“Something’s going on,” the old lady said, “and I think it’s that Victoria who’s behind it. She’s another one of the Jamaicans.”
“I’ll speak to her,” Raylan said.
“Would you do that? I’d be so grateful.”
The old lady’s eyes shining with hope, or just watery; Raylan wasn’t sure.
“If she denies it,” Ms. Ganz said, “tell her she’s a lying fucking nigger. That’s what I do.”
He asked Victoria about the yardman, Cuban or Puerto Rican, said he came by to see Ms. Ganz and get paid?
“She tell you that?”
“The yardman did.”
“I saw a person like that come to see her last week, but I didn’t speak to him myself. It used to be people came to be paid by her; a plumber fixed something, another one for the air-conditioning. Not so much anymore.”
“She ever go home?”
“She used to, when she first come. Go home for a few days.”
“She said some guys stole her piano?”
“Yes, steal her underwear, her shoes. She goes crazy when nobody believes her. I go in there, sometimes she tries to hit me with her cane, call me something I won’t say to you. You understand this woman never had a piano long as she been here. The roses? She send those to herself, two hundred dollars a week, a standing order, they have to sign the card ‘With love from Warren.’”
“Her husband,” Raylan said. “I imagined Ms. Ganz was the one doing it.”
“Not the husband,” Victoria said, “suppose to be from the son, Chip. But that’s as hard to believe as the dead man sending them. Chip don’t spend ten cents on his mother. You know Chip?”
“Not yet,” Raylan said. “Tell me about him.”
fourteen
It was dark now and they kept the house dark except for the study where there were no windows. When Bobby Deo came in from outside he said to Louis, “You see him?”
It straightened Louis, sitting on the sofa, the shotgun next to him. “He come back?”
“Quiet this time, no lights on.”
Louis said, “Man, I didn’t see a thing. Got it on the full screen, too. But you can’t see shit out there at night with that cheap-ass camera, even with the spot. He get out and look around?”
“Came up to the house, he takes a look in the windows. Looks all around before he leaves. Walks to the back, looks at the swimming pool, looks in the garage. . . .”
“You put your car in there.”
“Yeah, well, he’s seen it now. Gonna want to know what it’s doing there at night.”
“You mean if he comes back,” Louis said. “What you tell him, you’re the caretaker.” Louis thought about it and began to nod saying, “Yeah, the dude looks in the window, don’t see any furniture, looks at the scummy swimming pool. . . . You understand what I’m saying? The dude can see nobody’s living here.”
“Yeah, but my car is there,” Bobby said.
“Man, I just told you, you the caretaker. You watch the place nobody breaks in. You sleep in the kitchen and must not’ve heard him outside. I’m saying if he comes back. See, then you ask him for some identification. You want to know who the fuck he thinks he is coming around here at night, you trying to sleep.”
Bobby was nodding like he agreed, but then said, “I don’t know about this guy. Is he looking for Harry?”
“See, I wondered the same thing,” Louis said, “on account of Chip owing Harry and here Harry is right upstairs. So we think, ‘Oh, he must be looking for Harry.’ You understand what I’m saying? But all the dude say he wants is to talk to Mr. Ganz. Am I right? The dude, it might be wants to sell the man something, like he can give him a deal on aluminum screens, some shit for the house.”
“So he comes at night,” Bobby said, “to measure the windows.”
“What I’m saying,” Louis said, “we don’t know what the dude wants outside of he wants to talk to Mr. Ganz. But now he sees Mr. Ganz ain’t here. Nobody is.”
Bobby was nodding again, only this time he said, “Why do you call him Mister?”
“Does it bother you?”
“I don’t know why you do it. You don’t work for him.”
