Powder Burn (19 page)

“Octavio Nelson is a fanatic,” she went on. “A couple years ago he got shot during a bust and nearly died, but not before he put two dopers away for good. Two Colombian pros.”

“So you never heard anything bad about him?”

“A few little things,” Clara said. “Last year there were two brutality complaints that probably had some basis in fact. Nelson roughed up a couple of nickel-and-dimers in his car. He used that big flashlight they’re all issued. Nothing came of it. They jumped bond anyway.” Her tone of voice told Meadows that the incidents were of minor journalistic significance. He thanked her for the information, hung up and submerged into his swirling thoughts.

He was certain of his information, sure of what he had lived and seen. Clara Jackson, who could find out more with a dozen profane phone calls than he could in a year, was certain that Meadows’s drug kingpin was a pillar of the community.

The thought of being wrong didn’t gall Meadows. He knew he was not wrong. Meadows thought fleetingly of taking his story to someone who might care. The state attorney? Federal officials? Wouldn’t they see justice done? Clara Jackson didn’t think they would even listen to him. And even if they did, could they possibly protect his anonymity?

Besides, in the cold light of day, what facts did Meadows have that would persuade anyone? That Bermúdez had talked in a funeral parlor with two men Meadows knew to be killers? There was nobody in that grisly purgatory that night that the unctuous man with the rose had
not
talked to.

Meadows did not even know the killers’ names. And before he talked about them, assuming anyone would even listen, he would have to explain what had happened in the parking garage at Miami International. And that would leave T. Christopher Meadows, AIA, up shit creek.

MEADOWS NEARLY DID NOT GO
to Coconut Grove the next day to retrieve the picture Clara Jackson had sent him. Being on Key Biscayne was tolerable, but getting on and off was torture. On this day Meadows needed to get to the mainland, and if luck was not with him, he knew, he could spend the better part of the morning on the journey.

There was only one way in and one way out of the key, which meant that the causeway became the island’s lifeblood and the frequent scene of the worst vehicular madness Meadows had witnessed north of São Paulo.

The bridge nearest the mainland was a drawbridge. It rose at the imperious behest of any plutocrat with a mast tall enough. Thousands could swelter for an eternity in the afternoon sun while some uptown slob in white shoes steered his ketch through the bridge, a doff of his gleaming white cap to the cracker who tended the infernal machine from a hutch atop the center span.

“How’s the traffic?” had become to the insular Republicans of Key Biscayne a salutation more common than “How’s the family?” by the time Meadows first knew the island.

But Meadows was not intercepted by the bridge that summer afternoon. Traffic was light. He slid across to the mainland as smoothly as if he had sailed across the bay. The damn thing is probably broken, he thought, as he crossed the grated center span of the drawbridge.

Even the traffic in Coconut Grove was tolerable, but as Meadows neared his house, he grew cautious. He drove twice around the block, slowly, looking at the parked cars. Nothing. He could not see the house from the street because of the foliage, but there was no one watching from the street. Of that he was sure.

Meadows parked Terry’s Ford a block away, scaled the four-foot limestone wall and approached the front of the house through the trees, shrubbery and undergrowth that were the silent sentinels of his privacy. He stopped at the mailbox, extracted a buff
Miami Journal
envelope and a Mailgram from the assorted trivia of bills and leaflets, and stuck them in his back pocket.

Even before Meadows reached the house itself, he knew something was wrong. He crouched for a long time behind a cabbage palm, but he heard nothing. So he went in. And immediately wished he hadn’t.

They had destroyed the house and everything in it. Systematically, viciously, calculatingly. Vandals run amok.

They had begun with his books, it seemed. Books of art and literature. Architectural reference works and leftover college textbooks. Dictionaries and paperbacks. Some lay shredded on the floor. The rest lay on the bottom of the pool.

The glass cases that housed his architectural models—what Meadows called his ego gallery—had been shattered. The models themselves had obviously puzzled the intruders. They had destroyed them capriciously. One had been burned; the top of another, a multitiered housing development, had been ripped from its base. A third had been stepped on.

Meadows’s Haitian paintings had been slashed with a knife, except one, coated now by what looked like dried ketchup. The entrails of Meadows’s leather living room furniture littered the floor. The blades of his ceiling fans had been snapped, one by one.

