Charles Willeford_Hoke Moseley 01

by Miami Blues

  “All right, but I’m going to talk to Wilson, and he’ll have something to say to you about this.”

  “I’m sure he will. Tell him if he wants to talk to me, we can meet in the Internal Affairs Office. Tell him that.”

  “You didn’t have to hit me, either.”

  “I wanted to get your attention, and I thought you might have a knife. Good-bye, Pablo.”

  Pablo looked as if he might have something more to say, but he turned and left the conference room. He didn’t close the door behind him.

  He’ll send the $250 tonight, Freddy thought, but after his talk with Wilson, whoever that is, he’ll probably discontinue the next payment. But maybe not. Sergeant Wilson would worry about those two magic words Internal Affairs. Even straight cops were frightened by the investigators in Internal Affairs. At any rate, a confused Pablo Lhosa wouldn’t come looking for Susan. As time passed, old Pablo would try to forget that he had ever known her.

  The old lady, smoking an aromatic Tijuana Small, was still waiting for Freddy when he came out of the hotel. The meter was ticking away.

  “Turn off the meter now,” Freddy said, as he got into the back seat. “It reminds me of the passage of time. I’ll give you another hundred bucks, and you can give me a tourist’s grand tour of Miami Beach. And then, when you get to Bal Harbour, you can drop me at a real estate office.”

  “I’ve got nothing better to do,” the old lady said.

  When Freddy handed her the money she lifted her Mercury Morris T-shirt, with the number 22 on the back, and stuffed the bills into her brassiere.

  16

  The work on Hoke’s mouth, as planned by Doctors Rubin and Goldstein, did not pan out as well as they had hoped. Hoke’s new teeth were almost fragile compared with his old Dolphin choppers; his jaw wouldn’t hold a set of heavier teeth. After the jaw healed, and it healed remarkably fast, the restraints were removed and a pan holding evil-tasting pink plaster was jammed into Hoke’s mouth. Impressions were made, and twenty-three days after the assault, Hoke had a full set of slightly yellow upper and lower dentures. Hoke had wanted whiter teeth, but Dr. Rubin had told him that whiter teeth would look false, and that the yellow ones were more natural for his age.

  Nevertheless, when Hoke forced himself to take a long look at his new visage, the teeth looked phony, and he was alarmed by his overall appearance.

  Hoke had lost weight on the liquid diet and was down to 158 pounds. The last time he had weighed 158 pounds he had been a junior in high school. He was only forty-two, but with his sunken cheeks and gray beard he thought he looked closer to sixty. The crinkly sun-wrinkles around his eyes were deeper, and the lines from the corners of his nose to the edge of his lips looked as if they had been etched there with a power tool. His habitually dour expression underwent a startling transformation when he smiled: the yellow teeth gave him a sinister appearance.

  But Hoke had no reason to smile.

  The departmental insurance had covered 80 percent of his hospitalization and a good portion of his dental and surgical fees, but Hoke still owed the hospital and the two doctors more than $10,000. Except for the one night when he had shared the four-bed ward with the teenager, he had had the ward to himself. As a consequence, the hospital had charged him for a private room, except for that one night. On that night, it was charged as a semiprivate room. Hoke’s insurance didn’t cover a private room, so the “private” room meant an extra $10 a day on his bill. Hoke protested the charge to no avail. When he left the hospital, the nurses packed his bedpan and enema equipment, telling him that he had paid for them and was entitled to take them along.

  Before leaving the hospital with Bill Henderson, who had driven over to pick him up, Hoke had a talk with the priest-counselor who wanted to work out some kind of a reasonable monthly payment plan. The talk had ended with both of them angry because Hoke insisted that he couldn’t possibly pay more than $25 a month on the enormous bill.

  Henderson drove Hoke straight to the Eldorado so he could get his car. The police radio was missing, and so was the battery.

  “The department’ll put in a new radio, Hoke,” Henderson said, “on the strength of a Lost and Damaged Report, but they sure as hell won’t get you a new battery.”

  “There goes another fifty bucks.”

  “What the hell? You’ve got the hundred and eighteen bucks the guy didn’t find, or didn’t want, on top of your dresser, and two paychecks waiting for you in Captain Brownley’s office.”

