Hard Case Crime: Dutch Uncle (2 page)

Leo waved to a girl. He pressed the canister into Harry’s palm.

“What’s wrong with a paper sack?” That was the way Harry did it whenever he was holding something the law would rather not have him holding. In a plain brown wrapper, an ounce of blow or a sizzling .38 might just as well be a tuna salad on whole wheat.

“My way’s more creative. That’s the trouble with you, Harry. You’ve got no imagination.”

“I got plenty of imagination, and what I’m imagining is getting my ass busted collecting Manfred’s money and being thrown back inside, only no Dade County lock-up this time, but a big league jolt in a fucking State Penitentiary. That’s what I’m imagining right now.” He put the canister down.

“You don’t wanna do it, don’t do it,” Leo said. “Suit yourself.”

“I didn’t say that,” Harry said. “But I’ve gotta be wondering, what’s in it for you? You know what I mean? What angle’re you working here?”

“Let’s just say I was hung up one time and somebody really helped me out. I believe in karma. I believe in giving back.”

Harry doubted Leo believed in a single thing outside his five senses. But what were his options? Knock over some granny for her Social Security check? He’d never hurt anybody that didn’t have it coming, and he wasn’t about to start. He could hustle pool, but that’d only be good till the other sharks got wise. Besides that, he had no back-up here, he was way off his game, and what if he lost?

Leo took off his shades and posed, the tip of an earpiece to a corner of his mouth. His eyes were the same green as the ocean beyond the asphalt and sand on Harry’s right. He looked at Harry and waited, the kind of guy who wanted to make you think he had all the answers.

Harry had to admit, he was curious about the Manfred-Leo connection. Maybe Manfred would shed more light on it.

He took two Marlboros from Leo’s box, lit one, and slid the other behind his ear.

Never a hard-knuckles hood, Manfred Pfiser directed a thriving import-export business from several outlets in Holland.

After suffering forty-seven years of Flemish latency, two marriages and three children, Manfred charged out of the closet and threw his arms around a lifestyle he was twenty years too old for. He loved his cocaine, piles of it, though only when he was partying, compulsive behavior he reserved for New York and now, Harry guessed, Miami Beach, the ideal hideout for any lateflowering fag.

He reveled in his reputation, playing the role with relish during his sprees, benefactoring dozens of runaways and beefcake queens who always had something nice for their Dutch Uncle when Uncle had something nice for them.

Harry met him working security at one of Frankie Yin’s events at the now shuttered Wonderland. It was easy work for a hundred bucks a night, and Harry was happy to get it. He wished Frankie Yin promoted more parties.

Manfred made Yin’s scene three weeks running and cruised Harry a bunch of times before he screwed up the nerve to actually speak to him. His opening, “You look awfully lonely back here,” was a line he had to repeat twice on account of the thudding blast of Super Sound, and the cartoony accent that made him hard to understand in even the quietest moments. Harry gunned him down politely, letting him know he wasn’t gay, and on top of that Frankie Yin had a strict rule against yapping with the clientele when you were supposed to be working for him.

And that would’ve been it, if fate hadn’t schemed to bring them together the next afternoon at a bagelry near Harry’s apartment. Harry munched eggs and bacon and toast, and a savagely hungover Manfred, bloodshot and wheezing, sipped black coffee and smoked half a cigarette at a time. He concluded the only cure for his misery would be more coke and more booze, and when he asked Harry where he could score and Harry answered “What’s in it for me?” they had the seedling of a working relationship.

Manfred appeared in the doorway dressed in a monogrammed robe that fell just to the tops of his thighs, his sunburnt skin a radish red rushed by Bain de Soleil.

He said, “Harry Harry Harry.” A hefty shot of Ballantine rattled in his hand. “So sad to hear of your recent sorrows, but I only recently learned the news, and why, here you are, among us once again.” He sounded like every bad actor who ever played a Nazi. “You really must control that temper.”

Harry said, “How about we talk inside?”

“Please, please.” He did a hop-step and closed the door. He wasn’t wearing underwear, and as he flounced around the room rearranging chairs, his balls were swinging free outside the robe.

“Let me offer you a toot,” he said, fishing for a vial. “And a drink, please have a drink. Have a drink with your Uncle Manfred.”

He got nellier and nellier the deeper he got into a binge. Auntie Manfred. The graying bags under his eyes hinted at about a thirty-six hour jag.

