Sideswipe (33 page)

At first, Dale was going to follow the original plan and drive back to the garage apartment, but she quickly changed her mind. Her packed suitcase was already in the back of the Lincoln, and so were Troy's things. And with Mr. Sinkiewicz's Honda still in the parking lot, Troy would undoubtedly follow her back to the apartment in the old man's car. At the next exit, Dale got off the overpass and drove through unfamiliar neighborhoods until she reached Biscayne Boulevard. She stopped at a Denny's, parked and locked the car in the back lot, and went inside, taking a booth in the corner. She ordered a ham sandwich she didn't want, to go with the coffee she did, and tried to figure out what to do next. She couldn't think very well at all, and she had to hold the cup of coffee, which was only lukewarm, with both hands to drink it. Dale was truly afraid for her life. Everything Troy had told her about going to Haiti and getting plastic surgery for her face and buying a nice home on the island where she could lie on the beach and recuperate, everything, including her dancing career, had been destroyed when she shot him in the face. Now that she had a little time to think it over, she decided that maybe he wouldn't have hurt her. In all probability he had just killed James and Mr. Sinkiewicz so he wouldn't have to share the money with them. After all, Troy had loved her, and told her so, lots of times, especially when they were doing it in bed. For the first time in her life she had met a man who loved her, who appreciated her for herself instead of just for her body, and she had spoiled it all by panicking and shooting him. But if Troy found her now, he would surely kill her, and she could hardly blame him. Troy would believe--and how else could he think?--that she had intended all along to shoot him and keep the money for herself. She didn't know what to do, she didn't know where to go, and she couldn't think of anywhere to hide where Troy couldn't find her. With her face, her badly disfigured face, she could be tracked down no matter where she went.

Not only that, but the car she was driving was stolen. Troy and James had hidden the owner's body in the big Shapiro house. Mr. Sinkiewicz hadn't been told about that because, as Troy had said, it might upset the old man, but the man and his car had been missing for three days now, and the chances were that the police were looking for the car. And if they found her driving it, and then found the owner's body, she would be blamed for his murder and then it would all come out about the supermarket robbery plus the death of James and Mr. Sinkiewicz and she would be charged with those murders, too. Troy, of course, was way too smart to be discovered or caught, so she would be blamed for everything! And that could mean the electric chair.

She ordered another cup of coffee.

"Anything wrong with the sandwich?" the waitress asked as she refilled Dale's cup.

"It's fine. But I think I'll take it home and eat it. Have you got a doggie bag?"

"No problem." The waitress left with the sandwich.

Doggie bag, Dale thought. She had all the money in that sack in the back seat of the Lincoln. She needed some advice and a place to hide and she needed it right away. That's when Dale remembered Marvin Grizzard, the pimp she had hustled for when she had first moved down to Miami Beach from Daytona. Because of the way she looked she had been lucky to get as much as ten dollars a trick hustling Mariel Cuban refugees on the Beach. She hadn't brought in enough income for Marvin, so after two weeks he had driven her across the causeway, dropped her off on Biscayne Boulevard, and told her she was on her own. He had been nice enough to give her a twenty-dollar bill, so she could rent a motel room, but he said that with her face she simply didn't bring in enough money for him to take care of her. What little she did bring in each night wasn't enough to pay the lawyer he had on retainer to get his girls out of jail when they were picked up by the vice cops. Dale hadn't blamed Marvin. In his own way, Marvin had been decent to her, but business was business to Marvin, and he had a lot of expenses.

But now she had a lot of money in the car.

If she gave the money to Marvin, he would help her get out of town, or he'd come up with some way to hide her from Troy. She was sure she had never told Troy anything about Marvin. In fact, she had almost forgotten about Marvin until now. He was the only man she could think of who would know what to do.