  “One of those checks goes to my ex-wife,” Hoke reminded him. “But what I can’t figure out is that money you found in my room. I’ll swear that I had less than twenty bucks when I got home. Otherwise I’d’ve given part of the hundred to Irish Mike to bring down my tab.”

  “Maybe the guy felt sorry for you. He took your wallet, so he had to take the money out to leave it on your dresser.”

  “Guys like that don’t feel sorry for anyone. Let’s go in and talk to Mr. Bennett. And Bill, I really don’t want to go home with you. I appreciate your offer, but I’m too much of a loner to put up with Marie and your kids. I want to be alone for the next couple of weeks.”

  “I thought you might feel that way, so I talked to Mr. Bennett myself. In fact, I won’t go inside with you, because Bennett and me—well—we had some words. I got on his ass about the lousy room he had you in, so finally he agreed to give you a small suite on the second floor. Suite two-oh-seven. The old lady who had it for eleven years died.”

  “Mrs. Schultz died?”

  “I think that was her name. Anyway, she had some nice things, and he’s left them there and cleaned up the place. You were missed around here while you were in the hospital. The old people were scared shitless when you were attacked. So I guess your Mr. Bennett finally realized that a free security officer was worth two rooms instead of one.”

  “I guess you knew all along I wouldn’t move in on you and Marie?”

  “I had a hunch. The main thing was to give you a Miami address, so be sure to use my address on your correspondence. Anyway, I brought all your stuff with me in the trunk of the car, just in case you wanted to stay here.”

  “Come on in, Bill. You don’t have to be worried about Bennett.”

  Eddie Cohen, the old man who was both night and day desk clerk when he wasn’t doing something else, was happy to see Hoke. Eddie rubbed his stubbled chin and pointed to Hoke’s gray beard.

  “You look like Dr. Freud, Sergeant Moseley.”

  They shook hands. “Before or after the prosthesis?”

  “Before and after. You lost yourself a little weight.”

  “Twenty-seven pounds.” Hoke smiled.

  “Your new teeth are beautiful! Simply beautiful!”

  “Thanks. You know Sergeant Henderson?”

  “Oh, yes. We talked the other day. Mr. Bennett said to say welcome back for him. He’s up in Palm Beach for the weekend. D’you know about your new suite?”

  “Sergeant Henderson just told me.”

  Eddie shook his head. “Mrs. Schultz went quietly in her sleep. She watched ‘Magnum P.I.’ in the lobby, went on up to bed, and Mrs. Feeny found her the next morning.”

  “She was the expert on ‘General Hospital’ in the TV Club, wasn’t she?”

  “Right. And ‘Dallas,’ too.”

  “My stuff’s out in Sergeant Henderson’s car. Some sonofabitch stole my radio and battery while I was—”

  “No.” Cohen shook his head. “Just your radio. I saw the radio was missing on my morning check outside, so I had Gutierrez take out your battery and put it in Mr. Bennett’s office. So you’ve still got your battery. You see,” he turned to Henderson, “when they built the Eldorado back in ’twenty-nine, people used to come down here by rail and ship. So there weren’t enough cars around then to build parking garages the way they do now.

  “Oh, yes, I’ve also got some money for you.”

  Eddie Cohen went into the office and returned with two manila envelopes. The flaps were s
ealed with Scotch tape.

  “I opened these when they was delivered, and there was exactly two hundred and fifty dollars in each envelope. I told Mr. Bennett, of course, and we kept the money locked up in the safe. Maybe I shouldn’t’ve opened them”—Eddie shrugged—“but I thought it might be something important.”

  “That’s okay, Eddie,” Hoke said. SGT. MOSLEY was printed in capitals with a black felt-tipped pen on each envelope. “Who brought the envelopes?”

  “Some Cuban kid on a mini-bike. Both times. He just said to put the envelopes in the safe for Sergeant Moseley. That’s all I know. I didn’t have to sign a receipt or nothing.”

  Hoke counted the money on the desk. The bills were all used tens, fives, and singles.

  “What’s going on, Hoke?” Henderson asked.

  “I haven’t got a clue. Let’s walk over to Irish Mike’s and have a drink.”

