Miami Noir (29 page)

I’d seen him before: Richard Zaden, age thirty-one. He owned an overpriced pizza restaurant in the Grove that his father had bought for him. People came and went that I thought the DEA would’ve liked to interview.

Maybe I still look like a cop. Rick Zaden saw me and veered in my direction. He said he was Dr. Zaden’s son, and a neighbor had called him. What the hell was going on here? Where was his father?

I should have turned him toward the door and suggested he find Sergeant Nance, but instead I told him the truth as gently as I could, then said I was sorry. I told him he probably didn’t want to go in there right now.

He broke down, hands over his face, wailing. Then he looked at me with tortured eyes and whispered, “My father. He’s gone? Oh my God, no. Dad.”

Call me hard-hearted, but it seemed overdone. I knew that Rick and his father had been at odds. But this didn’t mean anything. Lose your father, feelings can change.

He sagged against the front fender of the Toyota. “She shot the bitch. Jesus Christ. I can’t believe it. Kathy shot her. Where is she? I want to talk to her.”

“Not now. She’s on her way out. Her lawyer won’t let her talk to anyone.”

That got me a blank stare. “Her lawyer?”

“When the police get involved, people call lawyers.”

“Is she…under suspicion?”

“Not that I know of.”

He took a long, slow breath. “I want to go in.”

“Just a second.” I held onto his arm. “Who was Carmen Sánchez?”

“She wanted money from my father. It was a lawsuit or something. An accident when he was on vacation in the Dominican Republic. Some guy—her son—walked right in front of his car. It wasn’t Dad’s fault, but she wouldn’t leave him alone. He said he was going to pay her off.” Rick wiped his hands down his face. “What am I supposed to do now?”

“Somebody will be out to speak to you. Excuse me, but did this person, Mrs. Sánchez’s son, did he die?” Rick nodded. “And then what? She came here on a tourist visa?”

“Yeah. That’s what they do, then they don’t leave.” Rick Zaden gave me a closer inspection. “Are you a police officer or what?”

I had to tell him. “I’m a private investigator. I work for Kathy Zaden’s attorney.”

He stared at me, turned his back, and walked under the portico, leaving me with the answer to at least one of Sergeant Nance’s questions: Carmen Sánchez had come here to collect money from the man who had killed her son. Had Dr. Zaden planned to write her a check? If the death had been an accident, why would he pay her? And if she’d thought he would, why did she want him dead?

I scanned the faces across the street, wondering if anybody had seen a middle-aged Latina getting out of her car in a raincoat. I noticed the house next door. It wasn’t much of a house, but it had a terrace on the roof, and a man leaned on the metal railing with a long-neck beer. A chickee hut with a palm-frond roof had been built up there, and the flag of Great Britain hung from one end of it like a curtain.

My pant legs got soaked as I cut through his overgrown yard. He was around forty, with bright blue eyes and spiked, sandy hair. He wore old khaki shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt that revealed a pair of nicely muscled arms. I asked if I could talk to him. He said to come up.

Circular metal stairs took me to a teak deck on the roof. He had a view of the houses along the canal, sailboats and sport fishers at the docks, and a slice of Biscayne Bay at the end of the canal. The water repeated the dull gray of the sky. He’d installed a bar, a hot tub, and a sunning area. The reed privacy screen made me think he liked an all-over tan.

His name was Ian Morris. After I’d told him what had happened, he asked if Kathy was all right. “Is she, really? Poor baby. She must be in shock.”

“Are you English?”

“Born in Newcastle. That’s on the North Sea. I came here ten years ago. Love the weather, most of the time.” He finished his beer, went to a small fridge under the chickee hut, and took out another, lifting it toward me inquiringly. I sat on a stool and he opened a bottle for each of us.

He told me he was a metal sculptor, which explained the big arms. I asked if he’d made the piece on the sea wall, a rusted oval that swung and groaned from an arch of polished aluminum.

“Not your style, is it?” He grinned. “I sold one similar for twenty thousand dollars to a collector in Mexico. Oh, but Howard told me it sucked, and he wanted it gone. That and my little roof garden too. He promised to sue me into the ground, and I said fine, give it a go. Horrible man. Am I speaking ill of the dead?” He took a swallow of beer.

I asked him if he’d seen Carmen Sánchez arrive.

