STAYING ALIVE (Book Three of The Miami Crime Trilogy)

by Don Donovan

  "Sign this," she said. He did and she slid the check into a zipped compartment of her purse.

  They left the bank and walked back to the parking lot. Standing by her car, she pulled an envelope from her purse and gave it to Perry. He looked inside. Five hundred dollars, as promised.

  "Thank you, Miss López," Perry said.

  Alicia gave him a smile. "Thank you for your service, Perry. Maybe we'll do it again some day."

  Perry walked away while Alicia, Amy, and Jimmy got into the Bentley and headed for the next bank.

  ≈ ≈ ≈

  Four banks and four more Perry Mazinskys later, all one million eighty thousand dollars had been placed on deposit. Each of the Perry Mazinskys had signed blank checks and now Alicia filled them out.

  Each check was made out to Caribbean-American Automotive LLC, in the amount of two hundred sixteen thousand dollars. Outside the last bank, Alicia turned to Jimmy and said, "These bank drafts will have cleared by the weekend, but Monday is Labor Day, so meet me back at Tropical Bank on Tuesday, that's September fourth, for the next step." Jimmy nodded blankly.

  She took him back to his car at the Croydon, then she and Amy hurried back to the condo. Amy was in real need of disciplining before Alicia went home to Nick and Francesca.

  30

  Silvana

  Miami, Florida

  Monday, August 27, 2012

  12:15 PM

  VARGAS AND ACEVEDO CAUGHT SILVANA just as she was about to go to lunch. She had her copy of LA Confidential under her arm and was looking forward to it. She had left off where Dudley Smith had this out-of-town wop wiseguy cuffed to a chair and Bud White was pounding the piss out of him. White was her kind of cop, no doubt about it, and for that matter, so was Smith. Get it done, no matter what, and don't take any shit from dirtbag criminals. Smith told him to go home, to go back to New Jersey or wherever and tell the Italians to forget about Los Angeles.

  She had been thinking about LA Confidential for a while now, ever since she got past the first eighty or a hundred pages. Once she got into the rhythm of the story, of James Ellroy's language, of the hard-bitten characters, she could step back and look at the book as a whole. This was all back in the early 1950s when this story took place, when cops didn't have to worry about civil rights or any of that shit. They knew who the bad guys were and they went after them with all they had, with blunt force — unless they were being paid off, of course.

  She supposed it must have been like that in Miami back then, too, and she wished it were like that today. Where the good guys had nothing to worry about and the bad guys better look over their shoulders.

  Back to the moment: "What is it, Bobby?" she asked.

  "Silvi, we turned Laura Lee Sánchez's life upside down and can't find any connection to that triple homicide next door to her house."

  "Nothing? Nothing at all?"

  "We checked every neighbor on the street. Nobody ever saw her fraternizing with or even speaking to Chicho Segura, who lived in the house. We talked to her former ballet colleagues. None of them ever heard of Segura. Or either of the other two who were killed that night. We showed them photos. We got blank stares."

  Acevedo chimed in. "Segura had a thick jacket with us. So did Andrés Borraga, the other male victim. The female, a teenager, had no record. We combed every paper in Segura's and Borraga's jackets. Laura Lee Sánchez's name never came up. Neither did Anton Kovalenko. No mention of ballet, either."

  "What about Fuzzy?" Silvana said. "Did you check him out?"

  Vargas said, "We did. Same result. Nothing. Nada."

  "How about her phone records?" Silvana said.

  "She had a land line until about six months ago. She's had a cell phone for years. Still has it. No calls whatsoever to any of the vics. No calls to the late Bob Harvey, either, whose wife was the teenage girl's aunt."

  Silvana recalled Harvey, big shot county commissioner, who leaned hard on the department to find the killer of his wife's favorite niece, druggie slut that she was. Turns out he got his about five months ago, two in the head in a cheap whore motel.

  "Not only that," Acevedo said, "she didn't make any calls to anyone remotely connected to the vics. Nobody she called had a criminal record, the commercial places she called were ordinary — doctor's office, pharmacy, taxicabs, that kind of thing. That's from both her landline and cell phone. And … we checked Facebook and the other social media. She's active on Facebook, but we ran an exhaustive check and none of her posts or her friends are connected with any of this. She's on Twitter, too, but she doesn't tweet much. Very few followers."

