Cat Chaser Part 17

"Well, if he's ready to do it like at a moment's notice," Moran said, "why don't you spook him? Turn in some kind of false alarm."

"Yeah?" Jiggs said.

"He runs with it and you're waiting for him. Saves tearing his house apart."

Jiggs didn't say anything for a moment.

"That's not bad, George. That's not bad at all. Sounds to me like you're in the wrong business."

"Or maybe I could tell fortunes," Moran said. He picked up his beer gla.s.s and gazed at it. "I see a guy murdered in his house. I don't see anything about him being robbed, no money in the picture. But wait a minute. I see the police have been given information about a suspect. Ah-ha, guy runs a motel and is a good friend of the victim's wife." He looked at Jiggs. "That how it works?"

Jiggs said, "George, I offer you the stairway to happiness and all you gimme back're ideas. I'm telling you, you're in the wrong business."

13.

SOMETIME BETWEEN 12:45 and 1:00 A.M. an explosion blew the boat dock at 700 Arvida Parkway into Biscayne Bay.

The charge took out the wooden surface of the dock, the heavy planks, the steel davits, ripped out a section of the cement retaining wall, sheared off the pilings to leave splintered stubs that barely cleared the surface of the water, and shattered a sliding gla.s.s door on the sundeck of the house. Fortunately Mr. de Boya's $350,000 yacht, El Jefe El Jefe, was moored at Dinner Key where Mr. de Boya had picked up guests, business a.s.sociates, earlier in the evening and had returned there to drop them off at the time of the explosion. It was heard in downtown Miami.

Coral Gables Police called Dade County Public Safety and a bomb squad was at the scene by 1:30. They picked up pieces of wood and metal strewn over the lawn and would find out through gas chromatograph tests of residue the explosive used was C4 plastique. A Coral Gables detective said, "The f.u.c.kers are at it again." He put 700 Arvida on the computer to see if it was a hot address, if it had ever been used as a "safe house" where marijuana and cocaine were off-loaded, and found no reference. Andres de Boya's name went into the computer and came out clean. They didn't notice the graffiti, spray-painted in red on the cement pillars in front of the property, until daylight. They thought about calling in the Bureau but decided to wait. Dope or political, it was still within their jurisdiction and the graffiti could be either. Some kind of Latin dramatic effect that said, on all four of the cement pillars:

MUERTE A DE BOYA.

When Corky pulled up to the Jordan Marsh entrance to Dadeland the doorman was on the spot. He offered Mary his hand and slammed the door as Corky said, "Wait! ...Mrs. de Boya?" She stooped a little to look at him through the dark gla.s.s, almost invisible behind the wheel of the Cadillac. He was gesturing as he said, "I'm suppose to go in with you. Wait, please. I have to park."

Mary said, "That's all right. I'll see you here in about an hour."

She heard Corky say, "What? Wait, please!"

213.

"Tell him, will you?" Mary said to the doorman. She tried not to run entering the store. But once inside restraint gave way to eager expectation; it hurried her through Jordan Marsh and down the length of the Dadeland Mall to an entrance near the east end. She sprinted now, out into sunlight, saw the old white Mercedes waiting and almost cheered.

"I'm late," Mary said, catching her breath now, inside the car, as Moran drove through the crowded parking area toward an exit.

"Five minutes. Boy, you look great."

"I'm perspiring."

"Good. We'll take a shower. You know we haven't taken a shower yet?"

She seemed surprised. "Where're we going?"

"A new place. Change our luck."

They drove up Dixie to the University Inn across from the U of M campus where Moran had already got a room and iced the wine, just right, waiting for them. He poured gla.s.ses as she slumped into a chair, legs apart, flattening her tan skirt between her thighs on the seat.

"Here."

She took the hotel-room gla.s.s of wine and drank half of it down before her shoulders sagged and she began to relax.

"You better love me, Moran."

"Look at me, I'm dying."

"I mean you better be be in love with me." in love with me."

"I am am," Moran said. "Listen, if it was just getting laid there a lot easier ways." He'd better soften that and said, "You bet I love you. Boy, do I."

She said, "Do you, really?"

