Free Setup on Front Street by Mike Dennis Page B

course the answer was yes, and
naturally, I knew who really did do it. Or who had ordered it, anyway.
    "You ever know Sullivan to go down
there after hours?" he asked me. "Was he really that stupid? Or maybe
he liked to go down there trolling for whores and coke dealers?"
    "Ask yourself this, Ortega. Am I really that stupid? To threaten him, then put him down, and then leave
him out in the street? It's a fucking wonder you didn't find a bloody knife
right there with my initials on it. Or maybe you think it's still in my pants
pocket."
    "Oh, you're that stupid, all right.
Besides, no one else could've done it. Sullivan was well-liked all over town.
No one else had a motive."
    The thing was, I couldn't tell this idiot
who really did it.
    Number one, he'd never believe me.
    Number two, he didn't have the balls to go
after someone of Whitney's caliber.
    The old man was loaded with power in this
town, and few had what it took to go up against him. Me, I was an easy target.
I had a motive for sure: Sully owed me the money, so I did threaten him. He
probably told his wife about it Wednesday night when he got home, then she
spilled it to Ortega after getting the bad news this morning.
    Bringing Whitney's name up right now was
useless.
    And accusing him of murder? Killing some
nightclub owner that he had no connection to? Forget it.
    I had no response.
    Ortega had one.
    "Get dressed," he said.
"We're going downtown."

FOURTEEN

 
    THE session downtown lasted about an hour and a half. It consisted mostly of Ortega
talking tough, while practicing interrogation-room tactics he'd seen on Kojak reruns.
    I ran over my story a hundred times,
denying, of course, that I ever threatened Sully or even leaned on him for
money. For that matter, I claimed that the diamond job was a frame to begin
with, so therefore, there was no money.
    Even
though I couldn't prove I was asleep at the time of the hit, they didn't have
any hard evidence to hold me on. The pizza delivery boy could put me at Norma's
around nine, and no one could put me on Front Street at one-thirty.
    As I
walked out of the station, though, I knew this scene would be repeated in
living color whenever they picked up the slightest lead that they could connect
to me.

 
    ≈≈≈

 
    Norma went to visit her mother around noon up on Big Coppitt
Key, about ten miles up the road, so she dropped me off downtown before she
left. I hoofed it down to the South Beach Restaurant for lunch.
    It was a nifty little sandblown place right
on the water, over on the Atlantic side, but still kind of out of the way. I
was glad it was still there.
    I took a table on the edge of the outdoor
seating area, right off the beach itself. It felt terrific to be sitting there
in the ocean breeze, soaking up the open sunshine.
    A complete one-eighty from prison.
    There's nothing colder than prison
concrete. The dark desolation...the tense friction.   Hardened men scraping up against each other
all the time, the constant looking over your shoulder year in and year out
— it all messes with your mind, you know?
    Makes you think sometimes that you're no
better than any of those fucking animals in there. I don't even like thinking
about it.
    But now, finally, I was through with it.
    Human again.
    I removed my sunglasses to look directly
out at the wide, sparkling waters of the Florida Straits. Gazing out toward
Cuba, my thoughts went back to my boyhood.
    Back then, the tourists hadn't yet invaded
us in such big numbers, so we were pretty much all by ourselves down here. I
could still taste the salt on my tongue from swimming off Higgs Beach every
morning of the long, tropical summers, as well as every afternoon during the
school year. Then, after shaking off the sand, I'd run to play baseball.
    What I'm trying to say is that I was a
pretty normal kid. Back then, the conniver that I would become was still
forming deep down inside me. All the brainwork and the hustles that would
surface later on were dormant, but