Tourist Season (3 page)

So the turtle-eyed sergeant ignored him.

Keyes was surrounded by misery. On his left, a rotund Latin woman wailed into an embroidered handkerchief and nibbled on a rosary.
“Pobrecito,
he's in yail again.”

On the other side, an anemic-looking teenager with yellow teeth carved an obscenity into the bench with a Phillips screwdriver. Keyes studied him neutrally until the kid looked up and snapped, “My brother's in for agg assault!”

“You must be very proud,” Keyes said.

This place never changed. The hum and clang of the electronic doors were enough to split your skull, but the mayhem in the lobby was worse, worse even than the cell blocks. The lobby was crawling with bitter, bewildered souls, each on the sad trail of a loser. Girlfriends, ex-wives, mothers, brothers, bondsmen, lawyers, pimps, parole officers.

And me, Keyes thought. The public defender's office had tried to make the case sound interesting, but Keyes figured it had to be a lost cause. There'd be some publicity, which he didn't need, and decent money, which he did. This was a big-time case, all right. Some nut hacks up the president of the Chamber of Commerce and dumps him in the bay—just what South Florida needed, another grisly murder. Keyes wondered if the dismemberment fad would ever pass.

From the governor on down, everybody had wanted this one solved fast. And the cops had come through.

“Mr. Keyes!” The sergeant's voice echoed from a cheap speaker in the ceiling.

Keyes signed the log, clipped on a plastic visitor's badge, and walked through three sets of noisy iron gates. A trusty accompanied him into an elevator that smelled like an NFL locker room. The elevator stopped on the fifth floor.

Ernesto Cabal, alias Little Ernie, alias No-Way José, was sitting disconsolately on the crapper when the trusty opened the cell for Brian Keyes.

Ernesto held out a limp, moist hand. Keyes sat down on a wooden folding chair.

“You speak English?”

“Sure,” Ernesto said. “I been here sixteen years. By
here
I mean here, dees country.” He pulled up his pants, flushed the john, and stretched out on a steel cot. “They say I kill dees man Harper.”

“That's what they say.”

“I dint.”

Ernesto was a small fellow, sinewy and tough-looking, except for the eyes. A lot of cons had rabbit eyes, but not this one, Keyes thought. Ernesto's brown eyes were large and wet. Scared puppy eyes.

Keyes opened his briefcase.

“You a lawyer, Mr. Keyes?”

“Nope. I'm an investigator. I was hired by your lawyers to help you.”

“Yeah?”

“That's right. ”

“You're a very young guy to be an investigator,” Ernesto said. “How old? Dirty, dirty-one?”

“Good guess.”

Ernesto sat up. “You any good?”

“No, I'm totally incompetent. A complete moron. Now I've got a question for you,
chico.
Did you do it?”

“I tole you. No.”

“Fine.” Keyes opened a manila file and scanned a pink tissue copy of the arrest report.

Ernesto leaned over for a peek. “I know what that is, man. ”

“Good, then explain it.”

“See, I was driving dees car and the policeman, he pull me over on a routine traffic stop ...”

Oh boy, Keyes thought,
routine traffic stop
. This guy's been here before.

“... and told me I'm driving a stolen be-hickle. And the next thin I know I'm in jail and dey got me charged with first-degree murder and robbery and everythin else.”

Keyes asked, “How did you come to be driving a 1984 Oldsmobile Delta 88?”

“I bought it.”

“I see. Ernesto, what do you do for a living?”

“I sell fruit.”

“Oh.”

“Maybe you see me at rush hour. On LeJeune Road. I sell fresh fruit in bags.”

Somewhere down the cell block another prisoner started to bang on the bars and scream that his TV was broken.

Keyes said, “Ernesto, how much does your very best bag of fruit sell for? Top-of-the-line?”

“Mangoes or cassavas?”

“Whatever. The best.”

“Maybe one dollar ... oh, I see what you getting at. Okay, yeah, that's right, I doan make much money. But I got some great buy on this Oldsmobile. You can't believe it.”

“Probably not.”

“I got it from a black guy.”

“For?”

