Now he was nodding. “Your hair was different.”
“It was long then. You couldn’t believe I’d go in that neighborhood alone, to check on one of my guys.”
He said, “
That’s
where it was. I’ve been racking my brain.”
“I could see that,” Kathy said, beginning to realize it was hard to tell with this guy when he was sincere and when he was laying a line on you. Maybe not so different from her brothers. “Well, it’s been nice.”
No ring. Which didn’t mean anything. Maybe divorced and took his kids to the beach on weekends. There were all kinds of those around. Walking away she turned back and said to him, still in the same place watching her, “You didn’t tell me, do you work out?”
“Once in a while.” He raised his hand and said, “I’ll see you.”
Yeah, but when?
10
L
eanne had said to Bob Gibbs, “When you get home from court today I’ll be gone. I’ll call one of my dear friends”—meaning some nitwit from one of her psychic workshops—”to drive me to the bus station.”
That was the extent of her intelligence, to leave here you took a bus. He told her, trying hard to sound dejected, to take the car if she wanted. Long as he had his pickup.
She said, “Don’t ask if I’m going to the Spring or back to my roots, Luna Pier, Ohio, because I won’t tell you.” She said, “I may not ever speak to you again, Big, for what you did. I hope someday I will have it in my heart to forgive you, but I can’t promise.”
Bob Gibbs said wait now, curious, forgive him for what?
She said, “Having that alligator brought to our house.”
He worked himself up protesting. How could she accuse him of something like that? What would be his reason?
Leanne said, “I don’t believe it was to see me dead, you pass that sentence in court and keep your hands clean. But I know now you want to see me leave, so I will.”
He couldn’t argue with that. Still, he told her she should try opening her heart. Get in touch with her spirit guide and seek her guidance in looking at this situation.
Leanne said, “Wanda Grace is the one told me you had the alligator brought.”
There was no way he was going to argue through Leanne with a twelve-year-old colored girl dead 135 years and hope to come out ahead. He helped Leanne with her suitcases full of rocks and books, and put them in her car.
That was forty-eight hours ago and he hadn’t heard a word from her since. So Bob Gibbs was feeling new life this afternoon in court. He had two sentencing hearings, one of them Dicky Campau up for alligator poaching… but no probation violations, damn it, no chance of the little girl making an appearance. Marialena Reyes was prosecuting. He asked her if she happened to see Kathy Baker in the courthouse. Marialena said no, not today. Bob Gibbs left the bench, everyone rising, stepped into his chambers and told his JA to call the Probation Office and ask for Katherine Baker, he wanted to see her about a matter. Then had a fit when she wasn’t there. “Well, where is she?” His judicial assistant, another Bob, who’d been with him ever since coming to the bench, said, “If they don’t know, Judge, how’m I suppose to know?” Bob Gibbs returned to the courtroom. This time as everyone rose his mood was taking a downward turn.
The first hearing didn’t help any.
It started out looking simple enough. The defendant, a repeat offender, had previously been given ninety days on a burglary of a conveyance, but before going to jail had been allowed thirty days on the street. During this time he was arrested again, twice, on a grand theft auto and a petty theft, stealing a pack of cigarettes. Marialena Reyes said they were dropping the grand theft auto, since they didn’t have much of a case, and would recommend enhancing the defendant’s sentence from ninety days to nine months in the county jail. But the defendant wanted state prison time so he could get his glasses and his teeth fixed, which the police broke when they arrested him on the grand theft auto, now dropped. Marialena Reyes said okay, then she was recommending twenty-seven months DOC time. The defendant said that wasn’t fair, twenty-seven months for stealing a pack of cigarettes? Marialena explained to him he would only do nine of the twenty-seven months; it would be the same as county jail time except he would have a chance to get his teeth and his glasses fixed. The defendant said no, originally he was going to do six months in the Stockade on the burglary of a conveyance and it was reduced to ninety days. So how about giving him eighteen months DOC time and he’d do six? How did that sound?
