Hard Case Crime: Dutch Uncle (13 page)

Harry said, “I never killed anybody.”

It woke up Aggie. She had her arm across his chest, her face right up next to his. She said, “You’re having a bad dream.”

“I never killed anybody,” he said. He was awake, too. He found Aggie’s eyes in the dark, and he said it a third time, to her and not to the night, “I never killed anybody.”

Harry climbed out of bed while it was still dark and made a pot of coffee. Aggie followed him into the kitchen. Pulling out a chair, she fixed her eyes on Harry’s with a sleepy look of accusation, like he’d done something wrong.

Which he had. He’d done lots of things wrong.

He told her exactly the way it happened, told her about Leo and Manfred and the Surfside fags, how when he got back to Manfred’s hotel with Manfred’s money, there was the old Dutch Uncle on the floor with a bullet in his head.

He’d have liked to leave Julia out of this, but the reason he was in Florida at all was directly related to Julia, and the whole truth of it was, yes, it started with a woman.

This was about two years ago. Harry got a beep from somebody who needed half an ounce dropped off at a party on Spring Street. The party was stocked with chicks wearing black dresses that clung to their hips and made their legs look longer. They did the Bump with guys who were losing their hair, dressed in khaki pants, sporting wire-rimmed glasses with smudged lenses.

Pulling a Rolling Rock from a garbage pail full of ice, Harry helped himself to sandwiches and pizza and cookies. He was digging around in a bowl for a potato chip wide enough and thick enough to hold the glob of dip he wanted to smear on it when Julia approached the table. She wasn’t wearing black. Her dress was white with a pattern of roses, flimsy, loose, held up by two thin straps. She was picking over a plate of melon and sliced apple for a strawberry the right shade of ripe for her red, red mouth.

Somebody was yelling in her ear. She ignored him, eyeing Harry as she slid the strawberry between her lips. She set the stem on the tablecloth, then said to the yapping pest in a loud, clear voice Harry was supposed to hear, “Fuck off.”

The guy’s ears darkened, and he slunk back to the dance floor.

Julia asked Harry point-blank if he was the drug dealer.

“I am many things,” he told her, selecting a strawberry of his own, “to many people. Who would you like me to be?”

“Sir Lancelot,” she said. “And I’ll be your Guinevere.”

Harry was a pushover for literary references.

Aggie cut in. “Just like that, huh? Sees a cute guy, delivers a corny line. I suppose she fucked you that first night, too.”

“Hey,” Harry said, loosening up, “who’s telling the story, me or you?”

He brought Julia to a place on Grand Street, where his friend Irish Mike was tending bar. Julia pissed Mike off by forcing him to make her margarita twice because the first one wasn’t sweet enough.

“The drink’s supposed to be tart,” Mike explained. “That’s fresh lime juice.”

Julia said “What?” but Mike told her to forget it.

They sat and drank till last call. Mike was marrying bottles when Julia got up to go to the ladies’ room. He leaned in toward Harry. “Watch that one, kiddo. She’s nothing but trouble.”

“Why, cause she doesn’t like your margaritas?”

“She’s in here all the time with guys who got money,” Mike said. “What the fuck’s she want with somebody like you?”

Julia owned a co-op north of Union Square. The building had a swimming pool on the roof, and the plan was to go skinny dipping, but when they got up there, Julia changed her mind because she said it was too cold. They spent the next eight hours draining her champagne stash and fucking. At one point, they were doing lines off each other’s chests, but that was a detail Aggie didn’t need to know.

Julia grew up on Long Island, under the diamond eye of a stage mother. Child-acting in commercials when she got her break, she was in a sitcom that ran until the actors got too pimply for their parts. It was still in syndication, and every time one of those miserable shows flickered across a screen, Julia got paid. She had four bank accounts, a stock portfolio, and a financial manager.

She had lost interest in acting, but she wouldn’t have dreamed of having a job. Harry wouldn’t have gone hard on her for that, except her time was completely empty, and he didn’t care how loaded you were, you had to work at something. Look at those society broads. They oversaw pet charities or rounded up money for kids with cancer. Their energy went somewhere.

This was what he said to Aggie. He never mentioned it to Julia.