“Two hundred bucks.”

Ernesto seemed to sense he was losing ground. “Some buy. I dint believe it either.”

Keyes shrugged. “I didn't say I didn't believe you. Now, according to the police, you were arrested on Collins Avenue on Miami Beach. You ran a series of red lights.”

“It was tree in the morning. No one was out.”

“Where did you meet the man who sold you the car?”

“Right dare on Collins. Two nights before I got busted. I met him a few blocks from the Fountain-blow. Dare's a city parking lot where I hang.”

“The one where you do all your B-and-E's?”

“Shit, you just like the policeman.”

“I need to know everything, Ernesto, otherwise I can't help. Okay, so you're hanging out, breaking into cars and ripping off Blaupunkts, whatever, and up drives this black guy in a new Olds and says, ‘Hey, Emie, wanna buy this baby for two bills?' That about it?”

“Yeah, 'cept he dint know my name.”

Keyes said, “I don't suppose you asked the gentleman where he got the car?”

Ernesto laughed—a muskrat mouth, full of small yellow teeth—and shook his head no.

“Don't suppose you asked his name, either?”

“No, man.”

“And I don't suppose you'd recognize him if you ever saw him again?”

Ernesto leaned forward and rubbed his chin intently. A great gesture, Keyes thought. Cagney in
White Heat.

“I see dis guy somewhere before,” Ernesto said. “I doan know where, but I know the face. Big guy. Big black guy. Gold chain, Carrera frames, nice-looking guy. Arms like this, like a foking boa constripper. Yeah, I'd know him if I saw him again. Sure.”

Keyes said, “You had a remote suspicion that the car was hot, didn't you?”

Ernesto nodded sheepishly.

“Why didn't you unload it?”

“I was going to, man. Another day or two it'd be gone bye-bye. But it was such a great car ... aw, you wouldn't know about thins like that, man. You prolly got a Rolls-Royce or somethin. I never had a nice car like that. I wanted to cruise around for a while, that's all. I woulda fenced it eventually. ”

Keyes put the file back in the briefcase. He took out a recent photograph of B. D. Harper.

“Ever seen this man, Ernesto?”

“No.” The puppy eyes didn't even flicker.

“Ever killed anybody?”

“On purpose?”

“On purpose, by accident, any way.”

“No, sir!” Emesto said crisply. “Once I shot a guy in the balls. Want to know why?”

“No thanks. I read all about it on your rap sheet. A personal dispute, I believe.”

“That is right. ”

Keyes rose to leave and called for a guard. Then he thought of something else. “Ernesto,” he said, “do you believe in black magic?”

The little Cuban grinned.
“Santeria?
Sure. I doan go to those thins, but it be stupid to say I do not believe. My uncle was a
santero,
a priest. One time he brought a skull and some pennies to my mother's house. He killed a chicken in the backyard—with his teeth he killed dis chicken—and then dipped the pennies in its blood. Two days later the landlord dropped dead.” Ernesto Cabal made a chopping motion with his hand. “Juss like that.”

“You know what I'm getting at, don't you?”

“Yes, Mr. Keyes. I never heard of no
santero
using suntan oil for anythin ... ”

Keyes started to laugh. “Okay, Ernesto. I'll be in touch.”

“Don't you forget about me, Mr. Keyes. Dis is a bad place for an innocent man.”

 

Brian Keyes left the jail and walked around the corner to Metro-Dade police headquarters, another bad place for an innocent man. He shared the elevator with a tall female patrol officer who did a wonderful job of pretending not to notice him. She got off on the second floor. Keyes went all the way up to Homicide.

Al Garcia greeted him with a grin and a soft punch on the shoulder. “Coffee?”

“Please,” Keyes said. Garcia was much friendlier since Keyes had left the newspaper. In the old days he was like a sphinx; now he'd start yakking and never shut up. Keyes thought it might be different this time around.

“How's business?” Garcia asked.

“Not great, Al. ”

“Takes time. You only been at it—what?—two years. And there's plenty of competition in this town.”

