Razor Girl

  Trebeaux had booked a seat on a charter flight from Miami to Havana by presenting himself as a renowned sculptor whose medium was, naturally, sand. He stated his trip to the communist country would be strictly educational, and on his application he attached photographs of elaborate Gothic castles, languid mermaids and a medium-scale likeness of the space shuttle Atlantis. All these sand creations had been made one Saturday morning by fifth-graders competing in a “Floridays” contest on Cocoa Beach. Their proud schoolteacher had posted the photos online without the precaution of watermarking, which allowed Trebeaux to steal them and claim the sculptures as his own work. No one at the agency that booked his Cuba trip had displayed the slightest suspicion or, for that matter, interest.

  He called the company and said he’d decided to bring an assistant—would that be possible? The assistant, he added, would be traveling on a different flight.

  “But put her ticket on my credit card.”

  “We’ll have a taxi waiting for her at the airport, Mr. Trebeaux.”

  “Very good. What’s the best beach on the island? I mean numero uno.”

  “Oh, they are all lovely,” replied the woman on the other end.

  “Come on. There must be one special place that knocks your knickers off.”

  She admitted there was. “Playa Ramera,” she said fondly.

  “Never heard of it. What does that mean in English?”

  “I’m not sure,” the woman at the agency lied. “It’s just a local name. Would you like me to arrange a van to take you there from Havana? You and your assistant?”

  “That would be fabulous,” Trebeaux said.

  He looked forward to cavorting openly with Juveline in Cuba, which the Mafia had abandoned when Fidel seized power. The fact that Big Noogie had no eyes or ears there made it a safe zone of betrayal for both pleasure and business. Of the dual schemes that Trebeaux was hatching, the beach-sand project was less problematic because it was he who controlled all the key information. Big Noogie would have no choice but to take the sand man’s word about his dealings with Cuban officials—and the monetary split.

  The tryst with Juveline would be trickier, Trebeaux knew, because he wouldn’t be able to supervise her once she returned to Queens after their tropical adventure. One offhanded remark, one careless slipup—a matchbook from Hotel Nacional falling out of her handbag, for instance—could be fatal for both of them. Based on Juveline’s nonchalant reaction to the swollen hickey, Trebeaux believed she needed more guidance in the art of discretion.

  He was right.

  —

  Yancy dialed Rosa’s number and she picked up on the first ring. She asked if he was finished with the case, really finished, and he said yes.

  “Then you can come,” she told him. “Bring a parka.”

  He didn’t have a parka. He also didn’t have enough money for a flight to Norway, but he had plastic.

  The layover in Newark was murder; six hours and change. Yancy read a wild Harry Crews novel about a man who eats a car. After that he walked to a Hudson’s, where he bought fishing magazines and the New York papers. The Daily News featured an update about the case of the Muslim tourist from Brooklyn who’d been killed in South Florida. The widow of Abdul-Halim Shamoon said police officials were now classifying her husband’s death as a hate crime. A statement issued by Monroe County Sheriff Sonny Summers said that a “person of interest” had been identified, and that a joint city-county task force was combing the islands in search of the individual. The sheriff said he was confident the case would soon be solved.

  As Yancy read the story he heard his jaws popping.

  The News ran a picture of Abdul-Halim Shamoon and his family standing in front of an electronics shop. The caption said the store was in midtown Manhattan on Seventh Avenue. In the photo Shamoon was a smiling young man, unrecognizable from the bloodied corpse on Frances Street in Key West. Yancy counted five kids—three boys and two girls—posed on either side of their father. The children would all be grown now. Shamoon’s wife wasn’t in the photograph, probably because she was the one who took it. Yancy felt he knew what she looked like.