Up on the bench Bob Gibbs pictured Kathy Baker out at his place, strolling about in a white dress and a straw sunhat as he showed her his flowers, his orchids blooming in trees, watched her expression as she realized what a sensitive man he was, in close touch with nature. He could daydream and still follow Marialena and the defendant—okay, but that was enough. Time to end it. Bob Gibbs banged his fist down hard. He said, “What is going on here?” And to the defendant, “Keep arguing, you’ll do the entire twenty-seven months.” The defendant said, Judge, that wasn’t fair. And Bob Gibbs said, “
Fair
? What’s fair got to do with it?”
They showed utter contempt of the law but expected the system to be fair, which to them meant lenient.
There was Dicky Campau and his wife, Inez, a big ugly woman, in the first row behind the defense table, Dicky expecting his hearing to turn out fair. Get off for doing a favor. Except he hadn’t done the favor the way he was supposed to.
Leaving the bench Bob Gibbs told his clerk he’d be right back. In his chambers he said to his JA, “Call the probation office and get her home address and phone number for me, Katherine Baker.”
“I’m way ahead of you,” his JA said, and handed him a sheet of note paper. “She lives in Delray.”
Bob Gibbs, not caring for anyone to be way ahead of him, said, “Call them back. What I want is for her to phone
me
, at home if not before I leave here.”
“Give them your unlisted number?”
Be fair with the hired help too, show patience.
Bob Gibbs said, “Think about it. How would she call me otherwise?”
• • •
T
he allegation against Dicky Campau was that he had taken a young alligator from the Palm Beach Canal, approximately fifty yards south of Summit Boulevard, killed it and was skinning the tail when apprehended by a sheriff’s deputy. Someone in the neighborhood had called 911 upon hearing gunshots about fifteen minutes earlier.
Dicky Campau had told at his arraignment, he was on his way to Charley’s Crab with a load of fresh frog legs when he saw the gator on the spoil bank, not in the canal, and it was already dead when he stopped and checked. He said he would plead guilty to skinning the tail for meat before it turned as anybody would do that saw it laying there, but he had not killed the gator, a young male just under six feet. That was Dicky Campau’s story. As long as no one had seen him pull the gator out of the water with his snatch hook and hit it over the head with a tire iron, he was sticking to it.
What messed up Dicky Campau’s story, the deputy at the arraignment had testified there was a .22 rifle in Dicky’s pickup and because gunshots were reported he assumed this was the weapon used. Dicky swore that even those couple of times before when he’d been arrested for poaching, he never used a rifle. He testified the deputy had smelled the .22 and
knew
it hadn’t been fired. It must’ve been somebody else saw the gator before he did and shot it for sport. The deputy had said he was not a ballistics expert and Dicky had said, “He’s got a nose, don’t he?”
It was too late now to check the rifle, determine if it had been fired—this had happened over two months ago. They didn’t even know for sure what had killed the gator. But the prosecutor, a Latin woman, kept bringing up the .22 saying we know shots were fired and the defendant was found with a dead alligator and a rifle. What other conclusion can be drawn.
That was the case against him. Like saying the only way to kill a gator was to shoot it. That deputy hadn’t even looked at his tire iron.
Now Dicky Campau waited for Judge Gibbs to come through. Maybe say something about it being unfair to convict a man when all we know he did was cut some tail meat. The judge was looking right at him now.
“In that the defendant understands and appreciates the findings of these proceedings and is capable of entering into a plea… admitting he was in the process of skinning the alligator when apprehended, I have to agree with the state, at least in substance. But, I’m gonna go easy on you, Mr. Campau.”
Dicky liked the sound of that last part.
“I understand you’re a hardworking man with a wife to support. So I’m not gonna give you jail time, deprive you of your means of making a living. Instead, this court fines you five hundred dollars and places you on probation for a period of one year.”
There were legal words after that Dicky Campau didn’t understand, in fact barely heard, even staring right at the judge, who was coming off the bench now, everybody getting up as he left the courtroom. Dicky felt somebody take hold of his arm and knew it was his wife.
Inez said, “Do him a favor and he’ll do you one. That was some deal you made.”
Dicky walked away to get fingerprinted and sign some papers. It gave him time to think, wonder how he was going to raise five hundred dollars without killing another gator. It gave his wife time to think too, because when they were out in the hall and he mentioned it, she said, “That ain’t the way to do it. They catch you now, you go to jail.”
