Tourist Season (10 page)

“For starters, there's a very nice lady whose husband vanished in broad daylight on Miami Beach, and there's also a not-so-nice Cuban burglar in the county jail looking at Murder One.”

“Not anymore.” It was Bloodworth himself, inserting his rodent face through a crack in the door.

“This is a private conference!” Mulcahy barked.

“Wait a second. Ricky, what is it?”

“I thought you ought to know, Brian. Just got word from the police desk.” Bloodworth waved a notebook momentously. “Ernesto Cabal killed himself about an hour ago.”

Viceroy Wilson came into the room wearing tight red Jockey shorts and nothing else. This vision would have provoked cries of glee or terror from most women, but Renee LeVoux was speechless. Viceroy Wilson had stuffed a towel in her mouth before lashing her to the bed the night before.

Renee was mystified and afraid. She didn't know who this was, or where she was, or what was about to happen. She was sure of only one thing: her vacation was in shambles.

In the parking lot at the Miami Seaquarium, she had barely seen the inky specter that had swept her into the car and promised to kill her if she so much as twitched her honky lips.

The trunk of the automobile had been cramped and uncomfortable, but it had a new-car smell, which Renee thought was a good sign. She had shut her eyes and tried not to cry aloud. All she could hear was Wilson Pickett singing “Wait Till the Midnight Hour,” which her captor had played over and over on the tape deck, full blast.

Although it had seemed like eternity, Renee LeVoux actually spent only twenty-seven minutes in the trunk of the Cadillac. Viceroy Wilson had driven straight from the Seaquarium to a cheap motor inn on the Tamiami Trail. There he'd popped the trunk and lifted Renee LeVoux over one shoulder like a sack of tangelos.

Inside the room, he'd wordlessly removed her halter and jogging shorts, gagged her, and tied her to the bed. He'd noticed that she was trembling, so he'd tossed a thin blanket across her, as if she were a horse.

Renee had slept fitfully, straining against the ropes, certain that she would awake any moment to be violated by the biggest black man she'd ever seen.

But nothing had happened. Aside from intermittently checking the knots at Renee's wrists and ankles, Viceroy Wilson had paid almost no attention to his beautiful captive. Instead he'd watched Mary Tyler Moore on television, skimmed the New
Republic
, and done one hundred push-ups, Marine-style.

The next morning, when she heard him turn on the shower, Renee began to cry again. Viceroy Wilson poked his glistening head out the bathroom door and glared. He put a finger to his lips. Renee nodded meekly and became quiet.

Viceroy Wilson had no interest in pale white girls with strawberry hair. During his time in the NFL he had known an astounding variety of women with an equally astounding range of sexual appetites. It had gotten boring toward the end, and dangerous. When Wilson had reinjured his right knee before the crucial Pittsburgh Steelers game in 1977, the Miami Dolphins had put out a press release saying it had happened in a practice scrimmage—when in fact Viceroy's knee had hyperextended on a water bed beneath two limber sisters who worked in a foundry on the Allegheny.

Later, when he became a revolutionary, Viceroy Wilson made a vow not to mix sex and sedition. He wanted to be remembered as a very professional terrorist.

He attached no symbolism to the red Jockey shorts.

“What're you lookin' at?” he asked Renee LeVoux as he toweled off.

From the bed his prisoner just stared in fright.

Moments later a key rattled in the door and another man slipped into the motel room. Viceroy Wilson greeted him with a grunt and a nod of the head. Renee was struck by the difference in the two figures and thought it odd that they could be partners. Wilson's companion was a wiry Latin-looking man who spoke sibilantly and moved catlike about the room. Craning her neck from the bed, Renee could see the two of them conferring in the kitchenette. Soon she smelled coffee and bacon, and her stomach began to make noises. Viceroy Wilson approached the bed and removed the gag from her mouth.

“If you scream, you're dead.”

“I won't, I promise.”

“Your name is Renee?”