  Vargas: "She didn't make any big bank deposits after the triple homicide, either. Nothing unusual all year, in fact."

  Acevedo added, "We looked deep into Anton Kovalenko, too. The ballet dancer. Not a single link to the Tenth Avenue vics. No criminal record, no gambling or dope problem. Lived a pretty clean life. Had a string of gay lovers, but most of those male ballet guys are gay anyway, so that's no scandal, nothing for him to be afraid of."

  Silvana said, "That all?"

  "Well, not exactly," Acevedo said. "Anton's brother Vitali was killed in Anton's apartment over in Miami Beach on 16 August. Just five days before Anton was hit. Shot twice in the chest with a .45 semi-auto. And get this. According to the Miami Beach PD, Vitali was a top enforcer for the Russian mob, sent down here from Brighton Beach earlier in the summer."

  Leaning way forward in her chair, Silvana said, "Do they know what he was doing down here?"

  Acevedo shook his head. "Negative. But usually, whenever the Russians send one of their top guys anywhere, it's either to clean up some messy shit or muscle in on someone else's business."

  Silvana took all this in. It added up to a big spotless coincidence, Laura Lee Sánchez living next door to Chicho Segura on his last night on earth, yet with no connection at all. Then, the guy who dropped her on stage, breaking her back, gets two shots in the head, point blank. Then, his brother the gangster gets whacked right before he does. There was a stink around the whole thing, and sweet Miss Sánchez in her fucking wheelchair was right in the middle of it.

  Acevedo said, "One other thing, Lieutenant. She didn't call 911 that night, the night of the triple homicide next door. Kind of unusual, I thought. Every house on Northwest Tenth Avenue within earshot made the call around four AM that night. Every house but hers."

  Now Silvana really didn't like it. "Let's all go out there and have another talk with Miss Sánchez."

  ≈ ≈ ≈

  Rain had started to fall by the time they reached Little Havana. Not hard, but not cool, either. The temperature was still high and the air felt heavy going into Silvana's lungs when she stepped out of the car in front of Laura Lee's home. She looked to the left and saw the house in which Chicho Segura and his comrades took their final breaths. Now, as then, it looked quite ordinary. Just another house on a hot, sleepy street in Miami.

  The door opened after the first rap. Laura Lee in her wheelchair, looking thin and breakable, invited them in. Silvana, Vargas, and Acevedo all entered and sat on the couch. They refused her offer of coffee.

  "Miss Sánchez," Silvana said, "I'm Lieutenant Machado. I've accompanied Sergeant Vargas and Detective Acevedo to your home today because there are some questions I'd like to ask you, you know, woman to woman."

  Laura Lee seemed to understand and said, "Of course, Lieutenant. How can I help?"

  "Did Anton Kovalenko have any reason to dislike you? Anything you might have said to him? An offhand comment? Anything at all?"

  Laura Lee gave it some thought. Then: "No. Nothing I can think of."

  "Maybe professional jealousy? Something like that?"

  A little squirm in the wheelchair. Silvana caught it. Then she said, "No, Lieutenant. We were on good terms professionally. Neither one of us envied the other. He was a star in his own right, you know. The thing you should know is male and female dancers always do gender-specific roles in ballet. So any role I got would never
have been at his expense. He was never eligible for them. And vice versa."

  "Did he ever give you any reason to dislike him?"

  "Absolutely not. We were friends. And treated each other with the highest level of professional respect."

  "What about his brother? Vitali Kovalenko. Were you acquainted with him?"

  "I never met him. Anton spoke of him on rare occasion. I think he said he was some kind of criminal or something. I do know Anton was not exactly proud of him."

  Vargas wrote all this down. Then he said, "You're aware Vitali Kovalenko was shot and killed just a few days before Anton?"

  "Yes. I remember reading about it in the Miami Herald."

  Silvana took a deep breath and let it out. She said, "Now, Miss Sánchez, I want to go back to the night of June 25, 2011."

