Dutch Uncle hcc-12 Page 6

  Palmero handed out assignments at the beginning of a shift, and Harry usually got stuck at the small bar by the bathrooms. He was supposed to keep an eye out for rowdies hassling the bartender, and the unisex toilets, which were one hole each, to make sure people went in alone. If somebody stayed inside too long, Harry’d have to go after them with his key. He’d find some tenderfoot passed out with vomit on his shirt, and then the kid would have to be bounced. Puking was not allowed at Sailor Randy’s.

  By the start of his second week, the Spring Breakers landed and Harry was earning every pink penny of his one hundred nightly dollars. He had never seen so many kids in the same place at the same time, blown out on booze and hormones and the stupidity of feeling immortal. Tuesday’s Dress to Kill contest attracted the usual assortment of cycle sluts, but the less weathered collegiate competition hot-wired the room with a different kind of tension. The two finalists were last week’s winner, a biker broad who stripped off her tank top to reveal thunderous, surgically untainted breasts, and a sorority sister emboldened by baybreezes and the whistling crowd. The college girl was prettier, and, for the record, had nicer tits, full and round, but firm, with a slight upward curve and quarter-sized nipples that looked rouged from where Harry was standing. The reigning queen’s subjects left her high and dry. Not only was she dethroned by this show of non-support, actual boos peppered the lukewarm applause.

  She sent a few bitchy words the college girl’s way. The college girl, flushed with victory and all that vodka, made a couple of remarks, too. Some hair got yanked and a slap landed, but the winner was no match for this grizzled veteran of dressing to kill, and before she realized what she’d gotten into, she was catching a beating. A frat boy trying to break it up absorbed three quick rights from a guy twice his size and twice his age. He spit one tooth out of his orthodontically corrected thirty-two.

  Harry grabbed a big drunk kid around the biceps and muscled him toward the door, but the entire security crew was inside, and there was nobody to hand him off to. A biker pulled a buck knife. Harry let go of his man and cracked the biker on the jaw, blindsiding him just below the ear. The guy belly-flopped to the concrete and bounced, out cold. His knife skittered across the floor. One of Bryce’s whacko bartenders clobbered a frat boy with an unopened fifth of gin, a shot worthy of any cowboy movie. The kid went down. The bottle didn’t break. The bartender ran off, one eye bloody, fifth of gin held high.

  Head-up on a brass-knuckled biker who threw a hissing right, Harry blocked it with his left. He kicked the guy twice in the same shin, and once in the balls. He caught a left that backed him up, and the knucks came in again, a roundhouse. He ducked, digging his right into a jelly gut. His shoulder stayed in place, but a hard left connected, and Harry’s ass touched down. He sprang back up.

  He didn’t come out of nowhere, because Big Palmero never came out of nowhere. It took him too long to get where he was going. But he was moving quick for him, quick like a landslide, and snatching that brass-knuckled fist at the wrist, Palmero pushed his palm straight through the guy’s elbow, snapping the arm clean at the joint. The biker hit the floor and cradled his crippled limb, screaming.

  No shots were fired.

  The cops blew in behind helmets and masks and billy clubs that went whap whap whap. Harry vaulted the bar he was supposed to be watching and stayed right there until they cleared the club and Peyton came over to vouch for him, which Harry needed, in spite of his black t-shirt with the periwinkle lettering of Sailor Randy’s logo.

  Harry ducked everybody with a camera.

  The melee was front paged in the Sun-Sentinel, and it led the morning newscasts, file footage of the outdoor bar on calmer nights, clean-cut college kids whooping it up, shots of the dance floor and stage, “... where the riot” — they weren’t calling it a fight — “is said to have erupted.” The Chief of Police and the Mayor got quoted and so did some EMS guys. The paper ran a photo of Peyton, with a big black eye. “Dozens” of arrests were made, nobody said how many, and fifteen people had to be hospitalized.

  Harry would almost have been all right with all of it. Almost. But the next night he had to listen to Peyton’s juiced-up blockheads, whose conversations were usually restricted to how many big plates they could squat, crowing about their heroics. Like they’d achieved something. It made Harry sick to think he’d been on their side, right there with them, C-note-a-night muscle in a classic mug’s job.

