Miami Noir (8 page)
“If you take a look at where I am, I think you’ll see that it’s a little too late for that particular bit of advice, but thanks anyway.”
He smiled, but the gun stayed where it was. “You’re all right,” he said. “I wish you had been my teacher. I had some bitch named Ms. Duncan.”
“Listen to me,” I said. “You need to get the hell out of here. We both do. There’s nothing here for you. I know it’s easy for me to say, and I know how I would feel if I were in your place, but I’m telling you, I can read your mind like a fucking book and it’s crazy. This too shall pass, but if you go in there tonight, I’m telling you, you will regret it. Let her go. She isn’t worth it and neither is he. You know I’m right.”
“I know you’re right, but that’s my house; that’s my wife.”
“Let the lawyers handle it. Fuck them both. Let’s get out of here.”
“I bet you were a pretty good teacher,” he said.
“Maybe I was—once. I don’t know anymore. I don’t know anything anymore. I just know we need to get the hell out of here before I have a heart attack.”
“I’ve been driving around all day, looking at everything,” he said in a voice that was half anguish, half wonderment. “Everything’s gone, teach. It’s all gone. I can’t do it no more. Go to work, act normal, do my job knowin’ that they’re in there together in my house. Where’s the respect in that?”
I didn’t know what to say, so I said: “You’re a cop. Think about that. Respect that, Officer Paulson.”
“I tried, but it’s not enough. Stay here. I’ll be right back. Got to get a few of my things. Don’t go driving off now.”
“Why don’t you leave the gun with me?” I said.
“You think that’s a good idea?”
“I know it’s a good idea,” I told him.
“All right.” He handed me the automatic. I set it down on the floor between my feet. Officer Paulson got out of the car, straightened himself, and stared at the house for a long moment. Then leaned down, looked at me through the passenger’s side window, and smiled.
“I appreciate you driving around with me. It’s been a real crazy day, hasn’t it?”
“I think so. Go ahead and hurry up. Don’t be in there too long, you understand me? I don’t want to have to come in there and drag you out.”
“You sound like my pops.”
“Stay cool.” I gave him the peace sign, wondering if it still meant the same thing.
He smiled and began walking toward the house. When he got to the porch with its roof hanging down like a eye, he turned and waved at me. I waved back. I watched him knock politely on the door, and I watched the door open slowly. I could see the muted glow of a lit candle through the broken window. The tail end of a white curtain licked out at the breeze.
For about two minutes it was all quiet, and then the shouting started. Before I knew it, I was out of the car. I was halfway to the house when I remembered the gun on the floorboard and ran back to get it—why, I don’t know, since I’ve never shot one in my life.
I was running toward the house when the front door opened and a man came dashing out, a young guy not much older than the cop. He was wearing a black Miami Heat T-shirt and a pair of camouflage pants. I recognized him immediately. His named was Roger Starks. He had played point guard for the basketball team at the high school where I taught. He stopped when he saw me and his eyes focused on the gun. I reached back and stuck it in my pants. Starks turned to glance back at the house.
“Roger…” I started to say.
He began running back toward the house, but I caught up to him before he could pick up speed, grabbed him by the shoulders, and spun him around. He swung his right arm at me and pulled free.
“What the hell is going on?” I asked.
“He told me to go outside,” Roger said. “Said he wanted to talk to her.”
“It’s his wife; he’s got a right. Why don’t you get out of here? If it’s over, then it’s over. Don’t worry; I’ve got his gun.”
“No, man. No you don’t.”
We both jumped when we heard the gunshot. Then, stupidly, we were both running toward the house. The second shot came a few seconds later, like an afterthought to a bad idea. Roger and I slowed down and looked at one another. Roger ran ahead of me, but I knew there was no need to hurry. I stopped and looked around. Shadows had begun to come out of their houses.
“Somebody call the cops!” I shouted.
“Looks like they’re already here, bro!” someone shouted back.
A moment later I heard Roger wailing from inside the house. I walked up and sat down on the steps of the slanted porch and peered up at the stars in the night sky while the boy cried in the darkened house behind me. It came to me that as a boy I could name all the constellations, but now, as I looked up, it seemed to me I could barely remember a single one.
After a while, I went into the house and tried not to look at what I saw. Roger was kneeling on the floor, holding the limp body of the young woman in his arms. The cop was in a leather lounge chair with his feet up, his head over to one side, and there was a splash of blood on the wall across from him. A small silver-plated automatic lay on the floor beneath his outstretched hand. One of his pant legs was hiked up enough for me to see the empty leather ankle holster.
