Voodoo Eyes (41 page)

Had Elias been the one following him?

The triggerman’s accomplice – his driver – was described as ‘white’.

Elias was light-skinned enough to pass.

If that was the case, then the man on the island – Vanetta’s benefactor and saviour of Caille Jacobinne – was behind the murders in Miami. But who was he? Someone rich, scared and connected enough to buy himself a hideaway protected by the Cuban military. Was he one of the hundreds of people Eldon had fucked over?

Vanetta had been on the island since September. The murders had happened in October. Plenty of time to get her prints on the bullet casings, especially if she was sedated. But why frame her?

Unless Vanetta had ordered the hit herself. The man on the island had admired her enough to fund her refugee centres. Maybe that extended to settling her scores. She’d run out of time to strike back at Eldon legally, so she’d resorted to violence. Feasible, but lifelong pacifists didn’t turn into murderers in their final moments. Of course, she could have changed over time. That was possible. But then it was back to the same old question: why have Joe killed? Joe was her friend, her helper, her confidant.

Eldon and Joe had both been shot through the eyes and the casings had borne the black wings – the Abakuá MO. Sarah said they wouldn’t have leased the island. What if she was wrong? The most successful criminal organisations always adapt and evolve with the times, he thought. The Abakuás had outlived countless regimes in Cuba. And they’d outlive many more. Wendy Peck had told him they had infiltrated the regime from the bottom up. Sarah was underestimating them.

‘What was it Joe wanted me to see?’ he asked.

‘Vanetta was planning to return to America to clear her name. She was building a case, a defence. Joe was helping her. Not just with information. He was negotiating on her behalf with the FBI. She met with an agent on a few occasions.’

‘In Cuba?’

‘Yes.’

‘Was his name Jack Quinones?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘You know him?’

‘Vaguely. What was his involvement?’

‘He was helping Joe with information. Getting it to him, so he could bring it to her. It took a long time, putting it all together, cross-checking, finding more. Joe brought her everything. It’s here somewhere … on CD. I don’t know where, exactly.’

‘Sure she didn’t take it with her?’

‘I packed for her. One small bag with her pyjamas, a dressing gown and some toiletries. That was all.’

Max turned on the computer. While it was booting up, he checked the desk drawers. Pens, pencils, plain paper, headed paper, notebooks – everything blank and new – but no CDs or computer discs.

He panned the room.

‘There a safe in here?’

‘No.’

Then, from below, he heard voices – children – and a man calling Sarah’s name.

‘That’s my family,’ she said. ‘I’ve got to go. If you need anything, come ask. Stay as long as you need. And,’ she looked across at Benny, who was fast asleep, ‘we’re having
sopa de frijoles
for dinner. You’re welcome to join us. Both of you.’

‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘Tell me something. You know exactly what I’m going to find, don’t you?’

‘Pretty much, yes.’

‘But it’s something I need to see for myself, right?’

‘Joe told me Eldon Burns was your mentor. Taught you everything you know.’

‘Everything I
knew,’
he said. ‘I know differently now.’

‘I hope so,’ she said and left the room.

He looked on the computer, which was running Windows 98.

There was a single folder on the desktop, marked ‘Miami’.

It contained one document: a mess of tiny circles and arrows, which turned out to be a flow chart. He magnified it to 300 per cent. The circles had names in them. He zoomed in some more.

Eldon’s name leaped out at him. It was at the very centre of the chart, bold black letters in Arial script, with black, red, blue and green arrows pointing away from it in every direction to other encircled names. Some of the arrows were solid, others dotted.

Right below Eldon’s name, in brackets, were letters and numbers: CD 1–5.

There were many more familiar names linking back to Eldon.

Abe Watson: CD 8.

‘Halloween’ Dan Styles: CD 10–12.

Victor Marko – the political fixer whose bidding Eldon did: CD 13–17.

Melody Dascal Brown: CD 23.

Ezequiel Dascal: CD 23.

Special Agent Jack Quinones: CD 24–26.

Detective Dennis Peck: CD 25–26 + CD 29–30.

These were linked to over twenty other names he didn’t know.

Max hit print.

He shook Benny awake.

