Part 12 (1/2)

Sixteen.

A FRIEND Of a friend of an independent motion picture distributor in Miami found me a glossy eight-by-ten publicity shot of young Ruffino Marino in full living color. The typed data stuck to the back told me I was looking at Mark Hardin, the star of the newest release by Feature Masterworks, Inc., ent.i.tled Fate's Holiday.

Ruffi looked directly into my eyes. He was handsomely tanned. He had a very large amount of s.h.i.+ny black hair that curled around his ears, hiding all but the lower lobes. He had long eyelashes, a smallish puffy mouth with the lips parted just enough to reveal the gleam of wet teeth, very white. Black hair was combed across the broad tanned forehead. He wore one eyebrow higher than the other. Sort of quizzical. He had a cute cleft in his chin. He wore a gold choker chain of a size useful for restraining Great Danes. He had long hollows in his cheeks and a fuzzy hollow in his throat. His eyes looked wet, like his teeth.

But the film star did not attend his daddy's Ma.s.s. A lot of cops were there, and a lot of burly men in civilian clothes who kept whipping their heads from side to side, looking at everything. A lot of women in veils. A lot of important-looking couples arriving by private limo. Very, very few politicians. Very, very few public figures. Had he died of a coronary on the seventeenth hole at the club, all the politicians would have been there.

We had a third-floor front room in a hotel diagonally across the boulevard from St. Matthew's. The day was clear and bright. We both had binoculars. We looked for people the same size as Ruffi. We looked for anybody scooting in, hiding his face. We watched them go in and we watched them come out, the family last of all. Ruffi hadn't been able to make it.

On the way back in my blue pickup Meyer voiced the opinion that Ruffi might be way off to our right somewhere, wedged into a drum which had later been filled with wet cement, allowed to harden, and rolled off the deck of a coastal freighter. And perhaps a picture of him in the drum, prior to cementing him in, had been delivered in Lima.

”I'm sorry you had to say that, Meyer. I've been thinking it, but I hoped n.o.body would say it. I mean, it would be a nice thing to know, but d.a.m.n little chance of getting to know it for sure. And unless I know it for sure, I am going to have to go around flinching at every little noise behind me.”

”No sources? n.o.body to ask?”

”I thought of w.i.l.l.y Nucci, but last I heard he was retired. He sold the howl and he was going to travel, but he got sick, they say. I think hels still in Miami. Things change a lot faster than they used to. I don't know who to ask anymore.”

”Maybe I can find out where w.i.l.l.y is.”

”You, Meyer? How!”

”Details of the sale. It had to be a big dollar value. Trace it through public records. Dade County Courthouse records. How long back?”

I had to think about that, and relate it to other things that had happened in my life. ”Right about two years, maybe a little less.”

It took Meyer all of Monday and half of Tuesday to nail it down. He went there, back and forth, on a Trailways bus. Meyer likes riding buses. He says it is the ultimate privacy. n.o.body ever talks to you. You sit high enough to look over the tops of the cars and the bridge railings and see the world. You can read and think. He says tourists on cruises get off their luxury vessels and clamber onto buses, paying large fees to stare at the foreitgn scenery while somebody yaps at them about what they are looking at over a PA system so dreadful they catch one word in three. He says he has seen things out of bus windows so absurd, so grotesque, so fantastic, that riding the bus is sometimes like gliding through someone else's dream.

But he came back with the information that I could find w.i.l.l.y Nucci in #4 at 33 Northeast 7th Street. The compangy that had made the sale had been WiNu Enterprises, from whom w.i.l.l.y, as a private citizen, had purchased the first mortgage. The mortgage money was paid into w.i.l.l.y's account al a branch of the Sun Banks. When cash withdrawals were made, a young woman with a limited power of attorney would bring w.i.l.l.y's check to the branch bank and be given the cash.

On Wednesday the thirtieth, I picked up a rental Buick from my local Budget outlet and drove down. I felt better in the rental than in the blue truck. Miss Agnes was too conspicuous and too well known. I wondered if I should get rid of her. And also unload the Busted Flush and the Munequita. They were signs and symbols of my lingering adolescence. I could make do with rent-a-car, rent-a-boat, rent-a-girl, rent-a-life. Anything busts, mister, you get hold of us right away and we come over and replace whatever it is. You can buy full insurance coverage right here, so you'll never have another worry. Lose a friend and you can replace him or her with a working model, same size, age, education and repartee. Lose or break yourself and we will replace you too, insert you right back into the same hole in reality from which you were ejected.

