It Takes Two (14 page)

“Find me a operation where they don’t gossip about the boss,” Emma Mae answered, “and I’ll show you a out-of-business cemetery.”

I was smiling when I knocked smartly on Admiral Asdeck’s door a few minutes past ten, after I’d had a chance to pick up the accounts ledger.

“Enter!”

He was seated at a room service table, his naked back to the view of the river, with papers, pencils, coffee cup, slide rule and humidor neatly squared before him. No doubt about it: The admiral stayed in shape. His shoulders, furry chest and flat belly seemed to have never known a hint of fat. Each strong arm bore a discreet tattoo. He was wearing bifocal glasses and white Brooks Brothers skivvies, the kind with buttons in front and strings on the side.

He stood up, and we greeted each other with an eye-to-eye handshake, the way military men often do. Slipping off his specs, he pointed me toward the sofa with one hand, meanwhile bringing his straight chair forward with the other. Every gesture revealed unconscious power combined with conscious care and grace.

He’d caught a flight from Miami to MacDill Air Force Base the previous day, he said. And hired a car for the run down from Tampa to Fort Myers.

Nervous and ready to get started, I stepped right up to last night’s lapse. “Look, Admiral, I apologize for not being awake when you got in.”

“You aren’t on probation, Dan,” he answered, smiling now. “A man’s got to sleep some time.”

I opened my mouth to offer amiable thanks, then closed it when he kept on talking.

“You getting to know this detective pretty well?”

My mouth opened again, involuntarily. I hadn’t planned on starting with a discussion of Bud.

“We…we had a good talk last night,” I said. “Some of it was connected to a homicide investigation Detective Wright is running. And I showed him around the club. He’d been inside the hotel a time or two before but…”

Asdeck shot me a tolerant, fatherly glance. His balding head was close cropped on the sides and smoothly shaved around the neck and ears. “They tell me you two boys got caught in somebody else’s shoot-’em-up Sunday over on the Tamiami Trail.”

I tried to downplay what happened. “Felt like cowboys and Indians, that’s right, sir.”

“Don’t guess they locked Mrs. Norris up in the loony ward? Good thing her aim was off.”

I answered straight. But I wondered right off how Asdeck knew Willene Norris’s name, what she’d done and where she’d done it. None of this had been in the newspaper. “Detective Wright slapped the cuffs on her,” I said. “But, no, the coroner advised against taking her into custody. Mrs. Norris and her family own half the town, apparently.”

I was aware that the boss always had more than one source of good information. But today’s discussion was beginning to feel like a test, not a conversation.

Asdeck nodded, as if what I’d said explained everything. To me, of course, it really hadn’t. So I went ahead and detailed the connections between Hillard Norris, Willene Norris, her card-playing brother-in-law Ridley Boldt and the Caloosa Club.

“Damn glad nobody on our side got hurt,” Asdeck said when I finished. “Now what about the incident last night? Your buddy was here with you when the yokels torched the cross? What did he do? What, exactly, did he say to you?”

It sounded as if Asdeck was trying to find fault with Bud. Again, there was nothing to do but answer truthfully. So I did, explaining that Detective Wright had recognized one of the cross burners and planned to quiz him on the reasons behind the Klan’s visit. Other than that, he’d seemed as surprised as I was and had said nothing out of the ordinary.

“He’s looking into it,” I added. “But his first thought is Tommy Carpenter, our pianist. Detective Wright figures the Klan sees us and our colored musician as some kind of Northern integrationist plot.”

“The hotel as Harry Truman? With the segregated city of Fort Myers as the armed forces, huh?”

“Something like that.”

Asdeck went to the window and looked out at the wide, blue-green Caloosahatchee. After a moment, he turned, shot me another glance and said, “I’ll sleep better knowing the connection between the shooting and the burning last night.”

That hadn’t crossed my mind but I didn’t say so.

“Could be no link,” he added. “And if there’s not, we need to know that too. You men need to keep your ears open.”