  The chicks Bryce Peyton employed as bartenders weren’t at Sailor Randy’s because they were especially skilled at mixing cocktails, or because they could handle a bunch of customers all at once or had the kinds of personalities people were willing to shell out money to be around. They were there to preserve the myth of the beach bunny as ideal woman, modern version: bottle blonde where nature fucked up, sun-tanned, cap-toothed, tattooed and pierced.

  Agatha stuck out because she was none of these things. Big Palmero handled the introduction. It was early. Bryce had just turned down the lights, and Agatha was toweling lime juice off her fingers, getting ready to go. Harry asked her if people called her Aggie.

  “With a name like Agatha,” she said, “they better.”

  Harry told her it was a nice name, though what he meant was it was an old-fashioned name, and if he had a daughter, he sure as shit wouldn’t be naming her Agatha.

  “Double double, toil and trouble,” Agatha said. “It sounds like the name of one of the weird sisters.”

  With the possible exception of Bryce Peyton, who could surprise you with the things he knew, Harry would’ve laid ten to one that he and Aggie were the only two souls in the place who knew the line was from Macbeth, and he said so.

  Her hair was light brown, and her dark eyes were bright with intelligence. She had a nice, compact body, and the shape of her legs looked great, even in her jeans. She stepped down the bar to pour two drinks, and Harry pictured her walking away from his bed at the Wind N’ Sand, panties riding high, baring one cheek of her ass.

  “You don’t seem like Bryce’s type,” he said.

  “I’ll take that as a compliment.”

  “Why’d he hire you?”

  “Because he trusts me,” Aggie said.

  “You know him a long time?”

  “Eight years. We worked together at a place called Mead’s. There’s a Dunkin’ Donuts there now.”

  “So you’re local.”

  “Fort Lauderdale, Florida,” she said. “But you’re not.”

  “I’m from New York.”

  “The city so nice, they named it twice. Why on earth are you here?”

  “I needed a change of scenery.”

  “Uh-huh,” she said. “What’s your story?”

  “Let me take you out for breakfast, and I’ll give you the condensed version.”

  The bar accumulated a handful of customers, waiting with bills in their hands. Standing money, Peyton called it. He was glaring across the dance floor, his eyes locked on Harry’s, his arms spread wide and his palms turned up. Harry made a gun out of his hand, and fired it by pushing down his thumb. Right you are, boss.

  “I thought you had to close,” Aggie said, reaching for a bottle of Midori.

  “Not tonight,” Harry lied. “Listen, I gotta make it look like I’m working. I’ll catch up with you later.”

  As a matter of fact, the toilet cop always had to close. So if he was going to see Aggie after work, he needed somebody to cover for him. This was going to be tough. He had no friends on this crew, and everybody hated closing.

  The first guy he hit up was Tommy, no last name learned or cared about. He was looking a tad tender from Tuesday night’s festivities, though his left eye had started to open a bit. Tommy was a good bet. This was his only job, and the most important thing he had going the next day was polishing up his tan.

  “Dude,” Tommy said, “you serious?”

  “Like a capsized cruise ship.”

  “I can’t,” Tommy said. “It’s Thursday night.” Like
if it had been a Monday or a Friday, Tommy’d be happy to oblige, the muscle-bound closet-case.

  That led Harry to William-Not-Bill, a puppet-legged blockhead with Cuban blood and a prizefighter hairdo, spiky on top with rat-tails curling out the back. When Harry asked him for the favor, Not-Bill wanted to know if Harry’d been smoking crack.

  This left only the Big man himself, and Harry stalled asking the whole night, till he noticed Aggie counting out her money and getting ready to split.

  “I give you the twinkiest gig in the whole house, and y’all wanna run outta here,” Palmero said. “Why you gotta do me like that?”

  “I got a date with Aggie,” Harry said. “I mean, I do if you cut me loose.”

  “That right?” Palmero said. He nodded his enormous head, impressed. “Ain’t she the sweetest?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to find out, Big.”

