New Hope for the Dead

by Charles Willeford

  “It isn’t easy to always know the right thing to do, I suppose. But then, I’m not a family man.”

  “When can I get the body? I’d like to send somebody over to get Jerry cremated.”

  “After the autopsy. I can recommend Minrow’s Funeral Home, if you don’t have anyone else in mind.”

  “What do you get? A ten percent commission?”

  Hoke didn’t mind the question, not from a Miami lawyer. As it happened, Hoke didn’t get any commission, but he usually recommended Minrow when someone asked, because he and Minrow had been neighbors when Hoke first moved to Miami. If he denied getting anything, Hoke knew that Hickey would merely consider him a fool.

  “No,” Hoke said. “I just get a flat fifty bucks for each referral.”

  “Okay. I’ll call Minrow’s and mention that you recommended him. It makes no difference to me.”

  “At one time,” Hoke said, getting to his feet, and placing the empty Tab can on the glass-topped desk, “there was a number you could call in Miami, and a man would come by in a taxi cab. You paid him five bucks and he took the body away and you never heard of it again. But I don’t think that number’s in service any longer.”

  “Is that the truth, Mr. Moseley, or are you trying to be funny?”

  “Sergeant Moseley.” Hoke pointed to a framed blue-and-green oleograph on the opposite wall. A blue man playing a violin floated upside down above a white house in a green sky. “Is that one of Jerry’s crayon drawings, from when he was a kid?”

  Hickey shook his head. “No, it’s a Marc Chagall.” He leaned forward and switched on the television. A commercial touting the new aviary at the Metrozoo appeared on the screen, and Hickey turned off the sound.

  “I like the picture anyway,” Hoke said, turning in the doorway. “Just one more question, Mr. Hickey, and I’ll be on my way. Did Jerry ever carry any large sums of money for you?”

  Hickey got to his feet. He shook his head. “No. I never wrote Jerry a check for more than a hundred dollars at a time. The most money he ever had was when he sold his car. I paid four thousand for his Escort, and he sold it for only two. He should’ve gotten a lot more than that.”

  “That almost always happens. You always pay more for a car than you sell it for.”

  “I know that. But I should’ve kept the title so he couldn’t’ve sold it at all.”

  “We all make mistakes sooner or later, Mr. Hickey. Thanks for the Tab.”

  The Filipino appeared and escorted Hoke to the front door.

  8

  As Hoke drove back toward the city after cutting over to 1-95, he wondered why he had wasted time talking to Harold Hickey. Hoke wasn’t fond of lawyers, especially lawyers like Hickey who managed to get low bonds for their drug clients and then advised them to skip the country to avoid prison. On the other hand, someone had been furnishing Jerry with money. Jerry’s father gave him an allowance, but he wouldn’t have given the kid a thousand dollars. A thousand bucks for a drug dealer, on the other hand, was small change. And now that he was dead, the missing $24,000 was gone forever. It was possible that Jerry had been a small-time pusher in the Grove to help him support his own habit. But it still bothered Hoke that an experienced user, with a large sum of money and more drugs available, would take a deliberate overdose, or even OD accidentally. It just didn’t fit the pattern.

  Hoke returned to U.S. 1, and then stopped at an Eckerd’s drugstore to buy a package of Kools. After he paid for the cigarettes, he showed the clerk his shield and asked if he could use the telephone. Since the pay phone rates had jumped from a dime to a quarter a few years back, Hoke, as a matter of principle, had never paid to use a phone again. He called Ms. Westphal at the house-sitting service. When she answered after the first ring, Hoke identified himself and asked if she had found any more prospects for him.

  “I’m now willing,” he said, “to take a short-time sitter’s job, even if it’s only a couple of weeks. How about that apartment on Grove Isle?”

  “That’s gone. I’ve got a garage apartment on Tangerine Lane in the black Grove. It’ll be available next Friday for twenty-one days. It’s owned by a Barbadian sculptor who’s going up to New York for a one-man show. He uses the garage under his apartment as his studio, and he doesn’t want his tools and things left unguarded.”

  “That’s right in the middle of the black Grove, isn’t it?”

  “Not exactly in the middle. It’s off Douglas a few blocks. But you’re a policeman, and you’ve got a gun, so it shouldn’t bother you to live in a black neighborhood.”

