB. That really made sense to him.

Norma was just repaying BK for all the
wonderful things he did for her. Like honoring her with his dick in her mouth
whenever he could slip away from his wife.

Yes sir, now there's one she owes him.

What is it with these people?

Then he leaned all the way back in his
chair and spread his hands out in front of him.

"Besides, this is the nineties. We've
got to be broadminded about this sort of thing."

I gripped the arms of the chair and
clenched my teeth. Then I reached down into the front pocket of my guayabera
for the red dice and began silently grinding them inside my big fist.

After a moment of this, I could speak.

My voice was ice. "BK's free ride is
over. And that's final."

"From what I understand, this bookie
is very impatient with people who owe him money. If it were anyone else, I'd
deal directly with him, but he's a DeLima. His family and mine have had sort of
an understanding over the years, so I don't question his policies. If he says
my son has to pay up, then that's the way it is. So we move down a couple of
levels, and that's where we find you and your … girlfriend."

He was looking so far down his nose at me,
I felt like I was in another area code.

"Move to whatever level you want, but
the elevator doesn't stop at Norma's floor."

His upper body then moved as far forward as
possible without leaving his chair.

"All right, I'll lay it out for you. I
don't really care about his gambling. I don't even care about the money. And I
certainly don't give a damn about this slimy Stock Island whore in that
back-alley brothel. But when you blow back into town, fresh out of prison, and
start pushing my son around, my son the
mayor
, I might add, then you've
got trouble. So your price for avoiding that trouble is to stay out of my son's
private life."

I ground the dice together harder and
harder.

"I didn't push anybody
—
"

"Shut up!"

He put his palms down on the desk and
almost stood up.

"Who the hell do you think you're
talking to, you fucking ape! My family's been on this island seven generations,
and you come in here telling
me
what my son is going to do with some
whore who fucks niggers and Cubans all night long? If he wants to ship her up
to Miami to work the
streets
, he'll do it! Without any shit from
you!
" Then he sat back and
added, "Unless that girl resumes her duties, this might be the most
expensive conversation you've ever had."

He was pissing me off, but that was about
it. I was getting ready for the "you're-going-back-to-prison" speech.

My eyebrows raised, then my head tilted a
little, asking him silently what he meant, thinking I knew the answer.

He said, "Yes, I said expensive. I
know you're back here looking for the money that Irish saloonkeeper is holding
back from you. You lay off my son or you'll never get it."

Whoa, where'd this come from? Now it was my
turn to lean forward.

I said, "You're the one who's —"

"Don't bother with a comment. Today is
Friday. If the girl's not back to work by tomorrow night, you'll never see the
money. And I'll know if she's there, because I own the building.
Bradley!
"

The door flew open and Bradley appeared.

"Take him back to town."

BY
Sunday night I'd moved out of the rooming house and in with Norma.

Her apartment was pretty nice, with a
sweeping view of the parking lot, but with the two of us in there, it was
small. No room for anything. That's what she kept saying, anyway.

I told her if she'd spent three years in a
tiny cell with a jigaboo gangbanger, she'd think this place was the fucking
penthouse suite at Caesars Palace.

We'd ordered out for pizza. The room was
dark except for some sitcom she had on the TV, along with whatever light
drifted in from the kitchen. The air conditioning cooled things off nicely.
Norma felt good curled up next to me on the couch.

"So what're you gonna do now?"
she asked.

"Well, first thing is, I'm gonna have
a beer before the pizza gets here."

She playfully slapped my arm.

"No-o-oo. You know what I mean.
What're you gonna do from now on?"

I pushed the remote button to lower the TV
volume.

"Like I told you, this week I come
into some money. It'll be a lot, and it can hold us for a good while, but not
forever. We
will
have time to plan things out, though."

I held her closer to me, then lowered my
voice accordingly. "Think about it, honey. It's gonna be a little easier.
No more pressures of having to make the rent. Or a car payment. We can have a
few nice things. A little breathing room for a change. And now that you're out
of the Fun House, there'll be no going back. How do you like that?"

