AGAINST THE WIND (Book Two of The Miami Crime Trilogy) (21 page)

Silvana

Hialeah, Florida

Friday, April 13, 2012

12:35 PM

T
HE
FRIJOLES NEGROS
WERE ESPECIALLY TASTY
today
and Silvana had
to smile with every golden forkful. She liked to mix them in with the rice and
the cut pieces of grilled chicken breast on her plate. She always did this, no
matter where she was eating this dish, and it always tasted far better than
eating the individual components of the meal separately. But today, here at
Yoyito, they exceeded even her expectations. She knew now when she died, she
was going to hell because she'd just been to heaven.

Yoyito was this tiny Cuban restaurant in Hialeah,
in the far corner of a small strip center, seldom catching anyone's particular
attention, but a big neighborhood favorite. She and Vargas had stumbled onto it
a few months ago, coming here for lunch after doing some legwork in the area.
What was it? What were we doing out here? Then she remembered. One of her Miami
drug dealers didn't show up one payday at the appointed spot and she and Vargas
had to track him down. It wasn't too hard to do, just asked around a little,
and they trailed him to a barred-up one-story dump in central Hialeah. Vargas
worked him over and they extracted their tax plus interest.

Afterward, they'd worked up an appetite and as
they rolled up to the intersection of West 49th Street, they saw Yoyito. One
bite of the food and she knew they'd found a little undiscovered gem.

She sipped at her
con leche
when her cell phone rang. She didn't recognize the number
on the caller ID, Vargas looked at the number and shrugged, but she answered it
anyway. "Machado."

"Machado. You know who this is?"

She knew. That voice stayed with you once you
heard it.

"Maxie," she said. "Why are you calling
me?"

"I need to see you.
Ahorita
. Right away. Can you come to my office?"

She said, "What's it about?"

"I can't tell you on this phone. Come here
right away. Please."

Please
?
That was a word you didn't hear Maxie Méndez say very often. Now she was interested.
"You're in luck. I'm in Hialeah right now. I can be there in about fifteen
minutes." She crawled back into her delicious meal as if it were a hot
bath.

≈ ≈ ≈

Twenty-five minutes later,
they pulled up into the handicapped spot in front of Lolita's. Silvana reached
for the door handle but Vargas put a hand on her arm.

"I gotta tell you, Silvi," he said,
"I'm not crazy about this. I don't like it."

She let go of the door handle and turned to face
her partner. "Bobby, don't worry. There's not gonna be any trouble. If it
starts to look bad, we tell him we phoned our location in to headquarters,
complete with a description of Méndez's
 
mysterious phone call, and if we don't call in when we leave, he'll have
a SWAT team in his face."

"Well … it's one thing we come here every
Friday to collect our juice, but this … he calls
us
."

"I know. Take it easy, partner. Nothing's
going to happen." She reached again for the door. "I mean, stay
alert, okay? Don't go to sleep in there. But we'll walk out under our own
power."

They entered the store and once again felt the
soothing air conditioning, always set to perfection in this place. They took
their time sauntering to the rear office, where the ape sentry opened the door
for them, giving off the distinct vibe of
I
know you're cops and that's the only reason I'm letting you in, so don't push
it.
Silvana and Vargas walked past him without so much as a look.

Maxie sat at his desk in his shirtsleeves, no
necktie, and sweating like a glass of ice water despite the cool AC. His
bodyguard remained to one side. Silvana and Vargas entered and stood side by
side, Vargas's suit jacket was open for easy access to his holstered weapon.

Silvana opened. "What's up, Maxie? What's so
damned important?"

"Did you hear about what happened Saturday
night? That nigger drug dealer getting clipped?"

"Yeah. What of it?"

He looked like he was about to cry. "Did you
know my daughter was killed there, too? My beautiful daughter!"

Silvana's jaw dropped. She looked at Vargas. His
mouth was open, too, telling her he knew nothing about it.

"N-no," she said. "We — we
didn't know that. I'm really sorry to hear that, Maxie. I mean that. We were
off yesterday, so when it was called in, they gave the case to someone
else." Vargas nodded alongside her.

"She was so lovely," Maxie said.
"Her whole life was in front of her! Only twenty-one years old and now …
now …" He buried his face in his hands and started sobbing. Vargas was
going to speak up, maybe offer some sympathy, but Silvana stopped him. Give
Maxie this moment.

