New Hope for the Dead (16 page)

Hoke picked it up and gestured for Sue Ellen and Aileen to stay seated and not follow Ellita to her room.

“Tony Otero’s down here, Sergeant Moseley.” It was Eddie Cohen. “He wants to talk to your daughter Sue Ellen. Shall I send him up, or does she want to come down here?”

“Tell him to wait at the desk. I’ll be right down.”

Hoke hung up the phone. He told the girls to clear the card table, fold it up again, and put things away. “I’ll be back in a few minutes, and then we’ll have a little talk.”

Tony Otero, wearing a white linen suit, white shoes, and a red silk necktie, smiled at Hoke and shook hands with him when Hoke met him in the lobby. When Tony smiled, Hoke noticed a dark line above Tony’s four upper front teeth. He realized that the little boxer was wearing an upper plate. He hadn’t noticed it when Bill Henderson had introduced him to the lightweight a few weeks ago.

“Let’s sit over here, Tony.” Hoke gripped the boxer’s elbow with a thumb and two fingers and led him over to a tattered divan in the lobby, away from the desk. The divan was well separated from the old ladies watching the TV set on the wall.

Tony was looking past Hoke’s shoulder, toward the elevators.

“Sue Ellen won’t be coming down, Tony. What gave you the idea you could talk to my daughter?”

“I was going to ask her out to dinner. Take her out for a steak maybe.”

Hoke shook his head. “How old are you, Tony?”

“Twenty-four.”

“D’you know how old Sue Ellen is?”

“Seventeen, she told me.”

“She’s sixteen. Just barely sixteen, hardly going on seventeen.”

“Sixteen? Seventeen?” Tony shrugged. “What’s the difference? I was just going to ask her out to dinner, no shit.”

“Why?”

“She’s a pretty girl, and I got nothing else to do tonight. I just thought that—oh, I see! You think I—” Tony laughed. “No, Sergeant, I’m not wanting to screw the girl, no shit. I’m in training, you know. I won’t be able to do nothin’ like that till after the fight next month. My manager’d kill me, no shit.”

“But after the fight you’d make your move, right?”

“After the fight, I go back to Cleveland.”

“Do you know what ‘propinquity’ means, Tony?”

“Pro—propinquity? Sure, I’m a pro. I been fightin’ five years now, man. I’m number twenty-two in
Ring
magazine, no shit. Number twenty-two.”

“Not pro. Propinquity. It’s a word. And what it means is close together. Two people, in propinquity, eventually get married, you see. If there’s no propinquity, there’s no marriage. So if you only have propinquity with someone you’d be willing to marry, you’ll never make a bad marriage.”

“I don’t want to get married, man. I
been
married, but I’m not married now, no shit.”

“I know you don’t want to get married again, Tony. That’s why I can’t allow any propinquity between you and Sue Ellen. Sue Ellen’s only allowed to go out with a man who’d be a suitable husband for her, and no one else. Because, you see, without propinquity there can be no marriage. So inasmuch as you don’t want to marry Sue Ellen, and she doesn’t want to marry you, you can’t take her out to dinner. Or talk to her down in the lobby here, or ever see her again. Get my meaning?”

“Well, I don’t want to get married, no shit. I got a Jaguar
out in the lot, man. I can always find a girl to take to dinner, no shit. Just tell her I stopped by to say hello.”

Tony got to his feet, and so did Hoke.

“No, I won’t tell her that, either. If I did, she might get the wrong idea, that you were trying to develop some propinquity. The best thing for you to do is to get into your Jaguar, drive away, and forget all about Sue Ellen.”

Tony threw his shoulders back and looked around the shabby lobby. “This place is a dump, Sergeant Moseley, no shit. I got to get going.”

“Good luck on the fight.”

“I don’t need no luck, no shit. I’ll put that Filipino away in the third round.”

Hoke held out his hand. Tony Otero ignored it and walked stiff-backed to the double doors without looking back.

Hoke took Sue Ellen and Aileen up to the roof. He took three webbed chairs off the stack and arranged them on the duckboards so that he could face the girls as he talked with them. Hoke had the view across the bay to the city, and the girls, looking past him, saw the steel elevator door. It was hot on the roof, but a damp wind from the Atlantic, gusting occasionally, made it bearable. The girls had changed back into their shorts and T-shirts. They had never been out of Florida, and they paid no attention to the heat, but Hoke was perspiring beneath the arms of his clean sport shirt. His face was oily with sweat, and he cleared the perspiration off his forehead with a sweeping forefinger.

