Finding a solid suspect besides Ernesto Cabal wasn’t going to be easy. B. D. Harper had not risen to the pinnacle of his trade by making enemies. His mission, in fact, had been quite the opposite: to make as many friends as possible and offend no one. Harper had been good at this. He positively excreted congeniality.
Sparky had lived and breathed tourism. His singular goal had been to lure as many people to South Florida to spend as much money as was humanly possible in four days and three nights. He lay awake nights scheming new ways to draw people to the tropical bosom of Miami.
As a reporter, Brian Keyes had come to know B. D. Harper fairly well. There was nothing not to like; there simply was nothing much at all. He was an innocuous, rotund little man who was jolliest when Florida was crawling with snowbirds. For years Harper had run his own successful public-relations firm, staging predictable dumb stunts like putting a snow machine on the beach in January, or mailing a ripe Florida orange to every human being in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska. This was in the boom days of Miami and, in a way, Sparky Harper had been a proud pioneer of the shameless, witless boosterism that made Florida grow.
In later years, as head of the Chamber of Commerce, Harper’s principal task was to compose a snazzy new bumper sticker every year:
“Miami—Too Hot to Handle!”
“Florida is ... Paradise Found!”
“Miami Melts in Your Mouth!”
Brian Keyes’s personal favorite was “The Most Exciting City in America,” which Sparky propitiously introduced one month after Miami’s worst race riot.
Harper shrewdly had peddled his lame slogans by affixing them to color posters of large-breasted women sunbathing on the beach, sprawling on the bows of sailboats, or dangling from a hang-glider-whatever Sparky could arrange. The women were always very beautiful because the Chamber of Commerce could afford to hire the top models.
The annual unveiling of the new tourism poster made Sparky Harper neither controversial nor unpopular. As far as anyone could tell, it was the only tangible thing he did all year to earn his forty-two-thousand-dollar salary.
As for the murder, Keyes thought of the usual cheap possibilities: a jealous husband, an impatient loan shark, a jilted girlfriend, a jilted boyfriend. Nothing seemed to fit. Sparky was a divorced man with a French poodle named Bambi. When he dated at all, he dated widows or hookers. He had been known to get bombed on occasion, but he never made an ass of himself in public. And he wasn’t a gambler, so it was unlikely that the Mafia was into him.
Keyes guessed that whoever killed Harper might not have known him personally, but probably knew who he was. With garish methodology the killer had seemed to be making a very strong statement, which is why Keyes couldn’t dismiss the “Nights of December” letter, nutsy as it was.
Keyes decided that he needed the autopsy report. He drove to the medical examiner’s office and asked for a copy. Dr. Joe Allen wasn’t in, so Keyes decided to wait. As he sat in a tiled room that smelled sweetly of formalin, he started to read Allen’s report line-by-line. Halfway through, his curiosity got the best of him and he unsheathed the color slides. One by one Keyes held them up to the light.
The more he studied the gruesome photographs, the more Keyes was convinced that Ernesto Cabal was telling the truth: he’d had nothing to do with B. D. Harper’s murder. It was beyond Ernesto’s stunted imagination to have conceived something like this.
“Don’t smudge up my slides!” Dr. Joe Allen stood at the doorway, laden with files.
“‘Mornin’, Doc.”
“Well, Brian. I hear you’ve hit the big time.” Joe Allen had always liked Brian Keyes. Keyes had been a solid reporter and it was a damn shame he’d given it up to become a P.I. Joe Allen wasn’t crazy about private investigators.
“This was no robbery, Joe.”
“I don’t know what it was,” Dr. Allen said, “except that it was definitely death by asphyxiation.”
“Have you ever heard of a B-and-E artist to show such flair?” Keyes asked.
“It seems the police are of that opinion.”
“I’m asking for yours, Joe.”
