The Meter Maid Murders

by Andrew Delaplaine

  “And what brings you to PMS HQ, Detective Bricker?” Bunstable asked imperiously.

  The garage door went up, revealing an armored vehicle from Security Stinx Armored Trucking Corp. Stinx came three times a week to take coins to the bank.

  “Chief thought it would be a good idea for someone to ride with the Security Stinx truck since the coin thefts started.”

  “Tell the chief I’ve got it completely under control. I’m sending one of my best, PMS First Class Melissa Cuthbert, to ride with the truck to make sure it gets to the bank.”

  Bricker looked at Missy and smiled.

  “Well, that sounds like a brilliant idea, Major.”

  “Of course it is, Detective. I thought of it.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “But thank the chief anyway. That will be all.”

  By now the flatbed dollies with a ton or more of coins had been wheeled into the Security Stinx truck. As Holly Hernandez and her people moved out of the truck, Missy ducked into the rear of the truck and turned around to face Bricker.

  “Have a safe and productive trip, Melissa!” said Bunstable, who promptly turned and marched away.

  “See-ya ‘round, big guy,” Missy purred.

  Missy stood there in the truck smiling at Bricker and working her eyebrows again in a very unnerving manner as Holly’s people from the Counting Room closed the thick doors of the truck with a hard clang.

  Just before they slammed shut, however, Bricker could have sworn he saw Slimy Salazar glance into the back of the truck from the driver’s seat.

  Then, suddenly, there was only Missy’s smiling mug staring at him through the little square bulletproof window in one of the back doors.

  The truck roared to life, and was gone.

  16 – Coins Galore

  Bricker stood there blinking as Holly Hernandez pushed the button that lowered the steel doors on the loading dock, sealing off PMS HQ from the outside world.

  Maybe the sun was in his eyes. How could that have been Slimy? And what was he doing driving a Security Stinx truck? He worked exclusively for TWERP Towing. Didn’t he?

  “You okay, Brick?” asked Holly Hernandez.

  “Yeah, Holly. Fine.”

  Out in the sunshine, Bricker crawled into his Crown Vicky and thought a minute about Slimy and the Stinx truck. PMS HQ was right next door to TWERP Towing. It was just a matter of a minute to run into TWERP to make an inquiry.

  What the hell are you thinking? Get back to work!

  Bricker pushed the thought of Missy and Slimy to the back of his already overcrowded brain, and kept up his routine but dogged surveillance of Miss August.

  Fatso Farhat lived in a section of Miami called the Fashion District within the Wynwood area across the Venetian Causeway and a few blocks west of Biscayne Boulevard. It was an old warehouse district, with huge, boxy, graceless buildings that lately had become fashionable as real estate speculators bought up the warehouses, painted them bright colors and converted them into huge art galleries and artists’ loft-style spaces in an effort to pump up the real estate prices to the level that would then allow them to evict the artists and sell the properties for outlandish profits. (In fact, one such speculator in the Design District just to the north of the Fashion District took art from the artists when they fell behind in their rent and became in several years’ time the pre-eminent art collector in Miami. Go figure.)

  These new speculators in the Fashion District were trying to copycat that developer’s success in the Design District, but in Bricker’s view it was still a dumpy part of town that would always be dumpy, depressed, ridden with crime, and, well ... boring. And the minute the developers could get out with the cash and the colorful paint jobs on their buildings faded in the brutal summer sun, they’d pull the old rug out from under the artists and leave them to the obscurity they so richly deserved. (Bricker’d been to some of these “art weekends” over in Wynwood, and the crap these people were passing off as art was remarkable—remarkably bad.)

  A few days later Bricker woke after sleeping late, and rushed to get ready for the day ahead.

  As he went outside and got into his Crown Victoria, a warm, soft summer rain began to drift down from a barely cloudy sky. A few streets away, the sun was shining brilliantly. Only in Florida, he thought. He listened to the rain gently pitter-patter on the car, and gazed out as a huge rainbow filled the sky where the sun was shining. Beautiful. The gentle rain eased up and stopped and he rolled down his window to light up a Montecristo.

