Charles Willeford - Way We Die Now

by Unknown

  "You -have- to come, Hoke," Ellita said. "Tbo Arnoldo doesn't know any Americans, and Mama's already told him that I live here with you. If you don't come, he'll think you don't approve of him."

  Aileen returned from the kitchen and handed Hoke the Tabasco sauce. He unscrewed the top and sprinkled his pork liberally. "That doesn't make any sense," Hoke said. "Whether Sue Ellen or I come or not--or Aileen--makes no difference. We're not related to your uncle. He wasn't a political prisoner anyway. You told me he was sent to prison for killing a man, a man who was sleeping with his wife. He served his time and then got a visa to Costa Rica, so he's paid his debt to Cuban society. I don't hold anything against him. Now that he's here in Miami, he's just another lucky Cuban far's I'm concerned. I can't see why your family's trying to make a big hero out of him. If he was a Marielito, with his prison background, he'd probably be locked up in Atlanta, waiting for shipment back to Cuba with the rest of the criminals."

  "Tio Arnoldo's not a criminal!" Ellita said. "He's a man of honor, and he's family! If you were getting out of prison and then exile after twenty-six years, we'd give a party for you, too. When you were married to Patsy, if you'd caught her sleeping with another man, wouldn't you have shot the -cabrón?-"

  "Hell, no! You don't shoot a man just because he falls in love with your wife. What you do, you get a legal divorce."

  "You don't understand Cuban honor."

  "The Cuban judge didn't either. He sentenced your uncle to life, didn't he? Even though he got out in twenty-two years. But I don't hold it against him. I intended to go to the party, but I have to stay home and wait for a call from Major Brownley. This afternoon, just before I left, Bill Henderson told me to let my beard grow and that Brownley was going to call me at home Sunday."

  "What kind of message is that?" Ellita raised her eyebrows.

  "It's the message Bill gave me. It's probably some special assignment. We're shorthanded in the division, and BrownIcy decided to give it to me. What with the suspensions and resignations, I don't think I'll be on cold cases much longer."

  "What time will he call you on Sunday?"

  "Bill didn't say."

  "Can Major Brownley do that, Daddy?" Aileen asked.

  "Do what?"

  "Make you grow a beard?"

  "I don't know. One thing I do know--the department can make you shave -off- a beard, and a mustache, too, if they want. That was a concession we had to make with the new PBA contract. But I don't know if they can make a man grow a beard or not. At any rate I won't shave till I talk to him. Willie Brownley's weird sometimes, but he's not frivolous."

  "Why didn't he tell you himself, instead of Bill?" Ellita said.

  "He's fishing down in the Keys with one of his old college buddies and won't be back till Sunday."

  "He can call you at my father's house just as easily as he can here. I'll phone Mrs. Brownley, give her the number, and he can call you there. You aren't getting out of this party, and neither's Sue Ellen."

  "Okay." Hoke shrugged. "Call her then. You heard that, Sue Ellen. We're all going to the party."

  "In that case," Sue Ellen said, sighing, "I'll dye my hair brown again--if you'll help me, Ellita."

  "I said I would, and I'll help you dye it back again next Monday night."

  "You don't have to do that, Sue Ellen," Hoke said, "if you don't want to--I hope you know that."

  "I know, but it'll make it easier for Ellita. Besides, all afternoon those old Cubans will be whispering about the -chica- with the -pelo azul-, and I'm liable to say something nasty."

  Hoke grinned. "You've picked up a few Spanish words, haven't you?"

  "I hear the Cuban dudes talking behind my back at the car wash. They make jokes about my blue pubic hair, too-- but not to my face. They know what kind of temper I've got."

  "If you want my opinion--" Aileen said.

  "I don't."

  "--I think it looks gnarly. Blue hair, I mean."

  "That's enough about hair at the dinner table," Hoke said. "Let's talk about something else."

  Sue Ellen glared at her sister for a moment and then doused her pork with -criollo- sauce without speaking. Pepe awoke and started to cry. Ellita got the baby from the crib, sat in her chair again, rolled up her blouse, and the baby began to suckle the left nipple.

  "Which breast does Pepe like best, Ellita?" Hoke asked. "The left or the right?"

