| |
I was happy to let Miriam take over. She set up equipment so that she could hear the whole phone conversation, while I helped Yulirus clear the table, to take his mind off what she was doing.
Then slowly and carefully she walked Yulirus through what she wanted him to say, mentioning key words that he wrote down on a white lined pad. By the time eight o’clock approached, he was much calmer, and I admired the delicacy she’d used with him.
He was great—until the phone rang, and he started to shiver.
“You can’t do this to him,” Jesse protested. “Look at him.”
Yulirus took a deep breath. “I must do this, Papi.” Then he answered the phone.
The whole conversation was in Spanish, so I could only follow a few words. Instead I watched Miriam. She was intent, listening and translating in her head, nodding to Yulirus, pointing at words on the page.
Finally Yulirus said, “Claro,” and ended the call. Then looked at Miriam. “I do all right?”
“Very well.” Miriam turned to me and Jesse. “Yulirus did an excellent job of explaining how Elpidio got hold of the painting,” she said. “Vela Blanco tried to stop him, and even said that he knew the painting was stolen.”
“That’s great!” I said.
“That’s a fundamental building block to our case, now that he’s admitted he’s buying a stolen painting.”
“So Yuli is done then,” Jesse said. “You’ve got your confession from this guy.”
Miriam shook her head. “Not until we have a physical handoff of the painting.”
“Why can’t you get this other guy to do it? The one who stole it.”
“Because Elpidio López is in custody at Krome,” I said. “And we’ve already played that card once, to get Yulirus out. It’s not going to work again.”
I looked at Miriam. “I heard the word miércoles in that conversation. Does that mean the handoff is going to be on Wednesday?”
“It does. Nine PM, in the parking lot for the Diaz Industries building on Brickell Avenue in downtown Miami.” She looked at Yulirus. “Make yourself available then. We’ll be in touch with the details.”
Then she turned to me. “Come on, Angus. We’ve still got a lot of work to do.”
As we walked out, she said, “How would you feel about staying with Yulirus and Jesse until the handoff?”
“Whatever you need.” Lester wasn’t going to be happy that I was out of the apartment for the next two nights. But he’d lived alone before moving in with me, so he’d get over it.
“Good. Go home, get your clothes, then come back here. I don’t trust Jesse Venable at all. Now that Yulirus has his paperwork I wouldn’t be surprised if Jesse tried to get him to skip out on his responsibilities.”
“Yulirus is scared,” I said.
“I understand that. But he was a gay man in Castro’s Cuba. That must give him some strength, right? You understand that.”
It was a lot different from being gay in Scranton, or coming out in the supportive atmosphere of Penn State, but yeah, I got it. Yulirus was strong, and he’d make it through the next two days with me by his side.
When I got back to the apartment, Lester was lounging on the sofa watching a football game on TV.
Wearing only his jockstrap.
“Well, that’s a nice sight to come home to,” I said, dumping my messenger bag on a kitchen chair.
He looked at me, smiled, and shut off the TV.
That was all the invitation I needed. I started shedding my clothes and he pulled down his jockstrap, and we went at it like rabbits. Very horny rabbits, even though we’d just had sex the day before.
We didn’t even leave the living room. When we were finished, we were both on the floor cuddled together. “That was just what I needed,” I said, kissing the back of his ear. “But I have to take a shower and head out again.”
He turned to look at me. “What?”
“I have to babysit Yulirus for the next two days.” I explained about the handoff on Wednesday night. “But I’ll be home after that. And then nothing more on my plate.”
“Until you get a new case,” he grumbled. He pulled himself up so he was leaning against the sofa. “I need to go up to Gainesville and meet with the people who work the UF circuit. I can drive up there tomorrow morning, spend the night, and be back Wednesday.”
“You’d do that? That’s so sweet.”
I was thanking him for doing his job, the way I was doing mine, but it was kind of him to work around my schedule.
“Do something for me, though. Take a picture of that dildo you said is on the dresser.”
I blushed bright red, and Lester laughed. “Good. You know just what I want to see. Text it to me tomorrow night.”
“And what are you going to do with that picture?”
He grinned. “That’s between me and my K-Y.”
Then he swatted my butt. “Better get in that shower and get moving. Don’t want to give Yulirus time to run away.”
I showered and packed, and when I finished Lester was back on the sofa watching his game, though he’d put on a T-shirt and shorts. I kissed him goodbye and hefted my duffle bag.
This time I didn’t bother to creep up on Jesse and Yulirus. I parked in the driveway and Jesse answered the door. “Not surprised to see you,” he grumbled. “Come on in. We’re working on that bottle of wine you brought.”
I put my duffle in the guest room, where the big dildo still sat on the dresser, and even though no one was there to see me I felt myself blushing.
The three of us quickly demolished the bottle of wine, and Yulirus opened a second as we all told stories. It was fascinating to hear Jesse talk so openly about growing up queer in a small town in Indiana. “I didn’t know what it meant,” he said. “I hated taking showers after gym class because looking at other boys gave me a boner, and they’d tease me and call me names.”
He shrugged. “None of us knew what a faggot was then. It was just a name you called someone, but it was bad. Then one day in English class we read an excerpt of some book, and the narrator was staying in some seedy hotel where he said the desk clerk was a fruit.”
