Elmore Leonard - Gold Coast

“They’ve charged someone else with his murder,” Karen said.

“Arnold Rapp, I know that,” Vivian said. “It’s too bad, but I’m not giving my life for Arnold Rapp.”

“It’s almost nine-thirty,” Maguire said.

Karen, seated close to Vivian, looked up from the kitchen table. “Why don’t you go with him? Come back at ten.”

Why? What were they going to talk about? He couldn’t see Karen’s eyes behind the glasses. She sat in the dirty kitchen of the house on Monegro in the Cuban quarter working something out. As though she did this all the time.

Maguire went out to the curb and got in the Mercedes as it came to a stop.

“Where is she?”

“We come back in a half hour.”

Jesus drove off. “I went up to Eighth Street. I saw a guy there he say Roland’s looking for me. Shit. Man, I got to go to Cuba or do something.”

Maguire didn’t say anything, looking at the people sitting in front of their houses and the ones on the sidewalk watching the silver-gray Mercedes-Benz drive by.

“What do you think about Vivian?” Jesus said.

“I think she’s scared.”

“No, I mean do you think she’d pay us something? Why not, uh?”

They picked up Karen at 10. Maguire slid behind the wheel and Jesus got in back as far as S.W. Eighth, where they dropped him off. Maguire cut over to 95 and headed north to Lauderdale. Karen had taken off her glasses. She sat holding them, silent.

“Well?” Maguire said.

Karen didn’t say anything.

“What else you find out?”

“Nothing, really.”

“She still won’t go to the police.”

“The day Roland dies, she will. If the other man is still in prison. He kills people,” Karen said.

“You mean Roland.”

“Yeah. He kills people.”

Maguire said, “Do you want me to stay with you tonight?”

Karen took a long time to answer. She said, “Not tonight, okay? I’d like to do some quiet thinking.”

“That’s the only kind,” Maguire said, keeping it light, but feeling a little hook inside him. Something was going on.

They drove in silence; left the freeway and headed east toward the ocean through light evening traffic, across the 17th Street Causeway and past Seascape, Maguire’s other world, dark. Maguire picturing the dolphins by themselves, surfacing in moonlight within their pools and tanks.

He said to Karen, “When I worked at the dolphin place down on Marathon, ten years ago-I didn’t tell you, did I, I got arrested for willful destruction of property?”

Karen didn’t say anything.

“You listening?”

“You were arrested for willful destruction of something.”

“The fences,” Maguire said. “They didn’t have tanks down there, they had wire fences built out from the shore and the breakwater. Like pens they kept the dolphins in. Different pens that were attached to each other. One night I went out there with some tinsnips and cut the fences.”

Karen said, “You freed the dolphins?”

“Yeah. They swam out to sea.”

“That’s remarkable.” She kept looking at him now.

“Unh-unh, the remarkable thing,” Maguire said, “as soon as they got hungry they all came back to the pens and never left again… They didn’t want to be saved. They just wanted to play games.”

JESUS DIAZwas taking his suit and some pants to the dry cleaner, getting ready for his trip, whenever it was going to be. He was walking past the place on the corner of Eighth Street and Forty-second Avenue that gave spiritual readings and advice, when the car turned the corner, stopped hard, and the voice said, “Hey!”

Jesus almost dropped the clothes and took off. But it was Lionel Oliva motioning him to come over to the car.

“I thought you went to Cuba.”

“Pretty soon.”

“I got your job. Man, it’s a lot of work.”

“Keep it,” Jesus said.

“What’s he want with Vivian Arzola?” Lionel asked.

Jesus moved in closer, stuck his head in the window, resting his clothes against the dusty car.

“He’s looking for her?”

“He came to the trailer yesterday, insulted me, then hired me to find her. What does the pimp give you for a job like this?”

“Different amounts. What he feels like,” Jesus said. “You have any luck?”

“That’s what it was,” Lionel said. “You know she owns some houses to rent. I was talking to this guy used to know her, lives in the Grove. He said yeah, this house of Vivian’s on Monegro was vacant for a month. But then he saw a light on, and he thinks he saw her go in there the other day. So I went over, I look in the window. There she is in the hall, going into the kitchen or someplace. I knock on the door, no answer.”

“She probably don’t want to see anybody,” Jesus said.

“Stuck up, owning all those houses,” Lionel said. “Fuck that, I’m not going to bother with her.”

“I wouldn’t,” Jesus said.

“Let Roland see if he can talk to her.”

“You tell him yet?”

“Yeah, I just called him a few minutes ago.”

Ten-fifteen, another fifteen minutes before show time, Brad Allen was addressing his “gang”-Lesley, Robyn, Hooker, Chuck, and Maguire-sitting around on the lower grandstand benches, while Brad, in pure white, stood between them and the pool. The main-show dolphins would surface and watch them from the holding pens along the side. Brad half-turned to point across the pool to the deck that served as the stage.

“What we’ll do, we’ll light some paper in some kind of shallow metal container. Maguire, you’ll still be backstage. Wait there after the intro. So you’ll ring the firebell.”

Seascape opened at ten. There were people on the grounds already looking around, coming past the roped-off grandstand area and looking in, wondering what all those kids in the red T-shirts were doing sitting there. No, they weren’t all kids, were they?

Robyn said, “Brad, it’s a dynamite idea, but do you light the paper and you’re the one that yells fire?”

“No, you’re right,” Brad said. “ You light the paper. That’s good thinking, Rob. And I’ll be distracting the audience, my back turned to you.”

Maguire saw Jesus Diaz approach the chain across the entrance and the sign hanging from it that said: THIS AREA CLOSED UNTIL SHOWTIME, Jesus looking at the sign and then looking in anxiously at the group sitting in the grandstand. Maguire raised his arm. He stood up.

“Sit down,” Brad said.

“I got to talk to that guy for a minute.”

The others were turning to look up at Maguire and then over to the Cuban waiting by the chain.

“Sit down till we get this straightened out,” Brad said. “I turn around, I see it and yell, ‘Fire!’ Cue for the firebell. No, wait’ll I say, ‘This is a job for Smokey the Dolphin.’ Yeah. Then ring the bell. Then Hooker? You’ve got the hat on Dixie, right?”

“Right,” Hooker said.

“Maguire, sit down.”

“I just have to see the guy a minute.”

“When we’re through,” Brad said. “Okay, Hooker-you give Dixie the signal.”

“Right.”

“She comes over, gives a couple of tail flaps-”

Maguire was staring at Jesus, trying to read his mind.

“-and puts out the fire.”

“He knows where she is!” Jesus called out to him.

Maguire was moving.

“Where you going?… Maguire!”

Brad and the “gang” watched him hurdle the chain-brush the sign with his foot, causing it to jiggle-and take off with the Cuban.

“Any idea where he’s going?” Brad asked.

“He probably don’t know himself,” Lesley said. “He’s weird.”