‘I need you to go through the books on the shelf. Take every one of them down. Ruffle the pages, shake them.’

Benny blinked and stretched and yawned. ‘What I look for?’

‘CDs.’

‘Eh?
In book?’

‘Si.
Vamos!
’

While Benny started taking books off the shelves, Max went back through the desk and filing cabinets. He looked behind and under both.

He searched the chest of drawers. He dumped everything on the floor. Clothes, jewellery, a couple of photograph albums, a gun case with a Tokarev pistol and two full clips. He pulled out the drawers. He flicked through the photo albums and shook them. Sheafs of loose snapshots fell on the floor. He ignored them.

He went through the wardrobe, through all her jacket and coat pockets.

He threw everything out.

He stripped the sheets and cases off the bed and pillows. He pressed into the mattress with his fists.

He pushed the mess he’d made to one side and tapped at the walls, then the floorboards, looking for hollows.

He opened the first of the three filing cabinet drawers and groaned. It was crammed tight with hanging folders, themselves bursting with paper. He prised out the first.

Then he heard music. Familiar music.
Loud
familiar music. Choppy funky guitar, that four-to-the-floor beat, piano, brass, a whistle. ‘Chug-chug! Beep-beep!’

Donna Summer’s ‘Bad Girls’.

Benny was dancing around with an album sleeve in his hands, singing along about how you can’t score if your pocket’s tight.

‘The fuck you doing?’ Max shouted.

‘Work is better with music!’ shouted Benny, crotch-humping the air in perfect time.

‘Turn it off!’

‘You no like Donna?’

‘Turn. It. Off!’

‘Momento.
I like this movement now!’ Benny went into serious-rhythmic-hump-convulsion mode as Donna wailed about bad girls, sad girls, such dirty bad girls, beep-beep!

Max had loved Donna Summer back in the day. He’d even had the album Benny was holding. Also called
Bad Girls.

But right now he fucken’ hated it.

Then he noticed something on the floor, something Benny was strutting his funky stuff all over.

Half a dozen CDs.

‘Benny!
Stop!’

‘OK, OK!’

Then Benny noticed the discs lying there too, his foot on two of them.

‘Oh! Shit! Is you CD, Max.’

Max picked them up – blue TDK CDs numbered in red. He found the rest in the album covers, slipped in with the vinyl.

48

He fed the first disc into the computer. It span intensely for several seconds and then an icon appeared on the screen. He clicked on it and a light-blue folder appeared: ‘Eldon Burns’.

He opened it up. It was divided into subcategories, more light-blue folders with headings: ‘Reports’, ‘Photographs’, ‘Associates’, ‘Witness Statements’.

He started with the photographs. Eldon as he was before he’d died: stooped, frail, white-haired, vulnerable, harmless. An old man in a tailored sports jacket and open-necked shirt, leaving his big house and getting into a taxi; getting out of the taxi and walking up the steps to the 7th Avenue gym; leaving the gym in the late afternoon and going back into his house. Always alone. No one waiting for him.

The pictures were all digitally time-stamped.

Vanetta had known his routine and where he lived.

Eldon had been a soft target, an easy kill.

Who was the photographer?

Max propped the flow chart up against the monitor and reached for the next CD.

Slowly, all through the night that followed, he pieced together what had happened to Vanetta Brown.

The discs were filled with confidential FBI documents, reams of eyes-only material that could only have come from Quinones: witness testimonies, transcribed wiretaps, over a hundred photographs, forensics reports and autopsy results. It was enough to bury Eldon and everyone he’d ever done business with several times over.

And then there was the work Joe had done. From 1985 to March 2008, he’d been conducting a personal, private and completely secret investigation. He’d interviewed more than two hundred people in North America, their every last word recorded and preserved as a sound file and a transcription.

Max read. Max listened. Max saw.

The deeper he delved, the more his certainties collapsed.

He couldn’t believe it, but he knew it was all true.

He took two breaks. The first was for dinner. Him, Benny and the Dascal family sat around a table and ate chickpea and bacon soup and chewed on freshly baked bread.

