The Four Corners of the Sky_ A Novel - Michael Malone [102]
“That’s a beautiful story. That’s America.” Rook took her hand. “Feel better?”
She slapped his arm. “Watch it. I’ll tell you one piece of news, Joyce Weimar will drop dead in the street before they’ll dump her in a place like this—” She pointed at Golden Days. “Which is what I told Louise Mischoff. I said, ‘Your son Herb is a shit.’ A chazer bleibt a chaser. But Herb wanted her money, so he put her in here and he took it.”
Rook nodded sympathetically. “Gelt gait tzu gelt.”
“Ah, you’re a rabbi.” She pinched off the cigarette ash, returned the butt to her leather case, and slowly rose to her feet. “You two work out your own problems, I’m late to water ballet.”
Holding up his pants, Raffy ran after her. “Mrs. Weimar, give me your phone number. I’ll call you for dinner, maybe a movie. Or we could go dancing. There’s a nice clean place in Little Havana. I used to play guitar there. Very nice.”
She pushed suspiciously past him. “Not on your life.”
He followed, bowing with a smile when she turned. “Forgive me, Joyce, for offering advice to the wiser sex. But the quality of mercy is not strained through a sieve but more or less dumped on our heads like a bucket of heavenly rain. I paraphrase the Bard.”
She thought a moment then gave Raffy’s nose a twist. “Don’t pee on my back and tell me it’s rain. Still, I see why Louise fell for you. You’re cute.”
Mrs. Weimar drove off at 10 miles per hour in her large white Oldsmobile.
Raffy shuffled back to Annie. “That didn’t work out,” he said mournfully.
“I thought you said you were a musician. Why are you flopping off cars and swindling old women?”
His sigh was itself a melody. “Maybe music’s the food of love, but it was never, in my particular case, so much the food of food. Then I met your papa.”
“Could you make this brief?”
“Brevity—”
“In fact, don’t even talk.” She pointed at Golden Days. “Just get me in there if that’s where my dad is.”
The Cuban, brushing off his clothes, claimed that to get her access to a patient’s floor, he would have to make clandestine arrangements with a friend who worked a later shift. There were complications.
She was not surprised. “What’s my dad even doing back there? I thought he left.”
Raffy glanced all over the sky evasively. Early in the morning, he’d returned home—and he pointed to a modest stucco duplex down the block—to find Jack Peregrine lying on the curb, more or less dead. At first Raffy thought they’d finished him off, but when he put his ear to Jack’s mouth, he could hear him cursing. So he’d rushed him into Golden Days, because it was only half a block from his house and because a nice nurse on staff was a close friend. Chamayra had helped them twice now by faking the paperwork and giving Jack a bed where he could hide out. Still, it was tricky for her to sneak people up to the floor where she’d put him. She might do it for Raffy. It would depend…
“Don’t blackmail me, Rook. I’ll go straight to the police. Who beat him up?”
Jack’s friend could only speculate. “He had more than a few enemies. Don’t we all?”
“No, we don’t,” said Annie. “Not that kind. And you’re sure he’s dying?”
“Terminal, he said.”
Annie scoffed. “He was telling suckers he was terminal ten years ago when he was selling them prime real estate in Savannah, Georgia. ‘I have to sell my house, I’m dying, you can have it for a song.’” She moved closer. “Why didn’t you ever show up at the hotel?”
“I was collared by that s.o.b. Hart! You didn’t get my messages?” Raffy swore that he’d been headed into the Dorado lobby today when he’d been suddenly set upon by Sgt. Daniel Hart of the lying Miami police. The violent young detective had dragged him off in a squad car to his office and grilled him about crimes he’d accused him of committing with Jack Peregrine. Raffy could only suppose that Hart was there at the Dorado because of Annie.
Annie agreed it was likely.
“Oh, muy bueno! Gracias!”