Voodoo Eyes (14 page)

‘Are you saying that smack was planted?’

Quinones didn’t answer.

Which meant yes.

Max wasn’t surprised.

‘What about the ties to Cuba, the money the Jacobins supposedly got?’

‘We planted those rumours in the press,’ said Quinones.

‘None of it was true?’

‘No.’

‘Why d’you do it?’

‘It was my job to,’ Quinones said. ‘Two colours white America hates: black and red. Mix them together and you get some kind of dynamite. Look at what the right-wing media are saying about Obama now – that he’s a “socialist”. Black and red again. Never stops, never fails.’

The waitress came and took away Max’s cup. He ordered more coffee.

‘How did that work? Joe just leaving an undercover gig and becoming a cop – on the same streets he’d marched through?’

‘Joe told Vanetta Brown he was leaving to join the police.’

‘What?’

‘That was his idea. Joe sold it to her like he could do some good on the inside, take the lessons he’d learned and apply them in the force. He said he’d spy for her too, let her know what was coming down. She was all for it. She gave him her blessing. The Black Jacobins were never anti-police. Despite everything that had happened to Vanetta Brown. She believed in reform, not revolution.’

‘So she never suspected?’

‘She never knew he worked for us, no. And that’s all I’m going to tell you, Mingus, because that’s all Joe
asked
me to tell you.’

‘You mean there’s more?’

‘There’s always more. But as far as I’m concerned, your bowl’s full. The check’s on you.’

Quinones got up.

‘One more thing: I’ll be coming to the funeral next week. Do me a favour. Don’t sit next to me, don’t talk to me, don’t look at me. Goodbye.’

‘Yeah, and fuck you too, Jack,’ Max said to Quinones’ departing back.

He stared at the tiny black puddle at the bottom of his cup, looked around the restaurant. The crowd had thinned. The background muzak became more prominent. As did the sounds of the gulls squawking over tourist conversations.

Sitting there, he felt hollow and dizzy. It was all crashing down around him. Everything he’d known. Everything he’d been sure of. None of it still standing.

17

Max rested against a palm tree and dug his bare feet into the fine warm sand.

He never came out to the beach any more. It reminded him too much of Sandra. She used to like going there when they lived together in his condo on Ocean Drive. She’d lived in and around Little Havana all her life before she met him; a trip to the beach had been a treat, a place she’d had to make an effort to get to, something she’d only done with family or friends on holidays or weekends. Having a place so close to the sea was a novelty for her. And it never wore off.

He liked thinking about Sandra but he didn’t like being reminded of her. Thoughts he could control, memories he couldn’t. They were happy memories, but they left the bitterest taste. He knew what came next, where they led to.

Max wasn’t angry at Joe for not talking about his past. Maybe he’d even been leading up to it when he was killed. It didn’t matter. It didn’t change a thing about them or the way they’d been.

But …

Why had Vanetta Brown put a hit on him?

Had she found out about him being an FBI informant?

Eldon led the raid on the Jacobin House. Vanetta Brown lost her husband and her daughter that day.

The motive wrote itself.

It all made sense.

Too much sense.

Like Quinones said, there was always more.

But …

Wouldn’t it be best just to leave it here, cherish the version of Joe he remembered and accept it as definitive, as some kind of truth?

He sensed that if he went deeper, he’d find out the kind of things that would redefine his memories, sully them, warp them. He didn’t need that, not now, not at his age, not when he had so little to look forward to and so much to look back on.

His phone rang.

It was Dan Souza.

‘I checked Emerson Prescott’s account details. Payment was made from a Bank of America account in the name of RMG Ents. I don’t know what the RMG stands for. Ents could be Entertainments or Enterprises.’

‘Or both. Or neither.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Nothing,’ said Max. ‘Thanks for your help.’

‘You’re welcome.’

Max headed home via the walkway that ran between the beach and the backs of the hotels. It was part living breathing billboard, part scenic route, part pink-and-white concrete vein sluicing tourists, joggers, dogwalkers, couples, manual workers, bums and cops on bicycles from the top of Collins to the end of Ocean Drive.

