The Pope of Palm Beach Read online

  “I don’t know.” Spitting out a reddish mixture. “I just got back from the job site—”

  Bash.

  Slump.

  The gun swung toward the second construction worker on the other bed, where four henchmen were delivering a cringe-worthy beatdown, grabbing broken-off bedposts and chair legs. Wham, wham, wham . . .

  . . . Serge stopped on the sidewalk outside room 108. “Do you hear all the racket?”

  “Sounds like someone’s being murdered,” said Coleman.

  “Can it get any worse?” said Serge. “They’re enjoying hot pizza at the beginning of an action movie! The guilt is overwhelming! . . .”

  . . . “Step back,” said Salenca, pressing the pistol with a silencer to the first worker’s nose. “God is next. Who sent you?”

  “Please! I just work construction!”

  Pfffft.

  He spun toward the other worker.

  “Nooooo!”

  Pfffft.

  Salenca ejected his clip. “Check their wallets.”

  Billfolds were retrieved and rifled. “I have their IDs, but Diego’s credit card isn’t in here.”

  “Keep looking!”

  They ripped apart luggage and went through drawers . . .

  . . . Outside on the sidewalk: “I feel awful about this but . . .” Serge raised his hand to knock on the door. “I’ll just beg for forgiveness.”

  Coleman upended a Coors. “Maybe start by telling them you’re not boning their wives. Get on their good side.”

  “Coleman.” Serge lowered his knuckles from the door and looked at a rigid shape in his pal’s pocket. “Where’s your room key?”

  “Right here.” He patted his side.

  “Let me see it.”

  “Sure thing.” He shifted the beer to his other hand and dug a plastic rectangle out of his pocket. “Here you go— . . . Wait, it’s that guy’s credit card.”

  “You blockhead! I didn’t leave it in the other room after all. That’s why I couldn’t remember.” He turned and headed back toward their room.

  “You’re mad at me?”

  “Nothing a hot pizza won’t fix.” Serge pulled out his phone and stared at the number on the credit card.

  . . . Inside room 108, one of the goons stepped over the bodies. “Mr. Salenca? I always want to learn from you. May I ask a question?”

  “You want a lesson now?”

  “It’s just that you shot those guys,” said the aide. “Now we won’t be able to find out who’s moving in on us.”

  “That’s the nature of someone moving in on you. You can’t help but find out,” said the honcho. “In the meantime, it was more important to send a message. They killed one of ours, we killed two of theirs.” Salenca looked down into his aide’s hands. “Now, I have something I’m wondering about. That pizza’s been on the floor.”

  “I’m hungry.”

  Another goon reached down for a slice. “And it’s still hot. Can we turn on the TV?”

  “No!”

  Something in the room began to beep. The first goon pulled out his cell phone. “I got an alert notification. Another hit.”

  “Hit on what?” asked Salenca.

  “Diego’s credit card.”

  “But—” Salenca looked over at the recently deceased. “That’s not possible.”

  “All I know is what my phone says. Someone just ordered a large pepperoni.”

  “What company?” asked the boss.

  “Jack Rabbit Pizza.”

  Salenca looked down at the cardboard box with a running bunny on the cover. He rubbed his eyes with both fists and looked again. “That’s weird.”

  Chapter 27

  1989

  Hanley Dunn, attorney-at-law, was not new to the legal racket. He’d seen just about everything in his sixty years.

  What struck him as new was sitting in an ultra-dark room in the middle of the day while Kenny Reese devoured a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken.

  A bone flew back over the lounge chair as teeth sank into a wing. “This is the best meal I’ve had in my entire life!”

  The attorney sat on the edge of his chair, patiently smiling to conceal his puzzlement. Kenny finally finished the last piece, along with the mashed potatoes and baked beans. He fell back in his chair, patted his stomach and burped. “I needed that.”

  Dunn continued smiling for a polite duration before: “You mentioned some other business? Besides the food?”

