"Fine," Jean said. "Go on."
"Let see. 'Get four thousand hunnerts, three thousand fifties and twenty-five hunnert twenties.' " Nobles paused. "How you know the bag'll hold it?"
"It will," Jean said. "Go on."
" 'You are to put the money in a Hefty thirty-gallon, two-ply trash bag. Put this one in another Hefty trash bag of the same size and tie it closed with some type of wire. Hay-baling wire is good. You will be told where to take the money. If you do not do as you are told you will die.' I like that part. '... you will die.' Underlined. 'If you try any tricks you will die. If you tell the police or anybody you will die. Look at your car. You know this is not just a threat. You have two days to get the money and your car fixed. I am watching you.' Underlined. I said baling wire there, so it won't come undone. Is that okay?"
"Good idea," Jean said. She leaned close to him to look at the note. "You misspelled baling, as in hay-baling wire."
"Shit," Nobles said.
"That's all right, leave it," Jean said. "But if the police question you they might get tricky and pick up on that word, ask you how to spell it."
"Yeah?"
"There's no e in it. It's b-a-l-i-n-g."
"That's balling," Nobles said and started to grin and said, "Hey, puss..."
"Richard, we have a lot of work to do and I have to get back."
He hunched in to look at the note with her. "Hey, what should we sign it?"
"Well, Cordially, would be nice," Jean said. "No, that's fine the way it is. Now we'll write what you're going to say when you call, so you'll have it word for word. You'll tell me to go to a phone booth, you'll call me there at a certain time." Nobles was shaking his head. She said, "What's the matter?"
"Nuh-uh, they're gonna have traps on the phone. Shit, I know that much. I seen the feds do it when I was on the Opa-locka Police, setting up drug busts. They can't prove what I write, but they can sure as hell get my voice print on a phone. You have to tell 'em where you're suppose to go, don't you? Make it look real?"
"Yeah, you're right."
"By the time you get to Boca they got a trap on the phone booth. It tells 'em right away what number I'm calling from. See, it's different from a movie. They got equipment now, shit, you don't have a chance of doing something like that. You might as well give 'em your phone number."
Jean said, "All right, we'll do it with notes. Instead of a call I receive a note at the hotel, telling me where to go..."
"Find it on the porch, say."
"I'll go to the phone booth in Boca, find another one--"
"Hold it there. I'm being watched how'm I gonna put the note in the phone booth?"
"I'll have it with me," Jean said. "Make it look as though I found it. Hello--what's this?"
"That'd work."
"The note tells me to go to my apartment." She gave him a wink. "Got it?"
"Gotcha."
"I find another note, slipped under the door."
"You have it with you too."
"Or we write it now and leave it here."
"Yeah?" Nobles was thinking. "You know where you go next?"
"Of course."
"Got the whole deal worked out, haven't you?"
"Every step. The only change, notes instead of phone calls. I like it even better--they'll be playing with all their electronics for nothing."
"They love it, the feds, all that technical shit. Where's my little Cuban come in at?"
"The next stop."
"You're still gonna have a tail on you, you know that."
Jean nodded, smoking a cigarette, blowing the smoke out in a slow stream. Boy she was calm.
"All I'll need is to be out of their sight for about twenty seconds."
"You got the place?"
"I've got the place. I'm pretty sure. But I'm going to look at it again when I leave here."
"Cundo's gonna take it from you by force."
"There's no other way," Jean said. "But I'll cooperate, you can be sure of that. Does he have a gun?"
"Doesn't like guns or rough stuff. Talks big but being half queer he's girlish."
Jean said, "Okay, we'll write the notes. We'll need three..." She paused. "You'll have to take the typewriter with you when we're finished here."
"Yeah, I guess I better."
"Drop it in the Intracoastal. That area just before you come to the Hillsboro Inlet, there're a lot of trees."
"It's a shame, it's a nice typewriter."
"Richard?"
"Don't worry, I'll get rid of it. Or I could sell it."
