Hard Case Crime: Dutch Uncle (10 page)

Williams stood up to say goodbye. Martinson hoped he wouldn’t notice he was grasping a hand as warm as Manfred Pfiser’s.

Lili had gone back to check on Annick Mersault, and she was doing all she could to stay in her chair while Annick described the man she had seen leaving the hotel. The boyfriend, Allain Marcoux, was having a tough time, too, translating Annick’s subjective concepts into English for the Department sketch artist, an illustrator named Charlie Roth. Before Roth suggested they move to an interview room, Annick was using Ron Robotaille as her model, saying the man was handsome like Robotaille, except with a squarer chin and a thinner face.

“Thinner?” Roth was asking. “Or narrower?”

“That’s good,” Marcoux said after clearing things up with Annick, “she means narrow.”

The kissy-kissy thing Marcoux had going with this little twit was making Lili sick. She was over the gap in their ages — young or not, Annick was an adult old enough to make her own decisions. But she’d have thought a man of Marcoux’s years — he had to be as old as Martinson, and Arnie was what, forty-five? — would have the decency to be embarrassed by a gushing twenty yearold, but the sleazeball just fastened his necklace, slapped on more cologne and lapped the fawning up.

And it hurt to admit it, but Lili was jealous of Annick’s beet-faced mooning over Robotaille. It was Robotaille’s eyes she was stuck on now. The man at the hotel had eyes like his, Annick said, but the detective’s were further apart.

“Do us a favor,” Roth said, staying patient, “forget about Robotaille. Try to concentrate on the face you saw. Can you remember what the eyes were shaped like?”

Lili headed out into the squad room. Martinson was walking in, carrying an envelope. He nodded at Lili, stopped to pour himself a cup of coffee, and added two Sweet N’ Lows.

“I can’t stand to be around that French girl another minute,” Lili said.

“She’s seen too many Brigitte Bardot movies, that kid. How’s it going?”

“Slow. She’s hung up Robotaille’s eyes.

“Uh-huh. And who’s that with Robotaille?”

“Douglas Waters. He was the manager on duty at the hotel that night.”

“Oh, yeah?” Martinson said. “When did he get here?”

“About five minutes ago.”

“Here’s the autopsy report, Lil. Why don’t you go over it with our fearless leader? I wanna talk to this guy.” She was about to head for Kramer’s office when Martinson grabbed her elbow. “Hey, by the way, I’m sorry what I said about Williams.”

“What’re you talking about?”

He let go of her. “That shot about him being a witch doctor. I didn’t mean anything by it. He’s not so bad, you know.”

Acevedo shrugged him off, but it made Arnie feel better, having said what he said. He moved toward the desk where Robotaille was babysitting his witness. Ron noticed him coming over and got up to meet him.

“Good timing. The guy’s gotta be at work soon. Says he would’ve been in earlier, except he fishes the Keys on his days off. I don’t know,” Robotaille said, “he looks more like the country club type to me.”

“Wherever he’s been, it was in the sun. Check out that white stripe across his eyes.”

Robotaille went and picked up a telephone and Martinson introduced himself to Douglas Waters. He took the chair Robotaille had been sitting in and said, “I’m sure you heard all about last Wednesday. On that night, did Manfred Pfiser receive any visitors?”

“Not to my knowledge,” Waters said. He was a babyfaced guy with cool blue eyes and a close shave.

“Not to your knowledge?”

“We have a policy about announcing visitors, but the restrooms of the café are on the mezzanine level of the lobby, and you can’t always tell who’s who.”

“The hotel isn’t exactly a model of security.”

“We have a team that works weekends,” Waters said.

“Nobody during the week?”

Waters tightened his lips and shook his head no. His tie was tied perfectly, coming up flush against his collar, the knot in the dead middle between the collar points.

“Did you see or hear anything suspicious, anything that would’ve alerted you things weren’t quite right Wednesday night?”

“I saw two men leaving the hotel, two men who weren’t registered guests and didn’t look like patrons of the restaurant. Something about them was just wrong.”

“Such as.”

“They were an odd pair,” Waters remembered. “One was short—”

Martinson cut him off. With Waters seated, Arnie couldn’t tell his exact height, but the man was probably close to six-three. Nearly everybody was short compared to him, and Martinson pointed this out.

