Magic City (26 page)

“Defensible grievances,” Gundy said. “That's the term the Pentagon liked to use. He hit me, so I get to hit him back. What's good enough for the schoolyard is good enough for our nation's foreign policy.”

“I'm not following you,” said Thorn.

Snake came closer and eyed Gundy suspiciously.

Gundy took a breath and blew it out.

“All right, then,” Gundy said. “I'll slow it down for you.”

He worked his peach pit as he spoke, the air around them fragrant with sap and the lemon oils and varnishes that kept the wood shining. There was the sharp scent of epoxy underneath those natural smells.

“They brought me into it a few days after the killings. I was just a kid, never worked anything more complicated than a barroom fight or a stolen car. I took it as an honor, but that's not how it was meant. They wanted me 'cause I was just a second lieutenant, someone they could manipulate. They were just going through the motions, doing it because someone in civilian leadership was having a hissy fit and forced them to investigate. Some senator, I don't think I ever knew his name.

“Top brass didn't think I'd uncover anything useful, and when I did, they weren't much happy with it and I was relieved of duty.”

“What'd you find?”

“Southwoods was its code name.”

Gundy shaved at the peach pit, eyes on his delicate work.

“I came across the paperwork. Top-secret. Classified. But I read it anyway. It was my job.”

“Why was the military investigating at all? It was a civilian crime.”

“Not entirely,” Gundy said. “Right from the get-go it was clear the killers had had military training. At least a couple did.”

“You knew that from what?”

“Weapons they used, ammo. Fingerprints.”

“What fingerprints?” Snake said. “Nothing I ever read mentioned prints.”

“There weren't any,” Gundy said. “Not the kind you could dust for.”

Gundy was silent for a moment. He looked up at Thorn and took a long breath, as if he were starting to reconsider his confession.

“The two fingers left behind,” Thorn said. “The ones Snake chopped off.”

“Correct,” Gundy said. “Took me the better part of a month, 'cause I didn't have computers doing the work like they do now. I compared the prints against military records, and a few hundred hours later a name popped up.”

“The prints belonged to Edward Runyon.”

Gundy stopped his whittling and stared at Thorn.

“You boys better watch yourselves. You're digging in some perilous holes.”

“Southwoods,” Thorn said. “Tell us about it.”

“Well, now, when I got those prints back and I tracked down this Runyon fellow, he was in some special army unit, answering directly to people at the Pentagon. I tried to sit down with him and ask a few questions, and that's about the exact minute I was relieved of duty. They wanted me to do my job, but they didn't want me to do it so well I brought down the government. So that was all she wrote for my military career.”

“What're you saying? My parents and sister were killed by the government of the United States?”

Gundy took a minute to answer, focused on his peach pit.

“I'm sorry to say they were, son. I'm even sorrier to say that after I learned that fact, I was unable to bring it to the attention of anyone who gave a shit.”

“Southwoods,” Thorn said.

“It was dreamed up by a bunch of fanatics in the State Department that called themselves the Cuba Project. Some angry old hawks who never got over the disaster at the Bay of Pigs. They ordered the Joint Chiefs to come up with war-game scenarios. That's how they sold it. Plausible actions providing justification for military intervention in Cuba.”

“But it didn't work,” Thorn said. “The Morales family died and no war started.”

“Starting a war with only one provocation is like trying to light a log with a single match. Of course it wouldn't work. Southwoods called for a coordinated effort, several stages: attacks at Guantánamo Naval Base, sinking boatloads of rafters who were trying to make it to Miami, hijacking civil aircraft and blaming it on the communists. They were even considering shooting down John Glenn, the astronaut, blaming that on Castro, too. Half a dozen hostile acts, all of it Fidel's doing. A slow build.

“Right after the Morales murders they had another incident planned that was supposed to happen out in the Florida Straits. You two were young back then, so you might not remember our pilots flew out of Homestead Air Force Base, made regular runs down to Cuba, always staying a legal twelve miles offshore, of course, just flapping their wings in the dictator's face. Taunting.