Dale paid for her sandwich and coffee at the cashier's, then threw the foil-wrapped sandwich and Mr. Sinkiewicz's signed traveler's checks into the dumpster on her way to the car. She retrieved her suitcase and the Hefty bag from the car, wiped the steering wheel and door handle with a paper napkin from the restaurant, walked to the taxi stand at the Omni Hotel, and took a cab to Miami Beach. She checked into Murgatroyd Manor, a pink and green art deco hotel on Ocean Boulevard, paid a week's rent in advance, and got a room overlooking the sea. She looked up Marvin's telephone number, called his apartment, and spoke into his answering machine after the little ding.

"Marvin, this is Dale Forrest. I've got the money I owe you. Five thousand dollars. If you're interested, I'm in room 314, at the Murgatroyd Manor." She hung up the phone, waited for a minute, and then called the desk and asked the clerk to send up a bottle of Early Times and a bowl of ice.

An hour later, after she had had three drinks and had calmed down some, and decided not to drink any more, there was a knock on the door.

Marvin, worried about some kind of a trick, but keenly interested in the sum of five thousand dollars, although Dale Forrest didn't owe him any money--no one ever owed Marvin any money for very long--had sent Hortensia, one of his girls, to check on the situation while he waited in his Cadillac a block away. Dale handed Hortensia two hundred dollars in twenty-dollar bills.

"Tell Marvin this is a sample, but tell him I want to talk to him in person."

Hortensia walked back to the car, gave Marvin the money, and told him that Dale was alone in her hotel room. She hadn't seen anyone else lurking around, either. There was no one in the lobby, and the desk clerk was half-asleep behind the desk.

Marvin went down the alley, climbed the fire escape to the third floor, walked down the corridor, and knocked on Dale's door.

The money, almost nineteen thousand dollars, had been counted and stacked on the double bed. The rolls of coins were beside the rows of stacked bills, and the Hefty bags, folded neatly into squares, were side by side on top of the pillows.

Dale poured Marvin a drink over ice cubes in a plastic glass and told him about the robbery. She also told him that she had shot Troy, but that Troy, though he was wounded, was undoubtedly looking for her and the money, and that he was, in all probability, driving a brown Honda Civic. Marvin had nodded, asking a few questions but looking at the money instead of Dale. When she finished talking, he took another drink from her bottle of Early Times, this time drinking from the bottle instead of pouring a shot into his glass.

All of this had taken considerable time. Dawn arrived before they finished discussing the situation. What he would do, Marvin told Dale, he would get her out of the country. He would get her a ticket to Puerto Rico, and a passport so she could enter that country, but he would drive up to West Palm Beach and buy a ticket to the island from the Palm Beach airport, instead of Miami's, because it would be unlikely that Troy Louden would think she would leave from Palm Beach. Troy might have the Miami airport covered, but he wouldn't cover the Palm Beach airport.

It would cost, Marvin told her, three thousand dollars to get her a false passport. The remainder of the money, except for a thousand dollars, which she would need to get started on in San Juan, would be his fee for these services. It might take a couple of days to get the passport, but she would be safe here in the hotel if she didn't leave the room; meanwhile, he would drive up to West Palm and buy the ticket. He realized that his fee was high, but this Troy she told him about was a dangerous bastard, and he, Marvin, was putting his ass on the line--

At this point, Gonzalez broke in: "You asshole. You don't need a passport to go to Puerto Rico. It's part of the United States!"

"Since when? I thought it was like El Salvador--"

"Never mind," Hoke said. "Tell us the rest of it, Marvin."

"I reckon Dale don't know that about Puerto Rico, either," Marvin said, shrugging. "Anyway, that's the plan I came up with. I took three thousand for the passport, and two hundred more to get the ticket, but I left the rest of the money in the room--to show my good faith and all. Then I left. I ate breakfast back in my apartment and watched TV. There was something about the robbery and massacre, but not too much details. I went down for the -Miami Herald-, you know, but there was nothing in the paper about it. The story had happened too late at night to get in. But at ten, when the -Miami News- came out, the first street edition, with the pictures and all, I realized that this situation was too heavy for me. I was gonna help Dale get away. I was gonna have a fake passport made up, and drive her up to Palm Beach myself, just like I said. But this was a big Murder One thing, so I put off doing anything, you see, trying to figure out what was best for me. If there's one thing I don't need, it's a 'cessory rap to a Murder One rap, and on top of that, whenever I thought about this Troy dude my balls turned to ice cubes.

