The Lonely Silver Rain Part 11

"We do all that? I hardly know you."

"It can be our getting-acquainted cruise. It's like eighty days, I think."

"This is so sudden."

She shook me. "Are you in there? Are you awake? Listening? A penthouse suite, man, and I buy all the goodies."

"I'm not that kind," I said.

She laughed and then said, "Seriously, do you ever think you've worn it all out around here?" It hit a little too close to home. Too many had gone away and too many had died. Without my realizing it, it had happened so slowly, I had moved a generation away from the beach people.

To them I had become a sun-brown roughlooking fellow of an indeterminate age who did not quite understand their dialect, did not share their habits-either s.e.xual or pharmacological-who thought their music unmusical, their lyrics ba.n.a.l and repet.i.tive, a square fellow who read books and wore yesterday's clothes. But the worst realization was that they bored me. The laughing, clean-limbed lovely young girls were as bright, functional and vapid as cereal boxes. And their young men-all hair and lethargy-were so laid back as to have become immobile. Meyer was increasingly grumpy, and sometimes almost hostile. I couldn't remember the last time I had tried to stop laughing and couldn't. I could hang around while the rest of the old friends slid away. I couldn't remember the last time I'd had twenty people aboard the Flush at the same time. When the green ripper dropped around and took the Alabama Tiger off for permanent and much needed rest, the heirs had sold the 'Bama Gal to a fellow who moved her around to Mobile. For a time ladies of an overwhelmingly female persuasion had stopped by to ask me where the h.e.l.l the Tiger had gone. I told them he had died smiling, and they had toted him off to the family plot, and the longest floating house party in the world had at last ended. Always, they wept. The party was over.

The management had changed. Irv Delbert had departed. The city was changing. It was getting ugly and dirty and brutal. Locks and chains sold well. People full of speed and angel dust beat each other to death on the night beaches. There is a high in the life cycle of any city. I had seen it in Fort Lauderdale, and we had pa.s.sed it and it was going to be a long downslope. I could ride it down or leave it and hope that memory would gradually replace the "now" with the "once upon a time."

"Seriously, Millis, maybe I have."

"Are you saying yes?"

"I'm saying let's us take a little nap. Let's sleep on it.

"The agent said those suites have their own little sun decks. Completely private."

"Uh-huh."

"It anchors in Cook's Bay at Moorea. Billy told me that is the most beautiful place he ever saw in his whole life."

"Uh-huh."

"Frank's tax man estimates that after estate taxes I'll have an income of about seven hundred thousand, mostly tax-free-more if I sell this place, but I want to give that a lot more thought."

"Uh-huh," I said, and heard nothing of what she might have said after that.

On Monday I tried to see Mr. Jornalero at his office in Miami. He was in but did not wish to see me. I threatened to stay until he decided he could, but the tiny receptionist phoned down and two security men were sent up. I went peacefully. I drove out of my way and took a look at Sailfish Lagoon. It looked as if the same architect had designed Dias del Sol. But it had more of a fortress look than did Millis' place. And there seemed to be some elegant private homes behind the high wall, near the yacht basin.

A man who wishes nothing further to do with you presents a problem. Though I had not seen the procedure, I could guess that Arturo, between his fortress and his office, traveled in a chauffeured limousine, and that when he walked to a nearby restaurant for a business lunch, there would be a muscled fellow a half step behind him, and maybe another a few steps ahead. Rich men walk carefully in Miami.

When I had worked out a plan, I hurried back to Bahia Mar and began working on overdue maintenance on my aging runabout, the Munequita, a two-ton T-Craft with a pair of one-hundred-and-twenty-horsepower stern-drive units. It shares the same slip with the houseboat. Usually I am very good about taking care of my gear, but it had been too long since I had given the Munequita the loving attention she needs. I had not noticed the five-inch rip in the custom tarp cover near the gunwale on the port side, amids.h.i.+ps. It was damp and grungy under the tarp, with mildew thriving. The automatic bilge pump had tried to take care of the incoming rain until it killed the batteries. The tarp was faded, the paint was faded and the white letters of her name on the transom had turned to ivory.

