In the ridiculous elevated bed, the lights out; a murmurous indefinable sound that might be the air-conditioning, or someone in an adjacent room quietly and drunkenly arguing; the feverish damp warmth of Andrea’s body, her mouth hungry against his, her slender arms around his neck. Naively, childishly, in a voice Harry has never heard before, as if this is, of all Andrea’s several voices, the one truly her own, she asks, “Do you love me, Harry? Will you always love me?” and he kisses her mouth, her breasts, her warm flat belly, bunching her nightgown in his fists, he whispers, “Yes.”
George Pelecanos
When You’re Hungry
from Unusual Suspects
The woman in the aisle seat to the right of John Moreno tapped him on the shoulder. Moreno swallowed the last of his Skol pilsner to wash down the food in his mouth. He laid his fork across the segmented plastic plate in front of him on a fold-down tray.
“Yes?” he said, taking her in fully for the first time. She was attractive, though one had to look for it, past the thick black eyebrows and the too-wide mouth painted a pale peach color that did no favor to her complexion.
“I don’t mean to be rude,” she said, in heavily accented English. “But you’ve been making a lot of noise with your food. Is everything all right?”
Moreno grinned, more to himself than to her. “Yes, I’m fine. You have to excuse me. I rushed out of the house this morning without breakfast, and then this flight was delayed. I suppose I didn’t realize how hungry I was.”
“No bother,” she said, smiling now, waving the manicured fingers of her long brown hand. “I’m not complaining. I’m a doctor, and I thought that something might be wrong.”
“Nothing that some food couldn’t take care of.” They looked each other over. Then he said. “You’re a doctor in what city?”
“A pediatrician,” she said. “In Bahia Salvador. Are you going to Bahia?”
Moreno shook his head. “Recife.”
So they would not meet again. Just as well. Moreno preferred to pay for his companionship while under contract.
“Recife is lovely,” the woman said, breathing out with a kind of relief, the suspense between them now broken. “Are you on a holiday?”
“Yes,” he said. “A holiday.”
“Illiana,” she said, extending her hand across the armrest.
“John Moreno.” He shook her hand, and took pleasure in the touch.
The stewardess came, a round woman with rigid red hair, and took their plates. Moreno locked the tray in place. He retrieved his guidebook from the knapsack under the seat, and read.
Brazil is a land of great natural beauty, and a country unparalleled in its ideal of racial democracy...
Moreno flipped past the rhetoric of the guidebook, went directly to the meat: currency, food and drink, and body language. Not that Brazil would pose any sort of problem for him; in his fifteen-odd years in the business, there were very few places in the world where he had not quickly adapted. This adaptability made him one of the most marketable independents in his field. And it was why, one week earlier, on the first Tuesday of September, he had been called to the downtown Miami office of Mr. Carlos Garcia, vice president of claims. United Casualty and Life.
Garcia was a trim man with closely cropped, tightly curled hair. He wore a wide-lapelled suit of charcoal gray, a somber color for Miami, and a gray and maroon tie with an orderly geometric design. A phone sat on his lacquered desk, along with a blank notepad, upon which rested a silver Cross pen.
Moreno sat in a leather chair with chrome arms across from Garcia’s desk. Garcia’s secretary served coffee, and after a few sips and the necessary exchange of pleasantries, Moreno asked Garcia to describe the business at hand.
Garcia told him about Guzman, a man in his fifties who had made and then lost some boom-years money in South Florida real estate. Guzman had taken his pleasure boat out of Key Largo one day in the summer of 1992. Two days later his wife reported him missing, and a week after that the remains of his boat were found, along with a body, two miles out to sea. Guzman and his vessel had been the victims of an unexplained explosion on board.
“Any crew?” asked Moreno.
“Just Guzman.”
“A positive identification on the body?”
“Well. The body was badly burned. Horribly burned. And most of what was left went to the fish.”
“How about his teeth?”
“Guzman wore dentures.” Garcia smiled wanly. “Interesting, no?”
The death benefits of Guzman’s term policy, a two-million-dollar payoff, went to the widow. United’s attorneys fought it to a point, but the effort from the outset was perfunctory. The company absorbed the loss.
Then, a year later, a neighbor of the Guzmans was vacationing in Recife, a city and resort on the northeast coast of Brazil, and spotted who she thought was Guzman. She saw this man twice in one week, on the same beach. By the time she returned to the States, she had convinced herself that she had in fact seen Guzman. She went with her suspicions to the widow, who seemed strangely unconcerned. Then she went to the police.
“And the police kicked it to you,” Moreno said.
“They don’t have the jurisdiction, or the time. We have a man on the force who keeps us informed in situations like this.”
“So the widow wasn’t too shook up by the news.”
“No,” Garcia said. “But that doesn’t prove or even indicate any kind of complicity. We see many different kinds of emotions in this, business upon the death of a spouse. The most common emotion that we see is relief.”
Moreno folded one leg over the other and tented his hands in his lap. “What have you done so far?”
“We sent a man down to Brazil, an investigator named Roberto Silva.”
“And?”
“Silva became very drunk one night. He left his apartment in Recife to buy a pack of cigarettes, stepped into an open elevator shaft, and fell eight stories to his death. He was found the next morning with a broken neck.”
“Accidents happen.”
Garcia spread his hands. “Silva was a good operative. I sent him because he was fluent in Portuguese, and because he had a history of success. But I knew that he had a very bad problem with alcohol. I had seen him fall down myself, on more than one occasion. This time, he simply fell a very long way.”
Moreno stared through the window at the Miami skyline. After a while he said, “This looks to be a fairly simple case. There is a man in a particular area of Recife who either is or is not Guzman. I will bring you this man’s fingerprints. It should take no more than two weeks.”
“What do you require?”
“I get four hundred a day, plus expenses.”
“Your terms are reasonable,” Garcia said.
“There’s more,” Moreno said, holding up his hand. “My expenses are unlimited, and not to be questioned. I fly first class, and require an apartment with a live-in maid to cook and to clean my clothes. And, I get two and one half percent of the amount recovered.”
“That’s fifty thousand dollars.”
“Correct,” Moreno said, standing out of his seat. “I’ll need a half-dozen wallet-sized photographs of Guzman, taken as close to his death date as possible. You can send them along with my contract and travel arrangements to my home address.”
John Moreno shook Garcia’s hand, and walked away from the desk.
Garcia said to Moreno’s back. “It used to be ‘Juan,’ didn’t it? Funny how the simple change of a name can open so many doors in this country.”
“I can leave for Brazil at any time,” Moreno said. “You know where to reach me.”