“And I thought you were dead. Figure that.”
“You’re thinking of the other guy. Scarface. Big Al. Me, I’m still kicking.” He fishes a card from his pocket and flicks it to me and I see his name is spelled without the “e.” Capon, French for castrated chicken. While I’m thinking of some cute remark the birdless bird says, “Now, let’s cut the bullshit and get to it. I need my six mil back and Marker says you’re the guy to find it. What I’m talking here is five percent finder’s fee. How’s your vacation now?”
I make good money; even so, the three hundred K catches my ear. “Nice number,” I say, “but I’m not into contingent work.”
Tree has finished his tour of my estate and takes his proper place one step to the rear and left of Little Al. “Okay,” Capon says, “you get your fee with the five percent as a sweetener when you find the stash. Cecil, give him five K walking-around money.” Cecil pulls a wallet out and starts fingering through what look like hundreds.
Sliced balls or not, the guy knows how to play his cards. “You’ve got my attention,” I say. Man’s in desperate trouble, even the best of us have to make sacrifices. “Tell me how this six mil walked out of your pocket.”
Cecil hands me a pack of bills about a half-inch thick. They’re hundreds. Capon says, “Marker told you about Rhodo, right?”
“Some.”
“Well, I run some businesses here on the Beach. Mostly the pleasure kind. People come down here, they want to have a good time. I help them out. Natives, too. Anybody looking for a good time, they come to my people. Rhodo, he was my banker. By the way, I’m telling you this like you’re my lawyer. This is privileged stuff. Goes in one ear, stays there. You understand?”
I shake my head. “I’m no lawyer, got no privilege.”
“You’re not listening,” he says. “I’m telling you this is privileged. Talk in your sleep, I hear about it, your ticket gets canceled. After that you don’t talk to nobody except maybe worms. So anyway, Rhodo, he’s my banker, sort of. This business of mine, it’s profitable. Yeah, we got expenses, but there’s plenty left over. But regular banks, they got too many forms. Makes a guy nervous. Y’know what I mean? So, whenever I get some cash Rhodo converts my trading money into diamonds and what’s left into real estate. You’re asking why I’m telling you all this. Well, I send you on a hunt, you got to know what you’re looking for. So that’s it. The six mil is probably in cash, diamonds, or real estate. Rhodo, he’s not talking, so you’re the one who has to find it.”
“This six mil,” I say, “tell me about it.”
“What’s there to tell? It’s gone and I want it back. End of story.”
“It go all at once or over time?”
“Hey, pretty good. Now I see it. Over time. Last couple of years. I got this accountant and he gives me the high sign that what’s going out doesn’t add with what’s coming in. Six mil and change, he says. I figure the change is probably expenses, so I round it. Still, six mil is six mil. So I asks Rhodo about it and during our conversation he slips over the rail of his condo.” Capon gives Cecil a “you dumb motha” look and Cecil jukes his head as if his collar’s too tight. “Accident,” Capon says, “but I still want my six mil.”
“Any idea where I should start looking?”
He gives me the same look he just gave Cecil and says, “If I gotta do the work, what’m I paying you for?”
As it was, Capon popped for two names: Rhodo’s lady friend, Lulu, and a local real-estate agent who Rhodo used to buy property. They seemed a good place to start.
Lulu was somewhere between twenty and forty. With all the Botox and lifts going around, it’s getting harder to peg an age. She was a model type with all her bones in the right place and just enough padding to make looking easy. If the sun hadn’t bleached her hair, her dresser deserved an Oscar. I’m a sucker for a pretty face, so one look and she had me. Classic straight nose, ripe lips, high cheeks, brown eyes that had never been red. Face like that, some part of it had to have been paid for.
I introduce myself, including Jaxon with an X, then start to work around to business. Ten seconds into this spiel I made up, she says, “You working for Little Al?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“He got you chasing that six mil he thinks Rhodo snatched?”
So much for privileged info. “Anything you can tell me about it?” I said, trying to stay cool. She gave me a head chuck and pulled the door for me to come in.
Her place was nice. Bigger than mine and better furnished, sort of contemporary, which you don’t see a lot of on the beach. Not one seashell or picture of sand in sight. The furniture seemed to be all leather and chrome, neither of which does real well in the salt air. Enough money, though, it doesn’t matter how often you trade in the old for the new. “Drink?” she asked and I gave her the usual.
After we were settled on this blue leather sectional — me on one end, her on the other — she says, “So, I suppose Little Al told you Rhodo scammed the six miclass="underline" cash, diamonds, or dirt.”
“Something like that,” I said.
“Give you five-percent finder’s?”
I gave her a right-on cock of my head. “Five percent.”
She laughed. It was a pretty laugh with a cynical undertow. “Pretty dumb, huh? Guy thinks someone finds six million, tax-free, no strings, untraceable, they’re going to turn ninety-five percent of it over.”
“Depends, I guess, on whether you do this as a business or a hobby. You think Rhodo took it, or what?”
Again she laughed. She was one of those women who, almost anything she said started with a little laugh or at least a smile. You know, the kind that win all the beauty contests. “It’s gone, Rhodo took it. Man had glue on his fingers.”
“Word is, you were his girl. That fit?”
The laugh. “Yeah, he gave me a lavaliere. We had it all planned, ten years from now we were going to get engaged.”
“You two travel much? Business? Pleasure?”
The smile. “You don’t believe I’m going to say, ‘Yeah we went to Capetown once a month to buy diamonds or Zurich to check if they had the numbers right,’ do you? Let me save you time, Mr. Jaxon with an X. Yeah, Rhodo and I traveled, but most of his business he did over secure lines. Yeah, we had a wide circle on the Beach and over in Naples and Bonita, but I can’t think of any one of them who would help you. Most of them had no idea of the business. Most of them wouldn’t have cared. No, I have no idea how he went over the rail. He wasn’t the kind that likes high dives. You think maybe he was helped, go ahead and think it, I can’t give you any help there. Do I know where the money is? No. Do I know if he converted it to diamonds or land? No. Do I know anything that can help you? No. Would I share it if I did? No. So there it is. Nothing I can do for you.” And the smile never left her face.
“You mind, I finish the drink?” I asked. Of course, she laughed. I took a big one, but left a little in the glass for a chaser. “You meet his mom when she was down for Thanksgiving?”
If you were really paying attention, you would have caught the hesitation in her eyes before the smile and the little laugh. “What mom?” she asked.
Dimples, whose name turns out to be Suzy, was once again tending as Ov and I checked in for happy hour and the sunset. Ov looked a little nervous, as he should, considering how he set me up. We ordered the usuals and Suzy slid a bowl of giant olives next to Ov’s glass. She was too smart to look as young as she was. “So, you knew about this?”
He gave me the bashful look, saying, “I’m into Little Al for ten gees.”
Second time I’d heard Capon called “Little Al” and here I thought I’d made it up. Go figure. “And,” I said, taking the first sip of Jack, “the stuff about Rhodo, how much of that was the setup and how much God’s truth?”