Powder Burn (6 page)

Meadows overcame his ennui once each day to dial the number Nelson had given him, to ask if the killers had been caught.

“Nothing new,” Pincus had said curtly the day before. Nothing new.

Awkwardly Meadows swung off the rattan sofa. Maybe if he went upstairs and sat at his worktable, he could summon up inspiration or at least some energy.

The house was wood, dark and weathered, with a fronting of native limestone. Meadows had bought it a few years before from a cracker family that had lived there in termited isolation for more than half a century. Meadows had dubbed the house his “cracker box” and set about rebuilding it in his own image.

The huge screened porch with its Sea Island hammocks faced the bay. Inside, Meadows had torn down the interior partitions, opening up the living area so it flowed into the porch, uniting the whole with polished oak floors and cypress ceiling beams. Doing most of the work himself, Meadows had built a second story, also of wood, also with its huge porch, and joined it to the first by a spiral staircase that seemed to float off the floor.

It was on the second floor that Meadows slept and gave birth to his architectural dreams. A skylight joined studio and bedroom, making the second story as light and airy as the first was dark and cool. A scarred drafting table dominated the studio. In walk-around mahogany display cases sat precise models of buildings Meadows had conceived—and some he wished he had.

Meadows was doodling listlessly that morning when Stella called. Stella was the dragon who guarded the small office Meadows kept in downtown Miami. He seldom went to the office, and she was the major reason.

Stella was an intense, aggressive female who should have been a politician: all style and no substance. She had the most commanding telephone presence Meadows had ever encountered—that was why he had hired her. What he had not discovered until after it was too late to fire her was that forceful Stella never got anything right.

At first Meadows had been dismayed. He had chided her, coaxed her, coached her until he was sure she understood. It was like translating from another language. If he asked her to book him on Western to San Francisco, she would say “Yes, sir, right away, Mr. Meadows,” and call Eastern.

By now, however, Meadows had grown accustomed to Stella. In fact, Meadows’s friends had his unlisted home number, everybody else called Stella. It worked fine. When Stella garbled a message, it usually turned out to be somebody he hadn’t wanted to talk to anyway.

That day she reported that a client named Nelson Octavio had called. At least she got the phone number right. Meadows felt a pulse of excitement as he waited for Nelson to come to the phone.

“Nelson, it’s Meadows. Have you arrested those guys yet?”

“No,
amigo,
we’re still working on it. But we’ve got a lead, and I’d like you to give us a hand.”

“Sure. What can I do?”

“They found a body last night in Coral Gables. It might be one of the guys you saw in the shootout. I’d appreciate it if you went down to the medical examiner’s office and took a look. Won’t take long.”

“Where?”

“The county morgue. Downtown.”

“Jesus. Can’t I just look at a picture?” Meadows asked. “I don’t want to go to the morgue.”

“Sorry, but a picture is no good. All these scumbags look alike when they’re dead,” Nelson said. “The complexion, the hairline, the size of the face—none of that comes through in a mug shot. Really, it would be a big help.…”

All look alike when they’re dead. Meadows saw Jessica’s body again as it arched into the air, Sandy’s as it dragged along the ground. “I’ll be there,” he said, and hung up.

THE MEDICAL EXAMINER’S
office, Meadows discovered after a series of wrong turns, was a featureless two-story annex attached to Flagler Memorial Hospital. Buildings without architecture, Miami was full of them.

Meadows was intercepted by a laconic clerk who seemed as anonymous.

“I’m here to look at a body,” he said.

“Are you next-of-kin?”

“Uh, no. Definitely not.”

“Name?”

“Christopher Meadows.”

The clerk leafed through a stack of pink carbons.

“We don’t have a Chris Meadows. We have a Christine Reilly, but she’s already been ID’d by her daughter.”

“Meadows is
my
name. I was asked to come down here and look at a body that was found this morning.”

“OK, whose body?” The clerk tapped a Bic pen on her desk. She had all day.

“I don’t know. They didn’t give me a name.”

“Is this a joke?”

“No, Detective Nelson told me to come. He said he was going to meet me here.”

The clerk mashed an intercom button. “Dr. Appel?”

“Yes, Lorie,” a voice reverberated. It sounded as if the man were in Key West.

“There’s a man named Meadows here wants to look at a body. Says Nelson sent him.”

“Right. Send him back.”