  "What kind of question is that? He usually takes the left first, but that's because I hold him that way. He doesn't have any preference."

  "Not according to Melanie Klein," Hoke said. "When you took your psych course at Miami-Dade, did they ever discuss Dr. Klein's theories about babies?"

  "I don't think so. Melanie Klein?"

  "Dr. Klein. She was a child psychologist, like Anna Freud, one of the first to analyze children. She claimed that babies developed a love-hate relationship with breasts. Breasts are good, both of them, at first. Then, when the babies are weaned, sometime during the first two years, let's say, and the breasts are denied to them, they become bad because they're a source of frustration. Being denied means they're bad objects instead of good objects, and they look at breasts as separate from their mothers. What mothers have to do then is to get them to see the mother as a whole person and not just as a woman who's got two objects hanging off her to be loved or hated."

  "What about the good breast and the bad breast?"

  Hoke thought for a moment but couldn't remember. His complete knowledge of Dr. Melanie Klein was limited to a book review he had read of her biography in the -New York Times Book Review-. He had picked it up in the men's room on the fourth floor of the police station. He had read the review while he was in the can, sitting on the commode, and he remembered thinking at the time that the theories of Dr. Klein were ludicrous.

  "It's very complicated, Ellita. It has something to do with transference, but I haven't read any Klein for several years, and I'm not sure exactly how it works. I do remember that Karen Homey supported Klein's theories."

  "We read Karen Homey at Miami-Dade. There was a chapter from Horney's book -Self-Analysis- in our textbook. But I don't remember any mention of Melanie Klein."

  "It's just a theory, I guess, like everything else in psychology. But if Pepe begins to favor one breast over the other, maybe you'd better look into it."

  "I think Dr. Klein is full of shit," Ellita said.

  Pepe dug his fat knuckles into Ellita's left breast, trying to increase the flow. Ellita, eating awkwardly with her right hand, dropped a forkful of lettuce saturated with Thousand Island on Pepe's head. She put down her fork and wiped the baby's head with a paper napkin. She smiled.

  "Are you making all this up, Hoke?"

  "As I go through life"--Hoke shook his head--"I find that when I tell people something they don't already know, they almost always think it's a lie. Dr. Klein was a famous pioneer in child psychology. Just because you never heard of her doesn't make her a nonexistent person."

  "Daddy wouldn't make up a story like that," Aileen said. "He doesn't have that much imagination."

  Ellita and Sue Ellen laughed.

  "Thank you, sweetheart," Hoke said, "for defending your old man."

  Pepe squirmed, and Ellita shifted him over to the right nipple. He suckled and gurgled. The four of them smiled at the red-faced baby's greediness.

  "So much for Melanie Klein," Hoke said.

  After dinner Sue Ellen and Ellita cleared the table and retreated to the kitchen to wash the dishes. Aileen, who usually helped, had a baby-sitting job down the street, and she left the house wearing the earphones to her Sony Walkman, listening to her new Jimmy Buffett tape.

  Hoke went into the bathroom, scrubbed his false teeth, and then put them into a plastic glass with water and Polident to soak overnight. He sat in his La-Z-Boy recliner, after turning on the set, and tried to change channels with the Telectron garage opener. It didn't work on the TV either, so he turned off the set. He went over his theory in his mind.

/>   Three days before his death Dr. Paul Russell had parked in his marked space at his clinic--the clinic he owned in partnership with Dr. Leo Schwartz and Dr. Max Farris. Sometime during the day his garage door opener had been stolen from his white Mercedes. Nothing else had been taken. He missed the garage door opener when he got home because it wasn't in the glove compartment where he always kept it. He parked in the driveway and entered his house through the front door. His second garage door opener-- the one Hoke held in his hand--was kept as a spare, according to his wife, Louise, on a small side table in the foyer.

  For the next two days Dr. Russell had intended to get another opener but hadn't got around to it. He was a busy doctor, and he still had the second opener. However, instead of taking the spare opener with him in his car, where it might be stolen again, he opened the garage from inside, backed his car out to the driveway, got out of his car, closed the door with his opener, and then went into the house through the front door. He put the opener on the little table in the foyer again. The procedure was annoying but not onerous, and he didn't want to have the opener stolen again--not until he obtained another spare.