She nodded; obviously they had her purse. “You can have all the money in my wallet,” she offered.

“We don't want your money.” Viceroy Wilson slid one hand under her head and lifted it slightly off the pillow; with the other he held a cup of coffee to her lips. She slurped at it timorously.

“Thank you.”

“What's your boyfriend's name?”

Wilson put the coffee cup down. Renee LeVoux noticed that he had a pencil and a piece of paper.

“Why do you want to know?” she asked.

“We're going to write him a letter. Tell him you're okay.”

“Oh no!”

“Oh yes.”

Now there were two faces hovering over her, one black and indifferent, one thin and fierce. The thin man was sneering. He tore the blanket away and saw that Renee was dressed only in her panties.

“Don't hurt me!” Renee cried.

The thin man brandished a shiny knife.

“Oh please no,” Renee cried.

The black man ferociously seized the thin man by the wrist and twisted his arm. The thin man yelped and the knife fell into the bedding.

“Hay-zoose, don't ever try that shit again,” Viceroy Wilson said. He was thinking to himself: This is the problem when you work with Cuban lunatics. They can't go five minutes without pulling a pistol or a blade. They couldn't help it—it was something in their DNA molecules.

“Renee, my name is Mr. Wilson. This here is Mr. Bernal.”

Renee said, “How do you do?”

Wilson sighed. “We need the name of your boyfriend, and we need it now.”

‘I'm not telling. I don't want you to hurt him.”

“Girl, we don't want to hurt him. We want to let him know what happened to you.”

Puzzled, Renee asked, “What
did
happen to me?”

“You've been kidnapped by a group of dangerous radicals.”

“God! But I'm nobody.”

“That's true,” said Jesus Bernal, fishing through the bed for his blade.

“Why me? I'm just a tourist.”

“Did you enjoy the porpoise show?” Bernal asked.

Renee nodded apprehensively. “Yes, very much. And the trained whale.”

“Shamu,” Bernal said. “That's the whale's name.”

This guy was sickening, Wilson thought. He might even be worth killing someday.

“Did you ride the monorail?” Bernal went on mockingly. He wore a mean smile.

“No, David wanted to see the shark moat instead.”

Now we're getting somewhere, Wilson muttered. “David who?”

“I won't tell you!”

Wilson slipped one hand around Renee's freckled neck. It felt soft and cool. He gave a sharp, tennis-ball squeeze; that was plenty.

“David Richaud,” Renee said, starting to sob. “R-i-c-ha-u-d.”

Viceroy Wilson carefully wrote down the name. “And where are you staying?”

“At the Royal Sonesta.”

“Thank you, Renee, my sweet,” said Jesús Bernal, bobbing at the foot of the bed.

“Shut up and type,” said Wilson, shoving the paper at his companion. Bernal bounced over to the kitchen table and sat down at a portable electric typewriter.

Viceroy Wilson turned to his victim and said, “Do you believe that fuckhead went to Dartmouth?”

Jesus Bernal may have come to the cause with impressive credentials, but he was not highly regarded by Viceroy Wilson. Jesus Bernal had once held the title of defense minister for a rabid anti-Castro terrorist group called the Seventh of July Movement. The group was named for the day in 1972 when its founders had launched a costly and ill-fated attack on a Cuban gunboat off the Isle of Pines. In later years an acrimonious dispute had arisen over the name of the group, with some members claiming that the Isle of Pines attack had actually occurred on the
sixth
of July, and demanding that the group should be renamed. A compromise was reached and eventually the terrorists became known as the First Weekend in July Movement.

Throughout the late 1970s this organization took credit for a large number of bombings, shootings, and assassination attempts in Miami and New York. According to the Indian, Bernal was named defense minister chiefly because of his Ivy League typing skills. As Viceroy Wilson knew, one of the most vital roles in any terrorist group was the composing of letters to take credit for the violence. The letters had to be ominous, oblique, and neatly typed. Jesus Bernal was very good in this assignment.

