He had this friend, he said, not family, but close, like a brother, someone he could trust to tell him the God’s honest truth and nothing but. The friend was an occasional business partner of Kevin Shanks. The friend was what they call an “eraser”—he made things go away. “You know what I’m saying?” So when Shanks found himself the victim of an extortion attempt, he called this associate.
Bay said, “So Shanks had some criminal activity he did not want exposed to the public.”
“Alleged activity.”
“Not simply some embarrassing behavior.”
“Correct.”
“Go on.”
“How do I put this?” Open Mike pressed his palms together and brought his hands to his lips. “This woman, Miss X, let’s call her, claimed that Shanks sexually assaulted her in the parking lot of Leo’s, and furthermore claimed to have a witness to said assault. She told Shanks she wanted fifty large or else. Shanks had been in hot water previously and could not afford another legal kerfuffle. But he was not going to pay the bitch a penny. The principle of the thing.”
Bay filled me in. Four years earlier, Shanks had been picking up his son at Bambiland Day Care in Ocean View when he told another little boy to stop running around like a berserker, and the kid said no, and Shanks told the kid to address him as “sir,” and the kid gave him the finger, and Shanks slapped the kid and broke his jaw. All that in front of a teacher, his own terrified kid, and several other parents. At the trial, the judge said that Officer Shanks had led an exemplary life of service for twenty-some years with the exception of this brief error in judgment, and since he was off-duty, though uniformed, he had not violated the public trust.
Open Mike said that when Miss X was not paid, she filed a complaint with EPD and told Shanks she now wanted $75,000, and the meter was running. Open Mike looked at me and nodded. “Nobody likes a shakedown. Am I right?” She also told Shanks her next move would be to hire an attorney and to speak to the press. Internal Affairs, so Open Mike was told, let Shanks know about the complaint, and he decided to put an end to this harassment. Arrangements were made. The friend was on standby at home when he got the call from Shanks, who was circling Miss X’s home in Golden Hills. Shanks told the eraser that his target was sitting there on her front porch with a drink in her hand. “Do it now,” Shanks said.
I said, “Why are you telling us all this?”
Bay said, “Michael owes me quite a bit of money, and this information will lower his vig.”
“Maybe he’s lying.”
“Aren’t you supposed to be able to tell?”
“I ain’t lying,” Open Mike said. “On my mother’s grave. And my friend has no reason to lie.”
Bay told me he’d checked the records on the cell phones and verified the calls. It’s so easy even the cops could do it.
“My friend, however, had a what-do-you-call-it, a dilemma. His wife had not yet returned from Target, and he couldn’t very well leave his one-year-old baby home alone. He’s that kind of father.” Open Mike lifted his eyebrows and nodded. “He kept looking out the blinds, pacing the kitchen, jiggling the fussy baby in his arms. Then Shanks called and wanted to know what was the delay. Anyway, my friend strapped the baby into her car seat, plugged a pacifier in her yap, and off he went. He pulled up right in front of the woman’s house. Shanks, who was parked down the block out of sight, couldn’t believe this. This isn’t how this shit usually goes down. So he calls again and says, ‘Is that a baby I’m hearing?’ My friend saw the woman on the porch. Good-looking, he told me, legs up to here. She stood and put her hand on the doorknob. My friend picked up the baby to quiet her down. That was a good move, it turns out, ’cause Miss X immediately lets down her guard, smiles, and comes down the walk toward them. My friend shifted the baby to his left arm, reached behind him, and drew the gun from his belt and shot Miss X in the face. And off he goes.”
“Jesus Christ,” I said.
Open Mike held up his finger and continued. “Shanks handled the investigation, planted some pot and a throwdown, and made the whole thing look like a drug deal gone bad.” Open Mike looked at Bay. “Are we square?”
“For now.”
I said, “He took the baby?”
Open Mike shrugged. “You gotta do what you gotta do.” He excused himself and stood. He was off to Tropical Racetrack. He looked at Bay and pointed to me. “Tell him the rules.”
Bay said, “You can’t tell your buddy Carlos, any cop, where you heard this.”
“But I can say what I heard?”
“Why would you start that snowball rolling down the hill?”