  "2011?" Laura Lee said.

  "Yes. Last year. On that night, you may remember there were shots fired in the house next door. Three people were killed."

  "Oh, yes," she said, nearly gasping for effect. "I do remember that. It was terrible. Police cars and ambulances and everything, all the way to the next morning."

  "Did you hear the shots yourself?" Silvana said.

  "I did. I couldn't sleep that night. The pain, you know. Excruciating. From all this." Her gesture suggested the wheelchair and her place in it. "I had gotten up and had taken some medication when I heard the gunfire. So many shots!"

  Silvana moved over toward the front window. She looked through it at the gently falling rain. "I see you have a pretty good view of the street. Did you see anything that night? During the shooting? Afterward? Anyone leaving?"

  "No. No. I didn't see anything."

  Silvana had heard this see-no-evil pretense before. Doesn't this bitch know I'm a cop? she thought. She doesn't think I've seen people like her in every ghetto in Miami? People who have vital information but won't talk to cops.

  "Are you sure, Miss Sánchez? Think very carefully. It's been over a year now."

  Laura Lee appeared to contemplate it. "No. Nothing. I saw nothing, Lieutenant. I didn't go to the window."

  Silvana said, "Could you tell us … why you didn't call 911 that night? You hear gunfire — as a matter of fact, there was a shotgun involved, which is an extremely loud weapon — coming from the house next door, and you don't call the police. Why not?"

  "I-I told you, I had just taken my medication for the pain. It was in the process of putting me under. I knew I couldn't have been the only one to hear the shots. Someone else would surely call, I thought."

  "Your medication was in the process of 'putting you under'," Silvana said. "Yet you say you saw all the police vehicles and ambulances outside. They didn't arrive for at least twenty, thirty minutes after the 911 calls were made."

  Laura Lee showed surprise. "Why, I thought they responded right away! I didn't know it took that long."

  "One car responded right away. Two patrolmen. When they saw what had happened, they called it in to homicide. Also to the coroner's office. That's where the delay came in. So I repeat, how did you see all that activity if you were being put to sleep by prescription narcotics?"

  "I … I don't know, Lieutenant. I really don't remember how it happened. I just know I saw all those cars out front and all the police and the yellow tape and everything."

  "How long does it ordinarily take for that medication to do its job? You know, kill the pain, put you to sleep."

  "W-well, normally … oh, I don't know. It can vary, depending on how much I take."

  "How much did you take that night?"

  Laura Lee said, "I don't remember. But it couldn't have been much if I was still awake a half an hour later."

  "Yet you said the pain was 'excruciating', was how you put it. Wouldn't you want something more than a mild dose of medicine? Something that will do the job fast?"

  "Lieutenant, I'm sorry. I just don't remember the exact dosage I took that night. One thing is for certain, though. I don't like to take full doses too often because of the habit-forming nature of the drugs. And because they're so expensive, you know."

  Silvana knew this was the end of the interview. But she also knew the Sánchez woman knew her story was not going over.

  "All right, Miss Sánchez. We'll be going now. Thank you for your time."

  The three cops stepped out into the rainy afternoon and headed for their car.

  Vargas said, "You want to put a tail on her, Silvi?"

  "I'd love to," Silvana replied, "but we don't really have enough on her to commit the resources. We'll need a lot more than just our suspicions. But I'm telling you, I still don't like this girl or her story. Not one fucking bit."

  31

  Jimmy

  Hialeah, Florida

  Monday, August 27, 2012

  1:10 PM

  LOLITA'S LIQUORS WAS UNUSUALLY CROWDED. Jimmy couldn't figure it out as he walked in. People in every aisle, some with shopping carts, filling them up with bottles of spirits and wine, and cases of beer as well. Monday Night Football didn't start for a couple of weeks yet, so there was no accounting for this little rush.

  He moved quickly through the store back to Maxie's office. Juano stepped aside and let him enter. Maxie sat at his desk with what could only be a stripper seated on his lap, wiggling around and running a fake fingernail across his cheek.

