“Could be,” Billy offered.
“Nahhh... I still think it’s Smarney Weiner. I’ve gotta find him and follow him around a few days, see if he lives some kind of weird dual life.”
“It’s not Smarney Weiner!” Billy yelled.
“How do you know?”
“Smarney just doesn’t... doesn’t feel right.”
“Well, I gotta sleep on it. I’m taking a nap before I have to follow Cassie Castro around all night.”
“Okay—you get some sleep, I’ll get outta here,” said Billy.
Billy went out into the garden through the French doors, closed his eyes and clenched his fists.
It looked like another long night.
It was 4 A.M., the first night of the New Moon, and Bricker followed Miss September, Cassandra Castro, closely, never letting her get farther than a block or two away.
(Later, he’d actually blame himself for the foul-up this time.)
He’d followed Cassie into the alley behind the Deuce—the very same alley where a previous meter maid murder had occurred. Cassie was on foot walking down Fourteenth Street writing tickets.
Bricker was absolutely certain—absolutely, that the meter maid murderer wouldn’t strike in the very same place he’d struck before.
Something like lightning, Bricker kept telling himself later, when he replayed it all in his mind.
So—since he was certain the meter maid murderer wouldn’t strike the very first night of the New Moon, much less in the same place he’d killed somebody before—and because Cassie had at least thirty to forty minutes of ticket-writing to get through—and because Cassie had brought along her dog, a big Great Dane, to protect her, Bricker slipped into the Deuce for a couple of quick shots of Ezra Brooks.
What Bricker missed, because he was so self-absorbed, was that the meter maid murderer was casually stalking Cassie Castro as she focused on her ticket-writing machine. His best friend Billy had been following Bricker as he followed Cassie Castro, taking care to hide from him (not that this was hard with a doofus like Bricker), but deep in his heart Billy hoped this would be the end of it, the final episode in the long running saga of his emotional collapse.
Surely Bricker would catch him tonight and end this hideous charade that had killed eight meter maids.
But when Billy saw Bricker slide into the Deuce with a casual look over his shoulder (he practically looked at Billy but didn’t see him in the shadows), Billy knew there would be a ninth murder tonight—Miss September was going to die a horrible death.
And it would all be Jake Bricker’s fault.
Cassie had her dog as extra protection, on a long leash, and it moved ahead of her to raise its leg to pee on a fire hydrant.
As the Dane busied himself releasing a torrent of piss onto the hydrant, Billy crept up behind Cassie and bopped her on the head with a blackjack, rendering her semi-conscious.
Then Billy dragged Cassie to the hydrant where the dog waited patiently. He gave the dog a treat and petted it on the head.
“Nice doggie.”
The doggie was nice, not a whimper.
Billy then pulled a dozen industrial sized boxes of 3M duct tape from a plastic bag he carried and proceeded to wrap Cassie to the hydrant. She was coming to as he completed the task of wrapping her whole body with duct tape. He taped over her mouth and her nose so she would suffocate, but left her eyes uncovered so she could watch.
“You’ll never use your filthy mouth again, you bitch!” he shrieked in a shrill kind of Wicked Witch of the West voice.
The dog came out with a half-hearted grumble, not even a growl, but another treat quieted him.
“You pissed on people all your fuckin’ life, you bitch! Now die in it!”
As Billy made his escape, the dog went over to the fast-expiring Cassie Castro, who looked at him longingly, hoping beyond hope that her faithful companion would turn out to be a meter maid’s best friend and somehow rescue her.
Instead, he raised his leg for one final squirt of pee right in her eyes.
About this time Jake Bricker, mellow from knocking back three quick ones, came out of the Deuce and headed down the street to see where Cassie was. He turned the corner just in time to see the dog lower his leg and sit down next to the dead meter maid.
“Oh, what have we here?” Bricker said to himself, thoroughly deflated as he walked up and surveyed the scene. “Billy’s gonna be so pissed.”
He looked over his shoulder. No one.
Then he dashed away from the meter maid to his car a block away. Safely inside, he called Billy right away.
