Nobody Lives Forever

by Edna Buchanan

  Talking to the detectives entitled him to special food, special privileges and a celebrity of sorts. He intended to milk it for as long as he could.

  “So you know Morningside, the Roads section, Allapattah, and you’ve been over there around the causeway islands?” Simmons said casually.

  “Yeah, I been over to Sam Remo, nice neighborhood.”

  Rick felt a chill in his stomach, thinking of Laurel, alone at night. His face remained frozen in a half-smile. Rapport with the rapist was important.

  “Did you assault anybody over there?” Simmons asked.

  “Nah, I just looked around.”

  “What brought you there?”

  “Some broad, a little dark-haired girl, nice ass. I saw her in a bookstore at the mall a couple times. She was driving one of those small Japanese cars. I followed her over to the island, thought she lived there, but I guess she was just visiting. I went by a few times after that. No sign of her car and she wasn’t around, just an older couple.”

  “How could you tell she wasn’t there?”

  “Parked up by the causeway and walked around in my jogging clothes.”

  “Which side of the island was that?”

  “The south side, a pink house with some kind of birdbath out front on the lawn.”

  Christie, Rick thought. He knew her, knew the house. She’d grown up on the island, too, like Rob Thorne. She was in college at Gainesville, probably in summer session now. Smart as a whip, determined to get through in three years. He’d last seen her home at spring break.

  “When was that?” Simmons said.

  “I don’t know, months ago, maybe April.”

  “When were you on the island last?” Simmons said.

  “That was it. Maybe I rode one more time in June to see if her car was there, but it wasn’t.”

  Thank God, Rick thought, his face revealing nothing.

  Simmons nodded slightly to Rick, handing the interview over to him at that point.

  “What about last week?” he asked the rapist. “Say Friday night, Saturday morning. You went over to the island that night too, didn’t you?”

  “San Remo? Nope.” The rapist lit another cigarette and watched the blue smoke as he slowly exhaled. “Haven’t been in that neighborhood for a couple of months.” He looked amused. “Why, some broad say I been there?”

  “You weren’t walking around? On the north side of the island that night, maybe four or four-fifteen A.M.? Carrying a gun?”

  Something changed in the rapist’s eyes. He glanced over at Simmons. The rape squad detective was leaning back in his chair listening intently and did not seem about to speak up for him.

  “What is it with you guys? This is straight arrow. I haven’t been over there in months. I got no reason to lie.” He looked at Simmons again. “You been telling me what a good memory I got. If I’d been there, I’d remember. And I told you before, I got nothing to do with guns. Don’t like them.”

  “Come on, pal,” Jim said. “You’ve been pretty up front until now. Why not tell us about the shooting?”

  “Shooting!” The rapist shot out of his chair so fast that it fell over backwards. “What the fuck you talking about?”

  Rick ignored the outburst. “You were prowling the island,” he said calmly, “looking for a victim, you got chased by a neighbor and you shot him.”

  “Why don’t you just tell us about it?” Jim said soothingly. “Maybe it wasn’t your fault. He was a big guy. Did he come at you out of the dark? Maybe it wasn’t homicide, maybe it was self-defense.”

  “Homicide!” The rapist’s eyes swept the faces of the detectives so fast that it looked like his head was spinning. “I don’t believe you guys! I didn’t kill nobody. You hear me?” He jabbed a forefinger. “No guns, no shooting. You ain’t pinning nothing like that on me. No way!”

  He snatched his nearly empty Styrofoam coffee cup off the table and hurled it to the floor. “No way! Goddamnit!”

  The detectives sat quietly. Drops of splattered coffee rolled slowly down the wall, leaving dun-colored trails on the drab off-white paint.

  “I ought to make you clean that up. I guess you don’t want your cheeseburgers now, either,” Jim said sadly.

  “What day was it? Friday night, Saturday morning? I’ve got an alibi. You can check it out!” he raged, his face reddening, the muscles taut in his neck and jaw.

  “What did you do with the gun?” Rick asked. “Sell it to Manny? Or drop it in the bay?”