  “Can you get everything out of my name?” said Kenny. “The house, utilities, banking, and I’d like all my mail sent to your office. Then I’m getting an answering machine, but I won’t answer, and the recorded greeting will be in someone else’s name, so just start talking and when I recognize your voice, I’ll pick up. I guarantee I’ll be here.”

  Hanley wasn’t expecting this. Client strangeness was the norm, but this had turned into a fire-breathing unicorn with the face of Buddy Hackett. “Uh, may I ask what this is about?”

  “Hold on,” said Kenny. “And from now on, I’d like all communication from my agent and publisher to go through you.”

  “Wait a second,” said the lawyer. “I thought your name sounded familiar. You’re that author. I’ve always admired people who could write. It seems so difficult.”

  “Then you’ll take me on as a client?”

  “It’s actually quite simple,” said Dunn. “I’ll set up a few things, power of attorney, some accounts, a shell corporation—that last part sounds shady. And usually it is, but not in your case . . . Sorry if I seemed a little thrown at first, but now I understand your situation. I’m a fan.”

  “You are?”

  Hanley nodded. “You’ve reached a certain level of fame, and I’m sure you need to avoid some people who don’t understand personal space and would bother you.”

  “I can say for a fact that you’re absolutely correct.”

  The attorney stood. “I’ll get the necessary paperwork drawn up, and we can meet at my office on, say, Wednesday?”

  “No!” yelled Kenny. “I mean, I’m kind of on deadline. I can’t leave the house.”

  “Understood again. I’ll have my assistant drop it all by.”

  “Great! Leave it on the back steps, after midnight if possible.”

  “I’m sure that writing is a solitary process, and you want to minimize interruptions.”

  “Correct again.” Kenny stood and handed the lawyer a slip of paper.

  “What’s this?”

  “A grocery list.”

  Hanley Dunn maintained poise with that smile. “My assistant will take care of that, too.”

  The Present

  A green Chevy Nova crossed the steep arch of the Blue Heron Bridge on the way to Singer Island.

  “Can’t tell you how great it feels to be back in my hometown!” Serge slapped the steering wheel with zest. “I used to ride my banana bike over here all the time when it was just a flat little drawbridge.”

  “I remember this beach,” said Coleman. “I popped jellyfish with my feet and screamed.”

  “I dropped a jellyfish on my mom’s feet and she screamed,” said Serge. “That was a bad week. Okay, so she had trouble walking for a few days. So keep a better eye on your kid . . . But in general, a great childhood. Regular tropical Huck Finn, barefoot and outdoors all day. They don’t make childhoods like that anymore, with all the electronic gizmos now spawning whole generations of sickly, pale dumpling children who’ve never climbed trees or played in the mud. The only upside is they can type fast on small surfaces, which is an evolutionary dead end. When overpopulation turns the whole planet into a refugee scrum, the typists will be trampled. You can quote me.”

  “I remember climbing trees,” said Coleman. “My parents got a new washing machine and threw out the cardboard box. I dragged it into the backyard and jammed it between a tree and the fence, then climbed the tree and dropped down into it. I was trapped. Couldn’t get out. The box was wedged too good to tip over, and I was still to
o little to punch my way out. I fell asleep, and my parents went frantic for hours because the next thing I knew, the police were pulling me out of the box. For some reason, they were always calling the police.”

  Serge stared at Coleman a moment, then finished his coffee. “Why did you want to drop yourself into a tall box?”

  “It was different.” Coleman swatted at the windshield. Jingle, jingle. “I’m a cat.”

  Serge feverishly chugged his coffee. “Coleman, look at my knees! Look at them! Are you looking? Look!”

  “Meow . . . I’m looking . . . What am I looking for?”

  “Last night in the motel, I knew my childhood stomping grounds were coming up today, and for some reason I got the stray thought that I hadn’t looked at my knees for a while. The key to life is not to ignore stray thoughts, so I looked.” Serge glanced down. “And suddenly warm waves of boyhood bliss washed over me. Unlike the aforementioned youth of today, my knees are covered with so many overlapped scars that you can’t even begin to count how many times I skinned them. You can always tell the quality and era of a childhood by the knees.”