“Billy-Boy, it’s me. Are you sitting down?”
He couldn’t even remember all the vitriol Billy’d sent through the phone line. He’d never heard some of those cuss words. But he knew they were cuss words because of the way Billy was saying them! And just as Billy was peaking, his high dudgeon getting higher than it’d ever been before, Bricker looked out of his window and saw Louie Lewis zip by in his rental car.
Now he felt helpless!
Maybe he’d been right all along! And Lewis was just smarter than the chief, using his own mom as the perfect cover. But there was no time to worry about it now. He had to leave. On the drive home, he knew there was nothing he could do about Louie Lewis. If he went to the chief with this news, the first thing the chief would ask was: “Well, so what the fuck were you doing at the scene of the crime before the murder?”
The next morning, Bricker woke with a start as the alarm clock went off ten inches from his ear.
The alarm wrenched him from the midst of a terrible dream, more like a montage of all the meter maid murders, swirling around in his subconscious for the last few hours while he did the restless toss-‘n-turn.
Looking outside, he saw water drops falling from the palm fronds on the bushes immediately outside his window. He heard a strong wind whooshing through the fruit trees in his yard (planted by his mother when he first bought the place). An occasional mango or avocado hit the ground with a dull thud.
His smile faded at the thought of Billy, who was so upset with him he was actually thinking of letting Bricker bring in Smarney Weiner as their chief suspect.
Bricker hauled himself out of bed, still half asleep, but not too asleep to stop for a few seconds to admire his naked body in the full-length mirror attached to the back of his bedroom door. He smiled at himself. Yes, the dimples definitely help, he thought. He pulled on a pair of Brooks Brothers boxers (a Christmas present from his mother) and went into the living room where he acknowledged the meows coming from Marilyn Monroe, his black alley cat.
He went into the kitchen where he turned on his Senseo machine. It made coffee one cup at a time, using those little pods. (He got them in a four-pack from Amazon.) Very nice and rich. He got a pouch of cat food and fed Marilyn. (She liked the Friskies Ocean Whitefish in Tuna in the morning and in the evenings Fancy Feast’s Turkey Florentine in a Delicate Sauce with Garden Greens, not that Jake Bricker could be said to spoil his cat.)
He pulled a small carton of Half & Half from MacArthur Dairy out of the fridge, tossing in a packet of Equal to sweeten the brew.
He poked his head outside the French doors giving onto the garden and saw his morning copy of The South Beach Mullet Wrapper lying in its plastic bag by the gate. He dashed out, the occasional drop of rain making him shiver like a schoolboy, not a big tough copper, grabbed the paper and ran back into the house, wiping his dirty feet on the floor mat.
His took his coffee and went in to a glass-walled breakfast nook to turn on the morning news, opening The Mullet Wrapper. The paper had gone to press before Cassie Castro’d met her fate.
He knew Billy’d already be at the WHY-TV studio at the crack of dawn, having spent all night at the crime scene with his crew.
After he discovered Cassie, Bricker’d made an anonymous call from a pay phone to 911.
Then he disappeared from the scene, driving back home to wait a few minutes till word got out and h
e could return to the scene looking like he’d just been hustled out of bed.
Bob Blunt, the morning news anchor, was just finishing with the weather girl.
“Thanks for that report, Jill. We’ll all be sure to bring our umbrellas out with us when we go to work this morning.... We have a late-breaking story. The mighty Fortune 500 company, 3M, has issued a statement denouncing the meter maid murderer’s use of a 3M product to kill a meter maid. 3M reports that they know of no previous incident when their tape was used as a murder weapon. William Willoughby, who’s been up all night with the story, has more. William?”
The camera shifted to Billy-Boy standing outside the Deuce.
