Florida Heatwave (17 page)

They filed out through the door, me and Cartouche flanking it on either side.

Joey stopped two inches from me, got right in my face and softly patted my cheek. “Be seeing you soon,” he said with a smile.

McKool gave me the eye and shook his head, so I let it pass.

I lost my first nickel in less than an hour. One five-way hand I flopped trip kings and Flapper caught runner-runner for an inside baby straight and pulled down a monster that should have been mine. I always seemed to start trying to claw back to even.

A little after two AM a loud whompf sound came from the riverside and everybody looked toward the door. McKool peeked out the peephole then gestured for Cartouche and me. “Lefty, Iron Mike, keep dealing.”

McKool opened the door a crack and slipped through. Cartouche and I followed. At the far end of the parking lot along the waterfront, fire engulfed a cream colored Cadillac DTS sedan. The bright orange blaze cast flickering shadows and the flames reflected in the river’s oily sheen.

“Big Tiny. He just had to pick Flapper’s car,” McKool said. He turned to me. “Radio it in. Tell them you were driving by and saw it, the situation’s under control. Stall them.” To Cartouche he said, “Have Mike and Lefty count them down and cash them out quick. Tell Two-Ways to take Flapper home.”

“Jeez, McKool,” I said. “I can’t do that.”

“Blue. That’s why I have you. We have no time to screw around. Do it. Now.”

I called in the fire, told them I was on the scene, nobody was hurt and there was no emergency, no rush. I talked as slowly as I could, and then transposed two numbers in the street address.

As the players filed out, McKool spoke briefly with each. When a thirty-foot MFD pumper pulled up twenty minutes later only McKool, Cartouche and I remained. McKool explained to the fire lieutenant that the bridge game had broken for the evening a few hours earlier, and one of the players—a little old lady—hadn’t been feeling well and gotten a lift home, left her car behind. The fire had already died down and it took them less than five minutes to put it out. The Caddy was totally crisped. I’d get myself assigned to the case. Accidental fire caused by some kind of engine malfunction. Hopefully Big Tiny’s crew had left no evidence of accelerants.

“I’ll go to Flapper’s with Two-Ways in the morning,” McKool said. “He’ll do the insurance paperwork with her.” Bobby Two-Ways had been an insurance investigator before taking up poker for a living.

“We playing tomorrow?” I asked.

“Why wouldn’t we?” McKool said.

Monday and Tuesday are my weekend—I play after I take Abuelita to get her hair and nails done and for dinner at El Rincon or El Viajero. Even though it was my day off I stopped in at the station Monday morning to handle the paperwork on Flapper’s car fire.

“Coming in on your day off. Nice,” Eddie Figueroa said when he saw me.

“Just had to do a little paperwork,” I said.

He looked at the file as I worked on it. “What were you doing down by the river at two o’clock in the fucking morning?”

I shrugged. “Like I told you,
amigo,
I got trouble sleeping.”

“Anything special about this car fire? Gang bangers? Mob?”

I shook my head. “Some kind of engine problem. Civil matter. The old lady turned it over to her insurance company.”

McKool gets his action going by playing gin in the afternoon with a few regulars, and then serving dinner. He’s all about getting cards in the air and butts in chairs and keeping them as late as possible—and he’s really good at it, building a stack of chips with players that he cashes as needed to get the action going and keep it going. I’m part of McKool’s night crew, help keep his game going late. This Monday, though, McKool was worried about having enough starters to get the game off because of Sunday’s car-fire incident, so he asked me to come early and stay. Monday is the night he has the most trouble getting and keeping the game going.

Lilith served dinner as always at six. Cards were in the air six-handed at six thirty—me and McKool, Bobby Two-Ways and Flapper and two gin players, Crazy Al and Luckbucket. Cartouche never played. By nine the game was eight-handed, the second table hadn’t gotten going, and McKool was assuring everyone that there would be plenty of action. Big Tiny had smacked McKool where it hurt—in the red chips dropping into the collection box.

Lilith tapped me on the shoulder and handed me the cordless. “It’s your grandma,” she said. McKool discourages cellphones at the table, says they slow down the action, which means they slow down the rake. I had the game on speed dial at home.

“Abuelita?” I said into the phone. Lefty dealt me a Jack-nine suited, a fair hand but risky in early position. I’m inclined to get involved with anything that has play potential—usually I’d have called but I passed. I took the phone and stepped away from the table.

