Red Tide (16 page)

I sat.

“They treat you okay?”

“Sure. Except they forgot to tell me what this is about,” I said.

Porky nodded. He just watched me with a half-pleasant smile. His partner continued to glare at me. A couple of minutes went by like this. I knew the technique. I was supposed to get uncomfortable with the two of them staring at me. It would break down my defenses and make me want to please them by admitting I had done it.

It’s surprising how often that routine works. That’s why cops use it. The only problem was that I didn’t know what I had done. I could give them a kind of general confession and let them slap it on where they wanted it, but I had the feeling they might try to make it stick. I decided to play it straight.

“Listen,” I said. “I’ll be glad to cooperate with whatever you got going here, but first you have to let me know why I’m here. As far as I know I didn’t see anything or do anything interesting in the last few days.”

“Sure,” snarled the Wolf. “Nothing at all. Innocent as a baby. It’s fucking amazing how everybody we talk to is innocent as a fucking baby.”

“Lorenzo,” Porky said to him.

Lorenzo slapped the table. “He pisses me 
off
. Look at him! He thinks we’re just stupid spic cops, ha? Is that what you think, 
pendejo
?”

“All right, Lorenzo,” Porky said, giving me a weary smile that said, 
See what I put up with?

I felt honored. I was actually getting the Mr. Hard and Mr. Soft Routine. Cops have used that routine since Cain killed Abel. I was surprised to see it in a place as sophisticated as Miami. Maybe they’d seen 
Miami Vice
 too many times.

“We have a problem, William,” Porky said.

“Yeah, you do. You’re grilling the wrong guy.”

He ignored me. “Our problem is this. We think maybe you know a few things we want you to talk about. If we could just clear this up quick, Lorenzo could go home.” He leaned his head towards his partner with a small smile. “He gets cranky when he’s up this late.”

 “This guy thinks he’s tough.” Lorenzo slammed his chair back and stood up. “Is that what you think? You’re too tough for a couple of 
puercos gusanos?”

“Sit down, Lorenzo,” Porky said.

“He’s pissing me 
off
!” Lorenzo said, but he sat down.

“What about it, William?” Porky said, giving his head a sympathetic shake. “Can you help me out here?”

“I’ll be glad to,” I said. “First, tell me what you think I did, then read me rights, then ask me a couple of real questions. That way we can settle this and Lorenzo can go home. Does that help at all?”

Lorenzo slammed his hand down again and said something in rapid Spanish with no consonants. Porky raised a hand to calm him down and said something back. Then he smiled at me.

“All right,” he said. “Let’s play this your way. When was the last time you saw Arthur Nagle?”

I stared at him. The question told me they had a body somewhere, but it didn’t tell me anything else. I’d never heard the name in my life. “As far as I know,” I said, “I’ve never seen Arthur Nagle.”

“You lying sack of shit,” Lorenzo said.

“Lorenzo,” Porky warned him.

“We got a dozen witnesses, fuckbag, so just drop that shit right there.”

“That’s enough, Lorenzo.”

“That fucking bartender said you were—”

“¡
Cállate
!” barked out Porky, and this time he meant it. Lorenzo looked at him with surprise.

“I wasn’t going to say anything,” Lorenzo said, looking hurt.

“You already have,” Porky told him.

And he had. I knew why I was here.

The only bartender I had seen in the last few weeks was the one at The O. So he had called in and told them to come get me. They had come pretty fast, and that told me that Arthur Nagle was dead. And the fact that it was the bartender that dropped the dime on me told me one other thing, too: I knew who Arthur Nagle was.

Bud.

Bud was dead.

It was a damned good excuse for not showing up to meet me.

“Do you have an alias for Nagle?” I asked Porky.

He glanced down at the file in front of him. “His friends called him Bud,” Porky admitted.

“Okay,” I said. “I knew him.”

“No shit,” Lorenzo snarled.

“Some shit,” I said. “Most if it coming from you.”

Lorenzo stood up again. He thought he was going to come down and swing at me, but Porky held up a hand. “
Siéntense
, for Christ’s sake,” he said. “You got it coming.” Lorenzo sat down and Porky swung his busted snout back to me. “What was the nature of your association with Nagle?”

