LaBrava (15 page)

“Hey, my pictures.”

“I know why you fell in love with Lana.”

“That broad, I been looking all over for
her
too.” He brought three eleven-by-fourteen prints out of the envelope, laid them on the marble countertop and began to grin. “Look at her, showing herself.”

“Where’d you see the guy?”

“I saw him on Collins Avenue, I saw him on Washington Avenue. You can’t miss him.”

“He likes to be seen,” LaBrava said. “He’s the Silver Kid.”

“No shit, is he? . . . I like this one of me. It’s cute, uh? You like it?”

“One of my favorites. You talk to anyone at the Play House?”

“Yeah. Maybe he was in there, they don’t know him. But that isn’t the place. The place you want to go—a guy I talk to, he say check the Paramount Hotel on Collins.”

“Who was that?”

“The guy? Name is Guilli, a Puerto Rican guy. He’s ascared all the time, but he’s okay, you can believe him.”

“I know who you mean. So you went over there?”

“Yeah, but I didn’t see him.”

“Where’s the Paramount?”

“Is up around Twentieth. I saw him on Washington, I saw him on Collins Avenue. Two days now. Three days—man, where does the time go?”

“You doing all right?”

“Sure, I make it. You kidding? Lana is going to like this one, showing herself. I hear she went over to Hialeah, see her mother. But I don’t know where her mother lives no more, I got to look for her. Man, they give you a lot of trouble.”

“Dames are always pulling a switch on you,” LaBrava said.

Paco said, “What?”

“Something a guy in a movie said.”

“He did?”

“Listen—how about when you saw the guy, what was he doing?”

“Nothing. Walking by the street. Go in a store, come out. Go in another store, come out.”

“You’re not talking about drugstores.”

“No, regular stores, man. Grocery store—or he go in a hotel, he come out.”

“Has he bought any stuff off anybody?”

“Nobody told me he did. Guilli thinks he’s a cop. But you know Guilli. Guilli thinks the other guy is a cop too, guy drives the black Pontiac Trans Am. Shit, Guilli thinks everybody he don’t know is a cop.”

“What other guy? Cubano?”

“Yeah—how do you know that?”

“I might’ve seen him. He’s got a black Trans Am, uh?”

“Yeah, he stay at the La Playa Hotel. You know it? Down the end of Collins Avenue. There’s a guy live there—you know a guy name David Vega?”

“I don’t think so.”

“David Vega told Guilli he
knows
the guy, from the boat-lift. He told him, he’s not a cop, man, he’s a
Marielito
. He say the guy was with some convicts they put on a boat, from a prison. He say he remember him because the guy wore a safety pin in his ear.”

“That mean something?”

“Like a punk. You know, be in fashion. Now David Vega say he’s got a gold one, a real one he wears.”

“What’s his name?”

“He don’t know his name, he jus’ remember him.”

“Staying at the La Playa.”

“Listen, the first night he come there a guy live there was ripped off. The guy come back from the pier from doing some business, he got hit on the head and somebody robbed him, took four hundred dollars.”

“That happens all the time there, doesn’t it?”

“Yes, of course, with guys like this guy. Tha’s what I mean.”

“Why does Guilli put the Cubano with the big blond guy?”

“He saw them talking, that’s all, it don’t mean nothing. But maybe. Who knows?”

“I’ll see you in a couple days, uh?”

“Yeah, I have to go to Hialeah. Talk to Guilli or David Vega if you want to know something. Also, you want to, you can drive my wheelchair. I think you like it.”

There weren’t too many places had swimming pools around here. A pink and green place called the Sharon Apartment-Motel on Meridian and Twelfth, across from Flamingo Park, had a little bitty one out front, but nobody was in it. Nice-looking pool, too, real clean, sparkling with chlorine. There hadn’t been anybody in it the other time either. This was Nobles’ second visit to the Sharon Apartment-Motel office, the important one.

He said to Mr. Fisk, little cigar-smoking Jew that owned the place, “Well sir, you think over my deal?”

Mr. Fisk had skinny arms and round shoulders but a big stomach and was darker than many niggers Nobles had seen in his life. Mr. Fisk said, “Go out and turn left and keep walking. What do you come to, it don’t even take you ten minutes and I’m talking about on foot?”

Nobles said, “Let’s see. Go out and turn left—”

“The Miami Beach Police station,” Mr. Fisk said. “Look, right here I got it written down. I even got it in my head written. Six-seven-three, seven-nine-oh-oh. I pick up the phone they’re here before I can say goodby even.”

