Lush Life: An Artie Deemer Mystery (10 page)

“That’s the R-r-ruff Dog, right?”

“No, but he looks like the R-r-ruff Dog,” I said without looking up. “Lot of people mistake them.”

“Come on, that’s the R-r-ruff Dog. And you’re Artie Deemer.

“Who are you?”

“I’m Chet Bream.” Unbidden, he sat down beside us and began to pet Jellyroll. “I’m a journalist. It’s my job to know people.”

“Could you go do it somewhere else?”

He didn’t move. He was a skinny-faced guy with freckles, a long lower lip, and close-set eyes that darted around my head, only seldom settling on mine. At first I thought this was another Jellyroll proposal. Somebody or other always wants a piece of him for self-serving purposes. Local TV idiots from all over the country want to “interview” him, make faces and cock their heads the way he does while they ask him stupid questions. They make him appear ridiculous, a clown, and his innocence in the face of that exploitation (not totally different from my own) depresses me. I always say no. I started to say no now—

“So how’s Crystal taking it?” he said.

“…What?”

“Weems’s death.”

“Beat it.”

“I’ve been following a story on the CIA and the financial community. More precisely, the CIA in the financial community.”

I didn’t say anything.

“That joker from yesterday in the lime-green getup, he was a cop, right? He wasn’t federal, right? He was a local cop, right? Only a cop would dress like that.” Eyes darting east and west, he whipped a tube of ChapStick out of his shirt pocket and smeared his lips with jerky, birdlike motions. “Mind telling me what he’s investigating?”

“Yeah.”

“I can understand your reticence. Guy sits down with you and your dog at the beach—incidentally, I’m a big fan of his—and starts asking you questions. Besides, the press isn’t held in the highest esteem of late. I can understand that. But I’m alternative press. I first came across Crystal down in Miami in the mid-eighties. You got to understand what Miami was like in those days. Your standing in certain social circles, your hipness quotient, was determined by how much dirty money you had around you. Narco-terrorists, savings and loan crooks, crazy spooks, deposed dictators, crooked developers with politicians in their pockets, gunrunners, stock manipulators—they were the cream of the social crop for a time. It was hip to have a hit man to dinner and talk about him behind his back. Cocaine was the lingua franca. It was Reaganomics strung out on one-hundred-percent-pure pixie dust. Coke, money, and bloated corpses in the canals.” He spoke a mile a minute like a speed freak, but this guy wasn’t stoned. He was just intense.

“Back in Miami there was this bank called Tropical Trust. Trammell Weems ran but did not own Tropical Trust. Everybody knew Tropical Trust was a laundry. What are you gonna do with six million bucks in twenties? Rent a U-Haul and take it to Trammell Weems at Tropical Trust. Dry-cleaning while you wait. As a result, Trammell was a local celebrity. Here was this charming, urbane cat, rich, socially connected. Rode cigarette boats and polo ponies. And how hip can you get?—he was married to a professional
pool player
from Sheepshead B Bay, Brooklyn, New York!

“In addition to dope money, Miami was the nerve center for all the weird spook activity going down in Central America. And that’s where my story begins. Take a Contra to lunch in Coconut Grove, sell him a Tow missile or two. There were riches for all in the anti-Communism dodge. The spooks were in bed with the narco-terrorists, and everybody had great bundles of illegal bread. The sides blurred. Only the money mattered. Hell, even the Sandinistas needed a bank like Tropical Trust. Through good old-fashioned journalistic digging, I learn that one Reggie Archibald is among the owners of Tropical Trust.” He stopped to slather on another layer of ChapStick. He pursed his lips to spread it around. “That name ring a bell?”

“Reggie Archibald…from ‘The Mayhews’?”

“Yep. Honest Milt Mayhew. Voted TV’s finest citizen, represented all those traditional values that made this nation strong. How about that for irony? Milt Mayhew runs banks for criminals, drug dealers, spooks, and gunrunners. Don’t you love irony? So fucking American. You can’t make up better stuff than that. Especially when you add that Trammell Weems played his son, Timmy Mayhew! That’s the thing I love about this whole story. With these fuckheads, truth is stranger than fiction, if you don’t blanch at the cliché. And I don’t.”

I was growing more depressed with each machine-gun sentence.

