Thursday, right after Max got back from lunch, he let Louis go with Winston to pick up Zorro, the Puerto Rican burglar with the swords and hyper women. The other day when Winston had gone to get him, Zorro wasn’t home.
Ten past three they were back.
Winston came in shaking his head at Max, Winston followed by Louis Gara and Ordell Robbie, Ordell with a grin saying, “I’m coming to see you, I run into Louis out front. Let me talk to my friend a minute, then I want to collect the money you owe and have you write me another bond.”
Max, sitting at his desk, didn’t say a word.
Neither did Louis Gara. He didn’t speak or look at Max as he picked up the coffee mug from Max’s desk. Louis motioned with a nod of his head and Ordell followed him into the meeting room, Ordell saying, “Man, I been calling and calling you . . .” Winston followed them to the door and slammed it closed.
He turned to Max saying, “What’d you send him with me for?”
Max said, “What?” preoccupied, trying to make sense of Louis taking his coffee mug, not asking if it was okay. He said to Winston, “They just happen to run into each other outside?”
Now Winston had to shift gears in his head. “Who? You mean those two? I guess so.”
Max said, “It was Louis’s idea to go with you.”
“Well, he ain’t ever again.”
“He’s a different guy today,” Max said.
Winston stood close to the desk. He touched his face saying, “Lookit here. You see these scratches?” He held his arm out to show the sleeve of his sport shirt torn and bloodstained. “You see this?”
Max straightened in his chair. “Jesus, what happened?”
“I told Louis I’d do the talking, he was along to back me up was all. I reminded him how you never ever try to handcuff a Cuban, a Puerto Rican, any those Latin people, in front of their women. They won’t allow it, their manhood won’t, have women see them submit like that. You have to bring the man outside first, get him by the car. I asked Louis, you understand that? Yeah, he knows, says he does. We get to the house, Zorro lets us in. The man knows he’s going in but has to wave his arms around first, make a speech how somebody snitched him out and it ain’t his fault, the situation he’s in. Louis is standing there—you say you think he’s different? He looks at me, says, ‘Fuck this,’ and takes Zorro by the arm, goes to cuff him. Zorro’s woman, his two sisters, they all come at us hitting and scratching, screaming their heads off. His mother come out of the kitchen with a butcher knife. . . . Lookit here.” Winston pushed up his torn sleeve to show a bloody handkerchief wrapped around his forearm. “You know how Zorro’s got the swords on the wall? He tries to get one and Louis hits him with his fist, hard, kept hitting him while I’m defending myself from this old woman with the butcher knife. We get outside I say to Louis, ‘You pretty good with a little PR stoned on acid. How ’bout trying me?’ I mean I was mad how he fucked it up. Louis gives me that sleepy look, says he’ll think about it and let me know. The first time he ever said anything like that, like he might put on the gloves with me. You think the man’s different, I think it could be his real self coming out.”
Max watched Winston unwrap the handkerchief to look at his wound. “Zorro’s still home?”
“I saw I wasn’t gonna take him without killing somebody. Yeah, so we left.”
“I’ll get him,” Max said. “You take care of your arm.”
“It’ll be all right, I get some stitches.” Winston raised his arm to his face and sniffed. “I think that old woman was chopping onions.”
“I got another one for you,” Ordell said to Max, “friend of mine, she’s an airline stewardess. Got caught coming back from Freeport with some blow. See, I’m thinking what you could do is use the ten you owe me left over from Beaumont. It’s what they set the stew’s bond at this afternoon, ten thousand, for possession. They say Jackie had forty-two grams on her. Not even two ounces. Shit.”
“The bond for possession’s only a thousand,” Max said.
“They calling it possession with intent.”
“It’s still high.”
“She had, I believe it was, fifty grand on her too,” Ordell said. “There was a cop at the hearing, young guy with FDLE, wanted the bond set at twenty-five saying there was risk of flight here, Jackie could get on a airplane and take off anytime she wanted. Being, you understand, a stewardess.”
