Tourist Season (3 page)

“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!” Ernesto 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 heart-breaker, 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.”

Besides Keyes himself, Skip Wiley was the only person in the world who knew the real reason for the tears. But he wasn’t telling.

A few months later Keyes got his private investigator’s license, and his newspaper friends were amused. They wondered how the hell he was going to hold together, working for a bunch of sleazoid lawyers and bail bondsmen. Brian Keyes wondered too, and wound up avoiding the rough cases. The cases that really paid.

“Still doing divorces?” Al Garcia asked.

“Here and there.” Keyes hated to admit it, but that’s what covered the rent: he’d gotten damn good at staking out nooner motels with his three-hundred-millimeter Nikon. That was another reason for Al Garcia’s affability. Last year he had hired Brian Keyes to get the goods on his new son-in-law. Garcia despised the kid, and was on the verge of outright murdering him when he called Keyes for help. Keyes had done a hell of a job, too. Tracked the little stud to a VD clinic in Homestead. Garcia’s daughter wasn’t thrilled by the news, but Al was. The divorce went through in four weeks, a new Dade County record.

Now, Brian Keyes had a friend for life.

Garcia poured the coffee. “So you got a biggie, Brian.”

“Tell me about it.”

“It’s a touchy one. Can’t say much, especially now that you’re lined up with the other side.”

“Did you work the Harper case?”

“Hell,
everybody
up here worked that case.”

Keyes tried to sip the coffee and nearly boiled his upper lip.

“Hey,” Garcia said, “that piece-of-shit rag newspaper you used to work for finally printed something intelligent this morning. You see it?”

“My paper was in a puddle.”

“Ha! You should have read it anyway. Wiley, the asshole that writes that column. I hate that guy normally—I really can’t stand him. But today he did okay.”

Keyes didn’t want to talk about Skip Wiley.

“He wrote about this case,” Garcia went on. “About that little scuzzball we arrested.”

“I’ll be sure to get a copy,” Keyes said.

“I mean, it wasn’t a hundred percent right, there was a few things he screwed up, but overall he did an okay job. I clipped it out and taped it on the refrigerator. I want my boy to read it when he gets home from school. Let him see what his old man does for a living.”

“I’m sure he’ll get a charge out of it, Al. Tell me about Ernesto Cabal.”

“Dirtbag burglar.”

“Was he on your list of suspects?”

Garcia said, “What do you mean?”

“I mean, you’ve got thirty detectives working on this murder, right? You must have had a list of suspects.”

“Not on this one.”

“So what we’re talking about is blind luck. Some Beach cop nails the guy for running a traffic light and bingo, there’s Mr. Sparky Harper’s missing automobile.”

“Luck was only part of it,” Garcia said sourly.

Keyes said, “You caught Cabal in the victim’s car, but what else?”

“What else do we need?”

“A witness or two might be nice.”

“Patience, Brian. We’re working on it.”

“And a motive?”

Garcia held up his hands. “Robbery, of course.”

“Come on, Al, this wasn’t a knife in the ribs. It was the ritual murder of a prominent citizen. How did Harper get into those silly clothes? Who smeared suntan oil all over him? Who stuffed a goddamn toy alligator down his throat? Who sawed his legs off? Are you telling me that some two-bit auto burglar concocted this whole thing?”

“People do crazy things for a new Oldsmobile.”

“You’re hopeless,” Keyes said.

“Don’t tell me you believe Cabal’s story? Brian, you got to get this liberal-crusader shit out of your system. I thought two years away from that newspaper would cure you.”

“You’ve got to admit, it’s a very weird case. You guys checked out the car, right?”

“It was clean, except for Cabal’s prints.”

Keyes took out a legal pad and started jotting notes. “What about the suitcase?”

“No prints. Its model number matches a batch sent to Jordan Marsh about a year ago, but we can’t be sure. Could’ve just as easily come from Macy’s.”

Keyes said, “Any sign of the missing legs?”

“Nope.”

“Did you trace that terrific Hawaiian wardrobe?”

“Ugh-ugh.” Garcia made a zipper motion across his lips.

“Oh, you got something, uh? A store, perhaps. Maybe even a salesman who remembers something odd about this particular customer—”

“Brian, back off. This is a very touchy case. If the chief even suspected I was talking to you, I’d be shaking out parking meters for the rest of my life. I think we’d better call it quits for today.”

Keyes put the legal pad back in his briefcase. “I’m sorry, Al. I appreciate what you’re doing.” Keyes was telling the truth. Garcia didn’t owe him a damn thing.

“Normally I wouldn’t mind, Brian, it’s just that this one is Hal’s case. He’s the lead detective. Went out to the scene and all. I don’t want to screw it up for him.”

“I understand. What’s he got you doing?”

Garcia rolled his eyes. “Checking out dead-enders. Take a look at this.” He slid a sheet of paper across the desk.

It was a typed letter. Keyes scanned it quickly. He started to read it again, when Garcia snatched it away.

“Crazy, huh? It came in today’s mail.”

Keyes asked for a Xerox copy.

“No way, Brian. The PD’s office would cream over something like this. And it’s crap, take my word for it. It’s going right into the old circular file as soon as I make a couple routine calls to the feds.”

“Read it out loud,” Keyes said.

“I’ll deny I ever even saw it,” Garcia said.

“Okay, Al, you got my word. Read it, please.”

Garcia slipped on a pair of tinted glasses and read from the letter:

Dear Miami Chamber of Commerce:

Welcome to the Revolution.

Mr. B. D. Harper’s death was a milestone. It may have seemed an atrocity to you; to us, it was poetry. Contrary to what you’d like to believe, this was not the act of a sick person, but the raging of a powerful new underclass.

Mr. Harper’s death was not a painful one, but it was unusual, and we trust that it got your attention. Soon we start playing for keeps. Wait for number three!

El Fuego,

Comandante, Las Noches de Diciembre

Al Garcia removed his reading glasses and said, “Not half-bad, really. For a flake.”

“Not at all,” Keyes agreed. “What do you make of that
number-three
business? Who was victim number two?”

“There wasn’t any, not that I know of.”

“So who are the Nights of December?” Keyes asked.

“A figment of some nut’s imagination. ‘The Fire,’ he calls himself.
El Fuego
my ass. I’ll check with the Bureau, just in case, but J. Edgar himself wouldn’t have taken this one seriously. Still, I might ask around with the guys on the antiterrorism squad.”

“And then?” Keyes asked.

“A slam dunk,” Garcia said. “Right into the wastebasket.”

Cab Mulcahy poured the coffee. Skip Wiley drank.

“The beard is new, isn’t it?”

“I need it,” Wiley said, “for an assignment.”

“Oh. And what would that be?”

“That would be confidential,” Wiley said, slurping.

Cab Mulcahy was a patient man, especially for a managing editor. He had been in newspapers his entire adult life and almost nothing could provoke him. Whenever the worst kind of madness gripped the newsroom, Mulcahy would emerge to take charge, instantly imposing a rational and temperate mood. He was a thoughtful man in a profession not famous for thoughtfulness. Cab Mulcahy was also astute. He loved Skip Wiley, but distrusted him wholeheartedly.