by Miami Blues
“What I want to do, first thing tomorrow, is go down to the bank and take out the CD. Then I can start another one some place else. We’ve got a ten-thousand-dollar CD saved, plus another four thousand in our joint NOW account. And I sure don’t want daddy or the Krishnas to get it.”
“Good. We’ll do that first thing. Now that we’re engaged, we’re going to start our platonic marriage. D’you know what that is?”
Susan nodded. “Beth had one, on ‘The Days of Our Lives,’ when she moved in with the lawyer. And I want one too. I’ve been really lonely out here at night. I didn’t like Marty, but even so, I missed him when he moved out to the camp.”
“Why didn’t you like him? He was your brother.”
“Remember, before, when I told you I never went steady? Marty’s why, that’s why. He’s the one that got me pregnant, and I think daddy suspicioned it, too. And then when we came down to Miami and I got the abortion, Marty couldn’t find any work. He met Pablo when he was looking for work at the hotel. So then he made me go to work for Pablo. I don’t like working at the hotel, Junior, I really don’t. That old man from Dayton, Ohio, today was disgusting.”
“You’ve turned your last trick for Pablo. You’re living with me now.”
“You really don’t know Pablo. He smiles and bows and all that, but he’s mean. And he knows where I—where we live, Junior.”
“Don’t worry about Pablo. I’ll take care of him. Do you remember that Bob Dylan song about the lady laying across a brass bed?”
“I don’t remember. Maybe I did. They don’t play much Dylan on the radio anymore.”
“Well, here’s what you do. Go into the bedroom, take off your clothes, put two pillows under your stomach, and lay face down on that big brass bed. I’m gonna have another beer, and then I’ll be right in.”
“You’re gonna do it to me the back way whether I want to or not, aren’t you?”
“Yeah.”
“In that case, I’d better get another San Miguel for you, and some Crisco for me.”
Later, bars of moonlight came through the slanted vertical Levolors and made yellow bars across Freddy’s hairless chest. Susan, in a shorty nightgown, snuggled close to him and used his extended right arm as a pillow. Freddy chuckled deep in his throat and then snorted.
“Remember that haiku the teacher wrote?”
“Not exactly,” Susan said.
“The Miami sun./ Rising in the Everglades./ Burger in a bun. That’s what I was laughing at. Now I know what it means.”
8
There was a middle-aged man sitting in the glass-walled office with Sergeant Bill Henderson when Hoke arrived in the squad room. Hoke checked his mailbox and then signaled his presence to Henderson with a wave of his arm. Henderson beckoned for him to come over. Henderson got to his feet and smiled as Hoke crossed the crowded squad room. Most of Henderson’s front teeth were reinforced with silver inlays, and his smile was a sinister grimace. Hoke and Bill had been working together for almost four years, and Hoke knew that when Henderson smiled, something horrible about human nature had been reconfirmed for his partner.
Hoke cracked open the door. “I’m going down for coffee, Bill. I’ll be right back.”
“I already got you coffee.” Henderson pointed to the capped Styrofoam cup on Hoke’s side of the double desk. “I want you to meet Mr. Waggoner. We’ve been having an interesting little chat here, and I know you’ll want to hear what he’s got to say.”
Hoke shook hands and sat in his chair. “Sergeant Moseley. I’m Sergeant Henderson’s partner.”
“Clyde Waggoner. I’m Martin’s father.” The man from Okeechobee was wearing a white rayon tie with a blue chambray work shirt, and khaki trousers. There was a thin nylon Sears windbreaker folded over his left arm. He had short brown hair with shaved temples, the kind of haircut they call white sidewalls in the armed forces. His skin was sallow, but it was blotchy in places from long exposure to the Florida sun, and there were scars on his nose and cheeks from debrided skin cancers.
“I suppose you came for your son’s effects,” Hoke said, unlocking his desk drawer. “Sorry I’m a little late this morning, but I had to drop off some dry cleaning.”
