CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Three minutes later Thorn’s cell phone rang. Danny Berasategui had a quiet voice with an uncertain catch in his speech, like a boy summoned to the principal’s office. In the background Thorn heard a woman’s giddy laughter. She sounded so close to the phone, she might have been nuzzling the plumber’s neck.

Thorn kept it short and gruff. Repeating what he’d said to the guy on the phone.

Danny considered it for a moment, then covered the receiver and asked the woman a question. She must have given her assent.

 

Forty-three Star Island Drive was protected by three sets of security gates. The first manned by a red-faced guard with cheap sunglasses and a cheaper grin.

“We’re here to see Danny Berasategui.” Thorn gave him the address.

The guard didn’t have to check his book to know there was no one by that name anywhere on that posh island.

“He’s a plumber,” Thorn said, “working a job out here.”

“A plumber? I’m going to buzz you through on the okay of a plumber?”

“Ring the house, see what the owner says.”

He did, and the owner wanted to speak to Thorn.

It was a woman with such a purr in her voice, on a normal day Thorn would’ve felt a tingle in his gut.

“Danny’s plunging my toilet,” she said.

“Too much information,” said Thorn.

He handed the phone back to the guard, the woman sent her furry voice into the guard’s ear, and a second later the steel post rose.

The man bent to Snake’s window and delivered his parting advice.

“No one likes a smart-ass.”

“Wisdom for the ages,” Thorn said.

Star Island was a dredged-up lozenge of marl and sand, so neatly sculpted and landscaped that Thorn found his hand flattening the front of his rumpled shirt.

Movie stars lived there, rock stars, tennis stars, a TV legend or two, and the reigning basketball superman, all planted cheek to jowl, all sharing the diamond light radiating from the bay and the white distant glow of the towers of Miami Beach. The woman Thorn talked to on the phone had probably flushed a sack of gold coins down her toilet by mistake. A reason to summon Danny.

At the second checkpoint, a black man in a Nassau cop’s uniform saluted and waved them through his gate. Word had passed along. On the eastern edge of the island they located number 43, a standard-issue villa, Mediterranean style. Ten thousand square feet of view and all the other necessities. Stepping from the private guardhouse was a young woman in safari clothes and a pith helmet, a handgun strapped to her waist. She examined them through the windshield, then pointed into the walls of the estate.

“All these guards,” Thorn said. “Somebody’s expecting a revolution.”

Snake pulled up behind a pink Rolls and got out.

Thorn was imagining Mae West in a half-open silk bathrobe, but the twenty-something woman who whisked down the steps and met them in the drive was as emaciated as a Death Valley distance runner. Thorn could never be sure about such women, whether they were super-fit or anorexic. She wore pink shorts and a matching halter top. Her childish mouth was set in a pout as if Danny’s plumbing skills had not quite satisfied her needs.

Lugging his hamper of tools, Danny Berasategui was a few steps behind. A man in his early forties, well built, in a white company shirt and stubby blue shorts. He wore a phone on his belt and several gold chains around his throat, as if jewelry were one of his accepted forms of payment.

“Would you like to come inside?” she said in her downy voice. “Have a drink. Mojito, or something.”

“We can’t stay,” Snake said.

“Pity,” the woman said. “Which of you was on the phone?”

Thorn raised a guilty hand.

“So you’re the witty one,” she said. “I enjoy witty men.”

“We’re always in great demand.”

She led them to a gazebo in a grove of palms and said she’d let them talk in private. As she passed Thorn on the way back to the house, she trickled her fingers across his arm.

“You know where I am,” she said. And headed away into luxury.

“Okay,” Danny said when she was gone. “What the hell is this about?”

Snake said, “Your father, was he a communista?”

Danny stared at Snake for a moment and slowly got to his feet.

“Now, now,” Thorn said. “He meant no offense.”

“My father was no goddamn communist,” Danny said. “I don’t care what the cops said. He hated communists. Hated them with a passion.”

“So noted,” said Thorn.

“What else do you know about him?” Snake said.

Danny sat back down. He was shaking his head.

“Who did he work for?” Snake said. “Just tell me that.”

Danny turned his eyes toward the waterway, where a white Hatteras yacht was steaming north, a redhead on the bow, waving in their direction. All the rich folks so happy to see one another.

Danny swallowed and settled himself on the white gazebo bench.

“You guys aren’t cops.”

“True,” Thorn said.

“Who are you?”

“Interested parties.”

Danny considered that a moment, his hard look relaxing by degrees.

“There’s nothing to solve,” he said. “A kid killed my dad. Some little boy with a machete.”

Snake sat across from him, and his tongue wet the corners of his mouth.

“Got to be hard losing a dad at that age. What were you, two, three?”

“I wasn’t born yet. I was in the womb. I never met my old man. But hard, yeah, sure it’s hard.”

Snake nodded and looked back toward the house.

“Did your father do anything besides plumbing?”

Danny kicked a toe at his bag of tools and said, “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I’m asking a simple question. Did he have another job? Another employer?”

“Who the fuck are you guys?”

“I’m the kid,” Snake said. “The one with the machete. That was me.”

This time Danny popped to his feet. Thorn braced himself to pull the two apart, but Berasategui closed his eyes and must have been weighing his own hurt against Snake’s, because when he opened his eyes again, he filled his chest with air and blew it out, then planted his butt again on the bench.

“So what is this? You here to fuck me up?”

“No,” Snake said. “Just to learn a few things. Did he work for someone on the side? Moonlighting?”

Danny looked at Snake for a long moment.

“I can’t believe it. You’re the kid. That fucking kid.”

“I am.”

For a second or two Thorn thought Danny might begin to sob, but he fought off the emotion and turned his face to the splash of sun on the bay.

“Berasategui,” Danny said. “It’s a Basque name.”

“So?”

Danny cleared his throat and rubbed his lips with the back of his hand, as if he meant to erase any traces of lipstick he might have missed.

“Before my father was a plumber,” Danny said, “he played jai alai at the Miami Fronton. He’d played it as a boy in Bilbao, the Basque country of Spain. He was very good.”

“Okay.”

“When he could no longer play well enough to earn a living, he took work as a plumber, but jai alai was in his blood. He went back to the fronton every day and drank wine and hung out with the players, and he bet on the games. He became a gambler. I believe it was an addiction. Something to fill up his heart from no longer being able to play the game he loved.”

“So he was in debt.”

Thorn was thinking about the photograph. Humberto Berasategui. How uncomfortable he looked, how out of place. Sitting next to Pauline Caufield, down the row from Meyer Lansky.

“Yes, he was in debt.”

“To bookies.”

Danny nodded.

“Did you ever hear the name of Meyer Lansky?”

Danny strained under the weight of the memory.

“My mother mentioned him, yes. She was afraid. Men were coming by the house. Thugs threatened to hurt him, burn down his business.”

“And then it all stopped,” Thorn said.

Danny looked at him.

“How did you know that?”

“Maybe your father was forced to participate in something dangerous to wipe out his debt. It’s possible it was his only way out. To join with some other people in killing Snake’s family.”

“To pay off a debt.” Snake spoke the words as if practicing them.

“Lansky may have wanted to have his own team member aboard. In that case, your dad was there that night to save his own family. That’s all.”

Snake stood up, started toward the car. His face was blank, but Thorn could see the emotion clenching his shoulders.

“Wait a minute,” Danny said. “You’re just going to walk away? You show up, tell me you killed my old man, and then walk off? Not let me know what’s going on?”

“We don’t know what’s going on,” Thorn said. “Not yet.”

Danny looked at Snake for some parting word. But there was none.