"Oh, it sounds wonderful. Just
wonderful. I hope we can 'plan things', as you say, so that we won't have to go
back to the way things used to be."

She turned her head up from my chest so she
could look at me.

"You know, a couple of months ago,
there was this guy on Oprah who said planning a better life is something
everybody ought to sit down and do. Like, he said you should sit down with a
pencil and paper and actually make a list of things in life you want to do. But
he said that sticking with that plan is really, really hard, and that most
people fail. We won't fail, will we, Don Roy?"

Before I could tell her no, she sighed,
"You know, all I want...I just want us to have a … a … future."

That was a word she'd always had trouble
with. The concept was pretty hard for her to comprehend.

Fact is, I'd never really had a solid grip
on it myself.

I'd always lived in the weedy undergrowth
of straight society, raised in one of those dried-out-white shotgun houses on
the edge of Old Town, scraping through on a mix of wits and muscle. My adult
life was a blur of moving from score to score, then back into the safety of the
shadows.

I usually got by all right, but how could
I, or Norma for that matter, see our "future" the way everyone else
saw theirs? Our futures growled in front of us, like a dark, curvy, mountain
road full of big potholes and upturned nails.

Small wonder, with the way we were brought
up, the way we steered our lives. Very few doors were ever open for us, so we
took what limited choices we had.

Shit, who could blame us?

IT
was barely dawn Monday morning when the repeated pounding on the door woke me
up. Not with knuckles, but with a fist.

The sound was unmistakable.

Cops.

Norma threw on a robe. She stood at the
door yelling, "Who is it?"

"Police! Open up."

As she opened the door, I already had my
pants on. I heard his distinct Cuban-Conch accent.

"Where is he? Where's Doyle?"

Ortega.

He shoved his way into the apartment,
followed by his plain-clothes partner and two uniforms. Norma's objections trailed
off into space.

I moved out into the living room. As he
approached me, the only thing between us was his attitude. It was way out in
front of him, like cheap cologne.

"Looks like you fucked up big-time,
Doyle."

His sneer really got to me. I wanted to
slice it right off his wise-ass face.

"Today's April Fool's Day, Ortega.
This your idea of a joke?"

"The joke's on you, big man. But you
probably won't think it's too funny."

I could tell by his smirk he thought it was
hilarious.

"Okay, it's tearing me up. Now, what's
your beef? And make it snappy. I want to go back to bed."

"You might be sleeping in county
facilities by nightfall. Where were you last night?"

"Right here. What's the deal?"

"Can you prove it?"

His eyes wandered downward to my bare
shoulders and chest, checking out my jailhouse tats.

"Yeah. Norma here was with me the
whole —"

"Oh, right! This bitch. Like she's a
real reliable fucking witness."

"Witness? To what? What's this all
about?"

The uniforms had unhooked their clubs from
their belts. They were slapping them into their palms, almost in sync with one
another. Warning me not to get out of line, yet itching for me to do just that.

He got right up in my face, I mean real close.
This was the first time anyone had done that in years and not been knocked flat
on his ass.

"Your fucking pal Frankie Sullivan is
what this is all about.
It
seems he went and got his throat slit last night. We found him down on Front
Street, face down in the gutter."

He backed
off an inch or two, then added, "Funny, I thought you Irish assholes had
some kind of secret agreement between you, you know, like, not to kill each
other."

Norma shrieked. As for me, my shoulders
sagged, while my knees went limp. I almost fell back on the chair behind me.

"Sully … he's
dead?
You telling
me he's
dead?
"

Ortega turned to his pals and said,
"Don't they have some kind of agreement? Where they swear on St Patrick or
something?"

They all nodded and smiled at that one.

Then he said, "Look at the fake
surprise!" He strutted around the room, mocking my raspy voice.
"'He's dead? I didn't know he was dead!' Like you were some kind of
innocent fucking citizen. Like you were at a church bake sale while Sullivan
was getting his neck torn open."

