What the fuck was going on? Why had they done this to him? Sure, his mother hated his guts, but he'd always brought her a steady stream of top-class girls earners. And he was damn good at finding and recruiting talent. No one could charm a bitch like him no one and certainly not Bonbon. It made no sense. No sense at all.
Then he thought of Julita, but instead he saw Lucita.
Stupid he hadn't realized this before, but even their names were similar. Julita and Lucita.
His heart grew heavy, his throat tightened and an overwhelming sense of hopelessness swallowed him. He couldn't do wrong or right without somehow fucking both up.
Without the pimping he was useless, good for absolutely nothing.
He saw his mother, imagined how she'd taunt him tonight in the bathroom, rub his failure in his face until he choked on it.
Julita wouldn't last long on 63rd Street. The Spades down there would give her hell 'cause she was the new girl on the block and a white girl at that. Didn't matter she was Cuban.
39'
That'd make it even worse for her. The gangster kids would run trains on her at five bucks a pop. No way would she ever earn back that $1,250. She'd be used up in two months.
Bonbon knew this. It was his way of punishing her for stealing off them. Carmine wished he hadn't gone to see her, then none of this would've happened. He'd gone and ruined not just her life, but her little girls' too.
He tried to gee himself up, think of brighter things.
What did they say 'bout hittin' rock bottom? The only way was up.
There was Nevada to look forward to. What about all that money he'd stashed away? That was something to hold on to. All wasn't lost. There was still hope.
Yeah, right!
Who the fuck was he foolin'?
It was just him in here, on his own, cold light of day.
He might've been at the bottom of wherever he'd been kicked to now, but he sensed there was further to fall.
This was the start of the end.
5o
The number Max had taken down in Haiti Mystique was for a house on North East 128th Street, North Miami Beach. Both house and phone were registered to Eva Desamours.
Early on Wednesday morning Max and Joe drove out to North Miami Beach in a blue '78 Ford Ranchero they'd got from the car pool. The car ran fine, but outwardly it looked like a piece of shit rusted fenders, scratches and chipped paint on the bodywork, dents in the hood and side ideal camouflage for the area, where every vehicle was a third generation hand-me-down.
North Miami Beach wasn't quite the worst the city had to offer, but it was a million miles from the best. Its main tourist attractions were the St Bernard de Clairvaux Church off the West Dixie Highway a medieval Spanish monastery William Randolph Hearst had bought in Europe and had had dismantied and shipped, down to the last brick, all the way over to the States - and a nudist beach at Haulover Park, across the Intercoastal Waterway, which was the target of regular protests by Christian fundamentalists. In-between the two was a drab area of working- and welfare-class homes, ugly-looking condos and cheapo stores where half the shelves were empty. Crime was high here, most of it comparatively petty and tame by Miami's current standards burglaries, home invasions, domestic violence, rapes and murders but there was still too much of it for the understaffed and over-extended local police to deal with, so they were forced to prioritize. Violence against the very young
393 or the very old got their full attention. Anyone in-between was out of luck.
They found the house a small pale pink bungalow with a screened porch and a palm tree growing to its left. It was set back from the road and surrounded by a well-tended lawn with a flower-lined brick path leading to the front door, easily the best-looking home in a street filled with dismal bungalows struggling to stay upright, losing the battle against their own decrepitude. Although some owners had erected barbed-wire fences around them, put bars on the windows and left various breeds of attack dogs out in their front yards, gang graffiti still adorned two-thirds of the homes.
They rolled a little further down the road and parked behind a dusty, brown Pontiac, opposite the house,. It was 8.05 a.m.
Joe turned on the radio. The Rolling Stones' 'Start Me Up' was playing. The song was all over the airwaves and racing up the charts. Joe nodded his head along with the beat and drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. Max looked out of the window, first at the light grey sky, then at the matching tone of the street, wishing his partner had better taste in music.
Forty minutes later a gleaming black Mercedes 300D with tinted windows, eight-spoke silver rims and whitewall tyres stopped in front of the house. Max took out a Nikon FM camera fitted with a 5 o mm lens and started snapping.
A tall, fat, dark-skinned man, wearing a long black coat, white gloves and a fedora stepped out and opened the passenger door. A woman with short black hair and the same complexion as the driver emerged. She was dressed in an elegant brown trouser suit and pumps and carried an alligator-skin purse. She talked to the man for a moment.
Next to him she looked starved and frail, but Max could see from the cowed expression on his face that she commanded his absolute respect.
394 I The woman walked briskly up to the house, unlocked the door and went inside. The man got back in the car.
'The driver looks like Fatty Arbuckle's shadow,' Joe quipped.
'Guessing from his appearance, that'll be Bonbon,' Max said, putting the camera down on his lap. 'And the royalty's Eva Desamours.'
At 9.08 a silver Porsche Turbo pulled up behind the Mercedes and a tall, slim, blonde woman got out. She was dressed expensively tailor-made blue silk suit, gold jewellery on her wrists, hands, neck and ears and long hair coiffed in a bouffant mane which didn't move at all as she clicked her way along the sidewalk and up the path to the house with the well-drilled grace of a catwalk model. She was beautiful, but it was beauty cut in ice all the aloofness money could buy. Max knew who she was.
'She must be loaded. That's a brand new Turtle.' Joe nodded at the Porsche 911.
'Don't you recognize her?' Max asked.
'Sure, that's Cheryl Tiegs,' his partner joked.
'Bunny Mason.'
'As in Pitch Mason's wife?'
'Uh-huh.'
Pitch Mason was a major cocaine distributor who had slipped two elaborate DEA stings, because, it was widely rumoured, he'd been tipped off by someone on the inside.
During the past year, Mason had become a society-page regular because of the stables and stud farms he owned and because of his wife a former swimsuit model who he referred to openly as his 'favourite filly'.