'Yeah, I have to go to Hialeah. Talk to Guilli or David Vega if you want to know something. Also, you want to, you can drive my wheelchair. I think you like it.'
There weren't too many places had swimming pools around here. A pink and green place called the Sharon Apartment-Motel on Meridian and Twelfth, across from Flamingo Park, had a little bitty one out front, but nobody was in it. Nice-looking pool, too, real clean, sparkling with chlorine. There hadn't been anybody in it the other time either. This was Nobles' second visit to the Sharon Apartment-Motel office, the important one.
He said to Mr. Fisk, little cigar-smoking Jew that owned the place, 'Well sir, you think over my deal?'
Mr. Fisk had skinny arms and round shoulders but a big stomach and was darker than many niggers Nobles had seen in his life. Mr. Fisk said, 'Go out and turn left and keep walking. What do you come to, it don't even take you ten minutes and I'm talking about on foot?'
Nobles said, 'Let's see. Go out and turn left--'
'The Miami Beach Police station,' Mr. Fisk said. 'Look, right here I got it written down. I even got it in my head written. Six-seven-three, seven-nine-oh-oh. I pick up the phone they're here before I can say goodby even.'
'Yeah, but see, by then it's already done.' Nobles took out his wallet and held it open for Mr. Fisk. 'What's 'at say there, under where it says Star Security?'
Mr. Fisk leaned against the counter separating them, concentrating on the open wallet. ' 'Private protection means crime prevention.' Is that suppose to be clever? I got a son in the advertising game could write you a better slogan than that one, free.'
'See, prevention,' Nobles said, 'that's what you have to think about here. See, you call the cops after something's done to you, right? Well, you call us before it happens and it don't.'
Mr. Fisk said, 'Wait a minute, please. Tell me what you're not gonna let happen the cops one minute away from here down the street would?'
'Well, shit, they could mess your place up all different kinds a ways.'
'Who is they?'
'Well, shit, you got enough dagos living around here. You got your dagos, your dope junkies, your queers, this place's full a all kinds. But, see, five hundred dollars in advance, you don't have to worry about 'em none. It gives you protection all year, guaranteed.'
'Guaranteed,' Mr. Fisk said. 'I always like a guarantee. But tell me what in particular could happen to my place if I don't buy your protection?'
'Well,' Nobles said, 'let's see...'
Surveillance, the way LaBrava remembered it from his Miami field-office days, was sitting across the street from a high-rise on Brickell Avenue or some place like the Mutiny or the Bamboo Lounge on South Dixie. Sitting in a car that was as close as you could come to a plain brown wrapper with wheels, so unnoticeable around those places it was hard to miss. The afternoon the wholesaler came out of the Bamboo, walked across the street to the car and said, 'Joe, the lady and I're going out to Calder, catch the last couple races, then we're going up to Palm Beach, have a nice dinner at Chuck & Harold's with some friends...' it was time to move on, to Independence, as it turned out...
But not anywhere near the kind of independence he was into now--protecting his movie star--standing in some bushes on the east side of Flamingo Park, catching Richard Nobles with a long lens coming out of a motel named Sharon:
Richard Nobles walking over to the swimming pool. Snick. Nobles turning to say something to the little guy standing in front of the office. Snick. The little guy with his hands on his hips, feisty pose, extending his arm now to point at Nobles walking away. LaBrava saying, eye pressed to the Leica, 'I see him.' Snick.
The guy turned to his office, then turned back again and yelled something at Nobles. Nobles stopped. He looked as though he might go back, and the little guy ran inside the office.
LaBrava got in Maurice's car, crept along behind Nobles over Twelfth Street to Collins and parked again, got out with his camera and followed Nobles up Collins. Silver jacket and golden hair--you didn't have to worry about keeping him in sight. There he was, like he was lit up. The Silver Kid. The guy never looked around either; never even glanced over his shoulder.
From the east side of Collins, LaBrava shot him going into Eli's Star Deli. About fifteen minutes later he got him coming out. He got him going in and coming out of a dry cleaner's. Finally he got him going into the Paramount Hotel, just above Twentieth Street. LaBrava hung around about an hour. The bad part. But better than sitting in a car full of empty styrofoam cups and crunched-up paper bags. At least he could move around.
He walked to the taxi stand on the southwest corner of Collins and Twenty-first and waited nearly twenty minutes for a red Central cab to arrive with the Nigerian, Johnbull Obasanjo behind the wheel, scowling.
'What's the matter?'
'Notting is the mattah.' With an accent that was both tribal and British.
'You always look pissed off.'
'It is the way you see, not the way I look.'
There were parallel welts across his broad face, tracks laid by a knife decades ago that Johnbull, second cousin of a Nigerian general, told were Yoruba markings of the warrior caste. Why not?
'You're disappointed.'
'Ah,' Johnbull said. 'Perhaps what you see is disdain.'
'Perhaps.'
'Mon say to me, the fare, 'Did you learn your English here?' No, in Lagos, when I am a boy. 'Oh,' he say, 'and where is Lagos?' ' Johnbull's twin knife scars became vivid, underlining the white-hot pissed-off expression in his eyes. 'When I am a child in school, for God sake, I can draw a map of the United States. I can show you where Miami is, I can show you where Cleveland is. But nobody here, they don't know where Lagos is, where you get the second most oil from any place in the world.'
'I'm looking for a guy,' LaBrava said, 'who doesn't know where his ass is. Big blond guy staying at the Paramount.' LaBrava handed Johnbull a ten-dollar bill. 'Watch for a black Pontiac Trans Am, late model. If it picks up the big blond guy, follow it. Then give me a call. I'll pay for whatever time you spend on it. If you have to leave, tell the other guys, I'll give 'em the same deal.'
'I want a picture for my mother,' Johnbull said. 'This one smiling.'
'Let's see a big one,' LaBrava said. He raised his camera and shot the Nigerian framed in his window, grinning white and gold.
The woman in the office of the Sharon Apartment-Motel said, 'Tell me you arrested him and you want Mr. Fisk to take a look it's the same one... Nuh, no such luck, uh? Oh well. Mr. Fisk is lying down he's so upset. Soon as the other police left he had to lie down. You know what he's worried you don't find him? What if he comes back?'
LaBrava waited.
Mr. Fisk came in, wary.
'You don't look like no cop to me, would wear a shirt like that. With a camera. What is this, you're on your vacation?'
LaBrava said, 'We like to take a few pictures when we process a crime scene, Mr. Fisk. You by any chance speak to Sgt. Torres?'
'I don't know--they come in a car with the lights. You know how long it took them? Twenty-five minutes.'
'See, they make out a U.C.R.,' LaBrava said. 'That's a Uniformed Crime Report. Then the Detective Bureau follows up. Did he give you his name? The big blond guy?'
'He showed me a gold star and the name of the company, something that says 'Private protection means crime prevention,' and his name printed there, typed. But I don't remember it. I should a wrote it down.'
'What'd he say exactly?'
'I told the two other cops were here. I told them all that.'
'In case you might've left out something important.'
'Okay, he wants to sell me protection. What else is new? I tell him I don't need any, I tell him I've got the Miami Beach Police Department one minute away from here down the street. That's how dumb I am. I don't know it