  He was down to his last few smokes, so he whipped out his cell phone and called his cigar smuggler, Guillermo Garza.

  “Hey, Willie—it’s Bricker.”

  “Ah, Bricker. Don’ tell me you need more Joyitas!”

  “I’m not calling to discuss the weather, Guillermo. I’ll be down in an hour.”

  “But I no have no more Joyitas, my friend.”

  “You’ll have them by the time I get down there.”

  There was the usual groan from Garza as Bricker hung up.

  He got the car going and headed across the MacArthur Causeway, taking a left at the Arsht Center for the Performing Arts. He kept repeating the name over and over in his head. Arsht. Arsht. Arsht. Hard to get that last “T” sound. They should have changed the name to Arshat or Arshot or Arshut or Arshet, something you could pronounce.

  Bricker made his way to a ramshackle little ferretería (hardware store) on Calle Ocho at Thirty-sixth Avenue in Little Havana and parked the car. He went into the little shop and confronted Guillermo Garza, who was already shaking his head.

  “Can’ you smoke some-sing else but Joyitas, amigo? Try another Montecristo, not jus’ thees one.”

  “I’ve made it very clear, Guillermo, that I like the small panatela, the Laguito No. 3. In other words, the Joyita.”

  Laguito No. 3 was the Cuban factory where they made the four and a half inch cigar, much shorter than most Montecristos.

  And, in the U.S., highly illegal.

  Bricker always took the paper collar off the cigar before he smoked it so it couldn’t be identified.

  He’d busted Guillermo and a couple of his cousins making a drop of their illegal cigars to a client in the smoking room of the National Hotel down on Collins Avenue. While he was doing undercover work, he got to smoke a few really superior Cuban cigars and developed a serious taste for these little Joyitas. He would hang out in the cozy little smoking room off the main lobby and soon Guillermo came to trust him, so when he got busted, Bricker made him a deal. He wouldn’t bust him if Guillermo would supply him with two boxes of Joyitas a month. Of course, Guillermo was wildly happy with this arrangement at the time, but as one year turned into two, he became increasingly unhappy with the deal. So much so that Bricker’d been forced to remind Guillermo that he was still making enormous profits from smuggling thousands of other cigars in from Cuba, and Bricker’s commission was a small price to pay for the lucrative trade he and his cousins enjoyed.

  He walked out with the two boxes.

  “See you next month, Guillermo.”

  On his way back to South Beach, Bricker crossed the MacArthur Causeway and headed up Washington Avenue to the station house. He saw the familiar Security Stinx truck barreling down the street in the opposite direction, and as Bricker passed the truck, he casually looked up and saw Slimy Salazar in the driver’s seat.

  This is too much of a coincidence, he thought. When he got to the next intersection, he did an illegal U-turn and followed the Stinx truck to the Chase Bank branch where he knew the city kept its parking department accounts.

  Problem was, the Stinx truck did not stop at the Chase branch, but kept on going. Maybe it was the wrong truck, Bricker thought. This was the right day for the coins to be picked up from Holly Hernandez and her crew at PMS HQ, but maybe this wasn’t the right truck.

  But the thing that most intrigued him about the Stinx truck was that Slimy Salazar was driving it.

  Bricker decided not to
think about it anymore, and simply to follow the truck. He followed it over the MacArthur Causeway where it took a right on Biscayne Boulevard and headed north. It took a left on Twentieth-ninth Street and pulled in at Enriqueta’s, a little sandwich shop and cafeteria at Twenty-ninth and Northeast Second Avenue. Bricker pulled up across the street and watched as Slimy Salazar hopped out of the driver’s cab and went to the open-air counter to order a couple of coffees and two Cuban sandwiches.

  He went to the back of the truck and banged on the door. It opened and Bricker saw Missy Cuthbert take one of the sandwiches and a cup of coffee.

  Slimy got back into the driver’s seat and headed west on Twenty-ninth till he got to Northwest Seventh Avenue. Here he turned south and went down to Northwest Twenty-fourth Street where he pulled up to a garage door in an old warehouse next to an empty lot that used to be home to the old Bobby Maduro Stadium where once upon a time Bricker had seen the Orioles play during spring training.

