Shark Infested Custard (6 page)

       "I'll need this extra money to buy a new pistol," I said. "I got rid of mine—and the holster."

       "What did you do with it, Larry?" Don said.

       "If you don't know, Don, you can't tell, can you?" I looked at Don and smiled.

       "What makes you think Don would ever say anything?" Hank said.

       "I don't," I said. "But it's better for none of you guys to know. Okay? Now. If anybody's got anything to say, now's the time to say it. We'll talk about it now, and then we'll forget about it forever. What I mean, after tonight, none of us should ever mention this thing again. Okay?"

       Hank cleared his throat. "While you and Eddie were gone, Don and I were wondering why you had us bring the girl here in the first place."

       "I was waiting for that," I said. "What I wanted was a make on the girl. I figured that if I could find out her address, I could call her father, and have him come and get her. Either that, or we could take her to him after I talked to him. That way, he could've put her to bed and called his family doctor. That way, he could've covered up the fact that she died from an O.D., if that's what it was."

       "That wouldn't have worked," Hank said.

       "Maybe not. But that was the idea in the back of my mind. You asked me why I brought her here, and that's the reason."

       "It would've worked with me," Don said. "I wouldn't've wanted it in the papers, if my daughter died from an overdose of drugs."

       "Okay, Larry," Hank said. "You never explained it to us before, is all. I just wonder, now, who those people were."

       "The papers will tell you." Eddie laughed. "Look in the 'Miami News'' tomorrow night. Section C—Lifestyle."

       "Don?" I said.

       "One thing," Don said, looking into his glass. "I didn't mean to pull the trigger. I'm sorry about getting you guys into this mess."

       "You didn't get us into anything, Don," Eddie said. "We were all in it together anyway."

       "Just the same," Don said, "I made it worse, and I'm sorry."

       "We're all sorry," I said. "But what's done is done. Tomorrow, I'm going to report it at the office that my pistol was stolen out of the glove compartment of my car. They may raise a little hell with me, but these things happen in Miami. So I'm telling you guys about it now. Some dirty sonofabitch stole my thirty-eight out of my glove compartment."

       No one said anything for a few moments. Don stared at the diluted wine in his glass. Eddie lit a cigarette. I finished my drink. Hank, frowning, and looking at the floor, rubbed his knees with the palms of his hands.

       "Eddie," I said, "do you want to add anything?"

       Eddie shrugged, and then he laughed. "Yeah. Who wants to go down to the White Shark for a little pool?"

       Hank and Don both smiled.

       "If we needed an alibi, it wouldn't be a bad idea," I said. "But we don't need an alibi. If there's nothing else, I think we should all hit our respective sacks."

       Eddie and I stood up. "You going to be okay, Don?" Eddie asked.

       "Sure," Don stood up, and we started toward the door.

       "Just a minute," Hank stopped us. "I picked up the girl in the drive-in, and bets were made! You guys owe me money!"

       We all laughed then, and the tension dissolved. We paid Hank off, of course, and then we went to bed. But as far as I was concerned, we were still well ahead of the game: four lucky young guys in Miami, sitting on top of a big pile of vanilla ice cream.

PART II

Hank Norton

He is only trying to frighten me, and he has succeeded.

CHAPTER FOUR

I had been running around with Jannaire for almost six weeks before I found out that she was married. At ten p.m., Sunday night, when I started to leave my apartment house, planning to buy the early edition of the Monday morning 'Miami Herald'' at the 7-Eleven store a block away, I knew that her husband, Mr. Wright, meant to kill me.

       Dade Towers, the apartment house where I live, covers a triangular block, and the building was constructed to fit all of the lot. Coming toward the building from LeJeune, it looks like the prow of a ship. If you approach it from College Drive it resembles a five-story office building. There is a main entrance on College Drive, with a Puerto Rican blue awning out front, and a telephone system and directory outside the locked door. To get the front door open you consult the posted directory, dial the apartment number, and if someone is at home and if he wants to let you in he pushes a button and a buzzer opens the door. When the door is opened, there is a large tiled patio-lobby, filled with glass and wrought-iron furniture. Beyond the patio is a swimming pool surrounded by a wide grassy border. There are four Royal palm trees inside, and all of the ground-floor apartments on this inner courtyard have back entrances to the lawn and pool.

