Voodoo Eyes (3 page)

Max checked out the love nest. It was identical to his room in almost every way – a double bed with a framed vintage Miami tourist board poster above it, next to the window a round table with two bucket chairs and a lamp, by the main door three small flying geese-shaped mirrors going up the wall, a TV and DVD player in the corner. Teddy had explained that the pictures were the hotel’s only remarkable feature – each room had a unique historical poster. In Max’s it was 1950 – the year of his birth. Room 30’s was 1961. The only noticeable difference was that the air conditioning worked in here – it smelled much fresher.

The following Thursday night he timed them.

7.07 p.m.–7.23 p.m.: talking. Cortland mostly, but Max couldn’t hear what he was saying because he spoke quietly, in a deep murmur. It must have been funny, or Fabiana was in love, because she laughed a lot.

7.24 p.m.–7.41 p.m.: quiet mostly, then random moans.

7.43 p.m.–8.17 p.m.: fucking. They were loud. She moaned, cried and yelped. He grunted and gasped. Then she started screaming and shouting. In Spanish. ‘
Más profuuuundo! Mássss pro!-fuuuundo! Si! Si! Mi amor! Si mi amor! Alli! Alli! Si! Siiii! Mi amor! Mi ángel
’.

By then Max was sitting by the door with his fingers vainly stuck in his ears to block out the worst. He felt deeply embarrassed to be there, ashamed to be making money this way.

8.18 p.m.–9.04 p.m.: deep, exhausted breathing – his and hers. Fabiana said, ‘Su
pene es una varita mágica,’
which made Cortland laugh and reply, ‘Call me Harry Focker, baby.’

Max heard the shower.

9.38 p.m.: the door closed.

Max looked out of the window and saw Fabiana come out of the hotel and head for Collins Avenue.

9.52 p.m.: the door closed again.

Cortland left the hotel and headed in the same direction Fabiana had.

Max listened in on them for the next three weeks. It was more time than he needed, but he had no new work coming in, and he didn’t like his client, so he stretched things out to their reasonable limit.

The couple started slightly later than before, but the timings were near identical.

All the while he’d been pondering how best to sneak into the room and take pictures without being noticed. He came up with two options. The first was hiding in the wardrobe opposite the couple’s bed. But when he tried it out for size, he couldn’t quite fit. The entrance was too narrow for his shoulders, and the only way he could get on board was by squeezing in from the side. He just about managed this, yet once inside he discovered he could barely turn his head, let alone use a camera. And then his foot had gone through the floor. So he’d had to default to his least preferred method – creeping into the room while they were fucking. This was a high-risk strategy. His job was as good as defined by his invisibility. If he blew that, he’d expose his client.

Thankfully, he found a way around the problem. The room’s connecting door opened right to left. If he slid it ajar a mere four inches, he had a clear view of the bed and could take as many pictures as he wanted without being seen. He wouldn’t even have to step into Room 30.

Problem solved. He was all set.

7.56 p.m. Max turned on his camera – a Canon SLR with a top-grade Leica lens, ten frames a second – and stood by the adjoining door. Fabiana hadn’t quite started screaming yet, but her moans were becoming louder. He heard Cortland’s grunts and snorts too.

It was time.

He put his hand to the door handle, but withdrew it suddenly as a great greasy coil of nausea slithered across the pit of his stomach, making him gag.

He’d always sworn he’d never work divorces, right from when he first thought of leaving the Miami PD to go private. Not for him that sleazy paparazzi shit. Sure, the money was good, the work plentiful, and, outside the corporate sector, it was the safest part of the profession to get into – the most you risked was a black eye or a split lip, if the adulterers managed to put their pants on quick enough to catch you. But he hadn’t wanted to make a living that way. He’d wanted to help people, not destroy marriages and make divorce lawyers rich.

Life had a way of poisoning your principles.

He let the feeling ebb and then opened the door a fraction. They’d left the lights on. Fabiana was screaming ‘
Mi angel!
’ Cortland was alternately snorting and gasping. Max felt sure everyone in the damn hotel could hear them.

He pushed the door a little more and the image of the bed came into the camera’s viewfinder. He could see white. Just white. He zoomed in. Nothing. He zoomed out. Now he had a clear view of the whole bed – sheets, pillows, bluey shadows playing at the edge.

