Hard Case Crime: Honey in His Mouth (14 page)

For lunch the co-pilot/servant brought a tray on which was bouillon, garlic bread, an omelet, and sweetish black coffee.

“You fly the food around too, do you, buddy?”

The man kept a wooden face. “No
habla, Señor.”
He placed the tray on the sand beside Harsh and left. Harsh wondered what would have happened if he had sprung some of the Spanish he had learned on the man. What excuses would he have had then not to strike up a conversation?

There was a telephone on a small table in the cabana. Harsh noticed it through the cabana entrance. He stared at the telephone for some time and abruptly got up and went into the cabana and picked up the telephone directory on which the instrument was sitting.

If there’s one in the telephone book, he thought, it’ll be in the classified section. Under L. L for Locksmith. His hand was shaking until he had to wedge the telephone directory against the wall while he turned pages.
Security Locksmithing Company.
He threw back his head and showed all his teeth at the ceiling, wishing he could let out a howl of satisfaction. By God, there was a locksmith in Palm Beach. There really was.

As the fellow says, nothing gets results like action, he reflected, and he picked up the telephone.

“May I serve you?”

It was Brother’s voice.

Harsh froze. He had made a mistake here, he had made a real mistake. The damn line plugged into a private switchboard at the house, and Brother had been keeping an eye on it. What could he do about it? He did not want Brother to know he had even toyed with the idea of using the telephone. He held his breath, wondering whether he had gasped or anything earlier so that he could have been heard. Jesus, if he put the telephone back on the cradle now, Brother would know for sure something was screwy.

His eyes chanced on the luncheon tray sitting on the sand outside. I need a table to eat my lunch off of, don’t I? he thought. As quietly as he could he placed the telephone on the cabana floor where it might have fallen if dislodged from the table. Then he picked up the telephone table one-handed, carried it outside, and plunked the legs down in the sand beside his chair. He maneuvered the luncheon tray onto the table, bracing it against his cast. Then he sat down and picked up knife and fork. He ate two bites before Brother came running from the direction of the house.

Brother looked into the cabana. “That telephone is off its hook.”

“It is? Say, I guess it fell off the table when I moved the thing out here. Put it back, will you? If I bend over to do anything, this face of mine stabs me blind.”

Brother’s syrup-dipped eyes stayed on Harsh. His lips were compressed. His breath came and went through his nose rather audibly. Then Brother began to call Harsh things in Spanish, words too fast for Harsh to understand, but which had the tongue lash that profanity has in any language.

Harsh waved a forkful of food at Brother. “Cuss all you want to, you crazy bastard. You think I care?”

Brother became suddenly pale and silent. Then he wheeled and strode back to the house and went inside. Harsh was both surprised and amused, and he was congratulating himself on having gotten rid of the man when Brother reappeared from the house. Now Brother had a shotgun. He came back to the cabana at a run.

Harsh got wildly to his feet, not knowing what he was going to do, feeling sure Brother was going to shoot him down. His skin felt like it was crawling with lice, so great was his nervous tension. Brother ran straight to him and jammed the muzzle of the shotgun against his chest. It was a double-barreled shotgun, a hammer model, and Harsh could see it was cocked. All right, I am going to die anyway, what is there to lose, Harsh thought. He fell back on his army training. It was no trick, the instructor had told them, to disarm a man who has a gun on you providing the gun is jammed against your body. You just grab the gun and knock it aside. It is a matter of the telegraphic speed of nerve impulses. If the gun is jammed against some part of your torso, you can make it, because it takes a split second for your brain to send the grab message to your muscles, and a split second for the other man’s brain to send the message that you are going to grab, pull the trigger. Your message gets the first start, and this is the difference. Enough difference.

Harsh was twisting when he struck the gun. It went off. Noise, a tubful of fire, powder stink. A hole appeared in the sand at their feet large enough to be a grave for a small pig. Jesus God, Harsh thought, it worked, that hairy-chested instructor wasn’t fly-specking us. Harsh got his usable arm over the barrel of the shotgun and spun his body completely around and the shotgun was torn from Brother’s grip. The gun sailed about twenty feet, landing in the foam where a wave was falling apart on the sand. Now Brother stood spraddle-legged and wide open for a kick, so Harsh let him have it. In the groin.