  “What alibi?”

  Simmons looked earnest, still maintaining the goodguy posture.

  “You tell them! Didn’t I give you the truth about everything!”

  “That’s right,” Simmons said. “As far as I’m concerned, you’ve been very open and truthful. If you do have an alibi, we can check it out. No problem.”

  “Well, you do that!” The rapist uprighted his chair, sat down sullenly and lit a cigarette. “My mom and stepfather own a bungalow down in the Keys. She doesn’t drive, and he had a stroke so he can’t. Every Friday night after rush hour, I pick them up, and sometimes a couple of their neighbors, and drive them down there. We come back late Sunday night.”

  Jim snorted. “Your folks would say anything to back you up. What about witnesses from the real world?”

  The rapist looked smug. He was calmer now and thinking clearly. “Well, my stepfather would not lie for me since I am not exactly his favorite person. Then there are their neighbors, a nice Christian couple who would not lie for anybody, but how about,” he paused, “the cops?”

  Eyes glittery, he gazed at them one by one to see if he had their full attention. He did.

  “If you recall,” he said slowly and distinctly, “the U.S. Border Patrol put up a roadblock at Florida City last weekend and stopped every motherfucking car.”

  Rick nodded. The drastic attempt by the government to block the endless flow of illegal drugs and aliens had made controversial headlines. Weekend traffic was tied up for hours. Cars overheated in ninety-degree weather. Motorists were infuriated, and the groundswell of outrage had caused Key West citizens to launch a movement to secede from the United States and form their own republic.

  “You still coulda made it back in time,” Jim said.

  The rapist shook his head and looked sorry for him.

  “When we finally got through the jam-up, I tried to make up for lost time.”

  “And?” Rick said.

  The rapist paused for effect. “I guess I was driving too fast. On the Seven Mile Bridge. A trooper pulled me over for speeding. I was mad as hell—in fact, he’ll probably tell you I gave him a hard time—but now I see he did me a favor. He is the man who’s gonna get you two assholes off of my case.”

  A muscle in Jim’s right cheek began to twitch.

  “You have the citation he wrote?” Rick asked.

  “Sure. You’ll find the ticket in my car, in the glove box.” He turned to Simmons. “If you don’t mind, I don’t want to talk to those two anymore.”

  “Sure,” Simmons said. He nodded at Rick and Jim, who stood up to leave. “I’ll be right back,” he said, and walked outside the room with them.

  “Don’t forget the cheeseburgers,” the rapist called after them.

  “Catsup and pickles on the side,” Jim muttered.

  “And two Classic Cokes!” the rapist sang out.

  “I’ll get the inventory on his car,” Simmons offered. “It was towed after he was arrested.”

  “Good,” Rick said. “If there is a ticket, we need the time and the date. If they match his story, we need to talk to the trooper, ask him to confirm by describing this guy.”

  “He could be blowing smoke,” Jim said, “about this ticket shit. Or it could be the wrong date.”

  “I hope so, he looks good,” Rick said. “A burglar, a prowler. A rapist with a rap sheet. He steals guns, likes to tippy-toe around in the dark, and he admits to being in the neighborhoo
d at some time.”

  “I better get back in there,” Simmons said. “I’ve got a lot of other cases to talk to him about. I hope he’s not too spooked.” He looked skeptically at Jim. “You really order his cheeseburgers?”

  “Certainly. A uniform is on his way in with them. Oh darn,” he said, over his shoulder, as they walked away, “I forgot the catsup and the pickles, and the two Classic Cokes.”

  To Rick, he said, “Too bad it wasn’t me with a shotgun who caught that piece a shit in the act, instead of the Crime Watch captain.”

  Dusty looked up, her smile eager. “How did it go? Is he our man?”

  “Could be.” Rick was surprised that Dusty could appear so vibrant on so little sleep. “He’s looking good but claims an alibi. If it checks out, we’re back to square one.”

  “Please, God, let it be him,” Jim said fervently, rolling his eyes toward heaven.

  “Amen,” Rick said.