The other cops chuckled at his performance.
The jerkoff should be on the stage somewhere. Anywhere but here.

He put his own face back on as he turned
back to me.

"All right, Doyle, how do you want to
do this? The easy way or the hard way?"

Words choked in the back of my throat.
"I … I swear, Ortega, I … I didn't know anything about this. Sully was
—"

"Yeah, I know, he was your closest
fucking friend. I hope you reminded him of that while you were turning out his
lights." He pointed toward Norma. "Now you say you were laying up in
her titties all last night. But you're gonna need a better alibi than that, my
man. Much better."

"Ortega, I swear to you, I didn't do
it. I had no reason to —"

"Oh, you had reason, all right. He was
holding your cut of that diamond job the two of you pulled three years ago. And
his wife claims you threatened him with bodily harm if he didn't fork it over.
Right there's aggravated assault. A felony in itself. Then, we find him lying
in a puddle of blood with a big smile on his neck. And you with an alibi that
won't hold up."

He stepped back smiling, satisfied with his
own read on this whole thing.

Then he said, "Now how's that for a
motive? And what do you think your future looks like now?"

"Look, Ortega, if it happened late at
night on Front Street, for Chrissakes, it could've been —"

"Some street punk? Sticking him up for
the cash in his pocket?"

"Yeah. Why not?"

He shook his head. "Uh-uh. His money
was still on him. Nearly seven hundred clams. And he had no reason to be down
there at one-thirty this morning. That was the time of death. He lives — or
should I say lived — up on Petronia Street off Georgia. As you leave his
bar, I'm sure you know that's in the exact opposite direction from Front
Street. And I'm told he always went straight home every night. Unless he
stopped off for some pussy from one of his girlfriends. And I doubt any of them
live down there."

His partner helped himself to a seat on the
couch. Ortega waited for my response to his neatly wrapped-up spin on the whole
thing.

I guess he thought I'd just break down and
spit it all out for him. You know, how I dragged or suckered Sully into a car
and drove him to the other side of downtown, where I knifed him in a fit of
rage over the money, then dumped him on the street.

Shows you how this cop thinks.

Like a fucking amateur.

"That's pretty amazing police
work," I said right back at him. "Dick Tracy would be proud of you.
Or did you get that from reading Sherlock Holmes?"

He turned around to face his club-swinging
goons.

Gesturing back toward me, he said, "We
got a big man here, boys. Thinks he's the biggest fucking man in the Keys.
Truth is, he's just another overgrown punk who thinks he's hot shit."

They nodded on cue, slapping their sticks a
little harder into their palms.

For effect, of course.

"You really think I did this?" I
asked him.

Of course the answer was yes, and
naturally, I knew who really did do it. Or who had ordered it, anyway.

"You ever know Sullivan to go down
there after hours?" he asked me. "Was he really that stupid? Or maybe
he liked to go down there trolling for whores and coke dealers?"

"Ask yourself this, Ortega. Am
I
really that stupid? To threaten him, then put him down, and
then
leave
him out in the street? It's a fucking wonder you didn't find a bloody knife
right there with my initials on it. Or maybe you think it's still in my pants
pocket."

"Oh, you're that stupid, all right.
Besides, no one else could've done it. Sullivan was well-liked all over town.
No one else had a motive."

The thing was, I couldn't tell this idiot
who really did it.

Number one, he'd never believe me.

Number two, he didn't have the balls to go
after someone of Whitney's caliber.

The old man was loaded with power in this
town, and few had what it took to go up against him. Me, I was an easy target.
I had a motive for sure: Sully owed me the money, so I did threaten him. He
probably told his wife about it Wednesday night when he got home, then she
spilled it to Ortega after getting the bad news this morning.

Bringing Whitney's name up right now was
useless.

And accusing him of murder? Killing some
nightclub owner that he had no connection to? Forget it.

I had no response.

Ortega had one.

"Get dressed," he said.
"We're going downtown."