He had been recruited to
Las Noches de Diciembre
after a bitter falling-out with his comrades in the First Weekend in July Movement. Actually Bernal had been purged from the group, but he never talked about why, and Viceroy Wilson had been warned not to ask. He tolerated Bernal, but he had no instinctive fear whatsoever of the Cuban. And he was getting awful damn tired of this macho switchblade bullshit.

“We're moving out soon,” Wilson told Renee LeVoux. He balled up the towel and started to stuff it back in her mouth.

“Wait,” she whispered. “Why did you tell me your names?”

Wilson shrugged.

“You're going to kill me, aren't you?”

“Not if you can swim,” Wilson said, inserting the gag. “And I mean fast.”

Renee's eyes widened and she tried to scream. The more she tried, the redder she got, and all that came out was a throaty feline noise that filled the tawdry motel room. She tossed back and forth on the bed, fighting the ropes, trying to spit out the gag, until Viceroy Wilson finally said “Dammit!” and whacked her once in the jaw, knocking her cold.

Meanwhile, preoccupied at the Smith-Corona, the man writing for
El Fuego
began to type:

Four items of special interest to Brian Keyes appeared in the Miami
Sun
of December 6.

One was a lengthy front-page story about the jailhouse suicide of Ernesto Cabal, accused killer of B. D. “Sparky” Harper. One hour before the tragic incident, Cabal had complained of stomach pains and been transported to the infirmary, where he drank a half-pint of Pepto-Bismol and declared that he was cured. While confined to the clinic, however, Ernesto apparently had pilfered a long coil of intravenous tubing, which he smuggled back to his cell. No one checked on him for hours, until they found him cold and dead at dinnertime. Using the I.V. tube as a noose, Cabal had managed to hang himself, naked as usual, from a water pipe. The duty sergeant remarked to the
Sun
that it was difficult to make a really good noose out of plastic tubing, but somehow Cabal had done it. When asked why none of the other inmates on the cell block had alerted the guards to Ernesto's thrashings, the sergeant had explained that the little Cuban “was not all that popular.”

The second item to catch Keyes's attention (he was reading on a musty sofa next to the aquarium in his office, where he had spent the night) was the inaugural column of Ricky Bloodworth. The headline announced: “Miami Rests Easier as Harper Mystery Ends.” The column was a fulsome tribute to all the brilliant police work that had landed Ernesto Cabal in jail and driven him to his death. “He knew the evidence was overwhelming and he knew his freedom was over,” Bloodworth wrote, “so he strangled himself to death. He was nude, alone, and guilty as sin.” Then came a quote from the big redheaded detective, Hal, who said that the Harper case was closed, as far as he was concerned. “This is one of those rare times when justice triumphs,” Hal beamed.

Keyes noticed that there was no quote from Al García. And there was no mention of the
El Fuego
letters.

The third article of interest was not very long, and not prominently displayed. The story appeared on page 3-B, at the bottom, beneath a small headline: “Police Seek Missing Woman.” The article reported that one Renee LeVoux, twenty-four years old, a visitor from Montreal, had been abducted from the parking lot of the world-famous Miami Seaquarium shortly before five P.M. the previous day. Incredibly, there were no witnesses to the crime. Miss LeVoux's male companion, whom police declined to identify, had been knocked unconscious by a single blow to the back of the neck, and was of no help. Anyone with information about Miss LeVoux's whereabouts was encouraged to call a Crime Stoppers phone number.

Brian Keyes made a mental note to find out more about that one.

Finally he spotted the one news item that he'd actually been looking for. Mercifully it was buried on 5-B, next to the advertisements for motorized wheelchairs.

The headline said: “County Lawyer Stabbed in Melee.” Splendid, Keyes thought ruefully, it made the final edition after all. Keyes wondered if the
Sun
had gotten the story right, and forced himself to read: