Miami Noir

by Les Standiford

  “Oh…Charlene!”

  Making shushing noises, Charlene patted her on the shoulder. She didn’t bother setting down her purse. She wasn’t staying long enough to chat. “You need to put something else on, darling. We’re leaving. Pack your jammies and a toothbrush.”

  “Will they let me go?”

  “They will unless you have confessed to something extremely naughty.”

  “I didn’t! I had to…oh. Oh—” She sobbed. “He’s dead. Oh, God. The blood. It was so terrible. I was sick. I threw up.”

  “Let’s just run upstairs and get you into some clean clothes, shall we?”

  “The detective said to give him these.”

  “Oh, really.” Charlene looked darkly in toward the door, where Sergeant Nance lingered. “Well, if and when a warrant is issued, he can have them.”

  “Why are they acting like I did something wrong? They swabbed my hands like I was a criminal. Why?”

  “It’s routine. Come on, let’s go.”

  Kathy blew her nose. A weak smile came my way. “Hi, Sara.”

  I put an arm around her. “Don’t worry. It’s going to be all right.”

  She lowered her head to mine and made another little sob.

  Kathy Zaden and I are the same age, thirty-three. That’s as far as the similarity extends. I’m short and dark, thanks to my mulatta grandmother. Kathy Zaden is a sexy blonde with long, tanned legs. She had a realtor’s license, and she’d met Dr. Zaden four years ago showing him an apartment on South Beach. He had just dumped his first wife and was looking for something more exciting—in both real estate and women, I suppose. Howard had made a fortune doing plastic surgery. He had a good build, an easy smile, a Mercedes CL500 coupe, a forty-two-foot Bertram sport fisher, a condo in Vail, and a tax attorney who showed him how to shelter his assets. For her birthday, he’d done Kathy’s boobs.

  You want to hate men like Howard Zaden. I’d wanted to hate Kathy, but I couldn’t. She’d been born poor in Valdosta, Georgia, and fought her way out. She sent money home; she organized charity events; she took in stray cats. But she finally got it: She believed Howard when he said that two kids from his previous marriage were enough. She believed that one day he would dump her too.

  Kathy had gone to Charlene to see about breaking the twenty-page prenuptial agreement he’d made her sign. Needless to say, Charlene had not been Kathy’s lawyer for the prenup. I’d been shadowing Dr. Zaden for a couple of weeks to see if we could find anything useful, and I was getting nowhere. Now it didn’t matter.

  We went upstairs. When I was finished taking shots of Kathy Zaden and the blood stains, Charlene shooed her into the bathroom, and I found my way to the study.

  The cool stares I got from the crime scene technicians meant that Bill Nance had told them who I was. He gave me a pair of blue paper booties and said, “Don’t touch anything, and don’t get in the way. You’ve got five minutes.”

  It was more a media room than a study, with a huge flatscreen television facing a leather sofa, rows of DVDs on the mahogany built-ins, and audio equipment behind glass doors. Hitting the shutter of my digital SLR, I maneuvered toward the other side of the room, where a desk and a clot of detectives hid my view. When they moved I saw two bodies in a puddle of dark red seeping into the ivory-colored carpet.

  Howard Zaden lay on his back in a blue dress shirt, arms out like he was soaring, gold on his cuffs. A heavyset woman in black pants and a white knit top lay facedown across his lower legs. I barely saw her; my eyes were on Dr. Zaden.

  His head had rolled to the side, and his neck looked like a piece of fresh steak. I could see something paler red protruding: bone, cartilage. His tie was gone just below the knot. Sweat prickled my scalp. This had not been the first cut; he’d survived long enough to scream and hold up his hands. Half his left hand was missing, and a long gash had opened his shoulder. More cuts went through his left bicep, his chest, his abdomen, as though she’d kept chopping after he hit the floor.

  I forced myself to concentrate on what I saw through the viewfinder. Carmen Sánchez was black, or Afro-Cuban or Afro-something. Her hair was medium length, processed straight. I squatted to see her face, but her hair covered it. There were two red holes in her back, another in her neck. One shoe had come off, and I saw a brown foot, a tan sole. It reminded me of Nena’s feet, the calluses, her cheap plastic sandals. I didn’t see a purse.