  “I told you I couldn’t be there much in the daytime, except for weekends.”

  “Daytime doesn’t bother Mr. Noseworthy. The man who lives in the house in front’ll be home during the day.”

  “That’s a pretty funky neighborhood, Ms. Westphal.”

  “Listen, Sergeant, I think you’re a little too finicky for this kind of work. Perhaps you should look for another agency—”

  “No, no, I’ll take the garage apartment. Of course, I’d like to look at it first.”

  “There’s nothing to see. It’s got a bed, a sink, a hot plate and a refrigerator, and you use the bathroom in the house in front of the garage. There’s no dog, if that’s what’s bothering you. If you don’t want it, I can easily get a black house-sitter for a furnished apartment like this one.”

  “Okay, I’ll take it. I’ll drop by one day next week for the key.”

  Ms. Westphal gave Hoke the address and reminded him to bring a hundred dollars for the bond when he came by for the key.

  “If you could give me my hundred-and-five-dollar salary in advance,” Hoke suggested, “you could just hang onto the hundred for the bond and pay me five dollars.”

  “You’re very droll, Sergeant.” Ms. Westphal laughed and hung up the phone.

  Hoke returned to his car. Major Brownley, he knew, would recognize the address in the black Grove and would wonder why in the hell he had moved there. He didn’t want the major to know that he would be living rent-free as a house-sitter. He wondered if the Bajan sculptor had a phone. If not, he would have to make some kind of arrangement with the neighbors to take his phone calls. The problem was, in that neighborhood, not many people could afford a phone. He’d just have to wait and see. Moving, at least, was no problem. Except for a cardboard box full of his files and old papers, all he had to move were his clothes and his little Sony TV. And his hot plate; he’d better take his hot plate. Even if Noseworthy had one, Hoke would probably need his own for the next move, although he could hardly move down any lower than a garage apartment in the Coconut Grove ghetto. Yes, he could; the Overtown ghetto was worse.

  When Hoke returned to the station, he stopped for a moment to say hello to Bill and Ellita and then he checked his mail. There was a printout on Gerald Hickey. Hoke sat in his office and read the rap sheet, which went back to Jerry’s junior-high-school days.

  In the eighth grade Jerry had gotten into a fight with a black student, claiming that his lunch money had been taken. A knife had been confiscated, but neither boy had been cut. No charges filed, but the officer who had been called by the principal had made a written report of the incident.

  There were two separate arrests for “joyriding” in stolen cars. Jerry was merely a passenger each time, and stated he didn’t know the car—in each incident—was stolen. No charges filed.

  There was another arrest when a woman claimed Jerry had exposed himself to her while standing on her front lawn. The misdemeanor was reduced to committing a public nuisance when Jerry claimed he had merely stopped to urinate on the woman’s lawn. Although the incident happened at 3 P.M., Jerry said he didn’t see the woman sitting on her front porch ten feet away. Charge dismissed. Counsel for Jerry had been Harold Hickey.

  Arrested for smoking marijuana, with two other juveniles, in Peacock Park, Coconut Grove. Charge reduced to loitering. No charges filed. Released in father’s custody.

  Two more pickups for “loitering” i
n Coconut Grove. No charges filed. Released at station.

  Picked up in a Coral Gables parking lot. A glasscutter confiscated. Jerry claimed he found the glasscutter in the street, and that he didn’t know what the tool was used for. No charges filed.

  Picked up in the parking lot, Sears, Coral Gables store, for shoplifting. Subject’s father paid for the item—a brass standing lamp, complete with parchment shade, with a blue eagle painted on it. Released to father’s custody. No charges filed.