Dr. Joe Allen had autopsied 3,712 murder victims during his long career as the Dade County coroner, so he had seen more indescribable carnage than perhaps any other human being in the whole United States. Throughout the years Joe Allen had charted South Florida’s progress by what lay dead on his steel tables, and he was long past the point of ever being shocked or nauseated. He performed meticulous surgery, kept precise files, took flawless photographs, and compiled priceless morbidity data which earned him a national reputation. For example, it was Dr. Allen who had determined that Greater Miami had more mutilation-homicides per capita than any other American city, a fact he attributed to the terrific climate. In warm weather, Allen noted, there were no outdoor elements to deter a lunatic from spending six, seven, eight hours hacking away on a victim; try that in Buffalo and you’d freeze your ass off. After Dr. Allen had presented his findings to a big pathologists’ convention, several other Sun Belt coroners had conducted their own studies and confirmed what became known as the Allen Mutilation Theorem.
Throughout the years a few spectacular cases stood out vividly in Dr. Allen’s recollections, but the rest were just toe tags. Brian Keyes hoped Sparky Harper might be different.
The coroner put on his glasses and held up two of the more sickening slides, as if to refresh his memory. “Brian,” he said, “I don’t think they’ve got the right man in jail.”
“So how do I get him out?”
“Give them a better suspect. ”
“Swell, Joe. Anyone in particular?”
“In my opinion, Mr. Harper was the victim of a ritual slaying. I’d say that several persons were involved. I would also say that neither robbery nor sexual assault was the motive. I wouldn’t rule out the possibility of an occult ceremony, possibly even human sacrifice. On the other hand, the body showed no common signs of torture—no cigarette burns, welts, or bruise patterns. But you can’t ignore what happened to the legs.”
Keyes asked, “What did happen to the legs?”
“The legs were removed after death occurred, probably so the body could be concealed in the suitcase. But it’s the way the legs were removed that’s so interesting.”
Keyes said, “Joe, are you doing this just to make me sick?”
“The legs weren’t just hacked off with an ax, which is the most efficient way,” said Dr. Allen, pausing to choose his words. “It appears from the wounds that Sparky’s legs might have been removed by a large animal. They might actually have been ... twisted off.”
‘God! By what, wild dogs?”
Dr. Allen shook his head somberly. “Judging from the bite pattern, it was no dog. It was something much bigger. Don’t ask me what, Brian, because I just don’t know.”
“Joe, you always brighten my day.”
“Happy hunting, my friend.”
5
Brian Keyes’s office was on the sixth floor of a dreary downtown bank building off SW Second Avenue, near the Miami River. The consulate of El Salvador was located down the hall, so most of the other tenants lived in perpetual fear of a terrorist attack and behaved accordingly. They all had chipped in to hire extra security guards for the lobby, but the security men had turned out to be professional burglars who one night looted the entire building of all IBM office machinery.
Brian Keyes was not affected by this crime because the only typewriter in his office was an old Olivetti portable, a leftover from his days of covering politics for the Miami Sun. The other items of potential value were an antique desk lamp and a telephone tape recorder, but the lamp was broken and the tape recorder was made in Korea, so the burglars wanted no part of either.
The highlight of the office was a fifty-gallon salt-water aquarium, a going-away present from his friends at the newspaper. Keyes had erected it in the foyer, where a secretary ordinarily might have sat, and filled it with whiskered catfish that sucked the alga
e off the glass.
Except for the aquarium, the place was just as cramped, ratty, and depressing as Keyes had feared it would be. He was rarely there. Even when he had nothing to do, he’d find an excuse to leave the bank building and stroll around downtown. He had an answering service, and an electronic beeper that fit onto his belt. The beeper didn’t make Keyes feel particularly important; every shyster lawyer, dope dealer, and undercover agent in Dade County wore one. It was mandatory.
On the morning of December 5, Keyes was down at Bayfront Park, munching a sandwich and watching the tugboats, when the beeper on his belt went off loudly enough to wake a derelict two benches away.
Keyes found a pay phone and called his service. Al García was trying to reach him. It was important. Keyes phoned Homicide.
“Meet me on the beach,” García said. “The Flamingo Isles, near Sixty-eighth and Collins. Look for the cop cars out front.”
