“Why can’t it?” she snapped at me.
“Let’s begin at the beginning. This is going to take all night. All right, first off I fall into their hands; that’s the starter. Now will you tell me how the holy hell I’m going to fall into their hands when I don’t even know who they are, or where they are, or how to go where they are so I can fall into their hands? What do you expect me to do — walk around all night with a sandwich board on my chest: ‘I’m waiting for you guys to grab me?’ ”
“Don’t get so funny.” She squelched me inattentively, running a fingernail up and down between two of her teeth in perplexed abstraction.
“I wouldn’t even know them if I saw them,” I grumbled. “They could be anybody at all.”
“Shut up.” She spit out the small end of a cigar and bent over the candle with it, sucking in flame. “Anything that can be put together can be taken apart again. This frame was nailed together around you; we can find the joints, take it apart into little separate pieces again, if we only keep at it long enough.”
“What d’ya say we do?” I assented dourly.
“That fat Chinaman is in on it in some way, that Tio Chin. That much you can be sure of. All the trouble started from his place. You and she were purposely steered there; he palmed the wrong knife off on you, faked the receipt, framed you to the police.”
“Him I would like to kick the wind out of.” I nodded darkly. “And I don’t know why I’ve hung around here this long without going back there and letting some air out of that balloon-belly of his.”
“Hold it,” she said, and hauled me back. “Just busting in that store of his and beating him up won’t do you any good. You won’t find out any more than you know now. He’ll squeal like a stuck pig; the cops’ll come down on you again, and you’ll be right back where you started from. The spiked evidence of the knife and the receipt and all the rest of it will still hold good.”
“But you’re going against your own argument, aren’t you? You just finished saying that they’ll grab me, that they can’t afford to turn me over to the police now any more.”
“Sure, but you’ve got to put yourself in the right position for them to grab you. They’re only going to grab you if they think you’re not expecting it; you don’t know who they are; you’re not wise to them. They’re not going to grab you if you go busting in that store the front way, beat him up; they’ll know you’re wise to him. Besides, this Chin isn’t alone in it. He’s just the front for somebody else. He never saw you before in his life, so what did he get out of framing you up? There’s somebody behind him.”
“That’s easy. That takes it all the way back to Florida. If this Chin is in on it with somebody else, if there’s somebody behind him, like you say, he must be working for Eddie Roman in some way.”
“That’s what we’ve got to figure out, the link between the two of them. That’ll show us where the two pieces fit together; that’ll show us the place for you to squeeze yourself in, so we can be sure they’ll grab you.”
I pushed the peak of my cap farther back on my forehead. “Now what would a big shot ‘sport’ and nightclub operator in Florida want with a Chinese agent in Havana? Chin deals in curios and antiques down here. Roman has no use for anything like that in any of his clubs. Not even in his own house; it was all shiny and modernistic. Yet there must be some form of transaction between them.”
“You used to do his driving for him. Didn’t you ever catch onto what his real business, his real source of income was?”
“Only what met the eye. Nightclubs, races, stuff like that.”
“That’s a short season down there. Did he go up North when his clubs closed down, operate someplace else?”
“No, he stayed there all year round.”
“Then he didn’t live off nightclubs. Nine months in the year, where was his money coming from?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “That was stuff that went on inside the house. I was outside it, sitting behind the wheel most of the time, don’t forget.”
“She was inside it. She was married to him. Didn’t she ever tell you anything?”
“She didn’t know any more than I did. She got it in the form of diamonds, but what shape it was in before it got turned into diamonds, I don’t think she knew herself.”
“That wouldn’t have been me, boy. Get something on everyone; that’s my motto.”
“He was too cagey.”
“She must have dropped some little remark or other, even if she didn’t know what it was herself. Any woman tells the guy she loves all about the guy she doesn’t love any more; that’s female instinct. Try to think, will you? Some morning when she got in the car alone with you. It’s right there — it must be — if you can only remember it.”
I thought back and thought back to a hundred dead and gone mornings, when we went speeding out the driveway, until we could get far enough away to exchange our first kiss unseen. Suddenly a word came to me. Came back to me from one of them. I flexed a finger at her. “What’s guava?” I asked her.
“What about it? Let’s hear it.”
“I asked you first.”
“It’s a fruit paste. Solid, rubbery sort of stuff.”
“She said something about that once. She asked me, just like I’m asking you now, but I couldn’t tell her. She overheard something one night, and she told me about it the next day in the car. You know, we used to park and then sit there together by the hour.”
She wasn’t interested in the mechanics of our love affair. “Por supuesto. But go ahead.”
“And she’d tell me every little thing that had happened since the last time, since the day before, or two days before, or whenever it was. And this was one of those little things. It wasn’t anything. It came at the tail end of everything else, just to have something more to say to me.”
She made avaricious grasping motions with both hands. “Well, let’s hear it, anyway; let’s see what it is.”
“Give me a minute now to see if I can fish it up in one piece. The phone rang one night and woke her. Four in the morning — some ungodly hour like that. It was right there by their bed. It was for him, of course. Well, he picked it up, and then she heard him say, ‘Hold it a second; I’ll talk to you from downstairs.’ And then he went to all the trouble of putting on robe and slippers, going down to the first floor, and taking the call from there, when he could have stayed just where he was in the first place. The scratchy noises coming from the open receiver bothered her and, half asleep as she was, she reached over to put it back on and shut it up, as long as he didn’t need it any more up there where she was. She put it to her ear for a minute to make sure he was on below, and that was how she got a snatch of this conversation. This business conversation. And the only thing that struck her strange about it was the peculiar hour.”
“She heard some of it?”
“Just a little. He was talking to some man, evidently someone who worked for him, and the man said: ‘But, boss, I can’t keep the launch cruising around in circles all night. I had to unload it somewhere.’
“Roman cursed him out and was sore at some delay. She heard him say, ‘Why didn’t you land it yesterday, when you were expected to? You’ve tied everything up in a knot. Now I’ll have to send a truck down to that Godforsaken place all over again to pick it up.’