  “That’s a lot of dough not to know anything about it—”

  “I know. Let’s talk about it at Irish Mike’s. While we’re gone, Eddie can get my stuff out of your car. Okay, Eddie?”

  “Sure. Go ahead. Gutierrez is around here someplace. He’ll take it up for you.”

  “You said you felt a little weak before,” Henderson said. “Can you walk two blocks in the sun?”

  “I need to walk off a little adrenaline.”

  They found seats at the bar in Irish Mike’s. Mike shook hands with Hoke, and frowned. “That beard looks terrible, sergeant.”

  “The doc said to leave it on for a couple of weeks.”

  Hoke took one of the Manila envelopes out of his leisure jacket pocket and counted out $100 on the bar. He pushed the money across to Irish Mike. “Take care of my tab, and leave what’s over as a credit.”

  “Your credit’s always good here, sergeant. You know that. I’ll just check your tab and give you back the change.”

  “No. Leave it. I want to see what it feels like to have a credit for a change. Early Times. Straight up. Water back.”

  “Similar,” Henderson said.

  Mike served their drinks and retreated to the other end of the bar to sell a twenty-five-cent punch on his punchboard to a white-bearded old man.

  “D’you think it’s a good idea to be paying off old debts with money you don’t know where it came from, Hoke? Or do you?”

  “Do I, what?”

  “Know where the money came from. That’s a lot of money. You aren’t into something you haven’t told me about, are you?”

  “I don’t know where it came from, and I don’t care. Maybe you guys in the division took up a collection for me?”

  “That’ll be the fucking day. First you find an extra hundred on your dresser you don’t know about, and then you get a couple of two-fifty payoffs in anonymous brown envelopes. It must’ve come from the guy who clobbered you.”

  “I hope so. But it’s no payoff, Bill. Maybe the bastard feels guilty. If so, it’s because he assaulted the wrong man. I’ve gone over every case I could think of in the last ten years. Lying in the hospital, I’ve had plenty of time to think, and I couldn’t think of anyone who’d lay for me like that. There’re a couple of guys who might’ve been happy to kill me, but that’s what they would’ve done. A beating like the one I got wouldn’t’ve been enough.”

  “Even so, Hoke, if it was me, I’d be damned leery of spending any of that dough till I found out where it came from.”

  “Fuck where it came from. I need it, and I can use it. I’ll be in Monday to pick up my paychecks, but Captain Brownley said to take two weeks’ sick leave before coming back to duty. And that’s what I’m going to do. How’s your new partner Lopez working out?”

  “Lopez is a Cuban, for Christ’s sake. He saw The French Connection, so now he wears his gun in an ankle holster the way Popeye did in the movie.”

  “No shit?” Hoke bared his yellow teeth in a smile.

  “God’s truth. Let’s have the other half.” Henderson signaled to Irish Mike for two more, and took out his wallet.

  “Put your money away,” Hoke said. “I’ve got a credit going here.”

  Gutierrez had put all of Hoke’s clothing away neatly by the time Hoke returned to his new suite. It was a small suite, all right, even with the sitting room, and it looked even smaller because the late Mrs. Schultz had crammed a great many purchases from garage sales into the sitting room during her eleven years of residence. There was a comfortable Victorian armchair stuffed with horsehair, where Hoke could sit and watch his little Sony, and there was a handsome rolltop desk with a matching swivel chair, flush against the wall. Hoke put his files and papers into the desk drawers, happy to have a desk in his room. In his tiny room on the eighth floor, he had had to unfold a bridge table that he kept under the bed, when he wanted to eat or to do some paperwork at home. The brass bed in the bedroom was full-size, too, which meant that he could bring a woman to his room and not be embarrassed.

  Hoke took out his dentures, which irritated his gums, and put them to soak in a plastic glass with some Polident. Dr. Rubin had said it would take a little time to get used to them and to note the rough spots, if any, and they could be adjusted on Hoke’s next visit to the office. Hoke examined his face in the mirror and was appalled. Without his dentures, he looked even worse. His gray beard, almost an inch long, reminded him of Mr. Geezil in the old “Popeye” comic strip. His chances of ever getting a woman into his new brass bed seemed negligible, and he hadn’t been laid for five months. With a sigh, Hoke left the bathroom.

