by Carl Hiaasen
Meadows was intercepted by a laconic clerk who seemed as anonymous.
“I’m here to look at a body,” he said.
“Are you next-of-kin?”
“Uh, no. Definitely not.”
“Name?”
“Christopher Meadows.”
The clerk leafed through a stack of pink carbons.
“We don’t have a Chris Meadows. We have a Christine Reilly, but she’s already been ID’d by her daughter.”
“Meadows is my name. I was asked to come down here and look at a body that was found this morning.”
“OK, whose body?” The clerk tapped a Bic pen on her desk. She had all day.
“I don’t know. They didn’t give me a name.”
“Is this a joke?”
“No, Detective Nelson told me to come. He said he was going to meet me here.”
The clerk mashed an intercom button. “Dr. Appel?”
“Yes, Lorie,” a voice reverberated. It sounded as if the man were in Key West.
“There’s a man named Meadows here wants to look at a body. Says Nelson sent him.”
“Right. Send him back.”
Meadows edged cautiously through one set of swinging doors, then another. He found himself standing in a vast room, walled in old tiles the color of lima beans. It took several moments before Meadows realized he was surrounded by human bodies.
They lay, one after another, on silver autopsy tables. Some were splayed open at the sternum, the skin stretched back and the chest cavity open like a Thanksgiving turkey. Meadows thought the corpses looked very small. The whole room smelled rotten and cold. He swallowed hard.
“Hello there.”
Meadows spun around. Dr. Harry Appel stood behind him.
“Hello,” Meadows replied shakily. “You scared me.”
“Didn’t mean to,” Appel said. “Sit down.”
Meadows sat. Appel, a tall man with tortoise-shell glasses, turned back to his work. In one hand he held a half-eaten ham-and-cheese sandwich. The other hand held a human heart, a small bloody violet balloon. Meadows thought he was going to be sick.
“I’d offer you a sandwich,” Appel was saying, “but this is the last one in the house.” The doctor noticed Meadows pale. “Oh, I’m sorry.” He put the sandwich in a paper bag. “I normally don’t eat on the job, but we’ve had a very busy morning. As you can see.”
Meadows nodded weakly and looked at the floor.
Appel placed the heart on a scale and read the weight aloud into a Dictaphone. Then he took a plastic bag, the same kind sold as sandwich bags in any grocery store, and pinched an edge until it opened. He slid the heart in, twisted a metal tab to seal it and dropped the whole soggy package back into the chest cavity. Meadows watched, transfixed.
“I have to do this,” Appel explained. “Used to be I could throw the organs away after I took lab samples. Lately, though, a lot of families insist that their loved ones be buried intact, with all the parts and pieces.”
Meadows just nodded.
“So, you’re here to see the Juan Doe?”
“Uh?”
Appel ran his hands under a faucet, rinsing blood off the diaphanous surgical gloves. He wiped them on his wrinkled green lab coat and motioned to Meadows. “I think your friend is over there.”
He led Meadows to a table where a skinny corpse lay. The top of the skull had been cut away with a fine saw. It hung as if by a hinge, exposing the upper hemisphere of the brain. The skin was pulled down over the face into a wrinkled rubbery mask. The nose was in the wrong place. The mouth was a sneer.
Meadows stood six feet from the table, frozen.
“Oh, Christ,” he wheezed.
“Don’t worry,” Appel said cheerfully. “I’ll put this face back so you can see what he looks like.” He replaced the cap of the skull on the brain, tugging the scalp into place. Then he pulled the skin up, tightening the facial features. Meadows now saw that the victim was a young man, probably a Latin. The face was narrow and bore a grubby trace of a mustache.
“I don’t know him,” Meadows said. “He wasn’t one of the men I saw.”
Appel shrugged. “I’m not surprised.” He asked Meadows about the shootout in the Grove.
“I’d rather not,” the architect replied. “Nelson can tell you what happened. Where is he anyway?”
“He called to say he couldn’t make it,” Appel said. “He mentioned that your girlfriend got killed.”
