Authors: John Katzenbach
‘It’s not here.’
‘I saw it there earlier. That’s where she always kept it.’
‘Not here now. What did it look like?’
‘Red leather. Not expensive. About four by five. Gold-embossed “Addresses” in script on the front. The sort of thing you’d get in a drug store.’
‘We’ll look for it. Not the sort of thing a junkie looking for cash is likely to grab. It’ll show up.’
Winter nodded. ‘She had it out, tonight, when I left her.’
‘Well, give your statement to the patrolman, Mr Winter. And don’t hesitate to call if you can think of anything else.’
Robinson handed Simon Winter a business card. The old detective put it in his pocket. Then the younger man turned away, leaving Winter to be led outside by the patrolman. Winter started to say something, but stopped, and keeping the surge of thoughts to himself, reluctantly followed the patrolman, leaving Sophie Millstein behind. He glanced back over his shoulder once, back into the
bedroom, and saw that her last moments were being documented by a police photographer’s camera. The photographer dipped and swayed, dancelike, around Sophie Millstein, his camera popping with each flash of light, taking another series of shots while the morgue team waited patiently in a corner, talking quietly amongst themselves. One man idly worked the large brass zipper on the shiny black rubberized body bag, making a small tearing sound.
Walter Robinson looked on the floor in the bedroom for the address book, but could not find it. He made a note of this as well. Then he went back to the telephone in the living room and dialed directory assistance on Long Island. Sophie Millstein’s son’s number was listed in Great Neck. But before calling the victim’s son, he dialed the twenty-four-hour service for the Dade County State Attorney’s Office and received the number for the assistant with homicide duty that night.
He dialed and waited through a half-dozen rings before a sleepy voice staggered across the line:
‘Yes?’
‘Is this Assistant State Attorney Esperanza Martinez?’ he asked.
‘Yes.’
‘This is Detective Robinson. Beach homicide. We haven’t met…’
‘But we’re going to meet now, right?’ the sleepy voice replied.
‘That’s right, Miss Martinez. I’ve got an elderly victim, killed by an unknown assailant inside her apartment, twelve hundred block of South Thirteenth Terrace. Crime could fit the profile of a series of breakins we’ve had out here, except this time the perp strangled the old woman.
We have a witness who got a look at the suspect. Tentative description: black, late teenage to early twenties, slight stature, about five-ten, maybe 175 pounds, and moving fast.’
‘You think I need to be there?’ the prosecutor asked. ‘Is there some legal issue you need advice on?’
The young woman’s voice had gathered an edge of irritation. Robinson ignored it.
‘Well, no. No legal issue that I can see. The crime itself is pretty cut and dried. But what we have is an elderly white, Jewish victim and a young black perpetrator, and it’s my guess this will be high-profile real quick, what with this being an election year for your boss and there being at least a half-dozen reporters and cameramen outside who are gonna be damned after waiting around all damn night if they don’t make this into something that lands ‘em on the
front page, or maybe the top of the newscast–-You hear
what I’m saying?’
‘You think’
‘I think you’ve got race and murder, and that’s a cocktail that don’t mix too good in this county, Miss Martinez.’
This was standard police procedure in Dade County: invoke the riots of the 1980s, and instantly obtain people’s attention. There was a momentary silence on the line before the woman’s voice, considerably more alert, answered:
‘I hear you loud and clear, Detective. I’ll be right over and we can wave the flag together.’
‘Sounds like fun.’
He hung up the phone, grinning. Occasionally waking up hotshot young prosecutors was one of the homicide detectives’ job perquisites. He figured at least a half hour before she arrived and got tossed in front of the press. He decided he could wait while inspecting the progress of the
search team working the alley behind the Sunshine Arms. Maybe they’ve found something, he thought. The jewelry box. It had to be close by. The perp probably threw it in the first trash can he could, after conveniently covering it with fingerprints and the unmistakable scent of panic.
Esperanza Martinez went by the nickname of Espy to her friends, which were few. She dressed swiftly in the semidarkness of her bedroom, first pulling on jeans, then discarding them in favor of a more fashionable loose-fitting dress, when she considered she might have to face a camera crew. Although she was alone in her apartment, she was careful to be quiet; she lived in a duplex, half of which was occupied by her parents, and her mother was uncannily sensitive to her daughter’s movements, and was probably, despite the wallboard, wooden frame, and insulation material that separated them, lying awake in bed, listening.
