Voodoo Eyes (10 page)

The whole family had gathered around the long sofa. Lena sat in the middle with her arms around her teenage twin daughters either side of her, the girls’ heads on her lap. Two of Joe’s sons – Dwayne and Dean – were perched on either arm of the sofa, while behind them all stood Jet in his dress blues. He was the spit of his father, forty years ago. It was uncanny and discomfiting seeing him there. Max was reminded of the first time he’d met Joe. Eldon had introduced them in the locker room.

‘Max, this is your new partner,’ Eldon had said. ‘Look, listen and learn. Listen to Liston –
hell!
– I could be in advertising.’

Eldon and Joe. Both dead.

Max took them all in, Joe’s surviving family, his legacy, proof that there was some goodness in the world. Lena’s eyes lit up when she saw Max, as though he was the person she’d wanted to see more than anyone else.

He didn’t know what to do.

Where to start?

What to say?

They’d taught him how to handle death as a cop. And they’d taught him well. He’d learned to be familiar with it, to expect it to be everywhere he was likely to be: behind a locked door, round a dark corner, under the dashboard of a pulled-over car. Then he learned to greet it in the morning when he left his house and give it the finger at night when he got back. Eventually, he grew indifferent to it. They didn’t teach him that. They didn’t need to. It happened naturally, the loss of visceral feeling, the jadedness in the face of horror. Death was something that happened to other people: people whose doors he knocked on to tell them their missing loved one was dead, cops who died on the job. Other people.

The silence was stifling. It wasn’t even quiet; it was the polar opposite of noisy, a spot where sound simply didn’t exist and had no possibility of coming into being.

He opened his mouth to say something but nothing came out. His throat was sealed, his tongue a concrete sculpture. His lips formed the words he thought he wanted to say like a fish drowning in air.

Then Ashley, one of the twins, got up from her mother’s side and came over and wrapped her arms around him. She held him tightly. He bent his head to kiss the top of hers. A tear he hadn’t felt dropped from his eye into her hair. Ashley’s sister Briony joined them, hugging Max with as much force from the other side. Then Lena came over and hugged him and buried her head in his neck. And the three boys closed around them. Gradually, the people in the room added themselves to the family and things went dark around him – not a mirthless lonely dark, but a respectful one, a dipping of lights.

He was back in time with Joe in the locker room. He remembered already being slightly awed by his partner-to-be: the way Joe had looked at Eldon, not in that deferential, ass-kissing way everyone else in the department did, but with professional suspicion and wariness, and just about enough respect to get away with it. Joe was always polite, even to racists. That was his thing, his way with people. Never get down to their level, always look down on it from several leagues up. ‘Please’ and ‘thank you’ to everyone. He remembered the first proper words Joe had said in the prowl car: ‘You Eldon Burns’s boy, the fighter? Don’tchu expect no special treatment from me, Punchy. In these streets, everyone hates us. We our own race out here. You dig?’ They were black and white in a town that was black or white, when it was all a big deal. Black cops didn’t trust Joe because he rolled with Max. White cops didn’t trust Max because he was learning from a black cop. Not even a badass legend like Eldon Burns could level that playing field. The divisions had made them close, the job and the shit they went through as good as welded them. He remembered times they’d got drunk and stoned, the tail they’d chased, the intimacies they’d shared. The cases they’d solved. He remembered laughing a lot. He recalled the arguments, about music and politics. Bruce Springsteen versus Curtis Mayfield. Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush the Father, Bush the Son. They’d finally both agreed on Obama.

And he was weeping now, safe in all that abundant, womb-like warmth, alone and in public, surrounded by more love than he’d felt in a long time. It made him feel sadder for Joe, who would never know any of this again.