Mr. Waggoner looked down at his scuffed engineer boots, made a goatlike sound in his throat, and began to cry. The sound was softly muffled, but the tears that came down his blotchy cheeks were genuine. Hoke directed a puzzled look at Henderson, and his partner broadened his brutal smile.
“Just tell Sergeant Moseley the same story you told me, Mr. Waggoner. I could summarize it, but I might leave something out.”
Mr. Waggoner blew his nose on a blue bandanna and stuffed the handkerchief into his left hip pocket. He wiped his cheeks with his fingers.
“I can’t prove nothing, sergeant, as I told Sergeant Henderson here. All I can tell you is what I think happened. I hope I’m wrong, I surely do hope so. My business is bad enough already, and a scandal like this could make it worse. Okeechobee’s a small town, and our moral standards are a lot different up there than they are down here in Miami. You know what they call Miami up in Okeechobee?”
“No, but I don’t suppose it’s complimentary.”
“It ain’t. They call it Sin City, Sergeant Moseley.”
“Are you, perhaps, a man of the cloth?”
“No, sir. Software. I got me a software store in Okeechobee. I sell video games, computers, and rent out TV sets and movies.”
“My father owns a hardware store in Riviera Beach,” Hoke said.
“He’s smarter than me, then. What I had in mind when I opened the store was a computer business for the commercial fishing on the lake. The government sets quotas, you see, and I figured if the fish houses had computers they could always prove exactly how much fish they caught and all that. Plus they’d know when they was falling behind, and so on. Then last year, when the lake went down to nine feet, the government stopped commercial fishing almost altogether. No nets allowed, you see, so all the fish houses’re just about out of business now. Besides, nobody’s buying computers up there because there ain’t no programs written up for lake fishing anyway.”
“So you’re just about out of business, right?”
“Oh, no—I’m doing all right. But I borrowed money to expand, and the interest is hurting me. My movie rental club alone pays my rent each month, but I’m in pretty heavy to the bank, you see. But I ain’t here to talk business. What I was telling Sergeant Henderson here is that I suspect foul play.”
“What kind of foul play?”
“That was no accident that killed Martin. That was murder.”
“If so, it’s the first of a kind.”
“Let him finish,” Henderson said. “There’s more.”
“That’s the best kind,” Mr. Waggoner continued, “the kind that looks like an accident but really ain’t. I’ve seen it on ‘The Rockford Files’ more ’n once, and if it wasn’t for Jim Rockford, a lot of people’d get away with it, too.”
“What makes you think your son’s death wasn’t an accident?”
“I’d really rather not talk about it because it’s so painful to me, as a father, you see. But I’m also a good citizen, and justice, no matter how harsh, must be done. Even to kith and kin …” He started to cry again, softer this time, and reached for his handkerchief.
Hoke took the plastic lid off his coffee and sipped it. It was cold. “When did you get this coffee?”
“I got in a little early today,” Henderson said. “But I didn’t know you’d be a half-hour late.”
Hoke replaced the plastic lid and dropped the cup of coffee into the wastebasket. He lit a cigarette, took a long drag, and butted the cigarette in the ashtray as he allowed the smoke to trickle out through his nose.
“So you think, Mr. Waggoner,” Hoke said, “that this unidentified assailant who broke your son’s middle finger killed him on purpose? Is that right?”
“That’s about the size of it.” Mr. Waggoner blew his nose, ex
amined his handkerchief, and then put it back into his pocket. “I think the man, whosoever he was, was hired to do it. That’s what I think.”
“The chances of killing a man that way are pretty remote, Mr. Waggoner. I doubt if more than one man in a thousand—I don’t know the actual statistics—would die from a trauma to his finger. It would be pretty stupid to hire someone to kill anybody in that manner.”
“You might be right about that. But if a man was hired to injure somebody on purpose, and then that person died because of the injury, wouldn’t that be a murder for hire?”
“A case could be made for that, I suppose. Except for a thousand unidentified passengers a day who don’t like Hare Krishnas, who hated your son enough to hire someone to break his middle finger?”