“Mi hijo,
two of your friends are here to see you.” Doo uff jore frenz are ‘ere do zee joo—over fifty years in Miami and you’d have thought she stepped off the boat yesterday.

I have friends at work and the game, a couple of buddies from high school, but not many who even know where I live let alone who would just stop by.”
Por favor,
give one of them the phone, Abuelita.”

Lefty put out a Queen-ten-eight, rainbow. I’d have flopped a straight.

“Blue. Your grandma’s a real nice lady. Gave me and Jimmy home-made lemonade. Tasty. I’d be nervous leaving my grandma alone with no security or nothing. Miami can be a dangerous place, ya know?”

“What the hell are you doing at my house, Joey?”

“Me and Jimmy stopped by to chat. Should have known you’d be at McKool’s. Any seats open?”

“No,” I lied. “You need to leave my house right now, Joey. I mean right now.”

“Hey, Blue,” Lefty called over to me. “The action’s on you.”

“Fold me.”

“We’re leaving,” Joey said. “Tell McKool maybe we’ll stop by.”

“Put my grandma on the phone.”

“It’s your blind, Blue,” Lefty said.

I waved my hand, telling them to play over me.

“Mi hijo?”

“Abuelita, my friends are leaving. Wait five minutes, then call me back, okay?”

“Si, pero por que?”

“No te preocupe,
Abuelita. Just
llameme
five minutes after they leave.
Entendido?”

“Si, mi hijo.”

I grabbed McKool and pulled him away from the table, told him about the Pizzas’ visit to my grandma.

“You gotta sit down, Blue, we can’t leave the game short-handed,” McKool said.

“I need to check on my grandma. You think she’s okay?” All I could think of was Joey Pizza’s leering face at Abuelita’s kitchen table.

He rested his hand on my shoulder. “Blue, if they were going to hurt her they’d have hurt her—they’re just messing with your head. I don’t like it, and I’m sure you like it less—but I’m also sure she’s okay.”

I shook off his hand. “I need to go, man,” I said.

“I need you here to keep the game going.”

I started toward the door when Lilith brought me the phone. “Your grandma again,” she said.

Abuelita started rattling about the nice young men who had just left and were their parents from Cuba and she had invited them to come to dinner with us next Monday, and they’d told her they’d talk to me about it.

It was my turn again to post the big blind, and McKool told Lefty to deal me in. He gently put his hand in my back and pushed me toward my seat. Convinced that Abuelita was indeed okay, I reluctantly sat down and took a hand, still listening to her chatter on in Spanglish over the phone. The game broke early and I rushed home.

McKool called me to come by around noon on Tuesday, said he needed my help with something. I knocked on the door and Cartouche let me in. McKool sat at the poker table poring over a thick file of papers. I sat next to him and he handed me twenty pages of computer printout.

“Look at this,” he said.

I flipped through the thick report, glancing at the pages. The printout was all about one Tomaso Albinoni, aka Big Tiny, aged forty-four. A bad guy with a long history, he’d cut his teeth on the Brooklyn waterfront then come to Florida in the cocaine cowboy days of the late ‘80s.
“Coño.
This is intelligence, not law enforcement. DIA? NSA? Homeland Security?” I asked. “I’m LE and I would never be able to access this kind of material. How did you get your hands on this?”

“I’ve got people,” McKool said. “And some of my people got people.” McKool’s business and his life are built on people who owe him favors.

Big Tiny had his bejeweled fingers in, among other things, refugee smuggling, drugs, and of course gambling. The detail was incredible.

“Read the section on known associates,” McKool said. “There. That page.”

Joseph Bodalato, from Queens, lots of petty crimes, served fourteen years of a twenty-year sentence in Attica for second degree murder. Last known address on SW Sixteenth Street, down near Woodlawn Park Cemetery, where Miami borders Coral Gables. “You and Cartouche pay Joey a visit,” McKool said. “He wanted to talk to you? Let’s give him what he wants.”

“I dunno, McKool,” I said.

McKool smiled. “I need to make a little show of force.”

Playing in McKool’s game was one thing, doing his errands to pressure mob boys another altogether. I wondered if perhaps he was setting me up, laying some kind of trap for me. “I don’t think I should,” I said. Was I being paranoid?

McKool ignored my protestation. “He’s there now; Lilith’s staking out his driveway. Take the Crown Vic.”

