Last Call (17 page)
Jack was in trial all day.The state attorney was determined to make an example out of his client, a high-school valedictorian who should have gone on to MIT, except that he’d already made a cool million selling nonexistent jewelry and sports cars via Internet auctions—always under the stolen identity of other sellers, of course. Jack wasn’t optimistic. Predicting jury verdicts was always dicey, but it appeared that this bunch had already left-clicked on Go_Directly_To_Jail.com.
Trial adjourned at 5:00 p.m., and Uncle Cy was waiting for him in the hallway outside the courtroom. Jack wasn’t expecting him.
“What’s up, old man?”
Cy kept pace as they walked toward the elevators.“You and me are going to Overtown.”
“For what?” said Jack, as he hit the down button.
The elevator doors opened, and they went inside. “For Theo,”
he said.
Ten minutes later they were in Jack’s car, cruising past the Miami Arena, the original home of the Miami Heat and one of the more expensive failed attempts to revive Overtown. In theory, fans would shop and dine in the neighborhood before and after events.
In reality, they came and left as quickly as possible. No offense to Uncle Cy, but with Theo having dodged a bullet to the head just last weekend, Jack was feeling a similar sense of urgency.
“Turn right here,” said Cy.
It was the same street as the shooting.“You kidding me?”
“You think I’d kid about something like this?”
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They parked at a metered space at the end of the street, directly in front of a yellow, three-story apartment building called The Landing. The façade was covered with gang graffiti and murals, though some of the markings had been painted over in a different shade of yellow. Security bars covered the first-floor windows.
The meter was broken. Jack put his coins away, said a silent good-bye to his car, just in case, and followed Cy into the building.
There was a small vestibule and a sign on the elevator that said out of order.The sign looked as though it had been there since Uncle Cy was Theo’s age.Another door led to the stairwell. It was locked.
The old man checked the numbers on the mailboxes—there were only numbers, no names—and rang apartment number twenty-two. No one answered. He rang again, and the intercom crackled.
It sounded like a woman’s voice, but the tinny speaker made it unintelligible. Uncle Cy went to the security door and shouted,
“Flo! It’s me, Cyrus!”
A buzzer sounded, the lock disengaged, and Uncle Cy opened the door. Jack followed him upstairs to the second floor.The corridor was dimly lit; about half the bulbs were burned out.A brown water stain on the ceiling marked the halfway point of their journey, and the indoor-outdoor carpet smelled of mildew.They stopped at apartment 22.The door opened a crack, and a woman peered out at them over the chain. Jack met her stare. She had a full face, and her hair was mostly gray. Probably not as old as Uncle Cy, but she could have just looked young for her age.
“Who’s he?” she said.
“He’s cool.Theo’s best friend. His name’s Jack.”
“Looks like the FBI.”
“That’s because he just got out of court. He’s a lawyer.”
She examined Jack through a narrow glare and rendered her verdict.“All right.”The door closed, the chain rattled, and then Flo was standing in the open doorway. Her face seemed to light up as Cy greeted her with a kiss on the cheek.
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The men entered, Flo shut the door, and Cy poured on a few kind words about how she hadn’t changed a bit. She seemed appreciative, even if he was a liar. Flo then led them to an old card table in the kitchenette, which was really just an extension of the living room, which accommodated a TV, a sofa, and a place to eat. On the other side of the table was the kitchen area, still technically part of the same room. Dinner was cooking on the stove, and the entire apartment smelled of boiled potatoes, despite the noisy fan in the window that drew fresh air from the outdoors.
Flo brought a large pitcher of cold lemonade and three tall glasses with ice. She poured for them. Cy assured Jack that it would be the best he’d ever tasted.
“You always did like my lemonade,” said Flo.
“A woman of many talents,” he said.
Jack tried his and seconded the compliment. “Cy tells me you two have known each other a long time.”
“’Bout a hundred years,” she said.
“You used to sing in the old jazz clubs, is that right?”
Cy cleared his throat, as if the subject was more complicated than the thumbnail he’d given Jack in the car ride over.“Flo and I were . . . used to . . .”
“Oh, for Pete’s sake, Cyrus.Tell him the honest truth.You ruined my career.”
“What?” he said.
