High Lie Read online

  “That’s him. Turns out his maid has a degree in computer science from Ohio State.”

  “You don’t say.”

  “Yup. So I’m just finished here. You at the office?”

  “The Breakers.”

  “And here I am with a fat check burning a hole in my pocket.”

  “Get over here,” I said. “Let me put that fire out for you.”

  Chapter Eight

  RON AND I had a couple of celebratory beers overlooking the water, waiting for the sun to start dropping behind us toward the gulf. Then he drove us to the oceanfront apartment of his squeeze, the Lady Cassandra. I had no idea if she was really a lady, like a duchess or a princess or something, but she sure had the class of one. And despite Ron’s red cheeks and a face covered in the splotches of removed skin cancers, she had been utterly charmed by him. He had that way about him, and ladies of a certain age were often suckers for the wiles of Ron Bennett. But this time, he was as taken with her as she was with him. He still had his place in West Palm, but he was spending more and more time at the widow’s palatial digs. Cassandra was off playing tennis, so we left Ron’s car and walked back to the Escape. It was time to go shark hunting.

  “You know, I like this car,” he said, as I pulled out toward the bridge, back to the mainland.

  “Yeah, it’s boring but it does have a nice high ride.”

  “Perfect car for kids.”

  “If I run into any kids I’ll be sure to ask them what they drive.”

  Ron smiled as we crossed the Intracoastal and headed out to Los Piños. It was the sublime to the ridiculous. Palm Beach was some of the most exclusive property on the planet, the sort of waterfront mansions that never even made the real estate section, but in twenty minutes we were in the soup of desperation and hope known as a low-rent trailer park.

  I pulled the car into the lot of a liquor store where three hombres in bandanas looked my SUV over like hyenas spying a New York strip. We sat for a time watching the entrance to Los Piños as the sun fell behind us. I figured the darkness would suit El Tiburon better, and I was right. Just as boredom was setting in, we saw a black Corvette with the vanity plate tiburon cruise into the park. We got out and locked the Escape.

  “There’s not going to a problem with my car, is there?” I said to the bandanas.

  One of them smiled wide. “Nah, man. We’d have to pay to get rid of them parts.”

  I nodded at them. It was true. Not even the local hoods were interested in my car, and for a moment I longed for my red Mustang convertible that had been smashed by some bad dudes who had wanted to hurt me. And hurt me they did. They had busted me up pretty bad, with a hockey stick as I recalled, and then smashed my Mustang into a tree. In my fragile state I had replaced the totaled Mustang with the Escape, and the hurt lingered on and on. I glanced back at the Escape as Ron and I crossed the road.

  “See, the benefits of a small SUV keep on coming,” he said with a grin.

  “Keep talking, pal. You drive a Camry.”

  “My point exactly. Fine car it is, too.”

  We didn’t get twenty steps into the trailer park before the old woman in the house-dress popped out of her trailer. She pointed across a rusted up children’s playground, to the trailers on the other side of the park.

  “El Tiburon,” she whispered.

  I waved. “Gracias.”

  We wandered across the unkempt grass and found the Corvette parked at the end of a row of rusted trailers. No one was on the street. It felt like Dodge City, when the outlaws came to town. Some things never change.

  “Which one do you think he’s in?”

  “No way of telling,” I said, looking around. We could sit tight and wait to see if he came out, or if someone went in, but he might not even be on this street. I didn’t have the patience for more stakeout. I had tried to keep my powder dry, to keep my energy in potential like Lucas would do, but I was done with that. I was about to explode. Being back in the trailer park reminded me of what these people had done to Desi—and would keep doing, if someone didn’t show them the path to righteousness. I wandered over to a trailer that looked uninhabitable and saw the glow of a TV through the window. I picked up a weathered piece of two-by-four and walked back to the Corvette.

  “He might have a gun,” said Ron.