"I went back to Dale's room late that afternoon and told her it would take more time than I thought to get the passport. I also took a Polaroid snapshot of her, which I said the passport man needed. I been stalling for three days now."

"What's the passport man's name?" Gonzalez asked.

"There ain't no passport man. I was just gonna paste Dale's picture on Hortensia's passport. Hortensia's here on a student visa from the Dominican Republic. But the more I thought about it, the more worried I got. Then when they come out in the papers this morning with the new reward, which is more than the nineteen thousand, I got this new idea--to turn Dale in."

"Where's Dale now?" Hoke asked.

"Like I said, 314, Murgatroyd Manor."

"Okay, Gonzalez," Hoke said, "let's go over to the Beach and get her."

"Shouldn't we notify the Beach cops we're picking her up?"

"We should, but we won't. This is an emergency, and the massacre was in Miami, not in Miami Beach. In the state she's in, she's liable to take off any second. Would you trust an asshole like Marvin?"

"Not for a minute," Gonzalez said.

"I resent that," Marvin said. "I done told you everything, like a good citizen. Besides, she's quiet because I been giving her Percodans. Hortensia's outside watching the building, and if Dale leaves she'll follow her."

They left the handcuffs on Marvin and boosted him over the gate before climbing over it themselves. Marvin, because his wrists were handcuffed behind his back, fell on his face, and some flinty pieces of gravel got embedded in his right cheek. They put Marvin in the back seat of their unmarked Fairlane and took the MacArthur Causeway to Miami Beach.

When Hoke rapped on Dale's door at the hotel, there was no answer. The television was on in the room, however, so Gonzalez went downstairs and got the extra key to the room from the desk clerk. When he came back, Hoke unlocked the door and pushed Marvin in ahead of him, in case Dale decided to take a shot at them. Gonzalez covered Hoke and Marvin with his pistol.

Dale was on her back, snoring, and a half-eaten Domino pizza was on the bed beside her with the stacks of bills and rolls of coins. She had finished the first bottle of Early Times, and she had made sizable inroads into a second bottle. Two grinning Channel Ten newscasters were making kidding remarks to the weatherman on the TV set. Gonzalez turned off the television and picked up Dale's purse from the bedside table. The little.25 pistol was inside. Gonzalez reclasped the purse without touching the weapon and tucked the leather purse under his arm. Hoke was unable to rouse Dale from her drug-and-alcohol slumbers. Hoke unfolded the Hefty bags and put the money inside without counting it.

"Where's the place on the Hefty where you cut out that little square?" he asked Marvin.

"I didn't cut it outa that bag 'cause I couldn't give Dale no reason for doing it. I cut it out of another Hefty I had in my apartment."

"Jesus Christ, Maria," Gonzalez said, shaking his head.

Before they left, Hoke and Gonzalez shook down the room, found nothing of interest in Dale's suitcase, and then drove back to Miami to book Marvin and Dale. Hoke had carried Dale downstairs over his shoulder, and Gonzalez had brought the bag of money, Dale's suitcase and purse, and a small sack of toilet articles that belonged to Troy Louden.

Marvin was isolated in Interrogation Room Two. The story he told and retold several times to Major Brownley and Bill Henderson was substantially the same as the one he had told Hoke and Gonzalez.

By the time Dale sobered up enough in the female annex of the city jail to realize that she was going to be charged with murder and robbery, she had decided not to say anything else to anyone. In jail, she knew she would be fairly safe from Troy Louden, and the prospect of spending a few years on Death Row, or with good luck, twenty-five years in prison, seemed for the moment like a reasonable exchange for her life.

Dale regretted telling everything to Marvin, but they couldn't use most of what she had told him against her in court. And she certainly wasn't going to tell the police anything she knew about Mr. Sinkiewicz and Troy. Troy was mad enough at her already, and even the women's prison wouldn't be safe enough distance from him if he knew she blew the whistle on him to the cops.