Skin Tight

  The lock on Maggie’s door was a breeze.

  Stranahan slipped inside and noticed how neat the place looked. Someone, probably a neighbor or a relative, had carefully stacked the unopened mail on a table near the front door. On the kitchen counter was a Princess-model telephone attached to an answering machine. Stranahan pressed the Rewind button, then Play, and listened to Maggie’s voice say: “Hi, I’m not home right now so you’re listening to another one of those dumb answering machines. Please leave a brief message and I’ll get back to you as soon as possible. Bye now!”

  Stranahan played the rest of the tape, which was blank. Either Maggie Gonzalez wasn’t getting any calls, or someone was taking them for her, or she was phoning in for her own messages with one of those remote pocket beepers. Whatever the circumstances, it was a sign that she probably wasn’t all that dead.

  Other clues in the apartment pointed to travel. There was no luggage in the closets, no bras or underwear in the bedroom drawers, no makeup on the bathroom sink. The most interesting thing Stranahan found was crumpled in a wastebasket in a corner of the living room: a bank deposit slip for twenty-five hundred dollars, dated the twenty-seventh of December.

  Have a nice trip, Stranahan thought.

  He let himself out, carefully locking the door behind him. Then he drove three blocks to a pay phone at a 7-Eleven, where he dialed Maggie’s phone number and left a very important message on her machine.

  AT the end of the day, Christina Marks dropped her rented Ford Escort with the hotel valet, bought a copy of the New York Times at the shop in the lobby, and took the elevator up to her room. Before she could get the key out of the door, Mick Stranahan opened it from the other side.

  “Come on in,” he said.

  “Nice of you,” Christina said, “considering it’s my room.”

  Stranahan noticed she had one of those trendy leather briefcase satchels that you wear over your shoulder. A couple of legal pads stuck out the top.

  “You’ve been busy.”

  “You want a drink?”

  “Gin and tonic, thanks,” Stranahan said. After a pause: “I was afraid the great Reynaldo might see me if I waited in the lobby.”

  “So you got a key to my room?”

  “Not exactly.”

  Christina Marks handed him the drink. Then she poured herself a beer, and sat down in a rattan chair with garish floral pillows that were supposed to look tropical.

  “I went to see Maggie’s family today,” she said.

  “Any luck?”

  “No. Unfortunately, they don’t speak English.”

  Stranahan smiled and shook his head.

  “What’s so funny?” Christina said. “Just because I don’t speak Spanish?”

  Stranahan said, “Except for probably her grandmother, all Maggie’s family speaks perfect English. Perfect.”

  “What?”

  “Her father teaches physics at Palmetto High School. Her mother is an operator for Southern Bell. Her sister Consuelo is a legal secretary, and her brother, whats-his-name . . .”

  “Tomás.”

  “Tommy, yeah,” Stranahan said. “He’s a senior account executive at Merrill Lynch.”

  Christina Marks put down her beer so decisively that it nearly broke the glass coffee table. “I sat in the living room, talking to these people, and they just stared at me and said—”

  “No hablo English, señora.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Oldest trick in Miami,” Stranahan said. “They just didn’t want to talk. Don’t feel bad, they tried the same thing with me.”

  “And I suppose you know Spanish.”

  “Enough to make them think I knew more. They’re worried about Maggie, actually. Been worried for some time. She’s had some personal problems, Maggie has. Money problems, too—that much I found out before her old lady started having chest pains.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Second-oldest trick,” Stranahan said, smiling, “but I was done anyway. I honestly don’t think they know where she is.”

  Christina Marks finished her beer and got another from the small hotel refrigerator. When she sat down again, she kicked off her shoes.

  “So,” she said, “you’re ahead of us.”

  “You and Reynaldo?”

  “The crew,” Christina said, looking stung.

  “No, I’m not ahead of you,” Stranahan said. “Tell me what Maggie Gonzalez knows about Vicky Barletta.”

  Christina said, “I can’t do that.”

