"Oh, hi, fellas," said Bert. "Youse look terrific." Then he turned his attention back to Claire and back to the subject of the chihuahua. "This dog," he said, "this dog is the bane a my life, a stone around my neck. Joey, I tell ya the latest about this dog? The latest aggravation? Dog needs sunglasses."
"Come on," said Joey.
"Yeah," said Bert. He held the chihuahua forward like a loaf of bread. "His eyes heah? The whaddyacallit, the pupils, they don't close right. See all that black? That shouldn't be. The light shoots straight inta his brain. He needs shades, I'm tellin' ya."
"Maybe a visor?" offered Zack.
Bert shrugged. "What the hell, I just keep him dim places. He don't like the heat anyway. Heat like dehydrates him, gives him kidney stones. The way he whimpers when he passes one…" Bert shuddered. "But hey, enough about the stupid dog. Joey, you gonna gimme a glassa wine or what?"
Joey stalled an extra few seconds getting the Shirt his drink. He wasn't used to parties, to so many people at once, so much to figure out. It made him a little dizzy.
When he came back, he noticed something different about Sandra. She was smiling a more thorough smile than he usually saw. Her green eyes crinkled at the corners, it was like enjoyment was seeping in everywhere. It seemed to Joey that she had never looked prettier or happier. She had friends, vegetables, plates that matched; the man she loved was not off doing something shady or dangerous; she was at ease.
Joey studied. He wanted to see how people acted at a dinner party, what they talked about, if there was a code for what you did or didn't say. The women talked about the bank, about some new system for closing out the cash count at the end of the day. Zack asked Bert about the Paradiso; he was interested in the real estate angle.
There was a sound of cascading water as Steve the naked landlord got out of the pool. People tried not to notice the flash of crotch before he wrapped his towel around him and said goodnight. Joey went inside to fetch more drinks.
When he returned, Bert was holding forth about the old days in New York. "Fifty-second Street," he was saying. "The jazz clubs. Beautiful. Three, four inna morning you could walk downa street. There was no drugs, no crime. It was perfectly safe."
As if conjured up by the mention of music, Luke the reggae player at that moment stepped out of his front door. He'd put his hair in dreadlocks, and his guitar was strapped across his back. Lucy the beautiful Fed followed him out. She'd done her eyes up big and looked like Cleopatra.
After they had passed, Claire said, "Jeez, you guys live, like, an interesting lifestyle here."
Joey hadn't thought about it quite that way before, but now that she mentioned it, he supposed they did. Very Key West. Extremely Key West. Feeling proud, he got up and lit the gas grill, then took a moment to look at the first star that had popped through the deepening sky. He filled glasses one more time, then went to the kitchen for the mountain of steaks.
Zack Davidson, who knew the protocol of cookouts, joined him at the grill. It was part of a guest's responsibility, part of the ceremony, this manly convocation around the fire and the meat. "This is nice," Zack said, with a small but enveloping gesture that took in the compound, the weather, the heavens.
Joey nodded. "Nice we're getting together outsida work."
"Away from Duval Street. The fucking zoo."
Joey stabbed a filet mignon, slapped it onto the grill, then realized, a beat later than a more practiced host would have, that he now had the opportunity he was waiting for, the opening that the whole evening had been set up to afford. It was strange, he reflected. He used to imagine that crime was easy and legitimate enterprise was hard. But just the opposite was true, because the whole world was set up to thwart the one and lubricate the other. Joey used to have to slip twenties, sometimes hundreds, to limping cross-eyed numbers runners from Catholic school to set up meetings that might advance his criminal career; but here in the legit world such meetings simply happened, around the barbecue, around the table, even, no doubt, around urinals at the office.
"Zack," he said, above the companionable crackle of burning fat, "I wantcha to know I really appreciate the way ya hung in there with me when I had, ya know, this personal bullshit that needed taking care of."
Zack waved the gratitude away, but Joey continued without a pause.
"And I remember you promised that you'd let me make it up to ya."
Zack said nothing, as if he assumed that Joey meant the dinner party was by way of thank-you.
Joey fiddled with the steaks. "So Zack, I'd like to give you a quarter-million dollars."
Zack was swallowing some wine, and he took an extra second to make sure it went down. Joey did not sound like he was kidding. He did not sound like he was drunk. Zack couldn't even stammer, but just stood there with his throat closed tight, Valpolicella pooling on either side of the constriction.
"There's just one more little thing I need you to do for me," Joey resumed, "and if that works out, we're in."
Zack still could not speak, and there was growing in him the heady and not totally unpleasant conviction that whatever Joey was talking about, it could not possibly be legal. The odd satisfaction Zack took from this made him wonder if maybe he was drunk; it made him wonder, too, if maybe he'd known all along that Joey was a desperado, and if it was this whiff of the outlaw that had drawn Zack to him.
"You're serious?" Zack choked out at last.
"Serious as diabetes," said Joey.
"Wha'do I gotta do?" As Joey had been groping for a toehold in normalcy, so Zack in that moment was getting on terms with the possibility of crime, and it was as if the boundary between their two positions was nothing more dramatic than a faint chalk line dabbed on rotting boards.
Joey poked a filet. "Set up a meeting with Clem Sanders and, ya know, sort of ease the way with him."
Zack shifted his feet, looked up at the sky. He was relieved yet somehow let down that he was not being asked to drive a getaway car or carry a satchel through a border check. "That's all?"
Joey flipped a steak, admired the grill lines etched across it, and nodded.
"Joey," said Zack, "I talk to Clem all the time. You don't have to pay me to talk to Clem."
"This is business."
Zack sipped some wine and found himself at a loss once more. Unlike Joey, he was unaccustomed to feeling out of his depth. He didn't improvise as well, couldn't fall in with a new cadence quite as readily.
Joey peeked at the underside of a filet, then looked toward the little group sitting by the pool. Bert, he noticed, had given Claire the high honor of holding Don Giovanni in her lap. "Sandra," Joey hollered over, "you ready with the salad and the broccoli?"
She waved yes, and jogged with her small neat steps toward the kitchen.
Zack cleared his throat. "This thing you wanna talk to Clem about," he said. "Is it, ya know, against the law?"
"I'm not really sure," said Joey, heaping the steaks onto the platter. Zack could only admire his blitheness, his certainty that it was not worth overcooking a filet mignon to discuss a mere question of legality. "That's one of the things we have to talk to him about."
Zack nodded, and Sandra bustled by with a salad bowl you could've bathed a baby in. Then she made a second pass with an avalanche of broccoli. Joey turned off the grill. "So you'll do it?" he said to Zack.
"Sure," Zack said. "But it's really not worth-"
Joey dropped his voice another notch to cut him off. "And lemme ask ya one more thing, while we're here, ya know, the two of us. In your experience with women, are they all such nuts about salad, about vegetables?"
— 40 -
"I get half," said Clem Sanders.
It was Monday lunchtime, and they were sitting in his office at the Treasure Museum. The office was a big room with barred windows, lined with glass display cases filled with old coins, ancient jewelry, corroded pistols, pieces of silver robbed of their luster and fused together by salt water and time so that they resembled crude models of the atom. Behind Clem Sanders's chair was a wall covered with photographs of himself outsmiling various dignitaries and local celebrities, none of whom Joey recognized.