She double-checked her appearance in a small mirror that hung next to a crucifix by the front door. She made certain that she had her State Attorney’s Office badge and a small .25 caliber automatic pistol in her pocketbook, and exited into the sticky nighttime. When she started the engine on the modest, nondescript compact car, she glanced up and saw the light flick on in her parents’ half of the house. She put the car in gear and maneuvered quickly out into the street.
Late at night in Miami in the summer, it seems as if the day’s heat leaves a residual glow, like the musty warmth that rises from a recently extinguished fire. The huge office towers and skyscrapers that dominate the downtown remain lit, shedding darkness like it was so many droplets of black. But for all its tropical smoothness, the city has an unsettling pulse, as if, when one slides down from the
brightly illuminated highways that crisscross the county, one descends into a basement. Or perhaps a crypt.
Espy Martinez feared the night.
She drove rapidly, slipping from quiet suburban streets onto Bird Road, then up Dixie Highway, heading fast toward Miami Beach. There was little traffic, but just as she maneuvered onto the four lanes of Route 95, a red Porsche with ink-black tinted windows flew past her, screaming by in excess of a hundred miles per hour. The velocity of the sports car seemed to suck her along, as if she’d been buffeted from behind by a sudden strong gust of wind. ‘Jesus Christ!’ she swore out loud - and felt fear sear through her for just one nasty instant, then flee as she watched the car rapidly disappear, momentarily glistening in the yellow-tinted sodium vapor lights of the highway before being enveloped by the night. A quick glance into the rearview mirror warned her of the state trooper’s car coming up equally fast behind her. The trooper was traveling without lights or siren, trying to close on his quarry before the speeder knew he was there. She understood this went against established procedure, and she guessed the trooper would lie about it in a court hearing, if he got asked. But she also knew it was the only way he could hope to catch the Porsche, which was faster and more maneuverable, so, mentally, she forgave him as he roared past her.
‘Good luck,’ she said. ‘You’ll need it.’ She hoped the driver of the Porsche would turn out to be some middle-aged doctor or lawyer or developer trying to impress a date who was half his age, and not a twenty-one-year-old coked-up drug smuggler, brain-fried from narcotics and machismo, who kept a machine pistol on the seat beside him.
The night, she thought, was dangerous. Anger hid so
successfully after dark, lurking, obscured by the warmth and the rich black air. Espy Martinez pushed her hair away from her face nervously and kept driving.
She spotted the flashing lights and the haphazardly parked television trucks from a block away, and quickly turned into a parking spot. She hurried down the sidewalk, ducking under the yellow crime scene tape before she was spotted by the dozen reporters and cameramen milling about, waiting for someone to come talk to them.
A patrolman started to wave at her, but she swiftly produced her badge.
‘I’m looking for Detective Robinson,’ she said.
The patrolman inspected the badge. ‘Sorry, Miss Martinez. But I made you for one of those television reporters. Robinson’s inside.’
He pointed, and she stepped across the courtyard without noticing the cherub. She paused, almost as if she were abruptly out of breath.
This was only the third homicide scene she’d been required to visit. The other two had been anonymous narcotics assassinations; in each instance, young Hispanic men lacking identification, probably illegal immigrants from Colombia or Nicaragua. Each had a single gunshot wound to the back of the head, administered by a small handgun. Murder at its neatest and cleanest. Almost delicate. Their bodies had been discarded with little ceremony in vacant lots - gold jewelry, wallets stuffed with cash, expensive clothing - all intact. In many jurisdictions the similarities would have had press and public buzzing, questioning whether these were the work of a serial killer.
