The Havana Room

'So?'

'At ten at night? A half mile or more away?'

'The bulldozer has lights, good ones.'

'But if the dozer had gone over the cliff, how did Poppy see it from the road?'

Jay stared at me. 'You got me on that.'

'In fact, remember he said something like if Herschel had been working there during the day, then his body had been out there about eight hours. He said that.'

'He did?'

'That means Poppy didn't see him working in the night.'

Jay held up his hands. 'Poppy's always gotten stuff screwed up, Bill. He got hit in the head by a sledgehammer when he was a kid. Never finished fourth grade.'

I wasn't convinced. 'You notice that Herschel wasn't wearing any socks?'

'No.'

'Makes you sort of wonder what a guy is doing working out in the cold on a bulldozer with no socks,' I said.

'He was a pretty tough old guy.'

Tough old guys usually keep their feet warm, in my experience, but I didn't press it. 'This whole deal is fucked up,' I muttered. 'From top to bottom. I help you with a real estate transaction and end up moving a dead black guy? Your dead black guy, okay? That pisses me off, Jay.' A fleck of my spit hit his face. 'Then the police find us? I don't like it.'

Jay held up his hands. 'I didn't know Herschel had gone off the edge. Poppy's note didn't say that, right? I know you're worried about it. Don't be. It's fine. Poppy worked it out. He told me this morning. He's known Herschel's family a long time.'

'What was going on out there, anyway?'

He nodded, anticipating the question. 'I asked Herschel to do some grading for me a week ago. The road was all washed out, and we had a lot of gravel on the other side of the property. He and his family rent an old house on the adjacent property. I still have some trucks and that bulldozer in the barn there.'

'What about the police?'

'I called them this morning,' Jay said. 'I've known these guys my whole life. It's all right. Herschel obviously had a heart attack.'

'Why is it obvious?'

'He's sitting there, dead on the tractor. Not a scratch on him. Long history of heart trouble, pericarditis, pulmonary edema. Working in the cold often gives-'

I didn't want to hear a lot of medical jargon from a layman. 'Did they ask you why you were out there on the same night that Herschel died?'

'Yeah, they did.'

'What did you say?'

'I told them I'd just finished the deal and I wanted to be sure some grading had gotten done.'

'Which is pretty close to the truth.'

'The first part of that is the truth, Bill. What else could it be? Herschel didn't do his grading on time and then was in a hurry to get started before the snow came too heavy, and then went out there in the cold on the bulldozer and had a goddamn fucking heart attack.'

'And if they come to me with the same question?'

Here Jay's face went slack and he stared through me, eyes seemingly focused on his own imaginings. He was, I felt, reminding himself of an idea or belief. 'I doubt they'll ask you,' he said.

I went on to the question of the deed. 'I checked on the records of the building and I think you've got a problem.'

'You do, huh?' Jay scooped up the menus and dropped them into the trash. 'I don't.'

'Voodoo LLC is not the current listed owner of the building.'

'Oh, hell, I know that, guy,' Jay answered as he examined the building directory. 'It's not so complicated. It's just paperwork. You didn't need to check on that.' He turned toward me. 'But I do need you to talk to a guy for me tonight, actually.'

'Jay, did you hear me? I don't think you own this building.'

'Of course I own this building!' He jabbed his fist against the staircase's newel post, making it shudder.

'You better explain.'

But that held no interest for him- he was already on his way up the stairs, making them creak under his weight. 'It's a corporate shell thing, Bill, no big deal. They do this all the time.' His voice bounced off the pressed-tin ceiling high above us. 'Really. You should know that, a guy with your experience. I do want you to talk to this other guy this evening, though, be my lawyer again, hold his hand, whatever. Go have dinner with him.'

'Forget it.'

'What?'

'I'm out.' I turned to go. And I should have gone, too, right then, should have stamped my way back down to the snowy sidewalk and not stopped until I had crossed back into some safer country of probability, but Jay came after me and pulled a slip of paper from his breast pocket.

'This is for last night, for the whole deal.'

'I never gave you a fee.'

'I estimated.'

It was a check for twenty-five thousand dollars. Very generous. Too generous, in fact. Shut-your-mouth money. I handed the check back. 'I don't want it. I want out.'

'All right,' he nodded. 'Fine.'

'But what do I have to do to understand, legally, what happened last night? It seems the title man didn't-'

'Just go have dinner with this guy for me tonight, and everything will be explained.'

'Who is it?'

'The seller.'

'The guy who owned this building?'

'Yeah.'

'So also the guy who now owns your old farm.'

'Right.'

'Why are you set to have dinner?'

'We weren't. He called me half an hour ago, said he had to hand over a couple more papers. Insisted. I just deposited his check, so I want to be polite. I didn't tell him I couldn't make it. Tonight is impossible for me. You can ask him whatever you want about the paperwork, Bill. He'll explain. Okay?'

'Just have dinner with him?'

'Yeah. Ask him anything.'

I shrugged. That was enough for Jay. He stood up. 'Let me at least show you the place. We can start in the basement.'

And so we did, then worked our way up. 'It's got eight office spaces. I've got several leases to renegotiate and you can help me with that, if you're interested,' Jay said.

'Nope.'

'All right. Anyway, it's a good location. People like the funky downtown locations. Good restaurants nearby, art galleries.' He pointed to a line of ancient screw holes that ran up the center of the wide stairs. They'd been sanded over and filled in with wood putty. 'See that?' he said. 'There used to be a long metal slide that went down the middle.'

'For finished goods.'

'Right. In the nineteenth century, beaver hats, then chairs. In the early twentieth, it was baseball gloves for a while.'

Now the building housed companies that manipulated symbols.

We knocked on the door of one small company named RetroTech, and a young Indian man opened it.