Waters said, “Less than average height. With no kind of haircut, you know what I mean? Not combed or shaped or anything.”

“Must’ve been pretty obvious, you noticing that in the two seconds it took him to walk past you.”

“No, it took longer than that. I was on them when they got off the elevator, and I remember them walking through the lobby and out into the street. I was watching because I wanted to make sure they were gone. The guy’s hair was horrid, looked like it had been cut with a lawnmower.”

Waters’s own hair was gel-tight. His sideburns, which reached the precise middle of his ear, didn’t have a single whisker out of place. A bad haircut is something a guy like this would notice about someone. Maybe the first thing.

Martinson ran a hand though his own hair. “What about the other one, his partner?”

“Taller by a head, and thin. Cuban. I would’ve said light-skinned black but his features were Latin.”

“What does that mean?”

Waters backpedaled. “Forget that. He could’ve been white, with an olive complexion, Italian or Jewish. I can’t say. I didn’t get a good look at him, but I do remember this. He had an afro.”

Again with the hair, Martinson said, “An afro?”

“An afro. This might sound stupid, but you would’ve noticed these two by their hair alone. They rushed out of the lobby without wanting it to appear like they were in a hurry. Weird, it was like the taller one was trying to keep up.”

“What’s weird about that?”

“It should’ve been the other way around. Wouldn’t the taller man cover more ground with a stride?”

“I suppose he would,” Martinson said.

“In any event, there’s no question they were together.”

“Can you recall the time, Mr. Waters?”

“It was after midnight, that’s for sure.”

“Why’re you so sure?”

“The waiters were stacking chairs in the café. That’s the image I have of these two. Out the lobby and onto the sidewalk, past the piled-up chairs. The café closes at midnight on Wednesday.”

“One of your guests told us that on that night she had to phone the desk to get Pfiser to turn his music down. You took the call, right?”

“I remember it clearly. Ms. Lowenstein in room 1207. I think guests like Ms. Lowenstein would be more comfortable at the Eden Roc, but her wishes do need to be respected. I went up to Mr. Pfiser’s room personally, and asked him to lower the volume.”

“Was he alone at that time?”

“As far as I know, yes.”

“Was this before or after the haircut duo made their exit?”

“Before. I told you they left after midnight.”

Martinson took a sip of his coffee and rubbed the back of his neck. He didn’t have any more questions for Douglas Waters but he hoped that Waters could come back on another day when he had more time, to take a look at the mug books. Waters said he would.

Martinson got Robotaille to escort Waters downstairs, and he caught Lili coming out of Kramer’s office. “What’d Big John have to say?”

“What’s he gonna say? It’s an autopsy report. The victim died of a gunshot wound. We knew that. What happened with the hotel manager?”

“He described the haircuts of two guys he saw getting out of an elevator.”

Lili said, “You like this guy the French chick’s describing?”

“I don’t like anybody.”

“Then who was the man leaving the room?”

“Couldn’t tell you,” Martinson said. “But we’re gonna need to find out.”

Kramer had his hair on fire over an editorial in some sporadically published model scene rag that accused the Miami Beach Police Department, and the Detective Bureau in particular, of negligence and sloth, not to mention indifference, toward solving the murder of Manfred Pfiser. Pfiser was a well-known figure among the gay set, and the editorial implied that the Dutchman’s homosexuality was the cause of foot-dragging by the Bureau, an idiotic allegation the paper did nothing to substantiate. The piece was headlined EQUAL JUSTICE UNDER LAW?

Kramer was white. He tossed the paper on his desk for Martinson to read. In the third paragraph, somebody left the second ‘p’ out of inappropriate. Arnie said, “Why’re you getting so worked up over a publication that doesn’t even know how to spell? Nobody reads these things.”

Kramer was pushing the idea of making the Annick Mersault composite public. They’d been back and forth over the relative merits of this strategy in the past, and for what it was worth, this was Arnie’s theory:

Nobody, no matter how stupid, who had committed a murder, wouldn’t think the cops weren’t after
somebody.
Especially with a body left at the scene. But there was a huge gap between an anonymous, faceless suspect, and the specific mug that appeared in a police composite. By keeping the picture in house, so to speak, the killer might be lulled into thinking nobody had seen him. It would naturally follow that he’d think he’d gotten away with it.

