Hard Case Crime: Dutch Uncle (19 page)

“I’m heading this way,” Harry said, meaning this was where Jimmy got off. “Good luck with everything.”

“Luck,” De Steffano said, “you need luck. I got skills.” He backpedaled north up Lafayette, and had just turned to retrace his steps when Harry made a right on Spring.

De Steffano was dead wrong. Whatever way you wanted to think about it, luck was something nobody could do without. Wasn’t that why he wore the crooked horn? To ward off the evil eye and bring good fortune? No, you needed luck, no question about it. And you needed the desire to not let things keep happening to you, to not just get done in by life.

At a lot of queasy junctions in Harry’s past, De Steffano’s ravings would’ve made perfect sense. Minus any real idea of what he was doing, he’d let himself get sucked into the whirlpool of bad planning and bad luck and wind up in the same place De Steffano was heading, the joint. The difference between then and now was this: Harry was all done letting things happen to him.

The sun hung on the western horizon, a blood-orange ball in Martinson’s rear view mirror. He was grateful the sinus attack or migraine that might’ve been coming on in Ft. Lauderdale had reversed itself, and he was almost feeling good as he drove east over the Causeway and back to the Beach. There wasn’t enough time to stop for flowers and make the last part of visiting hours, but it’d be okay to skip them this once, go sit with Josephine for fifteen minutes before heading back to the station house.

Riding the elevator up, he intruded on some family crisis, a mother, a daughter, and two brothers, all in tears. They had the same blue eyes and the same brown hair, except the youngest, a boy, who was blond. They stopped talking when Martinson got on behind them. He looked at his shoes until he got to his floor.

Right away, he knew something was wrong. He felt that cold tingle in his fingertips, walking down the hall. The machines Josephine Simmons was hooked up to had been wheeled out of the room. Last week’s flowers were holding up pretty good, and her get-well wishes were still lined up on the nightstand, but her bed was empty and the linens had been stripped off of it. Arnie was hoping they’d transferred Josephine out of Intensive Care and into another unit, but he knew that wasn’t what had happened.

He went looking for the young doctor with the curly hair. At the nurse’s station, a heavyset woman in hospital whites was talking on the phone. Martinson rested both of his thick hands on the upper level of the desk, wanting her to hurry it up. The caller was phoning about a patient, but didn’t know the patient’s last name. This nurse was saying they weren’t going anywhere without that.

A doctor about Martinson’s age, with square shoulders and a golf-course tan, walked up to the desk. He had the same lean, in-shape look Kramer sported. Martinson was surprised to see a pack of Salems bulging out of his smock pocket.

Martinson said, “I was wondering if you could help me.”

The doctor didn’t say anything, cocking his head to one side, waiting.

“I noticed that Josephine Simmons wasn’t in her room.”

The doctor’s name was Gustavo. It said so on his nametag. He took a breath and blew out a tired sigh. His head came perpendicular again and he said, “Are you a family member?”

He asked the question out of reflex. There were no black Martinsons, at least not that Arnie was aware of.

“She doesn’t have any family members. I’m Detective Martinson, Miami Beach Police.”

It was freezing cold in this unit. And it wasn’t him. It definitely wasn’t him. That tingling in his fingers had quit. With the sun down and the humidity almost nonexistent, there was no reason for the air-conditioning to be set so high. It couldn’t be good for these sick people.

“Miss Simmons passed about an hour ago,” Dr. Gustavo said. “She was just too frail to recover from that kind of beating. It was a miracle she held on as long as she did. I’m sorry.”

Although Arnie knew this was what the doctor was going to tell him, he said, “I’m sorry, too.” He didn’t know what else to say.

Doctor Gustavo shook his head. “Outside of her age, she was perfectly healthy. There was no reason she couldn’t have gone on another ten years. Who knows? Maybe more.” He shook his head again. “It’s a hell of a thing, to get that far in life, and then have it end like this.”

Martinson had been thinking the same thing the last time he was here, but he was all done thinking about that. He was concentrating on Anton Cantor, wondering how old Anton would feel now, with a murder beef hanging over his head. As soon as Martinson had the time, he was going to re-check Anton’s alibi. Maybe there was something he missed the first time around.