An ordinary day started between one and two. Harry’d go make some low-key moves, flag down some cash, iron out the wrinkles in whatever the next thing was, while Julia ate lunch with her girlfriends and shopped. Around five, they’d hook up for cocktails in the most up-to-the-minute trend-o-mat. Eat dinner in some other restaurant. They got written up in a gossip column where Harry’s name was misspelled. They were on the circuit.

Harry was raking a healthy profit off of Julia’s friends, plus some jobs he did on the side, helping Jimmy De Steffano move hot TVs and VCRs from the warehouse where he worked. But all his money was going on these cocktail hours and dinners and nightclubs where he hated the music. That was another thing: For all the money the selfish bitch had, Julia never went into her pocket for a dime. Not for a cup of coffee, or a drink, or a cab ride, nothing. Her money was her money. She expected Harry to spend his money on her. And he did, all for the privilege of fucking her, which, as the situation deteriorated, he was doing less and less.

Julia decided she needed a break. Though it was July, she had her mind made up on Miami Beach. Harry went along with it, figuring the town would be dead. He pictured himself on an empty beach, Julia rubbing oil into his shoulders, but they landed in a neon-charged netherworld combusting with flashy hipsters untroubled by a single thought and a Eurotrash factor that made Soho feel like a mall in Topeka. There were a bunch of them in on it, this goofy road trip. Julia’s whole circle was there.

It started in a Mexican restaurant. Harry was picking at a plate of quesadillas, and Julia was drinking margaritas and doing blow with a friend of hers named Yves. It would be just like Julia to trot out her boarding school French for this frog, and he corrected her when she needed it. Frequently. They giggled and played knees-y on the banquette.

Harry wasn’t drinking, but when they got to Lefty’s, a velvet rope dive, he ordered a double Dewar’s and a beer, and lost Julia and Yves in the crowd. An hour and two doubles later, he found them. Yves with his hand up her skirt. Julia’s tongue in the Frenchman’s mouth.

He shoved his way across the dance floor and said, not to one or the other, “What am I, some kind of fucking asshole?”

Yves made Julia step away, like he had an idea he was going to get tough. He started to say something in his fractured English, and Harry popped him with a left and a right and followed with a hook that missed because Yves was on his ass, looking up.

The big difference between the South Beach fight and the brawl at Sailor Randy’s was this: Harry got beaten like a borrowed mule.

He held his own against the bouncers, who were big and slow and didn’t know how to fight, but they pinballed him out the door, which is where he laid nine months of time on the jaw of Officer Kenneth Simms, then half the Miami Beach police force used him as a punching bag. This was the way he lost his teeth, if Aggie was wondering.

The weeks before his trial felt like one long day. He kept hoping Julia would appear, serious and sorry, a cashier’s check in her purse, but Julia and that moment never arrived, and before long he was pulling nine months of a year bid, including time served, twenty-three days.

The judge would’ve let Harry slide on the bullshit possession rap if he hadn’t punched Simms into the X-ray room, but his public defender, whose angry African-American-ness didn’t help Harry at all, refused to plea him out. This pissed off the judge like a charm, and when he handed down the sentence, he wasn’t even looking at Harry. He burned slow, shaking his head at the black PD.

“This is the problem,” he told Aggie. “My entire life has been getting fucked up and stealing and fighting, but it’s starting to feel less and less like me. You know what I’m saying? That fight at Sailor Randy’s? Last thing I wanted to have anything to do with.”

“That’s what Bryce pays you for,” Aggie said. “You were doing your job.”

“That’s what I mean. When I was moving blow, I was doing my job. When I was stealing TVs, I was doing my job. I don’t want to do jobs like that.”

Which presented a dilemma. He didn’t know anything else.

One thing he made sure Aggie understood, he never walked in anywhere behind a gun, and he never threatened to hurt anybody if they didn’t give up their wallet or their watch. That didn’t mean he wouldn’t lift a wallet on a rush-hour bus, but that was a different kind of crime. Any job that involved a gun, it wasn’t for him.

Using the gun, that is. He sold lots of guns. There was a good buck in that.

Sometimes he thought he might actually do something to change his life, but what? Unlike a lot of hoods, Harry never dreamed of the Big Score. His thinking didn’t run like that. The hustle was just to get him through one day and into the next. Harry Healy was textbook small time, and he knew it.