He asked her, “How, then?”
Inez said, “Get it off the judge.”
11
“I
f the judge can work it for you to go to Starke,” Elvin said to Dale, “that’s fine. I can tell you all about how to jail up there. Only I don’t see it happening. You get to Reception at Lake Butler, I doubt they’ll send you there on a first-time five-year deal. I’m talking about Florida State Prison, what we generally call Starke. Or you could get Union Correctional, over west of there not too far. It don’t matter which though, they’re both shitholes.”
They sat in the living room of the house in Delray Beach drinking beer out of longnecks, the only way Dale liked to have his. It wasn’t much fun though. Dale wanted to leave or turn the radio on loud or shut Elvin up if he knew how.
“Union Correctional, or UCI, is what they use to call Raiford, when they had Old Sparky there. See, wherever the ‘lectric chair is, that’s your state prison. That’s why now it’s at FSP. The difference I noticed my second fall, there aren’t no more real convicts since this crack shit come about. Convicts, they’d sit around talking about jobs, banks they’d held up, argue about how to blow a safe. Now you got inmates instead of cons and these guys are crazy. All they think about is getting dope and getting laid, looking to see who they can turn. See, once you get turned you’re pussy.
In
mates, they’ll snitch you for smoking a joint, anything, to get in good with the turnkeys.”
Dale said, “You want another beer?”
Elvin said, “Sit still when I’m talking to you.”
Dale eased back in the sofa, Elvin staring at him.
“What you have to learn is how to ride the rap, do your own time, but get salty quick as you can. You’re in the population you don’t have to be good-looking, you’re a new punk coming in and that’ll get you elected. The first one comes at you and you back down, you’re pussy. What you have to do is boo him up. A nigger, you have to stick him. See, if a nigger has a white boy, even one’s ugly, he thinks he’s a big man. What you do is buy yourself a shank. You can get anything you want in there but a woman. Some pretty good shine we call buck, made of rice or orange juice with some yeast and sugar. We’d have some poor asshole keep it in his cell while it set up.” Elvin paused. “I better show you how to make a shank. I could use a spoon… The easiest kind of weapon to make, you melt the end of a toothbrush and stick a razor blade to it. I cut a dink one time looked at me funny, he’s got a scar now from sixty-five stitches in his face. You won’t kill a person with a toothbrush, but he’ll stay wide of you. Let’s see… Yeah, what you might do till things settle down, stick a book in your pants under your shirt, one in front, one in back, so your belt holds ‘em there? It’ll give you some protection in case a dink tries to shank
you
. He comes in high on you, going for the throat or the heart, the books won’t do you no good. But most times it goes down is in a crowd and the dink will stay low so as not be seen. There was a boy one time, they’re hurrying him to the infirmary and this one holding the stretcher drops his end and stabs the boy again. So don’t trust nobody till you find out who’s with who, how they hang out together in the yard. Understand? They send you to Starke write me and I’ll give you the names of people can do you some good. It’ll cost you, nothing’s free. But it’s nice to have friends, huh? Listen, where your keys at? I have to go someplace.”
“I have to go someplace too,” Dale said. He wasn’t sure where, but knew he had to get out of here. Out of this house, out of Delray and keep going. He’d been to Orlando to Disney World and Daytona Beach a lot of times, but he’d never been past the Georgia line or to places he’d like to see like California.
“Dale? Where your keys at?”
• • •
I
t was quicker to shoot over to Dr. Tommy’s house from Delray than coming down from Palm Beach sightseeing, like the other night. Elvin took Dale’s pickup north on 95 to Boynton Beach, cut over to Ocean Ridge and it didn’t take him fifteen minutes.
From a dump full of palmetto bugs, called roaches other places, to what Elvin believed was the slickest house he’d ever seen. And yet a little sneak like Dr. Tommy owned it. The house was light-gray brick with white trim and shutters and a white tile roof. It didn’t look to have any size till you went up the drive through palm trees and sea grape and saw it was built into high ground, a lot more house on the ocean side where it had a big flagstone patio, a swimming pool but no diving board—shit—and all kinds of shrubs and palm trees dressing up the grounds. Elvin found this out by walking around the outside of the house and there was Dr. Tommy on his patio reading the paper, a tall drink on the table next to him, the whole patio in shade with the sun off on the other side of Florida.