  He put down the newspaper and jogged back to the main terminal, where he told a man at the SAS desk that he was canceling his Oslo trip due to a personal emergency. An hour later the airline brought him his luggage, which he rolled all the way to the Delta counter. There he purchased a ticket to Miami. After boarding the plane he called Rosa, not the warmest conversation they’d ever had. She made several strong points, the first being that nobody (including Sheriff Summers) wanted Yancy’s assistance in pursuing Benny Krill. Secondly, Yancy’s detective skills, superior as they might be, weren’t needed on the Shamoon case because Krill plainly wasn’t clever enough to elude the cops for long. Rosa’s final point, even more emphatic than the others, was that Yancy seemed to be losing focus of the big picture, meaning their future together as a couple. Yancy pointed out that it was she who’d abruptly quit her job and flown off to Europe alone. Such a move was not, he asserted, an act of unshakable devotion. The discussion grew sharper until a flight attendant told Yancy to turn off his phone because they were third in line for takeoff. He bit off half of an Ambien yet didn’t sleep a wink on the plane.

  The next day was spent scouring Key West for Benny the Blister, Buck Nance and Lane Coolman. Yancy located only one black Yukon, occupied by a white Baptist rapper who was in town for a concert benefiting the Pre-Teen Pioneers for Abstinence. The listing agent for the conch house on Fleming said it had been rented by a talent agency called Platinum Artists, which had paid for a month in advance. The agent was surprised when Yancy informed her that the tenants had already moved out.

  A text from Merry Mansfield sent him speeding up the Overseas Highway:

  Saw blk Yukon on my way back to Miami. Parked at a bar at MM 82. But you’re in Norway, so never mind.

  Yancy drove like a berserk person and made it to Islamorada in less than two hours. The bar at Mile Marker 82 was in a sushi restaurant where his credentials actually carried some weight. The hostess remembered three customers arriving in a black SUV the night before. One of the men, skinny but rough-looking, became belligerent because the restaurant served only beer and wine. The hostess said the loudmouth got wasted on saki and started tossing spring rolls in the air, trying to catch them in his mouth. She said the two other men from the black SUV stuck with Kirin Light and more or less behaved themselves. Yancy asked to see the credit-card receipt for their meal. It was signed by Lane Coolman, Buck Nance’s agent/manager/ass-wiper.

  Yancy figured that Krill, Nance and Coolman beelined from the sushi joint straight to Miami Beach, but out of diligence he inquired at the nearby Moorings, a secluded spread of resort cottages popular with fashion models, musicians and actors who don’t mind not being recognized. A camera crew was set up on the beach taping a commercial for a brand of guava-infused vodka. Strung between palm trees was a mesh hammock upon which lay a young blond woman wearing sunglasses and a banana-colored bikini. She was clutching the fifth of vodka to her cleavage in such a manner that fake condensation—supplied by a crew member with an eyedropper—dripped from the bottom of the bottle onto her tummy, trickling down the spray-tanned slope into a flawless navel. The journey of each glistening droplet was tracked at gynecological range by a scruffy sweat-soaked cameraman kneeling in the sand with his Sony. Gawkers snapped pictures with their phones.

  Unnoticed, Yancy made his way through the shaded property cottage-by-cottage. He rapped on the doors pretending to be looking for a guest named Rosa Campesino. The reactions were mostly genial until he approached a blue-trimmed villa where a croaky voice from inside told him to get lost. Yancy barged into the villa and right away noticed that Benny Krill had upgraded his weaponry.

  “I thought you were a knife man, Blister.”

  Krill raised the gun. “Name’s Spiro.”

  “That’s a winner. I like it.”

  “Close the goddamn door.”
r />   Yancy said, “Tell me what happened on the Conch Train.”

  “He freaked out is what happened. The little A-rab dude. I didn’t lay a finger on him.”

  “A couple witnesses say otherwise.”

  “They’s fulla shit.” Blister took a step back. He looked anxious. “All I did was tell the man he wasn’t foolin’ nobody, I know a damn sleeper cell when I see one. Then there was some Bible stuff I laid on him, all righteous and true. Next thing I know he jumps off the train car. Which is exactly what a damn suicide sleeper would do. What they call a ISIS synchronizer.”

  “Sympathizer. And that’s not what he was, Blister.”

  “It’s ‘Spiro’ from now on. Close the fuckin’ door.”

  Yancy kicked it shut. “I hear you’re going to be a TV star. That’s truly…unimaginable.”

  Benny the Blister beamed. “Done deal, man! Ain’t you or nobody else gone screw it up.”

  “And where’s the famous Captain Cock?”

  Blister’s grin was a pageant of prison dentistry. “You mean my new brother Buck.”