They were alone in the office. Winston had gone to Good Samaritan; Louis had told Ordell he’d see him later and left, not saying where he was going. Ordell, sitting against Winston’s desk, wore that same yellow sport jacket with a silky rust-colored shirt today. Max noticed he didn’t have his Dolphins athletic bag with him, his money sack. He said, “Let’s get Beaumont out of the way first,” and saw Ordell’s expression change to almost a grin.
“Somebody already did. Police came to see me about it. Must’ve found out was me put up his bond. They speak to you?”
Max shook his head. “What police?”
“Riv’era Beach, some detectives, look like they got dressed from the Salvation Army. They scared my woman, Sheronda. She thought they was gonna take me away. I told them I didn’t even know Beaumont’s last name till the other day. They want to know then why did I pay his bail? I told them his mama use to take care of my mama when I brought her down here to live? Took care of her till she passed on. Nice woman name Rosemary, Beaumont’s mama. You know it’s funny, I never knew Rosemary’s last name either. She went back to Jamaica, I think lives in the country. So now, you keep the money you owe me and use it to get Jackie out of the Stockade. Jackie Burke’s her name, fine-looking woman, has kinda blond hair.”
Max said, “What did her mother do for you?”
Ordell let his grin come this time. “Man, Jackie’s a friend of mine, met her flying. My friends get in trouble, I like to help them out.”
“Didn’t Beaumont work for you?”
Ordell shook his head. “That’s what the police thought. I told them I’m unemployed, how could I have anybody working for me? Now I bail out Jackie, I’m liable to have the police on me again, huh? Wanting to know was she doing things for me, was she bringing me that money . . .”
Max said, “Was she?”
Ordell looked one way and then the other, a gesture. He said, “Is this, me and you, like a lawyer-client relationship? The lawyer can’t tell nothing he hears?”
Max shook his head. “You’re not my client until you get busted and I bond you out.”
“You sound like you think it could happen.”
Max gave him a shrug.
“If there’s no—what do you call it—confidentiality between us? Why would I tell you anything?”
“Because you want me to know what a slick guy you are,” Max said, “have a stewardess bringing you fifty grand.”
“Why would she?”
“Now you want me to speculate on what you do. I’d say you’re in the drug business, Ordell, except the money’s moving in the wrong direction. I could call the Sheriff’s office, have you checked out . . .”
“Go ahead. They look me up on the computer they won’t find nothing but that bust in Ohio I mentioned to you and that was a long time ago, man. It might not even still be on the screen.”
Max said, “Ordell, you’re a shifty guy. You must be getting away with whatever you’re into. Okay, you want another bond and you want to move the ten thousand you put down on Beaumont over to the stewardess. That means paperwork. I have to get a death certificate, present it to the court, fill out a Receipt for Return of Bond Collateral, then type up another application, an Indemnity Agreement . . .”
“You know it’s there,” Ordell said. “You have my cash.”
“I’m telling you what I have to do,” Max said.
“What you have to do, in case you forgot, is come up with the premium, a thousand bucks.”
“Yeah, well, I won’t have that for a couple of days,” Ordell said, “but you can go ahead, write the bond.
”
Max sat back in his chair. “Couple of days? I can wait.”
“Man, you know I’m good for it.”
“Something happens to you before you pay me . . .”
“Ain’t nothing could happen. Man, I lead a clean life.”
“You could get shot. Beaumont did.”
Ordell was shaking his head. “I got money. I don’t have any with me’s all. Thousand bucks is nothing.”
“You’re right there, if I don’t see it in front of me.”
“Look,” Ordell said, coming over to plant his hands on the desk, putting himself square in Max’s face. “This fine-looking woman is out at the Stockade among all those bitches they have in there. Jackie spent the night with ’em and was at First Appearance this afternoon, that courtroom by the Gun Club jail? She didn’t see me, had her head down—I was in the back. But, man, she looked bad. Couple more days, it could kill her.”
“If she can’t hack the Stockade,” Max said to the face close in front of him, “how’s she going to do state time?”
Ordell stared. He raised one hand from the desk, reached into the open neck of his silky shirt and came out with a gold chain hooked on his thumb. “I paid twenty-five hundred for it.”
