I looked at Bruce. He seemed perplexed.
“What is the right answer, Fiona?” I said.
She cocked her head at me and then ran her tongue over her teeth. I’ve seen nature videos where panthers do the same thing. “What is it you want me to do here?” she said. “That will determine my answer.”
I took a deep breath. “Bruce, this is Fiona. She’s going to interrogate you about your story, because you’ve clearly lied to Barry about how you came across this information you need returned. I feel like you’ll probably lie to me, which will cause both of us great pain and sorrow, so I thought my… Fiona… could get the truth out of you without either of us getting hurt in the process.”
Bruce got a queer look on his face. “Is she going to torture me?”
“Maybe,” Fi said.
Bruce took a step back toward the door.
“No,” I said. “No, she is not. No, she is absolutely not. Are you, Fiona?”
“Everyone is so dull around here,” she said, a noticeable pout in her voice.
I handed my keys to Fiona. “Fiona is going to take you for a drive, Bruce. If she likes what she hears, she’ll bring you back here and we’ll have a deal. If she doesn’t like what she hears, she’ll drive you back here and I’ll be gone. Understand?”
Bruce looked over both of his shoulders and then back at both of us. We stared back at him. “I thought someone was going to come up and blindfold me. That’s how the FBI does it.”
“I’m not the FBI,” Fiona said. She took Bruce by the hand and guided him toward the car, even opened the passenger door for him. He looked back at me, shrugged and climbed in. Fi locked him in, which gave him a visible start.
“Don’t hurt him,” I said.
“Not even a little?” Fi asked.
“Not even a little,” I said.
Fi sighed. “One day,” she said, flirtation coming back to her, “you’re going to regret that I wasn’t allowed to hurt more people.”
She got into the car without another word, but I was pretty sure that finding out the validity of that threat would be either the best or the worst day of my life.
I watched the car round the corner at the end of the street and disappear and then made my way inside, in case Bruce’s mother woke up and needed something, because even a burned spy knows how to make a glass of water.
4
The way Bruce Grossman figured it, robbing safe-deposit boxes was a victimless crime. If people kept large sums of money in safe-deposit boxes-and there were always large sums of money to be found-that meant those people were probably crooks. If you’re a normal person, there’s no good reason to keep your money in a place hidden from use. Oh, sure, maybe you harbor fears that the Nazis are coming or the Commies are coming or the end of the Mayan calendar is nigh and the world is coming to an end, but even still, what would having money hidden away do for you? People who hide their money do it because they are doing something wrong.
That’s not to say he robbed safe-deposit boxes to get back at the bad guys, because that wasn’t the case in the least. Starting out, he just wanted to have things. A nice house. A nice car. A place for his mother in a safe neighborhood in Miami. Maybe some flash cash, just so the ladies knew he was more than a receding hairline and an odd personality, because, shit, he knew he wasn’t all that. No, starting out, that money got him places. Opened doors. Got return phone calls from smart girls.
And if he got in deep with somebody, say at the bookie’s joint, he just had to pop a score in some no-name town and come back with whatever money he needed to pay off his debts. Used to be, before a night out in Detroit-back in the 1980s, that was his place to go, right in the middle of the country, easy in, easy out-he’d find a credit union near Wayne State, get what he needed and go.
But later, it was just about cost of living. He moved his mother to Miami after his father died-this was in 1992-and her bills just started piling up. At this point in his life, Bruce considered himself excellent at what he did, to the point that, in an irony even he was aware of, he had to start keeping his money in safe-deposit boxes. He even robbed a bank he had an account and safe-deposit box in, just to deflect interest, not that he thought any was coming his way. His mom, though, was in her seventies and the ailments kept compounding. So he did what any enterprising businessperson, or good son, would do: He made as much as he could and then quietly retired to Florida.
And it was a good life, at first. Bruce spent the next few years in a condo across the street from the house he bought his mother, so that way he could come over and look in on her, replace a lightbulb or two, even take her out to dinner once a week. Most nights, he drove his red Corvette convertible down to South Beach and threw money around, met a couple nice girls, even a couple guys he considered friends, guys he’d fish with, that sort of thing. And, of course, his friend Barry, whom he helped with a few start-up business ventures initially. Importing stolen items. Understanding weak points in the ceiling mortar of old buildings. Hosting pyramid schemes.
But there was something about retired life that just wasn’t as exciting as robbing banks. So he’d periodically case places, you know, just to stay in shape.
And then just in case happened. His mom got her first bout of cancer, in her lungs. Doctors took out most of her left lung, a bunch of lymph nodes under her arm, stuck her in chemo for six months, radiation for another three. Thing was, she had crap for health insurance, just like everyone Bruce knew, apart from Bruce. She had Medicare, but Bruce wanted her to have good doctors, not the hacks who got government money. So out of his own pocket he flew her up to Johns Hopkins, out to LA to Cedars, even to some quack in Montreal who thought she should eat only pork and drink only lime juice.
Then, one afternoon, sitting in the waiting room at the transfusion center over in Coconut Grove, a place his mom liked to go just because it had better magazines than the chemo spot in Aventura, he got an idea while hearing two nurses bitch about their husbands.
“You know,” one said-she was Cuban, so he always thought of her as Fidel-“my idiot husband, if he loses a toe, his insurance policy gives him five hundred thousand bucks. A whole foot, a million. Some nights, I think about just chopping off his big toe and getting out of town, you know?”
The other nurse, who was pretty, so Bruce just thought of her, and thought of her, and thought of her, said, “Dismemberment insurance is what keeps me sane. Bad day here, I think, cut off my pinkie, retire to the Caymans, get away from Peter forever!”
The nurses laughed and high-fived each other, but Bruce started thinking about the future, about taking care of his mom, about maybe doing something good after doing so much bad all these years.
When he got home that night, he called his insurance agent and upped his coverage, added dismemberment to the buffet, said he was doing so much fishing he was afraid he might lose something important. His agent laughed. He laughed. Even told his buddies on the boat one day. They all laughed.
And then he started plotting a way to lose a finger, maybe two, just to keep his mother in the station she’d grown accustomed to. He also thought one more good job would seal the deal.
Now, sitting in the car next to this whack job Fiona, he wasn’t sure any of it was worth it. She was pretty, for sure, but he was supposed to be in business with Michael Westen, who according to Barry, was like a Jedi. He liked the idea of hiring a Jedi to help him out. Figured he could tell a few lies, leave out some key points, what would Obi-Wan know? But then this Fiona girl… she frankly scared the crap out of him, so he just figured he’d tell the straight truth, see where that got him. Worse came to worst, he was in the same position as he was ten minutes ago. But she was cute, so there was that.
“In retrospect,” Bruce told Fiona, as they rounded yet another street filled with old ladies out on their porches talking on their portable phones or playing solitaire, “I should have just chopped my finger off and been done with it.”