by Carl Hiaasen
“Sparky was a Baptist, and the police are calling it a homicide.”
“They’ve been wrong before.”
Ricky Bloodworth was not one of Dr. Allen’s favorite newspaper reporters. Dr. Allen regarded him as charmless and arrogant, There had been times, when the prospect of a front-page story loomed, that Dr. Allen could have sworn he saw flecks of foam on Bloodworth’s lips.
Now the coroner listened to Bloodworth’s typing on the end of the phone line, and wondered how badly his quotes were being mangled.
“Ricky,” he said impatiently. “The victim’s wrists showed ligature marks—”
“Any ten-year-old can tie himself up.”
“And stuff himself in a suitcase?”
The typing got faster.
“The victim was already deceased when he was placed in the suitcase,” Dr. Allen said. “Is there anything else?”
“What about the oil? One of the cops said the body was coated with oil.”
“Not oil,” Dr. Allen said. “A combination of benzophenone, stearic acids, and lanolin.”
“What’s that?”
“Suntan lotion,” the coroner said. “With coconut butter.”
Ricky Bloodworth was hammering away on his video terminal when he sensed a presence behind him. He turned slightly, and caught sight of Skip Wiley’s bobbing face. Even with a two-day stubble it was a striking visage: long, brown, and rugged-looking; a genetic marvel, every feature plagiarized from disparate ancestors. The cheekbones were high and sculptured, the nose pencil-straight but rather long and flat, the mouth upturned with little commas on each cheek, and the eyes disarming—small and keen, the color of strong coffee; full of mirth and something else. Skip Wiley was thirty-seven years old but he had the eyes of an old Gypsy.
It made Bloodworth abnormally edgy and insecure when Skip Wiley read over his shoulder. Wiley wrote a daily column for the Sun and probably was the best-known journalist in Miami. Undeniably he was a gifted writer, but around the newsroom he was regarded as a strange and unpredictable character. Wiley’s behavior had lately become so odd that younger reporters who once sought his counsel were now fearful of his ravings, and they avoided him.
“Coconut butter?” Wiley said gleefully. “And no legs!”
“Skip, please.”
Wiley rolled up a chair. “I think you should lead with the coconut butter.”
Bloodworth felt his hands go damp.
Wiley said, “This is awful, Ricky: ‘Friends and colleagues of B. D. Harper expressed grief and outrage Tuesday ...’ Jesus Christ, who cares? Give them coconut oil!”
“It’s a second day lead, Skip—”
“Here we go again, Mr. Journalism School.” Wiley was gnawing his lower lip, a habit manifested only when he composed a news story. “You got some good details in here. The red Royal Tourister. The black Ray-Bans. That’s good, Ricky. Why don’t you toss out the rest of this shit and move the juicy stuff up top? Do your readers a favor, for once. Don’t make ’em go on a scavenger hunt for the goodies.”
Bloodworth was getting queasy. He wanted to defend himself, but it was lunacy to argue with Wiley.
“Maybe later, Skip. Right now I’m jammed up for the first edition.”
Wiley jabbed a pencil at the video screen, which displayed Bloodworth’s story in luminous green text. “Brutal? That’s not the adjective you want. When I think of brutal I think of chain saws, ice picks, ax handles. Not rubber alligators. No, that’s mysterious, wouldn’t you say?”
“How about bizarre?”
“A bit overworked these days, but not bad. When’s the last time you used bizarre?”
“I don’t recall, Skip.”
“Try last week, in that story about the Jacuzzi killing in Hialeah. Remember? So it’s too early to use bizarre again. I think mysterious is the ticket.”
“Whatever you say, Skip.”
Wiley was boggling, when he wanted to be.
“What’s your theory, Ricky?”
“Some sex thing, I guess. Sparky rents himself a bimbo, dresses up in this goofy outfit—”
“Perhaps a little S-and-M?”
“Yeah. Things go too far, he gags on the rubber alligator, the girl panics and calls for help. The muscle arrives, hacks up Sparky, crams the torso into the suitcase, and heaves it into Biscayne Bay. The goons grab the girl and take off in Sparky’s car.”
Wiley eyed him. “So you don’t believe it’s murder?”
