Elmore Leonard - Riding the Rap

“I live here,” Louis said.

“Maybe I’ll take you in anyway.”

“For what?” Louis sounding surprised now. “Man, I’m the caretaker. He’s staying while he does the work and I help him out some.”

“What’s your name?”

“Louis Lewis.”

“You putting me on?”

“It’s my name . You want me to spell it for you?”

“Where’s Warren Ganz?”

“Down in the Keys someplace, been gone all week.”

“When’s he coming back?”

“Didn’t tell me.”

Now Bobby said, “When I came here to collect, he was leaving. He said go see his mother, she’d pay me. So I go see her at the home-”

“They’re talking,” Louis said, “Bobby tells her he’s a gardener and she hires him to clean the place up.”

“Yes, but first,” Bobby said, “she tell me no, she won’t pay the debt, even for her own son. So I call Harry, I say maybe if you try-you the one her son owes-you can get her to pay you. He say to meet him and we can talk about it. But I never went there.”

Like they were getting their stories straight.

Raylan said, “You told Harry about the mother?”

“I did. Told him how she is, how you don’t know what she’s talking about sometime. Like when I go to get paid for my work.”

Bobby shook his head, resigned, before looking up at Raylan with sort of a frown, interested.

“You went to see her the other night, didn’t you?”

“I spoke to her,” Raylan said.

“Yeah? How was she?”

“Older than she looks,” Raylan said. “We talked.”

“About what, her piano? Then you talk to a nurse and she tell you the old woman don’t have a piano? You ask about her son, the nurse tells you he never comes to visit? Then you come back here and sneak around look in the windows?”

“Woke me up,” Louis said. “I almost call the police, tell ‘em there’s a prowler, man could be armed and dangerous, so shoot the motherfucker on sight. You mean that was you?”

Louis waited until Raylan, giving them a look but no last words, walked off around the corner, back the way he’d come, before Louis said to Bobby, “Hold up your hand.”

“What?”

“Man, put your hand up in the air.”

Bobby raised his right hand above his head and Louis came out of his chair to reach over and slap the hand saying, “Yeaaah, we done it, man. The dude’s gone off scratching his head wondering what happen to him.”

Bobby smiled, not giving it much.

Still, it was the first time Louis could recall ever seeing the man smile, Louis smiling with him, sitting down again. He said, “There’s no way the dude can say any different than what we told him. You see a way?” He pushed the newspapers off the table and picked up the shotgun he’d laid there underneath, with the machete. Then looked at Bobby again. “Do you?”

“Do I what?”

“See how the man can believe anything but what we told him?”

“I don’t know what he believes,” Bobby said. “I have to think about it. The first time, he act like a cop trying to be a nice guy. Now we know he’s a cop, so he don’t have to act nice.” Bobby speaking with a thoughtful tone. “Comes here looking for Harry… Why would they send a U.S. marshal, a federal cop?”

“Nobody sent him,” Louis said. “Didn’t you hear the man say he’s a friend of Harry’s? Hasn’t seen him in a few days, so he ask around, follows some leads, decides to check on people owe Harry money. See if they’ve seen him, that’s all.” Louis looked toward the house and raised his voice to say, “Hey, you suppose to be down in the Keys.”

Bobby turned to see Chip in the sunroom, watching them through a pane of glass. He said, “Leave him in there.”

“Scared to come out,” Louis said. “Look at him,” and said, “Come on, man, the coast is clear.”

“I told you leave him in there,” Bobby said, his tone getting Louis’s attention. “We have to think about this guy-what’s his name?”

“Raylan something,” Louis said, “believes he’s a cowboy. Got the hat, the boots. I wouldn’t mind a pair like that, black with the tan wing tips?”

“Had his coat open, thumbs in his belt,” Bobby said. “You see that? Ready to draw his gun. I always wonder what that would be like, two guys facing each other with guns.”

“Like in the movies,” Louis said.

“Yeah, but it could happen,” Bobby said. “This guy isn’t going away.”

Whenever Raylan thought of Reverend Dawn he’d see her facing him from across the table with her eyes closed, her long hair parted in the middle. He’d see her eyes open then to look at him with her calm expression. He’d see her hand come up to move her hair away from her face, using the tips of her fingers in a delicate kind of gesture, and he’d notice the way she bit her nails down.

Raylan was anxious to have his fortune told again, see how he was doing, and was on his way from Warren Ganz’s home to Reverend Dawn’s when the beeper message stopped him. He followed up to hear a female voice in the Sheriffs Office detective bureau asking if he’d meet Sergeant Lou Falco in the parking lot of a funeral home on Federal Highway in West Palm. As soon as possible.

Shit. He knew Falco, Falco was okay, but how long would this take? It sounded like a stakeout.

Raylan found the funeral home, 1940s moderne painted white with round corners and glass-brick inserts. He got out of the Jaguar and into an unmarked Crown Vic, a gray one, saying, “How do you work surveillance when everybody knows this’s a police car?”

“I’m waiting for a guy,” Falco said, “who’s coming to see what his brother looks like with embalming fluid in him. The brother is sitting on his front steps, a guy gets out of a car, pops him three times, gets back in the car and drives off. Maurice has to know who did it, but won’t talk to us. So maybe, you know, when he sees his brother laid out…”

“Maurice,” Raylan said. “That’s the name of one of the guys tried to jack my car that time.” He saw Falco nodding.

“Maurice Woody. You see them once you know you’ll see them again. Maurice is why I asked you to come. The other one’s Faron, the dead one.”

“Wears his hair in cornrows?”

“Yeah, that’s Faron.”

“They must’ve made bond.”

“Ten thousand each. They promised their grandma they’d never get in trouble again and she put her house up as collateral. The brothers were out five days when Faron got popped.”

“Maurice was there?”

“In the house.”

Through the tinted windshield they watched a car coming along Federal toward the funeral home. As it passed Falco said, “You know Maurice. I was thinking when he gets here if you went in with me… You heard about Faron so you stopped by…”

“Offer Maurice my sympathy?”

“Talk to him in his bereavement, shoot the shit.”

“Offer a plea deal on the car-jacking?”

“You could mention it. See if he’d like to trade, give us who did his brother.”

“There isn’t a state attorney in Florida,” Raylan said, “would go for a deal on car-jacking. You know that.”

“Yeah, but Maurice doesn’t.”

“He’d have to be awful dumb. The guy’s in and out of the system.”

“So? We don’t know his I.Q. He might go for it. We were hoping,” Falco said, “to put them at a robbery in Delray, a mom-and-pop grocery store, right after they got out. Use it to leverage Maurice into cooperating. We showed their pictures, the woman said no, it wasn’t them, so…” Falco was silent, watching the street, before saying, “It was like these two guys spur of the moment decide to rob the place. They go through the store picking out what they want and put it on the checkout counter-snacks like pretzels, potato chips, a couple of six-packs, and Jell-O.”