Pronto (3 page)

"You shouldn't have taken the money," Kenneth said over his shoulder. "Man, I can't help you." His head turned to the window again.

The Zip came out of the bedroom. He ran his hand over the smooth vinyl backrest of the La-Z-Boy recliner aimed at the television set.

"Ask this guy why he's setting me up," Harry said, watching the Zip slide into the recliner and begin working the footrest lever, raising and lowering it.

"I like this chair. Be good for watching TV."

Kenneth said, "I have me two of those at my house. Just like that with the Magic Ottoman."

"Goddamn it," Harry said to the Zip, holding on, not raising his voice too much, "ask him about the plea deal he made with the feds. You know what I mean by that, what he's doing?"

"Let me ask you one," the Zip said. "Why you have those suitcases in there full of clothes. You going someplace?"

There was no way to talk to him. The Zip decided it was time to leave and that was that. Harry wanted to tell him, Look, we're both on the same side if it comes to believing this colored guy or me. I go back twelve years with Jimmy Cap and another ten with the guy before him. But once the Zip was out of the chair...

Harry even thought of mentioning Italy, something else they had in common. Tell the Zip he'd spent fourteen months over there during WW II and loved it. Ask him if he'd ever been to Montecatini, not far from Pisa, where he'd spent a month and had a ball drinking wine, getting laid, at the time the Second Armored was broken up and his company was put in an infantry outfit, the 473rd, activated in the field. Tell the Zip his war story, how he shot the deserter, a black guy from the 92nd, the colored outfit. Tell it in front of Kenneth. How he had misjudged the guy, thought of the deserter as a GI who'd messed up, gone AWOL too long, that's all, and would do some stockade time, hard labor at the Disciplinary Training Center and be sent back to his outfit. Both of them on the same side. That was why he couldn't believe it when the guy grabbed the carbine and tried to kill him, both of them in a hallway, close, looking in each other's face as the guy raised the carbine to club him with it and Harry had time to use the .45 sidearm the lieutenant had given him. Blew the deserter off his feet with it, killing him. And didn't find out till later the deserter had nothing to lose, that he'd raped and murdered an Italian woman and was going to be tried by court martial and no doubt executed.

Ask the Zip if he'd ever been to the place where the condemned prisoners were hanged. Aversa? Something like that.

Ask him -- what else? There was no time to say anything, find out where he stood. Once the Zip was out of the chair he waved Kenneth to come on and pushed him out the door. The only thing Harry knew for sure, the Zip thought the recliner would be perfect for watching TV.

Plan something for forty-seven years and all of a sudden you're out of time. Do it now, this minute, or maybe never get another chance.

He took the .45 from the shelf in the closet and cleaned it, stripped it and put it back together without too much trouble, and loaded the magazine. Harry hefted the automatic, three pounds of metal, stuck it in the waist of his pants, and walked around the room trying to get used to it.

He phoned Joyce.

"I have to talk to you."

"What's the matter?"

"Can you come over?"

"In about an hour. I just put my hair up."

"I have to talk to you now."

"Then come over here."

He had to think about it.

"Harry?"

"All right. Watch for me."

"Harry, what's wrong?" He hung up.

It was less than a fifteen-minute walk to Joyce's apartment on Meridian, five blocks from the beach. This evening, though, Harry felt he should drive, not be walking along these streets at night. His car was in a lot on Thirteenth, behind the hotel: his '84 Eldorado he'd have to do something with before he left. Maybe sign it over to Joyce. She didn't do too bad as a catalog model, but it was seasonal and she had to work in between jobs as a cocktail waitress. In one catalog she'd be a young matron in sportswear; in the next, a swinger in gauzy lingerie, garter belts, her hair all curly. Harry would open a catalog thinking, Okay, which model would you most like to jump? He told Joyce, kidding, to guess which one nine times out of ten he'd pick. Her. He told her thinking she'd say he was sweet, but all she did was look at him funny.