“Yeah, but see, by then it’s already done.” Nobles took out his wallet and held it open for Mr. Fisk. “What’s ‘at say there, under where it says Star Security?”

Mr. Fisk leaned against the counter separating them, concentrating on the open wallet. “ ‘Private protection means crime prevention.’ Is that suppose to be clever? I got a son in the advertising game could write you a better slogan than that one, free.”

“See, prevention,” Nobles said, “that’s what you have to think about here. See, you call the cops after something’s done to you, right? Well, you call us before it happens and it don’t.”

Mr. Fisk said, “Wait a minute, please. Tell me what you’re not gonna let happen the cops one minute away from here down the street would?”

“Well, shit, they could mess your place up all different kinds a ways.”

“Who is they?”

“Well, shit, you got enough dagos living around here. You got your dagos, your dope junkies, your queers, this place’s full a all kinds. But, see, five hundred dollars in advance, you don’t have to worry about ’em none. It gives you protection all year, guaranteed.”

“Guaranteed,” Mr. Fisk said. “I always like a guarantee. But tell me what in particular could happen to my place if I don’t buy your protection?”

“Well,” Nobles said, “let’s see . . .”

Surveillance, the way LaBrava remembered it from his Miami field-office days, was sitting across the street from a high-rise on Brickell Avenue or some place like the Mutiny or the Bamboo Lounge on South Dixie. Sitting in a car that was as close as you could come to a plain brown wrapper with wheels, so unnoticeable around those places it was hard to miss. The afternoon the wholesaler came out of the Bamboo, walked across the street to the car and said, “Joe, the lady and I’re going out to Calder, catch the last couple races, then we’re going up to Palm Beach, have a nice dinner at Chuck & Harold’s with some friends . . .” it was time to move on, to Independence, as it turned out . . .

But not anywhere near the kind of independence he was into now—protecting his movie star—standing in some bushes on the east side of Flamingo Park, catching Richard Nobles with a long lens coming out of a motel named Sharon:

Richard Nobles walking over to the swimming pool.
Snick
. Nobles turning to say something to the little guy standing in front of the office.
Snick
. The little guy with his hands on his hips, feisty pose, extending his arm now to point at Nobles walking away. LaBrava saying, eye pressed to the Leica, “I see him.”
Snick
.

The guy turned to his office, then turned back again and yelled something at Nobles. Nobles stopped. He looked as though he might go back, and the little guy ran inside the office.

LaBrava got in Maurice’s car, crept along behind Nobles over Twelfth Street to Collins and parked again, got out with his camera and followed Nobles up Collins. Silver jacket and golden hair—you didn’t have to worry about keeping him in sight. There he was, like he was lit up. The Silver Kid. The guy never looked around either; never even glanced over his shoulder.

From the east side of Collins, LaBrava shot him going into Eli’s Star Deli. About fifteen minutes later he got him coming out. He got him going in and coming out of a dry cleaner’s. Finally he got him going into the Paramount Hotel, just above Twentieth Street. LaBrava hung around about an hour. The bad part. But better than sitting in a car full of empty styrofoam cups and crunched-up paper bags. At least he could move around.

He walked to the taxi stand on the southwest corner of Collins and Twenty-first and waited nearly twenty minutes for a red Central cab to arrive with the Nigerian, Johnbull Obasanjo behind the wheel, scowling.

“What’s the matter?”

“Notting is the mattah.” With an accent that was both tribal and British.

“You always look pissed off.”

“It is the way you see, not the way I look.”

There were parallel welts across his broad face, tracks laid by a knife decades ago that Johnbull, second cousin of a Nigerian general, told were Yoruba markings of the warrior caste. Why not?

“You’re disappointed.”

“Ah,” Johnbull said. “Perhaps what you see is disdain.”

“Perhaps.”

“Mon say to me, the fare, ‘Did you learn your English here?’ No, in Lagos, when I am a boy. ‘Oh,’ he say, ‘and where is Lagos?’ “ Johnbull’s twin knife scars became vivid, underlining the white-hot pissed-off expression in his eyes. “When I am a child in school, for God sake, I can draw a map of the United States. I can show you where Miami is, I can show you where Cleveland is. But nobody here, they don’t know where Lagos is, where you get the second most oil from any place in the world.”