But if it wasn’t Cantor, it was somebody else, and that somebody else was going to have to pay. No matter how fucked up it seemed most of the time, this world would not tolerate the murder of a spindly old lady walking home with four dollars worth of groceries. It couldn’t. Justice existed, as an independent, true objective. It made no difference how twisted the path toward it was, or how long it took, there was such a thing as justice. It was real, Martinson thought, heading back to the parking garage. Justice was real, and this wasn’t it.

Acevedo was talking long distance with New York City Detective Don Kellogg. Kellogg spoke like they were living in some previous era of telecommunication, shouting into the receiver as if they had a staticky connection, which they did not.

After the FBI faxed her Harry Healy’s criminal records, she’d sent them along to Detective Don Kellogg, who’d been Police Officer Don Kellogg when he busted Healy for assault in August, 1994, his last fuckup before the one that landed him in the Dade County Stockade.

He said, “I see our boy is moving up. This memo says you want him in a murder investigation.”

“We found one of his fingerprints at the scene,” Lili said.

Kellogg whistled, and Lili heard him shuffling papers on his end. “Healy’s a hard-ball. A hothead. Like it says, he was working as a bouncer in this joint when he gave the complainant, William T. Dryden, a beating that put him in the hospital. What Dryden did I don’t remember, but Healy’s mouthpiece managed to get the charges dropped, as you can see.”

Kellogg’s New York accent was so thick, Lili would’ve thought it sounded phony if some actor tried it out in a movie. He took a sip of something that sounded like it was hot.

“As it happens,” he said, “and you’re going to think this is weird, but that’s the way the world works, I’m following a tip right now on a hood named Jimmy De Steffano. The reason you’d care is that De Steffano and Healy are the oldest of running partners. Check out Healy’s first arrest.”

May 23, 1978. Grand theft, auto. James Albert De Steffano was driving the car. Healy was seventeen. He drew a year’s probation.

“My snitch says Jimmy’s planning a diamond heist, and my feeling is, he’s stupid enough to try it. I’m gonna put some heat on Jimmy D, do a little preventive policing. If Healy’s in the city, he won’t be too far from De Steffano, I guarantee you that. Want me to call if he turns up?”

“I’m in after eight,” Lili said.

If she’d had anything better to do, Lili would’ve gone home and changed, but when she dialed into her answering machine to check the messages, the only person who’d called was her mother, twice.

Martinson walked in around 7:45 with his tie untied. The waistband of his pants was losing its grip on his rumpled shirt. “How’d it go?” he said.

Lili showed him Healy’s record. Martinson glanced at it and unfastened the most recent mug shots.

“The French girl did a pretty fair job describing him, don’t you think?” He held the composite next to the photographs. “He does sort of look like Robotaille.”

Lili said, “Robotaille’s better looking,” and immediately wanted to take it back. “There is a slight resemblance though, yes.”

He was balancing his one-armed reading glasses on the end of his nose. “Never got him with a gun,” he said. It looked like he needed to have his prescription changed, the way he was holding the folder out and away from his face. “This assault charge looks like it came from a bar fight. Murder’s kind of a big jump.”

“Meaning what?” Acevedo said.

“Meaning I’m not sure I’m crazy about him for the shooter.”

Lili wasn’t sure she was crazy about this shift in Martinson’s thinking. “How’d you make out in Lauderdale?” she said.

He scratched the shadow of whiskers under his chin. “I did a lot of sitting in traffic.” Stretching his neck forward, he rolled his head from left to right. “Healy was working in the club, like that deputy said, and I talked to the owner of the place. He gave me a woman Healy was seeing while he was there. She said he took off last week, she didn’t know where.”

“You believe her?”

“I don’t believe she doesn’t know where he went, no. My money’s on New York. But I didn’t need her to tell me that.”

“Kramer said he thought you had a contact in New York.”

“I grabbed a perp for New York a few years ago. But what am I gonna ask that cop to do, scour all five boroughs for one of our suspects? Anyway, I hate to use up a favor before it’s absolutely necessary.”

“What about the FBI?”

“Slow down a minute, Lil.”

She couldn’t understand why Arnie was dragging his feet. Why didn’t they just go and collar-up on this Healy?