The Flamingo Isles was not a classic Miami Beach motel. There was nothing charming about the color (silt) or the architecture (Early Texaco). At this motel there were no striped canvas awnings, no wizened retirees chirping in the lobby, no lawn chairs lined up on the front porch, no front porch whatsoever. Basically the Flamingo Isles was a dive for pimps, chicken hawks, and hookers. Rooms cost ten dollars an hour, fifteen with porno cassettes. It was rumored that some of the vestibules were equipped with hidden movie cameras to secretly record the sexual antics of Florida tourists. It was not a good place for an innocent man, but Keyes was hopeful that this was where Sparky Harper had spent his final earthly moments. If so, it meant that Harper had likely died in some bizarre sexual accident and not at the larcenous hands of Ernesto Cabal.
Keyes goosed his little MG convertible across the causeway and made it to the motel in eighteen minutes flat. Al Garcia already was interviewing a Jamaican maid in the lobby. He kept hollering for an interpreter and the maid kept insisting in perfect English that she spoke perfect English, but Garcia wouldn’t believe her. He finally enlisted a black Miami Beach detective to take the maid’s statement, and went upstairs, Keyes in tow. They entered room 223.
“Here you have it,” Garcia said.
A pile of men’s clothing lay in the middle of the floor: blue silk socks, turned inside-out; an undershirt; a pair of soiled Jockey shorts; and a powder-blue double-knit suit with a J. C. Penney label. The legs of the suit had been sheared off below the knees. Lying beneath the clothes was a pair of highly polished black Florsheims.
The room showed no signs of a mortal struggle. There was a half-finished bottle of Seagram’s and a couple cans of soda on the dresser. On the nightstand, next to the Magic Fingers machine, sat three plastic bottles of Coppertone tanning butter with coconut oil. A fingerprint man studiously dusted the containers; he was crouched on his haunches, oblivious of everything.
With a long pair of tweezers, García picked a plastic bag off the floor. The red-and-white lettering on the bag said: “Everglades Novelties. ”
“This,” Garcia intoned, “was used to transport the instrument of death.”
“The toy alligator?”
Garcia nodded.
“So this is where it happened.”
“The murder? No, we don’t think so.”
Suddenly a big redheaded cop barged out of the bathroom. It was Harold Keefe, the lead detective.
“Who’re you?” he asked Keyes.
“A friend of Al’s.” Keyes looked at Garcia. García had an oh shit! look in his eyes.
“Don’t touch anything,” Keefe growled on his way out the door. “Al, don’t let him touch anything, got it?”
García checked the bathroom to make sure no other detectives were sneaking around. He didn’t say another word until the fingerprint man packed up his kit and left.
“Christ! I didn’t know that bastard was in the john!”
“Relax, Al. He doesn’t know who I am.”
García started stuffing B. D. Harper’s clothing in a clear plastic evidence bag. “Check out the stains on the floor,” he told Keyes.
Two streaks of dried blood made a wavering trail from the bedroom to the bathroom. It was not very much blood, certainly less than one would have expected.
“The lab guys are on their way,” Garcia said, “so I’m gonna give it to you once. Then I want you to get out of here before I get in trouble.”
“Whatever you say, Al.”
“On the night of November 30, two men rented this room for one week. They paid cash in advance, three hundred and sixty bucks.”
“What’d they look like?”
“One was described as a muscular black male in a tight yellow pullover,” Garcia said, “and the other was a young Latin male wearing blue jeans.”
Keyes grimaced. “I suppose you showed Cabal’s mug shot to the desk clerk.”
“Yeah, and she’s seventy-five percent sure it was him.”
“Seventy-five won’t cut it in court, Al.”
“Don’t worry, she’ll be one hundred percent positive by the time this goes to trial.”
“Anyone see them with B. D. Harper?”
“We got a couple faggots in room 225 who saw the Latin male enter this room about eleven P.M. with a chubby Anglo matching Harper’s description. They heard some loud voices, and then the door slammed. The fairies peeked out just in time to see Harper being led down the stairs by the black dude and the little Cuban. Oh yeah, and the Cuban is carrying a red Samsonite.”