“I’m looking for a guy,” LaBrava said, “who doesn’t know where his ass is. Big blond guy staying at the Paramount.” LaBrava handed Johnbull a ten-dollar bill. “Watch for a black Pontiac Trans Am, late model. If it picks up the big blond guy, follow it. Then give me a call. I’ll pay for whatever time you spend on it. If you have to leave, tell the other guys, I’ll give ’em the same deal.”

“I want a picture for my mother,” Johnbull said. “This one smiling.”

“Let’s see a big one,” LaBrava said. He raised his camera and shot the Nigerian framed in his window, grinning white and gold.

The woman in the office of the Sharon Apartment-Motel said, “Tell me you arrested him and you want Mr. Fisk to take a look it’s the same one . . . Nuh, no such luck, uh? Oh well. Mr. Fisk is lying down he’s so upset. Soon as the other police left he had to lie down. You know what he’s worried you don’t find him? What if he comes back?”

LaBrava waited.

Mr. Fisk came in, wary.

“You don’t look like no cop to me, would wear a shirt like that. With a camera. What is this, you’re on your vacation?”

LaBrava said, “We like to take a few pictures when we process a crime scene, Mr. Fisk. You by any chance speak to Sgt. Torres?”

“I don’t know—they come in a car with the lights. You know how long it took them? Twenty-five minutes.”

“See, they make out a U.C.R.,” LaBrava said. “That’s a Uniformed Crime Report. Then the Detective Bureau follows up. Did he give you his name? The big blond guy?”

“He showed me a gold star and the name of the company, something that says ‘Private protection means crime prevention,’ and his name printed there, typed. But I don’t remember it. I should a wrote it down.”

“What’d he say exactly?”

“I told the two other cops were here. I told them all that.”

“In case you might’ve left out something important.”

“Okay, he wants to sell me protection. What else is new? I tell him I don’t need any, I tell him I’ve got the Miami Beach Police Department one minute away from here down the street. That’s how dumb I am. I don’t know it takes you to drive from First Street to Twelfth Street in a police squad car full speed with the siren and everything twenty-five minutes.”

“How much did he ask for?”

“Five hundred. In advance, of course. He says for a year’s protection guaranteed. Oh yeah? Next month he’s back for another five hundred. I grow up, live forty years of my life in Crown Heights, I don’t know this kind of business goes on?”

“He threaten you? Say what would happen if you didn’t pay?”

“Get ready. You want me to tell you exactly what he said?”

Mrs. Fisk said, “We can’t prove he said
any
thing. The policeman was here said unless the other places he did the same thing, we all speak up, then maybe.”

“Tell me what he said, Mr. Fisk.”

“He gives me the pitch, all this protection I’m suppose to get for five hundred dollars. I ask him, against what? What could happen to my place? The guy says, ‘Well, let’s see.’ He goes over to the door, looks out. He says, word for word, ‘Somebody could come around and take a dump in your swimming pool every night.’ Wait. Listen. Then he says, ‘That wouldn’t be too nice, would it?’ Not, he’s gonna smash all my windows, he’s gonna throw a bomb in, blow the place up, like they used to do it. Or even threaten to break my legs. No, this big blond-hair son of a bitch is gonna poo poo in my swimming pool.”

LaBrava shook his head. After a few moments he said, “Would you step outside here, Mr. Fisk? Thank you. Over by the pool more. Yeah, right there. Now give me kind of a pissed-off, defiant look. If you would, please.”

“Then the cop comes,” Mr. Fisk said, “and what does the cop do? He takes my picture. I’m telling you . . .”

LaBrava passed up dinner with Jean and Maurice to spend the evening in the darkroom, watching Nobles appear in trays of liquid, pleased with the shots because they were clear and in focus. He liked the ones where there was motion in the foreground, out of focus, the top of a car as it passed, in contrast to the clarity of Nobles’ confident, all-American boyish face. Hometown hero—the hair, the toothpick, the hint of swagger in the set of silver-clad shoulders. What an asshole.

How did they get so sure of themselves, these guys, without knowing anything? Like people who have read one book.

He hung Nobles up to dry and spent the next two and a half hours with Jean Shaw, in her apartment.

They did talk about Nobles, recapping, and he told her what Nobles had been up to and that he’d have prints in the morning, confirmation. She seemed fascinated. She sat facing him on the sofa and asked questions, probed for details, listening intently. Yes, it was fascinating—she used the word—that he could follow someone so closely, document the guy’s activity, and not be detected. She asked him about the Secret Service and continued to listen until—