  “Yeah, you’re right. Go stand over there,” I said, nodding across the street. Ron retreated to the shadows, and I swung the piece of wood like it was a Louisville Slugger. I had played most of my professional baseball career under the designated hitter rule, so I didn’t get many at-bats. It gave pitchers a lot of room for bravado, to talk up their slugging ability when they never really had to face up at home plate. But it also meant there was a lot of pent-up energy, for all the grand slams that never were. I put all my home runs never taken into that piece of wood, and swung for the bleachers. The side mirror on the Corvette took flight, long and true, into the middle of the blacktop some fifty yards down the road. I gave myself a little whistle and waited, but no one came out. I wandered around the car and tried switch-hitting. This time I just connected, smashing the mirror but not moving the housing at all. My second try at it took the housing off and sprayed it into the window of a nearby trailer.

  “Ah, foul ball.”

  I dropped the wood onto the ground and stepped back into the shadows on the opposite side of the road from Ron. The trailer next to me rocked violently and two guys charged out, bouncing off each other in their haste. A third guy ran to the car and inspected the damage.

  “Are you kidding me?” he screamed. He looked up the street, then spun the other way, as if the perpetrator was dumb enough to be standing in the middle of the road.

  “I am going kill whoever done this! Look at my car, man.”

  The other two guys hung back with their palms in the air. This told me two things. One was that the angry dude was the guy I was looking for, and two, the other two guys were probably not packing heat. El Tiburon certainly was. He snatched a big silver piece from his belt and waved it around like he was Pancho Villa.

  “Find them!” he screamed. “They got to be here somewhere.”

  “Holy crap,” I said, stepping out of the shadows.

  El Tiburon spun and pointed the gun at me.

  “Who the hell are you?” said El Tiburon.

  “Did you see what that guy did? He smashed your car for a home run.”

  “Who did this? Tell me!” he yelled, waving the gun at everyone.

  “That guy, he ran down there,” I said, pointing along the street.

  “Where?”

  “There. He hit your mirrors for a home run, dude. With this thing.” I bent over and picked up the two-by-four. I held it up for El Tiburon’s buddies to see.

  “See, he used this. Like a bat.”

  “Find him!” El Tiburon screamed at his guys.

  “He just swung it like this,” I said, and I hefted the wood for one last swing, hard and true and straight into El Tiburon’s face. It wasn’t subtle in any way, but I wasn’t messing with a lunatic with a gun. And I had a little energy left that I needed to use up. I could have tried just talking to him, but these guys never seem like the diplomatic type. El Tiburon fell like a dead weight onto the grass, dropping the weapon. I picked it up. It was heavy, and that told me it was loaded. El Tiburon screamed. His nose had exploded as noses do, not a lot of damage but a lot of gore. Shock and awe, of a sort. I gestured for the other two guys to come stand by the Corvette, and they complied. Ron wandered over and patted them down, finding nothing, then I told them to sit on the ground, crisscross, apple sauce. I bent down to El Tiburon and pulled him against the car door.

  “Hey, it’s okay. It’s just blood, all right. You’re not dying, so stop the wailing.”

  “Aaaargh, you hit me. You are a dead man.”

  “Dead man?” I said, holding the gun up. He pulled the volume back to a whimper.

  “What is your name?” I said.

  “El Tibur�
��”

  “No genius, not your stage name. Your real name.”

  “Brandon,” he sobbed, looking at the blood on his hands.

  “Brandon? Are you serious?” I shrugged. “Okay, Brandon. You’ve been selling drugs and organizing illegal bets in this park, correct?”

  “You can’t prove nothing.”

  It was true, but the truth was getting boring, so I smacked Brandon’s forehead with the butt of the gun.

  “I’m not a cop, Brandon. I’m not trying to prove anything. But these things you’ve been doing, they’re going to stop. You don’t come here anymore. You understand?”

  He nodded his head, but I wasn’t feeling full compliance, so I stood, grabbed the two-by-four, and put it through the driver’s side window. Shards of glass rained down on Brandon.

  “Do you understand?”