She looked at Jack, her eyebrow arching. “We started datin’, and honey, I didn’t feel like singin’ no blues.”
They laughed, and Jack joined them, though he wasn’t sure that he was supposed to be part of the joke. Cy drank more lemonade, then turned serious.
“Is the boy here?” he asked.
“In the bedroom,” said Flo.
“He tell you anything more?”
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“Won’t talk. But I know he seen something. Maybe you can get it out of him.” She rose and called to the next room.“Tyrone!”
It took a minute, but finally the door opened.A thirteen-year-old boy shuffled toward the table, dressed in an oversized Miami Hurricanes football jersey.
Flo returned to her seat and sat the boy down next to her.“This here is Theo Knight’s uncle,” she told him. “And his friend. Say hello.”
“Hey,” he said weakly.
“Tyrone’s my grandson,” she told Jack.
Jack said,“How’s it goin’,Tyrone?”
“Nice suit.You a cop?”
“Nope.”
“Lawyer?”
Jack sensed that it was better to leave that question unanswered.
“Theo’s my best friend.We met at FSP.”
“You
were in prison? What’d you do, shave strokes off your golf handicap?”
Flo swatted him on the arm.“Show some respect.”
Cy gave Jack a little kick under the table, as if to say, “Let me try.”“You ever heard of the Grove Lords,Tyrone?”
“’Course I heard of ’em.Ain’t what they used to be, but they’re still players.”
“Both my nephews were Grove Lords back in the eighties.That’s how Theo ended up on death row. Jack’s the lawyer who got him off.”
“Really?” he said, giving Jack another look.“Cool.”
“No, it ain’t cool,” the old man said. “Theo wasted his best years in prison. His brother ended up dead.Their leader spent most of his life in jail and got shot and killed last week. And somebody just tried to kill Theo.”
Tyrone didn’t say anything.
Jack said,“We hear you might know something about that.”
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“You hear wrong.”
“It happened right here on this street,” said Uncle Cy. “Last Friday night.”
Tyrone looked away, then back.“I ain’t talkin’ to no cops.”
“We aren’t the cops,” said Jack.
“No, but if I tell you, then we gotta go downtown and tell it to the cops.You know it, I know it, and that’s bullshit!” he said, rising.
“Siddown,” said Flo. She had him by the wrist. Tyrone was a big kid and could have easily shaken off the old woman. That he kept his cool and sank back into his chair was a credit to her and the way she’d raised him.
Tyrone folded his arms tightly across his chest. “I ain’t talking to the police.”
“I know this is tough,” said Jack.
“You don’t know nothin’,” the boy said.“They’ll blow my head off. Gram’s too.”
Jack had seen this many times before—a reluctant witness, a good person caught in a bad spot. Interrogators had many ways of dealing with it. The skill was in choosing the right strategy, especially with kids.
“Let’s try this,” said Jack. “You don’t have to tell me anything, okay? I’m just going to start talking. If I got it right, you just sit there. If I got it wrong, you say ‘honky.’”
The kid almost smiled.
“Honky?”
Cy laughed through a sip of lemonade, nearly spraying it.
“‘Honky’ kind of went out with ‘groovy.’”
“Hey, it’s my game, okay?” said Jack.
The boy kept his arms folded, but Jack felt as though he’d cut the tension, maybe even made a breakthrough.
“All right,” said Tyrone,“start talking.”
Jack glanced at Uncle Cy, who seemed okay with him taking the lead.“Your bedroom,” said Jack.“I see it faces right out on the street. And I assume it’s got a window.”
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Jack paused.Tyrone said nothing.
“You were in your room on Friday night. Alone.”
More silence.
“Doing your homework.”
“Honky.”
“He was grounded,” said Flo.
“Thanks,” said Jack. “But let’s keep this between me and Ty -
rone, okay?”
“Sorry,” said Flo.
Jack said,“You were in your room Friday night. And I’m gonna say that about nine o’clock you heard a gunshot out on the street.”
Tyrone didn’t answer.
“And you looked out the window.”
He shifted in his chair, but he said nothing.
“Then you looked over toward Second Avenue.There was a man down on the street. Another man running toward him.”
Jack could see the boy swallow the lump in his throat.Tyrone was still in the game, but the tension had returned.
“A car was speeding away,” said Jack. “You saw the car. It was red.”