We all do penance in our uAn strange ways. Mine was to risk getting killed while I paid my dues. By late Wednesday afternoon, the sixteenth, the batteries were up, bilge dry, mildew swabbed away, tanks topped, tarp, mended. I had taken her outside into a pretty good sea and punished my spine and kidneys jumping her head-on into the swells to knock a lot of the acc.u.mulated marine crud off the bottom. The Calmec autopilot was working again. The bilge pump was operational, the ice chest cleaned and stocked, the power lifts greased, the lights checked and replaced where necessary. She wasn't at her best, but she was h.e.l.l of a lot better than before. I wondered why I had spent all that time revamping a music system and indexing tapes when the Munequita needed help so badly. Meyer wandered over a couple of times to watch me at work. He wanted to know what I was doing about my personal problem, and I said I was working on it. He said it looked to him as though I was working on a boat. I didn't explain, though I should have. It wasn't fair to Meyer. But, then again, we had gotten into a game of surly. Old friends do that from time to time. To loosen the bonds, I guess.

At times it seems as if arranging to have no commitment of any kind to anyone would be a special freedom. But in fact the whole idea works in reverse. The most deadly commitment of all is to be committed only to one's self. Some come to realize this after they are in the nursing home.

With an hour of daylight left, and the day growing chillier, I headed down toward Miami, traveling inside. Black leather jacket and watch cap, and the winds of pa.s.sage strumming the canvas overhead, an NPR station on the FM, speaking mildly of the news of the day on All Things Considered, without hype or fury. The little doll growled along, at the lowest speed that would keep her on plane, white wake hissing behind her. There was comfort in being able to enjoy the boat. I had driven myself hard to got her back in shape. I had sore muscles, barked knuckles, a torn thumbnail and tired knees. Penance. Memory of the rumbling voice of the grandpa long ago: 'Anything you can't take care of, kid, you don't deserve to own. A dog, a gun, a reel, a bike or a woman. You learn how to do it and you do it, because if you don't you hate yourself.'

An out-of-date morality. Anything you don't take care of, you replace. of course, the ERA wouldn't cottan to Grandpa's including a woman in his list of owners.h.i.+p items. Grandma seemed a happy woman, however.

It was long past full dark when I came to the marina I had stopped at in other years. I lugged down until I had minimum headway, folded the top down, stood up with the portable spotlight and picked up the private channel markers as I made my way in. The place had expanded. I went to the gas dock and when a man sauntered out to take a line, I asked him if Wendy was around. He said she had sold the place almost two years ago, and it was now owned by Sea and Marine Ventures. They had a slip, though. I tied up, locked up, walked two blocks for pizza and beer, came back and stretched out on one of the narrow bunks in the bow and set my wrist alarm for five-thirty.

Fifteen.

ON THURSDAY morning at six-thirty I was making long slow lazy eights way out in the bay outside the sunlit structures of Sailfish Lagoon. By ten o'clock I gave up and dawdled back to the marina. The same little slip was still available, and there was a marine supplies store close at hand, so I bought various medicines and unguents, salves and brighteners for the little doll, and spent the rest of daylight improving her outward appearance, quitting at nightfall with sore arms and an easier conscience. About all that would remain to do would be to order a new custom tarp cover, and have her hauled for a bottom job.

On Friday I was on station at six, making my eights in the sunrise, binoculars handy. At twenty past six a triangular sail and a small jib went up in among a small forest of sticks, and soon a catamaran came out into the lagoon, heading for the bay. The sail was green and white. The figure aboard had on a dark red jogging suit and a white knit cap. I decided that it was not Arturo, but then when he came closer and I had him in good focus, I saw that it was. I abandoned my station and went off down the bay, heading south at a goodly pace, but keeping watch on Joawalero.

The morning breeze had freshened, and he began to zip right along. When he was far enough from his base, I swung around and came back at high speed and got between him and the lagoon. Apparently he did not notice me, or at least he did not notice the point of the maneuver. When I turned and came back out toward him, more slowly, he was moving well. He got on a long reach, and pulled his sail to the angle where one pontoon lifted out of the water, with Jornalero leaning far back for balance, hissing along at perhaps twenty to twenty-five miles an hour. It began to look trickier than I had expected.

