“You should feel pretty fuckin’ stupid not catching the asshole when you knew he was going for Miss May, huh?”
“Don’t give me that ‘huh?’ shit. I got from June to December, so get over yourself.”
Bricker remembered from history class (or maybe it was the History Channel) that a Japanese admiral had warned against attacking Pearl Harbor for fear of awakening “the sleeping giant,” by which he meant the United States.
Well, if national coverage of the meter maid murders was already intense, it went off like a volcano the next morning when Sara Succubus went on the air on The Morning Show to denounce “the incompetent, sun-bathing, scuba-diving, Margarita-drinking police department of Miami Beach for letting my sister Sammy and my mother Serena die at the hands of the vicious meter maid murderer.” She made it clear that, henceforth, she’d be covering the story personally, and she was going “to draw blood.”
Not one to be discouraged by a little setback, Bricker dropped by PMS HQ to have coffee with Alice. Major Bunstable was just leaving. She eyed him warily, the riding crop gently tapping her high leather boots.
“You’re spending an awful lot of time here at PMS HQ, Bricker.”
She had an accent he couldn’t pin down: Czech, Polish, Russian, Lithuanian, Croatian. Somewhere in there.
“You’ve got the best coffee in the department, Major,” he smiled as he touched the brim of his Trilby respectfully. He could tell she wasn’t taken in by his manly charms. “Plus, I thought it would be a good idea to inspect the perimeter of the PMS compound every now and then—make sure there’s no opening where the meter maid murderer might sneak in at night.”
The tapping on the boot became a little more insistent.
“I assure you, Sergeant, the perimeter of the PMS compound is quite secure. The murdering bastard will not get in here. Enjoy your coffee.”
The major swept past him down the steps and climbed into her chauffeur driven Cushman cart, specially fitted out with a back seat. The driver’s uniform he recognized as that of a PMS Academy trainee. The poor girl didn’t even look to be out of puberty, with plump red pimples marring an already ugly countenance. She had stringy ash blonde hair that hadn’t been washed in a week, her eyes were too far apart, and one was higher than the other. She smiled at him (all women smiled at Jake Bricker), revealing ragged teeth.
“Go!” commanded Bunstable with a whack of her riding crop on the roll bar, and the Cushman cart sputtered off into the wilds of South Beach.
Putt-putt-putt.
Bricker shuddered and went into the reception area where he received a much warmer welcome in the arms of sweet Alice.
They were alone in the outer area, so he held her close, massaging her breasts until he felt her nipples harden. She began to moan softly. The sex would be good this afternoon, he thought.
They heard footsteps outside. Alice pulled away.
“Coffee?”
“Sure.”
The door opened and Missy Cuthbert walked in with Wimpy Wimpole. Missy raised an eyebrow and her lip curled up into a half smile. Bricker knew she’d always had a crush on him.
“Well, well, well... if it isn’t Mr. Stud himself, Jake Bricker.”
“Hey there, Missy.”
“Wimpy, you know Jake Bricker?”
“Can’t say as I do,” said a suspicious Wimpy in a tortured Cockney accent. Wimpy couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred pounds, maybe one-ten. Her hair was dyed a nasty henna color and in a bob cut, with the brownish-orange ends curling around to her Cupie doll lips, nose wrinkled up in a perpetual state of disgust. She wore her black piss-cutter with its red piping at a jaunty angle.
“Jake here is the handsomest man in the department.”
“Well, if you like 'em lookin’ that way.”
“I like 'em that way,” Missy said in what she thought was a seductive purr.
Bricker shuddered again.
Mae West she wasn’t.
“Let’s get some coffee before we go out again,” Wimpy said.
“Sure, let’s go. So, what’re ya doin’ here, Jake?”
“Chief wanted me to check out the perimeter, make sure it’s tight.”
“I got somethin’ tight fer ya, take my word fer it. C’mon, lemme buy ya cup o’ coffee.”