  “I remember skinning my knees all the time,” said Coleman.

  “So does everyone our age.” Serge hammered his travel mug of coffee. “My school alone probably kept the Mercurochrome people in business.”

  “Wasn’t that the red stuff our parents painted on our scrapes?”

  “What a scam! And my folks were always asking how I could skin my knees so often, and I’d just say, ‘Hurry up with the Mercurochrome. I have to get back to the football game in the parking lot.’”

  “You played football in a parking lot?”

  “We’re way too supervised now,” said Serge, conjuring fond memories. “Football every day in the parking lot next to Saint Francis. Tackle football. In parochial school uniforms. And we’d all go home in shredded clothes that looked like we’d been attacked by wolverines.”

  “What about breaking your arm?” asked Coleman.

  “Goes without saying.” Serge grabbed his left wrist in nostalgia. “It’s a kid’s job to break his arm, and not just for fun. Broken bones are a critical element in cementing the playground hierarchy. It’s like the first day in prison when you’re forced to find the biggest, baddest dude and punch him in the nose, just so everyone thinks, ‘That motherfucker’s crazy! Let’s butt-fuck someone else.’ Similarly, out on the vicious jungle plains of childhood, you have to break your arm, the sooner the better. And the adults are in the windows saying, ‘Oh, look how cute! They’re all signing his cast!’ But in reality it’s about establishing that you’re nobody’s bitch on the teeter-totters.”

  “What if someone else breaks their arm first?” asked Coleman.

  “You have to break yours worse. Then you tell the other kid, ‘Unlike your cast last spring, mine goes up past the elbow, cocksucker!’ That one gave me reign over the monkey bars.”

  “Did we really swear like that back then?” asked Coleman.

  “‘Poop-head’ carried the same weight, like ‘I am rubber, you are glue.’”

  “Remember if you and another kid said the same word at the same time, the one who called ‘jinx’ first got to punch the other in the arm? And if you lost, you had to submit?”

  “That’s when the country still had honor.” Serge wiped caffeine dribble off his lips. “Coleman, what’s that on your shirt?”

  Coleman looked down. “Where?”

  Serge timed it perfectly like an echo: “Where? . . . Jinx!”

  “Shit.” Coleman offered his arm. “Go ahead.”

  Punch.

  “Ow.” Rubbing his shoulder.

  “We live by a proud code, you and me.”

  The Nova cruised up Singer Island a short distance on A1A, then found a sandy patch and pulled off the road. Mangroves and water all around the thin ribbon of land.

  John D. MacArthur State Park.

  “This is the spot! This is the spot!” said Serge. “I narrowed it down with satellite photos until there was only one possible location that fit the description.”

  “Description of what?”

  “The next stop on our Florida literary pilgrimage!” said Serge. “And I was astonished how many places were in my hometown of Riviera Beach! Like this one! Immortalized in the Elmore Leonard novel Rum Punch! You could literally draw a map of the crime routes from geographic details in the book so specific they could only come from Leonard driving around here himself and standing on spots like here. This is where he had Ordell—played by Samuel Jackson in the Quentin Tarantino adaptation, Jackie Brown—pop the trunk of an Oldsmobile and blow away Beaumont Livingston. Leonard even used the actual name of this park and described the turnoff.”

  Serge hit the gas, slinging sand as he headed back south.

  “But how did Leonard know so much about your hometown?”

  “At the time, he was spending a lot of winters in Palm Beach Gardens, and he did his homework . . . Then Ordell slams the trunk and races south on A1A just like we are, until he reaches the public beach and dumps the car with the body still in it behind the Ocean Mall—also mentioned by name.” Serge pulled around the back side of a long retail building. “Can you dig it? Old Dutch was right there!”

  “Where that dude is smoking and taking out the trash?”

  “I just received a notification alert that this is the correct location.”

  “From your phone?” asked Coleman.