  This time the nodding was vigorous.

  “If you come back here, I will know. And next time the blood won’t stop. Understand?”

  More vigorous nodding.

  “Okay. One last thing. You are not some criminal genius. You’re running numbers for someone. I need to know who.”

  He shook his head.

  “Brandon?” I said, like a schoolteacher.

  “I don’t run nothing, man. I just recruit. I just tell ’em where to go, and I get a finder’s fee. That’s all.”

  “And where do you tell them to go?”

  “The fronton. They talk to some guys there, that’s it.”

  I knew the guys. Redhead and Baldy. “What about if they are already a customer? What if those guys are not there?”

  “They go to the fronton, they text me. Then I text the van.”

  “The van?”

  “That’s all I know.”

  “Okay,” I said. I pulled Brandon away from the car and laid him down so I could grab his phone and car keys from his pocket. I held up the phone.

  “I’m going to borrow this.” Then I held up the keys. “These I’m taking so you don’t do something stupid. I’ll drop them at the front entry of the trailer park. In ten minutes you get up and you go get them. Anything before, I might just have to shoot you.”

  We left them on the grass, staring hard at the trailer in front of them. I dropped the keys to the Corvette at the edge of the road near the entrance, then Ron and I headed for the Escape. The car was in fine shape, and I waved the gun at the bandanas, just a friendly fellow saying hi. They waved back, which was nice.

  “You know,” said Ron. “For a guy who’s not keen on violence, you’re pretty adept at it.”

  “When you’re in China, you got to speak Chinese. Even if it doesn’t roll off the tongue so nice.”

  “What now?” Ron asked.

  “Longboard Kelly’s. I need a beer.” I put the gun into the console between us. “And Mick will know what to do with this gun so no one ever finds it.”

  Chapter Nine

  THE NEXT MORNING dawned like the one before: wonderfully sunny, but a touch cool if you were Floridian; perfect beach weather if you were from Quebec. The Atlantic coast of Florida had a population that ebbed and flowed like the tide, vast numbers of snowbirds descending from the Northeast and Canada, escaping those brutal winters I had grown up with, for the sun and sea and golf and all-you-can-eat buffets of Florida. I-75 and I-95 were like one-way streets headed south after Thanksgiving, then north in March and April. The town traffic came and went with the snowbirds, too, and we found ourselves cruising down A1A at no more than ten miles per hour, plenty of time to take in the rows of strip malls and gas stations.

  It was time to get back on the case I was being paid for and check out what was going on with the pelotari’s employers. I had left home without breakfast, Danielle having come and gone in the night, one shift to another, the sheriff’s office busier during the season, just like everyone else. I dropped by my office to collect Ron, who sat on the steps of our building in the shadow of the massive courthouse complex. Our building was newer than anything around it and suited the other tenants—lawyers, bankers, some companies with those names made up by joining two unrelated words or the names of your kids—better than us. Ron stood as I pulled up, brandishing a couple coffees and a bag of bacon and egg bagels. At our breakneck speed through West Palm, we had plenty of time to eat.

  We were rubbing our hands with napkins as I pulled into the near-empty parking lot at the Jai Alai and Casino. Ron and I wandered into the front entrance, once more startled by the lack of slot machine noise. Card games were pretty quiet if you thought about it, even more so when there was only one table open and no one playing at it. The few cars in the lot had brought their owners for the buffet breakfast.

  “I’m gonna take a look around,” said Ron.

  “I’ll find you after,” I said, slipping between tables, toward a hallway that was marked administration. The hall was guarded by a big unit with an unruly haircut, the kind of scruffiness one never saw in a Vegas casino—at least not on the strip.

  “I’m here to see Mr. Almondson,” I said.

  “You got an appointment?” said the big unit, sweating with the effort.

  “Yeah.”

  The guy blinked hard at me, then nodded as much as a human with no discernible neck can. “Okay. There’s the elevator.”