  Dusty’s eyes softened when she looked at him. Jim sighed. Rick has got to be one crazy son of a bitch, he thought. Laurel may be a beautiful girl, but this one is all woman.

  Rick was on the phone, scribbling an address. He turned to them, his expression resigned. “The good news is, they found López-Gómez. The bad news is, we were right. He’s already been autopsied—by an amateur.”

  “Awwww. They don’t need us,” Jim said. “He’s stolen property. Can’t robbery or missing persons handle it?”

  “Yeah,” Dusty said. “We already sent him to the morgue once. It’s somebody else’s turn.”

  Rick shook his head. “He belongs to us.”

  Seventeen

  The body snatchers had used a Ginzu knife, the one advertised by fast-talking pitchmen on late-night television commercials. Their surgical theater was in a cheap motel room west of the airport. The bathroom was now a Salvador Dali nightmare—in surreal greens, reds, browns and purples. Rummaging through López-Gómez’s intestines had proved far more difficult than expected.

  A middle-aged maid made the discovery. She quit her job on the spot, saying she was leaving Miami for good.

  Dr. Lansing was already there, in high dudgeon. “They didn’t even know enough to clamp off the abdominal aorta,” he grumbled in greeting. “Look at this mess!”

  The amateur pathologists had begun their treasure hunt with José López-Gómez reclining in the bathtub, his upper body elevated. Their first mistake, they discovered, after severing the big artery along the backbone, the one the size of a garden hose. The blood in the upper part of the body quickly flooded the area they were most eager to explore.

  “They had to tear out his entire digestive tract and search through twenty-six feet of intestine,” Lansing said.

  “It smells to bejesus,” Jim said, pulling his handkerchief out of his pocket.

  “It could have been worse,” Rick said, noting that the air conditioner was set on high.

  “What is that?” asked Dusty. “It looks like a burn. How do you suppose this happened?” A section of plastic shower curtain had shriveled, and there was a scorch mark on the wall over the tub.

  Dr. Lansing smiled approval. “You know, it’s really good to have you back aboard, Detective Dustin. I was about to point that out. This is extremely interesting.” He looked enthusiastic. “I think I can tell you something about one of the men who made this mess.”

  “And what might that be, Doc?” Jim’s voice was muffled by the handkerchief pressed over his nostrils.

  “You’re looking for a man who could be minus his mustache, eyelashes and eyebrows. See the distended bowels. We all know from experience during autopsies about the enclosed gases that build up.” The group nodded unhappily. “They’re a mixture of methane and other gases. If you light a match or a cigarette lighter as the bowel is punctured and the gas escapes—you get a beautiful blue flame.”

  Lansing leaned over the tub and what was in it. “Look at this!” he said triumphantly. The item he retrieved and held high in his gloved hand was a cigar, the end bitten off.

  “You mean a flaming fart took off somebody’s eyebrows?” Jim said.

  “Yep. Every time he cut to take out a bag, here came this puff of gas. It was okay until he lit his cigar. Maybe he just wanted a smoke, maybe it was to mask the odor. Whichever, it was like opening a propane container and lighting a match—one big whoosh, like a flamethrower. He’d have singed his face, hair, the whole thing. I’ll show you,” Lansing said eagerly. “Anybody have a cigarette lighter?”

  Nobody moved. They were alone in the room. The uniforms, usually eager to crowd into any air-conditioned crime scene, had elected to wait outside on this one.

  Lansing studied each solemn detective in turn, then shrugged and turned back to the tub.

  “Did they get the cocaine?” Rick asked.

  “Looks like they did,” the doctor said. “See where the stomach and intestine is all inflamed? That looks like a ruptured condom. It probably killed him.”

  “Let us know when you’re sure,” Rick said. “If so, that could get our man Sly off the hook. No telling how many bags there were. But they must have thought it was worth it, to go to all this trouble.”

  “I bet they didn’t think so any more by the time they were through,” Dusty said. “I’ll let the hospitals know to be on the lookout for a Latin male with singed whiskers and a distinct aroma.”