“What about your family?” Aggie said. “Your brother, the one on TV?”

Harry was a mistake, born when his mother was fortythree. He had two brothers, ten and fifteen years older. Ernie lived in North Carolina, and Arthur, the big Wall Street man, owned a house on Long Island that Harry used to visit on Christmas.

His mother worked forty years at the phone company, right up till the time she got sick. Diagnosed with liver cancer, she was gone, goodbye, six months. Harry was sixteen.

The old man was a trumpet player. Never had any kind of job besides playing trumpet. He still worked, or anyway was working off and on the last time Harry talked to him. Harry James was the old man’s idol. Harry didn’t get that one. Harry James was a suck-ass trumpet player if you asked Harry.

He hadn’t talked to his father, or his brothers, since, well, he didn’t remember, but it was a good long time.

What Harry had been doing all this time was waiting for something to save him. He didn’t know what. An event, a person, something, some vague thing, was going to pull him up and turn his life around. He usually caved in for the rich-chick-as-savior scenario, which is where he supposed Julia fit, but just look at how that one turned out.

Like after he read that Brooke Astor was dissolving her Foundation, giving away the last of her money before she went down for the long count, Harry thought, If she only kicked a million or so my way, I’d be set. He pictured himself above the fold of the
Times
, beaming, flanking an Ed McMahon-sized check with the ancient Mrs. Astor. Harry had it spec’d out to the shoes he was going to wear.

Maybe he’d waited long enough.

“My family,” Harry said. He let out a breath.

Every time Harry saw her, Darlene was looking better and better. The dermatologist gave her some pills that knocked out that skin condition, and she was coming off trashy and sexy in her cut-offs and halter, her baby-fine hair pulled back like a schoolgirl’s. He waved to her from his end of the driveway as he was letting himself into his room.

Harry had chipped a hole in the wall behind the hot water pipe, covered the hole with masking tape, then slapped some paint that almost matched over the tape. His money was in a Marlboro box in the hole. Winding some small bills around the fifties and hundreds, he stuffed the knot into his jacket and buttoned the pocket flap.

He packed his duffel bag and folded the promotional t-shirts he’d accumulated at Sailor Randy’s. He left the shirts in a stack on the bed. Darlene could help herself to them, cut them in half, some brand new halter tops for the siren of the Wind N’ Sand.

He stuck his head through the window that opened on an alley. All clear. He dropped his bag and climbed out feet first. Cutting through the alley, he walked into some weeds still wet with a rain he didn’t remember, and came out in a parking lot, where Aggie was waiting at the wheel of her Miata.

She wasn’t talking, so Harry went over his story one more time. Leo, Manfred, the Surfside two. What happened, he had no idea, but he didn’t shoot Manfred. Were they clear on that? Because there was a great chance the police were going to want to talk to her before too long.

“And you think you got set up,” she said.

“No,” Harry said. “No extra information. Don’t do their job for them. Let them do it. You don’t know anything. Nothing. You got it?”

She stared at the road, the wind sculpting her short hair into a quiff. Harry had her drive him to Boynton Beach, and when they found the bus station, Aggie went in and bought him a ticket to Philadelphia.

Without the highway to distract them, and with a halfhour wait yawning, the tension was like a bug-zapper crackling over the wheezing of the buses. It attacked Harry’s neck, that tension, but he didn’t want to be the one who spoke first. He didn’t know what to say.

Aggie said, “All I want to know is, where do I fit in?”

Harry flipped his cigarette to the asphalt and said,

“What do you want me to tell you? You don’t.”

He turned his face flush into a slap and he blinked twice, reeling Aggie back into focus. Then he thought of something. What stopped her from rolling right over on him? If she got that in her head, they’d grab him before he got to Orlando.

“Look, I know this isn’t nearly as romantic as you boarding a plane with some hero of the Resistance, and me walking away to run my gin joint.”

She got the reference. She wasn’t digging it.

“The last four weeks, Aggie... I’ve been happier than I’ve ever been. I guess I just wasn’t meant to live like that. I guess God is saying, Harry, you can’t have this kind of life.”

“How moving,” she said. She squeezed back the tears. They came out in spite of her. “Get out.”

“Sweetheart?”