This whodunit was also a whoisit. A woman found on the bank of a drainage ditch that bordered a high-density apartment complex just off the expressway.
The unexpected event had blossomed into a block party of sorts. Hordes of gawkers had obstructed and backed up traffic at the start of rush hour. The excitement of a real-live murder had lured the crowds, who in turn attracted the hot dog, cold drink, balloon and ice cream vendors.
Jim drove, but not even the blue flasher on the dash or his badge displayed out the window in a burly fist helped gain them access to the scene. The street and even neighboring lawns were cluttered with cars parked every which way, abandoned by drivers who feared missing something. “Start ticketing these illegally parked cars,” Jim told a uniformed officer who was trying vainly to divert traffic as horns blared and tempers frayed.
“But some of them belong to reporters,” protested the officer, who was red-faced and wore half moons of perspiration under his armpits.
“Good,” Jim growled. “Write them first.”
“Swell, so that's the mood we're in today,” Rick said. âYou know that nobody screams louder than reporters when they get tickets.”
Jim smiled at the thought. He scanned the eager faces in the crowd. They turned toward the detectives as one, looking expectant. “What are we?” he asked. “The entertainment committee?”
He locked the car and winked at Dusty. “Let's pay our respects to the guest of honor.”
The corpse was covered by a sheet, a real one, more substantial than the usual flimsy paper shroud. The uniformed sergeant, beefy and middle-aged, with a lot of mileage on him, looked smug. He smiled at the detectives. They recognized it instantly as a bad sign. He peeled back the sheet for them, curling his wrists as though unveiling a work of art.
The dead woman's clothes were tasteful and looked expensive. Her well-manicured fingernails and toenails glowed with glossy mocha lacquer. She wore gold and emeralds on her right ring finger, and diamonds and gold on her left pinky finger.
Her head was missing.
No one spoke for a moment. There were whoops of excitement from the crowd and the clicks of Instamatic cameras. Some adults were actually holding small children high on their shoulders so they could see. “Well,” Jim said to the sergeant. “Where is it?”
“Ya got me, Jim,” the sergeant said. “Doesn't seem to be here.”
“Shit. I was afraid you were gonna say that.”
Spectators hung precariously from the upper balconies of the nearby apartment complex. “Cover her,” Rick said quietly. The sergeant pulled the sheet back over the corpse as onlookers shouted in protest.
“Lovely crowd,” Dusty said. “Why us?”
“We must live right,” Rick said.
“There's more people out here than were at the fucking fourth of July parade,” Jim said.
“We have to look at her,” Dusty said softly. “We get paid to do it. But some of them even brought their kids. Look at their faces.” The people pressing forward, straining at the yellow crime scene tape, wore leers and grins, their eyes glittered with excitement. Dusty turned away and watched a silver airliner climb the clouds east of Miami International Airport.
“So we don't have a face or teeth to compare with dental records, but she's still got her prints, clothes, jewelry, a lot of other identifying points,” Rick said. He was thinking aloud, his tone detached, the way he always reacted to death in its most grotesque forms. The more gruesome the scene, the more businesslike he always became, as though official procedures, rules and routine were shields against emotion, madness and death. “Why would they take the head?”
“Religious rite. SanterÃa?” Dusty said.
“They usually steal the parts they need from a cemetery,” Jim said. “It's a lot less risky than murder.”
“Some psycho,” Dusty said flatly.
“Probably,” Rick said. “Where do you think it is, Jim?”
“I dunno. We better have the divers check the canal and then the rock pits around here. Maybe somebody wanted a souvenir. Hope it's not on his mantelpiece in this weather. I can tell you one thing. I'm betting it turns up.”
“Yeah,” Dusty said bleakly, as though not happily anticipating the discovery.
“I can't see any other obvious trauma,” Rick said, lifting a corner of the sheet with his good left hand. “It's not a clean cut. Do you think an alligator⦔
“Makes sense,” Dusty said. “If she got hit on the head or had a bullet wound, the gator would go for the blood. I don't know if we've had any sightings lately this far east.”