Ian Morris said that at about 4 o’clock he’d been taking down his umbrella before the storm broke, and he’d noticed a little red car pull into the Zadens’s driveway, a black woman at the wheel. Then the car went out of sight.

“I didn’t know who she was. I certainly didn’t see her get out with a machete. Howard had come home early, so I thought she might be his voodoo lady making a house call.”

“His…?”

“Psychic. Spiritual advisor? Tarot card reader?”

“No. Dr. Zaden had a psychic?”

With a grin, Ian said, “This is Miami, love. With a name like Morales, you must have an altar to Chango or Eleggua in your bedroom.”

I smiled and shook my head. “Most of us are smarter than that.”

“Well, Howard went for his reading at least once a month. He said his voodoo lady guaranteed the codeenforcement people would be on my ass. I told him I was shaking in my boots.”

I nudged him back to the point. “What about Carmen Sánchez?”

“Yes. Kathy told me about her, although, as I said, I didn’t recognize her.” Ian Morris shuddered. “My God. What a hideous thing to do! Even to Howard. And poor Kathy. I have to call her. Would that be all right?”

“She’ll be with friends for a few days.”

“I have her mobile number.”

Did he, now?

From the roof I could see the windows of the Zadens’s master suite. Their balcony overlooked the pool. Kathy had said she knew it was time to leave Howard when she started watching him do his hundred laps every morning and think about heart attacks. I could also imagine that Ian Morris had watched Kathy standing on the balcony in her nightie.

I said, “I met Rick Zaden a little while ago. I told him his father had been murdered and he seemed…like he had to convince me he cared.”

Ian laughed. “He doesn’t care. He’s probably ecstatic. You see, Rickie had borrowed, or conned, his father out of so much money that Howard finally decided to shut him down. Howard had a mortgage on a restaurant Rick owned, and he was going to collect.”

I sipped my beer. “How did you know this? From Kathy?”

“Howard was yelling about it right down there on the dock. He was hosing off his boat, must’ve been a weekend, and Rick came over. I don’t know how it started, but Howard told him he wasn’t getting another effing cent, and furthermore, he’d be calling his attorney and taking the effing restaurant. He finally told Rick to get off his property or he’d have him arrested for trespassing.”

“When was this?”

Ian’s eyes focused upward. “I’m going to say…three months.”

Plenty of time for them to get over it. “Anything more recent?”

“Couldn’t say. Rick hasn’t been around.” Ian shrugged. “Kathy tried to be a peacemaker. I kept telling her, why bother? Can I get you another beer?”

“No, thanks.” Ian Morris liked to talk, so I asked him if he knew anything about the car accident in the Dominican Republic.

He gazed past me at the Zadens’s house. “I don’t think Kathy would mind. It’s no secret. She and Howard were visiting friends over there. They rented a car and went sightseeing. It happened outside some wretched little village. Mrs. Sánchez’s son, her only son, was walking along the road, and Howard hit the poor sod and killed him.”

“Was he drunk?”

“He’d been drinking, but he wasn’t drunk. No, he was yelling at Kathy just before the impact. She doesn’t remember what about. Something petty. Howard was a shameless verbal abuser. He didn’t strike her, at least she said not, or I’d have been forced to beat the crap out of him.”

Ian crossed his arms on the bar. I could see little scars from metal cuts or torch burns. “Anyway, the accident. The
policía
investigated, but Howard’s friends were wealthy, quite connected, and so forth. Howard felt he’d done nothing wrong, but he paid the man’s burial expenses and returned to the States. That would’ve been the end of it, except that Mrs. Sánchez turned up. She wanted compensation, and Howard basically told her to bugger off.”

“How much was she asking for?”

“Ten thousand dollars for every year of her son’s life, and he was twenty-five. Oh, Howard could’ve paid, he just didn’t like to be told to. Carmen Sánchez came here to torment him. The staff at the clinic would find things at the entrance—a doll with pins in it, or a dead chicken—and it was driving Howard crazy. The police wouldn’t do anything because they couldn’t catch her at it. Howard filed a report with Immigration and maybe they’d have gotten around to deporting her in a year or two. Meanwhile, the bones kept appearing on his doorstep. Bad for business. A lot of Howard’s patients were Cubans, and Cubans know
Santería
when they see it, don’t they? He had no choice but to pay her.”

I let these facts settle, then said, “But why did she kill him?”

“Ha. Now there’s a question.” Ian Morris lifted his beer in a salute.