Usually he ducked out the service door of the hotel that opened on the alley; the parking lot was right there. This evening Harry came out the front entrance past the rows of metal chairs to the street, Ocean Drive, and looked both ways, taking his time, noticing a good crowd at the Cardozo for a Thursday night, all the sidewalk tables occupied. He turned the corner and walked along the side of the hotel to the parking lot, a small one, two rows of cars squeezed in there, an open space down the middle, a streetlight at the far end. Harry paused in the alley; he pulled the .45 from his waist, racked the slide and slipped the pistol into his waist again, inside his sport coat. His car was toward this end, the third one in. He came to the Eldorado's white rear deck sticking out. The guy who ran the lot told Harry he'd buy the car whenever he wanted to sell it. He wasn't here at night.

No, but somebody was. A figure in the open space between the rows of cars. Coming this way now, a dark shape. It wasn't the guy who ran the lot, he was a little guy. This one was taller, over six feet. Harry wanted him to be cutting through the lot heading for Ocean Drive. Now this guy Harry had never seen before said, "That your car?"

About thirty feet away.

Harry said, "What, this one?"

"Yeah, is that yours?"

Harry stood at the Eldorado's right-rear fender looking across the trunk at the guy approaching. He felt the bulk of the .45 against his stomach and said, "What do you care whose it is?"

The guy said, "I want to be sure you're the right one." Saying then, "Your name Harry?"

Harry was telling himself as the guy spoke to pull the .45, do it right now, seeing the guy coming the same way the deserter from the 92nd came at him with the carbine. That one, the deserter, didn't say a word.

This one did. He said, "What you doing, taking a piss? Have your hands full?" He said, "I got something for you, Harry," his right hand going inside his coat, "from Jimmy Cap."

Harry brought up the .45 in both hands and saw the guy stop and raise his hand that wasn't inside the coat. He looked like he was going to say something and maybe he did and Harry didn't hear it, with the noise. He shot the guy three times with that gun from the war and watched the guy fly off his feet backward, throwing a cut-down shotgun in the air to clatter off the trunk of a car and drop to the pavement.

Harry walked over to look at the guy. He was white, about fifty, wearing a tractor cap still on his head, an old suit coat over bib overalls, and work boots. Some redneck from the Glades. His eyes open, false teeth coming partway out of his mouth, the cleanest thing about him in the streetlight. Harry didn't touch him or the shotgun lying on the pavement. He went back to his apartment and phoned Buck Torres at Miami Beach police headquarters.

He wasn't there. Harry said it was urgent, that Sergeant Torres should get in touch with him right away. Waiting then, he felt he wanted a drink more than he ever did in his life, but held off. He thought of calling Joyce but held off on that too. Finally Torres phoned, not sounding in too good a mood. Harry said, "I just killed a guy. What do I do now?"

They talked for a few minutes and Torres told him not to move, not to do anything dumb.

"Like what?"

"Just don't do anything dumb."

Harry said, "Why do you think I called? If I was going to do something dumb, would I have called you, for Christ sake?"

He hung up and phoned Joyce.

She said, "No." She said, "You didn't.... Did you? You're putting me on and it's not funny."

By the time he heard the radio cars outside Joyce sounded like she believed him, asking what he was going to do and what she could do to help out. Harry told her not to worry about it, he didn't see a problem.

He wasn't thinking ahead yet. His mind kept looking at the scene and he'd feel pumped up at the way he'd known what to do and didn't panic, remembered to take a breath, hold it, let some out, remembered to squeeze the trigger, fired three times and hit the guy three times. When he did think ahead he pictured Torres and some other detectives at the scene shaking their heads, commenting among themselves over the way he'd played it. Man, don't mess with Harry Arno. Blew the guy away before he could get off a shot. They'd go over the scene and then talk to him, ask him exactly what happened, maybe have him sign a statement. Ask him to stick around, in case they had any more questions. After that, what?

