New Hope for the Dead

by Charles Willeford

  The Clash was playing “London Calling” on the jukebox. Hoke strained to listen, trying to make out the lyrics, but could only understand every third or fourth word. The whole song made no sense to him. He finished his beer and the rest of Henderson’s.

  Hoke drove back to Miami Beach in the pelting rain. He drove slowly. He was in no hurry to get back to the hotel. His little suite was no longer a sanctuary; it was full of females with unresolved problems.

  15

  After Hoke parked in his space at the Eldorado, he circled the hotel to check the bay side. Some of the residents had been dumping their trash into the sand of the filled-in swimming pool again, and the garbage pickup people had left a lot of litter scattered around the dumpster. Hoke entered the hotel from the rear entrance and wrote out his report at the manager’s desk, reminding Mr. Bennett to call the exterminators again. Hoke wondered sometimes whether Mr. Bennett ever read his reports. The conditions rarely changed, but that was the manager’s problem, not his—although Hoke hadn’t considered the Norway rat invasion as one of his reporting duties when he had agreed to take on the unpaid security position at the hotel.

  The girls were in Ellita’s room. The three of them had been shopping, and Ellita had made curtains from red crepe paper and tacked them above the window with thumbtacks. The girls had arranged two large crepe paper bows, and these bows had been thumbtacked to the gray walls. Ellita had bought takeout food from a Cuban restaurant, together with red plastic plates and tableware. The girls had brought up one of the card tables from the lobby. There was enough red crepe paper left over for a table-cloth, and the table was set for four. A small pot of African violets had been brought from Hoke’s suite as a centerpiece. A styrofoam cooler filled with iced Cokes and beer was next to the card table.

  “What’s all this?” Hoke said. “A party?”

  “I hope you don’t mind, Hoke,” Ellita said, “but we decided to eat in instead of going out tonight. The girls said they never had any Cuban food before, and we wanted to surprise you.”

  “I’m surprised. But there’s only one chair. If you move the table by the bed, I can sit on the bed. I’ll get a couple of more chairs.”

  Hoke walked down the hall, opened an empty room with his master key, and brought back two straight chairs.

  “Where’d you get all this stuff, anyway?” Hoke said, arranging the chairs around the table.

  “The food’s from El Gaitero’s, but the rest of the stuff’s from Eckerd’s and the 7/Eleven.”

  “We met Tony Otero, Daddy,” Aileen said, smiling behind her hand, “and Sue Ellen asked him if she could feel his muscle.”

  “Shut up, Aileen,” Sue Ellen said, punching her sister on the arm.

  “Did he let you feel it?” Hoke asked.

  Sue Ellen nodded and blushed. “Aileen felt it too.”

  “How about you, Ellita?” Hoke said. “Did you feel Tony’s muscle, too?”

  Ellita laughed, showing her white teeth. “He’s just a little fellow, Hoke. He only weighs a hundred and thirty-four pounds.”

  “I didn’t ask you how much he weighed.” Hoke grinned. “I asked you if you felt his muscle.”

  “Of course.” Ellita laughed again and began to open the cartons.

  There were fried pork chunks, black beans and rice, yucca, and fried plantains, all packed in separate cartons with tight foil-topped cardboard lids. There were two loaves of buttered Cuban bread, sliced lengthwise.

  The girls didn’t like the yucca and refused to eat it. Aileen pushed the chunks of pork around on her plate, and Hoke asked her why she wasn’t eating the best part of the dinner.

  “They hurt my teeth and gums, Daddy. My teeth hurt all the time anyway, and I can’t chew anything hard. I was supposed to see the orthodontist last Wednesday, but Mom was too busy to take me and said you’d make an appointment with someone down here.”

  “Do you like those ugly braces?” Hoke said. “They look like hell, to tell the truth.”

  “They’re too tight. I told Dr. Osmond that, but he said they’re supposed to feel too tight.”

  “I’ll take ’em off for you when we finish eating. You got any Valium in your purse, Ellita?”

  “I should have,” Ellita said. She got up from the table and looked into her purse for her pillbox. “I’ve got Valium, Tylenol-3, and some Midol.”

  “Give her a half Valium now, and one T-3. By the time we’re through eating, they should be working a little.”

  Aileen took the Tylenol-3 and the half Valium with a sip of Coke.