“An old friend. Just the way it happened…I’m still upset about it. I still don’t feel much like talking. The only reason I came down here was Nelson. He said this might be the guy who did all the shooting, but it isn’t.”
Appel peeled off his gloves. “I’m sorry about your friend. Nelson said you got shot up, too.”
“In the leg. It’s getting better.”
“That’s good,” Appel said. “That’s very good.”
Appel was trying to be friendly. Meadows liked him. He wondered why anyone would become a coroner. He was intrigued by Appel’s nonchalance.
“How did this one die?”
“Same old tricks,” said Appel.
With a bare hand—that was the first thing Meadows noticed—Appel grabbed the corpse by the hair and lifted the head off the block of wood under the neck. He turned it on its side and pointed to a dime-sized hole, dead center in the back of the skull. “There. Bingo.”
Meadows winced. “Why?”
“Take a wild guess.” Appel sighed. “Shit, I get these guys in here every week. Latin male, late twenties, early thirties. Single bullet wound in the back of the head. No ID, no family, no friends. Takes us weeks to trace them. This one’s a Colombian. A Juan Doe, and he’ll probably be buried that way. He’s an illegal. Do you know what they found on the body? Three thousand bucks.”
“That’s a lot of money to be carrying around.”
“He also had a gram of coke and a Cartier watch. The guy had great taste in jewelry but bad taste in the company he kept.”
Meadows took a breath and stepped closer. He studied the face again. “No, I really haven’t seen him before.”
“Were the men in the cars Cuban or Colombian?”
“I don’t know. They were Latin…well, dark-skinned. I just don’t know. They were yelling at each other in Spanish, but there was so much happening.” Meadows flashed on the scene again, just as in his dreams: the noise, the smoke, the screams, then dizziness. The cops had said ten or eleven seconds were all it took.
“You want to look at a Cuban?” Appel asked.
“Another drug murder?”
“Yep. Came in this morning.” Appel went to another table. The corpse was in a heavy black body bag. The words Metro Fire Rescue were stenciled in red near the feet.
“A stinker,” Appel warned as he unzipped the bag. “Better hold your nose on this one.”
Meadows fumbled for a handkerchief and mashed it over his mouth. The corpse was ghastly: bloated, greenish, fetid. The clothes were torn, and the flesh of the abdomen was shredded and white.
“Sharks,” Appel explained. “They found this one off Cape Florida. Three clowns from New Jersey were out dolphin fishing on a charter boat. They trolled right over the body and snagged it. Pulled an outrigger down, and they fought it for fifteen minutes before they realized it wasn’t fighting back.”
“God, I couldn’t possibly tell you if I knew that guy or not,” Meadows said, fighting waves of nausea.
“He’s been out there three weeks,” Appel said. “He died the same way as the Colombian: thirty-two semiautomatic in the back of the head.” The medical examiner zipped the bag up. “You know what’s interesting, though, is that this one got beat up first.”
“Was it a robbery?”
“Don’t think so. Beat up, as in tortured. Broken ribs, some kidney damage. They really did a job on him.”
“I’m sorry, but I can’t tell what he used to look like,” Meadows said.
“Oh, we got an ID on this one.” A
ppel handed the architect a clipboard. The police report was on top. Meadows read it all, fascinated, but feeling like a voyeur.
The dead man’s name was Ruis Juan González. Age: twenty-six. Single. Address: 1721 Brickell Avenue. Meadows knew the building, an ugly condominium two blocks off Biscayne Bay.
Appel pointed to a line in the police report. “This is the best part,” he said.
In the space marked Occupation the cops had written: “Import-export business.”
“That’s from his sister,” Appel explained. “She said her brother was very big into coffee tables from Colombia. Sold them in a shop down on Flagler Street.”
“But he really was a smuggler.”
Appel laughed. “Yeah. He really was a smuggler.” He watched Meadows closely. The architect was examining the homicide report as if it were one of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Appel sat down at his desk. Meadows noted, with astonishment, that the doctor’s coffee cup was fashioned from what seemed to be a human skull. Appel noticed Meadows’s discomfort and chuckled. “Want some Sanka?”