Brother fell backward when the kick got him, but instead of turning green and staying down, he got up again at once. Harsh ran for the shotgun. He tripped and fell face first into the wet sand, but got his good hand on the shotgun after what seemed forever, and sat up. A wave came in and broke and drenched him with salt water almost to the hip pockets. He watched Brother. “You want the other barrel?”

“Give me that gun, Harsh.”

“I’ll give you what’s in the barrel, I ain’t kidding you.”

There was a silence—what the fellow would call a pregnant silence, Harsh thought. He glowered over the shotgun sights and kept the muzzle pointed at Brother’s face.

Brother smiled a rather odd smile. If the smile was intended to worry Harsh, it succeeded, for he felt certain Brother was going to come at him again. But Brother turned and walked, in no hurry at all, back to the house.

Harsh tried to get up from the wet sand, but his legs refused the job. He looked down at the shotgun, and then he realized—he was sure by looking at the down hammers—that both barrels had exploded when Brother fired the gun. He had been threatening Brother with an empty weapon.

When Harsh saw Mr. Hassam the next morning, he threw up his arm and waved him over. He was very glad to see him. Mr. Hassam walked into the sun-splashed dining patio adjacent to the kitchen where Harsh was sitting on an iron spider chair eating breakfast. “You got back, eh? It seemed like you were gone forever.”

“I came in this morning early.” Mr. Hassam waved at the table. “I like to get my own breakfast. Excuse me.” He went into the kitchen.

Harsh listened to pans rattling for a time, then moved over to the kitchen door. “What are you fixing yourself?”

“Pompano sautéed in butter with capers. I like fish for breakfast. Could I fix you some?”

“I guess I could go for a little more. I got an appetite this morning, for a change. I’m glad to see you back, Mr. Hassam. I mean that. Nobody else around here offers to prepare me breakfast.”

“Thank you, Harsh. I do not see why you should not be popular.”

“Neither do I, but I keep having run-ins with different people around here.”

“You mean Brother?”

Harsh nodded. “Yeah, that’s who I mean. You know something, I never seen a guy like that bastard. I mean I don’t make him out. No crap. He scares the hell out of me, I’m not fooling you. You know what he tried to do yesterday afternoon? Blow my gut right out of me with a shotgun. Blow it right out of me.”

Mr. Hassam poured coffee into a cup. “Yes. Brother told me this morning. He is very sorry. He said he lost his head. He asked me to express his regrets.”

“He what?”

“He is very sorry, and wants to express his regrets.”

Harsh laughed. “Do you expect me to believe that?”

“Harsh, I could explain how you can avoid future trouble with Brother. I mean, I can tell you some things that may help you exercise restraint and tolerance.”

“I’ll restrain him with a brickbat, he points that shotgun at me again.”

“Harsh, here is the first thing I want to tell you. Brother has a mental handicap, an affliction known as paranoia. It comes and goes, and sometimes it reaches the point where he has to go to a sanitarium and take shock treatments.”

“That’s no news to me, Mr. Hassam. I had figured out he was nuts. You just watch him, anybody would know.”

“Harsh, if you will make allowances for his illness, I think you can handle him. Particularly now, since you bested him in the encounter yesterday.”

“Oh, he figured I licked him, did he? He had me guessing. I couldn’t tell what he thought. He ruined my night’s sleep. I kept wondering when he was going to pop in on me with another shotgun. That’s a tough boy, that Brother. You know what I did, I kicked him right in the privates as hard as I could. It didn’t faze the bastard. He got up ready to eat me. And he would have, except by then I had my mitts on the blunderbuss.”

“That is not so strange.”

“Listen, a kick in the testes like that would put me down for good.”

“Not if you didn’t have them.”

Harsh’s jaw dropped. “The hell you say! Is that what he is? I thought those guys were soft and peaceful.”

“Well, Brother is not. Brother adheres to a routine of rigorous diet and exercise, perhaps to subdue evidence of his handicap, I don’t know.”

“I’m glad you told me about it, Mr. Hassam. Nobody tells me anything but you. I feel kind of sorry for the guy, at that.”

“Yes, and you would feel even sorrier if I told you who did it to him.”

“I would? Why?”