  “Do you know how to take off braces, Daddy?” Aileen asked.

  “Sure. I was a dental assistant for a while when I was in the army. I learned how to do everything, including extractions. They never taught me how to make false teeth though. If they had, I’d make a better set than the ones I’ve got now.”

  “I think I feel a little dizzy already,” Aileen said, putting the back of her hand to her forehead dramatically.

  “Are you all through eating?”

  Aileen nodded. “I’m not hungry.”

  “There’s flan for dessert,” Ellita said, “but I’ll save yours for you.”

  “Flan?”

  “It’s a caramelized custard. You can eat it without chewing.”

  “I don’t think I want it. Not now, anyway.”

  “In that case,” Hoke said, “go back to the suite and sit in the armchair. I’ll be down in a few minutes.”

  Holding the back of her hand to her forehead, and staggering slightly, Aileen left the room, closing the door behind her.

  Hoke grinned. “She’s pretty good, isn’t she?”

  “I never knew you studied dentistry, Hoke,” Ellita said.

  “Neither did I. But you want the girl to have a little confidence in me, don’t you?”

  Sue Ellen giggled. Hoke poked Sue Ellen in the ribs with a forefinger, and she giggled again.

  “And don’t you tell her any different.” Hoke finished the rest of his dinner. He then ate the pork chunks on Aileen’s plate, and opened another can of beer.

  “Are you ready for your flan?” Ellita said, opening another carton.

  “I’ll skip dessert. I’m trying to cut down on sweets. What I’ll do, Ellita, I’ll clip those braces off with my toe-nail cutters. I’ve got a good pair, made in Germany, and they’ll cut damned near anything. You can hold her head still. Here, go down to the suite now and give her the other half Valium, and take her Coke along.”

  It took Hoke more than a half-hour to clip off the rubber bands and the tiny bolts that held Aileen’s braces together. The tight rubber bands were more difficult to snip away than the tiny bolts. There was a narrow gold strip glued to her lower teeth, however, and he couldn’t get it off. There was no way that he could get a purchase on it with the clippers.

  “I think,” Ellita said, “you’ll need some kind of solvent to remove that.”

  “Does the lower band hurt, Aileen?” Hoke said.

  “I don’t know. My whole mouth hurts now, so I can’t tell.”

  “I’ll leave the lower band on, then. I’ve got to go to the morgue on Monday or Tuesday, and I’ll ask Doc Evans about it. He’s probably got some kind of solvent he can lend me. But right now, you’d better lie down. Give her another T-3, Ellita.”

  Ellita took the girl into the bedroom. Hoke told Sue Ellen to gather up all the garbage in Ellita’s room and take it downstairs to the dumpster. “But don’t throw away the plastic silverware or plates. Wash that in Ellita’s bathroom, and put it away in her dresser.”

  Hoke lit a cigarette and turned on the TV. Ellita came out of the bedroom and closed the door just as the phone rang. She picked it up.

  “Put him on,” she said into the phone. “Yes, sir, he’s here. Me? We were just going over our plans for Monday, that’s all. Yes, sir. Just a second.”

  She covered the mouthpiece. “It’s Major Brownley.”

  “Shit,” Hoke said. “You shouldn’t’ve answered the
phone.” He took the phone from her.

  “Sergeant Moseley.”

  “What’s Ellita doing in your room, Hoke?” Brownley was pissed.

  “We’re trying to get a handle on what to do Monday, that’s all. In fact, I met with Bill Henderson earlier this afternoon. We’re all enthusiastic about the assignment, Willie, but there’s so much to do it’s hard to tell what to do first.”

  “That shouldn’t be a problem if you saw my flag.”

  “What flag?”

  “The red flag I attached to the Mary Rollins file. I put the Rollins file on the top of the stack so you’d get to it first.”

  “I didn’t see it. What I did, you see, was to divide the piles into three batches. So either Bill or Ellita must’ve got that one. Hold on a minute.” Hoke put his hand over the mouthpiece. “Did you look at the Mary Rollins file? Do you remember?”

  Ellita nodded. “I had it, and then put it into my reject pile. It isn’t even a definite homicide, it’s a missing person.”

  “Ellita saw it, Major Brownley,” Hoke said into the phone, “but I didn’t. I told them we’d read all the cases first before we decided which case to work on.”

