Hard Case Crime: Dutch Uncle (5 page)

Lili Acevedo was in Room 224. At first, with the almond eyes that were the exact same shade of cobalt, Lili made this French couple for a father-daughter team. The woman answered the knock, dressed in a pair of pink nylon shorts and a halter top, typical South Beach for a girl her age, with the body to show off. Through an accent like quicksand, she wished Lili a good morning. They were the last two words she attempted in English.

She was a generation younger than her boyfriend, who was in front of the bathroom mirror training a blowdryer on the salt and pepper hair he wove over the bald spot on his crown. A bathrobe was sashed tight across his pot gut, and a chain, featuring both a crucifix and a diamond-studded Star of David nestled in a thatch of black-grey chest hair. He introduced himself as Allain Marcoux, the girl as Annick Mersault, and Lili scribbled both names into a notebook, way too much alike to be clear in her head.

Acevedo had to use simple words and short phrases, but Marcoux understood and answered her questions deliberately and with some thought. The only problem was, the guy hadn’t seen a thing, was by his own admission shit-faced, a condition he illustrated by twisting a fist in front of his nose. He rolled his eyes and whistled, giving his head half a shake to unhinge the cobwebs.

Annick snuggled on the bed with her boyfriend. He had a hairy arm across her shoulders. After an unnerving round of chatter, Marcoux told Acevedo that Annick had seen a man in the hallway late last evening, leaving the hotel as they were coming in. Neither of them could recall the time, but it was after midnight. Marcoux recalled at one vague point looking up at the clock on Washington Ave., the one above the bank, and that it said 11:59. How much later it was when they got back, he couldn’t say, and Annick, when the question was put to her, turned down the corners of her mouth and blew out a puff of breath.

Acevedo said, “What does she remember about this man?”

Marcoux translated and relayed Annick’s answer. “She says he seemed like he was in a hurry to get out. She also says that yesterday afternoon, when she was returning from the beach, she saw the same man leaving the victim’s room.”

“How does she know it was the same man?”

Marcoux dealt the question.

Annick Mersault had expressive eyes and twitching, hyperactive lips. She was looking at Lili when she said, “Je m’souviens tout les beaux garcons.”

“She remembers all the handsome boys.”

Annick took her time giving Marcoux the details, and when she was finished talking, she gave him a kiss behind the ear. The little love bug. She just couldn’t help herself. She studied Marcoux’s face as he translated for Lili.

“He had dark eyes and dark hair cut short. Handsome features, about my height, and muscular.” Marcoux improvised a seated, pumped-up pose. “He stuck out because he was so pale, white like a ghost.”

Acevedo recorded the few facts Annick Mersault provided her with, skeptical about how much help she would actually be. She asked the girl through her translatorboyfriend if she would have a couple hours, perhaps later this afternoon or tomorrow, to look at some photographs and see if maybe she could identify the man she saw. If that failed, would she be willing to help a police sketch artist put together a drawing of this man?

Marcoux gave her the request and Annick lifted her head and nodded gravely. She was new enough in life to believe in a few too many things, a girl solid with the unshakeable convictions of youth. She spoke directly to Acevedo in French, knowing full well Lili couldn’t understand a word she was saying.

Marcoux handled the interpretation. “She says it would be an honor. She has a sense of justice that is,” the man groped for a word, “visceral.”

Martinson had the image of an old television commercial in his head. There wasan animated, cut-away model of a skull on the screen. The sinus areas of the skull were highlighted in blue. When sinus membranes are inflamed, a voice-over explained — here the blue parts turned to red and red lightning bolts shot off them — the sinus headache sufferer experiences pain. The commercial was for an over-the-counter medication that Arnie swore by until a few years ago, when it stopped working, and he developed headaches that were less like sinus and more like migraine.

Eusasky let him know his sinus status was unchanged, but he was concerned about the severity of these new headaches. He referred Arnie to a specialist named Boring — that was the physician’s name, Dr. Boring — and Boring ran a raft of tests on the Martinson noggin, up to and including a CAT scan that to Arnie’s immense relief revealed nothing. Dr. Boring scribbled a prescription for another kind of medicine that sometimes worked and sometimes didn’t.

He sensed a real monster coming on, but that feeling could be deceiving. It might turn into a migraine, or it could just be a sinus thing. He didn’t have enough experience with the migraines to differentiate between the two, at least not at their outsets.

