Voodoo Eyes (11 page)

Then he came to
Justice4Dennis.com
– a site devoted to the memory of Dennis Peck. The home page presented an official police photograph of Peck in dress blues – a fresh-faced, ginger-haired twenty-two-year-old with freckles, dimples and blue eyes sparkling with that familiar rookie glow, right before they hit the street and got the shine scared out of them. Max felt those eyes could have been his own, a mirror throwing all that unfulfilled potential and all those broken promises back at him with a single question: why had he fucked things up so badly?

Below the picture were Peck’s dates of birth and death: ‘November 9, 1934 – June 4, 1968’.

Thirty-three years old when he died.

Max found an account of Peck’s murder on the site. In 1968, Vanetta Brown had fled during a police raid on the Black Jacobins’s headquarters in Overtown. Dennis Peck had been one of the detectives involved in the raid. Four eyewitnesses described seeing Brown shoot him as she escaped through a back window.

The raid netted a big cache of heroin, money and guns.

Captain Eldon Burns and Lieutenant Abe Watson led the operation.

Vanetta Brown went into hiding and evaded a nationwide manhunt. In 1971 she resurfaced in Cuba, where Fidel Castro described her as an innocent victim of racist, imperialist America. They were happy to give her a permanent refuge, he said. She was granted asylum.

Peck’s family and colleagues formed the Justice4Dennis movement, devoted to bringing Brown back to the US to stand trial for her crime. They’d been writing to Castro every year since 1972, requesting her extradition. The family also wrote to Pope John Paul II in 1997, asking him to raise the matter with Castro when he visited the country the following year. No dice. Castro hadn’t budged.

The site included a slideshow of family photographs: Dennis Peck graduating from police academy, on his wedding day, and multiple portraits of him with his daughters, Wendy and Thelma. Wendy was the eldest. Images of her wearing her father’s police hat, playing with a toy police car, sat at the wheel of a real one, complete with a pair of sunglasses too big for her head. Then came her first Communion, followed by a family Christmas on the beach. The last photograph was of both daughters, now grown up, standing by Peck’s grave, holding hands.

The final search link was the
Miami Herald
’s online picture archive, where Max found two related photographs, the first of Vanetta in 1967 – a posed, black-and-white studio shot. She could have been a model or a blaxploitation movie queen. She was striking – dark skin, high cheekbones, full lips on a wide mouth – but so angry and defiant with it, any suggestion of sensuality was choked out of her features.

The second image was a US government photo-portrait of Wendy Peck, taken in 2006 and issued to the press on the day of her appointment as head of Miami Homeland Security. Shoulder-length auburn hair, blue eyes and a smile more formal than friendly. She favoured her father.

Max looked over his notes.

Questions:

Joe – what was his involvement? He’d been in Patrol back then.

What were Robbery-Homicide detectives Eldon Burns and Abe Watson doing on a drugs raid?

He paused there.

This wasn’t going anywhere good.

He knew Eldon had been neck-deep in shady shit from the jump, doing the bidding of Victor Marko, the political fixer. It wouldn’t have surprised him in the least if the Black Jacobins bust had been a proto-MTF fit-up. Find a perp, plant the evidence, arrest or kill on sight. Above all:
make it fit, make it stick.

But Joe?

If Max left it here, he’d never know. And that would be for the best. Ignorance was bliss and he’d smile with the best of them. He could still preserve his memories.

Yes, he
could
do that.

And spend his life getting eaten up by doubt, by the not-knowing?

Yes … at a push, he could do that: his memories were all he had left now.

He looked back at his notes.

He’d written
‘FBI/COINTELPRO’,
and circled it twice.

Max tapped out an email to Jack Quinones:
What do you know about Vanetta Brown?

He sent it and printed off the
Herald
pictures. He took two prints of Vanetta Brown’s studio shot. He stuck one on the board in his office.

He was dog-tired, but he knew he wouldn’t get any sleep, that he’d just lie there seeing Joe get his brains blown out right in front of him.

He took a shower and made more coffee.

He turned on the TV. Local news reported Joe’s murder and issued a description of the shooter. No mention of Vanetta Brown.

Then he thought of Emerson Prescott.