“That’s what’s so painful to me.” Mr. Waggoner sighed. “I think my daughter hired him.”
Hoke took the morgue identification form out of his notebook, unfolded it, and placed it on the desk. “Susan, the daughter who identified the body? Or do you have another daughter in mind?”
“No. Susan’s the only daughter I got. And Martin was my only son. None of us got along too good, I’ll admit that, and I sent her packing when she got pregnant. But Martin, even though he’s the one that done it to her, was my only son, and she shouldn’t’ve had him killed. Susan’s just like her mother, who was no good either, so I know she talked Martin into doing it to her in the first place.” Mr. Waggoner lowered his voice and his head. “Men are weak. I know that because I’m weak when it comes to women myself. We all are, even you two gentlemen, if you don’t mind my saying so. A woman can make you do anything she wants you to do with that there little hair-pie they’ve got between their legs. I know it, and you know it, too.”
“Let me get this straight,” Hoke said. “Your own son impregnated his sister, your daughter, Susan, and then Susan hired someone to kill him for revenge. Is that right?”
“That’s right. Yes, sir.”
“And Where’s the baby?”
“Susan had her an abortion here in Miami. I gave her eight hundred dollars when I sent her down here to get it. You can check that out easy enough, and Martin went with her, telling me he’d come back. He never did, though.”
“Are you positive Martin was the father?”
“No doubt about that. They was alone in the house all the time, and Martin, he never let her go out with no one else. I didn’t see what was going on at first. I just thought he was protecting her from those other boys up there, the way a big brother’ll look after his little sister. But after they left, I looked around the house some, and I found things. Martin, pretending to be so religious and all—butter beans wouldn’t melt in his mouth—had two French ticklers hid in his old high school Blue Horse notebook way back in the closet. And they was other things, too …” He looked at the toes of his boots and whispered. “Noises in the night… you know the kind. Down deep, I guess I must’ve known what they was up to all along, but I didn’t want to believe it, so I pretended it was something else.
“I don’t fear God or no man. What I fear is that little hair-pie, that’s what I fear. And knowing what I know, and knowing what kind of girl Susie is, a sneaky little girl, I just know she got her revenge on Martin. But as I said, I can’t prove nothing. I had to tell you what I think. The rest is up to you. I just hope you prove I’m wrong.”
“If I type up a statement about your suspicions,” Henderson said, “will you sign it?”
“Well, no. I told you, and that should be enough. I’ll sign for Martin’s effects, though. I know I’ve got to do that.”
“I’m sorry,” Hoke said, “but in view of what you’ve told us, we’re going to hang on to them for a while. At least until we complete the investigation.”
“Including the money? Sergeant Henderson said Martin had more’n two hundred dollars in his wallet.”
“That’s right. The money, too. He might’ve left a will, and in that case the money’ll go into probate.”
“I understand. I guess that’s the price a man pays for doing his duty. How do I get the body?”
“It depends upon when they finish the post-mortem. But you can notify any funeral director to take care of it for you. If you want a cremation, the Neptune Society will do it for you and scatter his ashes at sea.”
“Can’t I get the ashes myself? I’d like to scatter ’em on the lake. Martin always loved the lake as a boy, so that’s where he’d like to be scattered.”
“You can do whatever you like. You don’t, by law, have to have the body embalmed, so don’t let anybody talk you into that, Mr. Waggoner. Thank you for coming in.” Hoke stood up, and so did Mr. Waggoner.
“You’ll let me know, then, how the investigation comes out?”
“No. All our inquiries will be confidential. If the investigation’s negative, it would be foolish to let anyone know we made one in the first place. So you don’t have to worry about any publicity.”
“I may not look it,” Mr. Waggoner said, “but I’m ashamed. I’m deeply ashamed of what I had to tell you. Thank you both for being so patient.”
“I’ll take you to the elevator,” Henderson said. “It’s easy to get turned around in this building.”
Henderson took a glazed doughnut out of his desk drawer, broke it in half, and offered the smaller half to Hoke. Hoke shook his head, and Henderson began to eat the doughnut.