“Yes, sir. I’ll mention it to Detective Wright.”

And so, side by side at the desk, we went over my improvement ideas: Hire more young, perky waitresses (check), fit out conference rooms on the mezzanine and make them available around the clock (check), set up a stenographer in a lobby office and charge visiting businessmen for secretarial services (check), hire Detective Wright as chief of hotel security…

Asdeck asked how a hotel security guard might have prevented the cross burning the night before. “My parking lot is private property,” he said, “not some clearing in the woods. If you and I choose to hire this or that musician, it’s strictly our business. If your friend was guarding the place, what would he have done to keep the peace?”

“I’ll ask him to brief me, sir.”

“But you already think he can handle the job? And that your budget can handle the salary you propose?”

I nodded. “It’ll be money well spent.”

“Hope you don’t mind,” Asdeck continued, opening the desk drawer and removing a photocopied file. “I had a friend of mine over at the Pentagon pull up his personnel jacket. Spencer Wright was twice decorated for valor but has no more than a high school education. There’s not a single black mark on his record, though one chief put him down as too much of a loner. He got wounded so bad he was recommended for discharge, but he talked his officer and the doc out of it. Must be a hell of a jar-head, all in all.”

“He’s energetic, willing to work like a dog.”

“Yes, there’s that. I can only assume you’ve considered all of this on a personal level. He’s a mud-eating jarhead and a cop; you’re a wardroom officer and a white-glove gentleman. How’s that going to sit between you two? Can you live with him, sleep with him, drink with him, eat breakfast across from him day after day and still give him orders?”

My throat went dry. Did his words even mean what I thought they did? The time was the late 1940s, don’t forget. I trusted Asdeck. Back at the New Victory Club we’d occasionally swapped morning-after stories and joked about my taste in scarred-up officers versus his in shameless geishas. But how did he know so much about my relationship with Bud? And did he see it as some kind of conflict? Suddenly, even though I was talking to my mentor and best friend, I felt cornered.

“Tell you the truth, sir, I sure intended to bring that up. Now I’m embarrassed as hell. Figured nobody was aware of it. Thought we’d been pretty careful.”

“I expect you were. No doubt in my mind. But, Dan, you can’t ever let anybody hold something like that over you. Gives them power. And the laws of this benighted state concerning the so-called crime against nature—not to mention some of the Caloosa’s business—need to be changed. But right now we have to live with the cards we’re dealt. Which does give me an idea. What we need is trump cards, our own power cards, an ace or two.”

“Sir, I figured you had all that taken care of, important people taken care of, before you ever opened for business.”

The admiral got up, crossed the room to the desk, selected a Havana cigar from the humidor, clipped the end, struck a match, lit the stogie and blew a cloud of rich smoke toward the window before he answered. “May I suggest that you start Detective Wright part time. Start by paying him to fill us in on the sheriff ’s private attitudes toward Negroes, cross burnings and mixed-race staffs. Ought to be no trick at all for a man with the detective’s inside connections to draft a report on that subject.”

I didn’t quite follow Asdeck’s reasoning. I was getting a headache and I still couldn’t figure out how he knew Bud and I were mixing it up. Anyway, I balked, at least at first. “He works for Lee County,” I said. “The sheriff’s his boss. I’d be asking him to cross a line.”

“Working security directly for you would presumably cross that line soon enough.”

“After he quits the force is all I mean,” I said.

“Mixing business with pleasure takes balls, Dan. You sure he’s the right man? Before you decide to take him on, it seems to me you’ll want to survey your buddy right down to the keel. What if he refuses our offer? Will you still love him?”

So there it was. My throat closed up. I’d wondered about that. Would Bud and I become some kind of loving couple, complete with matching bowling shirts and a weekend shack in the Everglades? Or were we merely following the conventional barracks-room track of horniness and mindless sex, and going nowhere?