“That’s right, Bob.” Here he held up a large box of tape. “According to forensic investigators at the medical examiner’s office, the last meter maid murder”—here he looked down at his notes—“Cassandra Castro, was committed with an unusual weapon—duct tape. The victim was knocked on the head, which rendered the six-year veteran of the Miami Beach PMS Force unconscious. She was then wrapped in over thirty-five feet of duct tape, strapped to a fire hydrant her dog Buster had just urinated on. The medical examiner is not yet sure if Cassandra died of asphyxiation, from shock, or even, they say, possibly from drowning in her Great Dane’s pee. Back to you, Bob.”
“Tell us more about the meter maid murderer’s worldwide following, William.”
“That’s right, Bob. The serial killer has attracted a worldwide audience that follows his every move—or every murder. Not only is the meter maid murderer the subject of intensive news coverage around the globe, especially after Sara Succubus’s sister Sammy Succubus was killed, but he’s spawned his very own web site. The details of every aspect of all the meter maid murders are carried on the Internet, with chat rooms so you can post your theories and add your input... criminal science discussions, FBI-sponsored forums where motives are discussed, you name it. If you’re interested in checking up on any of this, the address is on your screen: www.metermaidmurders.com. There’s also a Facebook page with over twenty million fans. Even Oprah has only a million. Back to you, Bob.”
“It sure doesn’t look like the word ‘capture’ is anywhere in the meter maid murderer’s immediate future, does it?”
Bricker felt like Billy was looking right at him through the TV screen when he said, with no attempt to hide his bitterness:
“No, Bob, it certainly doesn’t look like it.”
20 – Woeful Wimpy
A few days later, Bricker repeated what had now become a pretty solid routine as he followed Missy and Slimy from the PMS HQ in the bogus Security Stinx armored car, over the Causeway, up to Twenty-ninth Street where they stopped at Enriqueta’s for Cuban sandwiches and coffee, over to the warehouse by the empty lot that had been site of Bobby Maduro Stadium, and then back again.
The following week, Bricker patiently smoked a panatela and waited by PMS HQ for the truck to show up. But it didn’t. After an hour, he called in to Alice.
“Can you talk?”
“For a sec. There’s auditors in from Tallahassee looking over our books with Holly and the major.”
“No big deal. Later at my house, yes?”
“Oh, very much yes,” she said.
So it was obvious: the operation had been suspended this week while the state auditors were in town.
When he researched how long the theft had been going on, Bricker quickly realized there had to be two or three million bucks in that warehouse, even if the fortune was all nickels and dimes. So what if they missed a week here and there? The state auditors were just about as stupid and clueless as the city auditors. Let ‘em look at the books. Bunstable was cooking the books anyway. They wouldn’t find anything.
But Bricker wondered where Slimy was hanging. He listened to the radio, and checked the TWERP dispatcher, but there was never a call that involved Slimy.
He drove down Alton Road to a little strip mall with a parking lot directly across the street from one of the dozen or so Starbucks coffeehouses on South Beach. If anybody knew where Slimy was, Basilio would know.
Bricker pulled up behind Basilio’s parked car and tooted his horn. Basilio got out and came back to Bricker and leaned in on Bricker’s window.
“How’s business, Basilio?”
“We had a very good morning. Over fifteen cars and even a Maserati.” Basilio raised his eyebrows for emphasis.
“I bet the guy was furious.”
Unless you’re a racecar driver, if you own a Maserati or a Lamborghini, chances are you think you’re hot shit, even if you’re not (and you’re probably not). These people tend to get mad easily.
“El tipo was fuckin’ crazy, man. I sat here and laughed my fuckin’ ass off, Bro.”
Basilio was about seventeen or eighteen. His job was to sit in his car and watch the strip mall across the street for people who parked “just for a minute” to go to Starbucks.
The illegal parker was under the mistaken impression that it would take longer for the owner of the strip mall or store to call TWERP and for TWERP to dispatch a truck than it would take for a barista to make a cup of coffee.
Maybe in Cleveland.
But this was South Beach. Time to get a grip on reality.
What they didn’t know when they parked in the strip mall was that a TWERP tow truck was parked literally around the corner waiting for Basilio’s call.