I pushed both throttles and came up on the windward side of him. He jerked his head around and stared at me in astonishment and waved me off. The cat turned into the wind and the pontoon dropped back into the water. The empty sail flapped. I yelled over to him. "It's me! McGee! Got to talk to you."

"No!" he yelled, and came about and started off on another reach, not as productive a one, but one that would take him back into the lagoon. I caught up and moved in front of him so that he had to shear away. I b.u.mped into a pontoon and nearly knocked him overboard. A moment later I had snagged a halyard with my boat hook. He was one very angry sailor.

"I've got nothing to say to you!"

"I don't want you to talk, Mr. Jornalero. I want you to listen. Okay? Come aboard. I'll take that thing in tow."

He was a sensible man. It took him half a minute to realize he had very little choice. We were well out from sh.o.r.e. I gave him a hand. He stepped on the gunwale and hopped down to the deck lightly and handily.

He sat on the engine hatch and said, "So talk." I moved out to a broader section of the bay, towing the cat, and then I killed the engines in the Munequita. There was lots of silence to talk into. The sail flapped idly on the cat.

"What I am going to say to you doesn't mean anything and won't mean anything unless you arrange to have somebody check it out. Do you know a wholesaler down in the Yucatan south of Cancun, down below Tulum? A man they call Brujo?"

"I'm listening. You're talking."

"Okay. I'll a.s.sume you don't, but I'll a.s.sume that you can get in touch with some people who do know him or know about him and who can arrange to go see him about something. They are to ask him about a man who flew in from Florida in a light plane to the Tulum airstrip four times, and made buys from Brujo and flew the product back to a ranch strip. The surveillance was getting tighter, so that same man hired the kids who stole Billy Ingraham's boat to come over and take it out by boat. He was there for the first buy, but sent them over by boat with the money for the second buy."

His expression had changed, lips pursed had twisted into contemptuous disbelief. The sun was high enough to have lost all the orange look of sunrise light, and the bay had changed from gunmetal to blue. Boat traffic was increasing. I had swiveled the pilot seat around to face him.

"Something bothering you?"

"You're talking."

"They had worked out a way to bring it in by boat."

"The people who stop boats know everyway there is."

"Now we're both talking. Okay, a discussion is better than a monologue."

"McGee, there's no point in talking to me about bringing in drugs. I don't have anything to do with it."

"Not since you used to recruit mules in Colombia?"

It jolted him. I could see his intent to deny, but he backed away from that. "Not many people know that or remember that. I worked my way up... and out. I head up my own corporation. it's a legitimate business all the way."

I smiled at him. "Want a beer, Arturo?"

"Before breakfast? Why not?"

I uncapped two from the cooler and handed him one. He took a long thirsty drink and wiped his mouth on the dark red sleeve.

I said, "They'd figured out a new way of bringing it in by boat." I told him about the eye bolt in the keel, the length of cable and the adjustable fins on the aluminum case. He listened carefully.

"So? A thing like that, it gets around," he said. "Others try it. Someone gets caught, and then it will no longer work. Towing a dead shark with the kilos sewn inside doesn't work anymore. Filling the hollow radio aerial with it doesn't work anymore. Dropping it in shallow water with an electronic beeper fastened to it doesn't work anymore." He stopped abruptly, took another swallow of beer and said, "I hear these things, but they have nothing to do with me. What's the point in what you are telling me?"

"When the kids came back to make a buy on their own they had to wait around for product. They hooked up with Gigi Reyes and took her along willingly when they left. When they left they stiffed El Brujo with seventy-five thousand of funny money."

"They were very lucky they didn't die right there."

"They were too dumb to know how lucky they were. They were being tricky. When they got back to the Keys they set up a meet with the fellow who had hired them, the fellow who had given up flying across the Gulf and the Caribbean. He met them in the Keys. They had hidden the product and the good money, which they hadn't used, and tried to pry a piece of the action out of their employer. They showed him how smart they were. They showed him the rest of the funny money."

"And so," Jornalero said, faking a yawn, "he killed them as soon as he'd made them reveal the hiding place. They had cut off his source of supply. And he had no idea how stupid it was to kill the Reyes woman."

