Contents Under Pressure (27 page)

“The who?”

“For the past twenty years, a bunch of the guys have been getting together for a game. Whitaker, Alvarez, O’Rourke, and Duran are some of the founding members.”

“Who else plays?” I reached for a pencil and began to scribble on the notepad next to the phone as Flood rattled off names.

“Tell your partner hello,” I said, trying to sound casual.

“Sure thing, toots.”

I got the distinct impression that he did not use my name because he did not want to be accused of talking to me. He didn’t even want McDonald to know.

I shook my head, hating all the secrecy and being treated like I was contagious. The names of the poker players were all familiar; they were cops who had been around for a long time. A few were old-time hard-liners who did not deal well with the press. I knew three of the others, Duran, O’Rourke, and Salazar, well enough to have their unlisted home phone numbers. Over time, as they ascended in rank, many cops became less paranoid about giving out their numbers. Two were lieutenants, another a captain.

They’re all buddies, I thought; if I use a shotgun approach and start peppering them with questions, word will quickly get back to all of them. I had to think this through and try to hit pay dirt on the first call.

I sat and studied the names. Lt. Sean O’Rourke’s jumped out at me. He was a smart man, good cop, loud and often boisterous, a bit of a drinker, and somewhat of a maverick. That had to be the reason he had not climbed higher in rank. I had called him at home a few times on breaking stories, and even relatively early in the evening his words had been slightly slurred, though he remained articulate. His dad had been an assistant chief on the New York City Police Department, a fact he was proud of. He loved police work, but exuded a sense of bitterness at the direction the department had taken. I knew he was eligible for retirement and thinking about putting in his papers. I had never known him to lie, which was why he often got in trouble with the brass. He hated politics and those who played it, loved the truth, and spoke out, often to the detriment of his career. He would loudly castigate his own men when they screwed up, but never allowed anyone else to criticize them. He was a real cop’s cop.

O’Rourke was beefy, with a chubby face, pale eyes, and a growing gut. I also knew that he’d been divorced a few years earlier after a long-term marriage, and had a son in college, studying engineering. Always alone at the functions I had covered, he was either carrying a torch or awkward about reentering the single social life. The times I had called him at home, he seemed to be alone and enjoying talking, keeping the conversation going far beyond what I needed for the story. I glanced at the accursed cuckoo clock. If I catch him at home, I thought, he’ll probably have had a few drinks by now. Loose, alone, maybe eager to chat.

“I need to talk to you,” I told him.

“Where’ve ya been, Britt?” His words seemed more than slightly slurred. “What’s up?”

“I wanted to talk to you about the Hudson case.” Nothing like getting right to the point.

There was a pause. I heard him breathing. “I was wonderin’ when you would catch on. This whole trial, it’s a crock of shit. Those poor bastards.”

“What do you mean?” I said, trying not to sound too eager.

“Where are you calling from?”

“Home.”

“You know we shouldn’t talk like this over the phone.”

“I doubt there’s any risk…”

“Never say anything over the phone that you don’t want your mother to hear when it’s played at your trial.”

“I could come there. Is that okay? What’s the address?”

He told me. “Jus’ come south down the Palmetto, get off at SW Twenty-fourth, hang a right at the fourth light. Don’t park in the driveway.”

“I’ll leave it down the block,” I promised, my pulse pounding in my throat. “I’ll be right there.”

I drove through the night with a growing sense of excitement at what lay ahead. I had no trouble finding the address; cops give good directions. I worried that maybe I was being set up. But O’Rourke had never lied to me, or anyone as far as I knew. He had a stubborn Irish sense of honor and decency that never helped him advance his career. More realistically, I worried that he might keep drinking and be incoherent by the time I got there. Or that he might sober up and, thinking clearly, decide against talking to me.

I carefully parked the T-Bird a block away from the house. It was about 10
P.M
., and I saw no one out on the street.

The door opened on my first ring of the bell. In his hand was a nearly empty glass, with melting ice cubes. His broad face was ruddy and red-veined.