Tyrone lowered his eyes, but he didn’t deny it.
“Now, you’re really afraid of those guys in the red car. Because they’re gangsters.”
Still no denial.
“You got a look at them, and you recognized them.”
“Honky.”
The response almost made Jack laugh, but Tyrone’s expression was deadly serious: Jack had it wrong.
“Okay,” said Jack.“You recognized the car.”
“Honky.”
“You saw the car again, some other place, after the shooting.”
“Honky.”
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Jack glanced at Cy, who simply shrugged. Jack pondered it, then said, “There was something about that red car. Something about it that told you it was gangsters.”
Tyrone was silent.
Jack was definitely on the right track.“It was the wheels—”
“Honky.”
“The bumpers or the paint job—”
“Honky, honky.”
“The windows.”
No reply.
Jack thought about it for a moment, trying to envision something distinctive about the windows on gang-mobiles he’d seen around Miami.“There was a gang symbol etched on the rear window.”
More silence.
Bull’s-eye.
“Okay, good. Now, I don’t want you to tell me anything, Tyrone. But sometimes I like to doodle when I’m talking to people.
Maybe you do, too. Helps relieve the nerves, you know?” Jack took a pen and a small notepad from inside his suit jacket and slid them across the table. “So I’m going to have more of your grandmother’s delicious lemonade, and if you want to doodle, you go right ahead.”
Jack drank his lemonade.Tyrone stared at the pen and notepad on the table. Finally, he took them. Jack watched as he inked an image onto the pad, but Tyrone’s hand covered most of it.
He finished in a few seconds and slid the pad back to Jack. Jack didn’t examine it. He didn’t study it. He didn’t want to do anything to make Tyrone nervous. He simply retrieved his pad and pen and tucked them into his coat pocket.
Tyrone let out a sigh of relief.
Flo patted the back of her grandson’s hand. “You done good, Tyrone.You didn’t tell nobody nothin’.”
“No,” said Jack.“Not a thing.”
Jack drove Uncle Cy home, and they were in complete agreement: they would do everything possible to keep Flo’s grandson out of the investigation, but Jack needed to talk with Andie Henning. A phone call wouldn’t do—not if Jack was going to share the boy’s drawing with her. Just picking a meeting spot, however, presented real difficulties.
“Let’s meet at—” Jack stopped himself, realizing that he was about to suggest the same coffeehouse they’d visited on their second date.
“How about—”Andie did the same thing, maybe even for the identical reason.Weird, thought Jack, the way their minds seemed to work alike sometimes.
Jack said,“There’s a McDonald’s on Bird Road.”
“Perfect,” she said.
“No, wait. I can do better than that. Meet me at the gas station on Seventeenth, right next to Casola’s pizzeria.”
“A gas station?”
“Trust me on this.You’ll be pleasantly surprised.”
She agreed, but after they hung up, he recalled that she really didn’t like surprises, and as he merged into traffic, he wondered why he cared. Rene backlash, no doubt, brought on by the fact that he hadn’t heard boo from her since she left Miami.
Oh, Jack, I
can’t stay more than a few days at a time because I’m afraid I might never
leave. Oh Jack, I promise to call you as soon as my plane lands.
Jack was still waiting for the phone to ring.
The minimart on Seventeenth Avenue was just beyond a part LAST CALL
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of I-95 that most drivers never saw: the end. It’s unclear whether the geniuses who built the interstate simply ran out of cement or actually thought it was a great idea for a hundred thousand cars a day to come barreling down the final exit ramp at seventy miles per hour, straight into the proverbial parking lot that was U.S. 1.
Either way, it was the perfect spot for a filling station, and one had graced this location—right alongside the busy highway and elevated Metrorail tracks—as long as Jack could remember. In a recent flash of inspiration, the owner had converted a back room into a small but lively restaurant that served good food and good wine at bargain prices.The décor was reminiscent of a French wine cellar, with long wooden tables and stools instead of chairs, and the wine selection was so good that even the Ritz Carlton’s sommelier was a regular.You picked your wine directly from the floor-to-ceiling bins that lined the walls, and the food was served tapas style—appetizer-sized portions to be shared with friends. And on your way out, you could buy Lotto tickets and a pack of Twinkies for dessert.