But there was something starting behind his eyes as he stood in the first floor room directly under the room where Pfiser had been shot. He was talking to a woman named Marcy Lowenstein, and his sensitivity training was flunking him, maybe due to his fear of a headache.

He took one look at her and thought, full-on, manhating bull-dagger. She was wearing no-nonsense wirerimmed glasses and her mouse-brown hair was short and thick like the rest of her, pushed back in a no-nonsense cut. She kept thinking it could’ve been her.

“This happens right upstairs while you’re sleeping, it shakes you.”

Martinson understood that.

“My entire life in New York, nothing even close to this, ever.”

She was wide-shouldered and widened some more at the waist. Her massive thighs touched from the knee up. She had both sandaled feet on the floor.

“When did you check in, Ms. Lowenstein?” This was sensitivity training in the field. That Ms. couldn’t have been any clearer.

“Wednesday night, for a long weekend. I was going to stay until Monday, but now I don’t know.”

“You told Detective Acevedo that you heard loud music coming from the victim’s room. What time was that?”

“All day. Patsy Cline. All day and all night. You know, they made the movie with Jessica Lange.”

“Sure,” Martinson said. He remembered when Patsy Cline’s records were hits, sometime before this woman was born, and she wasn’t all that young.

“I called the desk and complained.”

“Do you remember what time that was?”

“After eleven. I was watching the news, getting ready for bed.”

“And the music was turned down?”

“The music got turned off, and I fell asleep before the weather. I wanted to see what the weather was going to be. But then it came back on again, even louder. I tried to sleep through it, because I didn’t want to be a bitch and call the desk again.”

Martinson zeroed in. His headache was a minor sinus flare-up. Nothing to worry about. “Can you remember the time?”

“When it went off for good? Ten to two. I was actually looking at the clock. I couldn’t believe anyone would be so inconsiderate, and I couldn’t believe I was the only one it was bothering.”

“And after that?”

“Like in the song,” Marcy Lowenstein said. “Sweet dreams.”

“Is there anything else you can think of, Ms. Lowenstein” — there, he said it again — “that might assist us in our investigation?”

“I’ll tell you this much. He’s going to be missed. He was a really popular guy. People coming and going at all hours. He must’ve had a lot of friends here.”

Martinson was waging a ferocious battle against his first impression, recalling the sensitivity trainer’s words. Remember the old saying. You can’t judge a book by its cover. Lowenstein was homely, with her glasses and her big schnozz and her fat thighs. But fat thighs did not a dyke make. Half the female population looked like Marcy Lowenstein, and they weren’t all lesbians. She liked to spend long weekends in South Beach. And she went to sleep after the news. Just another dull vacationer, spending a lonely time in an overpriced Ocean Drive hotel. So what if she had hairy shins? That didn’t make her one thing or another. What business was it of his, anyway?

Arnie needed to review his sensitivity training.

The house was way up Pine Tree Drive, behind a high row of hedges that hid it from the street. It featured a gravel driveway and a two-car carport, an aluminum overhang with shingles nailed to its roof and tacked to the side, a whim the owners thought would make their property more rentable. But what did the owners know? They hadn’t lived in Miami in years. They were from Montana, or was it Missouri or Minnesota, some place with an M, and were now in either Saint Moritz or Saint Bart’s, Saint Somebody’s, Leo forgot what they told him.

Renting this pad was the first move he made after he got his inheritance. Leo turned thirty, and the money was his, just like it said in grandpa’s will. Thinking of his grandfather, wearing a powder-blue cardigan and finishing the back nine in the pinkish pre-twilight, made Leo feel like puking. It was a good thing the old man was dead. First, because Leo didn’t get the money until he died, but second, had he been able to see how his loving legacy was being squandered, it would’ve blown the toupee right off his head.

The house seemed like a good idea. The South Beach thing was getting hotter and hotter with each passing season, the narrow streets swarming with pussy, fine young pussy, pussy from all points of the compass. The world’s next supermodel had to start somewhere, and she needed to have a good time before the appointment of that divine hour, a good time that Leo, with his six rented rooms and his Jaguar and his Jacuzzi, was more than willing to provide. Boozed-up, coked-up nineteen-yearold Icelandic blondes, two at a time for Christ’s sake, that first month felt like a dream. But all that changed so fast. Where did it go?

Leo steered the Jaguar, British Racing Green and leased, through the opening in the hedges. He parked it next to the Eldorado that JP Beaumond had arrived with, and told Rex, the neighbor’s Rottweiler, to go home. Rex woofed. Off he loped.