“I don’t wear jewelry,” Max said.
Ordell let go of the chain and thrust his arm in Max’s face. “Rolex watch. Look at it. Worth five thousand, easy. Come on, write the fucking bond.”
Max said, “I don’t run a pawnshop. Hock the watch if you want, come back when you have the thousand bucks. That’s all I can tell you.”
“Look at it again,” Ordell said, turning his wrist, gold flashing in the overhead light. “She a beauty?”
6
Max sat talking to Zorro in a living room done in a mix of scarred oak furniture from another time, bright plastic patio chairs, framed holy pictures, and swords. They both had drinks, rum and Pepsi Cola. Zorro sat in a lounge chair holding ice cubes wrapped in a dish towel to the side of his face. The women were in the kitchen. Max could hear them, voices in Spanish blending with voices from the television in English. There were four sets in the living room; only the one in the kitchen was playing. He said to Zorro, “This hits the spot,” raised his glass, and was looking at bullfight swords in leather scabbards crossed beneath the Sacred Heart of Jesus. There were other mail-order swords on the walls, sabers, a cutlass, a scimitar, several pictures of the Blessed Mother, St. Joseph, different saints; Max recognized one as St. Sebastian, pierced with arrows.
He said to Zorro, “If we leave now you can be there in time for supper. Don’t they eat around five? Or you can have your dinner here, that’s fine. I’ll wait in the car, give you some time with your family.”
“You should fire that guy,” Zorro said, his mouth against the ice pack, “for what he did to me.”
Max nodded. “I’m thinking about it. I don’t know what happened to him.”
“He went crazy.”
Max nodded again, serious about getting rid of Louis. He said, “Listen, tomorrow I’ll talk to your probation officer. Karen’s a good kid, but she’s mad at you because you lied to her. That business about going to your grandmother’s funeral.”
Zorro took the ice pack away from his face to nod his head, Max looking at all that thick black hair, Christ, more than he needed.
“I went, I did. I took my mother and my sisters.”
“But you didn’t ask permission. You broke a trust. If you had asked, Karen probably would have let you. In fact I’m sure she would.”
“I know,” Zorro said, “that’s why I went.”
“But then you told her you were home.”
“Sure, ’cause I didn’t ask her could I go.”
Maybe it was a language problem. Max let it go. He said, “Anyway, if Karen’s willing to reinstate you, the judge might go along. But you have to show up at the hearing for it to happen.” Max sipped his drink, comfortable in the plastic chair. “What was the original charge?”
“Burglary from a dwelling,” Zorro said. “I got a year and a day and the probation.”
“You did what, about three months?”
“A little more.”
“You’re lucky, you know it? How many burglaries have you done?”
“I don’t know.” He glanced toward the kitchen. “Maybe two hundred.”
“I would think you’d be tired,” Max said. He looked over to see Zorro’s mother in the kitchen doorway, a squat woman in an apron; she would be about his age but looked a lot older. He said, “It smells good, whatever you’re doing in there.”
They drove toward a red wash of sky, west on Southern Boulevard toward Gun Club in Max’s ’89 Seville. He had put away a big soup plate of asopao de pollo, chicken fixed with salt pork and ham, with peas, onions, peppers, pimientos in a spicy tomato sauce and served over rice. The woman could be a threat with a butcher knife but cooked like a saint. He’d start his diet again tomorrow, take off ten pounds, most of it around his middle. Lay off beer for a while. He said to Zorro, in the front seat next to him, “Are you clean?”
Zorro, wearing sunglasses, stared straight ahead. Zorro, with his two hundred burglaries and all that hair, being cool. After a moment he reached into his pants, dug all the way to his crotch, and brought out several cellophane squares of blotter acid.
“This is all.”
“Get rid of it.”
Zorro let them blow from his hand out the window.
“Are you clean now?”
“I think so.”
“Come on, are you clean?”
Zorro raised his knee. He reached into his boot and brought out the handle of a toothbrush with a single-edge razor blade fixed to one end, the plastic melted to hold the strip of metal.