Chapter
Three.

After they talked to him for two hours he spent the rest of the night in a detective-division holding cell. The next morning Harry told the Crimes-Against-Persons detectives it was just as easy to fix eggs the right way, over easy, for Christ sake, as it was to fry them till they were stiff as leather. One of the detectives let him know the eggs were from the Cuban joint down the street. Call them up if he wanted to complain.

Harry couldn't believe it, the way people he knew over the phone were treating him.

They transferred him to the Dade County jail, where he was booked and printed. That afternoon, at his first-appearance hearing in circuit court, he entered a plea of not guilty. The next thing he knew he was charged with second-degree murder and a bond was set at one hundred and fifty thousand dollars. He couldn't believe it. He said to his lawyer, "I understand this was a preliminary hearing, but you might've mentioned the shotgun the guy had."

His lawyer, actually the son of the lawyer who ordinarily represented Harry when he was brought up but was out of town, said, "What shotgun?"

"The one he was gonna kill me with. Doesn't anybody understand that?"

The young lawyer shook his head. "There's no shotgun mentioned in the Uniform Crime Report."

Harry said, "Did they look for one? You think I shot this guy I never saw before in my life for no reason? Or you think I was muggin' him, what?"

The victim was Earl Crowe, fifty-three, from the Glades, as Harry thought. Clewiston, up on Lake Okeechobee.

He said to Buck Torres, after, "Where were you last night when I needed you?" Meaning during the interrogation. "I have all these dicks ganging up on me."

Torres said it was a homicide investigation and he was with an organized-crime task force, Torres cooler than the last time they talked. He said, "You were nervous, right? Man, I can understand it. You thought sure this guy was coming for you."

"He was," Harry said. "He knew my name."

"You're a popular guy."

"He had a sawed-off pump-action shotgun, for Christ sake, he says from Jimmy Cap. He comes right out and tells me that so I'll know. From Jimmy."

"You had a loaded Colt .45," Torres said. "You want to talk about intentions?"

"I didn't know the guy."

"I hear he's got priors and state time going back thirty years," Torres said. "Maybe you can work a deal with the prosecutor's office, get it down to some kind of manslaughter. If you want you can talk to the feds about Jimmy Cap. Help your cause, if you know what I mean. McCormick asked me to mention it, that's all."

"They set me up," Harry said, "then offer to save my ass and I'm supposed to be grateful. If I say I'll tell stories on Jimmy, will they all of a sudden find the shotgun?"

Torres shook his head, saying he would never be part of anything like that.

"Yeah, well, I got no business being in jail," Harry said, "but if I'm out on the street I'm fucking dead."

"They'll look out for you," Torres said, "as long as you can do them some good. What else can I tell you? That's the way it is."

After the first-appearance hearing Harry was remanded to the Dade County Stockade in Miami, told by his lawyer he could be there as long as six weeks, until his arraignment came up. Monday, three days later, a woman from ABC Bail Bonds appeared at the Stockade with Joyce Patton and he was released on the one-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar surety bond.

Not put up by Joyce, no way. In fact he didn't know a single person who'd be willing to put up the ten percent the bond would cost, fifteen grand in cash, and have the collateral to represent the value of the bond, the full amount that would be forfeited if he failed to appear for his court hearing.

"Please don't tell me," Harry said, "Jimmy Cap put it up. Okay?"

The ABC Bail Bonds woman said, "How about your wife in Palos Heights, Illinois?"

Joyce standing there taking it in.

"My ex," Harry said. "You're telling me she came down here and gave you a check for fifteen grand? The day I went in business for myself she stopped cooking, refused to go in the kitchen unless I got a real job. We ate out every night for the next nine years. When I couldn't live like that anymore I gave her the house, a four-bedroom Tudor in Palos Heights, outside Chicago, and came back here to live."

Joyce said, "You still eat out every night."