Alice shrank away unnoticed back to her desk while Bricker followed Missy into the large break room and over to the coffee machine. As a concession to the Cuban influence in Miami, there were three espresso machines so they could make morning café con leches and cafecitos in the afternoon.
“What’s yer poison?” Missy asked.
“American.”
Missy poured a cup from a Mr. Coffee and gave him a glance.
“Dash of milk, two sugars.”
He always used Equal when alone, but with a woman present (even if it was a meter maid), he always used sugar. More manly.
Wimpy had drifted to the far side of the room where she toiled over some paperwork.
“You and me, Jake,” Missy’s eyes twinkled. “You and me should, you know, get together.”
“Yeah,” Bricker said, burning his lower lip on the scalding coffee.
“Hey, Missy!” Wimpy called out. “Help me with this scheduling form.”
“I’ll be lookin’ forward to it. Meetcha some day at the Deuce, okay?”
“Sure. Some day. ”
Missy winked at him and moved across the room to Wimpy.
Above the coffee machines and to the left was the infamous Annual PMS Calendar. He went through it and looked at the rest of the year:
MISS MAY – Samantha “Sammy” Succubus
MISS JUNE – Modest “Moddy” Morriseau
MISS JULY – Pepita “Pretty” Rios
MISS AUGUST – Fatiwa “Fatso” Farhat
MISS SEPTEMBER – Cassandra “Cassie” Castro
MISS OCTOBER – Winifred “Wimpy” Wimpole
MISS NOVEMBER – Saturnina “Satty” Gomez
MISS DECEMBER – Melissa “Missy” Cuthbert
Posted on the wall to the right of the coffee machines was the current weekly schedule. He saw that Miss June, Moddy Morriseau, was working up by the fancy high-end hotels on Collins Avenue—the Raleigh, the Setai, the Delano, the Gansevoort, the W.
He slipped out while Missy and Wimpy were busy, left his coffee outside with Alice, gave her a quick kiss, arranged to meet her later, and got the hell out of PMS HQ as fast as he could.
Bricker drove away from TWERP Towing and up along Dade Boulevard past the high school and turned onto Twenty-third Street. He paused in front of the Miami City Ballet building where he watched some of the dancers practice in the glass-walled rehearsal studio, then drove slowly around the area till he spotted Modest Morriseau.
He’d never seen Moddy till now, but he was not surprised to find that she was as ugly a Haitian as her Cuban counterparts were ugly Latinas. She had skin as black as the ace of spades. It always seemed to Bricker it was easier to tell a Haitian from an American black because the Haitians were so black. Pitch black. They never intermarried the way American blacks do. But Bricker wasn’t into genealogy and didn’t much care one way or another why Haitians were as black as they were.
All he knew was that he had to follow Modest wherever she led him, or at least get to know her patterns so when the New Moon came round again, he’d be ready to pounce, nab the meter maid murderer, release the story to Billy and bask in the glory and praise soon to be showered upon him.
Moddy was working the parking lot on the ocean just south of the W Hotel at Twenty-second Street. They’d just put a zillion dollars into the park renovating it, but there were still meters to be fed, so Moddy was busy cranking out the tickets. Well, not exactly meters as this was a revamped parking lot that had a Pay & Park system—the driver could use change, dollar bills or a credit card to feed the machine, which then generated a slip that was placed on the dashboard. All Moddy had to do was check the time on the slip to see if it had exp
ired. About forty per cent of them had, from what Bricker could tell as he saw her write a ticket every third or fourth car.
Seeing that Moddy would be a while working this lot, Bricker parked his car illegally and strolled down to the ocean, over the narrow wooden bridge to the beach and looked out at a sparkling sea, the early morning sun casting what looked like a billion diamonds across the surface, dazzling to the eye. He lit up a Montecristo, thinking ahead to seeing Alice later that afternoon. He smiled to himself, wondering what people would say if they knew he was fucking a meter maid. (Well, not really a meter maid, but a maybe-meter-maid-to-be.) By the time he finished his smoke, he heard a commotion in the parking lot on the other side of the dunes, so he retraced his steps.