Elvin said, “How we doing today?”
He didn’t see the Cuban guy—what was his name? Hector. Dr. Tommy was also a Cuban but hard to tell. Neither one of them had what you’d call that true greaser look. This doctor was a shifty booger though. Look at him. Shorts and no shirt, tan and skinny, squirming to sit up straight, putting his nice face on. Some newspapers slid off his lap to fall on the flagstone. Dr. Tommy didn’t seem to notice.
“Well,” he said. “I didn’t expect you so soon. No, I should say I expected you, yes, but didn’t think it would be this soon.”
Getting his meaning straightened out. Elvin didn’t see it changed anything. He pulled a chair away from the glasstop table, a heavy wrought-iron patio set, nothing but the best, settled into the chair’s maroon cushions, then had to turn his head to look up at the house this close. Two floors with an upper deck across the back and stairs coming down from it.
“Being put out of business hasn’t seemed to hurt you none,” Elvin said. “What kind of doctor were you?”
“I still am,” Dr. Tommy said. “Dermatologist.” He raised a finger to his cheekbone. “Those brown spots you have right here should be looked at.”
“You’re looking at ‘em, aren’t you?”
“I mean tested. You have to be careful, you let it go, it could be melanoma.”
“Now you’re trying to scare me.”
“If you don’t worry about skin cancer…”
“I been outside all my life.”
“That’s why you have those spots. But you wear a hat, that’s sensible. What else you want to know?”
Dr. Tommy didn’t seem as nervous talking about skin as he did movies the other night. Elvin put his hat down on his eyes a little more. “I been thinking about what Sonny told me.”
“Oh, the movies?” Dr. Tommy said. “I can hear Sonny. Told you if you got your hands on them, even one, you could make a lot of money. Is that right?”
Smiling now—look at that. Not a bit nervous.
“That was Sonny’s idea, threaten to show my father unless I paid him. But he didn’t have the nerve to do it himself, so he tried to get a young lady to help him. She would do all the work, keep him out of it. But she came to me instead, told me everything. So then I accused Sonny in front of the young lady. He called her a liar and she hit him with her fist, a big woman. Sonny had to protect himself, so he hit her with that iron thing, the poker.”
Dr. Tommy paused to take a sip of his drink right in front of Elvin, not bothering to ask if he wanted one. Elvin wondering, What’s going on here?
Putting the glass down the doctor said, “Okay, he told you a different story. And you believe him because Sonny is a beautiful liar. Am I right?”
Elvin had to readjust his hat on that one, set it looser on his head. “You catch him,” Elvin said, “he’d like roll over on his back with his paws in the air. Give you this sad look so you won’t hurt him too much.”
“You know him,” Dr. Tommy said, “and you don’t know whose story to believe? I’m talking about why that young lady was killed. But really, what difference does it make? You’re more interested in those movies than the truth. I tell you they’re gone, you don’t believe me. It’s why you came back. What were you in for, in prison?”
Shifting his gears all of a sudden.
“I shot a guy,” Elvin said.
“You kill him?”
“Course I killed him.”
“I thought something like that. Okay, so now you come to work a deal on me. But there aren’t any movies, so what do you do now? You want to search my house if you think I’m lying?”
Here was this dink talking right up to him. It took Elvin a moment to adjust, resetting his hat again where it would stick to his forehead.
He said, “Well, we sure got a lot cleared up there, didn’t we?” and looked toward the house.
The doc’s boy, Hector, was out on the upper deck now in his Cuban shirt, leaning on the rail watching them. He had shoulders on him for a little guy, short in the legs but maybe worked out, knew some tricks. He acted like a girl and was an ugly fucker, reminding Elvin of sneaky types he’d known up at Starke.
“If I was to take you up on that,” Elvin said, “look around your place…”
“Yes, if it pleases you, do it.”
“He won’t try and stop me?”
“Who, Hector? What does he care? It’s not his house.”
“What’s he do for you?”