Leo picked his way through the piles of shit, the grenade-sized turds Rex laid down — he was going to have to speak to those people about their dog — and the thinner, neater work of Mimi, the long-haired teacup Chihuahua. Mimi was her own set of problems, and Leo didn’t particularly care for her. Come to think of it, he never much liked dogs, and now he had one under the same roof with him. But Mimi was tiny, and quiet, for a twitching, trembling mutt. When she wasn’t in Vicki’s lap, she was sniffing out new hiding spots around the house. Mimi was a dog Leo could live with.

Vicki, on the other hand, he could not. She was in the Jacuzzi with Mimi, in the water up to her neck, holding the Chihuahua’s head just above the churning surface. She was a friend of Lawrence the Model Dude, who Leo hadn’t seen since his New Year’s Eve party, the night he introduced Leo to Vicki. New Year’s Day, Leo woke up next to her, and she’d been at the house ever since. It turned out to be a chore just getting Vicki to keep her clothes on, which was fun at first, but by now Leo was so over her that a mere glimpse of her nude, evenly browned body gave him a headache.

“Hey,” Vicki said. “C’mon in, the water’s fine.” She splashed some his way.

The lawn chair where a towel or a bathrobe should’ve been hanging was empty.

Leo said, “Are you naked under there?”

“Get in and find out for yourself,” Vicki said.

“Because this Lady Godiva routine is getting tired.”

“That’s the way mommy likes to dry off,” she babytalked to the Chihuahua. “It’s good for her. Sun-dried, like a tomato.”

“Over-ripe,” Leo said. “Like a fucking hothouse cantaloupe. Okay, new rule. No walking around the yard without a bathing suit. Period.”

“If somebody wants to look, let them look. I don’t mind.”

“The neighbors mind,” Leo said. He jabbed a thumb at their exposed southern flank. “Their kids can just gander this way and set their little brains on fire. They mind that. And let that poor dog out of the water. Look at her.”

Mimi had been appealing to Leo with her eyes. Just her luck her mistress would be the one person in the world who thought this was a cute idea, a Chihuahua in the hot tub. Mimi sighed.

Vicki set her on the ledge and the dog hopped down with a single yip of gratitude.

The sliding glass door was locked. Leo tapped the Jag’s ignition key against the pane, a clinking that brought Beaumond’s eyes, yellow and dilated, out from behind the curtain. The dining room table was cluttered with boxes of baking soda, a roll of sandwich-sized baggies, and a jar of unlabeled powder. A bunch of bananas was going brown in the fruit bowl.

Beaumond and Fernandez had gotten hold of two triple-beam scales, strategically angled near their places at the table. Dumped on the Business section of the Sunday
Herald
, the kilo sparkled under the glow from a hanging lamp.

Like the house, the plan to rob Manfred had seemed like a good idea the night it was born, over an eight-ball and a bottle of Jose Cuervo Gold. The gun was supposed to be for show. Nobody said anything about murder.

Fernandez was taking a break. He’d cleared out the end of a Newport and was loading a pebble of coke into it, crushing it up so the coke and tobacco mixed. He twisted it closed, lit a lighter that had a flamingo decal on it, and sucked. The paper went like a fuse. The stink of burning cocaine hung over the table. Fernandez held his hit, then exhaled a thin stream of grey.

Leo met Alex Fernandez on a high school all-star team. He had the livest arm Leo ever saw, but every schoolboy had a fastball, it was the amazing assortment of junk Fernandez worked around his heater that made him so special. He threw a sinker, a sharp-breaking curve no lefthander could touch, and a slider, all for strikes, plus a screwball his coach wouldn’t let him use. Then he entered USC, where every guy was an all-star. He didn’t earn a spot in the starting rotation, and just walked away from the game.

Leo’d never forgiven him for that. You didn’t walk away when you had the stuff like Fernandez had it. Leo didn’t have half the raw talent Fernandez had, but he’d been disciplined, had thrown a baseball every day except the day after a start, and he’d been undefeated in Dade County his senior year. Of course, after the injury, none of that mattered. Leo remembered the afternoon. His elbow felt like a cherry bomb had exploded under his skin, but every pitch was working, so he kept throwing. Never threw any harder in his life. The next day, he couldn’t raise his arm to scratch his head, and after two surgeries and two rehabs, the scouts stopped calling.