Meadows shook his head.
“Do you know much about the dope business?” Appel asked.
“Just what’s in the papers,” Meadows said. “I talked to Nelson after the shooting. After the murders. He said it was probably just a rip-off, that was all, and everyone started shooting.”
Appel fingered his sideburns, flecked with gray. A bit premature, Meadows thought. The doctor couldn’t be more than thirty-five, thirty-six.
“There’s a small war going on,” Appel said evenly. “They’re killing each other left and right. We get at least one a week in here, just like I showed you. Colombians, Cubans, a few stupid Anglos. It started about a year ago, and at the time it was all very neat because it was fratricide. Dopers killing dopers. Nobody seemed to care. Then some innocent people started getting in the way.”
“Like…”
“Like your friend and her little girl.” Appel lit his pipe and didn’t say anything for a while. Meadows looked at the room full of bodies. He counted nine.
“Oh, most of these are naturals,” Appel said, waving at the tables. “Routine stuff. Some old lady on the beach is insisting I do a post on her husband. He was seventy-four. Now I know he died of congestive heart failure; I know it. But she’s convinced he got poisoned by the boysenberry pancakes at this cafeteria downtown. She’s already hired a lawyer, for Chrissakes! Pancakes.”
Appel and Meadows laughed together.
“I could never do this sort of work,” the architect muttered.
“No, probably not,” Appel said, not unkindly. He thought of Sandra Fay Tilden. He didn’t tell Chris Meadows that he himself had done the autopsy.
“I’ve been down here five years, and I’ve never seen it so bad,” Appel said. “They brought in one of these jokers the other day and I counted eleven machine-gun holes. Machine guns…think about that.”
“Why a war?”
“Greed,” Appel said. “The money is beyond imagination, probably even more than doctors and architects make.” The coroner grinned. “Coke,” he said.
“Cocaine?”
“That’s it. That’s why these assholes get killed. That’s why your friend got killed. She got between the salesman and the merchandise and never knew it.”
Meadows stood up to leave. “I’m sorry that I couldn’t find one of the killers here today.”
“Don’t get your hopes up,” Appel said sardonically. “Most of these murders are never solved. No one talks.” He pointed at the dead Colombian. “That’s the price you pay if you do.”
“Did Nelson say if they had any more leads?”
“Didn’t say.” Appel shook Meadows’s hand. “It was nice meeting you. Hope I didn’t spoil your appetite for the day.”
“I’ll be OK.”
Meadows stepped into the parking lot, and the harsh afternoon sun blinded him. He breathed deeply. Full of rain and summer heat, the air felt marvelous in his lungs after an hour in the stale autopsy room.
Chapter 5
THE PHONE was ringing when Meadows returned from the morgue.
“Chris, thank God. It you don’t come here instantly and rescue me from these miserable curs, I shall never speak to you again.”
“Terry!”
“Perro de mierda. ¡Cállate, carajo!”
“Terry, where are you?” From the receiver came snarls, barks, a howl.
“I have just brought two dozen mangy dogs from Panama to a place called the Miami Shores Kennel Club. I should have dumped them out over the Caribbean instead. Filthy brutes.”
“I’ll be right there. Wait in the lobby.”
“I will not wait in the lobby. I will wait in the bar, and if you are not here in twenty minutes, I shall run off with the first man there who tells me he hates greyhounds.”
“Twenty minutes.”
Meadows hustled back to his Karmann Ghia and pointed for the expressway north. The steering wheel was nearly too hot to grasp. Meadows hardly noticed. Terry was back.
Terry the wildcat. Meadows had never known a woman like her. She was to Sandy as a hurricane was to spring rain.
They had met at a party in New York the year before, one of those East Eighties parties so full of earnestly meaningful phonies that Meadows had taken one look and nearly headed for the door. Instead, he had sought out a quiet corner, and there she’d been.…
“MY NAME IS María Cristina Betancourt Issuralde,” she said after a moment, apparently deciding he wasn’t one of the bores. “People call me Terry.”