“Get rid of it.”
“Man, I have to have a weapon in there.”
“Get rid of it.”
Zorro tossed it out the window.
“You clean now?”
“I’m clean.”
“You better be,” Max said. “They find anything on you, we’re through. You understand? I’ll never write you again. I won’t speak to you, I won’t speak to your mother or your girlfriend when they call. . . .”
What a business. Sit down to dinner with a burglar and his family and then take him to jail. Max moved his hand on the steering wheel to glance at the gold Rolex he was holding for Ordell. Half past six. He’d drop Zorro off and drive out to the Stockade for the stewardess, Jackie Burke. See what she was all about.
The house where Louis was staying, down in the south end of West Palm, might’ve been somebody’s dream thirty years ago. Now it belonged to a guy named J.J. who had gotten his release the same time Louis did and offered to let him stay if he wanted. J.J. had lasted less than a month on the street and was back in for conspiring to traffic. So Louis had the house to himself—still a mess from when the police banged in and tossed it. He’d replaced the front door with one he’d pried off an abandoned house and put J.J.’s clothes back in the drawers they’d dumped on the floor and cleaned up the kitchen, coffee, sugar, Rice Krispies all over the place. Louis hadn’t been home at the time of the raid and was lucky the cops didn’t know he was living here, or he’d be up at Gun Club with J.J. waiting on an arraignment. There was no way Max Cherry would have bonded him out. Max kept him at arm’s length, didn’t want him there, so they hardly ever spoke. Louis could understand how he felt. What was he doing for Max? Once in a while pick up a guy who’d FTAed. He was doing even less for the insurance company. Nothing.
Sunday, when Ordell dropped him off after the white-power demonstration, Ordell sat in his sixty-thousand-dollar car looking at the house. He said, “Louis, you on food stamps?”
Louis said, “It’s small, but I don’t need a lot of room.”
Ordell said, “Size ain’t what I’m talking about.
This house is the next thing to being condemned. I ’magine it smells bad in there, huh? Any place a junkie lived. You have bugs?”
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“Some.”
“Some—shit. Nighttime, I bet you can’t walk in the kitchen without the roaches crunching under your feet. Turn on the light you see ’em split, gone. That’s your car, huh?”
The ’85 Toyota Louis was making payments on sat in the carport attached to the house. (The insurance company paid him fifteen hundred a month in cash. They were giving him one more week to bring in some business or he was through.) There was a mattress in the yard the cops had torn up and trash barrels of junk Louis hadn’t set out by the street to be picked up.
He said to Ordell, “What do you want—I just got out of the can.”
Ordell said, “It ain’t what I want, Louis. It’s what you want.”
The next time they spoke, Wednesday evening, Ordell had come by while it was still light. Louis asked him in the house. Ordell said he was fine sitting in his car; his car was clean, had it washed and vacuumed.
He said, “You know what your trouble is, Louis? Why you ain’t ever going to make it less you change?”
Like his father speaking to him from the car, Louis standing there.
“You think you’re a good guy,” Ordell said, “and it messes you up.”
Not like anybody’s father after that. Louis relaxed and got out a cigarette.
“You get into a deal, you don’t see yourself taking it all the way,” Ordell said, “doing whatever has to be done to make the score. You go in looking for a way out. Not ’cause you scared. It’s ’cause you think you’re a good guy and there things a good guy won’t do. What’s the most you ever took robbing a bank? Maybe twenty-five hundred? Was me, I decided to do banks? Man, I’d go in and clean the fucking place out. Plan it and do it right. What you stole each time, you couldn’t even buy a good used car with it, could you?”
Ordell said, “Listen to what I’m saying to you. Once you decide what you’re going after you ride it out, no stops, no getting off. You need to use a gun you use it. Look at the situation. If it’s him or you, or if it’s him doing time or you doing time? There’s nothing to think about, man, you take him out.” Ordell said, “Once I pick up the goods and make one more delivery? I won’t ever have to work again till I’ve spent something like a million bucks. You think some dude gets in my way I won’t remove him?”