When he got back to the computer, he realised he couldn’t recall much about the dinner. He couldn’t remember what the soup had tasted like or whether or not he’d even liked it, let alone very much about Sarah’s family, except that they’d all spoken English and the talk had been small and polite. Towards the end of the meal, Sarah had told him they were welcome to spend the night. He’d thanked her, he supposed. He’d been far away, thinking about what he’d just read, about what was still to come. Thinking about Joe and all the secrets he’d kept, the ones he’d uncovered, the lonely risks he’d run.

More CDs. More chart arrows flowing upwards and sideways and downwards; all leading back to Eldon, pointing at him, incriminating him, puncturing him.

Max’s eyes and head ached, and the monitor became harder to look at. His hands shook. He felt angry. Angry at a memory. Angry at a ghost. Tension squeezed the top of his neck, then clamped the base of his skull, pressing, tightening, not letting go.

He went out on the balcony for air, but it was still raining hard and he got drenched in seconds. He didn’t mind. He took the soaking with his eyes closed and his mouth open. Back inside he dried his face and hands on the curtains.

Somewhere in between, Benny had turned on the radio, which was now receiving. He’d gingerly interrupted Max to tell him the news was coming on. The intro floated into the room weak and archaic, as if from a séance, and then it was incomprehensible Spanish babble.

Benny translated: they’d found the bodies of the cops by the roadside, the newscaster said. The police were sure it was the work of the duo wanted for the murders in Havana. He gave no explanation as to how they had come to this conclusion, but extolled instead the two uniforms, saying that they were heroes of the revolution, young martyrs who’d given their lives to keep all Cubans safe. Then there was something about finding the stolen Chevy Bel Air in Trinidad. The suspects, the newscaster went on, were now believed to be heading for the Santiago de Cuba area. Then the newsreader went off into a rant about the inhumane US embargo and how the imperialist neighbour had forbidden its citizens from travelling to Cuba because it didn’t want its people to know that everything they’d been told about the country was a tissue of lies and misinformation used to justify the barbaric and pathetic embargo. But, he continued, the imperialist bully had failed because many of its courageous and intellectual citizens still came to Cuba regardless. You can recognise them quite easily, he went on: they say they are from Canada.

Max should have been shocked.

But he wasn’t.

He wasn’t even worried. Not for now. Compared with what he was reading and discovering, his current problems seemed far away, a trifle concerning some random stranger.

Benny though, was plain terrified. He was shaking. The bad-meat stink was coming off him strong and his wound was pumping a thick seep of clear fluid. He was in dire need of a doctor.

Max looked at the maps on the wall. He saw the Windward Passage, clearly marked on both, but no sign of an island between the two countries.

His eyes fell on Guantánamo, first the town, then the province. Nothing there about the American base, although the whole world knew where it was.

And that’s when he had an idea how to find the island.

Sometime later, Sarah came in with a pair of towels. She told them there was soap in the bathroom, but to use it sparingly because it was running low and had to last the family another ten days.

She took in the mess in the room. She asked how he was doing. When she saw the look on his face, she nodded and left quietly.

He finished close to dawn. It had stopped raining and cocks were crowing.

He looked back over the notes he’d made and retold himself Vanetta Brown’s sad, shocking, violent and, above all, heartbreaking story.

49

Later that morning Max and Sarah said their goodbyes over coffee in the living room. The house was empty. Her husband had taken the children to school and then gone off to work. Benny was sitting with the CDs, the flow chart and all of Max’s notes in the car, waiting, ready to go.

Max thanked Sarah for her hospitality and for the things he’d found out, even though that new knowledge had destroyed him.

He was glad Eldon was dead, that Vanetta Brown had had her revenge. Eldon had deserved it, even that late in the day, when it barely counted or made much difference. But he still didn’t know why she’d killed Joe, her friend and ally, her helper. That was a question he’d be asking her soon, in person, face to face. He hoped she had as good a reason. Anything less just wouldn’t do.

They drove down to the bay.

The rain held off, but the sky seemed undecided and volatile, the clouds blackening in dark knotted frowns one moment, thinning away to a blue-patched graphite the next. Sunlight came through weak and grainy, its heat carried on a cold undertow.