9

Max went home in the rain. A straight and steady downpour, with barely a breath of wind behind it. It was 4.30 a.m. and Washington Avenue was busy with people dashing out of clubs, jackets and handbags over heads, jumping into cars and cabs and those rent-by-the-hour, block-long white limos with blacked-out windows. Drunk and drugged-up partygoers stumbled along the sidewalk, hand in hand, shouting, screaming, singing, laughing, falling over, oblivious to the weather. A bum with a tattered umbrella was making like Fred Astaire. A man in military uniform stood to attention, saluting a flashing neon Stars and Stripes in a souvenir store. A girl in a silver dress puked her guts out while a man tenderly held the hair off her face with one hand and her shoes in the other. He guessed they were Brits. A dull, repetitive dance beat thudded away at the air, a single bass note making the raindrops on his windshield jump and run, run and jump. It sounded as if every single one of the clubs was playing the same damn song in sync, each note meshing into a kind of anthem for twenty-first-century Western youth – all computer-generated, wordless, voiceless pre-fab music celebrating cataclysm without deliverance, marching music for sheep.

He had to hit the brakes hard as a line of people spilled out into the street in front of him, conga dancing under a single sheet of clear plastic, close to fifty or sixty of them, men and women in Halloween costumes bobbing up and down across the street like a translucent, headless Chinese New Year dragon. The car behind sounded its horn. A woman in the procession turned, unzipped the front of her sequinned dress and shook big, tassel-covered tits at him – only, she had implants, so it looked like the tits were shaking her.

Sitting in his Acura, waiting for the lumpy human snake to slither off, Max felt like an alien in a space pod, visiting this slightly threatening and thoroughly unwelcoming place for the first time. He couldn’t imagine staying here much longer. His time was almost up. He could feel it. He and this town were done. It didn’t want him. It had no place for him.

No easy way to put it. Miami was fucked. The high times had peaked. Sure, it had always had cycles, its culture of death and rebirth, twenty-year booms and ten-year busts; but something told him it wouldn’t recover from this one, that he was watching the last big party before the end of something major. People were boogieing on credit-card-thin ice atop a vast dark ruinous hole, hastening its collapse with every frenetic stamp of their designer heels. But they hadn’t noticed because they didn’t care; and if they’d heard the cracks forming, they’d just pushed their dinky white iHeadphones in a little deeper and turned the music up louder. His generation had known hardship early, and because of that, they’d bounced back. This pampered, overindulged, maxed-out bunch of pricks knew nothing. When they hit rock bottom, they’d probably mistake it for another dancefloor.

The city had been here before, many a time. And he’d been there for some of it, its unwitting barometer, riding out the down-wave, surfing the up-wave, adjusting his eyes from dazzling to dark and back again. He’d been born at the time when Miami was America’s playground, a tourist magnet. He’d grown up when the playground had gone to seed and the art deco hotels closed. The city had recast itself as ‘God’s waiting room’, the hotels had reopened as quiet retirement homes for East Coast Jews, the garment district refugees, heading for the Promised Land of sunshine and low rent and death. He’d been a cop in the dead-zone seventies, when the Freedom Tower was a homeless shelter and Ocean Drive a refugee camp. That same decade he’d gun-battled the Cocaine Cowboys whose multi-millions made the city fat and corrupt. During the busted-flush comedown that followed he’d been a private detective, looking for the abducted, the kidnapped and the runaways, their disappearances always dollar-indexed. Then he’d watched film crews renovate one derelict hotel after another as a TV show –
Miami Vice –
fed a primetime version of his home town so removed from reality it made him laugh. Within a year, the tourists were flocking to the movie-set hotels, paying top dollar to swagger down the same corridors Don Johnson had. The dying Jews were supplanted by dying gay men, Aids sufferers ostracised by the richest, most medically advanced nation on earth, who’d come to Miami to die somewhere they could afford to live. They breathed their last gasps into Miami’s defunct club culture, reinflating it, making it fashionable again. When he came out of prison, he saw their legacy in full bloom: South Beach all hip and glitzy, back to its fifties place-to-be pomp, straight with a gay edge, a fashionista magnet presided over by its crown prince, Gianni Versace, from his gaudy mansion on Ocean Drive. When Versace was gunned down on his doorstep in 1997, the party didn’t stop. It just changed frocks. Versace’s memory was toasted and then drowned in Cristal, the gay scene relocated to Fort Lauderdale and his old home became a luxury hotel. Class gave way to vulgarity but there was no one around to point out the great big difference. So Miami was long overdue another slump. It would be slow and painful. The neon would cede to darkness, the noise to silence, and the waves would no longer hum lullabies but make hissing erosive sounds as they ate away at the pre-fab postcard-perfect beaches.