When Maxie composed himself, he said, "She
was my reason for living, you understand? My only daughter. My beautiful,
precious daughter! My little Ana Maxina! Dead! Murdered by some fucking scum
…" His voice flowed on, sailing off into the room, promising to track down
the killer and dispense his own kind of justice. Then he said, "And I want
you to give me whatever the Miami PD gets on this case. I want every scrap of
information that comes your way."

Silvana said, "Now, Maxie, we both offer you
our deep sympathy for your loss, and we know you want to get the guy who did
this, but we can't give you information about an ongoing investig
¾
"

"Fuck it!" He slammed a fist onto his
desk. The impact rattled everything on it. "I pay you a grand a week! I've
been paying you almost a year. Plus I gave you fifty large at the beginning. I
figure you owe me this one." Tears stained his face and shirt. Even the
bodyguard was getting dewy-eyed.

"We're not on the case," Vargas said.
"We can't give you much."

Maxie stiffened. "You can find out what you
need. Ask around. I want whoever did this. No arrest. No trial. No lawyers.
Somebody's going to pay for what happened to my little girl. Her mother is
going crazy right now. She may never recover."

Silvana took a deep breath. "We'll find out
what we can," she said. "I can't promise it'll be much, but I'll give
you whatever I can get. You have my word."

"Do you know anything right now?" he
asked.

Silvana shook her head. "Like I said, we're
not on the case. We only know three people were killed over there in that
little apartment building off the causeway. We know one of them was the
Jamaican drug dealer, who probably got what was coming to him. We don't know
any motive, we know of no witnesses, we don't know any more than that. I swear
to you, we did not know your daughter was one of the victims until just
now."

"Get me something by tomorrow. Something.
Anything."

"We'll do what we can," Silvana said.
She walked up to his desk and leaned over it, speaking softly and directly.
"Like I told you, you have our word on that."

Maxie reached into a desk drawer. "Thank you,
Machado. You too, Vargas. Your word is good enough for me. Now, I want you to
have this." He handed them a banded packet of money, looked like all
hundreds, maybe ten grand worth. "This is to show you my commitment. I
hope you will give me your best effort. You find this cocksucker for me, there
will be a lot more of this for you."

Silvana took the money, but for a fleeting second
she thought about the long trail of corpses Maxie had left in his own wake.
Every single one of those now-deceased people had mothers and fathers or sons
and daughters or wives or husbands who were crushed when they got the bad news.
Now Maxie was getting a taste of how they felt, but Silvana didn't think it
would stick, certainly not turn him into some kind of anti-crime zealot.

Maxie reached out his hand for a shake. Both cops
took it. His eyes, now dry and determined, told them everything else they
needed to know.

Silvana

Friday, April 13, 2012

Hialeah, Florida

1:30 PM

H
IALEAH PARK
RACETRACK LURKS BEHIND
an impressive entrance off East Fourth
Street. Yawning gates between carved stone pillars encourage visitors to make
their way down an entryway lined with royal palms and poincianas.

On their way over there, Silvana googled it on her
cell phone and found out the original track opened up in 1925, kicking off a
storied history. Magnificent in scope, frequented by movie stars and world
leaders, Hialeah Park was like no other, she learned. Known for featuring the
best horses, stunning architecture, and an overall splendor not found in most
racetracks, Hialeah Park stood at or near the top of the list for decades. The
place was closed for most of the 2000s, but they reopened in 2009 amid lots of
talk about building a casino adjacent to the track. Silvana could see the
beginnings of construction over in a distant corner of the property.

As Vargas guided their car down the entryway,
Silvana noticed a great effort had been made to restore the grounds and the
buildings to their former glory. The pink logo was everywhere, and gorgeous
magenta bougainvillea crawled its way up the height of the grandstand.

They parked in a No Parking zone outside the
entrance to the clubhouse and quickly located the Win Place Or Show Gift Shop.
Inside, there was little space and no customers. A middle-aged
gringa
stood at a spinning book stand,
arranging books. Silvana caught a glimpse of them and saw they were all about
horses and racing. No cop novels.

