Voodoo Eyes (9 page)

Joe’s head rocked back sharply. The people behind him were splattered with blood.

Liston pivoted on the chair’s hind legs, balanced an instant, and then fell back, his legs upending the table.

Max had dived off to the side, instinctively, reflexively, away from the sound.

He rolled over on his back and looked up, but all he could see were people running in different directions, falling over each other. Through the din in his ears, he heard screams and shouts, glass and crockery shattering, panic.

He scrambled over to Joe.

His friend’s right eye had been shot out. He lay motionless. Max grabbed his wrist and yelled his name. No pulse. No motion. The hand was still warm. But it wouldn’t be for much longer. Blood was seeping out of the back of his head, thick and dark red.

Max grabbed Joe’s gun out of his holster and stood up.

He heard crying, people screaming. Everywhere, people were running, ducking into doorways, stores. The front of the restaurant had emptied. Tables had been overturned. Food all over the floor. Customers cowering behind the bar, looking at him, terrified.

He couldn’t move. He had gunsmoke in the back of his throat.

‘Drop your weapon!’

Cop’s command at his ear, behind him.

‘Drop your fucken’ weapon!’

He dropped Joe’s gun and put his hands in the air. Someone grabbed his arms and locked them behind his back. He was forced down on the ground, his face almost touching Joe’s feet. His hands were cuffed. He was patted down. Cops surrounded him. He heard sirens, the sharp crackle of police radios and, in his head, the echo of a gunshot.

7

He’d been here before, on the wrong side of the interrogation room, getting grilled about murder. Only this time he hadn’t killed anyone.

They were treating him like a suspect, keeping him in this white room with its bolted-down furniture. The chair he sat in was slightly lower than the one opposite and a good half ass-cheek too narrow for basic comfort. The table surface, knuckle-dented and fogged with graffiti and bored scratches, resembled the inside of an old tin pan. Cast iron loops for chains had been bolted to the floor and presiding over the whole dull scene were black cameras, bracketed high on adjacent walls.

No one had said a single word to him.

Two hours in and he was still waiting.

Joe was dead.

A uniformed cop had confirmed it. He walked in, put a picture on the table and pushed it over to Max without saying a word. Then he walked out.

Max stared at the picture.

Joe.

A single bullet to the head, clean through the eye.

It had been taken within an hour of the shooting – the glow of life hadn’t fully faded from the flesh. Joe didn’t look dead, more the victim of a grim Halloween prank – like someone had put make-up on him in his sleep.

Ha ha ha. Not funny. Not funny at all.

Max knew his friend was gone.

For ever.

And he felt sick.

Then came deep disorientation. Compass points had been switched around, gravity realigned. A few hours before, they’d been having dinner, talking, like two regular guys on a night out. He could see the edge of a Mariposa menu in the corner of the picture. That was their last ever time together.

Max couldn’t feel anything.

No sorrow, no anger – no emotions of any kind.

The grief would come later, he knew. You never got over losing those closest to you. You made room for the emptiness and you learned to live with it.

He wanted to call Lena – Joe’s wife – and go and be with the family.

He thought of Joe’s children. He thought of how Joe had been just seven months away from retirement. He thought of the grandchildren Joe would never see.

That name.

Vanetta Brown.

Still a mere chime, a distant bell tolling in the fog of memory.

Joe was about to tell him who she was. Then he was shot.

Through the eye.

Shot like Eldon.

Shot by Eldon’s killer.

The cops had arrived at the scene in under a minute. Four of them had jumped him, knocked him down, frisked him, cuffed him. Sheer panic everywhere. The make-believe monsters had fled in terror. The real one had gotten away.

The Miami PD hadn’t changed their game much since his time. Same old shit. Tired playbook. Stick your suspect in a room and leave him there alone for two or three hours. Let him stew in what he’s done, let him get a foretaste of captivity. Meanwhile they watched you for tell-tale signs – twitching, fidgeting, crying, sleeping. That gave them angles to use – soft or hard, loud or quiet, empathy or aggression, good cop-bad cop/good cop-indifferent cop/bad cop-worse cop. It all only really worked on newbies. Seasoned pros knew they were heading to prison anyway and rode the routine out for the hell of it, making the most of comparative freedom.

