Voodoo Eyes (49 page)

‘I know you didn’t kill Dennis Peck,’ he said.

‘Everybody knows that. Especially the FBI. Yet they still put a price on my head and hung a label around my neck for something they
know
I didn’t do. You know what they call me? A domestic terrorist,’ she said bitterly. ‘Dennis Peck’s daughters grew up to hate me. And they don’t even know the truth about their own father.’

She glared at him, the fire in her eyes momentarily overriding her weakness, cancelling out their frail body and its wasted, twig-like limbs.

‘Dennis Peck was an undercover FBI agent,’ said Max. ‘He was in so deep that even now – dead – he’s stayed in character. His family don’t know a damn thing about him. They believe he was a detective in the Miami PD, who died a heroic death at your hands.’

She nodded. ‘What else do you know?’

‘Peck was part of a covert unit J. Edgar Hoover put together in the early sixties to infiltrate a network of mob-affiliated cops based in Florida. Those cops were headed up by Eldon Burns. He’d been doing business with the mob – the Trafficante crime family – for years. Drugs, prostitution, gambling, extortion, murder. The works.

‘Burns did more than just look the other way in exchange for pay-offs and tip-offs. He was as good as a gangster himself. His cops helped organise the Trafficante’s drug distribution network. And they carried out hits on those hard-to-get-to targets – witnesses in federal protection, top mobsters with armies of bodyguards.

‘Now, mafia guys like to call themselves “connected”, but Burns was the real deal, hooked up like the national grid. He worked closely with a political fixer, Victor Marko. Burns had politicians in his back pockets and businessmen in his front pockets. When something dirty needed to get done, he was the one they called.’

‘Eldon Burns. Eldon … Burns,’ she whispered. ‘He is an evil man.’

‘Is …
?’ Max looked at her. The sharpness had gone from her eyes, which were fluttering. Max guessed it was the drugs, kicking at her head, disarranging her memory.

‘… an evil man,’ she repeated. ‘Carry on.’

She was alert again.

‘The Vietnam War was good for Burns. Troops were coming home strung out on smack. He saw an opportunity to get in on the game himself. To out-mob the mob,’ said Max. ‘One way or another, cops have always worked with criminals. It’s the nature of the game. They use them as snitches. They let one carry on doing bad, so they can take down another doing far worse. It’s all relative. When you’re a cop, you either get in all the way or you don’t get in at all.

‘Burns and Abe Watson had worked with a drug dealer called Dan Styles. Halloween Dan. He used to sell reefer and pills in the ghetto, and then push heroin and coke to the upmarket crowd. Before ’Nam, heroin had been a rich man’s drug. The only black people who could afford it were doctors or jazz musicians.

‘Halloween Dan had a brother in the air force – Jerrod, a sergeant, stationed in Saigon. Him and Eldon came up with a scheme where Jerrod bought heroin in bulk from local suppliers and flew it into Hialeah airbase in Florida. Dan’s people collected it. A third stayed in Miami, the rest went to the East Coast via Eldon’s network of cops.’

‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘Heroin came into our neighbourhoods. It destroyed Overtown and Liberty City. Crime went way up. And all that good work we’d been doing – with education, job training, self-awareness – that was undone with a prick of a needle. Halloween Dan used to roll up on street corners in his Caddy and hand out free samples of that poison – getting brothers and sisters hooked, turning the recently emancipated back into slaves.’

She stopped to breathe. Her lungs made a swooning sound as the air pushed through crumbling passages.

‘We tried reasoning with him,’ she said. ‘We even went to his headquarters, this bar he owned. Me and two others. I tried to appeal to his sense of community, his responsibility to his people, his decency. You know what he said? He said: “Bitch. Only colour I be interested in be orange ’n’ green.” And then he took me out into the street, in broad daylight, and made me kneel down. He stuck the barrel of his gun in my mouth and told me to suck it like I sucked my husband. Right there, in front of everyone. And I did it, because otherwise he would’ve blown my brains out. He said if he ever saw me in his bar again, he’d kill me and my family.’

She stopped and reached for her water, but the effort was beyond her strength. Max handed her the glass. She thanked him with a smile that radiated mostly from her eyes.