  There was also a brief report from an interview with a psychiatric social worker:

  Hickey, Gerald. Age: 16-4 mos. 68 inches tall. Wt. 147 lbs. Adopted. I.Q. (Stanford/B) 123. Intelligent, but rambles when asked direct questions. Sociopathic personality. Schizoid tendencies; unrealistic goals, i.e., wants to be “Russian interpreter at U.N.” or a “marine biologist.” Suppressed sexual anxieties. Admits to hustling gays for money, but not always “successful.” Smokes pot daily. Mixes codeine with pot, but doesn’t use PCP. Cooperative. Despite sociopathic attitude and quick temper, Jerry would probably thrive in a disciplined environment, e.g., live-in military school. Father can afford it. Therapy recommended.

  s/t M. Sneider, MSW

  Not much. Hoke wished now he had read the file before he talked to Harold Hickey. He could have asked him why he hadn’t sent Jerry to a military school. Of course, at a military academy, a weak kid like Jerry would have been cornholed by the upper classmen, but they would have kept him off the spike. On the other hand, this was about the time of Hickey’s marriage to Loretta, so Harold might have thought that she would be a stabilizing factor for Jerry. But that was speculation. Not a single overnight stay in Youth Hall or jail. In a legal sense, Jerry wasn’t a juvenile delinquent officially. To become a bona fide juvenile delinquent, a kid had to be charged, found guilty, and the case adjudicated. If Jerry had been pushing dope, he had managed to avoid ever being apprehended for it.

  Hoke phoned the lab and asked if they had completed the report on the contents of the Baggie that Sanchez had sent for analysis. He was promised a report for Monday, Tuesday at the latest.

  “Make it Monday,” Hoke said and hung up.

  It was only three o’clock, and he should take the money to Loretta Hickey. But there were all those files to be read. Henderson and Sanchez would have made a dent in them by now, and he would have to catch up. Hoke looked up the number of the Bouquetique in Coral Gables, then wrote it in his notebook before dialing.

  A childish, incredibly high voice answered. “Bouquetique. How may I help you?”

  “Mrs. Hickey, please.”

  “She’s designing in the back. May I help you?”

  “Just take a message. Tell her that Sergeant Moseley will be in to see her tomorrow.”

  “Sergeant Moseley?” the tiny voice chirped.

  “That’s right. You are open on Saturday, aren’t you?”

  “Oh, yes! Saturday’s our busiest day.”

  “Okay. I don’t know what time, but it’ll be some time tomorrow.”

  Hoke hung up the phone. The voice sounded like a little girl around six or seven years old, he thought. Why would Loretta Hickey employ a child to answer the telephone? Hoke went to join Bill and Ellita in the interrogation room.

  Bill and Ellita were sitting close together at Bill’s end of the table. Both were studying material from the same accordion file. Hoke lighted a Kool, but before he could sit down, Bill held up an eight-by-ten black-and-white glossy photograph.

  “Remember this guy, Hoke?”

  Hoke looked at the photo and grinned. It was a picture of an unsmiling middle-aged man—a head-and-shoulders shot—wearing an open-collared polo shirt.

  “Captain Midnight.”

  “That’s right,” Bill said. “Captain Morrow. I was telling Ellita about him. He was the pilot we called Captain Midnight. We must’ve talked to him a half-dozen times three years ago.”

  “He was clean.”

  “He wasn’t clean. He was eliminated as a suspect because we couldn’t prove anything. Anyway, I’d been looking at his file just before Ellita and I went over to have lunch at the Omni. Otherwise, I don’t think I’d have recognized him. The fucker was sitting on the bus bench at the southwest corner of Biscayne when we went in, and he was still sitting in the same place when we came back to get the car. But if I hadn’t just been looking at his photo here, I wouldn’t’ve recognized him. He’s a bum now, Hoke. On a hunch, I sent Ellita over to talk to him because I figured he might recognize me. She asked him if he’d missed his bus, and he told her he was waiting for his wife.”

  “His wife’s dead,” Hoke said. “Her head was smashed in by a four-pound sledgehammer. He was our only suspect, Ellita, but we finally suspended the case.”

  “He did it, Hoke, I know he did,” Bill said.

  “We think he did it. We couldn’t ever prove it, Bill. He passed the polygraph without a tremor. I know the machine can be beat, but in his case, if he did kill her, the indications were that he didn’t know he’d killed her. After he passed the test, we had to drop it altogether.”

  “According to your notes,” Ellita said, “he didn’t have any reason to kill his wife. They’d only been married a year, and the neighbors claimed they were a happy couple. He didn’t need money—not as a pilot earning fifty thousand a year.”

  Hoke sat down and flipped through the papers in the file. “We should be reading the other cases. We can vote on this one later if you want, if you want to put it on your list. But right now we should follow my plan.”