  Her hair was bottle platinum, and not done very creatively. Way too much mascara around the eyes, pink lipstick covering a thick, nasty mouth. Tits clearly not her own, close to popping out of her halter top. Her fake tan told Jimmy she didn't live anywhere near a beach or even a swimming pool. A flat stomach rose up out of fringed shorts. Jimmy couldn't see her shoes, since she was behind the desk, but he figured they were nothing to get excited over. Not for him, anyway. Maxie? Well …

  Maxie poked around her cleavage, chuckling and sticking a fat finger down between her tits. He said, "What is it, Jimmy? What do you want?"

  "We need to talk. Privately."

  Maxie shoved his mustached mouth into the girl's cleavage, made some kind of noise, then stood her up on her feet. "Okay, honey. Gotta do some business. I'll see you tonight." He spanked her butt.

  The girl squealed approval and walked away from him toward the door.

  When she was gone, Jimmy pulled up a chair and sat in front of the big man's desk. "Okay," Maxie said. "What's up?"

  "We found Wilfredo Zayas."

  "Ahhhh, good work, my boy. Muy buen trabajo."

  Jimmy said, "Yeah, but it's not what you think. He swears he didn't kill Raúl."

  Maxie waved it off. "Pffuh. Of course he's gonna say that. They all say they didn't do it right before you blow their fucking heads off."

  "I didn't blow his head off, Maxie," Jimmy said. "I believe him."

  Maxie slapped the desk with his palms and raised his voice. "What? You believe that fucking nigger faggot? What is this, are you drunk?" A few beads of sweat glistened on his forehead and over his mustache.

  Jimmy put his hands out to calm him down. "Listen to me, Maxie. I believe him. He says a Russian did it. Think about it. He and Raúl were about the same size, both Cuban. Plus it was dark in the room. The Russian saw Raúl in the doorway and figured it was Wilfredo, and he started blasting. Besides, Wilfredo can prove he was nowhere near the Dobbs Hotel that night."

  "You're telling me that motherfu —"

  "Maxie, please. Please listen. I was there, at the Dobbs. I assumed it was Wilfredo doing the shooting because it was his room. I figured he saw the door was ajar and he eased it open, then fired. I never really saw him. All I saw from the top of the staircase was the back of a guy running through the small lobby for the front door of the hotel. I had him in my vision for two or three seconds, max. By the time I got outside, he was gone."

  Maxie chewed on this. He looked like he wanted to kill somebody. Jimmy could feel the big man's blood pressure going through the roof. He thought Maxie's heart might explode right then and there.

  "Where is he now?"


  "Flaco's got him in a safe house. Tied up. Had him since last night."

  "You check out his alibi?"

  Jimmy nodded. "Tighter than two coats of paint."

  Maxie exhaled and cursed.

  Jimmy said, "What about the deal from last Wednesday? Have they approved it in Colombia yet?"

  "Not yet," Maxie said. "We haven't heard from the Russians, either. Don Rafael is supposed to call me when they approve the whole thing. Then, if the Russians okay it, we get together again and divide up territories in Greater Miami."

  "If they approve the deal, we can't let on about this. We have to stick with our original claim, that it was Wilfredo. If we let on the Russian killed Raúl after all, they'll say we hit Kovalenko in return, and the war will be on."

  "We may have a war on our hands anyway," Maxie said.

  "Wh-what do you mean?"

  "I hear they have been moving in on us, on our street operations. In East Hialeah."

  Jimmy tried to brush it off. "Oh, that. I took care of that the other night. I didn't want to bother you with it."

  Maxie's eyes narrowed. "How did you take care of it, Jimmy?"

  "Well, I … I replaced our dealer. He wasn't making any money for us anyway. It was like you said in that meeting with Don Rafael. You said we try to avoid war with the Russians."

  "You replaced our dealer. And just what makes you think the new dealer will be able to stand up to the Russians?"

  "I was going to have a —"

  "To the Russians who are moving in to East Hialeah!"

  "Maxie, it's not what you're thinking. It's —"

  "In Hialeah! Our fucking town!"

  Jimmy fell silent. He had no reply. Maxie had him by the balls. He could only hope he still had them when he walked out of here. If he walked out of here.

  "First, you let Zayas go," Maxie said. "Now this."