He didn’t want to be around for any of that.

He didn’t know where he’d move. He had nowhere in mind. Just a vague notion of what might suit him best – somewhere quiet and warm, without too many people to fuck things up. Maybe the Utah desert.

He thought of Joe’s blood on Lincoln Road and how all trace of it would most likely have been washed clean away now. The restaurant would reopen in a few days’ time and people would sit and eat at the very spot his best friend had died. Life would go on regardless, the infinite cycle.

10

Home. Kitchen.

Back in his drinking days he would have crawled deep inside a bottle for comfort. Now all he had for kicks and relief was coffee.

He turned on the espresso machine and watched the Bustelo drip thick and black into a chrome cup; the badass brew, strong enough to wake the dead.

He was tired and running on fumes, eyes red and puffy, vision blurry, weariness deep in his bones, skin heavy on his back like chainmail.

He could have laid down on the floor and gone straight to sleep, conked out for his regulation four to five hours. He could have stopped everything and made space for grieving, for reflection, straightening things out in his head, being there for the family, whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted it.

But that would have to come later.

He had to find out about Vanetta Brown. Who she was and why she’d had Joe and Eldon killed … If she really had.

He wasn’t sure.

It didn’t fully fit.

Why kill Eldon
and
Joe? They’d been complete opposites. Joe was by the book. Eldon lived by his own rules: he’d bullied, blackmailed and intimidated his way up the ranks and then run both his department and the city in much the same way.

Max couldn’t see the common ground, outside of the fact that Joe had worked for Eldon.

Plus, why wait so long?

In his office, he checked his email.

Just the one message, but completely unexpected.

It was from Jack Quinones, a pal of Joe’s, and a former friend of Max’s. Quinones was the only Fed he ever got along with – back in the day. They’d worked cases together and shared information without going through rolls of bureaucratic red tape and jurisdictional one-upmanship.

Now they didn’t get along at all. Quinones despised him – as did everyone he’d known in law enforcement, outside of MTF. He’d never fully understood why Joe had stuck by him. He wasn’t sure Joe knew –
had known
– himself either. When Max had asked him, Joe had shrugged and taken his time scrounging up some words. In the end all he’d said was: ‘Hitler had friends too.’ That hadn’t exactly made him feel better, but it had made him laugh.

Max,

Heard about Joe. Very sincere condolences.

We need to talk. Drop me a line asap.

JQ

They’d last seen each other by accident at Joe’s house around the time Max was setting up Pétion-Mingus Investigations. Max had arrived early to see Joe. Quinones was there and he hadn’t even bothered to be polite. He looked at Max with disgust and left. He knew what every cop in Miami knew – that Max had killed in cold blood and walked free after seven years, that Eldon Burns had pulled strings and favours, that he’d leaned on the DA and paid for the judge’s house. Would Quinones have liked him more if he’d been doing life? No. But that wasn’t the point.

*

Max went on the web and searched for ‘Vanetta Brown’.

The information was scant – six hits on twenty-three pages.

The first two linked to essays about the Black Power movement, with very brief mentions of ‘the Black Jacobins in Miami’. They were described, almost dismissively, as a fringe group, one that didn’t share the separatist ideals of the Black Panthers – ‘Panther Cubs’, ‘Black Flower Power’ and ‘Age of Aquarius Niggaz’ were some of the phrases used. The pieces mentioned Vanetta Brown killing a Miami police detective called Dennis Peck in 1968 and absconding to Cuba, seemingly the only thing that she did of note.

Next he found a site called ‘Cuba: Gangsta’s Paradise’, which listed ninety-four US criminals given asylum by the Castro regime between the 1960s and the 1980s. The list was subdivided into five categories: cop-killers, murderers, hijackers, robbers and fraudsters.

The name ‘Vanetta Brown’ headed the cop-killer roll. Alongside it, a blue link: ‘DT’. Max clicked on the letters and the ‘FBI’s Most Wanted’ site came up in a separate window. It categorised Brown as a ‘Domestic Terrorist’ and briefly detailed her crime, present location (‘Havana – unconfirmed’) and the government bounty on her head: ‘$500,000’.