It was a shard of wood, half-buried. He caught the edge, pulled, brought up a foot-long chunk of gilt picture frame. He dusted it clean on his pantleg, had another look. One edge smooth, elegantly curved, glinting in the sunlight, the other a series of jagged splinters. He stood, hefting the wood, trying to comprehend. What had it been like, anyway, when it happened? One moment you’re walking along with a bunch of nice people, drink in hand, looking at all the pretty paintings, the next instant a bomb goes off, you’re flying through the middle of Hell. And all because somebody doesn’t like your politics? Not even your politics. The politics of the guy who runs the country where the guy lived who painted one of the pretty paintings.
He tossed the fragment into the quagmire of shattered boards and brick and muck where a wonderful house had once been and turned to go. Then stopped short. There was a face staring at him, over a hedge that separated one side of the museum property from one of the neighboring estates. An Hispanic guy in a battered straw hat, his leathery face a map of wrinkles stubbled with a grizzled beard, watery blue eyes that stared at him for a moment more and then disappeared.
“Momento,” Driscoll called. “Momentito!” A bit louder. He found himself ready to run after the guy, but where would he run to? The thick hedge stretched unbroken for a city block in either direction. By the time he got around, the guy could have gone anywhere.
Then the old guy appeared, coming around the other side of the poinciana tree. “You are wanting something?”
Driscoll craned his neck, trying to see around the tree. “How’d you get over here?”
The old man followed his gaze and shrugged. “Walking,” he said.
Driscoll still hadn’t spotted any gap in the hedge. He gave up, flashed his phony badge. The old guy barely glanced at it. Apparently Sonny Crockett was as good as any other cop. The old guy waved a gnarled hand over the ruined lot. “Bad business, eh?”
Driscoll looked at him. “Bad all right,” he said. The guy might have been seventy, might have been eighty, his skin a relief map in bronze. “You here when it happened?”
The old guy stared out at the rubble. “I was in my country. On one vacation.”
Driscoll gave the guy another look. “Not Cuba?”
The old guy shook his head. “I am from Zacatecas,” he said solemnly. “In Mexico,” he added.
Driscoll tried to imagine the guy flying on a plane, but the image didn’t work somehow. How long would it take to go to Mexico by bus, about a month and a half? “You’re a long way from home, pardner.”
The old guy nodded. Driscoll pocketed his shield, was ready to pack it in. He’d go down to City-County, see if he could pick up another address for Ms. Marquez, maybe something on the tax records.
The old guy was rooted to his spot, however. Apparently he’d come to talk. “You don’t see this kind of thing in Mexico,” the old guy said.
Driscoll followed his gaze at the rubble. “Yeah?” he said. “Why not?”
The old guy gave him a grin. “Too tired,” he said. “Everybody too tired.”
Driscoll smiled back, gave him a clap on the shoulder. It felt like he’d struck a gnarly fence post covered by a work shirt. “Well, you take it easy, Pop.”
The old guy gave him a look, the same one he’d used on Driscoll’s phony badge. “The lady,” he said. “She is better?”
Driscoll hesitated. “Ms. Marquez?”
The old guy nodded.
Driscoll shrugged. “I guess so. She’s out of the hospital. She must be.”
The old guy considered it. “At home?” he asked.
Driscoll had taken a step toward the car, but stopped. He turned back to the old guy. “Yeah,” he said. “She went home. You wouldn’t happen to know where she lives, would you?”
The old guy nodded.
“You do know where she lives?”
He nodded again. Driscoll took out a pad. “Well, that’s good, because I need to talk to her.” He found a pencil stub in his jacket pocket. “You want to tell me where it is?”
“Maybe she does not want to talk to you.”
Driscoll looked up at the guy in surprise. “I’m trying to help her. Find out who did this.”
The old guy shrugged. “Maybe she does not want to talk to you anyway.”
Driscoll took a breath. What was he going to do? Lean on an eighty-year-old guy? Offer him a sawbuck? Somehow he didn’t think it would work. He certainly couldn’t threaten to take him downtown for questioning. He glanced back at the neatly trimmed hedge, at the jungly estate on the other side of it.