The kitchen was a lake where cheese rind floated next to soggy bologna. The tap was still on, and Meadows let it run. Water from the bathroom cascaded by the staircase and seeped along the oak floor, out the door and into the pool.

Over by what had been his stereo system the oak was scarred where filter-tip cigarette butts had been ground into the wood. Cauliflower Ear and the Peasant had obviously waited a long, impatient time for the
gringo
to come.

Meadows touched nothing. He stood silently in the living room, cataloguing in his mind a barbarism that his eyes sought to censor. A terrible rage consumed him.

In the debris he spied the cut-glass figure of a troubadour he had bought in Venice many years before. It was miraculously unbroken. He picked up the delicate statuette and fondled it. Tenderly he set it back in its place on the mantel over the fireplace, where someone had smeared human feces and food and mustard.

The phone rang. Meadows stared at it for a long moment. Then he spun on his heel and strode out the door without looking back.

Chapter 15

MEADOWS WAS
out of breath by the time he reached the top of the stairs, clutching the key to Terry’s condominium. He surged through the door, slammed it behind him and double-locked it with finality. His shirt was soaked. He hunted for the thermostat and twisted the dial to sixty-five degrees. He turned on a small table lamp but purposely avoided disturbing the drapes covering the wide picture window that presented such a grandiose view of the Atlantic. Below were a pool and a small park, Meadows recalled. And people.

No, the apartment should remain dark, closed up.

The package from Clara Jackson was still under one arm as Meadows went to the refrigerator and foraged for a beer. He found a can of Bavaria, a tart Colombian brew, and in it a reason for small rejoicing. It was ice-cold, but even better, it was strong.

Meadows collapsed on a fat throw pillow, decorated with a radically vivid Panama mola, then gulped half the can before surrendering to curiosity and ripping open the brown envelope from the
Miami Journal.
During the breakneck ride from his desecrated home in the Grove to Terry’s place on Key Biscayne, Meadows had kept the envelope on his lap, fingering it nervously. He could feel the stiff photographic paper inside. Clara Jackson had come through, somehow raiding the
Journal
’s sacrosanct photo morgue for a picture.

Now Meadows looked at it and could hardly be silent. His sketch had been accurate indeed. The man in the photograph, beaming so self-consciously at a chamber of commerce spaghetti luncheon, was the silky man at Mono’s wake. The man with the yellow rose.

José Bermúdez.

Meadows felt vindicated. The conversation at the funeral home could not have been misinterpreted. Sandy had died because of this man. Mono had merely been the bullet; Bermúdez had been the trigger.

A sheaf of Xerox-copied newspaper clippings accompanied the photograph. Meadows could hear Clara Jackson’s chirpy voice as she stood over the machine, watching it spit out copies: Surely this will convince the paranoid architect that he’s wrong.

Meadows finished off his Bavaria and cracked open another can, the last one. Then he sat down at the kitchen table to read about the extraordinary, esteemed Señor Bermúdez.…

“Banker José Luis Bermúdez was honored Friday by the Greater Miami Chamber of Commerce when it presented the exile leader with its annual Statesman’s Award for his service on behalf of South Florida’s Latin business community.…”

Clip date: December 17, 1979. The article ran beneath the photograph now on Terry’s kitchen table. The biographical material was impressive, and the weight of it afflicted Meadows with new doubt.

Bermúdez was forty-four years old, born in the Matanzas Province east of Havana. He was the son of a wealthy landowner who had turned acres of free-growing royal palms into acres of rich and highly prized Cuban coffee; who had given the best of everything to his three sons, his wife, his friends; who had panicked like a race horse in a burning barn after young Señor Castro had come down from the Sierra Maestra to take Havana. Bermúdez, his wife and two of the boys had made it to Miami with more of the family money than was thought possible in those frantic days of flight. The third son, Luis, had died in the revolution.

A feature article, written for the
Journal
’s Spanish editions and translated rather clumsily for Anglos, told more of the banker’s history. How José’s father grew dim and withdrawn now in Miami’s Little Havana, spending his days at the hysterical funerals of old Cuban patriots and his nights dizzy with rum. Puerto Rican rum, at that. How the old man’s friendships had brought José, then only twenty-five, a minor officer’s job at a new Cuban-owned bank on Coral Way. The law degree that José had brought from Havana had been shelved forever; banking fortunes had exploded as hundreds of thousands of his countrymen had poured into Florida to build new lives. All of them had needed money, and exile banks had opened their arms. José Luis Bermúdez Modero had become a wealthy, important man.