“I met him in the bar, The O,” I said. “We talked, had a few drinks.”

“And when was the last time you saw him?”

“Two nights ago, in The O. That was also the first time I saw him.”

Porky and Lorenzo exchanged a look, then Porky came back to me. “So you meet the guy in a bar, never seen him before, and just start talking, is that it?”

“Yeah. It happens.”

“And what did you talk about?”

“He said he was going to go look for a friend of his.”

“Did his friend have a name?”

“I don’t know the last name. First name was Otoniel, called Oto.”

Lorenzo was on his feet again. “You son of a bitch—!” he yelled at me.

“Lorenzo!” Porky yelled.

“The son of a bitch did them both! He’s fucking with us!”

Porky stood up and in two quick steps he was on Lorenzo. He grabbed his partner by the shoulders and whirred out some rapid Spanish. Lorenzo rattled back, pointing at me and looking like he wanted to spit. Porky had to hold him back from jumping at me.

I barely noticed. I was too busy re-shuffling everything in my mind.

I had been taking it for granted that Oto had killed Bud; maybe for money, maybe because Bud was talking about things Oto didn’t want to talk about, maybe just because scary guys turn into scary drunks.

But if Oto was dead, too, then somebody had killed them both. It just couldn’t happen any other way. There’s such a thing as too much coincidence, too many bodies, even in Miami.

And there was only one person who might have had a strong enough reason to kill two guys who didn’t do anything more than hang out in a bar and talk. I didn’t know his name, but I knew who he was.

He was from The Black Freighter. If he wasn’t the captain, the captain had sent him. He had found out that somebody was asking Oto questions and he had stopped it quickly, brutally, finally. Just exactly the way he did his business out in the Gulf Stream.

I wanted to think that this was different, that killing two American citizens in the heart of a major American city was not the same as killing Haitian citizens in the middle of the ocean. But I knew better. People get away with murder. Cops are overworked and a low profile death doesn’t get the attention it needs. When Porky and Lorenzo were convinced that I didn’t do it, this case would probably slip to the bottom of their pile. They’d already spent a whole shift on it, and that was too much time not to have any result.

They weren’t going to catch this killer. It had to be me, and I wasn’t going to do it by sitting in jail.

It was time to play my trump card.

I looked up. Porky had calmed Lorenzo down without using a club and he was settling back into his chair.

“You were telling us about Otoniel,” Porky said with his patented tired smile.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I must have looked pretty good for this and you were hoping you got lucky. But I didn’t do Nagle, and I didn’t do Otoniel.”

Porky nodded. “Okay, William,” he said.

“Yeah, I know, it’s tough to swallow. But maybe I can come up with something that will help you believe it.”

“We’d like to hear that, William,” he said.

I tried hard not to smile as I said, “Do either of you guys know The Deacon?”

It was close to two hours before The Deacon came to get me. Part of that time was spent persuading Porky that I really had Deacon’s private number and that he would want to know that I was in jail.

The rest of the time, as I soon found out, The Deacon spent trying to calm down his wife.

“Angel had a shit-fit,” he told me. “She wanted me to leave you here.”

“I thought she liked me.”

“She did. But she’s Cuban. She believes that anybody who’s in jail after midnight, when she’s trying to sleep, is guilty of
something
.” He winked. “She might go easier on you if you got married again.”

The Deacon walked me through the paperwork and out to his car with amazing speed. It made me very happy to see that a little old-fashioned string-pulling still worked, even in The New Miami. The look on Porky’s face when he saw The Deacon come in was as close to hero-worship as you’ll ever see from a full-grown cop with a nose like a pig’s.

The paper-shufflers up front were just as eager to please. It didn’t have anything to do with Deacon’s rank. He was a supervisor, which was not high enough to make anybody jump through a hoop. It was partly his reputation. Everybody knew The Deacon, and what they knew about him made them very anxious to make him happy.

But he had something more. When he walked into a room, people stopped talking and looked up, even before they knew who he was. Several of the cops unconsciously dropped their hands near their holsters before they registered Deacon’s badge, hung on his jacket pocket.