  If Kathy Zaden had said Carmen Sánchez was stalking her husband, then Charlene had to know about it. Charlene hadn’t told me, but then, I hadn’t been hired for that.

  The machete lay near the bodies, a shiny curve about three feet long. Wood handle, blood drying to brown on the steel. I waited for a female officer to walk by, then zoomed in for a closeup. The edge had been honed till it shimmered. Something odd on the trailing edge: black smudges, like soot. Like she’d tried to burn it.

  Why had Howard let her in? Most sane people would have slammed the door on a woman carrying a machete. Then I noticed a raincoat on the floor and pressed the shutter.

  Sergeant Nance stood beside me. “What did she want with Dr. Zaden?”

  “I have no idea.” My viewfinder showed the desk, the stuff on it. A checkbook lying open, the big kind with a leather-bound cover.

  He said, “She doesn’t look like a disgruntled plastic surgery patient.”

  “No, she’s a poor black Dominicana.”

  “Take it easy, Morales.”

  I shot images of the blood spatter up the side of the desk, over the bookshelves behind it, across the ceiling.

  He asked, “Who was it answered the door? Mrs. Zaden?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Somebody let this woman in.”

  I looked at him. “You think?”

  Nance made a little smile, showing his teeth. He was still smoking, I noticed. “This lady came to do harm to Dr. Zaden, and we don’t know why. His wife could shed some light. We’re not out to get her. We just want to clear things up.”

  “Okay. I’ll be sure to tell her.”

  “You’re done here,” Nance said. “Put it away.”

  I shot one more for the principle of it. At the door I took off the booties and balled them into my pants pocket.

  Nance leaned closer. “Lucky thing you tripped down those steps, Morales. Know why?”

  I turned away, but his voice followed me.

  “Because they gave you disability instead of firing your ass. You weren’t cutting it.”

  I kept my reply to myself. You don’t get anywhere arguing with a cop.

  The clouds had rumbled off, dragging the heat with them, leaving a gray overcast and a few stray drops of rain. Beyond the crime tape, the crowd of onlookers had grown. Two local satellite news trucks had set up operations on the street, and another was moving into position. The murder of a prominent Miami plastic surgeon would be breaking news at 6 o’clock.

  Among the assorted police vehicles in the driveway, I spotted a red Toyota with a missing hubcap and a cracked side window. A Florida tag. I went over and took a picture of it, then the vehicle ID through the windshield. Whoever owned it would know Carmen Sánchez.

  Nance would do the same thing. This case would be all over the front page, and Nance would work it. Somebody—hair stylist, personal trainer—would eventually tell him that Kathy had wanted out, and that she’d get more from a dead husband than an ex-husband. Nance knew that Carmen Sánchez had been stalking Dr. Zaden. He was wondering who let her in. Had Kathy waited until her husband was dead to fire the pistol into Mrs. Sánchez’s back?

  A movement on the street caught my eye. A monster Hummer painted bright yellow turned into the front yard, tires digging into the wet grass, chrome snout pressing on the crime scene tape. The door opened, and a guy slid off the seat. Short brown hair, average build, a Hawaiian shirt. He shouted something to a uniformed officer and ran full speed toward the house.

  I’d seen him before: Richard Zaden, age thirty-one. He owned an overpriced pi
zza restaurant in the Grove that his father had bought for him. People came and went that I thought the DEA would’ve liked to interview.

  Maybe I still look like a cop. Rick Zaden saw me and veered in my direction. He said he was Dr. Zaden’s son, and a neighbor had called him. What the hell was going on here? Where was his father?

  I should have turned him toward the door and suggested he find Sergeant Nance, but instead I told him the truth as gently as I could, then said I was sorry. I told him he probably didn’t want to go in there right now.

  He broke down, hands over his face, wailing. Then he looked at me with tortured eyes and whispered, “My father. He’s gone? Oh my God, no. Dad.”

  Call me hard-hearted, but it seemed overdone. I knew that Rick and his father had been at odds. But this didn’t mean anything. Lose your father, feelings can change.

  He sagged against the front fender of the Toyota. “She shot the bitch. Jesus Christ. I can’t believe it. Kathy shot her. Where is she? I want to talk to her.”

  “Not now. She’s on her way out. Her lawyer won’t let her talk to anyone.”