  I wandered past and hit the button for the elevator, then turned to look at the guy. He was facing the casino floor, empty as it was, not worried about me at all, which told me plenty. I left the elevator to do its business and hit the fire stairs. This wasn’t the Empire State Building. I was pretty certain I could make it to the second floor under my own steam. I did just that and found myself in a small reception lobby. There was a desk with a box on it, and a note to hit the button in the middle of the box to call someone. I did that, then looked around. The room did not fit my idea of a casino HQ. It looked like a thousand small business offices—lawyers or tech start-ups or film production companies, any business that was on its way but had not yet cashed up enough to find nicer custom digs. The furniture was well tended but well used, and the artwork consisted of shots of people holding poker hands, mouths open, amazed that they were winning.

  A small woman with a tight bun came out from one of the offices and gave me the Florida smile. It’s true we get our fair share of grumpy folks, especially in season, when the snowbirds bring their moans and groans with them. But most people who come to Florida, and those who choose to stay, do so because they like it. They like swimming in winter, they like grilling year-round and they like pleasant evenings on the lanai of their two-bedroom efficiency unit with golf course glimpses. This small woman was no different. Her smile told me she had grown up somewhere cold, and even on its worst day, this was a whole lot better.

  “Can I help you, sir?”

  “Good morning,” I smiled. “My name is Miami Jones. I’m an investigator representing employees of the casino in a workplace complaint. I was hoping for a moment of Mr. Almondson’s time.”

  The skin between the woman’s eyebrows pinched some, and she nodded. “Let me check for you.”

  She stepped back into her office and I waited. Without an appointment, I found the possibility of workplace revolt opened a lot of business doors. The woman reappeared and smiled again, this time a little less genuine. She ushered me in the door and led me to the end of the hall, to the big office in the corner. She knocked and we went in.

  The office was massive but sparely furnished. A desk with one chair on either side, a smaller round coffee table with two arm-chairs, and nothing else. The pictures on the wall were all of building exteriors, casino projects, lit up like Christmas. The wall behind the desk was floor-to-ceiling glass and overlooked the rear of the parking lot and the freeway. The man who came out from behind the desk was surprising in a couple of ways. Everything I had seen in the casino wore the stench of being well past its prime—downmarket, you might say. But this person was anything but downmarket. Sharp pinstripe suit that fit like a glove, clearly bespoke an
d tailored by someone who knew what they were doing. The second surprising thing was that the man wasn’t a man at all.

  “I am Jenny Almondson,” she said, extending her hand with a tight smile. As we shook, I got a good dose of a fruity scent. She smelled as good as she looked.

  “Miami Jones,” I said.

  “You’re here about some kind of workplace issue?”

  “Of a fashion.”

  “Please,” she said, directing me to the solitary visitor’s chair by her desk.

  “Would you care for coffee?” she said, striding around the desk to her own chair.

  “Ice water?” I said, and she nodded to the woman with the bun, who bowed her head and left the room.

  “Who is it you represent?” she asked.

  I looked her over. She had shoulder-length blond hair, well groomed, that fell across one ear. In the other ear I saw a gold earring, two strands that wrapped around each other, like a model of DNA. She wore little makeup, but what was there was effective. I guessed her to be around forty, but with women’s ages I always gave myself a margin of error of plus or minus twenty years. All in all, she was a very beautiful woman.

  “Are you all right?” she asked, when I failed to respond to her question or take my eyes off her.

  “You’re a woman.”

  She smiled. “You’re very observant.”

  “The casino website just refers to you J. Almondson, no photo.”

  “Does it make me less capable of assisting you, that I’m a woman?”

  “Not at all,” I said. “I guess I just had a preconception about what a casino manager would be.”

  “Yes, I love those preconceptions.”

  It was then I noted the accent. She was a transplant. New York, maybe Jersey. The woman with the bun came back with ice water for me, and an espresso for Almondson.

  “So, you were trying to remember who you represent,” Almondson said.

  “Yes. Did you know that some of your staff have received death threats?”