“Chris Meadows.” He offered his hand awkwardly. “How do you get Terry from Maria and all the rest?”
“It’s a nickname—short for Terremoto.”
“I am moved.”
Terry rewarded him with a grin, then, after a few minutes, said suddenly, “Will you please take me away from this horrible party? Take me to eat. I’m starved.”
“Sure,” said Meadows, delighted and somewhat nonplussed. “Chinese food?”
“Anything.”
Over dinner they talked, or rather mostly she talked and Meadows listened. She had been born rich, Terry confided between mouthfuls of Peking duck, and she bored easily. She was the eldest child of a South American land baron who owned huge tracts, and passports to match, in Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil. Terry had skied at Portillo and swum at Monaco. She spoke English, Portuguese, Spanish and French interchangeably. She had been to boarding schools in England and a university in France. She had been wooed by playboys and tycoons. And she had rebelled.
“There I was one day, twenty-two years old. I had known about men since I was sixteen. I had known about the world since I was born. So I asked myself: ‘María Cristina, what are you going to do with your life?’ It was nasty question.
“‘Marry a millionaire and screw the gardener while he counts his money? Run off with a sports car driver until one day he makes goulash of himself against a concrete wall?’ No, señor, that was not for me.”
“I’m surprised you didn’t find a good revolution,” Meadows ventured.
“I thought about that, it is true—and believe me, I look terrific in khaki fatigues and a beret. But I will tell you something about my part of the world. The revolutions all promise freedom and justice. South America is a continent of great promises. But what they deliver is nothing. And I will tell you something else. Take away the rifles from those tough hombres and they are nothing. A woman might as well go to bed with her teddy bear for all the good they will do her.”
“I didn’t know,” Meadows replied weakly.
“Revolutionaries destroy. I am a builder. So I looked around for something I could build, something romantic and challenging. I thought about it for a long time, and then I decided. I went to my parents, and I told them. My mother called for her confessor. My father yelled and threatened to whip me, but deep down I think he was very pleased, for we both knew I was more like him than his sons, my brothers.
“I went to school and studied to be a pilot. Never has anyone studied so hard. And then I borrowed the money for a plane—an old Convair. I found a copilot, and I flew that plane anywhere there was cargo.
“Río Gallegos. Puerto Montt. Cuiabá in the Mato Grosso. Potosí, in Bolivia, where the mountains are cruel and the runway is short. My company is called Cargas Aereas Nacionales, CAN. I fly where I say I will fly, and I charge what I say I will charge. CAN do! Now I have four planes, and the money I spend is my own. My father is proud of me; my mother dares not criticize. Tonight I flew race horses to New York from Venezuela. Before that it was Brazilian tractor tires to Tegucigalpa. In a few days, who knows?”
SHE’D TRANSFIXED HIM. Beside her Meadows felt earthbound, pedestrian.
“I don’t know why you hang around with me,” Meadows teased one day after a joy ride across the state in a rented single-engine plane had left him green.
Terry had laughed deeply and bitten his ear.
“Pobrecito. I should have told you it would be bumpy. I’m sorry. That was a terrible thing to do to my protector.”
“My protector.” It was a private joke, a shard of that first night in New York. They’d left the restaurant three hours later and wandered aimlessly through the streets of Chinatown, talking.
The mugger had found them near the river. Meadows gave him what money he had, almost with a shrug, as though it were a form of taxation people who walk at night must be prepared to pay. But the mugger had wanted more than money.
“You go for a walk, big boy. The girl stays.”
That had been too much. When the man advanced, waving a chain, Meadows charged blindly and seized him in a bear hug. For endless minutes the two men grunted in a clumsy wrestling match until their momentum carried them crashing into a steel trash bin, and it was the mugger’s skull that caught the corner. The chain clattered to the pavement.
Terry had tugged at Meadows’s elbow, but still enraged, he’d stooped down and methodically stripped the man of his clothes, mugging the mugger, leaving him in underwear and socks and moaning half-consciously. He’d thrown the clothes into a sewer, then bought himself two Irish coffees to stop the trembling. That night he and Terry had made love for the first time.