‘If I lived by the law of the street, I would have killed Dan myself. Or sent people to do it,’ she said. ‘But if you follow the eye-for-an-eye, tooth-for-a-tooth dictum to its natural conclusion, everyone goes blind and nobody eats.’

‘So you fought him another way?’

‘Gandhi brought down the British in India by passive resistance. Dr King never preached violence,’ she said. ‘I organised the Black Jacobins to form picket lines outside Dan’s drug houses, to stop people going in or out. I called sympathisers in the media and told them what was going on and what we were doing about it. Cameras and reporters turned up and filmed us. They filmed Dan as well, a few times. He tried to drive us out. He rolled up with a gang of armed men, trying to scare us off. They always had dogs. But when he saw the cameras he left. This went on for two months. They killed Jacobins. They tried to firebomb the Jacobin House. We just intensified our efforts. If the white-controlled government couldn’t beat us during civil rights, some two-bit punk couldn’t either. Dan left Overtown and Liberty City. We turned the Jacobin House into a rehab facility and got everyone who walked in off smack. We thought we’d won.’

‘And then came the raid?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Then came the raid. I knew who Eldon Burns was, locally. But I never met him personally. He ran that boxing gym. People had good things to say about him. Especially the kids he helped turn into fighters. They looked up to him. But people in Overtown and Liberty City were wary of Burns too, not because he was white or a cop, but because of his partner Abe Watson. Abe had a terrible, terrible reputation. He hated being black and he took it out on his own people.’

She paused, looked at Max a moment.

‘Do you know Eldon Burns?’ she asked. Her eyes were clear. Why was she referring to him in the present tense?

‘Yes, I did,’ said Max. ‘I worked for him. Joe too. We were partners.’

‘Joe hates him,’ she said.

That present tense again.

‘I know.’

‘And you?’

‘I was one of those kids who looked up to him. But then I grew up. Now I look down on him and everything he stood for.’

She scrutinised Max for a moment, looking at him in a way she hadn’t, trying to see through him, trying to work out his play. She hadn’t asked what he wanted from her, which he’d found strange. She’d accepted his presence in the room without question. It was almost as if she’d been expecting him. He’d put it down to the drugs and the limited time she had left. Or maybe Joe had told her about him.

‘I was in Miami Springs when the raid happened. I was visiting my aunt Cecile. She was sick. I’d spent the night with her,’ she said. ‘I heard the police gave no warning when they attacked the Jacobin House. They fired tear gas through the windows and came in shooting. Eldon Burns and Abe Watson led it. Watson shot my husband and daughter. And he killed Dennis Peck. I read about it years later, in the FBI’s autopsy and ballistic reports.’

Max had read those reports twice. The FBI had secretly exhumed the bodies of Dennis Peck and Ezequiel and Melody Dascal to carry out autopsies. The remains were charred from the fire that had supposedly swept through the Jacobin House during the raid – but FBI tests and witness statements proved that the blaze was really started after the raid ended. Ezequiel had been shot twice in the back at point-blank range with a .45. The FBI coroner concluded that the bullets had gone through him and hit Melody, whom he had been shielding. Dennis Peck was also shot twice with a .45 – in the chest and in the head, at close range, execution/put-him-out-of-his-misery style. The FBI broke into the Miami PD’s forensic-evidence lab and removed the bullets taken from the bodies. The ballistics showed they’d come from the same gun – Abe Watson’s.

‘How did you get out of the country?’ asked Max.

‘Joe,’ she said. ‘Joe knew where I was. He came to my aunt’s house, while the raid was happening. I wanted to go back to Overtown, for my … my daughter,’ Vanetta stopped. Her eyes filmed over with a wash of tears. She wiped at them and collected herself. ‘My daughter was in the children’s playroom with my husband … Do you know why we called her Melody?’

Max shook his head.

‘When I was pregnant, Ezequiel would put his ear to my belly and swear he could hear her singing in there.’ Vanetta’s tears flowed. Max handed her some tissues from the box on the bedside table. She wiped her eyes and blew her nose and put the tissues up her sleeve. It was probably something she’d done out of habit over many years, but her arms were so skinny the ball of soft paper slipped out and fell on the floor by Max’s feet. She didn’t notice.