  “No shit?” Yancy said. “What a heartwarming turn of events.”

  —

  Brock Richardson had some time to kill before his flight to Key West, so he tried something he hadn’t done in years: Read a legal document from beginning to end. It was fascinating—and harrowing.

  The document was a deposition from a respected German endocrinologist named Harft, who’d recently completed a four-year study of a drug called testopheromenal, sold in nineteen countries under the trade name Pitrolux. The law firm of Truss, Hitch and Truss, to which Richardson referred many of his telephone clients, had hired Dr. Harft to review the frequency and severity of Pitrolux side effects. The findings rocked Richardson to his core. Being in theory a plaintiff’s lawyer, he was accustomed to grotesquely creative exaggeration in product-liability cases. A tiny red bump on the skin became a “pernicious and disfiguring rash.” Sore joints were automatically presented as “excruciating and debilitative.” Every headache was a “blinding migraine,” every bout of constipation a “toxic gastrointestinal impactment.” And, regardless of anatomical location, each side effect was alleged in every lawsuit to cause “a loss of libido and a fear of intimacy” that shattered the victim’s sexual relationships.

  However, while studying Dr. Harft’s neutral testimony, Richardson realized that for once there was no hype in the charges aimed at the drug’s manufacturer. If anything, the printed warnings on the Pitrolux bottles underplayed the ghastly possibilities. The lawyer’s bizarre experience with the substance wasn’t an isolated incident; numerous male users had reported the appearance of strange skin growths in their armpits, groins, buttocks cracks and even between their toes. These soft stalks of flesh were typically described as “mushroom-like” or “penile-shaped.”

  Dr. Harft capped his testimony with a discussion of addictive reactions to Pitrolux—some men doubled or even tripled their dosages even as the unsightly side effects worsened. Richardson could totally relate. When the attorney from Truss Hitch had asked for a professional opinion on what should be done about the deodorant hormone gel, Dr. Harft replied simply, “Remove it from the pharmaceutical marketplace, of course. As you Americans would say, it’s really bad scheisse.”

  Richardson placed the deposition in his briefcase and vectored to the nearest bar on the concourse. Before boarding the plane, he removed the travel-sized bottle of Pitrolux from his carry-on intending to throw it away. Then he changed his mind, telling himself it would be careless to discard such a dangerous substance in a public place. What if a child found it in the trash can?

  In Key West he was forced to rent a minivan because it was the last vehicle on the lot. He called Deb, who reiterated her opposition to the trip. Richardson replied: “I bet you’d feel different if it was your two hundred grand.”

  “Don’t be such a stubborn ass. Just let it go.”

  “I know what I’m doing.”

  “Really? Then I’ve got one more question,” Deb said.

  “I can hardly wait.”

  “Cremation, or burial? Let me know now, so I can start making arrangements.”

  Richardson drove to Louie’s Backyard and waited. Martin Trebeaux showed up an hour late, with no apology. Richardson was on his third scotch.

  “I had a girl in my room. She wouldn’t leave,” the sand man explained. “What can I do for you, counselor? I hope it’s not the Cuba trip ’cause I already filled your slot.”

  “No, it’s about my diamond ring, the one your guys were supposed to steal back for me.”

  “The one they couldn’t find. Big Noogie told me himself.”

  Richardson lowered his voice. “Afterward I sent my guys back to Yancy’s place, and guess what? He says your guys took the ring.”

  “And you believe that a-hole?” Trebeaux giggled, as if the notion of gangsters pocketing a two-hundred-thousand-dollar diamond was preposterous. “A man’ll say anything when there’s pliers attached to his nuts.”

  “That’s not how it went down.”

  The bartender interrupted them with a Creole shrimp appetizer that Richardson had ordered earlier. Trebeaux admired the spoke-and-wheel design of the crustaceans on crushed ice. When the barman left them alone again, Richardson said, “I want my goddamn rock back, Martin.”

  Trebeaux frowned. “Wish I could help, but I honestly don’t see how.”

  “I’ll tell you how: Talk to Big Noogie. Tell him how important that ring is to me. Tell him, hell, I don’t know…tell him Deb’s heart is crushed because she lost it. Make it sound like a sentimental situation.”