Meadows riffled through the clippings. On Cuban holidays—and who could keep track of them all?—Bermúdez seemed to be everywhere: the street dances in Little Havana; the domino park on Eighth Street; the Torch of Freedom on the boulevard, listening fervently to heated speeches.

It simply made no sense. Bermúdez was a man who did not need the drug business. He had a six-bedroom house in Coral Gables (featured once in the
Journal
’s fawning home style section), three clonelike children and a stunning wife. His name did not appear in Miami newspapers without the prefix “prominent Cuban businessman” or “noted Miami banker” or “exile leader.”

Meadows paced. No wonder Clara Jackson did not believe him. José Bermúdez was dead wrong for the part.

And he was perfect.

Could there be a better camouflage? Meadows mused. He envisioned a cop, say Wilbur Pincus, plodding about Little Havana, asking rude questions about Señor Bermúdez. The reply would be scalding stares, curses at such umbrageous suggestions. “Do you have nothing better to do, bastard, then harass honorable men? Get out! You are insane to bother Señor Bermúdez.”

The thought of such futility made Chris Meadows very tired. On Eighth Street they would laugh at his theory of José Bermúdez, cocaine broker. They would laugh, too, in the offices of Octavio Nelson.

Meadows stripped off his clothes and rummaged through Terry’s closet for a pair of old cutoffs he had left there. He permitted himself a peek through the curtains. The pool was churning with children and teenagers; sunning mothers sprawled nearby on canary patio furniture. Beyond was the Atlantic, indigo in the distant Gulf Stream and a radiant aquamarine where it lapped against the key.

Meadows struggled against desperation. “A prisoner in paradise,” he said with a sour laugh to no one. He could never go home. Home? They’d damn near fried him in his own swimming pool, then savaged his house. He grew sick, thinking of the wreckage and the filth. The message of their actions was horrifying.

What would Terry counsel? Call the police, Chris. The police who’d abandoned him at the funeral parlor, tossed him fat and high like a frigging clay pigeon. The police, Octavio Nelson and friends, were as much the enemy as the dopers. And perhaps more deadly.

Meadows was resolved to get out of Terry’s condominium as soon as possible, for her safety as much as his own. If Meadows was being watched, he could lead the killers far away from her at least. If they had not yet found his hideaway, he might still be able to disappear. That was a possibility, Meadows thought coldly. It would take them time, the killers, to track them down. Probably a full day of sifting through whatever they’d stolen from the house. There were many names, many phone numbers.

Meadows thought of Terry, of Arthur, of all his friends, and shivered.

And he thought of Octavio Nelson. When the rogue detective set his mind to the task, it would not take long—maybe twelve hours?—to find the frightened architect at an exotic girlfriend’s apartment. Meadows glanced at the door, half expecting to hear a cop’s perfunctory knock.

He gathered the material about José Bermúdez and stuffed it back in the envelope. Hastily Meadows leafed through the other mail, showing no interest until he came upon a Mailgram from Quito, Ecuador. He used a kitchen knife to slit the envelope:

SEÑOR T. CHRISTOPHER MEADOWS: BY THE TERMS OF YOUR CONTRACT, YOU WERE TO PRESENT TO THE ECUADOREAN OIL MINISTRY A PREDESIGN PROPOSAL ONE WEEK AGO. SO FAR WE HAVE RECEIVED NO PROPOSAL AND NO EXPLANATION OF ANY KIND FROM YOUR MIAMI OFFICE. OUR GOVERNMENT IS VERY EAGER TO COMPLETE THIS PROJECT ACCORDING TO THE TIMETABLE WE DISCUSSED LAST SPRING. ANY FURTHER DELAYS WILL FORCE US TO CANCEL OUR CONTRACT AND SEEK THE SERVICES OF ANOTHER ARCHITECT.

The notice was signed by a deputy minister of development. Meadows paid no attention to the name. He crumpled the Mailgram and threw it in the general direction of a wastebasket.

To hell with them. His studio was a shambles. He was afraid to show his face at the downtown office; Nelson certainly had the place staked out by now. No, the project was impossible. It hit Meadows like a foul wind: He might never work as an architect again. He grieved for his career, for his own spirit.