Prescott still owed him for the surveillance job. The sum of $5837 – plus $1200 expenses. That it had turned out to be bogus and he’d been made to look and feel a fool was neither here nor there. He’d played his part in whatever sad-sack postmodern porno pantomime Prescott had going on, and he was going to collect.

He needed to take his mind off Joe. There was nothing he could do right now but leave it to the police, be there for the family … and find out some more about Vanetta Brown.

He went back to his office and fed the Zurich Hotel DVD into his computer.

11

Max had never been into porn, never got the appeal. He found it pathetic and grubby, the preserve of the complacent and sexually short-circuited. His was a childhood-old repulsion. He’d seen his first strokemag when he was ten. It had been lying open in the middle of the sidewalk. Two thick rectangular humps of glossy paper with a faintly plastic smell. The mag was called
Farmers’ Daughters
and consisted of gyno shots of fat Mid -western girls sprawled on bales of hay. He felt like having a wash and then burning the shower down after seeing it.

So he’d never used strokemags. Not even tame ones like
Playboy
and
Penthouse;
not even in his teens. He had boxing instead. Eldon Burns used to buy his fighters hookers every time they won a trophy. The night he won the South Florida Golden Gloves, he popped his cherry on Eldon’s dime. When the hooker found out it was his first time, she stroked his face and hugged him and told him her real name was Evangeline. She said she’d always wanted to be remembered in a good way by someone. He never forgot her, even though for all he knew she said the same thing to all her virgins. Nine years later he busted her on Washington Avenue. He promised himself to let her go with a warning if she recognised him. When she didn’t, he took her in. After she’d been booked and processed, he told Joe about their shared past. Joe laughed and called him a heartless asshole. Truth was, the sex hadn’t been all that great. For a while he’d even wondered what all the fuss was about, until he started winning more titles. And getting girlfriends.

These days porn was everywhere, diluted and used to sell everything from soap to music. And it reminded him of prison. Porn had wallpapered practically every cell in Attica. Everyone jerked off in the Big House. It was the only thing they had in common – apart from the fact that they were massive fuck-ups. Masturbation was the great leveller. Blacks, whites, Latinos, Asians; lifers, short-timers; big men and their bitches. Everybody did it. His cellmate, Velasquez, had elevated it to a kind of theatre. He painted the nails of his left hand red and let them grow, relieving himself with the manicured paw after sitting on the hand for an hour to deaden it. When he closed his eyes, he explained, it was almost like his
mamacita
Melyssa was right there pulling his pud. She gave the lousiest handjob in Harlem, he said. But he still used to cry when he was finished. That was some sad shit.

As the film started Max realised it was the first time he’d thought of Velasquez since leaving prison. They’d spent every day of seven years and change together. He even liked him, as much as he allowed himself to like anyone in jail. Velasquez was several sets of irritating, but he didn’t care that Max had been a cop. Mingus wondered what he was doing now. Probably back inside, jerking off.

The DVD started with a shaky shot of an American Airlines plane coming in to land at Miami International, sunlight flashing in and out of the frame, as if it had been filmed on a cellphone. The picture briefly cut out. He saw a bright flash on the screen and heard a garbled noise – a short, low-pitched moan like a cassette tape of bass notes being chewed up. Then the picture returned and he heard the unmistakable crepitations of a needle on vinyl. As the aircraft’s wheels bounced on the runway, the music kicked in. Mid-tempo, mid-eighties generic rock bombast – every instrument turned up way too loud, echoing electronic drums and guitars wailing like suffering cats – bringing back memories of music videos of gurning men in Davy Crockett mullets and Sonny Crockett half-beards. To his ear, the music seemed better suited to an action movie soundtrack from the era, something starring Dolph Lundgren or some other semi-literate Eurotrash beefcake. But out of nowhere, a saxophone undercut the synth metal with sleazy honkings, bonding film to genre.

What was it about sax and sex in movies? Surely, more than just a misplaced vowel.

On the screen the woman he’d known as Fabiana Prescott strutted out of arrivals in high heels, a sprayed-on white suit, big sunglasses and a broad-brimmed floppy black hat with a white polka dot band. No bags. The camera zoomed in and out on Fabiana’s pneumatic tits and round ass. She went up to the chauffeur, who was stood close to the exit in cap and black suit.