  The nervous hotel manager was convinced that the occupant of room 109 had fallen victim to a gruesome murder. “He was already dead when he arrived,” Jim told him. “Trust me.”

  The man who had signed the register and his companion matched the description of the gunmen at the morgue. But one would look different now. The room was registered to José López-Gómez. “Cute,” Jim said. “For a stiff, he really gets around.”

  Jim slammed the door of the wagon after López-Gómez was slid inside, zipped into a polypropylene body bag. “This is getting to be a habit,” he told Lansing. “Try to hang on to him this time.”

  Eighteen

  Dusty was assigned to distribute the police artist’s drawings of the two Latin body snatchers to hospital emergency rooms. “One must have flash burns and may be missing his eyelashes, eyebrows,” Rick said. “See if you can come up with an ID. Try all the Latin clinics too.”

  “That’ll take days,” she said.

  “Try to get it done tonight,” he said grinning. “Then go home. You don’t need to come back in, unless you hit paydirt.”

  “What an incentive. Bye, guys.” She picked up the manila envelope with the pictures and took off.

  From his desk, immediately behind Rick’s, Jim was scowling at another detective, his feet up on his desk, chatting on the telephone, just out of earshot. “Wonder what the good goddamn he’s up to now,” Jim muttered. “That guy has covered up more shit than a cat. It’s amazing he’s still around. You can’t trust him.”

  “What do you think about Dusty, Jim? Can I trust her?” Rick swiveled his chair around to face his partner. His face was serious.

  Jim looked perplexed. “You’re the man who should know, bro. You got some reason not to trust her?”

  “Not exactly. But I thought our working together would be no problem. Now I find she apparently took our … relationship more seriously than I thought. She got a little weepy the other day.”

  “At the Southwind.” Jim nodded.

  Rick leaned forward and lowered his voice, although no one else was close by. “Laurel knows, and she’s a little jealous that we’re working together.”

  Jim looked puzzled. “How’d she find out about you and Dusty?”

  “I told her.”

  “Oh swell, there’s not enough trouble in this world, you like to create a little more for yourself, huh? Jeez, when it comes to policemen and sex, the heat from their balls travels up to their brains and turns them to shit.”

  “Give me a break, Jim. She picked up on it somehow and asked point-blank. I’m
not gonna lie to her.”

  “She woulda put it together anyway,” Jim conceded. “Women can smell it on each other when they have the hots for the same guy. Dusty always had eyes for you, probably always will.” His pale eyes looked wistful.

  “Remember back when Dusty first joined the department? We didn’t know her yet, but you couldn’t miss her. There was scuttlebutt about some situation she was involved in before she came to Miami. You remember what the scoop was?”

  “They talk about every broad that joins the department. I don’t listen to station-house gossip, unlike most cops.”

  “You don’t think she’d do anything to upset Laurel, you know, woman scorned shit?”

  “Hot pants have no conscience,” Jim said, leaning back in his creaky chair. “But on the other hand, Dusty is a champ as far as I can see. And if it’s a mandate that we gotta have a woman in here, I sure want her and not somebody like Foster, who couldn’t find her ass with both hands if she was sitting on it. You know she takes off her bra when she thinks it’s too hot in her patrol car. Or Tierney, who wouldn’t know if it was day or night without her police radio—all she’s conscientious about is the shade of her lipstick and what her hairdo looks like.

  “Or even that good-looking redhead in forty sector—a real sweetheart, but if a stranger so much as said ‘Boo!’ she’d go into cardiac arrest. There’s places for women, Rick—police work ain’t one of them. If we have to have a woman partner, we’re damn lucky it’s Dusty. I warned you when you first started screwing around with her that you shouldn’t shit where you eat. Everything that goes around comes around.”

  “Thanks, pal. I could have lived without the lecture.” Rick frowned. “You’re right, I guess. A lot has happened lately, and Laurel is sort of moody and changeable. I never know what to expect with her. She still has some growing up to do.”

  “Told you that, too,” Jim said, shifting his gaze over Rick’s shoulder. “Uh oh, here comes trouble.”