“Then it blows. Ka-boom! Tropical Trust goes bust. In 1985 it showed assets in excess of two billion dollars. In 1986 it’s insolvent. Flat broke with one point five billion in bad loans. Where’d all the money go? And why didn’t the Feds know what every cocktail party hanger-on knew for years?

“You wouldn’t have liked to see Crystal Spivey when they hauled her away in handcuff s. She looked like death warmed over. Turns out she was a pill freak, totally strung. That was to be her defense. She doesn’t know a thing. Too stoned.

“But defense was unnecessary, because the case suddenly got dropped. Why? Lack of evidence. I saw the evidence—I got friends in the DA’s office—it was ironclad. So I recognize right there that we’re dealing with more than crooked bankers and seamy depositors. We’re dealing with the
big fix
. I mean bi-ig. I’m talking the halls of government! I’m talking Justice, State, what’s quaintly called the intelligence community, maybe even the Oval fucking Office! I mean, nobody would kick up a fuss if Trammell Weems and his lovely wife Crystal went down, but if Trammell goes down, chances are Reggie Archibald’s gonna go down, too. It’s gonna come out that Tropical Trust is just one in a string of banks secretly run by old Reggie, and they’re all as crooked as Tropical,
and
they’re all connected t to some very heavy folks. In short, Artie, this is the story of the fucking decade!”

I sift ed morosely through the seaweed with a stick. “Then why don’t you go write it? You’ll probably get a job with Ted Koppel. What do you need me for? Or Crystal?”

“You want proof?”

“No, I don’t want proof. I want peace.”

“Well, proof is right at your fingertips. Trammell Weems gets busted for bank fraud, but all charges get dropped. What’s he do? Fade away, fortunate to have gotten out with his ass intact? Not our Timmy Mayhew. He moves to New York and opens VisionClear Bank and Trust. See what I’m getting at? This is a federally insured bank. Artie, the same people who ordered the Tropical Trust charges dropped approved VisionClear.”

“What did you say your name is?”

“Chet. Chet Bream.”

“You’re not listening to me, Chet.”

Finally his eyes rested on mine. “You want to know what this has to do with you, right? Patience, I’m getting to that. What we got here is different from your average corruption conspiracy in several ways. One, it’s bigger and juicier, but that’s not its main
distinction. Its main distinction is that there’s a smoking gun. I admit that my story came to a dead end. It’s very tough to follow covert money. That’s why they make it covert. But then I get wind of the smoking gun.” He paused, peered at me.

Clearly, it was my turn to ask, “What smoking gun?” but I didn’t. I continued to sift seaweed.

Chet didn’t let that stop him. “What smoking gun?” he said. “A smoking gun in the form of a videotape. Picture this scene: poolside, summer, the water shimmers in the sun. Several guys are sitting outdoors at a round table under a green canvas umbrella. There’s a garden party going on around them, tight bodies in tiny bathing suits. However, the guys at the table aren’t participating in the revelry.

“Since you’re so busy, I’ll get down to the dramatis personae in the tape without further ado. There’s five men sitting under the green umbrella. There’s Trammell Weems, looking really slick in Bermuda shorts and an open-necked shirt. There’s Reggie Archibald, who weighs in these days at about three hundred and fifty pounds. And then there’s three other colorful fellows. Let’s focus down on them—” But first he needed another hit of ChapStick.

“One, you got Handsome Danny Barcelona. Handsome Danny got busted back about ’eighty-five here in NYC along with Sammy ‘The Neck’ Randolucci and a half-dozen other overweight wiseguys. But the Feds couldn’t make it stick.

“Two, you got a very shady figure, a man of many identities. He was identified to me in Miami, by a source I’m not at liberty to divulge, as one Anthony Bonaventure. My source offered compelling evidence that Bonaventure ran a cell of anti-Castro bankers trying to undermine the Cuban economy by shooting it full of counterfeit pesos. I did some research on Senor Bonaventure. You don’t do that kind of research in the public library, so I had to depend on certain questionable sources for information. Under the name Captain Norman Armbrister, U.S. Navy, he served in a
secret cadre that ran incursions into Cambodia as early as 1967. Well, they got caught out in the open one day and had the shit shot out of them. Only one man came back—Norman Armbrister. Seems he walked back across the border with the top of his head blown off. It took him two weeks. This made him a spook star. The man sitting at that table under the green umbrella is leaning forward. You can see the top of his head—there’s the scar plain as day.” Chet paused for a dose of ChapStick.