  “Well, shit,” Palmero considered, “I gotta be at the clinic by nine, otherwise I would. Don’t suppose none of these tough guys is gonna help you out.”

  Harry shrugged.

  “Course not.” He thought a minute. “Alright, look. I’ll do it tonight and tonight only. Not on your account, you understand, but because I like Agatha.”

  “Thanks, Big,” Harry said. “I owe you one.”

  Palmero said, “You don’t owe me shit. Just do me a solid. In the future, make time on your time, not on my time.”

  Agatha St. Denis pronounced her name like the French martyr, San-duh-nee, and unlike the rest of her family, who Americanized it so that it rhymed with tennis. They were sitting in a Stuckey’s in Dania, being waited on by a begoggled biddy who moved like she had arthritis in her ankles.

  Aggie didn’t pour syrup over her pancakes, she made a puddle in a saucer and dipped bite-sized chunks into it. And she didn’t use butter. Bad enough she was eating at this hour, a snack like this could wipe out an entire week’s worth of sensible dieting.

  “What’re you worried about?” Harry said. “So long as you’re eating, I figure you’re okay.”

  “If you live in a Third World Country,” she said, “which we don’t. A few more late-night pig-outs, and you’re asking one of Bryce’s sand bimbos to have coffee with you.”

  They talked about exercise and nutrition. She tried to cook at home as much as she could.

  Harry said he was in the best shape of his life. No sense filling her in on his recently completed training regimen as Florida’s guest, but since he’d been in Lauderdale he’d kept it up, swimming in the ocean and running and doing his push-ups on the beach. He rarely thought about what he was eating.

  “I’m just the opposite,” Aggie said. “I can’t get with this whole sweat-culture thing.”

  Harry fired questions at her so he wouldn’t have to field any about himself. He found out she was married and divorced from some guy named Bob.

  “I thought I was supposed to be getting your story,” she said.

  “The one buying breakfast gets to ask the questions.”

  She studied his face and she made a gesture with her hand like she was going to speak a few seconds before she did. “You the trouble man?” A glimmer of a smile brightened her eyes. “You come up hard?”

  “Tremendous song,” Harry said. “Great song. That’s my favorite song.” He attempted a creaky, Marvin Gaye falsetto.

  “We know one thing for sure,” Aggie said. “You were never a singer in this or any life. You’re also really good at weaseling, like any trouble man.”

  She had him pegged for a roughneck and he wasn’t a roughneck. He knew some Shakespeare, didn’t he? “What is it,” he asked, “the teeth? Soon as I get some money, I’m gonna get them fixed.”

  She wrinkled her nose, dismissing. She slid a Marlboro out of Harry’s pack, and he put a match to it. Aggie covered his hand with hers.

  “I thought you didn’t smoke.”

  “I quit,” she said.

  “Why do you think I’m so tough?”

  “You’re hiding something with a tough front. It’s your whole vibe,” she said. “But I don’t think I buy it.”

  “I know,” Harry said, not listening, “it’s the accent. The accent makes me sound like a tough guy.”

  “New Yorkers have very definite accents, but you haven’t got one. Take Henry Miller, for example.”

  “Henry Miller, huh? When did you ever hear Henry Miller speak?”

  “In that movie Reds. Remember how they kept cutting in with those talking heads? It was like a documentary that interrupted the narrative?”

  The narrative. Why couldn’t she have said story?

  “Henry Miller was one of the people they interviewed.”

  It was time to get the check. Harry looked around for that waitress. “Warren Beatty played John Reed, the commie writer,” he said, “and Diane Keaton was his girlfriend, I forget her name.”

  “Right,” Aggie said. “Remember?”

  “I never saw it.”

  The waitress was resting her bones at the counter, studying the local section of the Sun-Sentinel.

  “Excuse me,” Harry said with a bit more edge than he intended, “can we have the check?”

  “There was a guy with a real New York accent,” Aggie said.

  Who? Warren Beatty? John Reed?

  “Henry Miller.”

