The Lonely Silver Rain Part 12

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?"

She grinned at me. There was one gold filling, way back. "s.h.i.+t, man. Everybody has to be someplace."

w.i.l.l.y said, "It's a load off my mind. I've got everything pretty well straightened out except Briney. And now that's done."

"Have you heard me say yes?" I said.

"Jesus, Nooch. Maybe you came on him too fast. Maybe he's got a girl there to take care of him. Maybe he's married. Maybe he's gay."

"None of the above," I heard myself say.

"You hear about me, you come get her, okay?" w.i.l.l.y asked. "Briney'll have cash money to pay her own way."

"I've never seen anybody so enthusiastic," she said, and walked out.

"What are you trying to do to me, w.i.l.l.y?"

"She sees a dumb bird in a tree singing, it's the greatest bird ever, singing the best song in the world. It sets her up for hours. She hops up for the sunrise, and it starts off the best day she ever had-every day. She hums to herself all the day long. I turn on the TV, she leaves the room. She says it is like living secondhand. Every morning, every night, she stands on her head in a corner fifteen minutes."

"w.i.l.l.y, you can't give people to people."

"You heard me say I'm dying? A dying guy can do what he wants. You hurt her feelings, right? In ten minutes she won't even remember. Okay, you had a reason to come here. You've never come to see me without a reason."

"Do you stay in touch?"

"Guys stop by. We do a little talking. I've been dropping business, spreading it around, mostly unloading it on the people doing the work. All I got left is a little bit of numbers and some sharking that is being paid off slow. So I know mostly what is going on."

"So you lost some friends lately?"

"What I lost was some guys I knew."

"What about Ruffino Marino?"

"One of the ones I knew. Not too bad of a guy. I read once about a cowboy escaping from the Indians. What he did, he walked backward across a sandy place and he had this big leafy tree limb and he brushed out his footprints. That was Big Ruffi. He got big in the Church, and all that. A thousand years ago he was a b.u.t.ton man out of Cleveland, doing invitation jobs in Vegas and Pittsburgh and wherever. So he gets to be a big man in the community, million-dollar condo, wife and four kids, the youngest nineteen and all of them out of the house, and they come in and stick him like a pig."

"Why?"

"I don't know. I heard what people are guessing, though. I heard he tried to put the lid on something Ruffi Junior did. There's a legitimate crazy He wants to be some kind of a hero but he doesn't know what kind. Some girl from a very important South American family that works close with the drug people here, she got herself raped and killed during some kind of drug hustle, and it wouldn't have happened if anybody knew who she really was. Anyway, Ruffi Junior went to his old man and confessed he'd been a part of the scene. He swore he hadn't killed anybody, and didn't know that his pal, Bobby Dermon, was going to kill three people until it was done.

"Big Ruffi was probably sore as boils that his oldest kid was getting into a drug thing after the old man had dry-cleaned the family name. Ruffi Junior had boats, airplones, fast cars, anything he wanted. The old man tried to put the lid on it. After all, his son hadn't killed anybody. It was his son's friend, Bobby. But somehow the whole Latin crowd got word that Ruffi Junior had killed the girl. They came after Big Ruffi and he gave them Dermon.

"They took Dermon someplace and they didn't kill him. I heard they probably took him to a warehouse where it wouldn't matter if he screamed, and they hot-vvired him and kept plugging him in until they got the very same story over and over, and it turned out it had been Ruffi Junior all along. People think that by then Dermon wasn't going to live anyway, so they took a Polaroid shot of him, and they sent the photo and the tape to Big Ruffi and they put Dermon into a condo foundation one of them was building down past Dinner Key. They asked for Ruffi Junior. Big Ruffi said he was gone, and he didn't know where. Frank Pochero had been involved in the Dermon thing, so they threw a grenade into his convertible. Then Hanrahan was blown up on general principles, and it spread from there. A war, like old times."

"Now it's quiet?"

"I hear it is quiet but it is tense. Big Ruffi got it for trying to put the lid on and not telling them where to find his kid."

"Why all the others?"

"Why not? All it ever was was a working arrangement. When it starts to come apart, then people get what maybe they asked for in other deals a while back. Maybe short weight or short money-just a suspicion, not enough to rock the boat for. Once it opens up you pay back old scores. And new ones."

"Anybody have any idea where Ruffi Junior is?"

"n.o.body knows. Maybe he's in Toronto, or maybe he's in Tampa. Wherever he is, he's scared s.h.i.+tless. He's sending out for food, booze and broads."

"He wasn't at the Ma.s.s."

"So I heard. n.o.body thought he'd be there, but they covered it anyway. You were there?"

"I kind of want him."

"Do yourself a favor. You get a line on him, don't dirty your hands. Call me and I'll get the word to the right place."

"It's a little more personal than that."

"Why should it be personal?"

"I got to the three people he killed before the law did."

He smiled and shook his head. "You are a nutcake like Ruffi Junior. Not the same kind, but just as nutty. What are you? The Spotless Avenger? Whyn't you go find work in a comic book? Ruffi is a sad sorry little creep who can't walk past a mirror without stopping and smiling at himself."

"Okay. Maybe, if I find him, maybe I'll call you."

There was a sudden twist of pain on his face, a spasm of one arm. He smiled again. "Don't take too long. Go get Briney."

I found her in the kitchen. She hurried to him. "A bad one, kid," he said. She trotted out of the room and came back with a hypo kit. She flipped his robe open, turned him to expose a wasted haunch and shot him, scrubbed the place with cotton dipped in alcohol.

w.i.l.l.y said apologetically, "It's spread to places where it hurts. Listen. McGee. You've got everything. Don't p.i.s.s your life away because you got some kind of blues. Honest to G.o.d, I never started to live until I found out I was dying. You promise you'll come get Briney?" His voice was getting slurred. She was where he could not see her, bobbing her head violently at me, frowning.

"Who am I to turn down something like that?"

"Atta boy. That's using the old..." And the next inhalation was a snore.

She walked over to a chair and dropped into it, crossed her arms, lowered her chin to her chest. I saw one tear fall to her lap. She raised her head and gave me a sweet sad smile. She spoke softly. "He was really glad to see you. I'm glad you came. I hope you'll come back soon. Please. He is not all that glad to see some of the other people who visit him. Some of them are very weird. Some of them, I have to leave the room while they talk. Thanks for telling him you'd come after me."

"It's a pretty strange offer."

"He's a funny old guy. He thinks I'm some dumb little kid he has to find a foster home for. Stuff is an old buddy of his. Stuff heard he was very depressed and he'd have to have around-the-clock nursing or go into a nursing home to die. So he sent me like a present. Only what he did was give me round-trip airfare and ten thousand dollars to come cheer w.i.l.l.y up, make him feel part of life again. It took a little while but I nudged him out of it. He can accept dying now. We talk about it. He's beginning to think of it as some kind of an adventure. A trip. He hates the needle because it takes him out of it, takes away some of what he has left. He hates to sleep at night. He talks to me about the old days. He hasn't got anybody else in the world. That must really be h.e.l.l on wheels, to have n.o.body at all. He says he wasted his whole life and if he gets another life to live, it'll be different."

"I've never heard of a better present."

She shrugged. "So you do what you can. I gave him Demerol, so he'll be out four hours. Do come back."

She took me to the door. I looked back at her and said, "People are always giving you presents and then taking them back."

She winked at me. "Ain't it h.e.l.l?"