The woman was stout and wore a tired look. The
slight slant of her eyes spoke of a distant Asian past and were by far her most
attractive feature. Plain, straight hair spread flat across her head. Her nose
bunched up against her big face, which bore the lines of a life of hard
work.
 
A name badge pinned to her
dated dress said "Edna". Silvana and Vargas showed their badges.

Silvana said, "Miami police officers, ma'am.
I'm Sergeant Machado, this is Detective Vargas. We'd like to speak with you for
a moment, if we may."

"Police? Why, what's the trouble?"

"No trouble, ma'am," said Vargas.
"Are you the store manager?"

"Yes. Yes, I am. What's this about?"

"We'd just like to ask you a couple of
questions about one of your employees," Silvana said. "Ana Maxina
Méndez."

"Oh, my lord," she said. "That was
so terrible! Everybody around the track is just shocked. Do you know who did
it?"

"No, ma'am," Silvana said. "But
we're trying to find out. Maybe you can help us."

"Well, I'll certainly try. What can I do for
you?"

"How long did she work here?" She pulled
out her notebook and started jotting things down.

Edna said, "She's been here about six months
now. I hired her back in the fall. Right after she turned twenty-one."

"What was her schedule?" Vargas said.
"How many days a week did she work?"

"Oh, she only worked Mondays and
Tuesdays," Edna said. "Just two days."

Silvana stopped writing. "Two days a week?
That's it?"

"That's it. But that's all she wanted to
work, you see. I offered her a full-time shift, but she didn't want it. Said
she had other things going. I had to hire another part-time girl for the other
days."

"She had other things going?"

"Yes. She never did mention what they were,
but they must have paid pretty well, because she was always very well-dressed
when she came to work, you know what I mean?"

Silvana said, "Well-dressed? You mean, like
expensive clothing? That kind of thing?"

"Oh, yes. Expensive," Edna said. "Nothing
fancy, you understand. I mean, her clothing was always appropriate for the
shop, but it was always very nice. You could tell by the feel and the look that
it was high quality clothing."

Vargas said, "Just so we understand, ma'am,
she didn't make that kind of money here?"

"Heavens, no," Edna said. "I paid
her just above minimum wage. But … there
was
one thing, you know …"

"What's that, ma'am?" said Silvana.

"She had all these nice clothes, but she
still somehow managed to look cheap. It wasn't the clothes, like I said. It was
her hair and makeup, you know? That can make the difference. She just didn't
know how to make it work for her."

"What are you trying to say, ma'am?"

"Only that she was very pretty — uh,
naturally, I mean — but that she messed it all up with that cheap
platinum blonde coloring which was totally wrong for her. And then on top of
that, she wore too much mascara, too much rouge, way too much fragrance … she
looked like … like some … oh, I don't know what. It just didn't fit with the rest
of her."

Silvana looked at this woman and wondered how she
could have ever developed that kind of insight, given her own lack of inspired
makeup and looks. "Did anyone come around to visit her? Any regular
customers? Boyfriends? Anything like that?"

"No. Nobody like that. But she did like to go
out at night. She'd tell me of some big show she went to — I think people
like Madonna — or she'd talk about some trip she took on her days off,
like to the Bahamas. Or Las Vegas, I remember. She went there once, I believe."

"Anything else you can think of, ma'am?"
Vargas said.

"Mmm, no. Not right offhand."

Silvana handed her a card. "Well, if you can
think of something we ought to know, please give me a call."

"Oh, I will, Sergeant. You can be sure I
will."

"Thank you." They turned to leave, but
Silvana turned back and said, "Oh, and ma'am."

"Yes?"

"There will probably be other police officers
coming around asking you questions about Miss Méndez. We'd appreciate it if you
didn't mention that we were here first, okay?"

A puzzled look descended over Edna's face.
"Why, is everything all right? You
are
going to try to find who did this, aren't you?"

"Oh, yes, ma'am," said Silvana. "We
certainly are. We're going to work day and night on this. But please don't
mention our little visit to any other police officers, okay? We're all trying
to find her killer, but we just don't want to get in each other's way. I'm sure
you understand."

"Well … I guess it's okay."

"Thank you, ma'am. And thank you for your
time. You were a big help today."

They walked out as Edna was saying, "Big
help? But I didn't do anything."