  Henry Miller grew up in Brooklyn and acquired the accent that made even the smartest people sound like retards. If you had money, you sent your kids to schools where they made sure that didn’t happen. Now, Harry was born and raised in Manhattan. People from Manhattan sounded different than people from Brooklyn, but it didn’t mean they didn’t have accents, and people from Brooklyn sounded different than people from Queens. Harry was too tired to explain all this to Aggie. He was tired, period.

  Aggie drove him home in her Miata. When he told her to pull into the Wind N’ Sand, she was startled to learn he lived there, but she didn’t say anything.

  Harry was startled to learn he lived there, too. He said, “Be it ever so humble.” He climbed out of the car. “Thanks for having breakfast with me,” he said, not looking at her. “I’ll see you over at the job.” Turning and heading for his room, he heard Aggie kill the ignition.

  “Hey,” she said. “Get over here.”

  He walked back to the car and was about to give her a peck on the cheek when she grabbed his face and gave him a big wet kiss right on his mouth. No tongues or anything, but still.

  “Tough guys don’t get their feelings hurt.”

  “I’m like James Cagney in Public Enemy. I ain’t so tough.”

  She said she didn’t know the film. A minute later, Harry was back in the car and they were smoking his Marlboros and he was telling her about Tom Powers and his brother, and Putty Nose, and if she saw Miller’s Crossing and remembered that scene with the guy begging for his life, that was ripped right off from Public Enemy.

  Aggie thought maybe the next night they were off she could make dinner and they could rent the movie, and watch it at her house. Harry said that’d be great, he’d look forward to that, and as he got out of the Miata for good, bad as he wanted to drag her into the Wind N’ Sand, he knew that part could wait.

  Chapter Five

  Lieutenant John Kramer was a rock-jawed, crew-cut Dick Tracy of a cop who’d had his cold eye trained on his current job since before he made detective. He enjoyed giving orders, and he didn’t enjoy leaving his office unless his squad was about to make a headline-grabbing collar, and then it was a shoo-in he’d be on the scene to provide the media with a statement. With many statements.

  It was essential that Kramer keep himself looking sharp for those appearances on the six o’clock news, and today he was sporting a double-breasted suit, the jacket to which hung from a wooden hanger on a coat rack. The clasps on his navy blue suspenders were aligned, and he was standing, which meant he was going to keep it short, with Martinson at least, short and sweet and to the point.

  “When are you going to b
ring me someone for this Pfiser thing?”

  “We’ve got a witness going through mug books, says she saw somebody leaving the scene. Acevedo’s with her now.”

  “That’s all you’ve got?”

  “So far. Robotaille’s still canvassing.”

  Kramer looked like he was adding things up in his head.

  “You figure what, bad drug deal?”

  “What it looks like,” Martinson said.

  Kramer came around his desk. “Arnie, I need you to make something happen here.”

  “You catching shit from upstairs?”

  “Let’s just say this is coming at a real bad time for me.”

  Martinson almost admired how the man could boil down any situation into what it meant for him personally. Lieutenant Kramer wasn’t bad at what he did, but Arnie had come to the conclusion that the man was completely consumed by his ambition to become Chief of Police John Kramer. If things worked out that way, maybe Mayor John Kramer. Ultimately, who could say? Governor John Kramer.

  “You mean it’s making you look bad.” With your pals in the State House, Arnie could’ve said, but didn’t.

  Kramer touched the knot of his tie.

  “I’m on my way to the ME’s office,” Arnie said. “The autopsy should be done. I’ll get back to you with the details soon as I can, probably this afternoon. Relax, John. The investigation’s proceeding.”

  “Alright, Arnie. Just bring me back something good.”

  Taking advantage of her union’s dental plan, Lili Acevedo got braces put on her teeth to correct an overbite her family’d been too poor to fix when Lili was growing up. She’d taken advantage, too, of the fact that her parents’ generation was the one that Americanized, attending public school all the way through her Master’s degree in Criminal Justice. She spoke peppery Spanish and network TV English and sometimes used words Arnie had to look up in the dictionary after Lili wasn’t around.