Some guys in the force loved going brain-to-brain with suspects, trying to trip them up and getting them to incriminate themselves. These same guys were aces at crossword puzzles and chess, but were too dumb to get into the FBI. Max and Joe never had the patience for epic interrogations, Max especially. If he was sure the perp was guilty, but the guy was being a wiseass or was holding out, he used oranges in a bag to get a confession. If he couldn’t get oranges, he went for a phonebook. Not the Miami one, that was too slim. He favoured the big cities – LA or New York. Hefty things, maximum impact, negligible bruising.

He’d have been thrown into prison and the force sued down to its last dime if he was a cop today and pulled that kind of stuff. He remembered a conversation he’d had with Joe the month before. They’d been talking about how divorce and drinking were way down in the PD. They put it down to the counselling cops got after being in traumatic situations – especially fatal shootings. Joe quipped that Max wouldn’t have liked it, that he would have been better off in the army, working for the water-boarding unit.

Max had laughed then and the memory made him smile now.

For a moment.

Then it hurt him deep – real deep. Like he’d burst a bunch of stitches somewhere inside.

Joe was gone for good.

He noticed the air con had come back on. When they brought him in it was cold in the room. They’d turned it off and the place had become stiflingly hot. More tired playbook. Now it was cool again, but comfortably so. The light above had become a little brighter.

He guessed they were about to start questioning him.

A tall, thickset, olive-skinned Latino detective walked in with a fistful of forms. Wavy salt-and-pepper hair, pocked skin, tired eyes. Late forties, maybe older. Dark-grey suit, white shirt, grey tie with black diamonds on it.

‘I’m Lieutenant Perez. Miami Beach Homicide.’ He held out a large hand. ‘Sorry for your loss. Joe Liston was a good man and a good cop.’

‘You know him?’ Max asked. Wrong tense, he realised immediately, but for him bereavement came in short, sharp increments. It would take a while to admit and then accept that Joe was gone.

‘We worked together a few times,’ said Perez.

Which meant Joe had probably called him when a tourist had come to harm in mainland Miami – perhaps an out-of-towner trying to cop in Liberty City or Little Haiti, maybe throwing in some patronising rap jargon and gang-signing for good measure, getting well out of their depth in the process. Joe had been joking about the Beach police for ten years. He called them ‘The Baywatch Cops’. All they had to do was look good in uniform and save people from drowning in sex and drugs – and then only if they called out for help.

‘I’m sorry to have kept you waiting. We had to eliminate you as a suspect. Took some time. We had a lot of witnesses to talk to.’

‘Have you ID’d the shooter?’

‘Physically, yes. We’ve got a good description. He got away, but we’re on him,’ said Perez.

‘Black guy, over six feet tall, hare lip, bird-patterned shirt?’

‘That’s right. You got a look at him too?’

‘No,’ Max said. Perez frowned. ‘He’s the guy who killed Eldon Burns.’

‘How do you know?’ Perez glanced at the camera above Max.

‘Same MO. I’ve been looking into Eldon’s murder.’

‘You’ve been looking into Eldon’s murder? No disrespect, Max, but you haven’t been a cop in near thirty years. Which means you’re a civilian. Which means you’re interfering with an official police investigation.’

‘No disrespect, Lieutenant, but it’s not much of an investigation.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘The guys working Eldon Burns aren’t exactly being thorough.’

‘How so?’

‘Did you recover a shell casing in a glassine bag from Joe’s body?’

‘Yes, we did.’

‘I gave that to him tonight. The owner of Swopes bookstore gave it to me. The store’s a few blocks down from Eldon’s gym. A few minutes after the shooter killed Eldon, he almost ran over a homeless guy called White Flight in the alley behind the store. White Flight tried to attack the shooter in his car—’

‘You got a make on the shooter’s car?’ Perez was surprised. He looked at the camera again. Max was tempted to ask who was watching them on the monitor, but he just wanted to get out of there as fast as possible.

‘A brown Sierra,’ he said. ‘I talked to White Flight in hospital today. The shooter put a bullet in his throat, but didn’t kill him.’

‘White Flight?’ Perez made a note. ‘That’s the name he’s registered under, at the hospital?’

‘Yeah. He told me the shooter wasn’t driving the car. He has an accomplice.’