“We go back,” Louis said. “He use to come over to the casino in Freeport when I was back there awhile dealing blackjack. One night he cashes in big, gives me a five-hundred-dollar tip and hires me to bodyguard him now and then. I been living here, learning how to be African-American, going back and forth when I felt like it; but now I come to stay. And now I’m being me, you dig? See, mostly he was going down to Miami then, playing high-stakes poker with the big boys and some of them had bodyguards, so he wanted one, too. Wasn’t bad at cards. He start losing, his mama would pick up his IOU’s, keep her sonny from getting his legs busted. See, then I went away and didn’t hear from him till I come out and he start to call me, ask how I’m doing. I come here to see him? Everything’s different now, his mama’s gone, he’s selling off the furniture, and he lay his idea on me, how we gonna be millionaires.”
“Without him doing any the work,” Bobby said.
“I told you he don’t know shit. Tried falsifying bank loan applications one time and drew probation. Otherwise the man’s cherry.”
“But we say okay, whatever he tells us.”
“Going with his idea, yeah.”
“He says let Harry sit there two three weeks, nobody talk to him. We say okay and we sit here watching the TV.”
“What you saying,” Louis said, “you don’t think we should wait.”
“I don’t see what good it is. Kidnap a guy and give him time to wonder what’s happening to him. For what?”
“We didn’t kidnap him,” Louis said, “we took him hostage.”
“You like to think of it that way? It’s the same thing,” Bobby said, coming over to the sofa, standing so close Louis had to bend his head back. “You get caught, you go to prison, man. He’s four days up in the room, that’s enough. We should talk to Harry now, tonight, tell him what he has to do.”
Louis said, “Get to it, huh?” wanting to think about it, but knowing he didn’t have time. It was him and Bobby for the time being and he’d have to go along. So he said, “I don’t see the good of waiting either, just ‘cause the man say to.”
Bobby said, “Let’s go do it.”
And that was that.
What they’d do, go upstairs and Louis would check on Harry, see if he had to go potty, while Bobby went to Chip’s bedroom to get him, the man last seen staring out his window burning herb.
As soon as Louis opened the door Harry’s voice in the dark said, “Is someone there?” Same as he always did.
“Goddamn it, say something!”
Yelling it. Bobby was right, this man was ready to be talked to. Louis went in past him to the bathroom and turned on the light. The window in here and the two in the bedroom were covered over with sheets of plywood nailed to the window frames. Louis looked at Harry in the light from the bathroom, sitting on his cot, the towel and silver tape wrapped around his head, the man not moving a muscle, listening hard for sounds.
The same way the hostages in Beirut must’ve sat listening, not knowing shit where they were at, why they were being held, nothing.
Chip had read all about the hostages, seen them on TV when they were released, read a book one of them wrote and came up with the idea he told to Louis. Pick up any one of these rich guys he had on his list and hide him out for a while.
Louis had said at that time, “You talking about kidnapping?” The same thing Bobby said when he was told about it. Like the man was crazy.
The way Chip saw the difference: “Kidnapping, you hold a person for ransom. What I’m talking about, we don’t call anyone, like the guy’s wife, and say pay up or you’ll never see your husband again. We wait, and after a while we ask the guy what his life’s worth to him.”
Louis, that time, still didn’t see the difference. He said, “But everybody knows the man’s been kidnapped.?
??
And Chip said, “No, the guy’s disappeared. No one knows if something happened to him or he took off or what. All the time they’re looking for him we’ve got him hidden away. Okay, once the guy’s no longer in the news, nobody’s talking about what happened to him, we pick up another guy from the list and do the same thing, chain him up blindfolded . . . like the real hostages, they were kept like that for months, some of them even years.”
Louis knew it was some Muslim brothers over there did the job. Being Abu Aziz for a moment instead of Louis Lewis, he said, “I believe was the Shi’ites. You don’t mess with those people.” He asked Ganz where he was going to hide his hostages and the man said he hadn’t worked that part out yet. This was before deciding his house was as good a place as any; the house itself was hidden away and hardly anyone he knew ever came by.
“This kind of setup,” Chip said, “only dealing with the hostages, you don’t have to warn anyone not to call the cops. Once the guy’s missing they’ll look for him; but remember, we’re not asking for ransom money, so there’s nothing to tie us to the hostage.”
“So how do we score?”