Meadows edged cautiously through one set of swinging doors, then another. He found himself standing in a vast room, walled in old tiles the color of lima beans. It took several moments before Meadows realized he was surrounded by human bodies.

They lay, one after another, on silver autopsy tables. Some were splayed open at the sternum, the skin stretched back and the chest cavity open like a Thanksgiving turkey. Meadows thought the corpses looked very small. The whole room smelled rotten and cold. He swallowed hard.

“Hello there.”

Meadows spun around. Dr. Harry Appel stood behind him.

“Hello,” Meadows replied shakily. “You scared me.”

“Didn’t mean to,” Appel said. “Sit down.”

Meadows sat. Appel, a tall man with tortoise-shell glasses, turned back to his work. In one hand he held a half-eaten ham-and-cheese sandwich. The other hand held a human heart, a small bloody violet balloon. Meadows thought he was going to be sick.

“I’d offer you a sandwich,” Appel was saying, “but this is the last one in the house.” The doctor noticed Meadows pale. “Oh, I’m sorry.” He put the sandwich in a paper bag. “I normally don’t eat on the job, but we’ve had a very busy morning. As you can see.”

Meadows nodded weakly and looked at the floor.

Appel placed the heart on a scale and read the weight aloud into a Dictaphone. Then he took a plastic bag, the same kind sold as sandwich bags in any grocery store, and pinched an edge until it opened. He slid the heart in, twisted a metal tab to seal it and dropped the whole soggy package back into the chest cavity. Meadows watched, transfixed.

“I have to do this,” Appel explained. “Used to be I could throw the organs away after I took lab samples. Lately, though, a lot of families insist that their loved ones be buried intact, with all the parts and pieces.”

Meadows just nodded.

“So, you’re here to see the Juan Doe?”

“Uh?”

Appel ran his hands under a faucet, rinsing blood off the diaphanous surgical gloves. He wiped them on his wrinkled green lab coat and motioned to Meadows. “I think your friend is over there.”

He led Meadows to a table where a skinny corpse lay. The top of the skull had been cut away with a fine saw. It hung as if by a hinge, exposing the upper hemisphere of the brain. The skin was pulled down over the face into a wrinkled rubbery mask. The nose was in the wrong place. The mouth was a sneer.

Meadows stood six feet from the table, frozen.

“Oh, Christ,” he wheezed.

“Don’t worry,” Appel said cheerfully. “I’ll put this face back so you can see what he looks like.” He replaced the cap of the skull on the brain, tugging the scalp into place. Then he pulled the skin up, tightening the facial features. Meadows now saw that the victim was a young man, probably a Latin. The face was narrow and bore a grubby trace of a mustache.

“I don’t know him,” Meadows said. “He wasn’t one of the men I saw.”

Appel shrugged. “I’m not surprised.” He asked Meadows about the shootout in the Grove.

“I’d rather not,” the architect replied. “Nelson can tell you what happened. Where is he anyway?”

“He called to say he couldn’t make it,” Appel said. “He mentioned that your girlfriend got killed.”

“An old friend. Just the way it happened…I’m still upset about it. I still don’t feel much like talking. The only reason I came down here was Nelson. He said this might be the guy who did all the shooting, but it isn’t.”

Appel peeled off his gloves. “I’m sorry about your friend. Nelson said you got shot up, too.”

“In the leg. It’s getting better.”

“That’s good,” Appel said. “That’s very good.”

Appel was trying to be friendly. Meadows liked him. He wondered why anyone would become a coroner. He was intrigued by Appel’s nonchalance.

“How did this one die?”

“Same old tricks,” said Appel.

With a bare hand—that was the first thing Meadows noticed—Appel grabbed the corpse by the hair and lifted the head off the block of wood under the neck. He turned it on its side and pointed to a dime-sized hole, dead center in the back of the skull. “There. Bingo.”

Meadows winced. “Why?”

“Take a wild guess.” Appel sighed. “Shit, I get these guys in here every week. Latin male, late twenties, early thirties. Single bullet wound in the back of the head. No ID, no family, no friends. Takes us weeks to trace them. This one’s a Colombian. A Juan Doe, and he’ll probably be buried that way. He’s an illegal. Do you know what they found on the body? Three thousand bucks.”

“That’s a lot of money to be carrying around.”