“One day a pilot who was in on the plot would be riding at the back of the formation, tail-end Charley, they called it. He'd drift farther and farther back. Then, near the Cuban coast, he was to broadcast that he'd been jumped by MiGs and was going down. Then radio silence. The pilot would turn his plane around and fly directly west at low altitude and land at an auxiliary base. The plane would be stored in a secret hangar and a new tail number applied. With one of our fighter jets apparently shot down, the country would be at war in a week. That's not a single match anymore, that's a damn blowtorch.”

“All right,” Snake said. “I get the idea.”

“Provocation,” Gundy said. “That's what they wanted. A pretext for war. Get the American public lathered up, then go in there, throw Castro out, ship all the exiles home.”

“Why didn't they do the others on their list?” Thorn said. “The fake shoot-down and all that.”

“Lost their nerve, I'd say,” Gundy said. “LBJ got wind of it, too. Came flying down here and tore some heads off.”

“Pauline Caufield?”

Gundy sniffed and shook his head.

“I believe she ran the show, yeah. Young woman, barely out of college. She's out there supervising the murdering of American citizens so she can get a salary upgrade.”

“There was a woman along that night,” said Snake. “I heard her voice. She was the boss of the operation. That was Pauline Caufield? The blonde in the picture?”

Snake was standing so stiff he looked like his body had been flash frozen and might shatter with the slightest touch.

“Well, yes, that's her in the picture. But, no, I can say for certain Caufield was not along that night. Far as I know, it was five people in the raiding party. Two from this photo, that little Cuban fellow on one end and Runyon. The others who did the shooting were ones the CIA brought into it. Never got their names. That's where I ran into the stone wall.”

“I heard a woman's voice,” Snake said. “She said, ‘Leave him, let's go.'”

“Could be true,” said Gundy. “I had a couple eyewitnesses said there was a woman running with the others. But it wasn't Pauline Caufield. She had an alibi. Rock-solid.”

“What was that?” Thorn said.

“She was in jail that night. Her and her buddy Meyer Lansky.”

“In jail for what?”

“That's another story,” Gundy said.

“We got time.”

“Well, I don't have all the particulars. It wasn't central to my investigation. What I do know is, Caufield and Lansky were arrested in a vice raid on a bookie joint out on Miami Beach. Lansky was there to cover the losses on the Clay fight and ream out a few of his people. Apparently he thought he had that fight rigged. Liston was supposed to blind Clay with some stinging jelly he smeared on his gloves, then move in for the kill. Didn't work out that way.”

“Clay survived.”

“And Lansky lost a mountain of money.”

“Caufield went to jail that night, too?”

“Wrong place, wrong time, happened to be with Lansky, although I expect I know where she was headed after that. She just stayed in the city jail overnight. Charges dismissed. Lucky break for her. Kept her clear of the Morales murders. So it wasn't Caufield that Snake heard at his house. That woman was in jail.”

Thorn looked back for Snake. But he had vanished.

“You're welcome to that story if you'd like to have it,” Gundy said. “I'm about ready to be shut of it myself.”

Thorn thanked him for his generosity.

“We talked to a man named Miguel Cielo earlier. Did that name come up in your investigation?”

Gundy nodded.

“He told us something I didn't understand,” Thorn said. “That if he'd been in charge, Morales wouldn't have been the target.”

“From what I gather,” Gundy said, “Cielo was campaigning for some larger, more well-connected militia group. That's what he thought. If thirty, forty people were killed, instead of just seven or eight, the outrage would be that much greater, and declaring war on Cuba would be more likely.”

“These are his own people,” Thorn said. “Fellow Cubans. And he's pissed off because more of them weren't killed?”

“You got it.”

Thorn glanced around the orderly workshop. For years, through some dogged alchemy, Gundy had been transforming his regret and frustration into that drawer of grim, decapitated men, as well as those intricate abstract sculptures. Maybe it wasn't art. Maybe it was something better.

“I can call you a taxi if you like,” Gundy said.

“Thank you, sir. I'd appreciate that.”

“And by the way, I only met him five minutes ago, but that friend of yours, he looks like he means to take some justice into his own hands.”