  “How much did you promise to pay?”

  Again Christina shook her head.

  “Know what I think?” Stranahan said. “I think you and Ray are getting the hum job of your lives.”

  “Pardon?”

  “I think Maggie is sucking you off, big-time.”

  Christina heard herself saying, “You might be right.”

  Stranahan softened his tone. “Let me give you a hypothetical,” he said. “This Maggie Gonzalez, whom you’ve never seen before, shows up in New York one day and offers to tell you a sensational story about a missing college coed. The way she tells it, the girl came to a terrible and ghastly end. And, conveniently, the way she tells it can’t ever be proven or disproven. Why? Because it happened a long time ago. And the odds are, Christina, that Victoria Barletta is dead. And the odds are, whoever did it isn’t about to come forward to say that Reynaldo Flemm got it all wrong when he told the story on national TV.”

  Christina Marks leaned forward. “Fine. All fine, except for one thing. She names names.”

  “Maggie does?”

  “Yes. She describes exactly how it happened and who did it.”

  “And these people—”

  “Person, singular.”

  “He? She?”

  “He,” Christina said.

  “He’s still alive?”

  “Sure is.”

  “Here in town?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Jesus,” Stranahan said. He got up and fixed himself another gin. He dropped a couple of ice cubes, his hands were shaking so much. This was not good, he told himself, getting so excited was definitely not good.

  He carried his drink back to the living room and said, “Is it the doctor?”

  “I can’t say.” It would violate a confidence, Christina Marks explained. Journalists have to protect their sources. Stranahan finished half his drink before he spoke again. “Are you any good?”

  Christina looked at him curiously.

  “At what you do,” he said irritably, “are you any damn good?”

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “Can you keep the great Reynaldo out of my hair?”

  “I’ll try. Why?”

  “Because,” Stranahan said, “it would be to our mutual benefit to meet once in a while, just you and me.”

  “Compare notes?”

  “Something like that. I don’t know why, but I think I can trust you.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I’m not saying I do, just that it’s possible.”

  He put down the glass and stood up.

  “What’s your stake in this?” Christina Marks asked.

  “Truth, justice, whatever.”

  “No, it’s bigger than that.”

  She was pretty sharp, he had to admit. But he wasn’t ready to tell her about Tony the Eel and the marlin head.

  As she walked Stranahan to the door, Christina said, “I spent some time at the newspaper today.”

  “Reading up, I suppose.”

  “You’ve got quite a clip file,” she said. “I suppose I ought to be scared of you.”

  “You don’t believe everything you read?”

  “Of course not.” Christina Marks opened the door. “Just tell me, how much of it was true?”

  “All of it,” Mick Stranahan said, “unfortunately.”

  OF Stranahan’s five ex-wives, only one had chosen to keep his last name: ex-wife number four, Chloe Simpkins Stranahan. Even
after she remarried, Chloe hung on to his name as an act of unalloyed spite. Naturally she was listed in the Miami phone book; Stranahan had begged her to please get a nonpublished number, but Chloe had said that would defeat the whole purpose. “This way, any girl who wants to call up and check on you, I can tell them the truth. That you’re a dangerous lunatic. That’s what I’ll tell them when they call up, Mick—honey, he was one dangerous lunatic.”

  Christina Marks had gotten all the Stranahan numbers from directory assistance. When she had called Chloe from New York, Chloe assumed it was just one of Mick’s girlfriends, and had given a vitriolic and highly embellished account of their eight-month marriage and nine-month divorce. Finally Christina Marks had cut in and explained who she was and what she wanted, and Chloe Simpkins Stranahan had said: “That’ll cost you a grand.”

  “Five hundred,” Christina countered.

  “Bitch,” Chloe hissed. But when the cashier’s check arrived the next afternoon by Federal Express, Chloe faithfully picked up the phone and called Christina Marks (collect) in New York and told her where to locate her dangerous lunatic of an ex-husband.

  “Give him a disease for me, will you?” Chloe had said and then had hung up.