A Chalk’s Airline amphibian, coming in for a landing on the water, was almost level with the roof of the hotel. As the three of them turned to watch the plane, it honked its horn three times.

“Did you hear the goose honk?” Hoke said.

The girls nodded. “I thought I did,” Aileen said.

“The pilot always does that to alert the ground crew on Watson Island that it’s coming in for a landing. The last
time I came in from Bimini there was a nervous guy aboard. When it honked three times, he said, ‘Why’d it do that?’ I told him that the pilot was honking for the bridge tender to open the bridge, and the guy almost crapped his pants.”

The girls giggled. “That’s for boats,” Sue Ellen said. “They have to blow a horn three times to get the bridges lifted.”

“I guess he knew that much,” Hoke said. “That’s why he believed the amphibian had to do the same thing.”

“Will you take us over to Bimini sometime?” Aileen said.

“Sure, but there’s nothing there. It’s only sixty miles and twenty minutes away by Chalk, and it’s a nice place to take girls for a weekend. Just don’t try to pin me down to any definite time. You know by now we have a cash-flow problem. This is all family talk, understand, just between the three of us. I don’t tell my partner everything, and you’re not to say anything to Ellita, either.”

“What’s the matter with her, Daddy?” Sue Ellen said. “Why was she crying?”

“She’s got a few problems of her own, but I can’t discuss Ellita’s personal problems with you, either. If she wants to tell you, she will. All I can say is that she’s been living at home, and now she’s left home and she’s going to get a place of her own somewhere. She’s never lived alone before, and I guess she misses her mother.” Hoke smiled, and patted Sue Ellen’s left knee. “I suppose you girls miss your mother, too?”

The girls looked at each other.

“Not me,” Sue Ellen said, lighting a cigarette with her disposable lighter.

“Me neither,” Aileen said. “I thought I would at first, but I haven’t so far.”

“Maybe it hasn’t caught up with you yet. Besides, Cubans aren’t like us. What’s that you’re smoking, Sue Ellen?”

“It’s a generic cigarette. That’s the only kind the machine downstairs carries, and they don’t taste like much of anything.”

“I should’ve warned you about that. That’s Mr. Bennett’s personal machine. He stocks his own machine, you see, and at a buck and a half a pack he makes a bigger profit on generics than he would on real cigarettes. From now on, buy your cigarettes at the supermarket, you’ll save fifty cents a pack.”

“I’ve never seen Mr. Bennett, or Emilio either,” Aileen said. “Everybody’s always looking for Emilio, but no one ever finds him.”

“Mr. Bennett gets the kind of help he pays for. But Emilio’s around. You can see the evidence of his work. Didn’t you notice how neatly the gravel driveway was raked this morning? That’s Emilio. But Mr. Bennett only comes around late at night, when he comes around at all. Otherwise he’d be bothered by the residents complaining to him all the time. But it works out. Any time an old lady gripes to me or Mr. Cohen, we refer her to Mr. Bennett. But that’s not what I wanted to talk to you about. Your mother’s house in Vero Beach. What’s she going to do with it? Will she sell it or rent it out?”

“She’ll never sell it,” Sue Ellen said. “She and Curly’ll live in it when the Dodgers come back for spring training next year. She could probably rent it, but I can’t see her doing that, not with all her nice things and all.”

“It was just a passing thought,” Hoke said. “If Patsy would give me the house, I could try for a job on the police force up in Vero, and—”

“No, Daddy.” Sue Ellen shook her curls. “Momma wouldn’t give you anything. You might not believe it, but Momma doesn’t like you very much. Isn’t that right, Aileen?”

“She hates your guts, Daddy,” Aileen said, nodding in agreement. “That’s a fact.”

“I’ve often suspected that,” Hoke said, “especially when
her lawyer calls me. But it was just a thought. I’d hate to live in Vero anyway. But we’re going to have to be practical. Tomorrow morning, when I go to the station, Sue Ellen, I’ll take you with me. Then you can start looking for work at all the places of business closest to the police station. The cafés, shops, drugstores, dry cleaners, whatever. Go to each place in turn, but the closer to the police station you find work, the easier it’ll be for both of us. That way, when you get a job, I can drop you off each morning on the way to work, and then bring you back here, or wherever we move to next Friday, when my shift is over.”

“I’ve never had a job before. What do I say?”