  There was a single window air conditioner in the bedroom, but very little cold air filtered into the sitting room. If he couldn’t wangle another room air conditioner from Mr. Bennett, he would have to buy an overhead fan. On the wall above the desk, there was a large painting of three white horses pulling a fire truck. The horses’ nostrils flared, and their eyes rolled wildly. That was one hell of a painting, Hoke decided, and probably worth a lot of money. He was surprised that Mr. Bennett had left it in the room instead of selling it—

  There was a rapping on the door—three sharp peremptory knocks.

  Hoke panicked. He pulled open drawers in the desk, ripping a fingernail in the process, forgetting for a frenzied moment or so that his gun had been stolen. What could he use as a weapon? There was a heavy glass paperweight on the desk, with a butterfly preserved in its interior. Hoke snatched it up and stood with his back against the wall beside the door.

  “Who is it?” Hoke said.

  “Sergeant Wilson,” a deep voice rumbled. “Miami Police Department.”

  “Slide your ID under the door.”

  “Are you kidding?”

  “Try me. The next thing you hear, if you hear anything, will be a bullet through the door!”

  “Je-sus Christ!” The deep voice was disgusted.

  A moment later, the ID card with Wilson’s photograph on it was slipped beneath the door. Hoke picked it up. It showed that Wilson was black, six feet, two inches tall, 230 pounds, and a sergeant in the MPD, Vice Division. He was also ugly. His nose was almost as wide as his lips, and he had a boxer’s cauliflower ears.

  Hoke took off the chain lock and opened the door. The man reached for his ID card. He held his badge in his other hand. He took the ID card from Hoke’s fingers and put it back in his card case; then he put his badge away.

  “What’s up, sergeant?” Wilson said. “You got a guilty conscience?”

  “I just came home from the hospital.”

  “I know. I checked. You also got something that belongs to me. Let’s have it.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’ve never seen you before.”

  “I’ve seen you. I’m in Vice, and you’ve been moving into my territory. Let me have the envelopes, please.” He held out a huge hand.

  Hoke was puzzled. If Hoke had been paid off by mistake, how could anybody take him for Sergeant Wilson? Whoever it was who mixed them up had to be colorblind or badly misinformed.

  “The envelopes addre
ssed to me?”

  “The ones addressed to you.”

  Hoke handed over the two brown envelopes. Sergeant Wilson counted the money. “It’s a hundred dollars short.”

  Hoke cleared his throat. “I spent a little.”

  “Give me your wallet.”

  “Fuck you.”

  With the flat of his palm, Wilson pushed Hoke into the swivel chair by the desk and held him there with very little effort. Hoke struggled, realized how weak he was, and slumped back in the chair. Wilson took the wallet out of Hoke’s hip pocket, counted out $100, and tossed the wallet on the desk. He put the bills into the brown envelope and then put both envelopes into the breast pocket of his beige silk sports jacket.

  “Pablo wants the girl back, too, old timer. Make sure she’s back at the International Hotel by ten A.M. tomorrow, and all will be forgotten. Not forgiven, but forgotten. Otherwise …” He looked around the room and shook his head. “I guess you’re desperate for dough, livin’ in a dump like this, but you must’ve been crazy to fuck with me.”

  Wilson checked the bedroom and then took a quick look into the bathroom. He noticed Hoke’s false teeth in the plastic glass. He dumped the water into the sink, opened the window in the sitting room, pushed out the screen, and tossed the teeth out the window.

  Hoke almost asked, what girl? But he knew that the girl was Susan Waggoner. And he knew now who had put him in the hospital. He didn’t know why, and he didn’t know why he’d been sent money, but he intended to find out.

  Wilson closed the door softly behind him as he left the room.

  It took Hoke twenty minutes to find his teeth, but they had landed in a cluster of screw-leaved crotons and weren’t damaged. He put them into a fresh glass of water with another helping of Polident and wondered what in the hell he was going to do next.

  17

  After the cab tour of Collins Avenue in Miami Beach, Mrs. Freeman made a brief stop so that Freddy could take a closer look at Lincoln Road, the once famous and now deteriorated shopping mall. Freddy suggested a late breakfast.