  The hit man known as Chemo was not nearly as resourceful as Christina Marks, but he did know enough to check the telephone book for Stranahans. There were five, and Chemo wrote them all down.

  The day after his meeting with Dr. Rudy Graveline, Chemo went for a drive. His car was a royal blue 1980 Bonneville, with tinted windows. The tinted windows were essential to conceal Chemo’s face, the mere glimpse of which could cause a high-speed pileup at any intersection.

  Louis K. Stranahan was the first on Chemo’s list. A Miamian would have recognized the address as being in the middle of Liberty City, but Chemo did not. It occurred to him upon entering the neighborhood that he should have asked Dr. Graveline whether the man he was supposed to kill was black or white, because it might have saved some time.

  The address was in the James Scott housing project, a bleak and tragic warren where few outsiders of any color dared to go. Even on a bright winter day, the project gave off a dark and ominous heat. Chemo was oblivious; he saw no danger here, just work. He parked the Bonneville next to a fenced-in basketball court and got out. Almost instantly the kids on the court stopped playing. The basketball hit the rim and bounced lazily out of bounds, but no one ran to pick it up. They were all staring at Chemo. The only sound was the dental-drill rap of Run-D.M.C. from a distant quadrophonic blaster.

  “Hello, there,” Chemo said.

  The kids from the project glanced at one another, trying to guess how they should play it; this was one of the tallest white motherfuckers they’d ever seen this side of the Interstate. Also, one of the ugliest.

  “Game’s full,” the biggest kid declared with a forced authority.

  “Oh, I don’t want to play,” Chemo said.

  A look of relief spread among the players, and one of them jogged after the basketball.

  “I’m looking for a man named Louis Stranahan.”

  “He ain’t here.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Gone.”

  Chemo said, “Does he have a brother named Mick?”

  “He’s got six brothers,” one of the basketball players volunteered. “But no Mick.”

  “There’s a Dick,” said another teenager.

  “And a Lawrence.”

  Chemo took the list out of his pocket and frowned. Sure enough, Lawrence Stranahan was the second name from the phone book. The address was close by, too.

  As Chemo stood there, cranelike, squinting at the piece of paper, the black kids loosened up a little. They started shooting a few hoops, horsing around. The white guy wasn’t so scary after all; shit, there were eight of them and one of him.

  “Where could I find Louis?” Chemo tried again.

  “Raiford,” said two of the kids, simultaneously.

  “Raiford,” Chemo repeated. “That’s a prison, isn’t it?”

  With this, all the teenagers doubled up, slapping fives, howling hysterically at this gangly freak with the fuzzballs on his head.

  “Fuck, yeah, it’s a prison,” one of them said finally.

  Chemo scratched the top two Stranahans off his list. As he opened the door of the Bonneville, the black kid who was dribbling the basketball hollered, “Hey, big man, you a movie star?”

  “No,” Chemo said.

  “I swear you are.”

  “I swear I’m not.”

  “Then how come I saw you in Halloween III?”

  The kid bent over in a deep wheeze; he thought this was so damn funny. Chemo reached under the car seat and got a .22-caliber pistol, which was fitted with a cheap mail-order suppressor. Without saying a word, he took aim across the roof of the Bonneville and shot the basketball clean out of the kid’s hands. The explosion sounded like the world’s biggest fart, but the kids from the project didn’t think it was funny. They ran like hell.

  As Chemo drove away, he decided he had taught the youngsters a valuable lesson: Never make fun of a man’s complexion.

  IT was half-past noon when Chemo found the third address, a two-story Mediterranean-style house in Coral Gables. An ill-tempered Rottweiler was chained to the trunk of an olive tree in the front yard, but Chemo ambled past the big dog without incident; the animal merely cocked its head and watched, perhaps not sure if this odd extenuated creature was the same species he’d been trained to attack.

  Chloe Simpkins Stranahan was on the phone to her husband’s secretary when the doorbell rang.