“First, you have to look nice. Wear a dress and pantyhose, and some shoes with heels—not those running shoes. Fix your hair and put on some lipstick. Then, you walk in and say, ‘I’m looking for a job.’ The guy or the woman who runs the place will then say, ‘We don’t need anybody.’ What you do then is point out that they do need someone. Show them how dirty their windows are, and that they need washing. Point out the dust, and other dirty things. Then tell them that you’ll clean the place up for three dollars an hour. About every third place, especially the smaller shops, is always crummy. So you’ll get some work all right. A cleanup person for only three bucks an hour’s a bargain, so they’ll hire you instead of doing it themselves. Do you have any problems with that?”

Sue Ellen frowned. “What about stuff to clean with? Should I buy some—”

“No. At only three bucks an hour, they’ll have to furnish the equipment and cleaners and whatnot. All these places have brooms and rags and soap, but they’re too lazy to use it. Concentrate on shoe stores. Did you girls ever use a restroom in a shoe store?”

“I asked once,” Aileen said, “but they said it was for employees only.”

“You know why they said that? It’s because the rest rooms in shoe stores are the dirtiest Johns in the entire
United States. Shoe salesmen, wearing suits and ties, think they’re too good to clean up their John, so they let it go to hell. You can get two hours’ work, or six bucks, for every shoe-shop John you clean. They’re filthy.”

“What about me, Daddy?” Aileen said.

“Until you’re sixteen, you can’t get a work permit, but you can go into private enterprise. There’s a good way to make some money. When I was a kid up in Riviera, I washed dogs one summer, and you can do the same. I used to get two dollars a dog, but times have changed with inflation. You can charge five bucks a dog now, and they’ll pay up without a word, because people hate to wash their own dogs. We’ll get you a bucket and some laundry soap from the utility room, a dozen towels or so, and you can hit up the dog owners in the apartment houses around here. No dogs are allowed in the hotel, but a lot of these old people in the apartment houses have them. So you can wash their dog, dry it off with towels, and pick up five bucks a dog. If you wash four in the morning, and four more in the afternoon, you’ll make forty dollars a day.”

“If it’s so easy to make forty dollars a day, why doesn’t Emilio do it?” Aileen said. “You told us he worked in the hotel for nothing except his room and tips. These old people around here aren’t going to tip him much—they can’t even find him.”

“It’s hard to explain, honey”—Hoke took a breath—”but Emilio’s a Cuban refugee who was raised as a Communist in Cuba. The Communists don’t understand the American way of life. They don’t allow free enterprise in Cuba, and their government finds everybody jobs, jobs they have to take whether they want them or not. When there are no jobs, they give them free food and a place to stay anyway. Besides, Emilio gets a check for eighty-five bucks a month from some Cuban refugee organization here in Miami Beach, just because he’s a Marielito. If he started to make any money on his own, they’d stop giving him the check. He wouldn’t jeopardize losing that check for anything.
He was brought up to think that way in Cuba, you see. If he wanted to work and make a lot of money, he’d leave Miami and make fifteen or twenty bucks an hour in the East Texas oilfields. But you girls are WASPS, and you’ve got to realize that you’ve got to make your own way in the world. As girls, you’ve got two choices. Either you work, or you marry some guy who’ll support you.”

“I don’t want to get married,” Aileen said. “Ever!”

“Okay, then. You can wash dogs. Don’t be disappointed at first, when you get turned down a lot. You may not get a single dog to wash. But when someone does see you washing a dog out in the yard, they’ll bring theirs over to you, too. People are like that. They don’t want to be the first one, you see. Later on, when we get settled in Miami, you’ll get repeat business, too, a regular route. Then you can go around and wash the same dogs every month or so. But for the rest of the week, you can practice here on South Beach, and get some experience.”

“What about dog bites? A lot of dogs don’t like strangers.”

“I used to have a muzzle I put on them first. So just wash small dogs at first. Then, after you get your first five bucks, pick up a muzzle at a pet shop. Don’t wash any pit bulls, Dobermans, or Chows. Do you know what these dogs look like?”

Aileen nodded. “Curly Peterson’s got two Dobermans. Twins.”

“That figures. Okay, now, everything’s settled. Except now I have to tell you about sex. First, though, what did your mother tell you about sex?”

“She already told us everything, Daddy,” Sue Ellen said, looking at her fingernails. “You don’t have to talk about sex.”

“She tell you about the clap, syphilis, AIDS, herpes, shit chancres?”