I went over to where Roger was and put my middle and index fingers on the girl’s carotid artery, but it was only a formality. There was no way she could have lived. Together, Roger and I put her on a waterlogged sofa, and I covered her with a comforter I took from one of the bedrooms. I walked over to the body of Officer Paulson and for some reason lay the palm of my hand across his forehead, as though he were a child with a high fever from which he would soon recover, who was napping now and would soon wake up.
I left Roger inside and went back out to the patrol car. It was country-dark and the gondola-shaped moon was the only light. Somehow, after many tries, I got the squad car’s radio working and told the story to a dispatcher. She asked me who I was and where the house was located, and I told her to hold on while I went back and asked Roger for the address.
It took a long time for the police to get there. I left out the part about me driving the patrol car, and instead told them that I had just happened by. They seemed to believe me, but even so, it was nearly dawn before they let me duck under the yellow tape surrounding the house and go on my way. I was more than a bit lost when I remembered the compass in my pocket. I took it out, lined up the needle with the North Pole, and started back toward Homestead.
I
never knew why my stepmother called it the piano room. I never saw the piano or a picture of one and I never asked, so her explanation went with her when she died. The old pine floor measured ten-by-twelve between the front room and kitchen—fine for an upright but too tight for a baby grand. It could have been a dining room except for no table and no real upkeep for thirty years until this morning I’m talking about. Two days earlier I’d cleared it of old booze boxes full of crap like
Saturday Evening Post
magazines and mildewed utility bills from the ’80s. I knew the mound of trash would piss off the city’s garbage associates, so the next morning I stashed a twelve of malt liquor under the top layer and it all went away, no problem. Now, into my first renovation project, I was harmonizing with Garth Brooks, pouring Parisian Taupe flat interior enamel into a plastic paint tray, when someone double-knocked on the front screen door. At that moment the piano room dimmed—a cloud crossed the sun. I knew only two people who might show before 8:00 on a Saturday. I felt a balls-deep fear that both women had arrived at the same time. I hoped for the best and yelled out for my company to come on in.
“I ain’t one of your homies, Clance. You best come see who it is.”
This can’t be good, I thought. The last time I heard the voice of Detective Sergeant James Task he was the county prosecutor’s puppet. A starched white shirt and a ten-year-old’s haircut, dealing law jargon to a jury of my non-peers, knowing full-on that his technical words connoted expertise and truth. I was guilty as hell, but that didn’t mean he had to be so proficient, writing my upstate ticket to puff his tin-badge image. Four years later, I needed to kick myself for bad ears, for a lazy warning system. Not that my mental alarm could’ve ejected him from the porch, but his knock had been all cop and staccato and I might have offered a less jubilant invitation. I finished the pour and used a two-inch polyester brush to dab rim drips and squish paint out from behind the can label. I took my time, gathered a few yard smarts as I stood, muted my CD player, and ambled out to face the fucker.
Half the foyer back from the door, I waited for Task’s opener. He was shorter than I remembered, maybe 5’6″ or 5’7″, but built thick like a lifter. His forehead was an inch taller than it had been that day in court. His remaining hair was slicked back as if he had just showered and was a perfect shoe-brown, a screaming admission of a dye job.
“Clancy Whidden, smack in front of me,” he said. “’Sup, dawg? Same ol’ same?”
“You jump off by strokin’ me, take your salesman dance down the road.”
“I thought I was coming in clean.”
“I can do without that dumb-ass inside lingo the rest of my life.”
Task gave me a loser’s shrug. “I took a cram course last winter.”
“Selling door-to-door?”
“Being inside.”
“Start over,” I said.
“A few months earlier, I could’ve been your cellie.”
“I won’t buy that shit either.”
“Straight up,” he said. “I had an ugly accident on 836. You must’ve heard about it.”
I hadn’t heard and I wasn’t interested. My paint was drying in the pan and I hadn’t even dipped the roller. “I broke my newspaper habit while I was reading ceilings,” I said.
“My brake foot slipped, the lady ahead of me spun and got upside down in her Saturn. I bolted and made it about four miles, then they wedged me to the shoulder. I didn’t think I was toasted but I blew a 1.8. They smeared me all over the TV. Perp-walkin’ with hat-hair and blood streaming out my ears.”
“I broke that television habit too,” I said. “I couldn’t buy a chair in the prison rec room and now I can’t afford cable.”
“Anyway, four months,” he said, “I did it holding my breath.”
