Riding the Rap Read Free Page A

business with. Lately, though, I’ve had things on my mind you might’ve heard about—those people trying to whack me out, for
Christ sake. It can shake you up, take my word, somebody after you like that. I’m trying to retire and I got these loose ends to take care of.” Harry said, “So how about fifteen hundred?” Which represented the vig, the profit Harry would have made if Chip Ganz paid off on his bets like everybody else. Harry said, “A bounty hunter, Christ, you shouldn’t have any trouble.”
    The Puerto Rican, a slim, good-looking guy with dreamy eyes and a ponytail he twisted into a knot, said he was no longer a bounty hunter, but still knew how to find people. His name was Roberto Deogracias and was known as Bobby Deo and Bobby the Gardener.
    Bobby said, “This guy’s name is Cheep?”
    â€œYou got it,” Harry said. “Chip Ganz.”
    He loved guys like Bobby Deo; they’d do anything for a price, whatever you had to have done.
    Â 
    A couple of days later Bobby phoned Harry at his apartment in the Della Robbia Hotel on Ocean Drive, Miami Beach.
    â€œThe mother of this guy Chip Ganz owns the house where he’s living. The father, Warren Ganz, Junior, paid two hundred thousand for it in sixty-five, died and left the estate to his wife. Two point three-five acres on the ocean worth four to five million now. That’s an estimate, comparing it to places along there sold in the last few years.”
    â€œHow do you find that out?”
    â€œYou call the office of the Property Appraiser.”
    â€œThey tell you all that?”
    â€œThey have to, Harry. Is no secret.”
    â€œSo he lives there with his mother?”
    â€œThe mother is in a nursing home in West Palm, but I don’t know if there’s something wrong with her or she just getting old or what. I have to check, maybe go see her. So Mr. Chip Ganz, I’m pretty sure, lives there alone. Nine thousand square feet, man; swimming pool, tile patio, the house white with a red tile roof they call Mediterranean, Harry. It could be a beautiful place, but it’s in bad shape.” Bobby the Gardener speaking now. “I mean the property is overgrown, needs to be landscaped. You can barely drive into the place.”
    â€œMaybe,” Harry said, “it’s for sale.”
    â€œMaybe, but it’s not listed. When I went up there he wasn’t home, so I walk around the place, look in some of the windows at the living room, the dining room. There almost no furniture in the downstairs. Like he’s selling it, maybe a piece at a time and his mommy don’t knowabout it. Big three-car garage has a Mercedes-Benz in it, ten years old, needs some bump and paint work.”
    Harry’s voice on the phone said, “Shit. Well, it doesn’t look like he’s gonna have my sixteen five, does it?”
    Bobby Deo said, “Let me see what I can do.” And drove back to the Ganz estate: along Ocean Boulevard past walls of flowering oleander and wind-blown Australian pines to the spray-painted sign in the vegetation that said PRIVATE DRIVE and below it KEEP OUT . Bobby backed into the drive, eased his Cadillac through the vegetation growing wild and stopped when he heard it scraping the car. He got out and walked along the drive through sea grape, palmettos, sabal palms, past an old gumbo-limbo spreading all over the place, through this jungle to the house with no furniture in it. He looked again in windows to see the rooms still empty before walking around to the ocean side of the property and was pretty sure he’d found Mr. Chip Ganz.
    In a lounge on the red-tiled patio, reading the paper and smoking a joint, ten-thirty in the morning.
    Bobby’s first impression of Chip Ganz, he saw a skinny guy in his fifties trying to look hip: the joint, a full head of hair with gray streaks in it brushed back uncombed, and tan. Bobby had never seen an Anglo