“Accidental homicide. That’s my prediction.” Bloodworth was starting to relax. Wiley was rocking the chair, a look of amusement on his face. Bloodworth noticed that Wiley’s long choppy mane was starting to show gray among the blond.
Bloodworth said, a little more confidently, “I think Harper’s death was a freak accident. I think the girl will come forward before too long, and that’ll be the end of it.”
Wiley chuckled. “Well, it’s a damn good yarn.” He stood up and pinched Ricky’s shoulder affectionately. “But I don’t have to tell you how to hit the hype button, do I?”
For the first edition, Ricky Bloodworth moved the paragraph about the coconut oil higher in the story, and changed the word brutal to mysterious in the lead.
The rest of the afternoon Bloodworth spent on the phone, gathering mawkish quotes about Sparky Harper, who seemed venerated by everyone except his former wives. As for blood relatives, the best Bloodworth could scrounge up was a grown son, a lawyer in Marco Island, who said of his father:
“He was a dreamer, and he honestly meant well.”
Not exactly a tearjerker, but Bloodworth stuck it in the story anyway.
After finishing, he reread the piece once more. It had a nice flow, he thought, and the tone graduated smoothly: shock first, then outrage and, finally, sorrow.
It’s good, a page-one contender, Bloodworth told himself as he walked down to the Coke machine.
While he was away, Skip Wiley crept up and snatched the printout of the story off his desk. He was pretending to mark it up with a blue pencil when Bloodworth came back.
“What now, Skip?”
“Your lead’s no good.”
“Come on, I told you—”
“Hey, Ace, it’s not a second-day story anymore. Something broke while you were diddling around. News, they call it. Check with the police desk, you’ll see.”
“What are you talking about?”
Wiley grinned as he tossed the pages into Ricky Bloodworth’s lap. “The cops caught the guy,” he said. “Ten minutes ago.”
3
Brian Keyes slouched on a worn bench in the lobby of the Dade County jail, waiting to see the creep the cops just caught. Keyes looked at his wristwatch and muttered. Twenty minutes. Twenty goddamn minutes since he’d given his name to the dull-eyed sergeant behind the bullet-proof glass.
Keyes had run into this problem before; it had something to do with the way he looked. Although he stood five-ten, a respectable height, he somehow failed to exude the authority so necessary for survival in rough bars, alleys, police stations, jails, and McDonald’s drive-throughs. Keyes was adolescently slender, with blue eyes and a smooth face. He looked younger than his thirty-two years, which, in his line of work, was no particular asset. An ex-girlfriend once said, on her way out the door, that he reminded her of a guy who’d just jumped the wall of a Jesuit seminary. To disguise his boyishness, Brian Keyes had today chosen a brown suit with a finely striped Cardin tie. He was clean-shaven and his straight brown hair was neatly combed. Still, he had a feeling that his overall appearance was inadequate—not slick enough to be a lawyer, not frazzled enough to be a social worker, and not old enough to be a private investigator. Which he actually was.
So the turtle-eyed sergeant ignored him.
Keyes was surrounded by misery. On his left, a rotund Latin woman wailed into an embroidered handkerchief and nibbled on a rosary. “Pobrecito, he’s in yail again.”
On the other side, an anemic-looking teenager with yellow teeth carved an obsce
nity into the bench with a Phillips screwdriver. Keyes studied him neutrally until the kid looked up and snapped, “My brother’s in for agg assault!”
“You must be very proud,” Keyes said.
This place never changed. The hum and clang of the electronic doors were enough to split your skull, but the mayhem in the lobby was worse, worse even than the cell blocks. The lobby was crawling with bitter, bewildered souls, each on the sad trail of a loser. Girlfriends, ex-wives, mothers, brothers, bondsmen, lawyers, pimps, parole officers.
And me, Keyes thought. The public defender’s office had tried to make the case sound interesting, but Keyes figured it had to be a lost cause. There’d be some publicity, which he didn’t need, and decent money, which he did. This was a big-time case, all right. Some nut hacks up the president of the Chamber of Commerce and dumps him in the bay—just what South Florida needed, another grisly murder. Keyes wondered if the dismemberment fad would ever pass.
From the governor on down, everybody had wanted this one solved fast. And the cops had come through.
