The Four Corners of the Sky_ A Novel - Michael Malone [109]
The old people were glad to keep the Maltese while she went inside. The dog was a bouncy, licking, yapping scrap of life, a distraction from dying, and if Annie had asked them instead, “How would you like to be as young as I am and madly in love?” they could not have assented more heartily.
“His name’s Malpractice,” she explained. They found this hilarious, having been subjected to so much of it themselves. “Malpy. Don’t give him seafood.”
Raffy returned her purse to her. “Pardon, pardon,” he whispered as he led her behind the Dumpster at the rear of the building. “But discretion is the better part, if you take my meaning.”
“Raffy! You can’t just run off with my purse!”
“I had to use your phone. A family emergency.”
Automatically, she checked inside the small black Coach bag for her wallet. It was there. “You knew that man and woman in the Mercedes.”
“Not to speak to.”
“Well, that much was obvious since you ran away.”
“Happiness eludes them. Certain people could definitely use a little less caffeine, up the dosage on their serotonin, aromatherapy, maybe spend quality time on a nature walk or even a cat, little bird even—”
“You ran to the bushes.”
Raffy lowered his voice as if he could be overheard. “With that man, I tell you the truth, the bushes are not a bad plan. I am a naked newborn sitting on a shark’s molars in comparison to that man, who is not a nice man, any more than Castro was the Second Coming the way he convinced my Uncle Oswardo he was. That’s Feliz Diaz.”
Annie shrugged.
“Feliz Diaz. There are many people in Miami, when he says vote they vote; go throw rocks, they go. When he says buy that, they buy that. So on. The ace of aces. I heard in Little Havana, he blew a man’s hand off with a Beretta 92FS for misdealing the cards. There was talk of the incident on the street for years.”
Annie interrupted him. “Is the woman with him involved with my father?”
Rook gestured uncertainty. “I doubt it.”
“I feel like I’ve seen her before.”
Raffy shrugged evasively. “Annie, I swear, I’m a prop, I swell a scene, I’m a man of plastic packing bubbles. All I know is, Jack asked for my help: ‘Raffy, send this FedEx to my daughter; make this phone call, pick me up off this curb, and drag me into a hospital.’ Nightly I read the ‘Swan of Avon,’ to whom he introduced me in our prison cell in Cuba, for which I can never sufficiently thank him for I hate ingratitude worse—”
“Please don’t start talking Shakespeare.”
“The complete works from one volume at Costco. The Poet has a way of putting things nobody could improve on. ‘Lady, you are not worth the dust the rude wind blows in your face.’ That’s what I say to the puta that knocked those old ladies down. Could you say better than that? Could I?”
Annie was struggling to connect the face she’d just seen with the memory of Sam’s crying at the kitchen table. Then abruptly it came to her—the family portrait on Georgette’s bedroom wall of Georgette’s father and his sister. She said, “I think that woman was my neighbor’s aunt, from my home town. I think she’s a woman named Ruthie Nickerson. Do you know that name? Ruth Nickerson?”
Raffy looked puzzled. “Why would she be your neighbor’s aunt? She belongs to Diaz.” Raffy looked furtively at his watch. “We’ve got to go.”
He pulled her around behind the Dumpster, past a pile of garbage bags and up some stairs to the Golden Days rear landing, the door of which he propped open with his sneaker.
“Why can’t we walk in the damn front door?” she asked him.
“Shhhh.”
A pretty Latina woman in a nurse’s uniform suddenly appeared in the doorway, her finger to her lips.
“Chamayra!” Raffy embraced her with unexpected fervor. She pushed him away, her finger again pressed urgently against her lips. Then without a backward glance she walked ahead of them.
They hurried along a maze of concrete corridors and up staircases that took them to the third floor, which