‘Joe put me in the trunk of his car. He hid me in his apartment for a few days,’ she said. ‘I stayed at his place while the police looked for me. They looked everywhere. A real manhunt. But they didn’t think to look in a cop’s house. And then Joe brought an FBI agent round. I was moved to a safe house. I was there a week. The agent interviewed me about what had happened. You read my interview transcript?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘How did you get to Cuba?’

‘The FBI agent arranged the boat. Joe took me to the Keys. I sailed from there.’ She nodded.

‘Joe did that?’

‘Yes. You look surprised.’

‘How much did you know about Joe … then?’

‘That he was an FBI informant?’ she asked. ‘I guessed as much when he brought the agent to his house, from the way they interacted.’

‘You hadn’t suspected him before?’

‘No.’

‘And how did that make you feel – when you found out?’

‘To be honest with you, I no longer cared. I mourned my daughter and my husband for a long, long time. It took ten years to – not “move on” exactly, but to accept that they were dead. Do you understand what I mean?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I do.’

‘Joe – when he started coming here, he explained it all to me. Why he’d done it. And I understood. He was fair. He only reported what he saw,’ she said. ‘The Black Jacobins were never criminals. We never used violence. We never had guns. And we never sold drugs. We weren’t separatists. We weren’t racists. It was about empowering black people. Giving them a voice. Uniting them as one. That way, I thought, we could be like the Cubans in Miami. Only nationally. A force to be reckoned with. It’s because of the Cubans there that this stupid embargo exists today. Them and their money, buying politicians. I wanted us – black American people – to have that kind of power.’

‘Why didn’t the Feds move on Eldon?’ asked Max.

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Joe said Burns was very powerful. That he had dirt on everyone. Including Hoover. There were rumours about Hoover’s sexuality, the kind that could have ruined him if they’d had substance. Joe reckoned Eldon might have had that substance, that smoking gun.’

‘So why didn’t they clear your name at least?’

‘I wasn’t exactly innocent,’ she said. ‘We were a left-wing organisation. I modelled the Black Jacobins on the socialism you see in Cuba. I had strong ties with Fidel Castro then. It would have been embarrassing for them to exonerate someone who was guilty of “working with the enemy”. The Cold War was on. There’d been the missile crisis. There were reds under the bed. Even if I’d been cleared as a cop-killer, I’d still be guilty of being a commie, a red.

‘Besides, the Miami PD had built a very strong case against me. Eye-witnesses in the raid – people I’d known all my life – swore they saw me shoot Dennis Peck. They supposedly found bullet casings with my prints on them at the scene. And I’d fled to Cuba. It was open and shut. The guilty don’t run.

‘And also … of course, there’s that other thing. That
main
thing. I’m black. And it was the South then. Why, not fifteen years before, Jim Crow had told Rosa Parks to move to the back of the bus. My innocence was largely academic.’

Max felt something close to admiration for her. And this confused him. He’d expected to talk to someone deranged by hatred – a hatred that, while justified and understandable, had long since become irrational, twisted by time and failing memory, and sharpened to a point by the bitterness of unacknowledged injustice. Yet he heard nothing of the kind. He understood why people had fallen under her spell. Even now she had the power to move and inspire. And this was making the question he was coming close to putting to her all that much harder to ask.

He looked out the window at the bluey-black ocean, the blinking buoys swaying on the gentle waves.

‘The world changed. Communism collapsed. America got itself a new set of enemies,’ she said. ‘Joe visited me regularly. He was determined to clear my name. But then I got sick. And that changed things. I was on a clock now. I had a limited amount of time to get things done.’

She looked him straight in the eye.

‘To get what done?’ Max could feel his heart beating faster, that old familiar blood rush when he smelled a confession about to spill.

‘People always die before they intend to. And they always leave a mess somewhere. I’m determined not to. I’m determined to put things in order.’

The words raced right out of Max’s mouth before he realised. ‘Eldon Burns is dead. They’re saying you had him killed.’

She stared at him blankly. Her eyes dulled and dulled until he was staring at two pieces of felt.

Then she blinked. And frowned.

‘What did you just say?’

‘Eldon Burns. He was murdered in Miami last month.’

‘What? When? Last month?’ She shifted a little closer to him. ‘Did you say
murdered
?’

‘Yes. Shot. Twice. Through the eyes,’ he said. ‘And guess what? Two casings found at the scene had your prints on them.’