Coming to the top of the dune line, he saw Moddy in a heated argument with a meter mister (not all the people on the PMS Force were meter maids). Bricker walked down with a brisk clip and slipped quietly behind some trees in the middle of the park and positioned himself close enough to hear Moddy and the meter mister go at it.
“You’re not supposed to be workin’ the park, you dumb shit,” snarled the meter mister in a boyish whine.
“Yus, I am, man,” Moddy said in a heavy Creole accent, squaring her shoulders.
The meter mister shook his head, pitying her ignorance.
“You’re supposed to be working south of Twenty-first Street, which is the far side of this park. This park, if you will look at your God damn map, honey, is on the north side of Twenty-first Street. My territory today, not yours.”
“Jen ne sais pas de quoi vous parlez,” Moddy stammered.
“Lissen, don’t try that French crap with me, okay? You know exactly what I’m talkin’ about.”
“Vous ne savez pas tout, connard!”
“What does that mean, ‘connard’?”
The meter mister’s temper was rising. People were beginning to gather around them. Bricker slinked further behind his tree.
“It mean ‘asshole.’ It mean ‘deekhead.’”
“You just want to work this lot ‘cause you can write a hundred tickets without moving your meter maid mobile and ‘cause there are no lots south of Twenty-first street where you’ll really have to work—something you’re not used to doing in your stupid country.”
“I’m not in my stupid country, I’m in theese stupid country!” she shot back.
They went back and forth, and finally the meter mister called into HQ to find out who was right. Turned out the meter mister was right, so Moddy beat a path south of Twenty-first Street.
“Stupid black bitch!” the meter mister spat after her as she putt-putt-putted away in a snit.
Bricker got to his car and phoned Alice on her cell phone (he didn’t want any trace of a call to her on the main line into PMS HQ) to find out who the meter mister was.
“Oh, him. He’s Smarney Weiner, a real prick. Real name’s Barney Weiner, but everybody calls him Smarney ‘cause he’s such an asshole. It’s a combination of ‘smarmy’ and his real name ‘Barney.’ He’s real defensive ‘cause people call him names ‘cause he’s a meter mister. I don’t know why people think writing tickets is women’s work.”
Bricker didn’t want to educate Alice to the reality that in most people’s minds writing parking tickets wasn’t exactly the manliest profession in modern day America. In fact, most people couldn’t imagine a real man stooping to such a job. You’d have to be really, really desperate. No pride at all. There could be no pretension to having any pride about it. No, if you were a meter mister, there was no defying the fact you were there for the pension. You spend twenty years fucking people at $18 a pop, then the rest of your natural life fucking them when you collect your pension every month. Such a deal.
Later that afternoon, Bricker got ready to go to Sammy Succubus’s funeral: actually, a double funeral, since the mother Serena had also died.
Bricker checked in with Alice, who told him there wouldn’t be a church funeral because all the churches on Miami Beach had refused to permit the service, fearing public retribution.
No church could exactly put out a PR release, but the truth was they didn’t want any meter maids in their churches, dead or alive. The Interdenominational Church Committee did a study some years ago called The Effects of Meter Maid Church Attendance on Collections and figured out very quickly that meter maids were bad for business. Other worshippers simply were not in a generous mood when confronted by meter maids at church.
Bricker slipped into the Deuce for a quick drink. Boobs McCoy brought over his Ezra Brooks and placed it in front of him. She had a sneery smile on her twisted lips, and after he looked up from the glass, she pulled her hand from behind her and dropped in two cubes of ice, one slowly after the other.
“Thanks,” he mumbled.
“Pussy.” She snatched the money he’d dropped on the bar and walked away.
Why do I come back for this abuse? he asked himself.
He drank half the glass quickly, looking over at Boobs flirting with some lesbian bitch across the bar.
I think she likes me. Just afraid to admit it, he thought.
What other reason could there be? As handsome as he was?
Even Missy Cuthbert wants my dick.
The TV over the bar caught his eye.
“Hey, Boobs!” he called out. “Turn the sound up!”