“Oh, the laundry, cleans the bathrooms, makes my drinks.” Dr. Tommy looked up at the deck. “He wants to know what you do for me.”
Elvin saw the guy up there hunch his shoulders, still leaning on the rail. He said something in Spanish. Now the doctor said something back to him and Elvin looked over to see him smiling.
“What’re you talking about?”
“He said if we have to serve time, this is the place to do it, that’s all. A private joke.”
“Guy like him, if he wasn’t so fuckin’ ugly he’d do okay in the joint.”
“Hector loves me,” Dr. Tommy said. “I could ask him to shoot you, I believe he would, yes. Hector is very emotional.”
Elvin said, “Convicted felon, you have a gun in the house? That could get you in trouble.”
All it did was get the doctor smiling again.
“You’re still looking for a way to work some kind of deal on me,” Dr. Tommy said. “Okay, you want, call the police. Tell them I have a rifle my father gave me. I was fourteen years old and he took me to hunt wild pigs. You know what happened? He caught me shooting flamingos. From that time when I was a boy he started watching me.”
Maybe this guy was a retard. Elvin said, “What’d you shoot flamingos for? You can’t eat ‘em, I don’t think.”
“Why? What difference does it make? Fuck the flamingos. Fuck you, too. You want to call the police, tell them I have a rifle? Uh, tough guy?”
Elvin said, “What’s wrong with you?” The guy acting strange, his eyes getting a funny look, while his voice was fairly calm.
“Or would you like to use it?” Dr. Tommy said. “You have the experience, uh? You’re looking for a score… I’m serious now. You listening?”
“Yeah, I’m listening.”
“I’ll pay you to kill a man. What do you say?”
What Elvin said was, “How much?”
And it got Dr. Tommy smiling again, the dink easy to tickle, saying now, “You’re my man, Elvin,” becoming pals all of a sudden. “I knew it as soon as you walked in the other night. You don’t care who, only how much.”
“If the price ain’t right,” Elvin said, “what’s there to talk about?”
The doctor nodded his head, his smile gone but his eyes shining as he gave the figure.
“Ten thousand.”
That didn’t sound too bad. Get half up front.
“To kill the man,” Dr. Tommy said, “who ruined my life.”
It didn’t look too ruined to Elvin.
“I can’t work, I have to sell my possessions to live. My paintings, works of art…”
Getting a good buck, too, if he had ten grand laying around the house. “We talking cash for this job?”
“Yes, of course.”
“You been thinking about it long?”
“More than thinking, finding out about him. Where he lives, where he goes to drink, the women he sees. Hector is my eyes while I’m a prisoner.”
Whatever that meant. Elvin said, “Well, shit, you ought to know where he lives.”
“But it could be too late,” Dr. Tommy said. He bent over in his chair and started gathering up the newspapers he’d dropped, Elvin noticing he had
The Miami Herald
, the
Sun-Sentinel
… The doctor handed him one saying, “Here, on the front page of the
Post
. You must have seen it.”
Elvin took the newspaper. The second he spotted the picture, that bony face grinning out of the page, he said, “Jesus Christ, this is the guy we’re talking about? Judge Gibbs? I thought you meant your daddy.”
“He’s already dead.”
Elvin said, “And didn’t leave you nothing, huh? On account of you shot that flamingo and been generally fucking up all your life. I forgot for a minute there it was Gibbs convicted Sonny and nailed you on the dope charge. He’s the same one sent me up.” This was getting good, realizing he had his own pay-back motive now besides money. Why hadn’t he thought of it? “The other day this same judge give my young nephew five years for nothing. You met him, Dale Crowe Junior?”
Dr. Tommy was waiting, staring up at him.
“Have you read the paper? I ask that assuming you can read.”
Elvin gave him a look, narrowing his eyes. “You think I don’t know how?”
“Well, for Christ sake do it, will you?”
Elvin found the column, read partway into the story that asked if the judge was gator bait and stopped.
“There’s somebody already tried for him?”
“That’s the question, why I wonder if it’s too late,” Dr. Tommy said. “If I thought of it, how many others have too? Are thinking about it right now?”
“Shit,” Elvin said, “you want Bob Gibbs you might have to get in line, huh?”