“So if she was shot, our bullet could be in some gator's belly⦔ said Jim.
The intense afternoon sun suddenly slid out from behind threatening clouds. The detectives, standing in the glare, simultaneously became aware of something hurled, a spherical shadow arcing across the ground before their eyes, a round object soaring high over the corpse. Mouths open, heads raised, they stared into the blinding brilliance of the sun, their eyes following the flight. A running boy about eleven or twelve years of age caught the thing in his arms and sprinted across the adjacent field, shouting with glee, a half-dozen other boys in hot pursuit.
The detectives' eyes teared, blinked and focused hard on the object clutched in the boy's arms. A soccer ball.
“I need a drink,” Jim said.
“Maybe I'm going crazy,” Dusty said.
“No,” Rick said. “It's not us, it's Miami.”
At the morgue, Dr. Lansing pronounced the decapitation sloppy, but definitely not the work of an alligator or any other form of Florida wildlife.
“It's probably romantic,” Dusty theorized.
“Why so?” Rick asked.
“Hey,” Dusty said, checking the labels in the dead woman's clothes. “You know how love is.”
Rick silently watched her copy designer and manufacturer names into her notebook. When she'd flipped it open he had glimpsed some of the earlier notations, in red ink.
“I was just going to call you guys, to confirm what we thought,” Dr. Lansing was saying, “about your suspect. In the Overtown kung fu case.”
“He is a current resident of the Graybar Hotel,” Jim said.
“Charged with?”
“Homicide.”
“You can forget that.” The doctor wiped his hands on his lab coat and removed his eyeglasses. He held them up to the light and squinted at the lenses. Dusty, who was standing closest to him, saw they were spattered with tiny specks of blood and bone particles.
“Anybody have a handkerchief?” he asked.
No one answered. The doctor shrugged, rubbed the glasses on his coat and carefully put them back on his face. “We were right. Cocaine or, you might say, a leaking condom killed the man. No trauma, except for the fall following the fatal episode.”
“Do tell,” Jim said. “What the hell.”
“He sure didn't act like a dying man,” Dusty said. “He was about to beat our suspect's brains out.”
“His behavior had all the earmarks of cocaine psychosis,” the doctor said.
“Looks like we've got us a valuable confidential informant again.” Rick looked pleased.
“If he will even divulge to us the time of day,” Dusty said. “Remember, he's sitting in jail, not at all thrilled that he ever was your CI.”
“He'll get over it. He likes us,” Jim said reassuringly.
The captain wanted them back at the station ASAP to respond to media requests for interviews about the headless corpse.
“First things first,” Rick said.
At the Dade County Jail, he arranged to have J. L. Sly's personal belongings processed for release.
J.L. shuffled into the interview room, a defeated man, wearing the look of a whipped puppy. If he had had a tail, it would have been between his legs.
He sat without a word, gazing at them reproachfully.
“How have they treated you, J.L.?” Rick was smiling. So was Dusty. Even Jim's gruff features were arranged into something that looked moderately friendly.
“What a happy group,” J.L. said morosely. “Have you found some other crimes to charge me with, more nails in my coffin?”
“No way,” Rick told him. “Good news. We just talked to the state attorney, and all charges are being dropped. You're free to check out of this hotel and go. You didn't kill him.”
J.L.'s eyelids dropped to half-mast, as though digesting the news. He picked at the dirty ashtray on the table between them with a fingernail. “Free to go? Right now?”
The detectives all nodded and said he was.
“No charges?”
“No charges,” Rick said.
“I didn't kill him?”
“Nope, it was just like you said. You never hurt him.”
“You're lucky that we're your buddies and we looked into it,” Jim said.
J.L.'s liquid eyes were guarded.
“Who did kill him?” he asked, almost casually.
“Nobody,” Rick told him. “He OD'ed on cocaine. He was a mule and had a gutfull. It leaked into his system and proved fatal.”