"Right. And that angry man was-in here we insert a drum roll for suspense-that man was... Ruffino Marino, Junior."

You often see people open their eyes wide, but it is rare to see the eyes bulge. It must have something to do with some sort of pressure in the brain. Arturo Jornalero's eyes bulged. His mouth hung open. His big white hand collapsed the almost empty beer can. I watched him pull himself together, but it took time. Lots of thoughts were spinning through his mind.

And then another thought brought him up short. "Wait a minute! n.o.body in their right mind would give their true name when making a buy. The money talks."

"Mr. Jornalero, you wouldn't get the people off my back. At first you thought you could and then you decided you couldn't. I had a chance to find out what this whole scam was about. I sat and listened to Brujo say that it had been Ruffino Marino. How do I know how he knew the name? Maybe it was painted on the side of his little airplane. Maybe he gave it because he thought Brujo had seen his movie. Maybe he introduced himself because he is simply stupid. But that's the man."

Slowly and reluctantly; he bought it. He shook his head. "That explains it."

"Explains what?"

"Never mind."

"Is this going to get me off the hook? Hey!"

He raised his head and frowned at me as if he had forgotten I was there. "What? Oh, I think you can probably forget about the whole situation. Yes." He got up and got the line and pulled his cat close and climbed down into it. He freed my line and tossed it back aboard, pulled his sail taut, worked the rudder and began to head without haste toward the lagoon. He didn't turn or wave. I was out of sight and out of mind. He had a lot of other things to think about.

The breeze was from the mainland. The sea was flat. I took the Munequita outside and ran north up the coast at close to forty knots, promising myself as I have so many times before that the only sane way to get from Lauderdale to Miami and back is by water, and I would never drive again.

On that Friday afternoon I made my peace with Meyer and related all the action up to date, leaving out any mention of Millis. She was not a pertinent factor. He is a good listener. The questions were infrequent. We talked aboard the Flush. While we talked, we worked on a jug of wine, a Gallo red. Meyer wore a white turtleneck and his cold-weather overalls. He looked more dockhand than economist.

When the tale had been told, Meyer sighed, got up and went over and looked at my tapes, and selected one of his favorites, a CBS release, Suite for Flute and Jazz Piano, with Jean-Pierre Rampal on flute, Claude Bolling on piano, Marcel Sabiani on drums and Max Hediguer on string ba.s.s: Meyer likes the next-to-the-last number on side two called "Versatile," where Rampal plays a ba.s.s flute. Meyer says you can hardly ever get to hear a ba.s.s flute solo anymore.

He slotted the tape, turned on the rig, adjusted the volume. Then he fiddled with the equalizer. He likes more treble emphasis than I do. I think he is beginning to lose the higher registers. They're the ones which go first.

He sipped wine and listened to the music with his eyes closed, legs outstretched, ankles crossed. A potato-nose Buddha in meditation, totally at ease and complete within his hairy carapace. He listened all the way through the tape, and got up slowly and turned it off just as "Versatile" ended. He doesn't care for the last number. Fidgety, he calls it. It is t.i.tled "Veloce."

"It could work," he said.

"What?"

"The families of the so-called Mafia are no longer rooted in the Sicilian tradition, where even though they were in dirty businesses, there was a sense of unity and honor and loyalty within the group. They aren't families anymore. They have taken in too many outsiders. They've mongrelized the group with everything from Swenson to Pokulsnik to Moran. Honest Italian-Americans no longer have to resent the press coverage of their Sicilian brethren. But even back in the olden times, it never resembled the sentimental idiocy of The G.o.dfather. These groups of gangsters, their only loyalty is to money. They've joined forces with the Latins and the rednecks because without contention and with control of the marketplace, the money is better. On the other hand, the Latins still have the sense of family and duty and honor that the Mafia had fifty years ago. The money is almost everything, but not quite. So I think Browder is right. This will cause a split. The way they are interlinked, too many people know too much. So it will tend to get b.l.o.o.d.y. Each side can turn loose the enforcers they've been using in solving normal business problems. Send them after bigger game. We can sit in the stands and cheer."

"Maybe these people have gotten soft," I said, "but if it gets b.l.o.o.d.y, they'll bring in out-of-town talent."