He frowned. “I’d never heard that term, but it blazed into my brain. I thought I was destined to end up like that, working some crappy job, that I’d never be able to have a real life.”
“Oh, Papi,” Yulirus said, and squeezed his hand.
“I looked on TV and the only men I saw I could tell were gay were the real over-the-top ones, like Paul Lynde and Liberace. I saw the way they used their flamboyance as a shield over them. So I started cultivating that. I was always ready with a self-deprecating wisecrack, and the other kids laughed. Laughing with me, not at me.” He smiled. “I liked that.”
“How did you get out of Indiana?” I asked.
“I studied my ass off, for one thing. Got the only academic scholarship awarded to a boy from my county to study at Ball State in Muncie. One day I stumbled into the art museum on campus, and I was hooked. By the time I graduated with a degree in business, I had memorized every item in that building.”
He poured us all another glass of wine. “Then I moved to Chicago. Worked a bunch of different office jobs, spent my weekends in museums and my nights in bars. I was a lot better looking back then, and I got lots of offers.”
There was a certain way he turned his head when he looked at Yulirus, when I could see the echo of the man he’d been.
“Then they started dropping,” Jesse continued. “Men I met in bars. Men I had roller-skated with along the lakeshore. Men I slept with.”
He shivered. “It freaked me out. Winter of 1982 I lost my job because I mentioned I had a friend who had died, and I said to hell with this snow, I’m going to Florida. I drove down here and started collecting my unemployment insurance, and I got a part time job at an antique store in Sears Town. Betsy’s Bits-n-Bobs, something like that.”
He leaned back in his chair. “That’s where I met my first thief. Didn’t know what he was, back then. He’d come into the store with a silver service, a Rolex watch, a diamond ring. He always had a story. His mother died. He picked up the watch at a yard sale. That kind of thing. Then he stopped coming in, and I thought the police must have busted him.”
I was fascinated. When I’d arrested Jesse originally, I never thought about how he had begun his life of crime.
“Then I ran into him at a bar. Bought him a couple of drinks and he told me he’d found a pawn shop that didn’t ask questions, that gave him more cash than Betsy could. The next day I walked past the place, just out of curiosity, and saw a help wanted sign in the window. I walked in, dazzled the guy with everything I knew about art, and what I’d learned at Betsy’s about antiques, and he hired me.”
He shrugged. “You know the rest, if you’ve read my record.” He struggled to stand up, and Yulirus jumped to help him walk down the hall to his bedroom.
I thought about my brother then, his love of art and Italy and all the beautiful things in the world that cost money. I was determined to see that he didn’t drift into a life of crime like Jesse, even if it meant worrying that he was in danger with an organization like the CIA.
I went to sleep soon after that. When I woke at sunrise, the house was quiet, and I grabbed a key and went for a long, looping run through the manicured streets of Jesse’s development. By the time I returned, Yulirus was in the kitchen.
“I’m going to take a quick swim and cool down,” I said. “Towels?”
“In cabinet by pool,” Yulirus said. “Jesse, he will still sleep another hour.”
I could have gone into my room and found a bathing suit, but the pool was sheltered from the neighbors by a screen of palms and low shrubs, and Jesse was still asleep. So I shucked my running clothes and dove naked into the deep end of the pool. I swam a dozen laps, then wrapped myself in a towel and climbed out of the pool.
It felt naughty and transgressive, not something that a proper FBI agent would do. But I was horny and missing Lester, and Jesse’s house, with all its naked male art, didn’t help.
I relaxed for a few minutes, then showered and dressed. When I came back to the kitchen Jesse was eating an egg-white omelet stuffed with mushrooms and green vegetables, and Yulirus offered to make me one, too.
Yulirus had to take Jesse for physical therapy that morning, so I had the house to myself. I settled at the dining room table, made sure the VPN was running on my laptop, and got to work, answering emails and reading bulletins.
An hour in, Miriam called and we talked about the next night. She was liaising with the Miami police department about security around the parking lot, and she gave me a series of small assignments of people to contact.
Jesse and Yulirus returned around noon, and Jesse went right to bed for a nap. I worked on FBI business for the rest of the afternoon, until I began to sniff delicious smells coming out of the kitchen. I walked in to find Yulirus in a tank top and tight shorts, stirring a mélange of meat and colorful vegetables. “That smells great,” I said.
“My picadillo,” he said. “Is a Cuban dish, only I make with ground chicken to be healthier for Jesse.”
I leaned against the counter. “What do you want to do when you finish writing up Jesse’s collection?”
“I like help him,” he said simply. “He say that maybe I can stay here after I finish.”
“And give up your career? To take care of a sick old man?”
I knew it sounded heartless as soon as I said it, but I couldn’t take it back.
“Jesse say maybe I am consultant,” he said, pronouncing the word carefully. “I learn a lot about other kinds of art by researching his collection. He say he know other rich people, and maybe I help them document their collections, maybe even advise with buying and selling.”
I nodded. “That sounds good. You are a lot younger than Jesse. You have to make sure you can get by on your own.”
He gave me a teaspoonful of picadillo to taste, and my mouth was in heaven. “Then again, maybe you can cook, too.” I was reminded of what Miriam had said, that growing up gay in Castro’s Cuba had made Yulirus strong. As long as we didn’t put him in mortal danger during our arrest of Alvaro Vela Blanco, he’d be all right.