There was no one on it.

The sounds coming from the room were getting even louder, the couple screaming in chorus. Maybe they were on the floor.

He lowered the camera and peered through the gap in the door. He could see most of the room. And what he couldn’t see was too small an area for two people to be in. He was deeply confused. He could still hear them. They were deafening. But the room appeared empty.

He opened the door all the way and took a few tentative steps forward. Now he was standing in Room 30. He looked around. The bed hadn’t been disturbed at all. It was freshly made up.

He looked in the bathroom – but it was empty too.

He was baffled, asking himself a hundred questions.

Then he saw the TV.

On the screen a dark-haired woman on all fours was getting boned by a tall blond man, both his arms sleeved in tattoos. The man was Will Cortland. And the woman was Fabiana Prescott. She was also tattooed – two overlapping hearts on her lower back, a devil with a pitchfork on the side of her abdomen, a swirl of stars on a thigh.

The film was coming off the DVD player, the sounds those he’d memorised over the last three weeks.

He stood there, numbly watching but not seeing the TV screen, trying to work out what had just happened, what had been happening.

Something on the screen caught his eye. The poster on the wall above the bed was identical to the one in Room 30. He kept watching. The film had been shot here, in the very room he was standing in.

He opened the front door and looked out down the corridor. Empty and totally quiet. Weird for a Thursday night, he thought. That’s when the out-of-town clubbers usually arrived.

He went back into the room and looked out the window onto the street, but he knew he wouldn’t see them.

He turned off the TV and ejected the DVD.

No title on the disc.

Teddy wasn’t at reception when Max went downstairs. It was some Asian guy he hadn’t seen before, with a name tag that said ‘George’.

‘Where’s the manager?’ he asked.

‘I’m the manager. How can I help you?’

‘The
other
manager, where is he?’

Max thought back to when he’d walked into the hotel. Had he seen Teddy at reception? He hadn’t looked for him. He’d just gone straight up to the room.

‘You mean Ted? He quit Sunday,’ said the manager.

‘Sunday? Why?’

‘I don’t know. I didn’t ask. I just got the job.’

‘What day did you start?’ Max asked, feeling anger creep into him.

‘Is there a problem with your room, sir?’

‘Have you got an address for Teddy? Or a number?’

‘We can’t give out that information, sir.’

‘How much?’ Max sighed.

‘Sir?’

‘How much for his details? What’s this going to cost?’

‘Sir, I’m going to have to ask you to leave.’

‘What?’

‘I’m not giving you his details,’ the man insisted self-righteously, underlining it by puffing out his small chest and squaring his coathanger-frame shoulders.

‘Who put you up to this?’

The manager raised a hand and beckoned to someone over Max’s shoulder.

‘Sir, I’m going to have to ask you to leave the hotel with immediate effect. Security will escort you back to your room to pack.’

In the mirror behind the reception Max could see the fat, bald black security guard standing ready, thumbs hooked in the huge leather gunbelt slung around his bulging stomach like a lethal rubber tyre. A thin moustache crested the edge of his upper lip like dirty foam.

Max caught a look at himself. Bald too. Snow-white-dome stubble mingling with small beads of sweat. Tired-looking. Face flushed with anger and humiliation, eyes icy blue pinpricks. He still just about had his powerful build, but flab was starting to gain on muscle. The manager was thirty years younger. Back in the day he’d have hauled the little prick over the desk and threatened the information out of him. Back in the day he’d been a cop.

He glowered at the little man. Was he in on it? Maybe not. He was just a guy working the shitty end of a shitty job in a shitty hotel. There were a lot of them around here.

He walked past the security guard and out into the street. The hot blast of nocturnal Miami air hit him in the face. The breeze carried smells of food, perfume and the sea. As he walked, music came from everywhere – cars, restaurants, clubs, stores. He didn’t recognise any of it. They were alien sounds, no more than bleeps to his ears. Hip hop, R & B, robotic salsa and something that sounded like an elephant’s coronary. People passed him by, brushed against him, bumped him. Summer clothes, all young, smiling, talking excitedly. Heading down to Ocean Drive for dinner and pussy or to Washington Avenue for clubs and pussy. Not a care in the world. Problems parked at the door. He envied each and every one of them.