“Can't say I blame him.”

“No,” Gundy said. “Can't say I do, either.”

As he was leaving the house, Thorn promised Gundy he would do what he could to pass along the story of the Southwoods operation to a wider audience. Both Shepherd and his wife said they'd certainly appreciate that. It was past time for the American people to know the deeds their elected officials had done, and what they might one day be capable of doing again.

“Wait a minute,” Gundy said, and turned and went back into the house.

“Thank you,” Mrs. Gundy said when he was gone. “Thank you, sir.”

When he came back, Gundy was carrying a sheaf of papers. He held them out to Thorn.

“Something else you can slip into that envelope. Might be of use. I'm sick of having them around.”

Thorn glanced at the cover sheet.

In bold print across the top it read:
TOP SECRET SPECIAL HANDLING
.

Below those words the subject of the memo was short and to the point: “Justification for U.S. Military Intervention in Cuba.”

“Be smart with that,” Gundy said. “Probably the only copy that exists.”

“I'll do my best.”

Thorn gave the taxi driver the address on the pink slip Mariana Cielo had pressed on him. The last stop on the stations of the cross. He sat and looked out the window as the cab rolled through the decayed heart of Miami, heading south past Jackson Memorial Hospital toward the greener neighborhoods.

Thorn hoped that Shepherd Gundy's unburdening would do him some good. Get him an extra hour or two of sleep at least. He meant what he'd told the old couple, that he had every intention of trying to expose Southwoods and anybody still alive who might have had a connection to those events. Though, honestly, he had no idea how he would manage any of that.

The address Mariana Cielo had given him was a block off Flagler in the heart of the residential section of Little Havana. Thorn asked the Haitian driver to wait out front, and he agreed to.

Except for the windows, the house was exactly like every other one on the block. Small, brightly painted, with a tiny attached garage, a single stunted tree in the yard. The grass was freshly mowed and edged, a gardenia bush by the door showing a few early blooms.

The jalousies, however, were from a distant era. Narrow louvered slats that cranked open to snag the breeze. Panes so flimsy, they'd shatter with the accidental brush of a child's passing. Snap one in half, then stick your hand inside to unlatch the door or window, walk right in. Burglary 101.

All the other houses on the street were heavily barred, and some probably had the new bulletproof glass. Alarm-company signs were planted in every yard like miniature tombstones marking the grave of a bygone age.

But the house Thorn walked up to appeared to be unprotected, as though it held some special exemption in the neighborhood that no thief in his right mind would dare challenge.

He knocked and knocked again but heard only silence inside. He was turning to go when the door cracked open and a woman in a gray nun's habit peeked out at him. She was milky-skinned and there was a curl of blond hair showing at the edge of her hood. She was a few years younger than Thorn, in her early forties perhaps.

“Could I help you?”

“I was given this address.”

“Were you now? And why was that, do you suppose?”

The nun spoke with an Irish lilt, and her big-lipped smile was rich with mischief.

“I'm not sure why. The woman who directed me here said this was some kind of shrine, that it would help me with the problem I'm looking into.”

“A shrine, is it? Well, now, I suppose it might be described that way. What sort of problem is it you're working on?”

Thorn drew the photo from the envelope and handed it to her and she studied it for several moments, then tipped her smile his way.

“I wouldn't know anything about a boxing match.”

“No, ma'am. It's the people in the stands, row three, I'm interested in. Those fans watching. About an hour after this picture was taken, some of those people committed an extreme act of violence.”

The smile drained from her lips.

“When are we talking about here?”

“February 1964. It took place here in Miami, a father and mother killed, and their daughter as well. In a neighborhood a lot like this.”

“Are you meaning the Morales family? Jorge and María?”

Thorn stared into her green eyes and said yes, the Morales family.

“Then it's not a neighborhood a lot like this,” the woman said. “It's a neighborhood exactly like this.”

She stepped back and swung open the door.

“I haven't had any visitors before,” she said. “But I'll do my best to answer what you'd like to know. Step right in.”