“Mr. Keyes!” The sergeant’s voice echoed from a cheap speaker in the ceiling.
Keyes signed the log, clipped on a plastic visitor’s badge, and walked through three sets of noisy iron gates. A trusty accompanied him into an elevator that smelled like an NFL locker room. The elevator stopped on the fifth floor.
Ernesto Cabal, alias Little Ernie, alias No-Way José, was sitting disconsolately on the crapper when the trusty opened the cell for Brian Keyes.
Ernesto held out a limp, moist hand. Keyes sat down on a wooden folding chair.
“You speak English?”
“Sure,” Ernesto said. “I been here sixteen years. By here I mean here, dees country.” He pulled up his pants, flushed the john, and stretched out on a steel cot. “They say I kill dees man Harper.”
“That’s what they say.”
“I dint.”
Ernesto was a small fellow, sinewy and tough-looking, except for the eyes. A lot of cons had rabbit eyes, but not this one, Keyes thought. Ernesto’s brown eyes were large and wet. Scared puppy eyes.
Keyes opened his briefcase.
“You a lawyer, Mr. Keyes?”
“Nope. I’m an investigator. I was hired by your lawyers to help you.”
“Yeah?”
“That’s right. ”
“You’re a very young guy to be an investigator,” Ernesto said. “How old? Dirty, dirty-one?”
“Good guess.”
Ernesto sat up. “You any good?”
“No, I’m totally incompetent. A complete moron. Now I’ve got a question for you, chico. Did you do it?”
“I tole you. No.”
“Fine.” Keyes opened a manila file and scanned a pink tissue copy of the arrest report.
Ernesto leaned over for a peek. “I know what that is, man. ”
“Good, then explain it.”
“See, I was driving dees car and the policeman, he pull me over on a routine traffic stop ...”
Oh boy, Keyes thought, routine traffic stop. This guy’s been here before.
“... and told me I’m driving a stolen be-hickle. And the next thin I know I’m in jail and dey got me charged with first-degree murder and robbery and everythin else.”
Keyes asked, “How did you come to be driving a 1984 Oldsmobile Delta 88?”
“I bought it.”
“I see. Ernesto, what do you do for a living?”
“I sell fruit.”
“Oh.”
“Maybe you see me at rush hour. On LeJeune Road. I sell fresh fruit in bags.”
Somewhere down the cell block another prisoner started to bang on the bars and scream that his TV was broken.
Keyes said, “Ernesto, how much does your very best bag of fruit sell for? Top-of-the-line?”
“Mangoes or cassavas?”
“Whatever. The best.”
“Maybe one dollar ... oh, I see what you getting at. Okay, yeah, that’s right, I doan make much money. But I got some great buy on this Oldsmobile. You can’t believe it.”
“Probably not.”
“I got it from a black guy.”
“For?”
“Two hundred bucks.”
Ernesto seemed to sense he was losing ground. “Some buy. I dint believe it either.”
Keyes shrugged. “I didn’t say I didn’t believe you. Now, according to the police, you were arrested on Collins Avenue on Miami Beach. You ran a series of red lights.”
“It was tree in the morning. No one was out.”
“Where did you meet the man who sold you the car?”
“Right dare on Collins. Two nights before I got busted. I met him a few blocks from the Fountain-blow. Dare’s a city parking lot where I hang.”
“The one where you do all your B-and-E’s?”
“Shit, you just like the policeman.”
“I need to know everything, Ernesto, otherwise I can’t help. Okay, so you’re hanging out, breaking into cars and ripping off Blaupunkts, whatever, and up drives this black guy in a new Olds and says, ‘Hey, Emie, wanna buy this baby for two bills?’ That about it?”
“Yeah, ’cept he dint know my name.”
Keyes said, “I don’t suppose you asked the gentleman where he got the car?”
Ernesto laughed—a muskrat mouth, full of small yellow teeth—and shook his head no.
“Don’t suppose you asked his name, either?”
“No, man.”
“And I don’t suppose you’d recognize him if you ever saw him again?”
Ernesto leaned forward and rubbed his chin intently. A great gesture, Keyes thought. Cagney in White Heat.
