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  I concentrated my gaze on him. “You have a special interest in this?”

  Manuel put his hand up in the air palms toward me, fingers splayed. “I’m just here as one of those ... those good Samaritans.” He flashed me a smile. “You like the word? I’m doing what you said. I got me one of those improve your vocab books ...”

  “Very nice.”

  Manuel stroked his left sideburn. “I figured I’d help you out. I’d help Eli out.”

  “I’m surprised. Disinterested generosity not being your usual style,” I noted dryly.

  Manuel scrunched up his face and did a good imitation of being affronted. “You got no call to talk to me like that.”

  I had all the call in the world. I was about to remind him of why I did when Eli started talking.

  “It’s okay.” Eli studied the floor for a minute before looking up at me. The thickness of the lenses in his glasses imparted an unfocused quality to his pupils. “I told him that he could tell you.”

  I scrutinized Eli. “If you don’t mind, I’d rather hear the story from you.”

  Eli bit his lip. I watched the skin around his teeth go from pink to white.

  “I can respect that,” he said after he’d released his grip.

  I glanced over at Manuel. He was tapping his fingers against his thighs and doing a little shuffle dance with his feet.

  I motioned to the back room. “Would you rather talk to me in there?”

  Eli shook his head and tugged on the edge of his brown corduroy jacket. “It’s not really a big deal.”

  I began to sympathize with Manuel. I wanted to say, if it isn’t such a big deal, why are you here? I didn’t. Instead, I waited as Eli reached up and reseated his baseball cap on his head, setting it first one way and then another, until he found the exact right place. Then he motioned to one of the tanks sitting alongside the left wall.

  “How much would one of those corn snakes set me back?”

  “About one hundred and fifty.”

  “I don’t suppose you’d let it go for one hundred?”

  I told him I’d think about it.

  “Good.” Eli smiled for the first time since he’d walked in the store.

  I tapped my fingers on the counter. “So, are you going to tell me what this is about or not?”

  He let out a titter, then stopped himself. “It’s about a suitcase.”

  “What about it?” I prompted after thirty seconds or so had gone by without Eli saying anything, not that I didn’t have a pretty good idea of what he was going to say next. I wasn’t wrong.

  “I need you to find it for me.”

  “No kidding.”

  “That’s right.” Eli licked his lips. He hurriedly took an envelope from his shirt pocket and held it out to me, an offering, all the while averting his eyes from mine, looking at the fish and the birds and the hamsters and every damn thing in the store except me. This did not inspire confidence. “There’s six hundred in here for you now and another six hundred when you give it to me.”

  I wondered what was in the suitcase. Drugs? Hot merchandise? Certainly not Eli’s Armani suit. I repressed a sigh. So much for my ideas on Eli’s moral character. What had they been based on anyway? The fact that he liked herps and went to school? I made a steeple with my fingers and lightly rested my chin on it. “What’s in this suitcase that’s so valuable?”

  Eli swallowed and glanced at Manuel. Their eyes locked. Manuel gave the merest suggestion of a nod.

  “Nothing important,” he replied. “Personal stuff.”

  I drummed my fingers on the countertop. “Right. And I’m Marie, the queen of Rumania.”

  “Rumania?” Manuel asked all wide-eyed. “Is that a country or something?”

  “No. It’s a new planet.” I pointed to the door. “That’s enough. Both of you. Out.”

  “Please,” Eli cried. “You got to help me. They’re going to chop my fingers off if you don’t.”

  Chapter 2

  Maybe it was because Eli looked so piteous standing there in front of me—he was practically wringing his hands—that I made what was going to turn out to be the first mistake of many. Instead of telling him to close the door behind him, I asked exactly who was going to chop his fingers off.

  Eli licked his lips again. “A guy named Chapman. Robert Chapman.” He let out a deep breath, seemingly relieved to say the name.

  “You said they,” I reminded him while I automatically reached for the pad of paper—it was lavender, a color I loathe, but it had been on sale for ten cents—I always keep paper next to the register and printed Chapman’s name in caps. I told myself as I wrote that taking notes didn’t mean I was going to take the case, it was just something I’d gotten in the habit of doing.