Not in Miami. Prosecutors in the Dade State Attorney’s Office termed such homicides felony littering. There was a macabre theory among prosecutors and police that the
closer to the center of the city each body was found, the less important the particular victim was. The truly significant narcotistas ended up dead, decomposing beneath the swampy muck of the Everglades or sinking chained to a cinder block in a thousand fathoms of Gulf Stream waters. So, these two men that Espy Martinez had merely glanced at were nobodies who amounted to nothing. Their deaths probably resulted from a single unfortunate flight of ambition, wherein they crossed some invisible but uniquely deadly line. Murder as organizational housekeeping. Even their assassins couldn’t be bothered with the lengthy, messy, and bothersome effort required to dispose of their corpses where they wouldn’t be discovered. No arrests were expected. No trials. Just a pair of numbers tallied on an unfortunate set of statistics.
Espy Martinez hadn’t even had to approach either body. Her attendance had been requested only by homicide detectives eager to make sure the state attorney understood the inevitability of the failure attached to the investigation of those crimes.
This case, she knew, was different.
A real person, with a name. A history. Connections. Not someone who simply dropped in and out of life.
She hung in the doorway of the apartment, collecting her fears. A crime scene analyst pushed past her carrying an armful of scrapings and other samples. He muttered ‘Coming through’ as he passed her, and to avoid standing in his way, Espy Martinez stepped into the apartment. Another policeman glanced at her, and she took the time to fasten her badge to her pocketbook. When she looked up, she saw the policeman jerk his finger toward the bedroom. Taking a deep breath, she walked through the apartment, trying to see nothing and everything at the same time.
She lingered for a second on the edge of the activity in the bedroom.
Her view was blocked by several men standing at the foot of the bed. One moved slightly, and she saw Sophie Millstein’s foot. The toenails were painted with a confident red. She bit her lip at the sight. Espy Martinez took another deep breath, and despite fearing the croaking sounds she thought would emerge, tried her voice:
‘Detective Robinson?’
The wiry young black man turned, nodding. ‘You must be Miss Martinez?’
‘That’s right. Can you fill me in?’
She thought her voice wavered, and she thrust her shoulders back hard, her eyes meeting the detective’s.
‘Sure,’ he said. He pointed down at the body: ‘This is Sophie Millstein, white female, sixty-eight years. Widow. Lived alone. Apparently strangled. Here, look at these marks.’
Detective Robinson gestured, and Espy Martinez stepped forward. She narrowed her gaze, as if by looking at parts of the victim - her throat, her hands, her legs - not all of her at once, she could minimize the fear she felt.
‘Best as I can tell, he pinned her down, like one knee to the chest, and simply throttled her. Couple of bruises on the forehead, here and here, like he hit her a couple of times. But he must have got his fingers round the windpipe real quick, this is probably where he had his thumb, because it’s all pushed in and crushed, and the neighbors only heard one little scream.’
Walter Robinson saw the color drain from Espy Martinez’s face. He stepped swiftly into her line of sight. ‘Come on, let me show you where the perp made his entry.’
He grabbed the young prosecutor’s arm and turned her out of the bedroom.
‘Wanna glass of water?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘And some fresh air.’
He pointed at the patio door ripped from its moorings. ‘Wait right out there. I’ll get you a drink.’
When Walter Robinson found Espy Martinez, after rinsing a glass and filling it with tap water, she was breathing deeply outside, as if she could swallow the night air. She took the water from his hands and gulped it down. Then she let out a long sigh and shook her head.
‘I’m sorry, Detective. It’s kind of a cliche, isn’t it? The young woman upset at the sight of violent death. Let me get a grip, and then we’ll go back inside and you can finish.’
‘It’s all right. There’s no need, really. I can fill you in
here.’
‘No,’ Espy Martinez replied. ‘One more look. It’s my job
too.’
‘It’s not necessary…’
‘Yes it is.’
Without waiting for the detective, she reentered the apartment and stepped through the living room, into the bedroom. She tried to blank her mind of all thoughts, but this was impossible. Questions, fears, angers all ricocheted about within her, a racket of passions. She told herself: This is why you became a prosecutor-this woman, right here. The two morgue technicians were getting ready to lift Sophie Millstein from her bed.
‘Just a second,’ Espy Martinez said. She approached the corpse and looked down into Sophie Millstein’s eyes. What an awful way to meet someone, she thought. Who were you? She continued to stare at the murdered woman, and saw the same fear that Simon Winter did, and this infuriated her. Coward, she said to herself, as if addressing the killer. Punk coward. Steal an old woman’s life just like