“Didn’t take you long,” he said. “Come on in. Want a drink?”

“Club soda?”

He frowned.

“A wine spritzer?”

“Sure.”

I trailed him through the living room out into a screened-in patio, half-covered by an overhang. Baskets of well-tended orchids and stag horn ferns hung from a pipe that seemed to be part of the screening. “Wonderful house,” I told him.

“Been here twenty-two years,” he said. “Built this addition myself.” He was obviously proud of the place. Everything was orderly, with almost a military spit and polish.

A wet bar faced the pool and a brick barbecue. I could picture years of evening meals and family gatherings here. He moved comfortably behind the bar, fixing my drink. “I shoulda told you to bring a swimsuit.”

“It’s a little nippy for me,” I said. I love swimming in the ocean when the water is languid and steamy, like a warm bath.

“Peanuts?” He reached down to a shelf and came up with a vacuum-packed can. “I’ve got some right here.” He turned a key, opened the can with a whoosh, sprinkled the contents into a bowl, and pushed it in my direction. Music came from behind him, a stereo tuned into an oldies station, playing hits from the fifties.

He stood behind the bar, lonely master of all he surveyed. I sat on a rattan stool in front of him. He had been drinking, but probably no more than he drank here alone every night. His usual refrain was the sorry politics, the ethnicity, the leadership, or lack of it, in the department. His father had been highly decorated in New York. “The job had some honor to it then,” he was saying, about the early days when he was an eager, ambitious rookie and Miami was a sleepy southern resort city.

I could see that O’Rourke wanted to play host a bit longer, but I was impatient to address the reason for my visit.

“Have you been reading the trial coverage?”

O’Rourke looked glum. “Those poor bastards.” He shook his head.

“What about D. Wayne Hudson, that poor bastard?” I said, taking a handful of peanuts.

“It could be a homicide,” he blurted, staring bleary-eyed into his glass. “Cold-blooded, premeditated, first-degree murder.”

“But they didn’t even know who he was, much less have time to premeditate killing him.”

“Not them.” O’Rourke looked me straight in the eye, swaying slightly on his feet. “I have suspicions of my own.”

I felt chilly, despite my long-sleeved shirt.

“What do you mean?”

“This is strictly confidential, Britt. You can never, ever, use my name, or even hint that any of this came from me. We never spoke. I’ll deny it.”

I looked him square in the eye. “I never give up a source. You know that about me by now.”

He nodded and dropped fresh ice cubes into his glass. He poured a healthy slug of Jack Daniels over them.

“I’ve never been a rat no matter what they’ve done,” he muttered. “But seeing those guys—on trial, like common criminals. I’m not saying the Blackburns are heroes, and the department is better off without the Machados and Estradas, but I have a strong feeling that they shouldn’t be on trial, at least not on murder charges.”

“You believe somebody put out a phony BOLO?”

“It’s the only explanation.”

“Who could it have been?”

“Alvarez. He had the opportunity, and the motive.”

My mind raced, suddenly remembering, “Alma told me he was at the meeting with D. Wayne Hudson that night! It would have been simple for him to watch Hudson leave, then radio a description of his car and report it as stolen, driven by an armed and dangerous suspect. But why?”

“He wants the chiefs job so bad he’ll fuck over anybody to get it.” O’Rourke’s pale eyes looked haunted. “I’ve worked with the man for more than twenty years, Britt. He is without conscience. Totally amoral. Ambition can be an overpowering addiction. He’ll do anything for power. People like him would turn in their own mothers to make a rank.” As his voice rose, his fingers tightened around his glass until I was afraid it would shatter.

“Wait a minute.” He was getting carried away, and I was still confused. “Why would he believe that putting out that BOLO would land him the job?”