Meyer nodded. "Roofing contractors from Toledo."

"What do you mean?"

"That's what they used to call b.u.t.ton men. Roofing workers they call them now."

"How did you get to know that, Meyer?"

He smiled sleepily. "You think I'm some kind of recluse?"

The Miami Herald put it on page one on Monday morning: DRUG WAR BREAKS OUT. Most of the action had taken place on Sunday. One Walter Hanrahan, a prominent developer and land speculator in Boca Raton, had turned the key in his golf cart and blown himself and his son as high as the roof on the pro shop. Person or persons unknown had lobbed a grenade into Francisco Puchero's convertible as he was driving along Collins Avenue in Miami Beach. It had blown his legs off and he had died en route to the emergency ward. Puchero had been prominent in community affairs: Firemen responded to an alarm regarding a Lincoln Continental on fire near a landfill in Homestead. When the fire had been doused, they found Manuel Samuro and Guillero "Pappy" Labrador wedged into the large trunk. The two men controlled the privately held corporation called Federated Trucking Express of Coral Gables. They each left a wife and three children. Samuro had recently received an award of merit from the Chamber of Commerce for his work in attracting new light industry to the area. Two masked gunmen had forced their way into a private club in Hollywood, Florida, had gone to an upstairs room where a poker game was in session and had killed five of the six players,. each with two or three shots to the head. They had left the money, several thousand dollars, an the table. It had happened at 1 a.m. on Sat.u.r.day. The dead were Collins, Silvestre, Zabala, Shorter and Cawley. The survivor, Brett Slusarski, had two.22 caliber bullets in his brain and was not expected to live. All were prominent long-term residents of the Gold Coast, active in business and social life.

I had a sudden vision of Browder standing in one of the anterooms of h.e.l.l, welcoming the newcomers aboard with merry smile and hearty handshake.

The thing that apparently sewed it all together for the Miami Herald newsroom was when three Cubans broke down the gate and the door to a warehouse in Miami Sh.o.r.es by driving a white Ford panel delivery truck through them at five o'clock Sat.u.r.day afternoon, and then hopped out with automatic weapons, killed the three men working in the warehouse with about a hundred more rounds than necessary; and then fire bombed the warehouse and drove away. An unexpectedly efficient sprinkler system had contained the fire, and the authorities had recovered an estimated seven hundred kilos, or three quarters of a long ton, of pure cocaine. Owners.h.i.+p of the warehouse was being traced.

That brought the murders into a sharper focus, and explained the money being left on the table when the poker game was invaded. And it darkened considerably the public reputations, posthumously, of men who had given a great deal of time and thought over the years to presenting a picture of good characters and good works.

The violent deaths continued that week. The owner of a fleet of shrimp boats was killed when a car pulled up beside his on Alligator Alley and somebody shot him in the face. A man came screaming down out of the top floor of a highrise hotel on the Beach, the Contessa. He had owned twelve points in the hotel. A commodities broker was found hanging from a live oak tree in his backyard in Fort Lauderdale, with his hands tied behind him. His daughter found him. She was five years old.

And then on Thursday the name jumped out at me. Ruffino Marino. But it was the papa. He had employed additional bodyguards, stationing one in the sixteenth-floor foyer at Sailfish Lagoon, outside his apartment door, and the other down in the lobby by the elevator that served the sixteenth to twenty-second floors.

Somebody had gained entrance to the apartment above Marino's, tied and gagged the occupants, waited until nightfall, climbed from the upper balcony down to Marino's, forced the door, sliced the throat of the elder Marino as he slept, without disturbing Mrs. Marino in the nearby bed, climbed the rope back to the upper balcony, walked down the fire stairs to the parking-garage level and disappeared. Once in the clear they phoned the police so that the people they had bound and gagged could be released. Marino had been a prominent citizen, an investment adviser, with personal holdings in hotels, restaurants, beer franchises, magazine and book distribution, parking garages, linen service and liquor stores. The lengthy story about him said that he had been under investigation several times for possible racketeering, but no indictinent had ever been returned.