She said, "Oh, Christ."
"Just kidding. Don't you worry, it's good as done."
She was thinking or worrying about something though. This little schemer--boy, she was a sketch.
She said, "Does your friend Cundo know where you live?"
"You mean up here or down there?"
"In Lake Worth."
"Nobody does, 'cept you."
"You can't go there while you're being watched."
"I know it."
"Promise?"
Nobles said, "Hey, you think I'm stupid or something?"
She thought of handkerchiefs and how simply it was done in the movies: Henry Silva making phone calls with a handkerchief over the mouthpiece, in a time before electronic surveillance; the movie cop using a handkerchief to pick up the murder weapon. Henry Silva had used a second-hand typewriter and dropped it off the side of his boat on their good-luck cruise to Catalina, their last time together before her husband would receive the letter--$150,000 or you're dead. Impressive enough as a pre-inflation demand; today it would hardly be worth the risk. She remembered her line: "You can't come near the boat as long as the cops are tailing you." (Beat) "Promise?" And Henry Silva's line: "Do I look stupid?"
Some of it was different, some of it almost exactly the same. One thing she was certain of, it wouldn't end the way the movie did.
Chapter 18
THE OLD MAN SAID it was Joe Stella up in Lantana had given him this address, so he had come on down in his pickup truck. There it was across the street. It had dust-settle on top of that salt stickiness and he hadn't had no place to wash it, being too busy looking for his sister's boy, Richard Nobles. The old man said his name was Miney Combs.
His pickup was parked behind Jean Shaw's clean white Eldorado.
LaBrava told Miney yes, he had heard his name from Joe Stella.
The old man looked like he had lived outdoors all his life, the kind of man who knows where to fish and dig wells, how to fix pumps and tune his truck. He was heavyset with a belly; wore a John Deere hat, suspenders over his gray work clothes, long-sleeved underwear beneath, and carried about him the sour smell of aged sweat.
They sat on the porch of the Della Robbia talking, in the front corner section next to Thirteenth Street. The old ladies would bend forward to look over because the old man was using a snuff stick and they had never seen one before. LaBrava hadn't either.
It was like the man was brushing his teeth. The twig was about the size of a toothbrush, frayed soft on the end and stained the color of brown shoe polish from sticking it into his Copenhagen and then massaging his gums with it, sometimes leaving it in his mouth like a cigar. LaBrava went over to the Cardozo and brought back four bottles of cold beer. The old man sighed and his metal chair groaned as he settled in, resting his work shoes on the rail.
Miney said, "There's parts of that swamp you'd think nobody but Jesus would dare walk it. Richard, he'd go in there be right at home. Preferred it to his own home I believe account of the way my brother-in-law raised him. See, he believed you whupped boys you made 'em humble. Twist you a half-dozen lengths of hay-baling wire and whup 'em regular. See, my sister, what she did she run a grits mill. Had a old tractor engine tied onto the mill and would grind up was nothing but mule corn, hard as gravel, but it made pretty fair grits and she sold it, fresh grits. See, Richard worked there till finally he left to peck it out on his own, sport around in the swamp and hire out to take folks for canoe rides, so they could watch birds. You imagine? I said to Miz Combs, watch 'em do what? I heard it I wondered if they'd pay to watch me plow a field. First I heard of Mr. John after him was when he killed the eagle. Why did he kill it. Knowing Richard it was to see it die. All right, then here was these two boys working a still I heard from cane skimmings. But that couldn't a been, 'cause the first time they was brought up I knew the judge said it ought to be against the law to arrest anybody could make whiskey good as theirs. Then the second time, with our Richard testifying, swearing in court, they got sent to Ohio. Same as my boy and in the same court. My boy had done his time once. Yes, he bought weed from the shrimpers and sold it to college boys, but he never smoked it once. Now Richard come along and tells on him and some others to Mr. John--only the Lord Jesus knows why--and my boy is doing thirty-five years in a gover'ment lockup."