       There is an elevator in the corridor to the left of the patiolobby, and if you cross the open pool area to the other side of the building, there is another elevator. This second elevator serves the back entrance, and there is a tiled, lighted foyer here, as well, with a glass door leading out to Santana Lane. There is a streetlight just outside the doorway on Santana, and two steps down to the sidewalk. These steps are covered with green "noslip" strippings. Across the street, on Santana, there is a large parking lot, but it is rarely used. Most of the residents nose into the curb around the building, parking on College and Santana. The Dade Towers parking lot across Santana Lane, which is required by Miami law, is used mostly by visiting guests, or by residents who have a boat on a trailer, or a camper to park—or in some instances, an extra car.

       My apartment, 235, is directly above the back entrance foyer on Santana. I almost always park on Santana, and if the spaces are all gone, I park across the street in the lot. But I rarely park on College or enter the building by the front entrance. Whoever it was who shot at me knew that I would come out the back way, and they—or he—would know when I was leaving my apartment because the lights in my second floor apartment would be switched off. All of the residents in Dade Towers have an outside door key, and this key fits the front College Drive entrance, the back Santana entrance, and the two fire doors, as well. The locks haven't been changed in two years, and there are a lot of people in Miami with keys who shouldn't have them. Laundry men, paperboys, ex-residents, airconditioning companies, bug spray people, and who knows how many residents have passed out extra keys to their lovers, male and female? Nevertheless, as apartment houses go in Miami, Dade Towers is safer than most, and the single women who live here like the security. The building, as I said, is two years old, and so far there has never been a robbery.

       But because so many unauthorized keys are out, I was going to the 7-Eleven for a newspaper. I planned to crumple big balls of newspaper and scatter them around in my bedroom. That way, if Mr. Wright somehow got into the building, and then managed to get into my apartment when I was asleep, he would kick the wadded newspapers in my bedroom. They would whish or rattle into each other, and the sounds they made would wake me. I hadn't planned on what I would do after I awakened, but the thought of being killed in my sleep, which was one of many possibilities, frightened me. I had been thinking about Mr. Wright's threat ever since five p.m. and by ten that night I was worried enough to take him at his word.

       The single shot, fired from a moving, dark blue Wildcat, a car that roared out of the parking lot directly across the street as I stood on the steps of the Santana back entrance, missed my head by a good yard. But it was close enough to scatter a few bits of stucco from the wall, and some of these tiny chips stung my left cheek. The driver was making a right turn as he fired. He was driving with his left hand and firing across his body and out the window with his right. The Wildcat was moving about thirty miles per hour, and the car was about twenty-five yards or more away from me when he fired. The pistol sounded like a sonic boom in that quiet back street, and I figured by the sound that it was either a .45 or a .357 Magnum. With a gun that large, the marksman would have to be an expert to shoot accurately under such conditions, and the miss of a full yard, for which I was thankful, was too close to be a warning shot. Whoever it was, and if it wasn't Mr. Wright it must have been a man he hired (or even a woman), had surely meant to kill me.

       A split second after the shot was fired, which was already much too late, because by that time the car had reached LeJeune, I dived for the sidewalk, crawled into the gutter, and tried to wedge my two hundred pounds under a 1967 red Mustang. I got my left leg and left arm under the car, but that was as far as I could go. As I lay there, struggling futilely to get all of me under the car, I could feel my heart thumping away, and my dry mouth seemed to be full of unwashed pennies. I am thirty-two, and I've been in a few barroom fights and in several situations where the danger potential was incredibly high, but this was the first time in my life that I have ever been afraid for my life. As this thought registered, I realized that I was in a vulnerable position. If the gunman circled the block and came back for another shot, here I was, all spread out for him. He could stop his car, aim straight down, taking his time, and... I scrambled to my feet and, running in a half-crouch, the way I had been taught in R.O.T.C. summer camp, I scuttled to the door, fumbled with my keys, and ran up the stairs to my apartment.