J.L. sprang to his feet in a light and graceful movement. Even in shapeless jail clothes, he suddenly seemed a taller and more powerful man than the prisoner who had slunk into the room minutes earlier. Flexing his knees tentatively, he sidestepped into the familiar crouch. His eyes narrowed, his hands rotated, slowly at first, then more aggressively, in a series of challenging circles.
He paused to regard the still seated detectives. “Cocaine?” he asked.
“That's right,” Rick said. “An OD.”
“We're still looking for a couple of Colombians who put the snatch on the corpse to get the stash back,” Jim said. “One of 'em should have flash burns on his face.”
A corrections officer in a brown uniform arrived to escort the prisoner downstairs to the release desk.
J.L. swaggered to the door, then turned back to the detectives, his expression earnest. “Don't tell anybody about the OD. Okay?”
“Let's go,” said the bored guard.
J.L. regarded the upstart for a moment, head high, nostrils flaring, then dismissed him with, “Even a man who is a bit slow may locate the light and become truly one with nature.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Jim asked irritably as the door clanged closed behind them.
“I think he made it up,” Dusty said.
“He shudda been a reporter. I know a newspaper where he could get a job.”
“Speaking of which, we have to go make a press release,” Rick said.
There was little to tell the reporters. The dead woman was fair-skinned, middle-agedâprobably in her early fortiesâand dressed in expensive designer clothes, size ten. About five feet four inches tall, she weighed approximately 135 pounds and had probably died earlier in the day. Cause of death uncertain. The motive did not appear to be robbery since the killer had not removed her rings or an expensive gold watch. Her description matched no recent missing persons report. Anyone with a clue to her identity was asked to call the police. Her head was still missing.
The story was at the top of the evening news, and the department was flooded with calls. Instead of quickly identifying the dead woman, as the detectives had hoped, the coverage generated a flood of calls from cranks, psychics with visions, armchair detectives and people who thought she could be a long-lost friend or relative. Miamians possess more than their share of unusual fantasies. Hundreds of them, their overactive imagination fueled by tricks of light and shadow, happy hour or a few snorts, saw mysterious packages they suspected might contain the missing head. One man swore he'd seen his neighbor's pit bull burying a suspicious object in his backyard. They all called the police.
The usual bomb scares plummeted, head sightings soared and pranksters ran riot. A top-rated radio station offered a prize to the caller who most accurately predicted when and where the victim's head would be found. The contestant who came closest would win tickets for two on a weekend murder mystery cruise sailing out of the port of Miami.
“This is sick,” Jim said between phone calls. “I can remember when Miami was normal like any other town.”
“So can I, Jimbo,” Rick said wistfully. “You know, when I was a kid you could go hear all the great black jazz musicians at the clubs in Overtown without the locals trying to do a tap dance on your face. You used to be able to drive down Collins Avenue, eyeball the big estates on the oceanâand actually see the water.”
“That was before the concrete canyon, before they ruined it,” Jim said. “If you didn't know the ocean was there, you would never guess it now. You were lucky.”
“Yeah,” Dusty joined in. “I wish I had grown up here.”
“Where
are
you from?” Rick asked.
“Midwest,” she said, turning back to the telephone.
“I knew that. Iowa, right? But where?” he persisted.
“Small town.” She began dialing.
“What's the name of it?”
But she was already speaking into the phone.
“Here's one for you, kid,” Jim said, sliding her a phone message from the stack they had split. “Your new boyfriend.”
It was from Terrance McGee.
“They've been having lots of nice long talks,” Jim said. He winked at Rick, who was looking thoughtful, then snorted and blew his nose loudly. “Damn, I think my allergies are kicking up again. I bet those were fucking melaleuca trees out at that scene.”
Dusty was chatting with an elderly woman who had called earlier to offer her help. The woman was certain she had once seen a television show in which a headless body had been discovered. It might have been
Kojak
, or maybe
Magnum
. She suggested that police check with the network to see how the TV detectives had solved it. Dusty thanked her for the suggestion. When she put down the telephone, she glanced at the message from Terrance McGee, sighed, slipped it to the bottom of the stack and went on to answer the next call.