  “Tell him, Ellita,” Henderson said.

  “He was very confused, Sergeant Moseley,” Ellita said. “I tried to talk to him, ask him a few more questions like ‘Are you sure your wife’s bus stops here?’ and he just repeated what he said the first time. Finally, he got angry. He said, ‘You aren’t my wife,’ and walked away.”

  “I signaled Ellita to go get the car,” Bill said, “and I tailed him. He lives over on Second Avenue, down from the old Sears store, in Grogan’s Halfway House, or what used to be the halfway house. It’s just a rooming house now. Grogan lost his license and his city funds when the bag lady starved to death on the front porch. Do you remember that, Hoke?”

  “Yeah. It was a legal problem. There was no law to cover it, although the paper wrote an editorial on the case. What happened, Ellita, was weird. There were about ten guys staying at the halfway house at the time. All of them were on parole, but some had jobs and others were on a methadone program and just lived there. Do you remember the bag lady case at all?”

  “No. How long ago was it?”

  “Seven or eight years. I don’t remember exactly. Anyway, this old lady climbed onto the porch when it was raining. She was run down, physically, like most bag ladies, and she just laid there for four days. The guys in the halfway house, including Grogan, had to step over her for the first day or so, and then she managed to crawl over to the wall. The point is, no one helped her or gave her any food or water. She was too weak to move, so she just died there. Finally, after she died, someone told Grogan the woman was dead, and he called the rescue squad to pick up her body. When he was asked why he didn’t call them the first day she showed up on the porch, he said he didn’t mind her lying there. She didn’t bother anybody, he said, but he would’ve called the police if she’d tried to come inside the house. When they were questioned, the parolees in the halfway house all claimed that they didn’t see anything wrong with a woman lying out there, moaning, on the porch.”

  “And so Grogan lost his license for the halfway house?”

  “Yeah, but not for that. If someone comes up on your front porch to get out of the rain, you can let him do it out of the goodness of your heart. That person isn’t your personal responsibility. But a lot of people in town were pissed off because the old lady died. Four days is a long time. So housing inspectors were sent out, and they yanked Grogan’s license for faulty wiring and drainage problems.”

  “But Grogan’s hous
e is still there, Hoke,” Henderson said. “Only now his place is a rooming house, and that’s where Captain Morrow lives. Ellita picked me up in the car, and we came back here. I went over his file and I think we should talk to Captain Midnight again. The man owned a hundred-thousand-dollar home, he had money in the bank, and he was an airline pilot. Where did all of that go in only three years? He looks like he’s been on the street for months. And he looks at least twenty years older than he did the last time we talked to him. If he’s sitting around on a bus bench waiting for his dead wife, he’s confused and disoriented. Maybe he’ll admit now that he killed her if we lean on him a little. The time to kick a man, Hoke, is when he’s down. You know that.”

  “Maybe he was waiting for a new wife. He could have gotten married again, you know.”

  “Tell him, Ellita,” Henderson said. “Did he look like a married man to you?”

  “No one would marry a bum like that. He’s a sick man, not a drunk, not talking to himself or anything like that, more like a man lost somewhere in his own thoughts.”

  “Let’s go talk to him, Hoke,” Henderson said. “You know he’s guilty and so do I. If we can crack a case on our first day, Willie Brownley’ll shit his pants.”

  “Okay. But let me look at the file for a minute.”

  Everything in the file led to Captain Robert Morrow as a prime suspect. After dinner he had left his house, he said, to get a package of cigarettes. While he was at the 7/Eleven, he drank a cup of coffee, a large one, and talked to the Cuban manager. His house was only two blocks away, and he was gone for only twenty minutes—twenty-two minutes at most. When he returned home, he found his wife in the kitchen. Someone had taken his four-pound sledgehammer from the garage and hit his wife over the head with it while she was washing pots and pans at the sink. Death was instantaneous, with a hole in her skull big enough to hold an orange. From the way it looked, she hadn’t known what hit her. The sledgehammer, without prints, was on the floor beside her body. When he discovered her body, Captain Morrow had telephoned 911 and waited outside on the front lawn until the police arrived, smoking two of the cigarettes from the package of Pall Malls he had bought at the 7/Eleven.