  Salazar got out of the Stinx truck, opened the garage door and drove the truck inside the warehouse, getting out to close the door behind him.

  Well, well, well! thought Bricker. He didn’t need someone to tell him that something fishy was going on. Here, right under the noses of Major Bunstable and the group of detectives trying to figure out where one-third of the city’s coins were going each week, Missy and Slimy were stealing the coins and hiding them in a warehouse in a dumpy, ravaged part of town.

  Bricker looked around. The area was a total wasteland. He could see no one on the streets in any direction. Just a bunch of worn down warehouses, most of them abandoned, like most of Miami proper, as developers pushed further and further west into the Everglades. Bricker often thought of Miami as a poor little whore who’d been worked over by pimps till all the juice was gone; then dumped and left behind for the greener pastures (or soon to be filled-in swamps) of the ´Glades.

  So it worked like this, Bricker figured: a real Security Stinx truck showed up twice a week to take the coins to the Chase Bank, while on the third trip, this phantom Stinx truck was used to spirit away a third of the city’s take.

  This meant that Major Bunstable was in on the plot. Bricker’d been there that day when she oversaw Missy getting into the truck. So there was the major, Missy, Slimy and how many others? Maybe Holly Hernandez was in on it, too.

  Bricker smiled. He was on to something that was second only to the meter maid murders in importance. If he could solve both mysteries, it would be a huge Wow! for his career.

  He waited about forty-five minutes and then saw Slimy walk out of a door in the side of the building. He looked up and down the side streets, just to make sure the coast was clear. Then he disappeared back inside the warehouse. A moment later, Bricker heard the clinkety-clank as the garage door rattled opened. There was a roar and out charged Slimy’s TWERP Towing truck with Missy riding shotgun. Slimy got out and secured the garage door, then hopped back into his truck. Bricker could hear Missy’s pealing laughter fade as they drove away.

  Bricker drove over to the warehouse and, following Slimy’s lead, looked quickly up and down the streets. No one. He got out and circled the warehouse, seeing where the windows and doors were. All the windows had been bricked up with cinder blocks, leaving as the only entrances the side door, which was heavily bolted, and the front garage door, secured with no less than three locks at the bottom. But Bricker didn’t need to get inside. He knew what was there, by God: a shitload of nickels, dimes and quarters.

  Bricker picked up the trail of Fatty Farhat the next day.

  Farhat lived with her brother Ahmed in a little duplex over in Miami on Northwest Twenty-fifth Street and Third Avenue.

  Ahmed was as skinny and weaselly as Fatiwa was fat and gross. When Ahmed was away working as the assistant manager of the Checkers Burger joint (“You Gotta Eat!”) over on Sixteenth Street and Biscayne, Bricker’d broken into the house to have a look around, to familiarize himself with the layout in the event he apprehended the meter maid murderer within the house itself.

  He’d discovered one of Fatso’s little secrets: she had a Magic Fingers Vibrating Bed, and a vibrator called the Eroscillator. Under the bed he found a box full of what they called Flabbergasmic attachments. The most perplexing was the “French Legionnaire’s Moustache,” which was a head that snapped onto the Eroscillator, but had a type of mustache that looked like it belonged on Inspector Clouseau. Another one was the Several Pearls of the Orient, a series of ball-shaped spheres shoved either up a pussy or up an ass (Bricker wasn’t quite sure which) and switched on to create whatever sensation it was designed to create. It made Bricker shudder just to think about it. He certainly didn’t want to tell Alice about the Eroscillator. Might give her some ideas.

  As the week of the New Moon began, Bricker could be found, day and night, across the street from Fatso’s house, two doors down from a wig shop that boasted “100% Human Hair.”

  It was on the morning of the third day into the New Moon that Fatso deviated from her posted schedule and putt-putt-putted her Cushman scooter across the Venetian Causeway. Bricker’d noticed Fatso’d had a good run writing tickets all morning, and was well ahead of her quota (even though the city said there was no quota) so she must have thought she could take a little time off.