  “That was a figure of speech. It’s just this guy, this one guy.” Eli was whispering now. I had to ask him to speak up.

  “Who is he?”

  “The guy that set up the deal.”

  I underlined Chapman’s name, wrote the word others next to it, and followed that with a question mark. “Do you have a phone number for him?”

  Eli swallowed and shook his head.

  “An address?”

  Eli shook his head again.

  “Anything?”

  I tapped the pencil on the counter. The noise caught Zsa Zsa’s attention. She tilted her head in my direction, then came over and put her paws on my legs, demanding her due. I scratched behind her ears with my free hand. “All right Can you tell me what else he does? Where he comes from?”

  Eli looked sheepish. “I’m not sure,” he stammered. “I didn’t ask. Honest,” he added when I raised an eyebrow.

  “Okey-dokey.” Maybe Eli was telling the truth, maybe he was lying. The problem was, I didn’t figure him for that stupid, so why tell me a story that was this idiotic? Why not make up a better one, I thought as Zsa Zsa began butting my hand with her muzzle, her way of telling me to keep petting. It would be easy enough to do. I rubbed her chest and told Eli to continue. “Tell me about the deal,” I instructed.

  Manuel and Eli exchanged another glance. That did it for me. I crossed my arms over my chest. Zsa Zsa put her paws down and began nosing at a dust bunny on the floor. I clicked my tongue against my teeth and pushed the pad of paper away.

  “You must think I’m really dumb,” I informed them. “Find someone else. I have enough to do without being lied to. You come in and ask me for my help, you offer to pay me what is for you a fairly substantial amount of money, but you won’t tell me what this is all about or who the players are. Forget about it.”

  Eli hung his head. Manuel weighed in.

  “Come on, Robin,” he said. “Don’t be like that. It’s not what you’re thinking.”

  I leaned forward slightly. “Exactly what am I thinking?”

  “That Eli wants you to find a suitcase full of dope.”

  “Not at all.” I sat back. “Why would I think that? I was figuring that Chapman is some crazed comic book collector who is after Eli because he’s gone and lost a suitcase full of Green Hornet first editions.”

  Manuel drew himself up. “I thought we were friends.”

  “So did I.”

  He put his hands on his hips. “Then why are you disrespecting me like this?” he demanded. “I’m really insulted, and I mean this sincerely, that your opinion of me is so low that you think I’d actually involve you in something like that.”

  “Oh, PUHLEASE. Spare me the act. I’m not in the mood.” I rubbed my forehead. My left temple was throbbing. Had I eaten lunch today? I didn’t think so. The last items that had gone in my mouth were a cheese Danish and a cup of coffee at nine o’clock that morning. Maybe that was why I was so cranky.

  Manuel gestured to Eli and then to himself. “My cousin wouldn’t be doing that kind of shit and neither would I. It’s stupid. Too much heat for too little return.” For a few seconds, his tough guy mask dropped away and he looked like a six-year-old-boy unfairly accused of stealing his baby b
rother’s ice-cream cone. “You do know that about us, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” honesty forced me to concede, “I do.” While Manuel had operated on the fringes of the law for as long as I’d known him, he’d stayed clear of dealing dope in any meaningful way, “meaningful way” being the operative terms here. However, he wasn’t above doing favors for friends from time to time, the kind of favors where you run a package over to someone for a quick twenty. I just didn’t want to be part of one of those favors.

  “Good.” Manuel’s gold crown winked at me as he smiled. “Eli just suffered a small misfortune, is all. We’re trying to minimize the collateral ...”

  I picked up my pen again. “Collateral as in a guaranteed loan?”

  “No. As in damage,” Manuel explained impatiently.

  That was me. Damage control. I turned to Eli. “You have five minutes to tell me what this is about.” I looked at the clock on the wall. “Starting now.”