       Once inside, I put the chain-lock on the door, and poured a double shot of St. James Scotch into a glass and added one ice cube. The quick jolt, which I downed in two medicinal gulps, helped so much I wanted to drink another. But I didn't. I needed a cool head, not a befuddled one, to think things out, to figure out what to do next. Mr. Wright was crazy, a psychopath. He had to be. Nobody, nowadays, shoots a man just because he thinks the man has fucked his wife. I hadn't touched Jannaire. I had intended to, of course, but that wasn't the same thing, and besides, I hadn't known that she was married. If I had known that she was married, I would have made my plans accordingly. She was the most desirable woman I had ever met, and because I wanted her so badly, I had apparently overlooked the telltale signs of her marriage. She had fooled me from the beginning, and for no discernible reason.

       The entire pattern was senseless and illogical, beginning with the electronic dating service, "Electro-Date."

CHAPTER FIVE

Larry "Fuzz" Dolman, who also has an apartment in Dade Towers (319), is a friend of mine, and he became my friend—if not what you would call a close buddy—simply because we both happened to live in the same apartment house. We became friends through the accidental sharing of the apartment facilities. We used the swimming pool, and we played poker in the recreation room. We had both moved into Dade Towers when it opened, two years ago, and over this long period of time (two years is considered as a very long residency in a city of transients, like Miami), we had shared enough common experiences, together with Don Luchessi and Eddie Miller, to be more than just acquaintances.

       Eddie and I were 'close'' friends, but Eddie had moved out of the building and was shacking up with a well-to-do widow in Miami Springs. We were still good friends, and we called each other on the phone two or three times a week, but Miami Springs is a long way from the South Miami area, and we rarely got together to do things any longer.

       Don Luchessi, who had also lived in the building for a year, after leaving his wife, had finally gone back to her. Don still detested his wife, or said that he did, but she and the priest and her father and mother and her brother had worked on him, and he finally made the sacrifice and was reconciled. He had an eight-year-old daughter he doted on, a spoiled, fat little girl named Marie, and he went back to his wife because of his daughter—not because he wanted to live with his wife again. No man in his right mind would want to live with Clara Luchessi. Clara would never stop talking, and all she ever talked about was her house and the things that were in it. She never left the house, either. She would never come with Don when he came over to visit Larry and me, and when we went to his house we had to listen to Clara talk about army worms, her glass drapes, a new rug-cleaning process she had discovered, and other domestic inanities.

       And little fat Marie was also there, never more than six inches away from Don. When he was behind the bar mixing drinks, she was back there with him, "helping" him. If he sat down, she sat on his lap. He had a pool table in his Florida room, but she spoiled the games we tried to play. She always wanted to play, too, and Don would let her. If she missed a shot, she cried and he had to comfort her. If she made one, she crowed. She also cheated, and Don let her get away with it.

       Going to Don's house, which could have been a pleasant diversion, what with his heated swimming pool, his regulation pool table, and his well-stocked bar, was spoiled by his wife and daughter.

       Clara was a great cook, one of the best cooks in the world, but even her wonderful dinners were ruined for you because she had to tell you exactly how each dish was made, and where the ingredients could be obtained. No one else could get in a word, or force her to change the subject. During Clara's vapid monologue, delivered rapidly in a shrill high-pitched voice, Maria made ugly faces, got down from the table from time to time to play terrible children's records on the stereo, and greedily finished her food as soon as possible so she could sit on Don's lap for the rest of the meal.

       There is much to be said for the old-fashioned notion of having women serve the men first, and then eat their own meals at the second table in the kitchen.

       For a full year, the four of us had had some good times together, but after Eddie and Don moved out, Larry and I spent more time together than we would have ordinarily. We went to movies together, rather than to go alone; we went out to dinner sometimes, rather than to go alone; and we sometimes went to the White Shark on Flagler Street to drink beer and play pool. We both loved to play pool, and as partners we were a deadly combination. We invariably won more games than we lost. But we didn't have much else in common. And the times were becoming more frequent when I preferred going to a movie, or out to eat somewhere alone, rather than taking Larry along.