He thought about what to do next. Go to the Shore Club, to see if Fabiana was there? He wouldn’t get much information that way. Deluxe hotels guarded their customers well. He was curious about what had just happened, but another part of him really didn’t want to know, just wanted to walk away, forget it.

In the middle of his confusion and indecision, he saw a tall black man across the street looking right at him. He couldn’t make out the man’s face too clearly; it blended in with the night and blurred with the neon. But he sensed the stare, its probing insistence, its magnetism. The man had specifically picked Max out in the milling crowd, focused on him, targeted him. There were a lot of homeless crazies in Miami. They migrated here for the climate and the guilty generosity of tourists. Max might have dismissed him as one of those, but his old cop instincts kicked in, the sense of a person not being right.

Just then his phone rang, Bruce Springsteen’s irritatingly chirpy ‘Waitin’ on a Sunny Day’ playing out of the pouch on his hip. It was a ringtone he’d assigned to Joe Liston – his ex-partner and the only black Springsteen fan he’d yet encountered.

Joe never called Max at night. He was usually home with his family.

This had to be urgent, had to be bad.

Joe was a Captain in Homicide.

Max braced for the worst.

It came.

‘It’s about Eldon,’ said Joe. ‘They found him in the 7th Avenue gym two nights ago. He’s been murdered.’

It should have been a shock, but it wasn’t. At the very moment he heard the news, Max’s mind was abruptly distracted. The man across the street had disappeared, vanished without trace, as if he’d never been there.

‘Two
nights
ago?’ Max asked. ‘Why didn’t you call me as soon as you heard?’

‘Couldn’t. There’s some stuff going on we need to talk about. I’m at the gym right now. Can you get over here?’

‘I’m on my way.’

2

Joe Liston was waiting outside the gym, dressed to the nines, as usual. Beige linen suit, white shirt, brown tie and gleaming brown leather shoes. He’d always taken great pride in his appearance, considering it a reflection of how seriously he took his job and the responsibilities that went with it. The Miami PD had long before dispensed with its jacket-and-tie dress code for detectives, after complaints that tropical heat and formal attire weren’t conducive to efficient policing. Most plainclothes cops now turned up to work as they would to a barbecue – in loud beach shirts, faded jeans and worn sneakers. Joe had reacted to this sartorial liberalisation by wearing three-piece suits instead of two.

He was imposingly tall and thickset. His short-cropped hair was grey, where he still had it. His wife’s great cooking and ten years spent delegating from behind a desk showed on his round face and rounder belly. That didn’t bother him. He didn’t try to hide it or lose it. He’d turned sixty the previous year. At that age, he reasoned, a man was entitled to let himself go a little.

Max parked his car close by and walked over.

7th Avenue was absolutely quiet.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Joe. He held out his hand in condolence.

‘Thanks.’ Max had tried to focus on Eldon’s murder on the way over, but his mind kept returning to what had just happened in the hotel. And to the man in the street.

Joe cut through the seal on the door and they went inside.

Max hadn’t been to the gym in close to ten years, the last time he’d seen Eldon. He was shocked by the state of the place, its abject ruin – the collapsed ring, the hole in the roof, the debris, the rust, the stacked-up filth. The spot where so many young lives had been turned around was now a scrapheap.

He’d heard about the gym closing down after Abe Watson died, and how Eldon had still been going there day after day, staying from dawn to dusk. Looking around and taking it all in, trying and failing to rebuild it from memory, Max understood just how broken up the old man must have felt. The gym had been his pride and joy, the cornerstone of everything he’d built; and he’d sat by and watched it all fall apart around him. For the very first time since Joe’s call, Max felt a needle of ragged grief pierce him. It took him by surprise.

March 8, 1964. That’s when Eldon Burns had come into his life. It was here, by the door, where he was now standing, that they’d first spoken.

Max had gone to the gym with his friend, Manny Gomez. He hadn’t wanted to be a fighter that day, or any other day before. The closest he’d come to boxing was seeing Muhammad Ali on the corner of 5th Street, signing autographs for a gaggle of black kids. He’d never seen a live fight, let alone watched one the whole way through on TV. He simply wasn’t interested. He’d just gone along to the gym for something to do.