  That got me a blank stare. “Her lawyer?”

  “When the police get involved, people call lawyers.”

  “Is she…under suspicion?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  He took a long, slow breath. “I want to go in.”

  “Just a second.” I held onto his arm. “Who was Carmen Sánchez?”

  “She wanted money from my father. It was a lawsuit or something. An accident when he was on vacation in the Dominican Republic. Some guy—her son—walked right in front of his car. It wasn’t Dad’s fault, but she wouldn’t leave him alone. He said he was going to pay her off.” Rick wiped his hands down his face. “What am I supposed to do now?”

  “Somebody will be out to speak to you. Excuse me, but did this person, Mrs. Sánchez’s son, did he die?” Rick nodded. “And then what? She came here on a tourist visa?”

  “Yeah. That’s what they do, then they don’t leave.” Rick Zaden gave me a closer inspection. “Are you a police officer or what?”

  I had to tell him. “I’m a private investigator. I work for Kathy Zaden’s attorney.”

  He stared at me, turned his back, and walked under the portico, leaving me with the answer to at least one of Sergeant Nance’s questions: Carmen Sánchez had come here to collect money from the man who had killed her son. Had Dr. Zaden planned to write her a check? If the death had been an accident, why would he pay her? And if she’d thought he would, why did she want him dead?

  I scanned the faces across the street, wondering if anybody had seen a middle-aged Latina getting out of her car in a raincoat. I noticed the house next door. It wasn’t much of a house, but it had a terrace on the roof, and a man leaned on the metal railing with a long-neck beer. A chickee hut with a palm-frond roof had been built up there, and the flag of Great Britain hung from one end of it like a curtain.

  My pant legs got soaked as I cut through his overgrown yard. He was around forty, with bright blue eyes and spiked, sandy hair. He wore old khaki shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt that revealed a pair of nicely muscled arms. I asked if I could talk to him. He said to come up.

  Circular metal stairs took me to a teak deck on the roof. He had a view of the houses along the canal, sailboats and sport fishers at the docks, and a slice of Biscayne Bay at the end of the canal. The water repeated the dull gray of the sky. He’d installed a bar, a hot tub, and a sunning area. The reed privacy screen made me think he liked an all-over tan.

  His name was Ian Morris. After I’d told him what had happened, he asked if Kathy was all right. “Is she, really? Poor baby. She must be in shock.”

  “Are you English?”

  “Born in Newcastle. That’s on the North Sea. I came here ten years ago. Love the weather, most of the time.” He finished his beer, went to a small fridge under the chickee hut, and took out another, lifting it toward me inquiringly. I sat on a stool and he opened a bottle for each of us.

  He told me he was a metal sculptor, which explained the big arms. I asked if he’d made the piece on the sea wall, a rusted oval that swung and groaned from an arch of polished aluminum.

  “Not your style, is it?” He grinned. “I sold one similar for twenty thousand dollars to a collector in Mexico. Oh, but Howard told me it sucked, and he wanted it gone. That and my little roof garden too. He promised to sue me into the ground, and I said fine, give it a go. Horrible man. Am I speaking ill of the dead?” He took a swallow of beer.

  I asked him if he’d seen Carmen Sánchez arrive.

  Ian Morris said that at about 4 o’clock he’d been taking down his umbrella before the storm broke, and he’d noticed a little red car pull into the Zadens’s driveway, a black woman at the wheel. Then the car went out of sight.

  “I didn’t know who she was. I certainly didn’t see her get out with a machete. Howard had come home early, so I thought she might be his voodoo lady making a house call.”

  “His…?”

  “Psychic. Spiritual advisor? Tarot card reader?”

  “No. Dr. Zaden had a psychic?”

  With a grin, Ian said, “This is Miami, love. With a name like Morales, you must have an altar to Chango or Eleggua in your bedroom.”

  I smiled and shook my head. “Most of us are smarter than that.”

  “Well, Howard went for his reading at least once a month. He said his voodoo lady guaranteed the codeenforcement people would be on my ass. I told him I was shaking in my boots.”

  I nudged him back to the point. “What about Carmen Sánchez?”

  “Yes. Kathy told me about her, although, as I said, I didn’t recognize her.” Ian Morris shuddered. “My God. What a hideous thing to do! Even to Howard. And poor Kathy. I have to call her. Would that be all right?”