“You do yard work over there?”
“I am a gardener.”
“You work other places?”
The guy pursed his lips. It meant it would be considered.
“How about Ms. Marquez here? You ever cut her grass? At her house, I mean.”
The guy shrugged. Driscoll took it to mean that he had.
“Well, how’d you like to take a look at my place? I could use somebody every couple of weeks.”
The same shrug.
“Of course, I’d have to have a reference, talk to somebody you worked for, right?”
Lips pursed and the shrug this time.
In the end, Driscoll got the address, but not before he’d written out careful directions for the guy to Deal’s fourplex, made an appointment for Saturday morning. What the hell, he thought as he got back into the Ford. Tommy could always use a little help with the groundskeeping.
***
The house was a mile or so away, a modest Mediterranean bungalow a block or two from the Venetian Pool in Coral Gables, its lawn and flowerbeds immaculate. Don Pedro, as he had made himself known, was obviously an able gardener, no matter how old he was.
Driscoll drove past slowly, noted the empty carport, parked under a big ficus tree in front of a neighbor’s house. As he was moving up the front walk, he saw a lamp snap off inside.
There was a brass knocker in the shape of a lion’s head on the wood door and the thing echoed mightily when he clapped it, then clapped it again. He noticed a sweet fragrance, glanced down at a flowering bush by the steps: little white flowers. He made a note to ask Don Pedro about it. They could use something to cover up the smell of charred wood up at Deal’s place.
He heard the sound of a door closing somewhere and waited, but there were no footsteps. He backed down from the entry and hurried around to the drive that led under the carport, just in time to collide with a nervous-looking woman in a white housekeeper’s dress.
“Jesucristo,” the woman said, backpedaling. She had a string bag hooked at her elbow. Driscoll saw a pair of slippers inside, some folded clothes.
“Sorry,” he said. “I’m looking for Señorita Marquez.”
The woman glanced over her shoulder as if she were considering a dash for the backyard. There was a high chain-link fence there blocking access to the neighbors’ yard. A pair of Dobermans had appeared on the other side and had begun to bark furiously.
“Is she inside?” Driscoll said, producing his shield.
The woman turned a shade paler and shook her head. “Es no home!”
“Where is she? When’s she coming back?”
“Es gone, no se.”
“Uh-huh,” Driscoll said, thinking about it. “Habla inglés?” he asked.
“No,” the woman said, shaking her head vehemently. “No inglés.”
“Geez, that’s too bad,” he said finally. “Cuz now we’ll have to go down to the immigration office, find somebody to translate.” He smiled affably at the woman. “Tu sabes? Immigración?”
The woman’s terrorized expression fell away and was replaced instantly by a sullen glare. She hiked her bag up in front of her body like a shield. “What do you want with me?” she asked, her English impeccable.
Driscoll nodded at the bag she was clutching. “I’d like to talk to Señorita Marquez,” he said.
“She already tal
ked to the police,” the woman said.
“I’m not a policeman,” Driscoll said.
The woman glanced out at the white Ford, then back at him.
“What are you then?”
“A friend,” he said.
She studied him, still suspicious. “Don Pedro sent me,” he added. And with that, she followed him to the car.
***
Her directions took them north, into a shabby neighborhood a couple of blocks from the intersection of 79th and Biscayne. “Here,” she said, pointing to a two-story block building on a corner.
There was a sign painted there, advertising a botanic shop, an herbal medicine store, along with a big mural of what Driscoll supposed was a lady saint: she was depicted wearing a kind of habit with a white cloak, carrying a torch, a Bible, and an urn of some sort. There was a placid-looking dragon that looked more like an alligator curled at her feet. Saint Alligatrix, he decided.