He had me out in near-record time and led me outside with one hand on my elbow.

“How do you rate our jails?” he asked pleasantly as we walked to his car.

“The ventilation isn’t good,” I said. “But I thought they’d be more crowded.”

“Got lonely, did you?” He chuckled. “Boy, you broke some hearts in there. They thought they’d finally solved one. That’s why they kept you isolated. They were breaking you down.”

“It probably would have worked,” I admitted, “If only I’d been guilty and had an IQ of less than 70.”

“Franco and Lorenzo aren’t bad,” he said. “Just sort of basic. They’ve been working the River too long.”

“What do they have?”

Deacon shook his head. “Two bodies found together. You were seen talking to one of them, the older one.”

“Bud Nagle,” I said.

“And the next night he turns up killed.”

“How?”

Deacon chuckled. It was never a sound that brought a smile to my face. It was even colder now. “Hard to say, buddy. The coroner isn’t done yet, but they just can’t seem to figure whether they were crushed first and then bled dry, or the other way around.”

“Crushed?”

“Until their eyeballs absolutely popped out of their heads,” Deacon said. “Three cops on the scene threw up, which is a new record for one Miami crime scene.” He shook his head. “Still no guess as to how it happened. I haven’t seen the file. But they were crushed. Big cable, maybe. Whatever it was, it wrapped around and squoze ’em so hard there wasn’t anything left inside ‘em.”

“Bad way to go,” I said.

“You know a good one?”

We got to his car. It was parked cop-in-a-hurry style, angled in with one wheel on the sidewalk. I leaned on the roof while Deacon unlocked. There was a bare hint of a sunrise starting to show in the sky.

I was tired. Not just from staying up all night, either. This whole thing had been dumb and dirty and this trip had never seemed more pointless than it did right now.

Deacon popped open the passenger door of his metallic blue Chevy. I had to push some of the electronic clutter over a few inches in order to fit onto the seat. “Is one of these things a telephone?” I asked him.

“Two of ’em,” he said. He reached over and picked one up. “Try this one.”

“Thanks.” I took it from him and dialed the motel. They had one of those automatic switching things where an obnoxious recorded voice tells you to punch in the room number. I did. It rang a long time. Nobody answered.

Anna had probably stepped out. Maybe to get something to eat. That was probably all it was. And Nicky was in the other room and couldn’t hear the phone ringing over the TV. There was nothing to worry about. Nothing at all.

I let it ring a little longer. I thought about all the time I had been in jail, and talking to the two detectives. I thought about somebody who had killed Bud and Otoniel at the smallest hint of a question. Crushed and bled dry.

I put down the phone.

“Deacon,” I said, “can you make this thing go fast?”

He put his foot down before I even finished speaking. The car jumped ahead. “That’s one of the things I’m best at,” he said.

There wasn’t much traffic at this hour. Deacon slid his big car through what little there was. One guy kept up with us for a while, just for practice, I guess. Then he saw the blue light on the dashboard and dropped back.

We were at the motel in five minutes and I was out of the car before it stopped moving. I ran up the stairs, fumbling for a room key.

I didn’t need it. The door was open about two inches. A blast of cold air from inside hit me and went right through me, chilling me to the bone.

I pushed the door open.

The first thing that hit me was how neat and empty the room looked. It felt dead, the way only an empty motel room can. There was no sign that anything at all had happened; no broken ashtrays, no overturned chairs, no license plate numbers scrawled on the wall in blood.

I pushed the door further open. It hit some resistance. I stopped pushing and slid through, looking to see what it was.

It was Nicky.

He was stretched on the floor behind the door. One arm was spread out in front of him, the other folded under his body. A bruise ran across the side of his face, another on his throat.

I went down onto one knee and felt for a pulse. It was there, slow and steady. I heard something behind me and looked up. Deacon was there with a radio in one hand, already calling it in.

“He’s alive,” I said.

I went quickly through the room, the bathroom, the connecting door to Nicky’s room, the bathroom in there. I knew what I would find, and I found it.

Nothing.

Anna was gone.

I went back into the other room with a dead lump forming in me. It felt like something huge and hot was sinking down my throat to my feet.