He wondered how a woman like Mary could have doubts about herself. He came over in the pale light and pulled her up gently, wrapped bare sun-brown arms around her and told her how good she made him feel and how he thought about her and couldn't be without her. She said again what she had told him before, "I don't want to lose you." He told her it wasn't possible. He told her they couldn't lose each other now. He paused. Was he holding back? No, he was running out of words. He told her they couldn't be pried apart with a crowbar or cut apart, they were sealed together for good. He believed it with the feeling she did too, now. Everything was all right; even with Corky waiting they could make slow love and lie in silence after, looking at each other. Save conversation. What more was there to say?

They talked while they were getting dressed.

She told him the police were in and out of the house all day yesterday investigating the explosion, questioning her, the help, Andres, mostly Andres. Their tone wasn't suspicious but their questions were, trying to find out what Andres was into, if Dominican revolutionary or anti-government fac 215.

tions had ever threatened him before. Moran let her tell what she knew, Mary standing at the mirror brus.h.i.+ng her hair.

Then he told her about Jiggs Scully in the Mutiny Bar, and she put the brush down and stood very still. Moran ended with a flat statement.

"He knows Andres has at least a couple million hidden in the house. He wants us to tell him where it is. If we do he'll go in, take the money and he'll kill Andres, as a favor."

She said, "A favor favor," wide-eyed.

"We sail off into the sunset and live happily ever after."

The room was as silent as he could remember a room being silent, going back to when he was a little boy lying in bed during his afternoon nap, wide awake. Mary walked to a chair but didn't sit down; she turned to Moran again. He was sitting on the side of the bed with a tennis shoe in his hand.

"I have to tell him," Mary said.

He gave her time.

"You understand that, don't you? I have to."

"The only thing I'm sure of," Moran said, "somebody's trying to use us. A guy talks to me out of the side of his mouth like I'm one of the boys. Why? As far as he knows I'm a decent, law-abiding citizen. It's true you and I happen to have something going-"

"That's quaint, George. Something going."

"Something special, soon to be-you know- out in the open, aboveboard. Let me just tell you the rest, okay? The question is, first, why would he think we'd go along?"

"That's right, he'd be taking a chance," Mary said.

"A big one. But let's say we do. We tell Jiggs where the money's hidden and close our eyes. What happens then?"

"You just said-he'll kill Andres."

"Are we positive?"

Mary frowned, shaking her head. "I don't understand."

"What if the whole thing's your husband's idea?"

She hesitated now. "You think Andres is using Scully?"

"You go to your husband and tell him his life's in danger. What's the first thing he asks you?"

"G.o.d, you're right."

"You didn't hear it at the Dadeland shopping mall. But say you tell him," Moran said, "and now it's confirmed, Andres knows we've been seeing each other. What does he do then?" He saw a different look come into Mary's eyes. "You know him better than I do, but he doesn't seem the type that loses gracefully. What does he do to you when you tell him?"

217.

Mary's reaction surprised him: the look of calm that came into her eyes as she listened.

"You're right, it sounds like him. It's the roundabout way he thinks . . . the son of a b.i.t.c.h." She sat down in the chair, thoughtful.

"But we aren't sure," Moran said. "There's the matter of your dock blowing up. Would Andres go that far?"

Mary shook her head. "No, he's not gonna do something that makes him look vulnerable. Unless- why would it have to be part of Andres's scheme?"

"All I know is," Moran told her, "Jiggs said he'd make the hit look political. Like some revolutionary group out to get your husband . . . But why does he tell me all this if there's a good chance I'm gonna tell you and you're gonna tell Andres?"

She said, "He must be awfully sure we'd go along. Or it's worth the chance. He can always deny it. Which brings us back to the only question that means anything. Do I tell Andres or not?"

Mary looked like a young girl sitting in the chair, biting her lower lip now, though more preoccupied than frightened: an imaginative girl wondering how to tell her parents she was pregnant.

She said, "If something did happen to Andres..."

He said, "Mary, we don't need help. We don't have to hope he gets a heart attack or falls off his boat. All we have to do is walk away."

She said, "I know. I'm not hoping for anything like that," and looked at him with clear eyes. "But it would be nice, wouldn't it?"

14.