“So they took Harper someplace, killed him, cut his legs off, stuffed him in the suitcase, and—”
“Brought him back here,” Garcia said. “This is where the weird shit happens. These blood smears come from dragging the corpse into the bathroom. That’s where they dress him up in that stupid flowered shirt and smear the Coppertone all over and stuff him in the suitcase.”
“Don’t forget the sunglasses,” Keyes said.
“Right. Then they drive out to Key Biscayne and heave him into the bay.”
“Why all the trouble?”
Garcia said, “Beats the hell out of me. Anyway, the black guy and the Cuban haven’t been back since early on the morning of December 1. The maid just opened the room today. She saw the blood on the floor and called the Beach police. ”
“Well, this is great news, Al.”
“I’m not finished. Remember I told you I had a line on those goofy clothes? Well, I got a sales clerk at a joint down the street who says she sold them to a skinny little Cuban guy on November 29.”
“Emesto?”
“She’s eighty percent sure. The creep was wearing a floppy hat, so she’s not absolutely certain.”
“Give her time,” Keyes said glumly. Things were looking bleak for Senor Cabal. Keyes wondered if he’d been wrong about the little guy. Maybe he wasn’t just a crummy car burglar trying to get by.
García knotted the top of the evidence bag and scanned the room to make sure he hadn’t missed anything. “Time for you to hit the road,” he told Keyes. “And remember, I don’t know your fucking name.”
“Right, Al.”
Keyes was in the parking lot, strolling toward the MG, when he heard Garcia call from a balcony.
“Hey, Brian, you wanna really help your client?”
“You bet. ”
“It’s easy,” Garcia shouted. “Find the black guy.”
Keyes arrived at the county jail just as Mitch Klein was leaving. Klein was a scruffy young lawyer with the public defender’s office who apparently had drawn the short straw when they farmed out Ernesto Cabal’s case. As he walked out of the jail, his shirt damp and his tie loose, Klein did not look like a happy man. He looked like a man who couldn’t wait to get into private practice.
Klein greeted Keyes with a lugubrious nod and said, “What’s the bad news for the day?”
“They found a motel room on the beach with Harper’s clothes and some blood on the floor. Little Cuban guy rented it the night before Harper vanished.”
“Beautiful,” Klei
n grumbled.
“The good news is, a big black guy was working with the Cuban. He matches the description of the character Ernesto says sold him the Oldsmobile. Maybe 1 can find hit.”
Klein rolled his eyes and made a lewd pumping motion with his right hand. “I think Emesto is full of shit,” he said.
Wonderful, Keyes thought, the guy’s own lawyer is dumping on him.
When Keyes entered the cell, he noticed that Ernesto lay stark naked on the cot. Ernesto blinked at Keyes like a gecko lizard stunned by the sunlight.
“Dey took my close.”
“Why?”
“‘Fraid I’m gonna hang myself.”
“Are you?”
“Not now.”
“Glad to hear it.”
Ernesto rolled over on his stomach, exposing stringy white buttocks. Two prisoners in another cell hooted in appreciation. Ernesto ignored them.
“That man Klein wants me to cop a plea. Says he’s trying to save my life. He says dey strap my ass in a lektric chair if diss case go to jury. You thin’ he’s right?”
Keyes said, “I’m no lawyer.”
“Too bad. That Klein, he’s got nice shoes. You could use some nice shoes, no?”
Keyes told Cabal about the Flamingo Isles motel. The Cuban sat up excitedly when he heard the part about the black man and B. D. Harper.
“Was the black guy wearing Carrera frames?”
“I don’t know.”
“I’ll bet it’s the same dude who sold me that goddamn car.”
“I’ll try to find him, Ernesto.”
“Hey, you tell Klein?”
“Yes.”
“What’d he say?”
“He said it sounded very promising.”
“I seen the black guy before.” Ernesto stood up and started pacing the cell. Keyes found his nakedness a little disconcerting. Mainly it was the tattoo: a commendable likeness of Fidel Castro’s face, stenciled deftly on the tip of Ernesto’s most private appendage.