Blood of Paradise (3 page)

Too late if it isn't, Jude thought. It must have shown on his face, because Malvasio jumped right back in with, “Believe me, it's not like my guy's handing out your name and cell to the highest bidder. It's not like that.”

“I'd like his name,” Jude said, thinking: It's only fair. His information for mine.

“I'd really rather not do that.”

“I'm not asking,” Jude said. “I want his name.”

Malvasio seemed taken aback by Jude's tone. He'd known a boy.

“Listen, Jude, this guy, he can't afford trouble.”

“How much did you pay him?”

“Nothing, it was a favor. Look—you know how things work here. The important stuff gets done on a handshake—people you know, people you trust. My buddy trusted me. The folks I work for would make things right if I crossed any lines, but I wasn't going to do that. I owe too many people and, really, all I wanted was to sit here, like this, with you. Ten years is a long time away from everything you ever knew. I saw a name I recognized, one that meant a lot to me once. Still does. It felt like a gift, I wanted to connect. If there's any blame to be had in that, it's mine.”

Jude wasn't quite sure what to make of all that, but he felt moved. Again, the story was in the eyes. Malvasio could talk all he wanted about his “buddy”—that wasn't comradery, that was barter. Laugh Master Bill was a friendless man. Maybe he'd escaped his due in the States, but the past ten years had taken something out of him, like he'd served a kind of free-range solitary confinement. Not that lonesome excused anything. But if Jude really wanted to press the issue of the local cop digging up his private number, sneaking it to Malvasio, he'd also have to explain to somebody in officialdom that when a suspected felon, a fugitive—and, rumor had it, a killer—had used Jude's number to get in touch, the upright American, young McManus, hadn't contacted the embassy, the FBI, the Policía Nacional Civil, or anyone else. On the contrary, he'd jumped in his truck and hustled right over. There were reasons for that, of course, but they wouldn't matter to anyone but him.

A pair of wispy spiders scurried across the tabletop. Watching them, Malvasio said, “Tell me what you'd like to do.”

Jude made a show of his discontent but then just shrugged. “Nothing. Let's drop it.”

Malvasio's smile started small, then grew. “Thank you, sir.”

“These people you work for,” Jude said, “what kind of business are we talking about?”

“They're old money,” Malvasio said, “which down here means land. They grow sugar, bananas. Even found a way to expand their coffee production—no small trick, the way the Vietnamese have glutted the market the past couple years. There's a tale. You want a racket, try the international banks that funded that disaster.”

“Your employers know what happened? Back in Chicago, I mean.”

“It's a bit of an open secret and, well, it's interesting. What we did, me and your dad and Phil, I mean—it's a shrug and a wink down here. Somebody thinks you're out of line, he cuts out your heart and feeds it to the dogs. You find bodies along the road without heads or hands, they call it a haircut and a manicure. But hell, you know all that. You work here.”

Jude owed his job to the explosion in gang violence since the end of the civil war, a circumstance that had prompted a resurgence of the death squads. Even the Policía Nacional Civil—the new, supposedly incorruptible national police force that Malvasio and other American cops had helped train—were implicated. No surprise, the few officers charged were always acquitted. What jury would convict them? The
escuadrones
went out at night in vans and SUVs with the windows tinted black, trolling for prey: gang members and garden variety criminals mostly, but prostitutes, too. Homosexuals. Transvestites. They called it
limpieza social
. Social cleansing.

“These people you work for,” Jude said, “you get any read on where they stand on things like that?”

“Things like what?”

“You know what I'm saying.”

Malvasio waved him off. “I'm just the help. They don't share their politics with me.”

“What about
your
politics?”

“My what?”

“Your politics. Loyalties. Whatever.”

Malvasio shooed a fly from his empty soup bowl. “Look, the point I was making was just that the people who run things down here are hard-core. To them, guy like me, I'm a prom princess.”

“You may be selling yourself short there. I'm sure I'm not the only one who might draw a parallel between what you and my dad did back in Chicago and what happens here. Or have I got something wrong?”