  “She’ll be with friends for a few days.”

  “I have her mobile number.”

  Did he, now?

  From the roof I could see the windows of the Zadens’s master suite. Their balcony overlooked the pool. Kathy had said she knew it was time to leave Howard when she started watching him do his hundred laps every morning and think about heart attacks. I could also imagine that Ian Morris had watched Kathy standing on the balcony in her nightie.

  I said, “I met Rick Zaden a little while ago. I told him his father had been murdered and he seemed…like he had to convince me he cared.”

  Ian laughed. “He doesn’t care. He’s probably ecstatic. You see, Rickie had borrowed, or conned, his father out of so much money that Howard finally decided to shut him down. Howard had a mortgage on a restaurant Rick owned, and he was going to collect.”

  I sipped my beer. “How did you know this? From Kathy?”

  “Howard was yelling about it right down there on the dock. He was hosing off his boat, must’ve been a weekend, and Rick came over. I don’t know how it started, but Howard told him he wasn’t getting another effing cent, and furthermore, he’d be calling his attorney and taking the effing restaurant. He finally told Rick to get off his property or he’d have him arrested for trespassing.”

  “When was this?”

  Ian’s eyes focused upward. “I’m going to say…three months.”

  Plenty of time for them to get over it. “Anything more recent?”

  “Couldn’t say. Rick hasn’t been around.” Ian shrugged. “Kathy tried to be a peacemaker. I kept telling her, why bother? Can I get you another beer?”

  “No, thanks.” Ian Morris liked to talk, so I asked him if he knew anything about the car accident in the Dominican Republic.

  He gazed past me at the Zadens’s house. “I don’t think Kathy would mind. It’s no secret. She and Howard were visiting friends over there. They rented a car and went sightseeing. It happened outside some wretched little village. Mrs. Sánchez’s son, her only son, was walking along the road, and Howard hit the poor sod and killed him.”

  “Was he drunk?”

  “He’d been dri
nking, but he wasn’t drunk. No, he was yelling at Kathy just before the impact. She doesn’t remember what about. Something petty. Howard was a shameless verbal abuser. He didn’t strike her, at least she said not, or I’d have been forced to beat the crap out of him.”

  Ian crossed his arms on the bar. I could see little scars from metal cuts or torch burns. “Anyway, the accident. The policía investigated, but Howard’s friends were wealthy, quite connected, and so forth. Howard felt he’d done nothing wrong, but he paid the man’s burial expenses and returned to the States. That would’ve been the end of it, except that Mrs. Sánchez turned up. She wanted compensation, and Howard basically told her to bugger off.”

  “How much was she asking for?”

  “Ten thousand dollars for every year of her son’s life, and he was twenty-five. Oh, Howard could’ve paid, he just didn’t like to be told to. Carmen Sánchez came here to torment him. The staff at the clinic would find things at the entrance—a doll with pins in it, or a dead chicken—and it was driving Howard crazy. The police wouldn’t do anything because they couldn’t catch her at it. Howard filed a report with Immigration and maybe they’d have gotten around to deporting her in a year or two. Meanwhile, the bones kept appearing on his doorstep. Bad for business. A lot of Howard’s patients were Cubans, and Cubans know Santería when they see it, don’t they? He had no choice but to pay her.”

  I let these facts settle, then said, “But why did she kill him?”

  “Ha. Now there’s a question.” Ian Morris lifted his beer in a salute.

  As night closed in, Charlene Marks put Kathy Zaden in the passenger seat of her BMW and eased through the pack of reporters shoving cameras at the windows. I followed on her bumper. At Bayshore, the BMW put on its left-turn signal, then squealed right as I blocked the street. I saw the brake lights go on at Seventeenth Avenue, and the car disappeared behind thick foliage.

  I hooked up with them a couple of minutes later on U.S. 1 heading downtown. Charlene would deliver Kathy Zaden to a friend’s condo on Brickell Key, a posh private island overlooking the city. If you aren’t invited, you don’t get in. I called Charlene on my cell phone and gave her a quick summary of my conversations with Dr. Zaden’s son and the next-door neighbor. I was curious whether either of them had known Carmen Sánchez. Ian Morris had told me no, but I’ve been lied to before.