NOLEN AND RAFI HAD BEEN DRINKING the better part of two days and were both drunk when Moran found them in the early evening. Nolen was keeping it going. Moran saw it right away: Nolen had to stay up there because if he came down now he'd crash and burn.

They were having a private party in oceanfront Number One with scotch and rum, c.o.ke cans, a bowl of watery ice and potato chips on the coffee table and the smell of marijuana in the room. There was no sign of Loret. They were wound-up drunk: Nolen bare to the waist, stoop-shouldered skin and bones, his slack cheeks sucked in on a joint; Rafi wearing a scarf rolled and tied as a headband, the ends hanging to his chest, his sporty Dominican s.h.i.+rt open all the way. Nolen was calling him Che.

"You meet Che? George, shake hands with Che Amado, one of your premier fanatics, brought here by special request to combat the toadies of oligarchic imperialism, but don't ask me what it means."

"You didn' know that," Rafi said to Moran. Rafi sat slumped in a plastic chair, feet extended in glistening, patent-leather zip-up boots. "You think I come here to bite you for money. It work pretty good, didn' it? I had you fool."

"You had me fool, all right," Moran said. "I thought you were just a pimp. Which one of you did the job on the boat dock?"

"That was him," Rafi said, "he's the power-man." He squinted up at Moran and said, "What did you say before it?"

"That's powderman," Nolen said, "in the trade," and gave Moran a sly look. "I hear we're in business. Is that right? I heard it from a certain party, but I'd rather hear it from you...Where you going?"

Moran got a gla.s.s from the kitchen and came back to sit at the opposite end of the sofa from Nolen. He poured himself a scotch; he would probably need it.

"You're over your head," Moran said. He drank the scotch and poured another one.

Nolen was grinning. "So what else is new?"

"Stick to acting."

"It's what I'm doing, man. What's the difference?"

Aw s.h.i.+t, Moran thought.

221.

He wondered why he'd ever had a good feeling about Nolen, why he'd been comfortable with him and went for that grunts together, old war buddies grinning their way through life bulls.h.i.+t; he wasn't anything like Nolen. Nolen was pathetic trying hard to be tragic and any more of him, Moran knew, would be a bigger pain in the a.s.s than he could bear. He wanted to hear about it though, what they were into. He would hardly have to encourage them and it would come sliding out of their mouths with alcohol fumes.

"What'd you use," Moran said to Nolen, "on the boat dock?"

Nolen said, "On the dock?" focusing his eyes. "I was gonna go with ammonium nitrate and fuel oil, little dynamite, and light up the sky. But if these people're suppose to be pros, I thought no, you gotta go with a nonhydroscopic plastique, you dig? Slip in there in a Donzi, half-speed all the way. Me and my s.h.i.+pmate, this spic that steared-excuse me, Che-guy was wearing sungla.s.ses at night. You head due south from near Dinner Key where we launched till you get the Cape Florida light off your port bow, then hang a right and there you are. Drift in... I've already run the det-cord through the blocks, they got adhesive backing on 'em now, stick 'em flat under the boards but use a linear-shape charge on the pilings so it'll cut 'em off clean. Twelve pounds of plastique, could've done the house. I'm scared of timers, so we drifted down by Matheson Hammock and I blew it remote control." Nolen made an elaborate exploding sound on the roof of his mouth with his jaw clenched. "The dock's gone."

Moran said, impressed, "You remember all that from your paratrooper days?"

"No, I did a bit in A Bridge Too Far A Bridge Too Far and hung around with the special effects guys. It's all make-believe, George." and hung around with the special effects guys. It's all make-believe, George."

"What'd you blow it for?"

"Show him somebody means business."

"Who did the lettering?"

"Che. Right, Che?"

"De nada," Rafi said. Rafi said.

"Don't put yourself down," Nolen said. "You did it, man. Our silent partner goes, 'What's he gonna write?' I told him don't worry about a thing, this man's been writing on walls all his life, fuera fuera or or muerte muerte to whoever happens to be around that p.i.s.ses him off. The man's ace of the spray paint. You see his work?" to whoever happens to be around that p.i.s.ses him off. The man's ace of the spray paint. You see his work?"