“I contacted the arresting officer on Healy’s last goround before he came here,” she said. “Turns out he’s working a tip on an old associate of Healy’s, a guy by the name of” — she checked her notebook — “Jimmy De Steffano. Healy takes his first fall at age seventeen in a stolen car? Who’s at the wheel?”

“Jimmy De Steffano?”

“You got it. And this cop says if Healy’s in New York, it won’t be long before he tries to contact De Steffano.”

“That’s a hell of a coincidence,” Martinson said. He set the file on his desk, folded the one arm of his glasses, and stuck them into the pocket of his short-sleeved shirt.

He was not in good shape. Lili knew that he did almost no exercise, and that his diet was straight off the Mesozoic menu. But still, he looked strong. Close to fifty or whatever he was, exhausted, distracted, Arnie Martinson didn’t look like anybody some punk would want to screw with.

Lili took a call from the desk sergeant. “This is Schimmel,” Schimmel said. “I got a woman here who wants to speak to somebody upstairs.”

“About what?” She listed for a few moments to what the desk cop was saying, and hung up the phone.

“Somebody else wants to weigh in on Pfiser,” Lili said. “There’s a girl downstairs with a dog in her purse.”

The dog was a long-haired teacup Chihuahua. Arnie knew this because he asked, trying to establish some rapport with this girl. It was called Mimi.

The name the girl gave them was Victoria Leonard, and she had a kind of ruined beauty. An orange halter that tied at the neck and across the back exposed the dead-end of a peeling sunburn, and a bad tit job some strip-mall plastic man had tossed off. Though Arnie wasn’t convinced there was such a thing as a good tit job.

Mimi’s snout peeped over the thatched bag she was riding in, and she had a head cold. She was coughing, little yips in the back of her throat, and at one point launched into a seven- or eight-sneeze jag that left her muzzle wet with doggie snot. Victoria found a tissue in the bag and wiped Mimi’s nose.

Martinson could feel himself giving up on this day, after the terrible news about Josephine Simmons, and realized he hadn’t said anything to Lili about her death. Maybe after they were through with Victoria Leonard, he’d bring Lili up to speed. Or it could wait till tomorrow. Arnie was the only one who knew about his visits to the hospital, and he wanted to keep it that way.

He bought a bag of chips and a Kit Kat bar from the vending machine. The three of them, not counting the dog, went to sit in an interview room.

“Just let her say what she came here to say,” Martinson told Lili before they walked in. “Go soft. We can question her later.”

Victoria spent a lot of time blowing on coffee that wasn’t hot to begin with, a Styrofoam cup she loaded with sugar and powdered creamer. She was born in Idaho and moved to L.A. when she was eighteen. She wanted to be an actress.

She said, “What a surprise, right?”

Mentioning this was five years ago, if she was telling the truth, it meant she was only twenty-three, a shock considering how rugged she looked. Arnie would’ve guessed ten years older. Ten hard years.

Acevedo had her notebook out, but she wasn’t writing. She was regarding Victoria Leonard with her eyes narrowed, like she was coiled to pounce on her the second she got the chance.

Arnie swallowed some of the coffee in his cup. Maybe the reason it tasted so bad was because they needed a new machine. He was going to ask Kramer about getting them one. They had to be able to do better than this.

Victoria smiled a smile that showed her jarring white teeth. Twenty-three years old, Martinson thought, capped teeth and breast implants. The kid was a mess.

There was a television producer, a very successful television producer, Victoria said, that loved her. He put her in many episodes of a show that ran for three years in syndication. Maybe they had seen it. It was a cop show called
Do or Die
.

Martinson didn’t know that one. Acevedo went, “Mmmmmm.”

After those three years, the show had run its course. The producer couldn’t sell it to anybody, and it ended. Victoria drifted into projects she was far too talented for, things she never imagined she’d have to do, especially not when she was shooting
Do or Die
and watching herself on TV, twice a day sometimes.

Arnie assumed she meant porno, and maybe Acevedo did, too, but Victoria said, “Not what you think.”

They were a series of cut-and-run features that cost nothing to make, relatively speaking, movies that went straight to video or cable. She played the girl in the bikini, the hapless co-ed in five beach-blanket slasher movies. She’d have half a dozen lines before she got killed, and she got killed in every picture. They shot the principal photography in a week, and a project could go from script to screen in a month.