He followed the housekeeper out of the car and past the windows of the shop, where herbs of unknowable types hung upside down in great fan-shaped clumps. Two guys in ball caps had been standing down the curb near the hood of a decrepit Chevy discussing something in earnest Spanish; they took one look at Driscoll, glanced back at the Ford, and clammed up instantaneously. They couldn’t have looked more guilty if they’d have been wearing ARREST ME signs around their necks.
The woman shooed a couple of kids away from a paint-peeling entranceway and started up a flight of steps. She hadn’t bothered to check to see if he was following, but when they reached the landing at the top, she turned and held her hand up.
“Wait,” she said. She turned the lock on an iron gate, then two more deadbolts on an inner door, slammed both shut after her.
Driscoll stood in the hallway, trying to calculate what the heat might be in the dark, airless space. A hundred? Hundred and ten?
Sweat was trickling down his armpits. He could be home drinking beer. Furthermore, home could have been an apartment in Hallandale, close enough to get an ocean breeze, with an easy drive over to Joe Robbie Stadium, where he could be making use of those Marlins tickets. Instead, he’d moved into Little Havana, had nearly gotten himself fried to a crisp, and now was dragging ass over the whole of Dade County, chasing phantoms, and for what?
“¿Por qué?” he heard one of the kids at the bottom of the stairs whisper. He glanced down at them, a boy and a girl, maybe five, giggling, pointing up at the big gringo standing on the steps. ¿Por que? What was he doing here?
He could tell himself that it was just the luck of the draw, that this was just the way things had worked out, of course. But a part of him knew that wasn’t true. The truth was, he’d probably worked it out this way on purpose.
He’d felt pushed out of the department, not only because he’d reached retirement, but because he’d felt like he hadn’t belonged anymore. Most of his contemporaries had long since retired, or gone off to softer jobs in small towns upstate. And he detested the new hold-the-fort attitude that had come in with all the new faces over the years: He’d been a cop long enough to know that the streets were never going to be swept clean, of course, but he and his contemporaries had rarely been so brazen about the matter.
In Driscoll’s book, you at least aspired to make a difference. The way it was now, what most of the guys aspired to was not to look bad, put in the time until something better came along. You could blame it all on the overwhelming rise of crime, on the amount of drugs on the street, on the flood of immigrants into their part of the country, on the failure of the economy and the decline of social services in general, you could blame it on a million things, but what it all came down to was accommodation. Driscoll suspected you could plop yourself down in almost any big city at any given moment of history, look around the streets, listen to the pundits, you could convince yourself, “Hey, the world’s going to hell in a handcart.”
Then you could make your choice: try to do something about the situation or find a convenient excuse and accommodate yourself to it. The only thing was, these days most everybody down at City-County seemed to be an accommodator, and that left Driscoll, still behaving as if he could make a difference, feeling pretty much like a dinosaur.
The city manager buys his suits for pennies on the dollar from a well-known fence? Hey, Vern, chill out. Everybody loves a bargain. A commissioner gets picked up smoking crack with a hustler in a South Beach flophouse? Yo, Dris, we all gotta kick back once in a while. Somebody’s blowing up museums and travel agencies that do business with Cuba? Well, Detective Driscoll, we have to understand the passions of the dispossessed, don’t we? If there were a thousand crimes being committed at that very moment, there were a thousand pleas to cop. Driscoll could feel his blood pressure building, forced himself to calm.
Face facts, Driscoll. You may have left the department, but you’re still a dinosaur. Maybe there’s a comet coming, got a bead drawn on Dade County, on your fat ass, going to blow you to kingdom come with all the other dinosaurs, but never mind, you’re not going anywhere. You’re going to hang around your turf, because it’s your turf, and retirement or not, you’re going to keep on doing what you’ve always done, and now that you’ve got a sniff of something, your tiny brain is fixed on finding it.…
His thoughts broke off as footsteps sounded inside the apartment. In a moment the locks on the inner door clacked open and the woman in white reappeared, opening the gate, ushering him in dourly. The air inside was still close, stirred only a bit by an ancient window-unit air conditioner at the far end of the living room, but it felt icy in comparison to the heat on the landing. Driscoll opened his mouth to say something, but the woman had already turned, with a brusque motion for him to follow her.