He noticed the man following him. Short dark hair, linebacker build, sharply creased slacks, black leather shoes, short-sleeved white shirt, tie, RayBans and a cellphone he mumbled into intermittently. He was hanging back, trying to blend in with the pedestrians. Max had made him on the beach while talking to Souza. He’d been standing by a lifeguard hut as though buying water, clocking Max the whole time. He wasn’t a cop. A cop would know better than to dress like a Bible salesman trying to find his way out of Gomorrah.

Max stopped and sat on the wall and stared down the tracker. The man’s face showed confusion and then irritation, before he stopped and consulted his phone.

When he’d finished the call, he walked over to Max with quick, bold strides.

‘Max Mingus?’ the man asked. ‘Agent Joss, Homeland Security.’ He showed his badge.

How long had they been following him?

‘Could you come with me please?’

‘Why the elaborate tail?’

‘I wasn’t tailing you. I was trying to catch up with you.’

Pride before patriotism, Max thought.

‘Am I under arrest?’ he asked.

‘Someone wants to talk to you.’

‘Who?’

18

Wendy Peck stepped around her desk to greet Max with an extended hand and the same smile she wore for her official photo – the projection of pleasure they taught on the body language module of MBA courses; that pleased-to-meet-you, tooth-sheathed inflection that started and stopped at the corners of the mouth and was designed to be summoned or lost in an instant.

The small office in Little Havana was above a launderette, directly opposite the white art deco Tower Theatre, a building whose spire made it look more like a modern church than the cinema it really was.

The interior was low-budget functional: two grey plastic chairs, a wooden desk, a floor covered with carpet tiles. Everything looked and smelled new, the set-up feeling about an hour old. No plants, no phones, no lamps, no flag, no photo of the President. This was going to be the sort of meeting that had never happened; just his word against the state’s.

‘I’m sorry we had to do it this way, Max. But I’m sure, once we’ve talked, you’ll understand why,’ she said in lieu of an introduction.

Her photograph had made her seem robust, the first line of offence in America’s War on Terror. But in person she was slim going on petite. She wore a pale-blue blouse and a dark-blue skirt and jacket. No flag pin. She hid most of her wide, lightly lined and prominent forehead behind a fringe that stopped short of dark eyebrows and rimless rectangular-lensed glasses. She wore no rings and, aside from two small gold studs in her earlobes, no other jewellery. Minor make-up, most of it on her lips, which erred towards the thin. Not unattractive, he thought, but there was a remoteness about her, a frozen-over distance that wouldn’t thaw. He wondered if she had a family or a partner, or anything at home outside of the job she left it for.

She motioned to the chair opposite the desk and sat down after he’d taken his place.

‘Can we get you anything before we start? Water? Coffee?’

Empathy ploy, Max thought. First names, make the unpleasant a little less so. A preflight beverage before the bumpy ride started. He tried meeting her eyes but his attempt was rebuffed by the bright-white reflection from her glasses.

‘I’m good,’ Max said. She motioned for Agent Joss, who’d followed him in, to leave the room.

To Max’s left, there were two green box files on the desk, one on top of the other. She opened the first and pawed and pulled her way quickly through the contents, bunching printed pages aside like fabric samples in a swatchbook, until she found what she wanted: a single page. She placed it in front of her, glanced down it and then up at Max.

‘Why are you investigating Vanetta Brown?’ she asked, folding her hands together and leaning forward.

‘I wouldn’t call it investigating,’ he said. He’d known this was coming the minute they’d picked him up.

‘What would you call it?’

‘Trying to understand her motive for killing two of my friends.’

‘Do you?’

‘I’m getting there.’

‘You met with Special Agent Quinones a few hours ago. He filled you in on Captain Liston’s past as a Bureau informant. Yesterday you bought a banned book –
Black Power in the Sunshine State
– from Swopes bookstore.’

She spoke with the same modest Southern twang he did, taking the long way around vowels, but there was precious little Floridian warmth to her voice. She sounded like she’d spent serious time and effort ditching Dixie.

‘Why’ve you been following me?’ Max asked, feeling the screws tighten. He wondered if they’d report Jack to the Bureau. He was surprised he even cared, but he did. A little.