No fooling, Keyes thought. He had arrived in Miami in 1979 from a small newspaper in suburban Baltimore. There was nothing original about why he'd left for Florida—a better job, no snow, plenty of sunshine. On his first day at the Miami
Sun
, Keyes had been assigned the desk next to Skip Wiley—the newsroom equivalent of Parris Island. Keyes covered cops for a while, then courts, then local politics. His reporting had been solid, his writing workmanlike but undistinguished. The editors never questioned his ability, only his stomach.

There were two stories commonly told about Brian Keyes at the Miami
Sun
. The first happened a year after his arrival, when a fully loaded 727 fireballed down in Florida Bay. Keyes had rented an outboard and sped to the scene, and he'd filed a superb story, full of gripping detail. But they'd damn near had to hospitalize him afterward: for six months Keyes kept hallucinating that burned arms and legs were reaching out from under his bedroom furniture.

The second anecdote was the most well-known. Even Al Garcia knew about Callie Davenport. She was a four-year-old girl who'd been kidnapped from nursery school by a deranged sprinkler repairman. The lunatic had thrown her into a truck, driven out to the Glades, and murdered her. After some deer hunters found the body, Cab Mulcahy, the managing editor, had told Brian Keyes to go interview Callie Davenport's grief-stricken parents. Keyes had written a real heartbreaker, too, just like the old man wanted. But that same night he'd marched into Mulcahy's office and quit. When Keyes rushed out of the newsroom, everyone could see he'd been crying. “That young man,” Skip Wiley had said, watching him go, “is too easily horrified to be a great journalist.”

Besides Keyes himself, Skip Wiley was the only person in the world who knew the real reason for the tears. But he wasn't telling.

A few months later Keyes got his private investigator's license, and his newspaper friends were amused. They wondered how the hell he was going to hold together, working for a bunch of sleazoid lawyers and bail bondsmen. Brian Keyes wondered too, and wound up avoiding the rough cases. The cases that really paid.

“Still doing divorces?” Al Garcia asked.

“Here and there.” Keyes hated to admit it, but that's what covered the rent: he'd gotten damn good at staking out nooner motels with his three-hundred-millimeter Nikon. That was another reason for Al García's affability. Last year he had hired Brian Keyes to get the goods on his new son-in-law. García despised the kid, and was on the verge of outright murdering him when he called Keyes for help. Keyes had done a hell of a job, too. Tracked the little stud to a VD clinic in Homestead. García's daughter wasn't thrilled by the news, but Al was. The divorce went through in four weeks, a new Dade County record.

Now Brian Keyes had a friend for life.

García poured the coffee. “So you got a biggie, Brian.”

“Tell me about it.”

“It's a touchy one. Can't say much, especially now that you're lined up with the other side.”

“Did you work the Harper case?”

“Hell,
everybody
up here worked that case.”

Keyes tried to sip the coffee and nearly boiled his upper lip.

“Hey,” García said, “that piece-of-shit rag newspaper you used to work for finally printed something intelligent this morning. You see it?”

“My paper was in a puddle.”

“Ha! You should have read it anyway. Wiley, the asshole that writes that column. I hate that guy normally—I really can't stand him. But today he did okay.”

Keyes didn't want to talk about Skip Wiley.

“He wrote about this case,” García went on. “About that little scuzzball we arrested.”

“I'll be sure to get a copy,” Keyes said.

“I mean, it wasn't a hundred percent right, there was a few things he screwed up, but overall he did an okay job. I clipped it out and taped it on the refrigerator. I want my boy to read it when he gets home from school. Let him see what his old man does for a living.”

“I'm sure he'll get a charge out of it, Al. Tell me about Ernesto Cabal.”

“Dirtbag burglar. ”

“Was he on your list of suspects?”

Garcia said, “What do you mean?”

“I mean, you've got thirty detectives working on this murder, right? You must have had a list of suspects.”

“Not on this one.”

“So what we're talking about is blind luck. Some Beach cop nails the guy for running a traffic light and, bingo, there's Mr. Sparky Harper's missing automobile.”

“Luck was only part of it,” Garcia said sourly.

Keyes said, “You caught Cabal in the victim's car, but what else?”