I said, “Do you suppose Halliday filed a complaint, too?”
“I don’t know, but you did.”
The first person I saw at Almost Home was Avalon’s resolute mom, Gabriela, who told me that Junior Torres had returned to his senses and come back home. She’s in love all over again, she said, and little Avalon is over the moon. Junior doesn’t have a job yet, but he’s looking almost every day.
I knocked. Dad said to come in if I was beautiful. I came in anyway. I was delivering his dry cleaning from Mar-Flo—a brown plaid sport coat and a pair of brown flannel slacks. Tonight was Prom Night at Almost Home. A few dozen students from South Everglades High were coming to dance with the seniors. I hung the garments on the back of the closet door and joined Dad at the table. He crumbled some oyster crackers into his Lipton tea. He’d already buttered his brick of shredded wheat and now he poured the kettled hot water over it. He said, “I’m planning on getting me some tonight.”
“Some what?”
“I forget what you call it.” He put the kettle back on the stove. He said, “What you get when you’re with your best gal in the backseat of her mother’s Chevy out at Lost Lake.”
When I turned back, Dad held a pistol in his hand, the barrel pressed against his temple. He looked at me and smiled.
“Put it down, Dad. What the hell are you doing?” I tried to exude an aura of tranquillity. I did not want him getting jumpy all of a sudden. I held my breath and then held out my hand. I said, “Give me the gun, okay?” He pulled the trigger. I shut my eyes. I heard a snap, not the explosion I was expecting. I opened my eyes. He pointed the cap pistol at my heart and fired. I leaned back against the stove. “You son of a bitch.”
He laughed. “I ain’t had such dadburned fun since the mule kicked me in the head.” He was being Myles Stone, a character he’d based on Gabby Hayes. Long before he was married and I was born, before the shoe company job, Dad had a brief season of celebrity as a sidekick to Tex Comstock on early TV at WBZ in Boston. Myles was Tex’s grizzle-pated partner until Tex decided he wanted the limelight to himself. The gun was a prop Dad used on the show. Every time he fired a warning shot over the heads of the nasty varmints, a rubber chicken fell from the sky.
I said, “That wasn’t funny.”
“If I wanted to kill myself, I wouldn’t wait for you to show up.” He crunched his shredded wheat.
I told Sinead I was here to meet District Attorney Millard. She picked up a menu, smiled, and asked me to follow her. I reminded her that we had met the other night.
“I meet so many people.”
“You told me you were from Saint Helena.”
“And you believed me?”
“I did.”
“That’s sweet.”
“You’re not?”
I saw Linda, the woman scorned by Kim Swain, at the bar, shaking her hair, stirring her drink, sitting in the middle of a cluster of standing Ed Hardys.
I sat. Millard raised an eyebrow, lowered his eyelids. He had a secret, I could see, and he was eager to tell me all about whatever it was. He’d ordered us the fois gras appetizer; he hoped I didn’t mind. I said, “What’s going on?”
He took a half dozen photos from his shirt pocket and handed them to me. They had been taken at Mickey’s three-day wedding reception at Mar-a-Lago. There was Mickey and the governor; Mickey and the Donald; Mickey
, his bride, and the famous stuttering country singer; Mickey and the Miami Heat backcourt; Mickey and a four-star general; Mickey and Malacoda.
The redoubtable Thatcher arrived with our appetizer. I ordered an Innis & Gunn. Millard checked his watch. “We have a surprise party planned for Mr. Pfeiffer.” He turned to the bar. One of the popinjays nodded and returned his attention to Linda. Linda looked our way, smiled, and winked. Millard nodded.
I said, “You know Linda?”
“Lacey.”
“Lacey?” I looked at Sinead, who was chatting up a gray-haired gentleman in a navy blue linen suit, probably telling him about her home in Antigua. Does anyone tell the truth anymore? “What’s Lacey’s story?”
“We had a little fling some time ago.”
“Is she a cop?”
“She likes lawyers.”
“She likes them married, I’m guessing.”
“She likes their money.”