The trilling of
chiquirines
, the local variety of cricket, crescendoed suddenly to such a pitch it nearly drowned out the
cumbia
music. Malvasio waited it out. “Is that really what you think?”

Jude began chewing his lip, a nervous tic he'd had for years and seemed helpless to master. “You left behind some serious wreckage. I'm sure you know that.”

“Whoa. Whoa. Listen to me.” For the first time, Malvasio's composure gave way. “Those stories that came out about slangers capped by me or your dad? That's all crap. We killed nobody. Period.”

“More from luck than intention. At least that's the way some of the stories seemed to me.”

“Whose stories, your dad's?”

“No.” Jude and his father had talked about none of this before he'd died.

“The news then,” Malvasio said.

“Yeah.”

“You believe the news?” Like it was the stupidest thing imaginable. “Look, we were wrong. What we did was wrong. Absolutely. But I'm gonna say this again—we smoked nobody. The body count they tried to lay on us was gang action, moes and hooks, doing what they do. Not us. You gotta believe that. For your father's sake.”

Jude was of various minds as to what he should or shouldn't believe for his father's sake. “What about that guy they fished out of the Chicago River?”

It was one of the stories recounted on TV the night of his dad's arrest—some north-side banger claimed three men in coveralls and ski masks dragged him off his corner in a sleet storm, drove him down to the wharves, robbed him, stripped him naked, then gave him an impromptu back-flip lesson into the cold greasy river. Luckily, he'd found a ledge before going under one last time, and he'd stood there, screaming for help, till a warehouseman heard him.

Malvasio said, “You talking about Small Mickens?”

“I can't recall the name.”

“I don't mean to sound glib, Jude, but if memory serves, he survived.”

“He almost drowned.”

“Small? Yeah. Water so deep he had to walk out.”

“People die from exposure, too.”

“It was a warm spell between cold fronts and he came out okay—I know, I was standing there. Besides which, Small had quite a little curb service, used eight-year-olds for touts—the news tell you
that?
A mouthy little wannabe always crowing about how he was in the mix with the Insane Vice Lord Killers, but he was from nowhere, a fat little freak who let any hubba pigeon with a wet spot between her legs work twists for rock.” Malvasio sighed, dropped his head, and ran his hands across his cropped hair in a kind of private torment. After a few long seconds, he said quietly, “No. Cancel that. You're right. I said it before but it bears repeating: What we did was wrong. All of it.” He looked up, eyes filled with:
How many times do you want me to say it?
“But we didn't kill people. We just … didn't.”

Jude felt meager. It was, perhaps, a cheap shot, dragging in the death squad business. There'd been all sorts of rumors floating around back then, but nothing was ever proved. And yet: “Can I ask you a question?”

Malvasio chuckled. “There some way I could stop you?”

“That vice cop who was killed right before you disappeared. Winters?”

The mirth drained from Malvasio's face. “That.”

“Yeah. That.”

In the early morning hours before the Laugh Master arrests, a vice detective named Hank Winters was found on his back in an alley off Milwaukee Avenue, half his face ripped open from a point-blank gun blast. In the TV statements regarding Malvasio's disappearance, the police spokesmen took pains not to say too much about possible links between the two events. Malvasio wasn't a suspect, they said. They just wanted him to come in, surrender on the Laugh Master charges, help them sort out the Winters slaying if he could.

Malvasio looked off toward the darkening ocean, his eye twitching. Finally, in a soft, measured voice: “Lotta stuff got said about your dad and Phil and me. About how corrupt we were. Maybe so. But I've never, never known a cop more bent than Hank Winters. Guy had the conscience of a tapeworm. And plenty of enemies. Same deal with the other killings they tried to pin on us. You could fill a freight train with suspects for every single one. But when in doubt, blame the badge, right?”

“You saying you didn't do it?”