  “Consider that number one, then,” Brownley said. “I just had another irate call from Mrs. Rollins, Mary’s mother. I’ve had one or two calls a month from this woman for the last three years. I want this woman off my back. Anyway, I told Mrs. Rollins that you were working on this case personally, so from now on you’ll get all her angry phone calls. Then you’ll see what I mean.”

  “I’ll look at it first thing Monday, Willie.”

  “That’s all I had to tell you, Hoke. That, and that it was an unpleasant surprise to have Sanchez answer the phone in your hotel room on a Saturday evening. You know how I feel about things like that.”

  “I explained that. We were just—”

  But Brownley had hung up.

  Hoke hung up, turned, and grinned at Ellita. “Willie suspects a little hanky-panky. When you get up enough nerve to tell him you’re pregnant, he’ll put two and two together, come up with five, and tell you that Bruce, your detail man, is another Coconut Grove myth.”

  “I didn’t plan to tell him about Bruce. The major’s entitled to know I’m pregnant, but there’s no hurry about telling him. But you’re right, Hoke, I shouldn’t have answered your phone.”

  “Fuck him.” Hoke shrugged. “Let Willie think what he likes. He will anyway. Tell me something about this Rollins case.”

  “It goes back about three years. Mary Rollins disappeared, but they found her car. They also found her shorts—they called ’em hot pants then—in a pole-bean field off Kendall Drive. Her bloody T-shirt was with the hot pants. They both had Type-O bloodstains, and Mary had Type-O blood. That’s about it. There was no body. Her friends at work were interviewed, but no one saw her after she left work to go home on a Friday afternoon. She didn’t have any boyfriends, apparently. Because of the bloody clothing, it was listed at first as a possible homicide, but was changed later to a missing person case. I remember it from yesterday because I had to look up a word in MacGellicot’s notebook. He talked to a woman in Boca Raton, and then he wrote in his notes, ‘Hostile to males. Nugatory results. Maybe female investigator should talk to her.’”

  “You mean ‘negatory.’”

  “No. ‘Nugatory.’ I looked it up. It means having no worth or meaning. It’s about the same as negatory, but what MacGellicot meant, I think, was that the woman was stalling him because he was a man, and she didn’t like men.”

  “Why didn’t he say ‘lying’ then? Why use a dumb word like ‘nugatory’?”

  “We could ask him.”

  “He left the department two years ago. Mac had a degree in sociology from the University of Chicago, and he got a police chief’s job in some small town in Ohio. We lose a lot of good detectives that way. These little towns that advertise for a chief in the journal always flip when a Miami homicide cop applies for the job. But they usually want a new chief to have a degree besides. It’s not a bad life compared with the things we have to do. Six cops, one patrol car, and a sign hidden behind a tree to make a little speed-trap money. The only crime you have to worry about is teenage drinkers pissing on the gravel in front of the town’s only gas station.”

  “We can call MacGellicot on Monday, can’t we?”

  “No, we’ll just look at the file. See what else it says. Maybe you can drive up to Boca and talk to the woman, if she’s still there. We’ll have to do something, now that Willie called. Funny you didn’t notice the red flag.”

  “A bunch of the files are flagged, Hoke. You haven’t got to yours yet, maybe.”

  “That’s what pisses me off. I don’t mind doing the job, but I hate to be told how to do it. I don’t like being called at home either, just to get some woman off Brownley’s back.”

  Hoke finished his beer.

  “Tomorrow I’m going to see Ms. Westphal at the house-sitting service again. She’s got an efficiency available for three weeks in the black Grove, starting next Friday. She also pays the sitter five bucks a day for living in it. If you don’t mind living in the ghetto, Ellita, I can talk her into letting you have it. Three weeks’ll give you a base, and you can then look around for a decent place to live. Or maybe, after three weeks, you can move back home.”

  “I’m not going back home again, Hoke. If I did, I’d get the silent treatment from my father. It’s time I left anyway. I would like to get a place in the same neighborhood though. That way, my mother could come over and help me with the baby.”

  “You’ve got months to go before you have to worry about a baby-sitter.”

  “I know, but I’ve thought about it.”

  “How do you feel? Physically?”

  “I feel fine. I like your girls, Hoke. Not only are they well-behaved, they adore you.”