‘That we already know,’ said Perez.

‘How?’

‘Her prints are all over the casings.’

‘Her
prints? The shooter’s male.’

‘The prints aren’t.’

‘Is the accomplice’s name Vanetta Brown?’

Perez looked stunned.

‘Joe tell you that?’

‘He mentioned that name right before he was killed. He didn’t tell me anything else,’ said Max. ‘Who is she?’

‘We think she’s behind this.’

‘Who is she?’ Max repeated.

‘I guess it was before your time. It’s certainly before mine,’ said Perez. ‘Broad strokes: she ran a group called the Black Jacobins in the sixties. Based in Miami. They were like the Black Panthers of Florida. She shot and killed a cop in 1968. Escaped to Cuba where Castro gave her asylum. Up until now, we believed she was still there.’

That didn’t make sense to Max. No sense at all. He was about to voice his doubts, but Perez read his face and held up a hand.

‘I’ve already told you way more than I should, Max. I’m sure you remember the policy. Now, I need to take your statement.’

Perez placed a witness form on the table and uncapped a pen.

‘Why don’t you talk me through what happened tonight. And tell me what else you know. For the record.’

Max rewound back to the moment he’d met Joe outside Mariposa, Liston sitting there at the table, his shirt untucked to hide his gun, jacket slung over the back of the chair, his face a sea of turmoil. Then Max went forward: Joe’s eye imploding, the back of his head spraying the diners behind him, the salt and pepper shakers flipping up in the air when Joe fell backwards, the plates of food crashing about his head, lettuce spinning in rivulets of blood. Perez wrote everything down.

Ninety minutes later they were done. Perez numbered the eleven pages Max’s statement had run to. Then he gave Max his card.

‘Now please do me, the police and yourself a great big favour,’ he said. ‘Keep well out of this. Let us handle it. I know Joe was your friend. And I know Eldon was too. But this isn’t your investigation or your responsibility. We’ll find the killer. And we’ll find Vanetta Brown. We don’t need you tear-assin’ around Miami too, you understand?’

‘Sure,’ said Max, but he was already thinking – about Eldon, about Joe and about Vanetta Brown.

8

It was past 1 a.m. when Max pulled up outside the Liston family home in Biscayne Park. The lights were on.

Nate Rollins, the family pastor, opened the door. He’d married Joe and Lena and baptised their children. He greeted Max with a handshake that started firm and hardened into an unbreakable grip as he looked at Max without speaking a word, his eyes silvering, his jowly face quaking with emotion and pent-up grief. Max imagined the pastor had been there all night, stoically soaking up the sorrow and dispensing what comfort he could, all the while holding down his own feelings. He’d obviously needed this moment of release. They stood together at the entrance as the old man regained his composure. He took Max’s arm and led him inside.

Everyone was gathered in the living room, over thirty people stood or sat around, considerably diminishing the large and usually open space, pulling the walls in and the ceiling down. Max recognised them all by sight, if not by name – cousins, friends and colleagues he’d met at parties and get-togethers. The halting, respectful conversations petered out completely as heads turned his way. No one could meet his eye. It wasn’t out of shame or hostility. It was that everyone in the room knew he’d been with Joe when he was murdered, that Max had seen it happen, that it could have been him instead, that death had missed him by inches. No one had the right words for that. And no one wanted to be the first to say the wrong thing.

Max searched the room for Lena and the children. He negotiated the space before him as if it were a narrow, windblown ledge above a deep drop. Bodies stepped back and away. He caught sight of Joe’s brown-leather La-Z-Boy recliner, big enough to sit two people comfortably, but empty. The flatscreen TV playing CNN’s election coverage on mute. His eyes roamed the oak-panelled walls hung with plaques, certificates, commendations and plenty of pictures – one of the largest being of Joe and Bruce Springsteen backstage at the AmericanAirlines Arena three years before. Max had taken that. He remembered how tongue-tied Joe had been when he finally met the Boss. Joe had wanted to tell Springsteen how much his music meant to him, but the words got stuck in his throat and all he could manage was a nervous smile and a handshake. To his credit, Bruce thanked Joe for coming and seemed to mean it. Joe’s daughters later asked if the picture was of him and Max when ‘Uncle Max had hair’. That made Joe boom with laughter.