I told him I heard the Internal Affairs has been known to leak the news of complaints and investigations. He said it’s always a crapshoot with IA. He told me that Mickey owned homes in Florida—two in New River, one in Tallahassee—in Manhattan, Maine, Morocco, and one on Grand Cayman. “What better occupation for a criminal than the law?”
Thatcher arrived with my beer. Millard said, “The law is useful. That’s why Mickey is a lawyer. He knows the rules of the game.” He cut into his fois gras. “The law does not serve justice. The law serves those who know it and understand it.” He told me that the Indian tribe and the developer had settled their dispute. The Calusa burial ground would be preserved.
“Justice,” I said.
“And a casino will be built over and around it.” Millard checked his watch. He told me about Mickey’s selling court settlements, about his forging court orders. He told me that Mickey’s law partner was murdered by his CFO’s ex-husband.”
“You can’t make this stuff up.”
“We’re here to bust him. He’s expected momentarily.”
“How did he think he could get away with this?”
“I expect he’ll sing like a canary.”
“Maybe we’ll learn about Halliday.”
Millard excused himself and put in a call to the sheriff. “What’s the delay?” He listened and then ended the call.
“What is it?”
“He’s putting in a call to your friend Shanks, who was escorting Mickey here.”
When the sheriff had called back and Millard had listened and hung up, he folded his napkin, shook his head, and looked toward the bar. One of the Ed Hardys smiled. “He’s gone.”
“Where?”
“Vanished.”
17
Aldore LaFlamme, a competitive bass fisherman, with a second-place trophy in the Palatka Citrus Slam to prove it, whose sixteen-foot Diamondback airboat cost him considerably more than his modular home, was out in the Everglades just east of the Miccosukee Reservation near dawn, poaching alligators out of season. He’d already snagged and dispatched an eleven-foot bull with a bangstick when he spotted what he thought might be an engorged Burmese python in the sawgrass and shone his searchlight on it and saw a naked human body. He poked at it with his gaff and found it to be headless, handless, bloated, and blue. To Aldore’s credit, he got right on the radio and reported what he’d found to the authorities.
While he waited for the ESO to arrive, he noosed his gator around its forelegs and eased him off the deck and into the water. This way maybe the cops wouldn’t notice. Of course, they’d have to be blind, what with the tail afloat like it was. He examined the male human body and the damage inflicted. He got out his Shakespeare rod and spinner bait and began fishing. He thought about the story he’d tell his pals later that night at Betty’s Starlight Lounge and about how he’d tell it. He’d mention the stillness in the air, the ripe smell of the swamp, and the ratchety call of a snail kite. He’d describe the slices carved into the victim’s shoulders, forearms, and wrists, how the butchering had to have been done with a machete. He’d pause right there to give them all a solemn moment to consider the swift tarnished steel blade, the gush and splash of blood, the damp, fatty business oozing out from the parted skin, the thud of the bone below, resisting. You’re bound to think, he would say, that drugs were involved, but ask yourself, would a cartel’s bagmen bother with a disposal twenty minutes out into the Everglades? Think about it. Those jamokes are anonymous and untouchable. No, the guys that clipped this swamp hog did not want the victim ID’d because one of those missing fingers would point right to them. Aldore’s theory, which he would expound upon after buying the sparse house a round, was that a betrayal of friendship was involved here. That betrayal might have taken many forms: marital infidelity, financial shenanigans, judicial testimony, slander—you name it. The kind of savagery Aldore had seen chilling evidence of required a fury that only intimacy dishonored could incite. Remember, you’re losing someone dear and close to you, close enough to have stabbed you in the back. Aldore felt a nibble on the line and then nothing. Damn tilapia, he thought. He wondered if he’d be on the News at Noon, and he listened for the whoop of the approaching News 10 chopper.
The deputies released Aldore after getting his statement and information. He asked them if he should stick close to town. One of the deputies said, Where else would you go? Aldore said, To be available for questioning, I mean. We know where to find you, the deputy said. They confiscated his alligator and delivered it to a butcher they knew in Colahatchee. Then they delivered the mutilated corpse to Everglades General Hospital. The next day, the deputies got a call from the butcher.
“Guess what I found in the gator’s belly?”
“A pair of hands?”
“A BlackBerry.”
“For real?”