  Bricker was pissed off. He was supposed to meet Alice on her lunch hour down at South Pointe Park (when he assumed Fatso would be back at PMS HQ, safe and sound, at least for an hour or so).

  He followed Fatso to the Checkers drive-through on Biscayne Boulevard and realized when he followed her in and another car came up behind him that he’d have to order something. He was two cars behind the Cushman, and saw her take a bag full of Buffalo Wings from Ahmed, who was working the window. He pulled up and ordered a Diet Coke. Ahmed blindly filled the order, never even looking Bricker in the face.

  Fatso putt-putt-putted her way up Biscayne and then turned left, obviously heading home.

  Maybe she forgot something this morning, thought Bricker.

  He pulled up under a shady Schefflera tree across the street from Fatso’s house just as the big old thing waddled up the three steps to the little porch fronting the door. It was a blazing August day, so Bricker’s a/c was blowing away, cranking out cooool, cooool air.

  When Fatso didn’t come out fifteen minutes later, Bricker cut the engine and moseyed across the empty street and down the lushly overgrown alley behind the house. There was no one to be seen. As he approached the rear of the house, he heard Fatso’s voice through a half-open window in the bedroom.

  But what he heard were not words, but groans.

  Groans of ... ecstasy!

  Bricker rolled his eyes and could just picture Fatso lying on her bed like a big fat pig laid out for a lechon asado (where the Cubans roasted a big pig in a pit in the ground for ten hours), writhing around in Flabbergasmic delirium.

  In fact, he wondered if what was happening on that bed this very instant could really be as horrid as the images now coursing through his mind. He decided they couldn’t be, and pulled a rock over and stepped up to the bedroom window to peek inside.

  As his head came over the windowsill, Bricker looked in and saw the poor thing rolling around the bed with the Eroscillator protruding dramatically from the zipper of Fatso’s PMS uniform.

  Bricker turned his head slightly in disgust, afraid he was going to vomit, but in so doing, his eye was drawn to the partly closed door leading out to the hallway where—he froze—he saw two black-gloved hands appear in the doorway. They held a device that looked to Bricker’s untrained eye like a primitive detonator. One finger pushed a red button and Bricker’s eyes automatically turned back to the jerking and twisting Fatso, whose body suddenly erupted in a violent spasm as she seemed to jump off the bed.

  A scream came from the bitch as her body began to smoke. Her eyes bulged and literally popped out of her fat face until only black blood and gore remained. Her hair spiked out in a flash and began burning as a crackling so
und filled the air, replacing her faded screams.

  Bricker’s jaw dropped. The extremities of Fatso’s body were smoking, every toe and finger. The burning flesh created an acrid odor that filled the air. Bricker wrinkled his nose.

  But then his eye flashed back to the door where he saw the black-gloved hands drop the detonator and disappear into the hallway.

  Aha! he thought, jumping off the rock and running around to the front of the house. I got the son of a bitch!

  He knew the killer wouldn’t know he was looking through the window at the moment of attack, so all he had to do was run around to the front and grab him when he came through the door. He drew his weapon, held his breath.

  Nothing.

  Ten seconds, fifteen, twenty—he couldn’t stand it anymore.

  He dashed up the steps, opened the door and moved into the house.

  Silence.

  He smelled Fatso’s fat burning as the flesh melted off her body, the electrical charge still pulsating through her gross, disgusting body, buried deep in her vagina.

  Bricker forced himself to banish the images in his mind, worked his way methodically through the house, and once he found his way into the kitchen, saw the back door open wide, swinging lazily in a gentle breeze.

  Shit!

  Enough is enough, he thought. He should’ve brought in Smarney Weiner before this, not listened to Billy, and ended this charade.

  Now Bricker smelled real smoke. The sparks coming from Miss August’s hair, toes and fingers surely had to ignite the bedclothes. Soon the whole house would go up. Bricker made his way toward the front door, saw a few people walking by in the street, and decided the meter maid murderer had been right about using the back door, so he holstered his Glock and bolted like an impala into the alley out back.

  17 – Bricker’s Busy Day

  Bricker called Billy the minute he could get away from the scene, but his calls went to voice mail.