As night closed in, Charlene Marks put Kathy Zaden in the passenger seat of her BMW and eased through the pack of reporters shoving cameras at the windows. I followed on her bumper. At Bayshore, the BMW put on its left-turn signal, then squealed right as I blocked the street. I saw the brake lights go on at Seventeenth Avenue, and the car disappeared behind thick foliage.

I hooked up with them a couple of minutes later on U.S. 1 heading downtown. Charlene would deliver Kathy Zaden to a friend’s condo on Brickell Key, a posh private island overlooking the city. If you aren’t invited, you don’t get in. I called Charlene on my cell phone and gave her a quick summary of my conversations with Dr. Zaden’s son and the next-door neighbor. I was curious whether either of them had known Carmen Sánchez. Ian Morris had told me no, but I’ve been lied to before.

I asked Charlene to pull over and let me talk to Kathy.

“Make it quick,” Charlene said. “Somebody’s about to pass out on me.”

She parked a block off Brickell Avenue on a side street overhung with oaks and air plants. Glass towers haven’t completely taken over, not yet. A street light at the corner sent a weak yellow glow through the branches.

I opened the rear door and got in. Kathy rolled her head on the seat back to focus on me. Whatever she’d found in her medicine cabinet, it was kicking in. “Hey. What a mess, huh?”

“Kathy, I talked to Ian Morris. He told me about the accident in the Dominican Republic. Did you ever give him Mrs. Sánchez’s phone number?”

“Ian? No. Why would I?”

“You’re sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“Who let Mrs. Sánchez into the house?”

“I did.”

The lack of reaction from the driver’s seat told me that Charlene had already learned this much from her client. “I talked to Rick too. He thought she had come to collect money from his father.” Kathy nodded. “Did you know she was coming over?”

“Yes. I asked her to.”

Charlene sat up straighter.

Kathy sighed. “I’m sorry, Charlene. I didn’t want to lie to you, but…I don’t know. It sounds so bad. The truth is…I arranged the meeting.”

Charlene said, “Well, well.”

“It was Ian’s idea. He said we should offer her less money. She wanted $250,000! He said offer her $100,000.”

“Why was Ian being so helpful?” I asked. “He hated Howard.”

“He cares about me.”

“Is he in love with you?”

“I suppose he is. He knew things were bad between me and Howard. I was depressed, and I wasn’t sleeping.” Kathy frowned. “Maybe Ian did have her number. The first time I called her, it was from his house.”

“Kathy.” I shifted between the seats to see her more clearly. “Did Mrs. Sánchez say she would accept $100,000?” “She said she’d think about it. I told Howard, and when he finished screaming at me, he said he would ask his tarot card reader. I’m serious. He had to get permission. She said yes, but he wouldn’t pay more than fifty, so I called Mrs. Sánchez back and told her. She said she’d come at 4 o’clock today and pick up a check.”

Kathy hugged her arms around herself and stared through the windshield. “Howard told me to get the door. It was raining, and…she was standing there in this long black raincoat. I didn’t want to let her in. I mean, I had this, like, premonition. She was going to kill him. I could see it. She was…death, and she’d come for him.

“I tried to close the door, but she held it open. Howard took her into the study. I heard them arguing. She started yelling and cursing, and I went to get Howard’s pistol out of the bedroom. I ran downstairs and opened the door, and she was killing him, swinging the machete up and down. I shot her. I kept on shooting till I just heard clicks.”

Tears were sliding down Kathy’s face. “It was my fault.”

“How can you think that?” Charlene pulled her close. “You didn’t know what she would do. She was out of her mind.”

“Yeah, she’s not the only one.” Laughing, Kathy opened her purse and found a tissue. “Can we go? I’m so tired. I want dinner. I have to sleep.”

“One more thing,” I said quickly. “This psychic that Howard used. Who is she?”

“Rosario…” Kathy closed her eyes, then said, “Cardona.”

“Did Ian know her?”

“I think he met her once. It was like two years ago. The grand opening of Ponte Vecchio—that’s Rick’s restaurant. Next to Señor Frog’s. Rick hired her to read palms. A marketing gimmick, you know? She read Howard’s palm and said he’d win his lawsuit with his partner. He did. The next week the judge ruled in his favor, so after that, he believed anything Rosario Cardona said.”

“She could have learned about the lawsuit from Rick,” I said. “Have there been any fights lately between Rick and his father? Ian said they had a big one a few months back.”