“First,” Chip said, “we take time to prepare the guy, get him in the right frame of mind. For weeks he sits in a room and never hears a human voice. He knows somebody’s bringing him food, taking him to the can, but nobody in all that time says one fucking word to him. See, then when I do speak to the guy he can’t believe it. Jesus, someone’s actually talking to him. But all I say that first time, I ask him, ‘What’s it worth to you to get out of here?’”
Louis liked that part. “Yeah?”
“Couple of days go by, I approach him again. ‘Have you decided?’ You bet he has. How much do we want? Name it. Then it’s like negotiating, coming up with a figure we both agree on, something we know the guy can manage. We have to, you know, be realistic.”
“He pays, we let him go?”
“I guess. The guy’s never seen us. Take him out in the Glades and leave him.”
“What if he don’t want to pay?”
“He doesn’t have a choice,” Chip said. “First we agree on the amount. Then he has five days. . . . I tell him, ‘You have five days to come up with a way of paying us that we like.’ I tell him, ‘And it better be the best idea you ever had in your fucking life, I mean foolproof, because if we don’t like it, if we’re not absolutely sure it’ll work, you’re dead.’ So it’s strictly up to him. In other words we don’t have to work anything out, the guy does it. And he’s the kind of guy who knows how to move money around, a guy with hidden resources, like that savings and loan guy. Goes bankrupt, can’t pay his depositors, but he’s sitting on an estimated thirty mil. Right now he’s out on bond. Another guy on the list, everybody knows he launders drug money, gets it cleaned and pressed, puts it in a land development deal and the feds haven’t been able to touch him. There’re all kinds of guys like that around, I mean right in South Florida.”
“The hostage,” Louis said, “can’t think of a good idea, he gets shot in the head, huh?”
“If that’s how you want to handle it. There’re other ways might even be worse.”
“Like what?”
“You didn’t hear about the guy,” Chip said, “wakes up in the middle of the night, his wife’s got his dick in her hand?”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“She’s standing across the room with it. Cut his dick off with a butcher knife while he’s sleeping.”
Louis made a face. “Man, that’s the worst thing I ever heard of.”
Chip said, “See?”
It was in the news when they first started talking about taking hostages. Chip said he was kidding about threatening the guy that way. He said no, if the guy refused to cooperate, or came up with an idea of paying them they didn’t like, Louis could take care of the guy any way he wanted.
Letting him do the heavy work.
Louis unlocked Harry’s chain and brought him into the bathroom, Harry turning his head to say, “I only have to take a leak.” So Louis put him in position. When he was going, looking down at the toilet blindfolded, Harry said, “Speak to me, will you? Tell me what time it is. Christ, what day it is. You don’t want to do that, fine, but say something.”
Louis felt like whispering in the man’s ear and see him jump, but couldn’t think of anything good. He took Harry back to his cot and locked his chain again to the ring bolt in the floor, Bobby and Chip standing in the hall now looking in. Bobby motioned and Louis came out. As soon as he closed the door Chip started in.
“This guy, this fucking bill collector, tells me he wants to change the plan I spent more than a year working out. He gets a bug up his ass ‘cause he’s tired of sitting around.”
“We already decide,” Bobby said.
Louis took Chip by the arm saying, “We gonna talk, let’s step over here,” and brought the man away from the door. Saying to him now, “We wouldn’t be here it wasn’t for you.” Louis keeping his voice quiet, soothing. “We not changing nothing, we just want to get it moving.”
Chip was turning his head from Louis to Bobby. “Go along with your prison buddy, is that it? The cons taking over?”
“Hey, come on,” Louis said, “it’s cool.”
“He’s stoned,” Bobby said.
“Yeah, feeling good, huh?” Louis said, getting close, in the man’s face now. “You like that ganja.” Louis’s gaze moved to Bobby. “Gets some of his herb at his mama’s nursing home, from one of them Rasta fellas work there.” Now he was looking at Chip again, the man staring back at him with big eyes. “Listen to me now. We all going along with it. Me and Bobby Deo and my man Mr. Ganz. Understand? Harry, I can tell, is strung out ready for us, so we gonna do it, get to the money part.”