  On the third morning, after he had backed onto his driveway and closed the door, as he crossed the lawn to the front door of his house, someone stepped out from behind an Australian pine on Dr. Russell's front lawn and shot him between the eyes with a.38-caliber revolver.

  Dr. Russell had had a gallbladder operation scheduled at 7:00 A.M. at the Good Samaritan Hospital and had backed out of the garage at approximately 6:15. His dead body, still warm, had been discovered at 6:30 by the -Miami Herald- deliveryman when he threw a paper onto the lawn. He had then knocked on the front door to call the police. Mrs. Louise Russell wasn't home. She had gone to Orlando the day before to visit her younger sister, who taught the second grade. The deliveryman had then gone next door and called the police. He waited until the police came, standing beside the body, and said he didn't touch anything. Dr. Russell had been killed instantly, and the garage door opener had fallen from his hand. His expensive gold Rolex wristwatch continued to keep accurate time on his wrist. The Russells' Mexican maid didn't get to the house until 7:30, and when she did arrive and saw the homicide team and the dead body, she became hysterical. It took Sergeant Armando Quevedo, the detective in charge of the case, several minutes to calm her down before she could tell them that Mrs. Russell was in Orlando. Sergeant Quevedo had called the clinic to inform the nurse about the murder. Dr. Farris had gone to the hospital to take out the gallbladder Dr. Russell had been scheduled to remove.

  All this had happened three years before--three years and three months ago--and now the case was very cold indeed. Some of Quevedo's notes were in Spanish, but they were reminders to himself. The supplementary report was written in Quevedo's clear, easy-to-follow English. There were no leads whatsoever, except that the killing had all the earmarks of a professional hit.

  Quevedo could discover no motive. Dr. Russell had no known enemies. He had been a hardworking professional, and he had put in long days. He earned more than $i 50,000 a year, and he also owned an eight-unit apartment house in Liberty City. The apartment house was managed for him by a company that specialized in renting properties to blacks, and the company kept fifteen percent of the rents it collected. And it always collected, or the residents were evicted immediately. Although the black people who rented the substandard apartments might have resented Dr. Russell if they had known that he was their slumlord, they were unaware of his ownership.

  Dr. Russell owned the two-story house in Belle Meade, where he lived with his wife, Louise (they had no children), and she had said that they had a limited social life because of his busy schedule. He wasn't robbed. In addition to the expensive gold Rolex, there was a gold ring set with an onyx and a diamond on his ring finger. His wallet contained eighty-seven dollars and a half dozen credit cards. It was possible, Quevedo suggested in his supplementary report, that the hit man, whoever it was, had hit the wrong man.

  Hoke didn't accept that. The stolen garage door opener interested Hoke. Whoever had stolen the opener from Dr. Russell's Mercedes had had to be familiar with his habits. The man--or woman--who shot the physician must have known that he would cross the lawn at that point to get back to the front door and put the opener away before returning to his car.

  Who had profited from Dr. Russell's death? Dr. Schwartz and Dr. Farris hadn't brought in a new doctor to replace Dr. Russell in their clinic. After his death they had split Dr. Russell's practice between them. They both had profited because of their partnership insurance. Also, and this is what piqued Hoke's curiosity, four months ago Dr. Leo Schwartz had married the widow, Louise Russell. He now lived with her in the Belle Meade house, a house Dr. Russell's mortgage insurance had paid off in full at his death. Dr. Schwartz now drove the white Mercedes, and Hoke wondered if Dr. Schwartz was wearing Dr. Russell's Rolex and ring as well. And why, Hoke wondered, had Louise Russell decided to visit her sister in Orlando at that particular time? The sisters were not close; the Orlando sister had never visited the Russells in Miami. All this, of course, was not known by Sergeant Quevedo.

  Whoever had stolen the garage door opener from Dr. Russell's locked car at the clinic, and then relocked the car door afterward, was probably the murderer or the person who had hired the killer. Hoke suspected that that person was Dr. Leo Schwartz, or perhaps it was Dr. Schwartz and Dr. Max Farris--with an assist, perhaps, from Louise Russell Schwartz? All he had to do was find some proof.