“He also had a gram of coke and a Cartier watch. The guy had great taste in jewelry but bad taste in the company he kept.”

Meadows took a breath and stepped closer. He studied the face again. “No, I really haven’t seen him before.”

“Were the men in the cars Cuban or Colombian?”

“I don’t know. They were Latin…well, dark-skinned. I just don’t know. They were yelling at each other in Spanish, but there was so much happening.” Meadows flashed on the scene again, just as in his dreams: the noise, the smoke, the screams, then dizziness. The cops had said ten or eleven seconds were all it took.

“You want to look at a Cuban?” Appel asked.

“Another drug murder?”

“Yep. Came in this morning.” Appel went to another table. The corpse was in a heavy black body bag. The words
Metro Fire Rescue
were stenciled in red near the feet.

“A stinker,” Appel warned as he unzipped the bag. “Better hold your nose on this one.”

Meadows fumbled for a handkerchief and mashed it over his mouth. The corpse was ghastly: bloated, greenish, fetid. The clothes were torn, and the flesh of the abdomen was shredded and white.

“Sharks,” Appel explained. “They found this one off Cape Florida. Three clowns from New Jersey were out dolphin fishing on a charter boat. They trolled right over the body and snagged it. Pulled an outrigger down, and they fought it for fifteen minutes before they realized it wasn’t fighting back.”

“God, I couldn’t possibly tell you if I knew that guy or not,” Meadows said, fighting waves of nausea.

“He’s been out there three weeks,” Appel said. “He died the same way as the Colombian: thirty-two semiautomatic in the back of the head.” The medical examiner zipped the bag up. “You know what’s interesting, though, is that this one got beat up first.”

“Was it a robbery?”

“Don’t think so. Beat up, as in tortured. Broken ribs, some kidney damage. They really did a job on him.”

“I’m sorry, but I can’t tell what he used to look like,” Meadows said.

“Oh, we got an ID on this one.” Appel handed the architect a clipboard. The police report was on top. Meadows read it all, fascinated, but feeling like a voyeur.

The dead man’s name was Ruis Juan González. Age: twenty-six. Single. Address: 1721 Brickell Avenue. Meadows knew the building, an ugly condominium two blocks off Biscayne Bay.

Appel pointed to a line in the police report. “This is the best part,” he said.

In the space marked Occupation the cops had written: “Import-export business.”

“That’s from his sister,” Appel explained. “She said her brother was very big into coffee tables from Colombia. Sold them in a shop down on Flagler Street.”

“But he really was a smuggler.”

Appel laughed. “Yeah. He really was a smuggler.” He watched Meadows closely. The architect was examining the homicide report as if it were one of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Appel sat down at his desk. Meadows noted, with astonishment, that the doctor’s coffee cup was fashioned from what seemed to be a human skull. Appel noticed Meadows’s discomfort and chuckled. “Want some Sanka?”

Meadows shook his head.

“Do you know much about the dope business?” Appel asked.

“Just what’s in the papers,” Meadows said. “I talked to Nelson after the shooting. After the murders. He said it was probably just a rip-off, that was all, and everyone started shooting.”

Appel fingered his sideburns, flecked with gray. A bit premature, Meadows thought. The doctor couldn’t be more than thirty-five, thirty-six.

“There’s a small war going on,” Appel said evenly. “They’re killing each other left and right. We get at least one a week in here, just like I showed you. Colombians, Cubans, a few stupid Anglos. It started about a year ago, and at the time it was all very neat because it was fratricide. Dopers killing dopers. Nobody seemed to care. Then some innocent people started getting in the way.”

“Like…”

“Like your friend and her little girl.” Appel lit his pipe and didn’t say anything for a while. Meadows looked at the room full of bodies. He counted nine.

“Oh, most of these are naturals,” Appel said, waving at the tables. “Routine stuff. Some old lady on the beach is insisting I do a post on her husband. He was seventy-four. Now I know he died of congestive heart failure; I
know
it. But she’s convinced he got poisoned by the boysenberry pancakes at this cafeteria downtown. She’s already hired a lawyer, for Chrissakes! Pancakes.”

Appel and Meadows laughed together.

“I could never do this sort of work,” the architect muttered.

“No, probably not,” Appel said, not unkindly. He thought of Sandra Fay Tilden. He didn’t tell Chris Meadows that he himself had done the autopsy.