It was a smaller street than I expected, and it wandered aimlessly under old trees. Number thirty-three was old Moorish, a faded orange-yellow with vines crawling on it, looking for cracks. There was an ornamental iron fence around the small yard, and a walk that bisected the yard and went up three steps to two doors under an overhang. One and two ”are on the left, three and four on the right. Beside the four was an arromw pointing up, and a b.u.t.ton. I pushed the b.u.t.ton.

A, woman's voice came out of the little round speaker. ”Whizzit?”

”McGee. Travis McGee to see w.i.l.l.y Nucci.”

”Sec.” In a little while the door buzzed and I went in and up narrow stairs. There was a window of fixed gla.s.s at the top of the stairs, looking east, looking across a broad reach of bay toward the concrete puzzle of Miami Beach. Down below was a walled garden, beautifully tended.

I tapped on the door and a big girl let me in. She was a standard-issue plastic pneumatic blonde with wide happy blue eyes, sun-streaked hair, snub nose, smiling mouth and a suggestion of overbite. She wore a white knee-length T-s.h.i.+rt, and across her substantial b.r.e.a.s.t.s were the big red letters M A S C 0 T.

”Aren't you the big one!” she said. ”Come on in.”

”We make some kind of matched set,” I said.

”Get off that already!” w.i.l.l.y said in a frail voice. He was grinning at me from a nest of bright pillows on an oversized couch. I hoped I hadn't revealed the shock I felt upon seeing him. w.i.l.l.y has always been a small man, pale and scrawny. Now he looked about as big as a starving child. His hair was gone and the yellow skin was pulled tight to the skull shape. We had done a little business from time to time in years past. He had always been cool, remote, careful. I was one of the very few who knew that he actually owned the hotel he worked at.

Now here he was, grinning at me, delighted to see me-a character change. The handshake was like taking hold of a few little breadsticks.

”Pull up a chair, McGee. Tell me what you're doing for laughs.”

”Come to think of it, I haven't been laughing very much lately, w.i.l.l.y.”

”Having no fun?”

”Not very much.”

”Then you're not thinking good. There's a Hungarian proverb: Before you get a chance to look around, the picnic is over. What'll you drink?”

”A beer would be fine.”

”I got Carta Blanca.”

”Better than fine.”

”Briney, get my friend McGee a Carta Blanca, love.”

She left the big room. I looked around at it. ”Great place here, w.i.l.l.y.”

He shook his head. ”I was going to live great. Everything I wanted. The timing was terrible.”

”I heard you were sick.”

He grinned at me, a merry grin. ”What I'm doing here is dying. Right before your very eyes. I was getting chemotherapy, but I finally had them stop that s.h.i.+t. The only way I could be halfa.s.s comfortable was smoke pot all day, and that fogged up my head so I couldn't keep track of anything. Where I got it is in the pancreas, and I don't even know what that is or what it does. Or used to do.”

Briney brought the beer in a big frosty mug. I said, ”Thanks, Briney. What does that stand for?”

”Well, it was Brenda and then Brenny and then I got hung up on surfing and I was out there all day riding waves and so it was Briney. Like salt.”

”California meat,” w.i.l.l.y said in that whispery voice. ”Stuff Greenberg sent her to me as a free gift. You ever meet him? No, I guess you wouldn't. She owed him one and he owed me one, and so it goes. What I'll do, McGee, if you're going sour, I'll will her to you.”

”Human bondage is against the law,” I said. ”McGee,” he said in his tiny voice, ”she's had nurse training. We had her twenty-fifth birthday party last week. She's healthy as horses and she can cook anything you can think up, and she keeps this place clean, and she loves to eat and sleep and cook and dance and sunbathe.”

I stared at him and then at her. ”You're serious?”

”What am I going to do?” he said. ”I send her back to Stuff, I'm ungrateful. Almost everybody I know is a mean b.a.s.t.a.r.d except you. You are mean too, but in another kind of way than the other guys. And if you're not having any fun, she'll be a nice change for you.”

”Don't you have any say in this?” I asked her.

”Where do you live, McGee?” she asked.

”In a houseboat at Bahia Mar in Fort Lauderdale.”

”Hey, I've never lived on a boat! Neat-o!”

”Don't you have something you'd rather do? Someplace you'd rather go?”