  “How could they? They don’t even know me, for Christ’s sake. And I don’t know what to do with them either. You’ve helped me a lot.”

  “Did you call their mother yet? To let her know that they’re all right?”

  “Except for a few letters, I haven’t talked to Patsy in ten years. If she wants to know how they are, she can call me.”

  “Maybe she’s tried, Hoke? It’s hard to get you at the hotel.”

  “I’ll tell you what. Get her phone number from Sue Ellen, and you can call her. Reverse the charges, and if she won’t accept the call, the hell with it.”

  “Sure you don’t want to talk to her?”

  “Positive.”

  “I’ll call her then. If I were their mother, I’d want to know that they got here okay.” Ellita cracked the door to the bedroom, then closed it softly. “Aileen’s sleeping like a baby. That was awfully kind of you, Hoke, taking her braces off.”

  “What the hell.” Hoke shrugged. “She was in pain. I’m her father, for Christ’s sake.”

  Ellita started to cry. Hoke looked at her for a moment, then picked up his leisure jacket, left the suite, and took the elevator down to the lobby. He didn’t know why he felt so lousy, so useless.

  He got into his car, switched on the engine, and tried to think of somewhere to go. He didn’t have anywhere to go, so he drove to the police station in Miami. He looked for the Mary Rollins file, and read through it. He leafed through two more cases—hopeless, hopeless, both of them—and then locked his office. He went down to the cafeteria for a cup of coffee and sat down alone at a table to drink it.

  Lieutenant Fred Slater came in, and Hoke watched him as he got a carton of milk and a glass, and paid the cashier. Slater was grinning. He looked around the room, spotted Hoke, and came over to the table. Slater’s thin lips split his pockmarked face into two ugly parts. He opened the milk carton and filled his glass.

  “I just heard a good one, Hoke,” he said. “How do you know when you’re sleeping with a fag?” He took a sip of milk and wiped off the milk mustache with a paper napkin. “How? His dick tastes like shit!” Slater laughed and t
ook another sip of milk.

  Hoke didn’t laugh. “Let me tell you something, Slater, and I want you to get it straight. You ever tell my girls a joke like that, and exec officer or no exec officer, I’ll kick the living shit out of you.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. It’s just a joke, for Christ’s sake. All I was …”

  But Slater was talking to Hoke’s back as he walked out of the cafeteria.

  16

  On Sunday morning Hoke awoke at six, as usual, dressed, and drove to the 7/Eleven. He bought a dozen bagels, a quart of milk, a package of cream cheese, and three large cans of Dinty Moore stew. He also picked out a large Spanish onion, which he planned to dice and add to the canned stew for extra flavor. Back in the suite, he heated water on the hot plate for instant coffee, and when it boiled he woke the girls for breakfast. Then he walked down the hall and knocked on Ellita’s door, telling her to join them in his suite for bagels and coffee.

  Ellita wasn’t wearing pantyhose with her skirt when she joined Hoke a few minutes later, and when she sat down and crossed her legs, he caught a glimpse of the inner side of her thighs. Her soft thighs were as white as ivory, which surprised Hoke so much he stared a little longer than he had intended. Hoke had always assumed that Ellita was the same golden tan all over—like her exposed face, neck, and arms. Hoke knew that most Cubans thought of themselves as white, but he had always considered them as Third Worlders—an island mixture of Spanish, Caribe Indian, and black—and as being brown all over. For that reason, he had never objected to the department Affirmative Action program, which gave preference to minorities, both in hiring practices and on promotion lists. In Miami, however, although the majority of the population was Latin, they were still counted as a minority group. If Ellita was white as well as Cuban, Hoke figured, maybe she hadn’t really deserved a promotion to a detective’s slot in the Homicide Division. Ellita’s white thighs were a revelation to him, opening up a whole line of new thoughts. One of these days, he’d have to talk to Bill Henderson about this as something that should be discussed at the P.B.A. On the other hand, even though Ellita had been given preference, as a Cuban, over several WASP policemen who also deserved to be detectives, she had paid her dues after working all those years as a police dispatcher. So what difference did it make? None at all. It was just nice to know that Ellita was a white woman, after all—even if she was a Cuban. Henderson liked her, and so did he, and they could hardly blame her for taking advantage of the program to get out of a boring, dead-end job.