“How’d you like Mr. Waggoner’s little story, Hoke?”
“I found the bit about the hair-pie instructive.”
“Me, too. Although I knew already that I was weak in that regard. You ever been in Okeechobee?”
“Years ago. But not since I left Riviera Beach. My dad and I went fishing for catfish on the lake a few times, but we only went into the town a couple of times. There’s nothing much there, or there wasn’t ten years ago. It’s just an elbow bend on the highway north. I wouldn’t think the town could support a software store, even if Waggoner rents out films for TV. But for all I know, Okeechobee’s probably tripled in size by now, just like every other town in Florida the last few years. If a man likes to fish, it wouldn’t be a bad place to retire.”
“Apparently, there’s a shortage of women. Otherwise, a brother wouldn’t have to screw his own sister.”
“You know I spent some time with the girl, Susan, last night, and there might be some truth to what Waggoner told us.”
“Bullshit. If you hire somebody in Miami to do a beating for you, you get a professional job with bicycle chains. You don’t pay anyone fifty bucks to break a lousy finger.”
“But wouldn’t a girl be chicken-hearted and not want her big brother hurt too badly?”
“Anything’s possible. You want to check it out? We’ve got better things to do, you know.”
“Susan’s boyfriend was with her when I took her down to the morgue. He’s an ex-con, I’m positive, and strong enough to break someone’s arm. He gave me a phony name, Ramon Mendez, and for no good reason that I could see—unless he’s on the run.”
“Did you run a make on the name?”
“On Mendez? We’ve got hundreds of them. Remember when we tried to get a make on José Perez? Twenty-seven with records popped up. These Latins all have four last names and a half-dozen first names, including at least one saint on the list. And they use the ones they want at the time. But this boyfriend isn’t a Latin in the first place. Remember the intelligence seminar we went to last year, the one the agent from Georgia gave? He was with the GBI.”
“I remember that sonofabitch all right. He learned my name in the first class and called on me at every session.”
“Well, Susan’s boyfriend had blue eyes just like his—flat and staring. And he never looked away. I’d planned to lean on him a little, but after we talked for a while I knew I’d be wasting my time. Now, if Susan asked him to, this guy would break her brother’s finger or neck without even thinking about it. He’s done time, I’m sure, and he might even be a fugitive. He says he
’s from California, here to study management at Miami-Dade.”
“That’s possible. People come from all over the world to study at Miami-Dade.”
“Not from California. In California, you can go to college free. So why would a man come three thousand miles to pay out-of-state fees at Miami-Dade?”
“You can go to college free in California?”
“That’s right, right on through a bachelor’s.”
“Why don’t you check him out, then, at Miami-Dade?”
“I will. But I’ll have to find out what his right name is first.” Hoke got up, and pushed his chair into the desk kneehole.
“Is that where you’re going now?”
“No. I’m going down to the cafeteria for some coffee and a doughnut.”
9
Susan made scrambled eggs with green peppers, buttered rye toast, and fried baloney slices for Freddy’s breakfast. After he finished eating, he took his cup of coffee out to the screened porch. The brown, cultivated fields stretched out for several miles, and there were bands of dusty green that faded into a misty, darker green toward the horizon. The country was so incredibly flat he couldn’t get over it. There wasn’t a single mound or a dip or a gully for as far as he could see. And, from the fourth floor, the horizon had to be at least twenty or twenty-five miles away. Susie’s apartment was on the western side of the building and shaded in the morning, but he knew that the sun would bake this side all afternoon.
Inside, with the air conditioning set on seventy-five, the apartment was nice and cool. Out on the porch, where the humid heat was at least eighty-five, the sudden change brought a shock to his skin. But he decided he liked the heat. Freddy didn’t wear any underwear, and his linen slacks stuck to the backs of his legs as he sat in the plastic-webbed porch rocker. Susan, wearing white shorts and a light blue bikini halter, brought out the coffeepot and refilled his cup. Her bare feet were long and narrow, and she looked about thirteen years old.