  “Are you fucking serious?”

  “Listen, these Mafia types, they’re romantics deep down. They’ve all got families and wives and girlfriends,” Richardson said. “Big Noogie’ll understand. Being from the Italian culture, he will totally get where I’m coming from.”

  “Do me a favor. That Google app on your phone? Type in the name Dominick Aeola and tell me if you see the word ‘romantic’ anywhere on his Wikipedia page. The one that lists all his felony arrests, and all the witnesses that mysteriously disappeared.”

  “So you won’t talk to him about this?”

  “Under no circumstances,” said Trebeaux.

  It was the answer Richardson expected. “Then I’ll do it myself. Set up a meeting for me, okay?”

  Trebeaux said that was an extremely poor idea. Richardson fidgeted.

  “What aren’t you telling me, Martin?”

  “This is not a man you want to insult. If you accuse him of jacking your diamond, he might take it personally.”

  “What if he doesn’t even know?” Richardson said. “Those two meat hogs he sent to Yancy’s, what if they decided to keep the ring and told Big Noogie they couldn’t find it?”

  “That would take elephant balls.”

  “But still you can picture the scenario, right? It’s not what you call far-fetched. A crook is a crook.”

  Trebeaux was skeptical. “Seriously, that’s your pitch? You’re gonna tell Big Noogie that his own guys double-crossed him?”

  “I am, and I’m not.”

  “Christ, this isn’t a game.”

  “The word thing is what I do best. Trust me, Martin, the reason I write all my own TV commercials? Because I know how to connect with people, all kinds of people. I have the gift of instant empathy.”

  “You cannot fuck this up. This is my business partner we’re talking about.”

  “And it’s my two-hundred-thousand-dollar diamond.”

  Trebeaux swiped a shrimp from Richardson’s platter. “I can’t promise Big Noogie will see you. In fact I’d be amazed if he does—but I’ll ask.”

  “And you’ll come with me to the meeting? You don’t have to say one word. Just sit there like, you know, the mutual friend.”

  “Not a chance in hell,” said the sand man, licking a dot of cocktail sauce from his lips. “You go see Big Noogie, you’re on your o
wn.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  Buck Nance walked out of a back room glowering at Blister Krill. Yancy noted a scraggly resemblance, close enough to pass themselves off as TV brothers. Both were thin, sallow and had brown hair shot with gray. Once their beards grew out, they might as well be blood.

  “Hello, Buck,” Yancy said. “Or is it Matthew, like the old times?”

  “Who the hell are you?”

  “He’s the one that said he’s a cop but he ain’t,” Blister interjected.

  Buck snorted. “How do you know he’s not?”

  “Thank you,” said Yancy.

  Blister turned on the flat-screen and told everyone to sit on the couch. He said it was time for Bayou Brethren. Yancy was wedged in the middle, Blister gouging him in the rib cage with the barrel of the handgun. Buck drank Jack Daniel’s while Blister popped an IPA called Grizzly Snot. They both quickly got swept up in the TV show, for different reasons. Buck was incensed to learn that Junior was sleeping with Miracle, and that she was now an open topic for all America. Blister’s chief concern was his future seating location at the family table; he declared he wanted a chair between Clee Roy’s wife and Buddy’s wife, because they looked hot and do-able.

  “I thought you were married,” Buck snapped.

  “Just common-law, which don’t even count outside Florida.”

  “But homicide does,” Yancy pointed out.

  “Shut up and watch the damn show,” Blister grumbled. When a commercial came on, he said, “I didn’t mean to hurt that little Moose-lum dude, but for all I knowed that bag in his hands was a damn suicide bomb.”

  “It was gifts for his family.” Yancy looked over at Buck Nance. “Souvenirs, Matthew. That’s all he was carrying.”

  “Hey, I had nothing to do with it.”

  “Sure you did. Blister idolizes you—those sermons on YouTube.”

  Blister said, “Amen, brother.”

  He raised his non-gun hand to quiet the talk, for on television Buddy Nance had snatched up a half-full Dewar’s bottle and heaved it more or less at Junior’s head. “Awesome!” Blister cheered at the slow-mo replay.