  “Tell him, if he’s not home by eight, I sell the Dalí. Tell him that right now.” Chloe slammed down the phone and stalked to the door. She looked up at Chemo and said, “How’d you get past the pooch?”

  Chemo shrugged. He was wearing black Ray-Bans, which he hoped would lessen the effect of his facial condition. If necessary, he was prepared to explain what had happened; it wouldn’t be the first time.

  Yet Chloe Simpkins Stranahan didn’t mention it. She said, “You selling something?”

  “I’m looking for a man named Mick Stranahan.”

  “He’s a dangerous lunatic,” Chloe said. “Come right in.”

  Chemo removed the sunglasses and folded them into the top pocket of his shirt. He sat down in the living room, and put a hand on each of his bony kneecaps. At the wet bar Chloe fixed him a cold ginger ale. She acted like she didn’t even notice what was wrong with his appearance.

  “Who are you?” she asked.

  “Collection agent,” Chemo said. Watching Chloe move around the house, he saw that she was a very beautiful woman: auburn hair, long legs, and a good figure. Listening to her, he could tell she was also hard as nails.

  “Mick is my ex,” Chloe said. “I have nothing good to say about him. Nothing.”

  “He owe you money, too?”

  She chuckled harshly. “No, I took him for every goddamn dime. Cleaned his clock.” She drummed her ruby fingernails on the side of the ginger ale glass. “I’m now married to a CPA,” she said. “Has his own firm.”

  “Nice to hear it,” Chemo said.

  “Dull as a dog turd, but at least he’s no lunatic.”

  Chemo shifted in the chair. “Lunatic, you keep saying that word. What do you mean? Is Mr. Stranahan violent? Did he hit you?”

  “Mick? Never. Not me,” Chloe said. “But he did attack a friend of mine. A male-type friend.”

  Chemo figured he ought to learn as much as possible about the man he was supposed to kill. He said to Chloe, “What exactly did Mick do to this male-type friend?”

  “It’s hard for me to talk about it.” Chloe got up and dumped a jigger of vodka into her ginger ale. “He was always on the road, Mick was. Never home. No doubt he was screwing around.”

  “You know for a fact?”

  “I’m sure of it.”

  “So you got a . . . boyfriend.”

  “You’re a smart one,?
?? Chloe said mordantly. “A goddamn rocket scientist, you are. Yes, I got a boyfriend. And he loved me, this guy. He treated me like a queen.”

  Chemo said, “So one night Mr. Stranahan gets home early from a trip and catches the two of you—”

  “In action,” Chloe said. “Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t plan it that way. God knows I didn’t want him to walk in on us—you gotta know Mick, it’s just not a safe situation.”

  “Short fuse?”

  “No fuse.”

  “So then what?”

  Chloe sighed. “I can’t believe I’m telling this to some stranger, a bill collector! Unbelievable.” She polished off her drink and got another. This time when she came back from the bar, she sat down on the divan next to Chemo; close enough that he could smell her perfume.

  “I’m a talker,” she said with a soft smile. The smile certainly didn’t go with the voice.

  “And I’m a listener,” Chemo said.

  “And I like you.”

  “You do?” This broad is creepy, he thought, a real head case.

  “I like you,” Chloe went on, “and I’d like to help you with your problem.”

  “Then just tell me,” Chemo said, “where I can find your ex-husband.”

  “How much are you willing to pay?”

  “Ah, so that’s it.”

  “Everything’s got a price,” Chloe said, “especially good information.”

  “Unfortunately, Mrs. Stranahan, I don’t have any money. Money is the reason I’m looking for Mick.”

  Chloe crossed her legs, and Chemo noticed a very fine run in one of her nylon stockings; it seemed to go on forever, all the way up her thigh. Who knew where it ended? Internally he cautioned himself against such distractions. Any moment now, she was going to say something about his Rice Krispies face—Chemo knew it.

  “You’re not a bill collector,” Chloe said sharply, “so cut the shit.”