With his fingers, Malvasio pounded out a little rat-a-tat on the tabletop. “Okay. Fair enough. Let's deal with this.” He took a longer pull from his beer this time, then settled in. The sadness in his eyes hardened into something else. “There was a pimp Winters was working as a CI and the guy needed a little arm-twisting. So Hank had a bench warrant issued on some failure-to-appear, just to drag the skank in, teach him a lesson. Thing he forgot to tell the two uniforms serving the warrant? This pimp was on a crack binge like the world was gonna end. Guys knocked on the door, the bag of crap opened up and shot the first cop in the head. Boom. That was it. Twenty-six years old, the cop who got bagged—your age, basically. With a wife and a kid and one on the way. I knew him, liked him. Thought he had, I dunno, promise. Winters got called in by IAD but he danced his way around the whole thing and that just got to me.”

Good God, Jude thought. He's confessing.

“I knew Winters was seeing this call girl, had a crib off Milwaukee, and I waited for him. He got out of his car, I walked up and you should've seen his eyes. Like a couple golf balls. Must've thought I'd come there to grease him, but I just wanted to let him know—and let him know good—how I felt. About what went down with his stinking warrant. Didn't get a word out, though. He shoved a finger in my face, went off, said he had the drop on your dad and me and Phil. This proz he was about to see, she'd had a two-year thing with your old man and she knew all about Ray's business, our business, and she was gonna take us down if we didn't play smart. I don't know, it just twisted me up somehow and I decked him. I felt protective of your dad. He was the one with kids, you and your sister, which meant he had way more to lose than Phil or me. Any event, I clock Winters and he goes down to one knee. Then he draws his piece, the fuck. You work the streets, you know when a guy's gonna pull the trigger and when he's just waving the damn thing around. I didn't have a choice. I know that like I know I'm sitting here.”

Malvasio's last few words, for all their import, sounded strangely far away. Jude found himself hung up on that one phrase:
She'd had a two-year thing with your old man
. The things you don't know, he thought. The things you should've been wise to all along.

“If it hadn't been for the Winters thing,” Malvasio went on, “I'd have stuck around. Taken the heat like your dad. Like Phil. But there was no way I'd ever get an honest break on that, not with everything else. People want a hanging, they don't fuss much over details. And I figured, with me gone, your dad and Phil could point the blame my direction, say it was all my doing. And from what I heard about the deals they struck, I'd say that's pretty much what went down.”

Jude had to admit this last part rang true. In their plea agreements, his dad and Strock made no admissions of wrongdoing beyond filing false incident reports and abusing overtime. All charges concerning abduction, robbery, and violence were decreed Not Sustained. The deals came with a price, though. The two men got drummed off the force, surrendered their pensions and benefits, after which they were expected to drift away shamefully into the unknown. And they did. Sure it wasn't prison, but even with whatever he'd been through down here the past ten years, would Malvasio really want to trade places?

“Tell me about this call girl,” Jude said. “The one you said had a thing with my dad.”

“You didn't know about that?”

“No.” Strange, he thought, how pathetic that sounded.

“Look, Jude, let it go, okay? It's been ten years, your dad—”

“Is that why he tossed himself over the side of his boat?”

Malvasio looked stunned, even a little appalled. “Do you know for a fact that's what happened?”

“No,” Jude admitted. “Nobody does.”

“Then cut your old man some slack. Look, Ray made mistakes, some pretty serious ones.”

“No fooling?”

“Okay. Okay. But that means what—you should hate him forever?”

“I didn't say I hated him.”

“You should see the look on your face.”

Jude felt the skin on his neck prickle with heat. “I don't hate him.”

“Well, good. You shouldn't. I knew Ray better than anybody and there's still things I don't understand. But, just to tie up this one last thing, having a slice on the side isn't one of those things.”

“How do you mean?”

“Come on, Jude.” Malvasio looked off toward the ocean again, all scarlet and indigo with sunset. “It's not my place to say.”

“Say what?”

“I didn't come here to make a case against anybody. I mean that. But your mother …” He let his voice trail off.

Jude knew perfectly well what he meant, but still said, “What about her?”

Malvasio's smile said, You don't fool me, but deferring to graciousness, he said, “Maybe it looked different inside the family, I dunno. But from where I stood it was pretty damn clear your dad was miserable. He hid it well—like I said, he was proud. But I don't begrudge him wanting a little company. A little affection.”