“Questions about what?”
“A load of concrete you brought home from Redi-flow last summer.”
“Concrete? I don’t know nothing about—”
“How ’bout you invite us in or step outside?” I said.
He rolled his eyes and stepped to the stoop, Gershwin and I backing up to give him space and to give our noses some distance between Carosso and his body odor.
“I don’t bring concrete home. I deliver it to other people.”
“Your boss remembers, Mr Carosso. You brought home a load of concrete to install a new driveway.” I studied the drive across the fence, a dozen feet away, cracked and studded with weeds, the same drive poured when the house was new, maybe forty years ago. “I don’t see any new driveway, Mr Carosso. I don’t see repairs.”
“The fuckin’ workers never showed,” he said. “It never got done.”
He looked down, thinking, and I stepped closer by a couple inches.
“So where did the mix go?”
“I drove it out by the glades and poured it into a drainage ditch. And no, I don’t remember where.”
“Try.”
When he looked west I moved another inch, brushing back my hair to cover the motion. He said, “It was over that way somewheres.”
Carosso was sweating heavily. He turned his head to cough and I stepped into the edge of his personal space. “Mr Kazankis says you’re not a detail guy, Mr Carosso. It’s hit-and-miss whether you’ll get the barrel clean.”
“What does that mean about anything?”
Gershwin sensed it was his turn. “Mr Kazankis checked that day. Says the barrel looked like you climbed inside and scrubbed it out with a toothbrush. What made that batch so different you needed to eliminate every trace?”
“I just fuckin’ hosed it out like always. Kazankis musta got the trucks mixed up.”
I shuffled another inch forward. “Mr Kazankis doesn’t strike me as a man who gets much wrong. Except maybe the occasional hire.”
Carosso’s face spun my way. He hadn’t seen me move, but his body felt my nearness and didn’t like it. “Whaddaya want with me? I drive a goddamn concrete truck for sixteen lousy bucks an hour. Look at the shithole I live in. Why you picking on me?” His last sentence was a peal of desperation, like a frightened child.
“I need to see that load,” I said, knowing he could feel my breath on his face. “It’s important.”
“I don’t know where it is. I don’t know nothing. Leave me alone!”
He backed inside and slammed the door. Gershwin gave me a raised eyebrow. “Jumpy as a cat on meth. El schmendriko knows something.”
“On that we agree,” I said. “Let’s go back to the office and chase some paper.”
We climbed into the Rover. “It’s an oven,” Gershwin complained. “We were out five minutes and you could bake cookies in here.”
“The insulation is a bit thin,” I said as we pulled away. “But sweating clears toxins from the body.”
Paul Carosso wiped his brow with his shoulder and pulled a fifth of Jim Beam from a kitchen cabinet, sucking down long, gurgling swigs. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and flipped open his cell phone. He dialed, missed the number in nervousness, dialed again.
“It’s me,” he said, breath tight and voice strained. “The fucking cops just left. Tell me again how this makes sense.”
13
Gershwin and I headed to HQ to bang out the paperwork on Carosso. I still saw only one desk and a single chair, the disconsolate phone centering the floor. “I can swami on the carpet,” Gershwin offered, folding his legs and squatting beside the phone. He grinned and lifted the handset. “Plus I can be your secretary.”
“Screw this,” I said. “It’s Friday. Let’s find somewhere we can work with a beer nearby, I’m thinking beside my elbow. You know anywhere?”
“Most cops here head to Morgan’s Grill, eight blocks south. I been there once. Everyone looked at me like I had radioactive lice.”
“Pick somewhere you like. No loud music, please.”
“Yes, boss,” Gershwin winked. “I got just the place for a guy like you.”
Gershwin pointing the way, I drove north on Biscayne for a bit, exiting into an area of older neighborhoods interspersed with strip malls and fast-food joints, everything a tad seedy, like maybe it had once been the place to live, but then everyone came back from World War II and wanted bigger houses on wider lots.
“Here we are,” Gershwin said, pulling beneath a canopy of arching royal palms and into an asphalt lot bleached gray by the sun. The sign seemed like a relic from Vegas in the forties, crossed palms outlined in pulsing neon and framing the joint’s name.