The living area was paneled with dark fake wood like the waiting room of a cut-rate dentist. Low-slung sectional couches in a bright orange-and-red stripe faced an even lower round coffee table. Danish modern, Thorn believed. The shag rug was avocado green and ended abruptly at the edges of the living room, where the speckled terrazzo took over.

He wasn't sure what odor it was that so clearly evoked the decade of the sixties. Maybe some fiber in the shag rug or the musty, suffocating scent given off by so much paneling.

He went forward into the room and felt the swirl of déjà vu. Though he knew full well he'd never been in that house before, he had been thinking about the place a good deal in the past two days. Imagining what the house must have looked like and sounded like and felt like on that February night in 1964 when the killers poured through the front door and began firing.

On the wall above the Magnavox radio console there was an oil painting of a handsome hippie Jesus, his hands folded in prayer. A Cuban flag curtained a window in the Florida room.
La Estrella Solitaria
, the Lone Star. Red triangle, blue and white stripes. It gave the air a purple glow. Bookshelves were suspended from the ceiling on metal rods. No books, but a dozen black-and-white photos faced the front door.

Thorn stepped close. The girl, Carmen, was about thirteen at the time of the last snapshots, and she had cherubic cheeks and bright eyes that stared into the camera with a fervor that was edged with something like panic. Carlos was short and had blunt features and a leering grin. Snake looked distant and thoughtful and maybe mildly depressed. Jorge Morales, the young father, was a tall, whippy man who favored white shirts, the sleeves rolled three-quarters. His cigarettes dangled like a gangster's. Various tough-guy poses. The mother, María, appeared startled and out of place, as if she'd wandered into each photograph at the last second and would wander off again when the roll had been advanced. A woman of slender build with pretty eyes, short brown hair and a wincing smile.

“This is the Morales family.”

“Yes, it is.”

“Pardon me, my name is Thorn.”

“I'm Sister Sharon, Sharon McElvoy. I'm on loan from St. Michael the Archangel. This house is a special project of the monsignor's. I'm new to this assignment, so you'll forgive me if I can't answer all your questions.”

He was standing in the center of the room, his eyes panning back and forth across the photos and furnishings. Absorbing the room's vibrations, which seemed to radiate from the walls like painfully loud music.

Thorn tilted his head back and saw the faded patches in the paint where putty had been used to fill in the craters. Fist-size cavities in the cement where bullets had punched a half foot deep before losing steam. They were everywhere. Thorn lost count at twenty.

Thorn stared into the sunporch, where toys were scattered about on the bare terrazzo. A baseball glove, rubber soldiers, a Barbie in a wedding gown, Ken gazing fondly at his adorable bride. A deck of playing cards and a checkers board.

“I don't understand,” he said. “What's going on here?”

“It's a sad house, that I know. Bad things happened here, as you described.” Sister Sharon moved across the living room, drifting toward the hall. “We've tried to bring a little sunshine to the place without disturbing the original decor too much. She doesn't like it when we change things around. She gets very upset.”

“Who is that?”

“I thought you knew. I thought that's why you'd come. To meet Carmen.”

Thorn followed her down the hallway to a young girl's bedroom. There was a white spread on the bed, a collection of stuffed animals clustered on the pillow. A rhino, a duck, a camel. It was on that floor that Runyon's two severed fingers fell. And it was that window they climbed through, Snake and Carmen.

Thorn went to the window and looked out at the freshly mown yard and the street beyond. The lawn where Snake and Carlos and Carmen had run for their lives. Where Humberto Berasategui paid off his debt to Meyer Lansky by firing his pistol and striking down the young girl. Where Snake raised up with the machete and killed the small man with the pencil mustache, hacked him to death on the lawn of his childhood home.

“Carmen is alive?”

The sister smiled quietly and led him out of the room and farther down the hallway. At the master bedroom, she pushed open the door and stepped aside. Thorn looked in and saw a woman in her mid-fifties wearing the same nun's habit that Sister Sharon wore. She was kneeling before an altar that had been erected against the far wall. A gold crucifix hung above it, and on the cross the figure of Christ writhed in agony.