What they also didn’t know was that the mall owner had made a deal with TWERP (or some of TWERP’s drivers) so that the owner didn’t have to make the call. The tow truck drivers get the cars, get paid by the poor suckers for the tow, and then split the proceeds of the tow with the mall or store owner who’s set the deal up.
In fact, as Bricker noted, in the four-store mall, there was a pizza joint and a drycleaner’s. The other two stores were empty. The mall wasn’t in business to sell pizza. It was in business to tow cars.
“Hey, Basilio, here’s a quarter.”
“Oye. Pa’que?”
“Your meter’s expired. I don’t want you to get towed.”
Basilio laughed.
“Ha!”
“You seen Slimy?”
“Naw. Hoy no.”
“This is his gig, yeah?”
“Yeah, but he got the day off. Something he had to do. I can call his cell...”
“Nope, it’s not important. I’ll catch him later.”
“Okay, man.”
“Yo, Basilio, look,” Bricker nodded his head toward the little strip mall across the street. A young woman (she had that “lady lawyer” look) in high heels and a business suit parked her Lexus convertible in the lot and crossed the side street to Starbucks, jabbering away on her cell phone. (She wouldn’t know what hit her when she came out of Starbucks in five minutes.)
Basilio raced back to his car, grabbed up his cell phone and made the call, saying “Get your ass over here now,” but in rapid Spanish.
Just as the lady lawyer entered Starbucks, before the door was even closed, a TWERP truck pulled around the corner and was backing up to the Lexus. In less than a minute, her car was gone.
And all before she could get the words “triple grande soy latte” out of her very pretty Botoxed mouth.
Bricker left Basilio to his work, and Bricker supposed it was a kind of work. When he was growing up, he thought of tow trucks as something useful for pulling vehicles out of ditches, towing away cars that had been in accidents, things like that. Useful things.
But when he joined the police department, the scales fell from his eyes and he saw things differently. Tow trucks could be used to generate income, to make a bundle of money. Only problem with that, what they did to get the money was basically rotten to the core. They had gamed the system, worked it until it stank to high heaven.
The created income, yes, but they didn’t do anything useful along the way.
They just fucked people.
And the city let ‘em do it. (In fact, the city got an “administrative fee” for e
very tow.)
Anyway, Bricker forgot all about Slimy Salazar. He wasn’t quite sure how to handle the situation with Slimy, Missy, the major and the warehouse full of money. He wanted to tell Billy-Boy about it, see what he thought Bricker ought to do, but Billy-Boy wasn’t speaking to him very much these days. And when he did, he yelled. He knew he should go to Chief Ramirez and spill the beans, but he wanted to handle the bust himself so he got all the credit. The way he’d bungled the meter maid murders made him think he’d need another high profile crime to solve if he couldn’t capture the murderer, so he was, in the back of his mind, kind of “saving” the warehouse full of money for that fast-approaching rainy day when he needed to look good to the chief.
Now, he was focused more than ever on protecting PMS Second Class Wimpy Wimpole, Miss October. And if Bricker knew his meter maids, and she kept to her regular schedule, she’d be drinking coffee at the outside window at David’s Café off Lincoln Road.
Which is exactly where Wimpy was, with her best friend (if meter maids can be said to have any real friends), Missy Cuthbert.
“It’s been a whole month since Cassie died, you know?”
“I know,” said Missy, dragging on a Marlboro Red and sipping nonchalantly from her café con leche. “So what?”
“I’m missin’ her, that’s all.”
“Well, quit dwelling on it. You won’t be able to do your job.”
“Maria, let me have one of those empanadas.”
“Chicken or beef, girl?”
“Chicken.”
The familiar sound of a Cushman putt-putt-putting at high speed made them turn their heads just in time to see Major Bunstable driving by. She was standing at the roll bar as her chauffeur drove ahead. She saw them and cried out:
“Keep up the good work, girls! America needs you!”
Missy and Wimpy saluted the major with their Styrofoam coffee cups.
“Where you workin’ today?”
“Down by the marina. I’m lucky I didn’t pull any night shifts. That’s usually when the killer strikes.”
The Meter Maid Murders Page 17