  The garage door opener, the spare, had been locked away as evidence, and Hoke had checked it out of the property room (it took Baldy Allen, the property man, more than two hours to find it, three years and three months being a long time for evidence to be stored away), but Hoke was convinced that the opener was the key, somehow, to the case.

  Perhaps Dr. Schwartz had taken the original door opener, and if so, instead of throwing it away, he still had it? If so, and if he had also planned three years ago to marry Louise, and if they had been having an affair at that time, he was currenty using the original door opener to get into the garage now that he was married to Louise and living in her house--and driving the white Mercedes. Everything seemed logical; the killer could very well be Dr. Schwartz. Tomorrow, when he got to the office, he would see where Leo Schwartz had been when the murder was committed. There was nothing much in the report about Schwartz, except that he and his partner, Max Farris, both had attended the funeral. Sergeant Quevedo had attended Dr. Russell's funeral and had copied down the list of everyone who had signed the register. But Quevedo hadn't checked on any of these people to see where they had been during the murder. It might be a good idea to check the Belle Meade house, too. He would see if this spare opener still opened the garage. If it did, it might mean that Dr. Schwartz did indeed have the original opener--the one stolen from the Mercedes. If the spare didn't open the garage, it could mean that a new radio signal and new openers had been ordered and that he was on the wrong track...

  Hoke fell asleep in the recliner. Ellita brought him a cold beer at ten o'clock and woke him in time to watch the rerun of -Hill Street Blues-.

  CHAPTER 4

  The next morning, when Detective Teodoro Gonzalez came into the office, Hoke handed him the garage door opener and told him to go to the late Dr. Russell's house and see if it would open the garage door. Hoke didn't tell Gonzalez why. All he had was a theory, even if the opener did open the garage. If it worked, however, his suspicion would be stronger, and it would confirm that he was at least on to something.

  "After I open the garage," Gonzalez asked, "should I go inside, or will I need a warrant?"

  "All I want you to do," Hoke said slowly, "and I want you to do it as inconspicuously as possible, is open the door---if- it opens. Then, if it opens, push the button and close the door again. If anybody's around, don't do it. Drive past the house. Keep circling the block, and don't let anyone see you open and close the door. If you think Mrs. Schwartz is at home or
see her out in the yard, just drive away. Go back later when she isn't home."

  Gonzalez slipped the opener into his outside jacket pocket. He was wearing an iridescent lime green linen sports jacket, a black silk T-shirt, with pleated lemoncolored gabardine slacks, and tasseled white Gucci slip-ons.

  "And take off that jacket. Your T-shirt's okay, but that jacket isn't inconspicuous, and neither are your slacks. So don't get out of your car either."

  Gonzalez nodded. He removed his jacket and draped it, silk lining side out, over his arm. "Don't I check and see what's in the garage after I open it? I mean, take a quick little survey, something like that? What exactly am I looking for?"

  "Nothing. Just see if that gadget opens the door. Then come back and tell me. Do you know where the Belle Meade neighborhood is? How to find the address on Poinciana?"

  "I know about where it is. There's a Publix market at the corner of Poinciana and Dixie, so all I have to do is turn there and follow Poinciana till I get to the address."

  "Okay, then, move out. And come straight back here when you finish trying the opener."

  Gonzalez hadn't been promoted to detective-investigator because he had earned it. He had been promoted after only one year of patrol duty in Liberty City because he had a degree in economics from Florida International University. Gonzalez had a poor sense of direction and often got lost in Miami, even though he had lived in the city for the last ten of his twenty-five years. Hoke almost always found it necessary to brief him about directions before he sent him out of the office to do legwork. On the other hand, Gonzalez was excellent with figures and had saved both Ellita and Hoke money when he had prepared their income tax returns for them.

  Hoke hadn't realized how much he had depended upon Ellita for detail work until she was no longer his partner. Gonzalez was barely adequate at best, if he was told exactly what to do. He had no initiative, and Hoke had already asked Brownley for a replacement for Gonzalez at the earliest opportunity. But the Homicide Division was shorthanded, after three recent suspensions and several resignations, and it was unlikely that Gonzalez would be replaced.