She ignored the question. This was her show. She looked at her sheet of paper again.

‘You’ve been spending a lot of time on the internet at home, reading up about Vanetta Brown.’

‘How do you know what I’ve been looking at?’

‘How do you think?’

That jolted him, that he was being spied on. And then it started scaring him. How much did they know about him? How far back had they gone? He suddenly thought of Eldon. Eldon and the piles of dirt he’d salted away. His ‘insurance policy’, he’d called it. Had she got hold of that?

He corked his turmoil. He reminded himself he’d done nothing wrong. And that pissed him off. The fact that he was even here. Being talked to like this, being investigated.

‘Don’t you need a warrant?’ he said.

‘We have one. It’s called the Patriot Act.’

‘This was murder not terrorism.’

‘What’s the difference?’

‘Terrorism is murder for a cause or an ideology – political, religious, whatever,’ said Max. ‘I don’t see any kind of cause or ideology behind what Vanetta Brown did. I just see someone getting even.’

‘Look again,’ she said. ‘Brown is a fugitive from American justice, a cop-killer living in Cuba, a rogue state. She contracted an assassin to murder not one but two Miami cops. See where this goes? Cuba as a state sponsor of terror and all that?’

She smiled, not her camera-ready smile, but one she meant: a wry and mirthless grin telling Max that yes, that’s not necessarily the way it went down, but that was the way it would go down if she wanted it to.

‘How well did you know Captain Liston?’

‘You should know.’

‘Tell me anyway.’

‘We were best friends for close to forty years,’ he said. ‘I guess that means I knew him better than most.’

‘But not as well as you thought.’

‘Everyone’s entitled to a secret or two.’

‘Depends on the secret. Why do you think he never told you?’

‘Maybe because he thought it wasn’t relevant. Maybe because he’d taken an oath of silence. Or maybe because it was none of my business. I don’t know. And, frankly, I don’t care.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because he’s dead and he took the answer with him. All that’s left is speculation.’

‘How do you feel about him being killed like that, right in front of you?’

‘How did you feel when your daddy never came home?’

That stopped her. She flinched, then gave him a fierce look. And that was when he saw her eyes, hard and grey-blue, with the emphasis on the grey, the colour of icicles reflected on stainless steel. Her fingers tensed up into talons and the edges of the paper shrivelled under her touch. Outside, he heard wheels screech in the road and the beginnings of a dispute in Spanish. He felt sweat prickling on his back.

‘Why don’t you cut the shit and tell me what I’m doing here,’ Max said.

She stared at him a moment longer, weighing up personal rage against professional commitment, the what she wanted to do to him versus the what she wanted him to do for her. It took a while for her to tilt and settle in favour of the latter, but she did, turning back to the open file and extracting some photographs.

‘The police aren’t going to catch the man who killed Captain Liston and Eldon Burns,’ she said.

‘Why not?’

‘Because he got away. Like all good assassins, he split town as soon as his job was done,’ she said. ‘While you were waiting to give your statement to Detective Perez, the shooter and another man were getting on a speedboat in Miami Harbour. By the time you’d finished talking, they were transferring to another boat about fifteen miles offshore. That boat took them to Cuba. See for yourself.’

She dealt out half her sheaf of photographs and pushed them over.

The shooter’s face slid across the table. He was staring straight at the camera, straight at Max. Black eyes, a face so thin the features looked painted on to his skull, and then that cruelly hare-lipped mouth, a disfigurement so prominent and acute, at initial glance it appeared that the photograph was damaged; as if someone had cut diagonally across the right corner of the picture, taking out half the nose, mouth and chin, and then clumsily pushed the parts together, the segments misaligned, the physiognomy askew. Max covered the mouth and studied the face. The shooter looked young, late teens, barely a man.

The next picture was the uncropped original, the killer in context. He was standing on a pier, looking over his shoulder, wearing surgical gloves and a black short-sleeved shirt patterned with light-coloured, upward-flying birds. To his left, sitting at the wheel of the boat, was the accomplice – fuller in build, shoulder-length hair, face silhouetted in perfect profile against the pale boat.