“So that means you went…”
He looked away and shook his head. “They offered, but I couldn’t go that low. Rob a bank, do your time, you stop being a bank robber. But protective custody…”
“Right,” I said. “You’re a weasel forever.”
“So I opted to mingle with the population. It was known that I’d nixed PC, so I got slack, but I kept that grommet tight as a lug nut. I still walk like a duck.”
“No slash scars on your belly?”
He stared cold for a flash, then shook his head.
“And you’re here because…”
Task stuck an index finger into his ear, gave it a twist, pulled it out, and inspected for goo. “I need help on a wash job.”
“Not my expertise. Never was, never will be.”
“Money’s money,” he said. “You went up on a money crime, that sales-tax beef.”
“Because you never proved what I sold was stolen.”
“We had a semi-trailer full of Korean DVD players and a storage shed—two hundred toasters with Washington Mutual logos. The state attorney opted to streamline and go the tax route. His decision, believe me—I had no input. What were those toasters, for people who opened new accounts?”
I shrugged, shook my head. I didn’t know, never thought of it. “None of that means I can launder a damn thing, Task. Cars are cars, you don’t get a brake mechanic to replace your headliner.”
He peered through the screen, toward the room to my right. “That living room suite, you’re doing something.”
“Nothing that’ll pull me away from blue sky.”
“Can we at least talk?”
He’d parked a dark red four-door at the curb, a Town Car with its own long history. I weighed the chance that the state would put a badge in the joint for four months to build his undercover cred. It might, I decided, but not a small man like Task. Still, the dude had seriously screwed my life, kept me from attending my stepmother’s funeral.
“Some other year,” I said. “These days I’m on a problem-avoidance kick.”
“No way I’m here to create—”
“You just standing there is shit I didn’t have ten minutes ago.”
He tried to look righteous, like I should take him at his word. “No peril to your renovated moral code, you follow me? Nothing illegal on your end.”
I looked up the wall, decided the foyer would be my next project. “So, I like make your coffee?”
“Be my introduction.”
“And if you go south, I take your strain?”
“That direction isn’t built into this trip.”
The foyer ceiling would get priority attention. Maybe a crown molding. Not too fancy but a class touch. “I got work to do, Task. My paint’s drying in the pan.”
“I smell that fresh latex,” he said. “How long you got left on probation?”
“Fuckhead keeps bumping me. No reasons, no end in sight.”
He said, “They got a name for it, those lame-duck POs. They laugh and talk about Perpetual Pro. After I tell you how come, you’re two-thirds the way to getting off.”
“This is just wonderful.”
“More judges are sentencing full boogie, going stingy on probation,” said Task. “Even with overcrowding, it’s the wave of the future. Maybe the prisons-for-profit have judges in their pockets, I don’t know. Anyway, the caseload’s dropping, and Miami-Dade is cutting back. The longer a PO keeps your case active, the better his job security. You, my man, are the key to that asshole’s free checking and health insurance. He keeps the ring in your nose, his kids see the orthodontist. We live in a great country, don’t we?”
“I’m not feeling that two-thirds vibe.”
Task looked away. “They scarfed my badge but I still got numbers to call.”
“I’m into gaming it my way.”
“You got a point.” He peered again through the screening. “This furniture showroom paradise…”
“Triple paradise compared to thirty-eight—”
“—months, one week, and two days,” said Task. “Surrounded by tender loving curly-cues of razor wire which day and night makes for a sparkly view.”
“You did your research. You want to know how many hours that last day?”
“You didn’t take a full sentence to the door. Who’d you rat?”
I shook my head. “Reduced. I fixed and maintained the central air handler.”
Again, into his ear and out, and the finger’s close inspection. “My numbers to call, I got more than just one.”
“I don’t hold a grudge, Task, especially since you told the court I was nonviolent and cooperative. But you slap a PV on me, you best be looking for another side.”
“If you had to sit the rest of your—what, thirty-four more—sentence plus twelve months on the violation—”
“Eighteen.”
“Still, it wouldn’t be any more than…You’d hit the door in four years. Sell all this furniture, you might cover your property taxes, still have a roof when you walk free.”
I thought about the question with no answer:
Why me
My curiosity took over. I let myself look convinced of his goodwill, and my face gave me away.
“You’ve never been a stupid man,” he said.
“There’s only one thing I need to know. What ballpark we playing in?”
“We’re talking five-seventy-five.”
“Shit,” I said, “in this town? You could stash that roll under the mattress. Why stick out your neck for bird feed?”
“The people I’m working with, they don’t want to jump with both feet, you know what I mean?”
“They’re testing you.”