Then, on some booze-addled morning, the actor’s lips got loose, and he started bragging. Remember the Dutch guy who got it on the Beach? That was me. Next, somebody would rat the guy off. Which always happened. Too hot of a tip to sit on. Not to mention, there’s no way the actor arrives at the point where he’s pulling the trigger on a defenseless man in some hotel room without making a lot of people along the way hate his guts. This was your revenge factor.

They’d go pick the guy up. Using evidence detectives developed, the District Attorney’s office built a case against him. If they had the right man, and everybody did his job, a jury convicted him. Nine times out of ten, anyway. After that, the guy had the pleasure of putting his life on hold for twenty-five years in one of Florida’s garden spots. If he got lucky. If he got lucky and the prosecutor didn’t decide he should do a little crackling instead. Because Old Sparky was always ready to receive.

Unfortunately, Arnie’s scenario was encountering furious resistance in the face of one quality John Kramer had in very light supply: patience.

“These miserable rags are more influential that you think,” Kramer said. “The
Herald
’s bound to pick up this baton, then the TV stations, and then we’re the do-nothing Miami Beach Detective Bureau that doesn’t give a shit when somebody gets murdered in our jurisdiction. I can’t have this, Arnie. I cannot have it.”

“Relax, John. Who knows how hard we’re working? We do.”

Though it was lying perfectly flat against his perfectly flat stomach, Kramer smoothed his hand over his tie. The point of it touched his belt buckle. No suspenders today.

“If we take the composite public,” Kramer said, “it could actually help us come up with a suspect, and that’s more than we’ve got right now.”

On the other hand, it could send all the hard work your detectives have done so far straight to hell, but Martinson didn’t say that. And there was an outside chance Kramer might be right. There was a first time for everything.

There used to be a lot more of these dives on the Beach, where a shot of no-name whiskey went for two bucks and you could buy a glass of beer for seventy-five cents, but those dirty saloons were t-shirt shops now, and the city Leo grew up with was gone. South Miami Beach had always been there — it had looked the same on a map — but South Beach hadn’t existed. Not by that name. The transformation was so complete that travel agents referred to the area by its cutesy nickname, SoBe. And although this revival played right into the hands of Leo’s idealized self, there was something sad about the gouge that had been hacked out of his personal past.

Leo started drinking here, in Loby’s Ron-Da-Voo, when he was going to Beach High. Everybody knew Leo’s crew was underage, but since the youngsters made up about a third of the crowd, there were never any ID hassles. Florida lifers hung out in Loby’s, guys who owned leaky tubs they chartered for tours of the Keys, and so did a claque of Cubans, Marielitas mostly, giddily drinking cheap and singing along with the jukebox.

If Loby ever existed, he was dead before Leo’s time. Loby’s Ron-Da-Voo was owned by Simon the Bartender. He poured drinks straight through all twenty-one hours of legal operation, and if you went to Loby’s and you didn’t see Simon, he had either just left or he was on his way in.

Leo didn’t have time to kill with any of Simon’s saggytitted surrogates tonight, and he wasn’t in the mood to fend off propositions from an end-of-the-line hooker or to make conversation with a stewed regular who smelled worse than the Ron-Da-Voo’s men’s room.

Fortunately Simon the Bartender was at his post, deadpanning and shaking the ice cubes in the pint glass of tap water he was always sipping from. He had to be over sixty, still beefy in the forearms, still handsome in a busted-up, old-guy kind of way. His wavy hair was mostly grey, but a touch of the brown it used to be was hanging on at the temples.

Instead of saying hello, he nodded at people as they walked in, to set the tone in case they were thinking he was the sort they could tell their troubles to. And if they were drunk or stupid or just plain bad at catching nonverbal drifts and they started in on him, he’d come right out and ask them why they thought he gave a shit.

The clientele was pretty much the same as Leo remembered, though the Cuban quotient had been watered down by tourists out for a slab of what was left of local color and slumming queers who got a thrill out of drinking in a real dive, not a chic, in-crowd place pretending to be a dive.

Leo told Simon he wanted a word and Simon signaled to his man Bruce, who got behind the bar and stood there, a bleary grin on his face.