Carmen heard them. She turned and saw Thorn, and her body stiffened like a startled fawn.

“It's all right, Carmen, he's a friend.” Sister Sharon moved past Thorn and went to Carmen's side and took the woman's hand in hers and stroked the back of it.

Carmen's face was as childlike as it had been in the photographs on the living-room shelf. Unlined, untanned, a blush in her round cheeks. Her hair was black and glossy, as were her eyes. While her right eye tracked Thorn carefully, her left eye didn't move. It was locked in place. Either it was an orb of glass or some essential muscles had been snipped. A button-shaped depression marked her temple on the same side as the bad eye.

The panicky look passed and her features fell instantly into a dull repose. An expression that settled so naturally on her face, it was clear this was her prevailing mood.

Sister Sharon steered her back to the kneeling bench, and Carmen resumed whatever prayer she was capable of.

Outside in the hallway with the door shut, Thorn said, “She's brain damaged?”

Sister Sharon nodded.

“She's lost the power of speech. She can neither write nor read. Her memory seems to be gone, though she does have nightmares now and then. One can only imagine what she must be reliving. But she can feed herself and she moves quite well. She doesn't require a great deal of care.”

“Who else knows about her?”

“Why is that an issue, Mr. Thorn?”

“I've been working alongside her brother, Snake. He believes Carmen's dead. As far as I know
everyone
believes she's dead.”

“I'm not sure of the exact history, why it was decided Carmen should live here under parish protection. All that was determined long before I arrived in Miami. But from what I gather, when Carmen was first in the hospital, officials at the time were worried about her safety and made the choice to keep her condition confidential. I believe it was the mayor of Miami who took a personal interest in Carmen's situation and felt it best she receive private care. Her needs have since been supervised by a very generous benefactor. A woman who is a great friend of my church. Part of her tithes are stipulated to be spent by the parish for Carmen's care. Beyond those arrangements, I know nothing more.”

In the living room Thorn took another pass by the photographs. The déjà vu had slackened but not gone away. He studied the photos one by one, seeing Carmen as she'd been as a child. Her starched white blouses, her chaste smile. A Bible in her hand in more than one. A rosary, a catechism. The trinkets of religious devotion.

Thorn doubted that Stanton or Lola had been worried about Carmen's safety. What worried them was their own. That Carmen might be able to give a full description of the man who fondled her in her bedroom before Snake intervened. If the cops had an accurate drawing of Edward Runyon, someone might have come forward and the whole operation might have been exposed.

Then Thorn noticed, high on a shelf, a photograph he had missed before. He had to reach up and take it down to view it clearly. It was a color shot of Jorge Morales with his hip cocked against the fender of a chromed-up Studebaker. His arm was slung around the shoulders of a pretty young woman with bright red hair. He wore baggy tan trousers and a loose blue shirt that rippled in the wind. The handsome woman beside him had on checked capri pants and a dark sleeveless blouse. One hand reaching up to rein in her tossing hair.

Jorge's free hand rested on the sleek hood of that fancy car, and the look of smug possessiveness in his eyes might be assigned to his feelings for either the fine automobile or the woman, or perhaps some combination of both.

The woman, in contrast, was gazing at Jorge's profile with such intensity, there was no mistaking the object of her devotion.

“Is this your benefactor?” Thorn asked the sister.

“Her wish is to remain anonymous.”

“But this is her. This red-haired woman. This beauty.”

“I won't deny it,” the sister said.

“Has Carmen ever seen this?”

“That's why it's kept on a high shelf. The lady brought it and put it there for reasons of her own. But apparently the image upset Carmen the one time she noticed it. We can't take it down, because the lady drops by now and then and always looks for it. So it's there, up high, out of sight.”

“Her name is Lola, isn't it? Lola King.”

The woman said nothing, but her smile was sufficient.

That house of horrors had become a convent, a place where the girl's beliefs in a heavenly order could be lived out in everlasting isolation. A timeless, cloistered existence that was sustained by Lola and Stanton King's unflagging guilt. Or some mutation of parental love that was so twisted, Thorn couldn't quite get hold of it.