She took him down a narrow hallway, the uneven floorboards creaking as they went. The building suddenly felt lopsided to Driscoll, as if the whole second story had been added as an afterthought by a weekend carpenter and was now teetering, about to collapse and dump them down into the botanica below. Just the heat, he supposed, but he had to put out a hand to steady himself as he trailed along after his guide. A chunk of flaking wallpaper came off in his fingers.
She stopped abruptly and flung open a door. Driscoll went past her, crumpling the wallpaper out of sight, suppressing an absurd nudge of guilt.
The door slammed behind him and he glanced about, fighting the sensation that he’d been lured into a trap. The room was cool and dimly lit, the only window obscured by a yellow blind that had been pulled down and that was now rustling in the breeze from another wall-unit air conditioner.
There was a single bed pushed into a corner, a night-stand with a pitcher of water, a vase with some drooping flowers beside it. A figure was propped up against some pillows there, a woman, her dark hair spilling down over her nightgown. Driscoll couldn’t really see if she was awake, but he sensed eyes upon him.
“Miss Marquez?” he said. His voice sounded loud in the tiny space.
He thought he saw a nod. He walked closer, his eyes adjusting to the light.
Her face was puffy and taut, her eyebrows and lashes gone, the skin ruddy and scaling. Her eyes followed him eerily, like the lidless gaze of a snake.
“I’m Vernon Driscoll,” he said. He didn’t bother to produce the phony shield.
“You’re with the police.”
It was a statement, not a question. Though her voice was faint, he heard the caution there. He shook his head. “I’m retired,” he said. “I’m a private detective now.”
He surprised himself, saying it. All these months telling himself he had to get busy, file the forms, rent an office, get his act together, and suddenly he’d just cut through the crap, appointed himself.
He put his hand on the back of a wooden chair by the nightstand. “You mind if I sit down?”
She nodded at the chair, closed her eyes briefly. As he sat, he scanned her face again. There had been real beauty there once. Would be again, in time.
“Margaria says you have threatened her, Mr. Driscoll.” The voice was still soft, but Driscoll found himself offering an apologetic shrug.
“I wanted to ask you some questions,” he said.
She shook her head gently against her pillows. “I’ve already spoken to the police. I saw nothing, I know nothing, I cannot be of help.”
Driscoll nodded, letting the silence take them for a moment. He glanced about the room. Other than a crucifix above the bed, the walls were bare. He got a glimpse of a couple of nightgowns on hangers inside a tiny closet, saw a suitcase and the bag that Maria had been carrying as she left the Gables house on the floor inside. Despite the wheezing of the air conditioner, the air carried a scent of mustiness, a decay that seemed to emanate from the walls themselves.
“You’re afraid, Miss Marquez,” Driscoll said. “That’s why you’re hiding out here. I’d be afraid, too, after what happened.”
She was silent. He tried another tack. “The thing is, somebody’s got to find out who did it, see they’re brought to justice…”
She laughed then, a short, barking sound. The victim’s laugh, the one that comes when you find out who the joke’s really on. Driscoll had heard it plenty of times before.
He leaned forward in his chair, working his hands together. His fingers felt stiff and awkward. “You see, why I’m here, some friends of mine were hurt pretty bad. In an accident…” He broke off, correcting himself. “…in an incident that had some similarities to what took place at the museum…”
“An accident,” she said, almost dreamily. Her gaze was on the ceiling now. “That’s what I have been telling myself it was.” She turned and smiled bitterly at him. “A terrible accident. But one which I will survive.”
She held up her hand between them, palm toward her face. Driscoll saw a thumb, a forefinger, the skin swollen and flaking like that of her face. Gauze covered the stumps where the rest of her fingers had been. “I am going to go away from here, Mr. Driscoll. And put this behind me and pray that I never have an accident again.”
Her eyes found his, burning. After a moment she rolled back on her pillows, her gaze on the ceiling again.
Raw Deal Page 19