O’Rourke gulped a deep breath. When he spoke again it was in a lower register. “We’ve all played poker once a week over the years since back when Hector was a pup. We rap, we brainstorm, we relax. Over the years we all came up together through the ranks, and we all were pretty well disgusted when they brought the new chief in from out of town. It should have been somebody from inside. One of us. Nobody wanted it more than Alvarez. We all pretty much pissed and moaned when they brought in an outsider. Especially this chief. I swear, the man can’t count past twenty with his fly up. We all despise him, never cut him a break. We talked about it incessantly every week, hoping he’d screw up bad enough to get fired or forced out.”

O’Rourke leaned heavily across the bar, on his elbows, his jowly face open and sincere. “Alvarez knows that if this chief goes, he is next in line for the job. He’s front runner.”

I nodded, not wanting to slow him down.

“But as time went on, the goddamn chief seemed to be more and more entrenched. The son of a bitch has been weathering it, even with nobody giving him a break. Hell, he could be here for another ten years.” He rolled his eyes. “We’d all be long gone by then. Somewhere along the line, a running joke started among us about how to get rid of the man. Sheer speculation, just bullshitting. I said it myself one week, ‘What the hell do we have to do to get rid of the mother-fucker, put a bullet in his head?’ Scuze my French.”

I nodded and sipped my drink. In the distance a dog barked and somebody’s car alarm yelped. The oldies station played something throbbingly sweet and sentimental, meant for the occupants of back-seats in lovers’ lanes, back in the days when young sweethearts could frequent lovers’ lanes without being robbed or raped, or worse.

He leaned closer. “The night I said that, Alvarez said, ‘No, you’re wrong. He’s not the one we have to kill.’ He said it matter of fact, like he’d been thinking about it. Somebody asked what the hell he was talking about, and he made a little speech about how it’s better for a cause to kill a good man than to kill a bad one.

I frowned. “What does that mean?”

“You know how these Latins scheme, how they love intrigue. You understand it better than anybody; hell, you’re one of them.”

“Only half-Cuban,” I said.

O’Rourke studied me as if, even cold sober, I was too dense to comprehend simple English. He spoke carefully, like a drunk will do when trying to be certain he is understood.

“Simple. The catalyst needed to get this department cleaned out from the top would be a high-profile brutality case. If that wild bunch on midnights killed a well-known, highly respected black man, the community would be howling for the chief’s head.”

I gasped, a peanut slid sideways down my throat, and I erupted in a paroxysm of coughing. “You can’t be serious,’’ I sputtered, eyes tearing, my voice choking.

“You all right?” He patted me on the back with his big hand.

“Yes, yes,” I gasped, wanting to ask a dozen questions, unable to catch my breath.

O’Rourke took a long pull on his drink, watching me, then spoke slowly again. “He said when you kill a bad man nothing changes, but kill a good man and people react. They would kick the bad one out. His regime would topple. The chief would have to resign or be fired.”

“Which has almost happened,” I said, my voice still gravelly. The impact had hit me like a painful punch in the solar plexus. Had D. Wayne Hudson died to make Alvarez top man in the department?

“The funny thing is,” O’Rourke said ironically, “we laughed, we all said it made sense. We thought it was just the drinks talking.” He stared glumly into his glass, then refilled it.

“So he set up Hudson
and
the cops? But how could he know what they would do?” It seemed too farfetched.

“You have to remember,” O’Rourke said, “that Alvarez is the man who transferred most of those guys to midnights. He knew their propensity for violence, their reputations. He must have had a pretty good idea that they’d pile onto Hudson. If they didn’t, fine. It was worth a shot.”

“But he couldn’t know they would kill him.”

“Maybe they didn’t.”

My eyes locked onto his, waiting for his words.

“I’ve always thought it pretty strange that nobody, not the guys at the scene, rescue, or the doctors considered Hudson’s condition critical. Then all of a sudden, he’s brain dead. Just too damn convenient.”

“It happens.” I shrugged. “But you’re saying…”

“No way to ever prove it,” he warned. “Sheer speculation on my part, but what if after hearing Hudson was going to be okay, somebody made sure he wouldn’t be?”