Boobs tossed him the remote.
“Turn it up yourself, Pussy!”
He caught the remote and pointed his index finger at Boobs with a devilish smile on his face, as if to say: I’m gonna fuck you one of these days, bitch, I swear it!
He hit the remote and the sound came up on a news conference currently in session at Scilly Hall. Mayor Germane was speaking.
“Yes, in answer to your question, William, we have decided it’s time to call in the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”
The camera went to Billy.
“A follow-up question, Mr. Mayor. Why have you waited for five meter maids to die cruel and sadistic deaths before calling in the FBI?”
Germane looked to an embarrassed Chief Ramirez at his side and grimaced. He counted out five on his fingers.
“Well, you’re right, William. It has been five meter maids so far, but we were always under the impression”—another deadly glance at Chief Ramirez—“that we’d apprehend the killer long before this point.”
Another reporter piped in.
“What are the plans for the Succubus funerals?”
“Is Sara Succubus coming from New York?” asked another.
“We’ve heard from Sara Succubus’s publicist that she will be attending the funeral, which will be held in two days.”
There was an increase in the general buzz in the room. With the internationally known personality Sara Succubus attending, this was now a big celebrity event.
“Where will the funeral be held?”
“We were hoping for a church funeral, but because of the media frenzy you people have incited,” Germane was working up that righteous indignation act he did so well when he was in campaign mode, “I guess that’s out of the question.”
“And the interment?”
“There will be a secret interment. As you know, we have not revealed the whereabouts of the funeral plots of the two meter maids that were buried. The others were cremated. But Sammy Succubus and her mother already owned a burial plot, so they will be interred. We won’t reveal this location, either. In order to avoid any possible desecration of the grave by the general public.”
“Any closer to finding us a killer?” Billy spoke up.
“No.”
“Any suspects?”
“Everybody’s a suspect, William. We have to be realistic. How many people do you think hate meter maids?”
And so forth and so on.
A big-chested bleached blonde asked a question.
“Mariana Morningstar of the Australian National News Service, Mayor Germane,” she said in a thick accent.
“Yes?”
“Yes, I can. Armonk Scilly, a previous mayor back in the 1920s, commissioned and paid for the first city hall building, but only on the condition that the municipal building be named after his family, which he traced back to the Eleventh Century and the Scilly Islands off the western cost of Cornwall.”
“Ah,” said Morningstar.
The mayor wagged a finger.
“For all you print reporters, just don’t spell it the way it sounds.”
Bricker finished his Ezra Brooks, smacked his lips and got up.
“See ya later, gorgeous,” he called out to Boobs McCoy.
“Dream on, Bricker!” Boobs yelled back derisively over her shoulder, teasing him with a sly smile.
She wants me, I can tell.
Two days later, Sara Succubus was in town for XYZ’s The Morning Show, covering her own family’s funeral. Bricker rushed to get his Senseo coffee ready so he could watch. He got the machine up and running and poured an Equal into his cup. Then a splash of Half & Half. He toasted a piece of thin-cut Pepperidge Farm whole wheat bread and slathered it with butter and took the toast and the steaming coffee into the living room. He nudged Marilyn Monroe off his spot and settled down, Marilyn offering up a low meow in modest protest.
They’d set up a remote at the Delano, out by the pool bar with the glorious beach in view behind the hastily arranged anchor desk. Bob Blunt, the morning news anchor, shared anchor duties with Sara. You could tell Bob Blunt was a little star-struck by Sara.
“We can’t tell you how sorry we are about your loss, Sara,” Bob intoned, not very sincerely, thought Bricker.
“Well,” Sara said with a sick little giggle, “I do wish if this had to happen, it could’ve happened in the dead of winter, because I love to visit South Beach in the winter.”
“The weather’s still pretty nice, Sara, you have to admit.”
“For May,” she nodded, giving in a little.
“I want to bring in our special correspondent, William Willoughby, who’s been leading our team covering the meter maid murders.”
The Meter Maid Murders Page 5