“It was his brother.”

“Jesus. You mean his own brother—Jesus!”

Mr. Hassam tasted of a caper. “El
Presidente.”

Harsh stared. “You mean
El Presidente
is his...and he had him
castrated?
The guy I look like?”

“Now you’re getting it.”

“Jesus. The first time Brother laid eyes on me, back in that hospital, he gave one hell of a jump. He hated me right off, and he’s hated me ever after. I can begin to see why.”

Mr. Hassam transferred pompano to plates with the skill of a chef. “I trust this information will enable you to be more tolerant.”

“Yeah, it will make his crap easier to swallow.” Harsh accepted one of the plates. “What was the trouble between the brothers, anyway?”

Mr. Hassam smiled thinly. “Miss Muirz. They had a falling out over her.”

Harsh put the plate holding the pompano on the kitchen cabinet. He stood there for a while. “Miss Muirz.” He picked up a cup of coffee and drank it all. “Well, it figures.”

Harsh had intended to bring up the subject of the fingerprints on the bank deposit card but the news about Brother caused him to forget it until after breakfast, when Mr. Hassam brought out the mastic material he had brought with him from New York for the hand casts. The materials consisted of a little tin spray can and a jar of the mastic itself which was the color of taffy candy before it is pulled. Harsh was puzzled, but he followed instructions and sat down and permitted his hands to be sprayed from the can—both hands, the healthy one and the one in the cast. This placed an oily coating on his skin, designed to keep the mastic from adhering to the skin.

Harsh watched Mr. Hassam open the jar of mastic. “Hey, wait a minute. What is this for?”

“You need not be afraid.”

“I ain’t worried about my yellow feathers. What is that gunk, is what I wanta know.”

“We are going to have a custom-made pair of gloves fashioned for you, Harsh.”

“Yeah? Is that right, now?” Harsh drew his hands back. “Just a new pair of gloves, huh?”

“You’re not scared, are you?”

“You know how it is. You’re sure you’re being framed, you get shotguns pointed at your belly, and you get cute answers to questions. I ain’t scared, but I get to wondering.”

“I wish you would go along with me, Harsh.” Mr. Hassam sounded tired. “I have to do this. I have to get these gloves made, gloves which will carry your fingerprints, so that we can place your prints on additional bank deposit cards. You can understand, we can’t run all the way up here from South America with every bank deposit card. That is all there is to it.”

“Hell, I thought maybe you were going to knock off some guy and leave my prints on the job.”

“No, no, nothing like that. I swear it.”

“I think you’re nuts, Mr. Hassam, no crap. I never ran across such a wild scheme before.”

“Trust me, Harsh.”

“Well, okay.” Harsh held out his right hand. “I guess I got very little choice.”

When Mr. Hassam had stripped the set-up mastic off Harsh’s hands, he left the kitchen at once with it, leaving Harsh to do some second-thinking. He immediately wished he had not consented to having the hand casts made. Why had he been such a sucker, anyway? Mr. Hassam was a slick one, talking him into it. If they were going to make some gloves that anybody could wear and leave his fingerprints scattered around, that was serious. They could rob Fort Knox if they could figure out a way to get the job done, and hang it on him if they wanted to.

He felt something wriggling down his forehead. He struck it a hard blow with his palm, but it was just a drop of sweat, which he splashed to nothing.

He went over to the kitchen sink and washed the oily film off his hands, taking care not to get the cast wet. He had to use quite a lot of soap powder to get it off. Then he examined the gunk still left in the jar. There was not much of it. No label on the jar, no way to tell who made the stuff. Well, he had made another sucker move, that was what he had done.

He looked at Mr. Hassam narrowly when the latter rejoined him almost two hours later. “Them things you made of my hands, were they all right? They satisfy you?”

“Perfectly.”

“Could I have a look at them? I’d kinda like to see what they look like.” If he got his hands on the casts, he was going to destroy them.

“I’m sorry, Harsh. I have already sent them off to New York by air mail.”

“Oh.” Harsh rubbed the side of his nose with his finger. “Well, I guess that’s that. What else is on the toboggan for today?”

“More Spanish lessons, if you feel up to it.”

“Why not.”

“Shall we go down to the beach, then? More comfortable there.”