Murder. I stared at O’Rourke. “Was Alvarez at the hospital that night?”

“Not on paper. He’s not mentioned in any reports. For all we know he went right home after the meeting.

My mind was reeling. “If D. Wayne was murdered in the hospital, how? There would have to be medical evidence.”

O’Rourke shrugged. “Whatever it was, the medical examiner didn’t find it, did he? I told you Britt, this is all just speculation, my own theory, with holes in it big enough to drive a truck through.”

“The doctors who tried to revive him would have spotted any fresh injuries,” I said, thinking aloud. “You think he could have been smothered, with a pillow or something?”

O’Rourke looked skeptical, shaking his head.

“Wait a minute!” I said. “Alvarez has access to drugs…”

“How do you figure that?”

“His wife operates a clinic at Little Havana. I just heard something about it the other day. She’s a registered nurse. He could have gotten anything he needed right there.”

He shrugged. “But why didn’t the ME find something? If you pursue this, Britt, you have to make everybody think you figured it out by your lonesome.”

I nodded, and drained my own drink, heart pounding.

“Those poor bastards, on trial for murder.” He poured himself another, then sloshed wine into my empty glass.

“He’s dangerous, Britt. Alvarez is as crazy as hell. When the trouble the chief is in was brought up at the last card game, he just grinned. He thinks he’s gonna take his place. Looks like he will.”

“The chief had no idea?”

“Not a clue. As far as I know, he thinks it’s all just bad luck.”

I thought back over everything that had happened. “But why was Alvarez so infuriated when I showed up on the fifth floor? He had no reason if I’d served his purpose by writing about the attack on D. Wayne.”

“He bragged about that later, he really enjoyed hosing you down. Maybe he did it for effect, maybe it really did piss him off to see you up there. He’s always hated reporters. Without the media, he thinks he would have been chief long ago.”

“If you suspected all this, why haven’t you gone to homicide or internal affairs?”

He shook his head. “I told you, I’m out of it, Britt. There’s a big difference between having a gut feeling and proving something happened. My word against his. If it doesn’t stick, where do I stand? I don’t even know if any of the other guys have given it a thought. Besides, I wouldn’t piss on the chief if he was going up in flames. Those poor dumb bastards up there on trial, even
they
think they’re guilty.”

It all fit, in a crazy way. A native of this city where anything could happen, I was still stunned. I left O’Rourke the way he was when I arrived, standing alone at the door, a half-empty glass in his hand.

Once home, I called the hospital. On the third try, I finally got through to Rico, at a nurses’ station in ICU. “I need your help,” I said. “It’s really important.”

“What do you mean?”

“I need you to think back to the night D. Wayne Hudson came in.”

There was a pause. “Let me call you right back on another phone.”

“No problem.” I fidgeted for nearly ten minutes before the phone rang.

“Okay,” he said. “You didn’t leave any messages around for me with your name on them, did you?”

“No, you know better than that.”

“What do you need?”

“Remember that night?”

“If you recollect, I was the one who called you.”

“Right. Remember the blue uniforms. The Miami cops who were there?”

“Yeah?”

“They were mostly patrolmen, the ones involved in the chase. I need to know if one of the brass was there. Maybe later…”

“Frankie Alvarez?”

I caught my breath. “I didn’t know you knew him.”

“Sure, he’s been around for years. His wife used to work here, in the unit, before she got involved with some clinic, over there in Little Havana.”

“Was he there that night?”

“Sure. He showed up. I saw him out there on the floor, alone.”

“Do you know when it was?” I tried to keep my voice calm.

“The exact time, no. The other cops were long gone.” He thought for a moment. “It was before all the excitement, the code. Before D. Wayne went sour on us.”

“Didn’t anybody think it unusual? Could he ever have been alone with Hudson?”

“Without a doubt. What are you getting at, Britt? Nothing unusual about cops being in and out of here. I figured he just wanted to get a look at the patient. Him being a celebrity and all.”

“Thanks, Rico.” I was trembling.