The lengthy newspaper account described in great detail the sophisticated security system with its computerized video and audio scanning, its perimeter sensors which could detect all prowlers. In fact, the account did so much marveling about how clever the murderers had been that it was quite clear the reporters believed that some of the fellows operating all that great equipment had been bribed to turn deaf and blind and dumb during the murder. And that, of course, is the vulnerable segment of all foolproof systems, the fools who take care of it.

The picture showed a broad-faced, bullnecked bald man with heavy black eyebrows and a toothy smile so broad it produced a squint. He wore a sport coat and a s.h.i.+rt with an open collar. A thick thatch of gray hair sprouted from the 'tT of the open s.h.i.+rt, and a medal on a chain dangled against the hair below the wide throat the knife had sought and found in the darkness. The piece spoke of the widow, Rose Ellen Marino, and her work with handicapped children. The four children of the marriage were named, and only Ruffi Junior got any specific mention, as a producer and director of motion pictures and an investor in theatrical properties. It listed the powerboat races he had won.

The weekend papers had editorials about the bloodbath, as did the national news magazines. It had been correctly pegged as a war between the old-time underworld and the new drug barons, after several years of uneasy peace. One newspaper, USA Today,, was perceptive enough to note that the Canadian mobs were probably standing on the sidelines smiling. The editorials bemoaned the existence of the cocaine trade. The dollar value of the business was pegged at one hundred billion dollars, with an estimated one hundred metric tons coming in each year, with no more than six percent of it confiscated by the authorities. There had been seventeen violent deaths over a very few days, which became eighteen when Slusarski died without regaining consciousness. Had they known the connection, they could have counted up to twenty-five-a federal employee, two street urchins, two boat thieves, a Peruvian debutante and an old man in Cannes. It was the prominence and the civic reputation of so many of the suddenly and violently dead which led to so much coverage. The two standard shots were of the smoking remains of a golf cart, and of a side view of the Contessa Hotel, with a dotted line curving down from a high floor to a Germanic X on the pavement. Local television hit a new low in taste with the rernarkable question "And how did you feel, Karen, when you found your daddy hanging from that tree?"

A guest column in The New York Times, reprinted in local papers, was by an ex-employee of the DEA. He said, in part, "It is valuable, small, easy to smuggle. As easy as diamonds, but unlike diamonds it is a fas.h.i.+onable consumable. It is psychologically habituating without being physiologically addictive. It is the smart party snort for the young, middle-cla.s.s, half-successful, upwardly mobile professional, as well as for the career thief. It can provide a rush of extreme confidence accompanied by erotic fervor and torrents of oratory. It can also rot the nose and encourage suicidal driving habits. It is so expensive it has the cachet of conspicuous consumption at parties peopled by musicians, artists and writers, the sign of a gracious contemporary hostess.

"A vast and deadly infrastructure provides itfrom the plucking of the leaves of the highland bushes to the tiny gold straw that sucks a line into the delicate nostril of a mayor's mistress in Oregon and makes her eyes sparkle: Within the present context, nothing can stop it. The losses of officialdom are within the limits, say, of spoilage in the vegetable business. It has been brought in by drone aircraft, radio-controlled. It has been brought in by one-man submarine. It has been shot ash.o.r.e by slingshot from freighters docking at Tampa. Even were importation to be punished by death it would still go on, because the lifetime wages of a laborer can be carried in a single pocket.

'The only possible solution to this deadly trade is to ignore it. Legalize it along with marijuana. Then the infrastructure will sag and collapse. It will no longer be fas.h.i.+onable. Street dealers will no longer hustle new customers on high school sidewalks. And men won't die in the squalid ma.s.sacres we have seen recently in southeast Florida.

"But maybe it is too late for legalization. The bureaucracy of detection and control has a huge national payroll. Florida's economy is as dependent on Lady Caine as it is on cattle or fis.h.i.+ng. Legalization will be fought bitterly by politicians who will say that to do so will imperil our children. Are they not now imperiled?"

Meyer brought that guest column to my attention. He is a newspaper freak. He has'to have an oversized postal drawer instead of a box.

The killings had stopped. On Sat.u.r.day evening I went over to Meyer's boat and told him I thought we ought to go to a special Ma.s.s at St. Matthew's on Sunday, to pay our respects to the dear departed Ruffino Marino, a Knight of Malta.