“You know I can’t do that.”

“Take my Explorer then.” McKool had shifted the question from whether I would go at all to what car we were taking. He handed me a Mapquest to Joey’s house. “Go. Now. Just keep your mouth shut and follow Cartouche’s lead.” He handed his keys to Cartouche.

We drove through the midday glare past the cemetery through neighborhoods of tightly packed CBS houses with orange barrel tile roofs amid banyans and palms to Sixteenth Street. Much like my childhood neighborhood. As we turned the corner I saw Lilith parked in her Hyundai. Cartouche pulled up in front of a house with jalousie windows and wrought-iron security bars much like all the others, except its yard was overgrown. We walked through the gate in the chain link fence up a cracked walkway of concrete slab, up three steps of brick. Cartouche rang the bell. No answer. He rang again, held it long, an insistent
brinnggg.
Finally Joey came to the door, bleary-eyed, barefoot and unshaven, wearing jeans and an open terry bathrobe. He had a concave chest and a little pot belly.

He looked at Cartouche, then quickly tried to slam the door shut but Cartouche jammed it with his foot. “‘Allo, Pizza boy,” Cartouche said in his thick accent.

Joey shrugged and held the door open. He backed up into the living room, which looked as if it had been picked up from a furniture showroom and just dropped in place—sectional beige leather sofa, matching coffee and end tables and entertainment unit with big flat-screen TV, generic oil landscapes hanging on the walls. A handful of empty Heineken bottles and a half-empty bag of Cheetos sat on the coffee table. None of life’s bric-a-brac that said somebody lived here. An aluminum baseball bat rested against the wall by the front door—if we hadn’t woken Joey from a dead sleep he’d likely have had it in hand when he answered the door.

“You wanted to talk to me?” I said.

“We got nothing to talk about,” Joey said, backing into the room. “The one who needs to talk is McKool—to Big Tiny.”

I picked up the bat, poked Joey in the chest with it. “You like my grandma’s lemonade?”

“Put that down, Blue,” Joey said as he backed up a few steps.

All I could think of was this sleazy piece of sewage in my grandma’s kitchen, drinking her lemonade, oozing menace. “Miami’s dangerous?” I poked him again, harder, pushing him against the wall. “My grandma’s not safe?” I brought the bat up to his face, made as if to hit him. He flinched. I tapped his cheek with the bat. He brushed it away.

I brought the bat back as far as I could. Joey threw his arms up to protect his face. I swung away, but not where he expected—I brought it down with all of my strength on his left foot, smashing his toes. He screamed and before he could even move, I swung again, crushing his foot again. He fell to the floor.

Cartouche grabbed me by the collar and with one hand lifted me into the air. “We are not ‘ere to kill ‘eem,” he said. He dropped me on the couch, then poked Joey with his toe.

Joey rolled onto his side, curled up in the fetal position, and moaned.

“‘Ee will live,” Cartouche said. He picked up Joey’s phone, and handed it to him. “Tell zem to send an ambulance.” He turned to me. “Come. Bring ze bat.”

As we drove away Cartouche said, “We wair not s’pposed to do zat.”

Then he smiled a rare smile. “But I am ‘appy zat you did.”

Cartouche may have been happy I’d pounded on Joey Pizza, but McKool said I’d escalated things and we could expect some kind of retaliation. He did his houseman magic and got Tuesday’s game going, filled with a wait list by eight. I didn’t get to play, though—he had me on watch in the parking lot by the riverfront. Cartouche patrolled the street and driveway. McKool had given each of us little pen microphones that transmitted to an iPod-sized receiver with a Bluetooth earpiece he wore—we could tell him instantly if anything seemed awry.

I strolled up and down the concrete pier along the riverside at the end of McKool’s parking lot, a little frustrated about not being in action, a little abashed about creating problems for McKool, more than a little angry at the Pizzas. You can’t see many stars in Miami’s halogen sky, but reflected city lights made their own starscape on the river’s surface as it cut five miles through the heart of the city. A headless goat carcass floated past me on the rising tide. Piles of lobster pots and crab traps—rectangular wooden crates with a one-way door allowing crawling crustaceans easy entry, but preventing them from getting back out—lay scattered along the riverfront amid the repair yards, freighter terminals, and new construction high-rise condos going up. The night passed peaceably, but McKool didn’t get his usual influx of latecomers, and the game broke a little after two.