“That’s good logic but it ain’t the case. What we need to flip is no fat fortune, but one man’s floor is another man’s ceiling. Isn’t that how it goes?”
No, I thought. “Close enough,” I said. “Hand me your shirt and pants.”
Task froze. “I wouldn’t bring a weapon into your home, Clancy.”
“You tell that one lie, Task, I go to prison.”
He didn’t turn to check for neighborhood onlookers. Without hesitation he peeled down to a pair of boxers. Not the least bit self-conscious. That’s when I knew he’d done time. At least that part wasn’t bullshit.
“You can watch and talk,” I said. “When I’m done painting, you’re done talking.”
You learn the ropes by bouncing off. So I set myself up as the fall guy knowing he’d knock me down and curious how he’d do it. I would hear him out and keep clean; nobody ever said that being polite was a conspiracy. If his chatter gave me the heebie-jeebies, I’d boot him. Meanwhile, I showed him his choice of chairs. Task picked the one farthest from me.
“This living room,” he said, “reminds me of the house I grew up in.”
“Where was that?”
“Over the bridge in South Beach,” he said. “After the days of high deco fashion and before all this tits-and-bling showed up.”
“The in-between was a geriatric skid row,” I said.
“But growing up, you didn’t know the whole world didn’t wear purple wigs and play canasta. You got a bunch of fresh furniture in here, Clancy. Where you working, Rooms To Go Out The Door?”
Bastard had done his research.
My mother died a month before I got out. I inherited her house with the living room done up in 1975 porch furniture, so I decided to hit my problem head-on. I found a gig in a Dixie Highway furniture store owned by an old Miami family. I refurbished repos and returns and I repaired broken stuff. I explained to Task that the family loved the volume of ciggie-burned and butt-busted pieces I pushed back to the sales floor, even if a few had to go out as scratch-and-dent specials. What didn’t pass boss lady’s inspection went to trash. If I wanted to take home rejects, they were mine to carry. At first I didn’t go for it, but Mrs. Minton saw through my reluctance. She printed out a release form with blank spots for me to describe the furniture, write the date, and a place for her to sign off. That way, nobody could come back later and say I stole anything. So far I had toted home four chairs, an end table, and a fancy-ass coffee table—none of which matched—and a VHS tape rack to hold paperback books.
Inside, marking time and living without a toilet seat, you learn to stifle emotions, look oblivious while your mind strips gears and spins dirt. Task rattled off opinions: Hispanics, profitable opportunities, cops he knew who were worse than the criminals they caught. I couldn’t tell if cunning or fake enthusiasm or rookie hots were driving his pitch.
I didn’t push him to explain his money-laundering scam. I just listened and rolled paint. Home Depot’s brochure said to start with a W-shaped pattern each time you wet the roller. Then you filled in bare spots and distributed color evenly in one area before moving along the wall. It worked, but I wondered if it didn’t use up more paint than necessary. Clever, those brochures.
“Best part of living in South Beach was Biscayne Bay,” said Task.
“You had a motorboat?”
“How’d you know?”
“My cousin had a little skiff we ran out of the Grove,” I said. “Over to Cape Florida, sometimes down to Soldier’s Key. Every decent weekend for years, even during high school when we couldn’t get jobs. Some days I’d go in with my mask and snorkel, and he’d tow me for miles. My private under-water cinema.”
“My buddy and me, we did the same exact thing. We had to run under causeways to reach the bay, keep away from rich dudes’ yachts and wakes, then weave through all those exiles hooking sponges from their ten-foot boats.”
I dipped my paint roller, let the excess drip away. “They came over from Havana in those small sailboats.”
“You didn’t get tired of being towed around, watching the bay-bottom movie?”
“Oh, we grew up,” I said. “We got to crashing parties in Stiltsville. Topless college girls wouldn’t care if we stared, and the boys would sell us beer. We’d get tanked on two or three Pabst Blue Ribbons.”
“Shit,” said Task, “one time we took extra gas and went all the way to the bottom of the bay. We had to duck a squall up a tidal creek down below Turkey Point, and stupid me, during the rainstorm I stole a fifteen-horse Johnson off a piece-of-crap rowboat. I wrapped it in a foul-weather slicker and all the way back north, sunburned and stinking of raw gas, I waited for the Marine Patrol to bust us. I pictured them scouring marinas all over Dade, finding that damned motor, and hauling me off to jail. I scared myself so bad, I finally pushed it overboard by Virginia Key. That was my only crime until, you know…”
“Not even a candy bar into your shirt pocket?”