“Now let’s look at the fifth man at the table. The camera’s stationary, and the fifth man’s sitting with his back to it. He’s a distinguished gentleman in a pin-striped suit, with silvery gray hair. Who is he? Who’s that fifth man? I haven’t been able to identify him yet, but I’m working on it.

“There’s an audio portion to the tape. The sound quality’s not great, but it’s good enough. They’re talking about the means of security for deposits in Archibald’s off shore banks. Tiny—oh, I forgot to tell you, speaking of irony, that they call him
Tiny
Archibald—Tiny’s telling these hoods and spooks how to launder their cash and then how to get it overseas where no questions will be asked. It only runs about seven minutes, but it is ho-ot stuff! Tiny brags all about his connection to big shots on the federal level, he tells them his associate Trammell Weems will take care of all the details.”

Was that it? I waited to hear. This guy had stopped talking. “I still don’t see what that has to do with Crystal and me.”

“You don’t?”

“No, I don’t.”

“I’m disappointed, I took you for a beach-smart individual. Look at it this way. Trammell Weems was married to Crystal Spivey. Trammell drowns off Crystal’s uncle’s boat. No body was recovered. Whose word do we have to take? One Bruce Munger. I saw Crystal and Munger—not to mention you—together at a pool hall in Chelsea just the other day. You seemed to know each other.”

“We do know each other. That’s no secret.”

“Right, that’s my point. How would it look like to you if you were one of those five fuckers under the umbrella?”

My head was spinning.

“So you might be in danger just because you were in the wrong place at the wrong time. That depends on what you know.”

“Nothing!”

“What about Trammell’s so-called drowning? I was hoping you could shed some light on that.”

“What do you mean so-called?”

“I’m saying his drowning was bullshit. I’m saying it had something to do with that tape. What about this uncle? William Spivey?”

“What about him?”

“Could you set up an interview? I went looking for him, but he’s not at his pool hall or at his home. Maybe you could set something up with him. Crystal probably knows where he is. Come on, strictly off the record. In the interests of justice.”

“Yeah, right, justice.”

Chet Bream paused. He began to cover his knees with handfuls of sand. “I’m interested in justice. These guys piss me off. They’re running their own government, arrogant bastards. They rob federally insured deposits with impunity, and who pays? The poor average taxpayer pays. Ma and Pa Kettle, who can barely scrape together enough to make the monthlies on the Bronco, and everybody gets butt-fucked right on down the line. These guys think they’re above the law, and that puts me right off, Artie. I’m a very patriotic fellow, when you get right down to it. I think this is a great nation if it weren’t for the government and the banks and the secrecy. I want to expose it for the corrupt system it is. Of course, I want to be a media star for doing it, but that doesn’t mean I’m not interested in justice. I’ve just cultivated this cynical attitude over the years. Basically, I’m a shocked innocent.”

I watched him bury his knees. I believed him, but what difference did that make? “Where is this tape?”

“That’s the question. Where is the tape?”

“Who made it?”

“That’s an area I can’t talk about.”

“But you’ve seen it?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“I can’t go into that, except to say that the man who showed it to me had to be identified by his dental records.”

“Terrific. That makes me want to get deeply involved.”

His eyes settled again on mine. “I’m here to tell you you
are
involved.”

I believed him there too, but I held out hope that he was wrong. “What are your plans? Are you going to continue following us around? We’re not going to like that.”

“Yeah, I wouldn’t either…Look, let me talk to Crystal. I didn’t want to barge in on her. Women take a lot of shit these days—it doesn’t work to just barge in on them. You introduce me to her. If she doesn’t want to talk to me, I’ll go away.”

“And stay away?”

“Yes.”

“Promise.”

He gave the Cub Scout oath sign. Then he gave me a card with an address in Chelsea penciled on it.

Jellyroll’s body began to twitch and heave as if he were trying to expel a hot anvil from his guts. Then he began to retch.

“What’s wrong with him?” Chet Bream wanted to know.

We walked back toward Jerry’s house. I wondered how Crystal would take it, me showing up with a ChapStick-junkie reporter to talk about the death of her ex-husband.

“You know, I spoke to this guy Bruce Munger,” said Bream on the way. “He tried to hit me up for a hundred bucks to talk to him.”

“Then you got the right Bruce Munger.”