I tried to answer Asdeck’s question. Worked my mouth and failed. Finally, I said I was sure about Detective Wright—sure he was the right man for the job, sure that he and I would get along. I said I’d talk to him about buying reports on the sheriff.

Asdeck nodded, then added, surprisingly, “Dr. Kinsey says there’s thousands of men you could get along with. But complications on down the line won’t gain us anything. So, as long as you’re making a choice, I’d want you to be dead sure, as sure as you can be. One way or the other, this could be for keeps.”

“It’s complicated. He has a girl.”

Asdeck smiled and said he understood.

“He’s brave,” I said. “He saved my life. He’s honest with me, in so far as he knows how to be. But the crazy Norris woman could’ve shot at anybody, and he would have stepped in.”

“Good qualities,” Asdeck said. “So why the holdout on being sure he’s the one? Besides the girl you mentioned.”

“Because, sir, he doesn’t know why he does most of it.”

“Motivations?”

“Exactly, sir. Which means I don’t know what’s behind it.”

Asdeck laughed. “My wife would consider herself a traitor to all womanhood if she let me know even half of what makes her tick. There’s this, though, and let me briefly wonder about it out loud. What if your doubts are ringing a warning bell? Maybe somebody tipped him off on how we operate? Maybe giving you blow jobs is his way of getting inside the operation. Maybe he plans to go to a grand jury later. Maybe he’d like to make a name for himself with some kind of trumped-up charges.”

I must have blushed when I responded, “It’s been a lot more than blow jobs, sir.”

I still didn’t have the guts to mention Bud’s crying jag or his attempts to push me away in order to save me.

I said, “Honestly, sir, we’ve talked and I know a lot of his history. I can’t figure him having any bad intentions.”

“You’ll have to teach him a lot,” Asdeck replied. “Just like I taught you, back in Japan. And, for your own protection, you’ll need to level the playing field before you actually hire him.”

I shrugged, not liking the sound of that. “Meaning?”

“Meaning? Get him involved in more than just a sightseeing tour. Mix him up in something that might be interpreted as technically outside some statute or other.”

“You don’t think,” I answered, “that two grown men sharing a bed seven or eight times pretty much covers it?”

The boss laughed. “That might be enough if you wanted to hire him as a towel boy or room steward. But not as chief of security. He needs some kind of entangling involvement. As I say, just to level the field.”

Asdeck was probably right. “Give me a week, sir,” I said. “And I’ll get it all shipshape.”

“Take all the time necessary,” he said. “And, on second thought, forget about having him write up his boss. I know a better way to check on the sheriff ’s attitudes. I’ll look into it myself.”

Asdeck settled himself in the chair again and crossed his legs. “I’m confident you’ll be discreet with Detective Wright,” he said. “Your middle name is discretion. So let’s plan for the three of us to have dinner one night. We won’t bring up any of this. Now carry on.”

Did I have a choice? Hell, no. Each man is lucky to have one mahatma. Asdeck was mine. I saluted.

“Next, let’s look at your daily accounts,” Asdeck said.

“Hotel-for-Profit operational theory,” I answered, “is taking its sweet time getting inside my thick skull.”

Aboard the
Indianapolis
, Ensign Rizzo and I went wherever the admirals sent us. Combat washes out fear in many men, and that was mostly true for us. As officers, we were trained to figure the odds, move fast, follow our instincts and avoid second-guessing. Mike requisitioned a set of earplugs and learned to sleep in the noisy upper bunk, part-time anyway. In continuing to lock the cabin door when we both went off watch, he and I took a series of calculated risks. Doors customarily remained unlatched at sea. But if some knucklehead had suddenly busted in without knocking—which never happened—chances were four to one that we’d have been in separate bunks, reading cowboy novels, writing home or just sleeping. We never used words like homo or pansy. Mike even joked that our occasional lower-bunk coupling took his mind off more serious problems—such as the little yellow men in big gray ships sailing around the ocean trying to kill us.