  Eli blinked again. The light reflecting off the lenses of his glasses made it difficult to read his expression. “I just feel like such a moron,” he said.

  I refrained from the obvious comment and reminded him that the clock was ticking.

  Eli fiddled with the bottom button of his jacket for a few seconds. He was just about to tell me why he felt like a moron when the front door opened and a little girl and her mother walked in. Three more people followed. It was a classic. What I want to know is this: Why do customers always come in clumps? Why do they always come when I’m in the middle of something? I predict that anyone who can answer this question stands to make himself a million dollars.

  Eli and Manuel moved off to the side and fidgeted while I waited on everyone.

  “I’ve been thinking that I’d like to study geography when I graduate from OCC,” Eli said as soon as the last person left.

  “Go on,” I prompted. I doodled a “C” under Chapman’s name. Then I wrote “Who is he?” on the line underneath.

  “But that takes money,” Eli explained. “Even a state school takes money these days. I’m twenty-three. I don’t want to spend the next five years finishing up two years of school. I’m too old for that. I want to go full-time and get it done. You can understand that, can’t you?”

  I allowed as how I could.

  Eli resettled his glasses on the bridge of his nose. They tilted slightly because the left earpiece was connected to the frame by means of a small, gold safety pin. “If my grades are good, I’ve been thinking I could even get an assistantship and go for my Ph.D. So when I met this guy ...”

  I clarified. “Chapman.”

  “That’s right. Like I said, we were sitting at the bar and we got to talking and I was telling him about how I want to go on to grad school and do all this stuff, but I don’t have the money. He tells me that’s a shame. He tells me that’s the problem with America today, that it’s becoming the land of the rich and the bloated.”

  “And what did you say?”

  “I said, ‘Amen to that, man. You sure got that correct.’ Then he asks me if I’m an American citizen and I say yes, and then he asks me if I have a passport, and when I say yes again he asks me if I’d like to take a little vacation.”

  “Just like that?” I sneered.

  Eli nodded. “Yeah. Just like that.”

  “Which bar did this conversation take place at?”

  “Lefty’s.”

  I wrote Lefty’s under Chapman and circled the name. Lefty’s is a dive mostly frequented by heavy drinkers and those who liked to place bets on a variety of sporting events. I shifted around in my seat “What were you doing there?”

  Manuel replied instead of Eli. “Hey, Robin, it’s the only place down in Armory Square you can get a beer for a buck.”

  “Not to mention the fact they don’t check ID’s too carefully,” I couldn’t resist commenting. Manuel opened his mouth to reply, but I stopped him. “Let’s just get back to the topic at hand, if you don’t mind.”

  Manuel threw up his hands in a gesture of disgust. “I’m just trying to hurry things along, but, hey, no offense taken.”

  I turned back to Eli. “Where did this guy say he was going to send you?”

  “Cuba.”

  “Cuba, hunh?” I repeated as I added the name to my list. I began to see where things were heading. “How were you going to get there?”

  “Through Mexico. Chapman told me he’s got this regular operation going with college kids. He sends them over to Cuba and they come back with cigars and he pays them. It sounded perfect” Eli looked at me imploringly. “I mean, Robin, if I did that four times a year it would mean I’d only have to work part-time if I went to someplace like SUNY Albany. How could I say no?”

  “Yeah,” Manuel interjected. “It wasn’t like he was smuggling drugs or anything.”

  I shushed him and motioned for Eli to continue. “So, what happened next?”

  “I gave him my phone number and Chapman told me he’d get in touch with me when he’d made all the arrangements.”

  “The original conversation took place ... ?”

  “In September.”

  “And he called you up?”

  “The end of December. He told me he’d booked me on a January fifth flight.”

  I jotted down the date. “How much was he paying you?”

  “Three thousand dollars upon delivery. Plus, he’d pick up my plane ticket and pay for my hotel. It was so cool.” Eli’s eyes lit up at the memory. “It was warm. I got to swim in this enormous pool. The rum and Cokes were great. Everyone was really nice. I didn’t have trouble in Customs. They waved me right through.”