Chip shrugged and had to move his feet to keep his balance. He said, “This is the way you want it?” Being cool now since he didn’t have a choice. “Fine. I’ll go in and put the bug in his ear. ‘Harry, what’s it worth to you to get out of here?’”
“Go home to his loved ones,” Louis said, placing his hands on Chip’s shoulders. “Except one thing worries me. You made bets with Harry on the phone, didn’t you? Many times, called him about every week.”
“I’d speak to one of his sheet writers.”
“Yeah, but you talk to him, too.”
“Once in a while.”
“See, you go in and talk to him now, he could recognize your voice. Man like Harry, being careful, he knows voices. Same as with Bobby. Bobby’s spoken to him, the reason he come here. So he could know it was Bobby to speak to him.”
“You’re gonna do what you want,” Chip said.
“Listen to me. What I’m saying is I’m the one should talk to the man,” Louis said. “One, he don’t know me; but two, I know Freeport, Grand Bahama. Man, I’m from where his money’s at. Soon as he told Dawn I began to think, Do I know somebody works at his bank? I told you that. You my man, Mr. Ganz. What I want you to tell me is go in there and say your words, set the man up just like you was saying it.”
Harry raised his head, the way he always did.
“Is somebody there?”
Louis closed the door before turning the light on. He walked over to the cot and sat down. Harry, feeling it, turned his blindfolded head toward him.
“Will you say something? Please?”
“I’ll make you a deal,” Louis said.
“Jesus, anything.”
“We do some business. Just me and you. We don’t tell nobody else, not a soul. You understand what I’m saying? Just me and you.”
fifteen
Wednesday, Raylan brought his prisoner, the man barefoot and handcuffed in bathing trunks, through the parking structure and into Miami Beach police headquarters by way of the sally port in back. Check your weapon through a window slot and they close the outer door before opening the inner one to the holding-cell area.
Lt. Buck Torres was there waiting.
“I thought finding t
hem in bed asleep was the way to do it,” Raylan said. “Get ‘em sunbathing’s even better, no surprises under the covers. Buck, we have here Carl Edward Colbert, escapee from the West Tennessee Reception Center, down for armed robbery and assault with a deadly weapon, a pitchfork.”
Torres, looking up at Colbert, said, “Man, he’s a size.”
“Yeah, but sunburnt. All you have to do is touch him and he minds. If it’s okay with you,” Raylan said, “I’ll leave him here till I can arrange transportation, have him shipped back. Carl, how about packed in ice, would you like that? . . . Carl isn’t talking; he’s lost faith in his fellowman. A buddy of his, guy works at one of the hotels on the beach, turned him in to avoid getting brought up for harboring.”
Torres said, “You could’ve taken him over to Dade, they got more room there.”
“Yeah, but I wanted to ask you something,” Raylan said, “you being a good friend of Harry’s and all. He’s disappeared.”
Torres said, “Again?”
“Last Friday he was to meet a guy collected on some old bets for him—this was up in Delray Beach. The guy never showed up. Harry left the restaurant and that’s the last anyone’s seen of him.”
“Friday,” Torres said. “Maybe he went back to Italy, decided he liked it.”
“Harry wouldn’t leave without making a big production out of it. He goes to the bathroom, he calls Joyce and tells her. She checked with Harry’s travel agent; he said Harry hasn’t gone anywhere that he knew of. I was thinking one of Harry’s sheet writers might know who did the collection work, but I can’t find any of those guys around.”
“No—we closed Harry down, they left,” Torres said. “Let me think a minute. If Harry couldn’t find a certain guy, he’d call me to check, see if he was in jail. As a last resort he’d hire a collector. I know once in a while Bob Burton helped him out. Burton’s a skip tracer—you know, a bounty hunter, always working. He’d do a collection for Harry as a favor. There was another guy, a bounty hunter, went up on a manslaughter conviction. . . .”