  “No, my penis. Somehow it’s now GPS-enabled . . . Come on!” Serge patched out again.

  “Where to now?”

  “An excellent confluence of literature.” Serge swung west out of the parking lot and onto Blue Heron before taking a quick cutoff. “If Leonard wasn’t enough, there was another future literary giant working around here who would become a mainstay of the Florida genre. Charles Willeford authored dozens of books but in my opinion none better than his four-volume Hoke Moseley series. Tarantino praised him in the trades, and Leonard even gave blurbs for his back covers! These are no coincidences. And in the third installment, Sideswipe, the burned-out Miami detective takes a sabbatical to manage his father’s tiny beach apartment. Where? Singer Island! . . . And I can tell by how you’re chewing the catnip sock that you’re just itching to know how Charles found such an obscure location to set his book. Our next stop!”

  Serge pulled into another parking lot, in front of another long building. “It’s anchored on the end by the ancient 1940s-era Sands Hotel, and next is a nouveau cuisine bistro—which in the old days was the only strip club for miles, called the Island Room, where the dancers wore grass skirts and I wandered in as a bug-eyed eighteen-year-old. What a place to grow up! But that’s a whole ’nother story, because the reason we’re here is the place just to your right, 2441 Beach Court . . .”

  Serge stopped. Coleman turned and took the sock out of his mouth. “You’re just going to leave me hanging?”

  “Letting the moment build.”

  “GPS alert?”

  “Like a hummingbird. Back to live action: I got so into Willeford that I researched his formative years and learned he made his writing chops working as an editor for Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. While employed there, the younger Charles aspired to see his own name in print, and in August of 1966, on pages seventy-eight to eighty-four of that internationally famous periodical, an unknown writer published a short story called ‘Citizen’s Arrest.’ But wait, there’s more! After additional Internet searches, a total surprise popped up with the name of the Hitchcock publication and my hometown. I’m thinking I must have typed in something wrong. To complicate matters, it’s only a whiff of a reference with no context because it was just a sentence fragment in those bullshit search-engine results pages. So I repeatedly click on the listing to read the rest, but it keeps popping up that the page doesn’t exist anymore!”

  “Serge, you’re hitting your forehead on the steering wheel again. You asked me to tell you.”

  “Wait! Wait! Wa
it! It was driving me insane! What was the connection? I knew the magazine was headquartered in Manhattan, so it made no sense. I’m on the hunt! I pressed on through the night and into sunrise, no food or sleep. Then I tripped over another oblique reference in another sentence fragment: HSD Publications. I charge down that digital side trail and find another shard of unconnected data, this time an address. I collect all my fragments and begin a round robin of cross-referenced searches until finally around noon I hit the jackpot: In 1960, the Hitchcock magazine relocated from New York City to Florida, and of all places picked Riviera Beach, specifically 2441 Beach Court.” Serge pointed out the windshield. “Willeford got his start banging typewriter keys right in there! And people think I just waste my time.”

  He started the car and raced back over the bridge to the mainland.

  “Where to now?”

  “Remember that other big author from around here named Kenneth Reese?”

  Jingle, jingle.

  Chapter 28

  1999

  The house was dark.

  No lights ever on, inside or out, as long as the neighbors could remember.

  But someone still had to be living there. Always a car in the driveway. Except it never moved. And they often saw mail in the box by the door. Never anyone coming out to retrieve it, but the box was always empty by morning. And once in a while someone would drive up after midnight and leave brown paper bags somewhere around back.

  It was extremely suspicious and the neighbors had a nosy curiosity because they’re neighbors.

  On the other hand, whatever was going on inside that house was keeping to itself, and why open a mystery door that you might regret?

  The only sign of life was an occasional parting of the blinds about a half inch, just enough for an eyeball.

  Like now. The person inside scanned the street for any hint of unwelcomeness, as he did every hour. Then he let the blinds snap shut and replaced the thick towel like the ones that now covered all the other blinds and made the house a bat cave at all hours.