Está usted mi chófer?

Yes, mam. I haf big car.

The following ten minutes comprised a medley of scene-setting (cue palm trees, the beach, girls on the beach, girls under palm trees) intercut with front and side shots of a Lincoln Town Car, and interiors of Fabiana and the driver exchanging suggestive looks. Plenty of zooms down Fabiana’s cleavage, close-ups of her giving come-hither stares and licking her collagen-plumped lips. The chauffeur arched a brow and loosened his tie, as he pretended to drive the car, which was apparently stationary and parked next to a convenience store. Max guessed the budget didn’t extend to CGI.

The sequence ended with the limo stopping outside Tides on Ocean Drive. Fabiana got out and walked up the stairs. At the top she turned and beckoned suggestively to the chauffeur leaning against the car. That last touch made Max smile. Every time a movie set in Miami featured a hotel sequence where one or more of the characters was rich and classy, it was filmed at Tides.

Now the couple were in familiar territory, getting it on in Room 30 of the Zurich. Max recognised Fabiana’s dialogue by tone and intonation, having committed every vocal inflection to memory when he’d timed them.

There were only about forty more minutes of this crap to sit through and that pleased him no end.

Eventually when they were done they laid on the bed, sweat basted and breathing hard. Fabiana told the chauffeur he had a magic wand.

Call me Harry Focker, baby.

She laughed shallowly, but loudly and on cue.

They took turns to shower. The camera stayed in the room and filmed the steamed-up bathroom mirror through the open door. It didn’t move. He saw the chauffeur’s feet. He had thick, opaque toenails. A couple of flash cuts and that snippet of sound broke up the monotony.

Fabiana dressed and left. The chauffeur went in the shower and closed the door. The camera didn’t move.

The screen went black.

Max was angry, but he didn’t know why or at whom.

Why the fuck hadn’t he noticed anything?

Simple – because there was nothing
to
notice. Everything about the case had seemed straightforward. Trophy wife cheats on sugar daddy. Sugar daddy wants photographic proof. Max had done his job. Or, rather, he’d played his part.

He weighed up the options.

He couldn’t afford to forget about the money Prescott owed him. He had bills to pay. And he wanted the answer to a simple question: why had Prescott picked him? Was it random or design?

He called Prescott’s number and got a looped recorded message.

‘Sorry. This number is unavailable.’

Max rang off. Was Prescott even who he said he was? His ‘wife’ certainly wasn’t.

12

‘Moved out last week. Eight months left on the lease. All paid up. Weird,’ Dan Souza told Max. Souza was the letting agent of the Tequesta Building, where Prescott’s practice was located on the tenth floor.

Everything was still there – furniture, computer, phone, plants, water cooler, the magazines on the table – but the place had the definite feel of abandonment to it. Max noticed it as soon as he stepped out of the elevator: the silence, the way his steps seemed to echo about the walls, the way he could hear every creak and pop of his body. Which was pretty much how he felt in his own home when he woke up some mornings. Not this morning though. Because he hadn’t woken up. He hadn’t been to sleep. And he hadn’t changed his clothes, showered, shaved or even brushed his teeth.

Souza had arrived a few minutes after him, pen and clipboard in hand, a who-the-fuck-are-you look on his face as soon as he saw Max.

‘What did he say to you?’ Max asked.

‘Just that he was closing down the business and moving on. He told me to keep everything. There must be, like, at least $15,000 worth of stuff here and in the office. And I haven’t even seen inside the other offices yet.’

Souza was a short guy who looked at the world through steel-rimmed glasses. Late thirties. Blue blazer, beige pants, black loafers. His hair was too black, his skin too tanned and his teeth too white. His handshake overcompensated for soft hands. He wore a wedding ring. Not that it meant he was really married.

‘Are you a cop, sir?’ he asked Max.

‘Private detective.’

‘You’d been a cop, you would’ve “badged” me, right?’

Too much CSI, thought Max. Probably believed cops told people to ‘lawyer up’ too. Only last month Joe had been complaining about the new generation of cops talking just like cops did on TV, imitating the imitators.