“I just finished one drink,” Harry said, “which is one more than I need at four o’clock in the afternoon.” He paced to a spot where he thought he’d be comfortable, but he wasn’t comfortable. The darkened room was smoky and frigid, the canned air chemical and stale.

Manfred put the spoon to his nose and sucked up some powder with a wince. “Is this what you call a reunion? Come on, Harry, you can do so much better than this.” He acted like his feelings were hurt, but he always did when he didn’t get his way.

“I’ll tell you what I will take,” Harry said, “is one of those mongrel Dutch cigarettes in the orange pack.”

Manfred said, “Shore,” his accent thick with scotch. He shook a cigarette out and Harry took it.

“So,” Manfred said, “you found Leo? He’s a good boy, Leo.”

“Leo’s a punk. And I’m pissed off with you.”

Manfred clicked his tongue and collapsed on the bed. His robe fell open.

“What is this, some late-breaking bulletin? Leo got locked up with me weeks before my court date, and if somebody, you for instance, had coughed up a couple grand, I wouldn’t have spent the last nine months inside. Do me a favor? Put on some shorts or get dressed or do something so I don’t have to have that dick waving in my face. Don’t tell me this is the first you’re hearing of it.”

“Five days ago when I got to Miami. I swear, Harry. Would I let you suffer like that?” He was pouting now, and Harry didn’t know whether or not to believe him. He walked to the dresser and slipped on a pair of silk boxers. He said, “There. Feel better?”

“When I get off the Beach for good is when I’m gonna feel better. Leo said something about a package.”

“Patience, Harry. Patience, patience.”

Harry’s head was splitting. Manfred was annoying him more than ever, and the roaring air conditioner put a pressure on his sinuses that made him dizzy. “Look,” he said, “let’s get this out of the way. I’m wasting time here.”

Manfred took another slug of scotch. “Your appointment isn’t till tonight. The only product I’ve got now is in this little jar. I’m waiting for delivery.”

“When’s that gonna be?”

“Early this evening. No worries, nephew. We’ll have you on your way by nine o’clock.”

Nine o’clock. Five hours to kill. Wonderful.

The Hotel Fiorella was situated south of 4th Street in a part of town the neon didn’t reach, where the Harleys rumbled off the strip and where no heart-stopping brunettes strutted with portfolios under their arms. It cost thirty bucks a night and Harry was one of two or three current residents who wasn’t getting the tab covered by welfare.

It wasn’t the crazies or cripples, the winos or crackheads, that sickened him about life at the Fiorella, it was the idea of lives that had stopped. Of people who’d fallen over the edge and weren’t coming back. They slumped in the lobby, paralyzed by the television’s buzzing, unblinking eye, chain-smoking and dropping butts on the tiles, butts nobody bothered to sweep up, sixteen hours a day.

One evening, Harry’d seen a red-skinned infant, a week out of the hospital, tops. It hung at its mother’s breast, wailing at the world from the bottom of its tiny lungs. Harry couldn’t stop thinking about that kid. What were the odds it wasn’t going to die in a place exactly like this one, or worse?

With the blinds shut and a chair wedged under the doorknob, Harry calmed in the cool grey of his room. He sank into the rut of the mattress, smoking a Dutch cigarette, the evening ahead unfolding like a movie in his mind. He floated back to Manfred’s hotel through the neon-lit mob, and took directions from the Dutchman. Money in hand after the job, he saw himself sweating out the dawn in some Greyhound station.

He rolled out of the mattress and peeled off his shirt. He dropped to the floor, squeezed off fifty pushups. Harry struck some poses for the mirror, shoulder flex, biceps flex, side view. Jailhouse muscles. He shot a sneer at the mirror, then two jabs and a right, mumbling curses at his reflection. Starting another combination, his left went long and whacked the mirror flush. The mirror shattered.

He ran cold water over his knuckles and lay down again. He thought he was too wound up to sleep, but before long he lapsed into a dream. He was eating a sandwich in a glassed-in café, his eyes traveling over the gardening column of a newspaper. There was a photograph of a tulip, but the caption claimed it was a rhododendron. Harry had no idea what a rhododendron looked like, but the flower in the picture was a fucking tulip if he ever saw one. A guy he thought he knew started knocking on the window, pounding so hard Harry was scared the pane would come crashing in like the mirror had, and then he was awake and somebody outside was hammering on the door.

