'Shit, Stoke, I didn't get that good a look at her.'
'Why not?'
'Well, for starters she was wearing one of those black burkas. A fancy one. The one all the rich Arab women wear.'
'So you're saying you didn't see her?'
'Of course I saw her. I saw her fucking husband. I saw her fucking children. And I saw her luggage and her fucking dog. Gimme a break, man. I've been eating reds all night and I'm a little ragged here.'
'Ragged? I'm not in a real good mood, Harry. Seriously. I just got off the phone with Sharkey. I'm going to prison soon, Harry, a very bad prison.'
'What? Why?'
'Later. Now, you tell me all those people are still inside that suite across the hall. That they did not come out. Not one of them. Not ever.'
'Not one of them came out. I swear. I was watching that door, man. I been all over it.'
'They order any room service? Maid service? Bellmen? Plumbers? Electricians?'
'No. Not a soul. I swear.'
'You think about maybe waking me up, Harry?'
'It didn't seem like that big a-'
'Did you think about telling the manager to bring their passports up to our suite? So you could, you know, sorta check them out?'
'No. I mean, yes, of course I thought about it. But-'
'Did you think about what a good disguise a burka would make for a woman who didn't want to be recognized?'
'I-'
'Get your weapon, Harry. We're going across the hall to pay the sheik a visit. We're hotel detectives checking on the sheik's security arrangements in case they give us any trouble. Okay?'
'Good idea.'
'They better be in there, Harry.'
'They're in there, dude. Unless they can fly off balconies, they are most definitely fucking in there.'
THE PRESIDENTIAL SUITE WAS EMPTY. Stoke examined every square inch of it. You'd never know anyone had set foot in it. Only by going into the master bedroom walk-in closet, where there were chunks of plaster and plaster dust all over the goddamned floor where a fake wall had been taken down, and a big damn hole punched in the real wall behind it, would you know somebody had been there. There was a very substantial wall safe with the door hanging ajar. It was empty too. Imagine that.
'Shit,' Harry Brock said. 'Shit, shit, shit.'
'Yeah,' Stoke said, too angry with his partner to say more.
'So how did they get out, Stoke? Jesus.'
'It seems there is a small service elevator in the suite's kitchen pantry. It's behind a china cabinet that swings out from the wall. So room service can bring meals and hors d'oeuvres up directly and heat them for cocktail parties and shit.'
'Oh.'
'Yeah.'
'Our guys didn't know about the service elevator?'
'No, Harry, they did not. I did not. I should have. My bad. You feel better now?'
'How the hell you get twenty million in hundreds out of the damn suite? Out of the hotel?'
'I dunno. Steamer trunks with little brown LVs all over them, maybe? Huh? You think?'
'Right.'
'But all those kids. The dog. The sheik.'
'Relatives. Cousins, nephews, who the hell knows.'
'Yeah, relatives. Except for the dog.'
'Harry, I'm going to kill you.'
'You know what? I don't blame you. Give me five minutes alone in that bathroom and I'll kill myself.'
'I can't wait five minutes. Besides, I'd really rather do it myself, Harry,' Stoke said.
THIRTY-TWO
DRIVE EXACTLY 39.7 MILES DUE WEST of Palm Beach, Florida, and you will soon find yourself on another planet. There you'll find the miniburg strip called Belle Glade sweltering amid vast cane fields. BeeGee, as Stoke called it, was about as far removed from the money, tropical splendors, and glamour of Palm Beach as the earth is from the sun.
In addition to a smattering of smoke-belching Big Sugar factories out in the fields, a gas station, and a grotty Burger King, BeeGee is also the home of an infamous hellhole penal colony called the Glades Correctional Institution.
The Glades, for short. Think Cool Hand Luke meets Devil's Island and you've got yourself a pretty good mental picture. Established in 1932 as Florida Prison Farm 2, inmates were originally sent there to grow vegetables for other state institutions. Now it's just GCI, or as the medium-to-close custody population calls it, the Glades.
Stoke, who would be incarcerated inside the razor-barbed wire boundaries of the Glades in a few short hours, at three o'clock that very afternoon, had told Harry Brock he wanted to have his 'last meal' in Palm Beach. Palm Beach? Brock had said. Wasn't that where Bernie Madoff had lived? That's how much Harry knew about Palm Beach.
Stoke was starving. He knew exactly what he wanted, too. Cup of black bean soup followed by a rare bacon cheeseburger, mushrooms, fried onions, lettuce, extra mayo, at a restaurant called Taboo on Worth Avenue. Maybe even two bacon cheeseburgers. What the hell. God only knew how long he'd be inside the joint.
They were blasting up I-95 from Miami in Stoke's GTO, top down, Barry White CD pulsing, pushing the bass envelope on the Bose system. It was Stoke's particular fave, Staying Power, the one Barry White album that had the six-minute duet with Lisa Stansfield, the one called 'The Longer We Make Love,' on it. Stoke, behind the wheel, was singing along with Barry.
The blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice,
The longer we do it, the more we get down to it…
When they reached the I-95 exits for Southern Boulevard, Stoke took the one going east toward the Atlantic Ocean. Moments later, they were rumbling over what the Palm Beach locals called the South Bridge, brothers standing on both sides of the bridge, fishing in the hot sunshine, little Styrofoam coolers with ice and beer at their feet, not a care in the whole damn world. And that lucky old sun, he just rolls around heaven all day.
'You really look depressed,' Harry said, looking over at him.
'Me? Nah. Hell, I got it all, baby. See that big pinkish house over on the left? Big green lawn rolling down to the water. Know what that is?'
'Yeah. A big pink house.'
'That just happens to be Mar-a-Lago, Harry. Home of none other than the Donald himself. Donald and me, hell, we practically neighbors now. Glades is only about forty miles from here, y'know. Turn this car around, it's a straight shot west out Southern Boulevard. Way I see it, me and the Donald live on the same damn street. 'Course, I don't have a pool and a nine-hole golf course, but still.'
'You are depressed.'
Stoke, still pissed at Harry over the Fontainebleau debacle, reached over and turned Barry up, now on another CD backed by a full orchestra and Love Unlimited doing 'Love's Theme,' and concentrated on the music and just cruising Ocean Boulevard, breathing the salt air, the wide blue Atlantic sparkling on his right, gorgeous flowery mansions flashing by on his left. Beautiful. He had a lot of sins, but envy had never been one of them. He