“He swallowed it recently, so it’s likely the owner was present at the scene of the dumping.”
“We’ll pick it up with the meat.”
“I hit redial, and the fellow who answered said, ‘I told you never to call here, douche bag,’ and hung up.”
“Rude.”
On the drive out to Fat Willie’s Fish Camp to sell the alligator meat, the deputies read through the contact list on the phone and recognized some of the names: lawyers, cops, and criminals. They learned that the phone belonged to Pancho Phinn, which turned out to be a phony name. An interesting name, but a fabrication nonetheless, a lie.
Dad and I had just sat down in our booth with our early-bird dinners at Svensen’s Buffeteria when Carlos called with some news. A couple of kids looking for a secluded spot along the barge canal to shoot their heroin had discovered Mickey Pfeiffer’s severed head in a sealed Tupperware bowl. Mickey had taken a machete to the face before, during, or after the decapitation. The head matched the body found in the Everglades, of course. By then the ’Glades in west Everglades County had been burning out of control for two days, so it’s fortunate that they found the body when they did. Of course, if you have the head, that’s really all you need.
I watched Dad scoop a mound of sweet-and-sour brisket into a plastic Ziploc bag. I put on my incredulous face and shrugged, like, What-the-hell-are-you-doing? Carlos said there was no lack of suspects. Mickey had stolen money from the mob, from the Russians, from an Israeli defense organization, from the school board, from the Hadassah, from a host of banking CEOs, and from thousands of small investors. The thing about running a Ponzi scheme is if you’re not going to go to jail, you have to keep at it. And then Carlos told me that Kevin Shanks had been missing in action for a week.
I dropped some Optivar into my stinging eyes. Dad returned from his second pass at the buffet, this time with coconut fried chicken tenders and broccoli florets. My swiss steak was not “braised to tender perfection” as advertised. Not even close. I should have gotten seafood, but the salmon patties looked forlorn, and you would need a circular saw to cut through the immiserated parmesan-crusted mystery fish. Why did we come here? I said, “Dad, it’s all you can eat, not all yo
u can take.”
He said, “It’s expected. We all do it. It’s the cost of doing business in Seniorville.”
“How are you going to get it out of the restaurant?”
“Big pockets.”
I bit into my savorless chess pie. Dad told me that he had put his pistol back in the trunk with his hat and his boots. I hadn’t asked about it.
“Dad, do you know where we are right now?”
“Melancholy, baby.”
“We’re at Svensen’s Buffeteria.”
“I went to high school with a guy named Buff Ateria.”
The Everglades fire was now so intense that in places where the grass had burned out, the ground was now on fire, all that dry and decayed organic matter going up in flames. You could write your name or your sweetheart’s name in the layer of ash on the plastic café tables on the patio outside the Wayside. Bay and I decided to sit inside where we could breathe. The bartender, Helen Foley—her dad, Doody, owned the place—brought us our drafts and woke up Dusty Boswell, who was napping at the next table, his head up against the wall beneath last year’s Marlins schedule. Dusty had the word NO tattooed on his right eyelid, the word hope,on the left. Helen said, Let’s go, Dusty. This ain’t the Sleep-It-Off Motel. Dusty opened his right eye and nodded. He smacked his lips, wiped his mouth, opened the left eye, and tried to focus on Helen. He looked over at the two of us and shook his head. He stood and patted his trouser pockets. He was unzipped. Dusty took a deep and revitalizing breath and shuffled off to the door, running a hand through his tousled hair. He stared out at the parking lot, held the doorjamb with two hands, and stepped off into the night.
Bay told me that he’d learned that Marlena was more addicted to painkillers than he had realized. That burn she’d gotten on her arm at the Universe was intentional and self-inflicted. Her practice was to cut or burn herself and then head off to several of Everglades County’s three hundred pain clinics for prescriptive analgesia. She’d gone through the bottle of sleeping pills and the bottle of Percocets in his medicine cabinet before he noticed. He’d gotten Marlena into a residential rehab program, but he wasn’t sure if she’d stay. He’d gone to a couple of group meetings with Marlena at Discovery House and was not encouraged by what he’d witnessed.
No Regrets, Coyote Page 17