“I see dis guy somewhere before,” Ernesto said. “I doan know where, but I know the face. Big guy. Big black guy. Gold chain, Carrera frames, nice-looking guy. Arms like this, like a foking boa constripper. Yeah, I’d know him if I saw him again. Sure.”
Keyes said, “You had a remote suspicion that the car was hot, didn’t you?”
Ernesto nodded sheepishly.
“Why didn’t you unload it?”
“I was going to, man. Another day or two it’d be gone bye-bye. But it was such a great car ... aw, you wouldn’t know about thins like that, man. You prolly got a Rolls-Royce or somethin. I never had a nice car like that. I wanted to cruise around for a while, that’s all. I woulda fenced it eventually. ”
Keyes put the file back in the briefcase. He took out a recent photograph of B. D. Harper.
“Ever seen this man, Ernesto?”
“No.” The puppy eyes didn’t even flicker.
“Ever killed anybody?”
“On purpose?”
“On purpose, by accident, any way.”
“No, sir!” Emesto said crisply. “Once I shot a guy in the balls. Want to know why?”
“No thanks. I read all about it on your rap sheet. A personal dispute, I believe.”
“That is right. ”
Keyes rose to leave and called for a guard. Then he thought of something else. “Ernesto,” he said, “do you believe in black magic?”
The little Cuban grinned. “Santeria? Sure. I doan go to those thins, but it be stupid to say I do not believe. My uncle was a santero, a priest. One time he brought a skull and some pennies to my mother’s house. He killed a chicken in the backyard—with his teeth he killed dis chicken—and then dipped the pennies in its blood. Two days later the landlord dropped dead.” Ernesto Cabal made a chopping motion with his hand. “Juss like that.”
“You know what I’m getting at, don’t you?”
“Yes, Mr. Keyes. I never heard of no santero using suntan oil for anythin ... ”
Keyes started to laugh. “Okay, Ernesto. I’ll be in touch.”
“Don’t you forget about me, Mr. Keyes. Dis is a bad place for an innocent man.”
Brian Keyes left the jail and walked around the corner to Metro-Dade police headquarters, another bad place for an innocent man. He shared the elevator with a tall
female patrol officer who did a wonderful job of pretending not to notice him. She got off on the second floor. Keyes went all the way up to Homicide.
Al Garcia greeted him with a grin and a soft punch on the shoulder. “Coffee?”
“Please,” Keyes said. Garcia was much friendlier since Keyes had left the newspaper. In the old days he was like a sphinx; now he’d start yakking and never shut up. Keyes thought it might be different this time around.
“How’s business?” Garcia asked.
“Not great, Al. ”
“Takes time. You only been at it—what?—two years. And there’s plenty of competition in this town.”
No fooling, Keyes thought. He had arrived in Miami in 1979 from a small newspaper in suburban Baltimore. There was nothing original about why he’d left for Florida—a better job, no snow, plenty of sunshine. On his first day at the Miami Sun, Keyes had been assigned the desk next to Skip Wiley—the newsroom equivalent of Parris Island. Keyes covered cops for a while, then courts, then local politics. His reporting had been solid, his writing workmanlike but undistinguished. The editors never questioned his ability, only his stomach.
There were two stories commonly told about Brian Keyes at the Miami Sun. The first happened a year after his arrival, when a fully loaded 727 fireballed down in Florida Bay. Keyes had rented an outboard and sped to the scene, and he’d filed a superb story, full of gripping detail. But they’d damn near had to hospitalize him afterward: for six months Keyes kept hallucinating that burned arms and legs were reaching out from under his bedroom furniture.
The second anecdote was the most well-known. Even Al Garcia knew about Callie Davenport. She was a four-year-old girl who’d been kidnapped from nursery school by a deranged sprinkler repairman. The lunatic had thrown her into a truck, driven out to the Glades, and murdered her. After some deer hunters found the body, Cab Mulcahy, the managing editor, had told Brian Keyes to go interview Callie Davenport’s grief-stricken parents. Keyes had written a real heartbreaker, too, just like the old man wanted. But that same night he’d marched into Mulcahy’s office and quit. When Keyes rushed out of the newsroom, everyone could see he’d been crying. “That young man,” Skip Wiley had said, watching him go, “is too easily horrified to be a great journalist.”