Harry said, “What time is it?”

“Time for you to either pay up or get the fuck out,” a voice said, and Harry listened as feet shuffled away from the door and down the hall.

There wasn’t much to pack, underwear and socks, some toilet things he threw into a bag, crunching shards on his way out. He took the back exit to an alley, then cut through to the street and into the first sluggish trickle of the throng on Ocean Drive.

If he’d been looped in the afternoon, by the time Harry got back to Manfred’s room the Dutchman was in a fullon frenzy. One hand on his waist, one wrist flapping a faggot burlesque, the whites of his eyes laced with ruptured capillaries that shone pink in the half-light.

The air conditioner was still blasting, and the refrigerated air roiled with cigarette stink and a new offender, a musky cologne Manfred had slathered on. Somebody’d been dispatched to the liquor store. The Ballantine bottle sat drained on a nightstand, but there was a fresh one riding shotgun.

“Okay,” Harry said, “where am I going?”

“You know, Harry, you must never fix those teeth. The gaps, I find them terribly hot.” He brought out a twogram vial. It brimmed. “Tootski?”

Harry glared.

“Do a little bump with your uncle. Harry, for old times.”

Harry turned in his bottom lip. The last thing he needed was a toot. A hit, a bump, a blast. He wiped his palms on his jeans. “You know what, Manfred? I’ll take a drink.”

The bathroom door was open, and the shower was running. Steam humidified the room, and a whiff of the hotel’s brand of shampoo churned in the gumbo of odors. Harry stifled a gag.

He swallowed Manfred’s stingy measure, grabbed the fifth and poured a shot that’d loosen the knot in his gut. The vial was uncapped again, and Manfred held a heaping spoonful under Harry’s left nostril. Harry passed. Manfred pumped the coke into his own head.

“What I need from you is the package and the address, and I need to get this over. I don’t feel good about committing another felony three days out of the joint, and I’d just as soon put it behind me. You know what I’m saying?”

Harry was desperate to get out of the room before whoever it was, the juvie boy-toy, he guessed, climbed out of the shower, but it was already too late. The water quit splashing and he heard the clack of plastic, hooks sliding along the curtain rod. A second later, out stepped a blonde making a show of covering her body with a towel. Two things Harry noticed: her skin tone, basted to a succulent bronze, and her nipples, peaked, brown, peeping over the edge of the towel. How full of changeups could one degenerate Dutchman be?

“Har-ry,” he said, drawing out both syllables like he was calling him from another room, “This is Jennifer.” The old queen pronounced the J like it was a Y, Yennifer. He knew the difference, but he was way past the point of caring.

She played it cute, this chick, making no attempt to pull the towel higher. She took a few things from a suitcase, then glancing at Harry, she went back into the bathroom and clicked the door shut.

“You yum yum,” Manfred slurred. “Shore you can’t spend a few more minutes with your uncle? And Yenny?” He cupped his hand over Harry’s crotch and gave his balls a squeeze.

Harry gave him an easy shove and said, “Will you give it a rest? Are we gonna do this deal, or what?”

Jennifer warbled a Patsy Cline tune from behind the door, way off key. Manfred weaved a circular path toward the closet, really gone, and turned around clutching a double-bagged bundle the size of a bar of soap. He stopped to freshen his drink, and handed Harry the package. “One ounce,” he said. He had one eye closed. The other pinwheeled Harry into focus. “One thousand dollars.”

“What’s the guy expecting to pay?”

“You be a do-right nephew. You don’t fuck around.”

“What’d you say I’m getting paid for this?”

“Come on, Harry. Leo told you the deal. Two hundred bucks.”

Small potatoes all around. Manfred must’ve been doing somebody a favor. Somebody besides Harry. This was embarrassing.

“One more question, uncle. What’s to stop me from beating town with your cash? Seriously?”

Manfred tried to give the impression that he had that angle covered, but Harry saw the possibility was just dawning on him. He blinked twice and said through a squint, “Tragic. Positively tragic. You have no idea how deeply wounded is your uncle.”

He considered. “Of course. There is nothing to prevent you from this terrible deed, nothing but your conscience.” He admired Harry through a single, loving eye. “Dear, dear boy. You would never do such a thing in a thousand years. You don’t have it in you.”

It was a postcard Miami evening. Palm trees rippled with the breeze, the scent of salt water on the air.