  “But ...”

  Embarrassed, Eli put his hand over his mouth and studied the tiles on the floor. Manuel took over the conversation.

  “See, I told him.” Manuel jabbed himself in the chest with his finger. “I said, Eli don’t tell nobody what you’re doing. The less people in your business the better, but he didn’t listen. Cause he never listens to me, cause I’m just some uneducated, illiterate street punk who don’t know nuthin’ till he gets that wide brown ass of his in trouble and then all of a sudden it’s: Manuel, good buddy, what am I gonna do? But, hey.” Manuel threw up his hands and spread his fingers. “I don’t hold no resentments. I just tell myself, Manuel you got to remember, like your momma always say, family is family, blood is blood ...”

  “Get to the point, Manuel,” I ordered. “I’m not in the mood to hear a dissertation on family unity at the moment.”

  “Fine.” Manuel leaned on the counter. “The point is that my cousin told his good-for-nothing roommate, Nestor, a person I might add I had told him not to converse with, much less share an abode with. But I’ll let that go by.” Manuel nodded graciously, magnanimous in victory. “He and his girlfriend done disappeared with the suitcase.”

  “Disappeared?” I asked, interrupting Manuel’s rant.

  “As in gone. Vanished. Desaparecido.”

  “How long ago was this?”

  “Four days,” Eli said. “We’ve looked everywhere.”

  “Meanwhile,” Manuel added, “this Chapman dude been calling and calling, and Eli been telling him one thing after another. Finally, I guess he got fed up because he came down to where Eli is working and dragged his ass out of the kitchen.”

  “I explained what happened,” Eli said, taking up the narration again. “I told him, me and my friend we were working on the problem and he said he’d give me four more days, and that if I couldn’t find the suitcase by then he wanted the eight thousand dollars he would have made on those cigars, and that if he didn’t get it he was going to come and clip off some of my fingers with a bolt cutter and nail them to my forehead.”

  “That was probably a figure of speech,” I said.

  “If we thought that,” Manuel replied, “we wouldn’t be here talking to you.”

  “Well, what makes you think he was serious?” I asked Eli as I straightened out the “specials” flyers on the counter.
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br />   Eli bit his lip. “He kicked me in the balls,” he finally admitted. “And then he did this while I was on the floor.” Eli held up his hand and took off a Band-Aid he’d wrapped around his finger. “It’s a cut.”

  “I can see.” It was a triangle.

  “He did it with his pocket knife and he was smiling when he did. He’s got a real nasty smile. He said this was just the beginning.”

  “All right.” I could feel myself relenting. “When did this take place?”

  “About an hour ago,” Eli said. “You can see why I can’t go to the police. God.” His face crumpled. He looked as if he was going to cry. “All I want to do is finish school. You believe me, don’t you?”

  Actually I did. More or less. A month or so ago I’d read a full-page article about smuggling Cuban cigars in Newsweek. I mean, if Newsweek writes about it, it has to be true, right? The article had explained that with good cigars fetching prices of twenty-five to fifty dollars each, numerous small-time operators were moving in to fill the void created by our trade blockade of Cuba. On their part, Cubans aided the traffic by not stamping American passports. By traveling through Mexico or Toronto, smugglers were able to avoid US sanctions, thus filling humidors across the country.

  Manuel tugged his pants up. “You gonna help him or not?” he demanded. “We gotta know.”

  I picked up my lighter, then put it back down as I considered what I was going to say. I knew I should probably say no. While Eli’s story was credible, the odds were strong that he’d left two or three important points out, points that would come back and kick me in the ass. On the other hand, he was scared. He wasn’t faking that. And of course there was the money. Twelve hundred dollars would come in handy right now.

  “Have you considered taking a long vacation?” I asked Eli, proposing another solution. “It seems, given the circumstances, that might be your best course of action.”

  “He can’t,” Manuel answered before Eli could. “He’s got these courses that won’t come around again till next spring. He’d be wasting a whole year if he did that.”