Voodoo Eyes (2 page)

He was offered a deal. He could keep everything – his fortune, his houses, his pension, his reputation and his freedom – but he had to resign immediately and go quickly and
very
quietly into obscurity.

So he retreated to the 7th Avenue gym, where, in many ways, it had all really begun for him.

It took Eldon a while to separate the man standing in front of his office window from the ghosts he’d conjured up in the gym. When he realised that the nigra wasn’t a figment of his imagination, the gym returned to its ruinous empty present, and it was just the two of them there.

The man seemed to be looking right at Eldon through the mirror, his steady and unwavering eyes two dark beams piercing his own reflection.

He was tall and thin, going on malnourished. His clothes – a short-sleeved black shirt and chinos the same shade of deep brown as his skin – billowed about him in the gentle breeze from the broken windows and ruptured roof. The shirt had gold birds on it.

Eldon didn’t know him. What the fuck did he want? In the last eight years Burns hadn’t had a single visitor here.

Not one.

The kid didn’t look like a bum. The clothes were too good for that, and his hair was too short.

Perhaps he’d come to learn to fight.

How about that?

Eldon thought about it. How long had it been since he’d tested a greenhorn? Could he still – even at his age?

The impulse went through him in a pleasant, invigorating surge and he chuckled to himself.

Eldon scoped the kid out. He looked all of fourteen. And
soft.
His features were still puppy-fat smooth, no edges, little character. Except for his
mouth.
Jesus – what a fucked-up kisser! How the fuck had
that
happened? But he couldn’t see him as a fighter, not really, not at all. A boxer’s punch would cut him in half. In fact, the more Eldon looked at him, the more he failed to see any athletic potential in him whatsoever. He had the height of a basketballer, but none of the robustness. Too wan, too wasted, too fucken’ feeble.

Then, as if he’d read Eldon’s thoughts, the kid walked away and headed for the front door.

He was leaving.

He couldn’t.

Not yet.

Eldon got up from his chair as quickly as he could. He had to catch the nigra before he left.

He opened his office door and stepped out.

‘Wait!’

The kid turned around and looked at Eldon, who started towards him across the filthy floor.

‘Elton Booorns?’ He had a strong Hispanic accent. An off-the-boat immigrant, Eldon guessed, possibly Cuban, even though the dry-footers were way down now.

Eldon nodded and approached him, noticing how the kid’s eyes were moving around the gym while keeping him in view. He was sharp and very quick. Eldon bet his reflexes were on point.

Eldon decided to have himself a little fun, treat the nigra like every newcomer who stepped through the gym doors wanting to be a fighter. Back then Eldon had had his own particular – and legendary – way of sorting out the serious from the seriously deluded.

‘What do you want?’ Eldon stopped and stood in front of him. Nothing but a kid – a kid who was a good foot taller, with a head a couple of sizes too big for his emaciated body. And Eldon couldn’t help but stare at his mouth, at that heap of natural, arbitrary carnage piled up under his nose.

‘You wanna be a fighter?
Usted desea ser boxeador?’

The kid nodded.

‘What’s your name?’

‘Osso.’

‘Osso?
You what,
Cubano?’

Osso didn’t respond. Probably an illegal, thought Eldon. Like Frankie’d been.

‘Good fighters come out of your country, you know that? Best amateur boxers in the world.
Los mejores boxeadores son Cubanos.’

The kid smiled at that, and his smile was a horrible sight, like a strip of fresh roadkill splattered across a freeway. No discernible teeth. In a way, thought Eldon, it was a good start. Up close he saw that he’d been wrong. The kid was young but far from fresh. He didn’t have much of a face to lose. His nose was already flat and there were two deep parallel scars across his right cheek. Maybe Eldon could do something for him, send him to one of two gyms he knew, run by ex-fighters he’d trained.

But first he needed to see how much Osso wanted to fight, just how determined he was. The kid needed to pass the test.

‘OK, Osso. Here’s what I want you to do,’ said Eldon. ‘I want you to hit me in the face.’

Osso looked at him with complete bewilderment.

That was always the greenhorn’s first reaction, and it meant nothing. But their next one did.

‘Hit me in the face. I mean it,’ Eldon said. Osso didn’t budge. He looked confused.

Then Burns realised that maybe the nigra hadn’t fully understood him, so he made a fist and said it in Spanish.

‘
Golpée me en la cara. Da me to mejor golpe. Vamos cabron!
’

That got through. He saw it in the eyes. Something passed behind them, like a shadow had crossed his brain.

Osso drew back his right arm and Eldon got ready to duck a wild haymaker.

But the kid didn’t throw a punch.

He pulled a gun instead.

Not just any gun.

Abe’s gun
– his .45 Colt, his pride and joy – the gun he’d been
buried
with.

Eldon recognised the pearl grips, the chip at the mouth of the barrel and, lastly, Abe’s initials – ‘A.J.W.’ – scratched up the trigger guard.

Eldon had lived half his life expecting this moment, but now that it had finally come, he wasn’t even scared. Only people who believed in God or had something to live for feared death. He wasn’t one of those people. And at this range it would be as painless as dying in a coma. He’d be dead before his body knew it.

The only thing he felt was curiosity.

‘Quién le envió?’
he asked his future killer.

‘Vanetta Brown.’

‘What?’

The door opened behind the gunman. And the very last thing Eldon Burns saw was a person walking back into his life.

PART I
CITY OF WORMS

1

Miami was bad for marriages. That’s what Max Mingus concluded as he sat in Room 29 of the Zurich Hotel on the corner of 8th and Collins waiting for the adulterers next door to get down to business so he could get along with his.

Of all the people he knew, only his best friend, Joe Liston, was still with his first wife. The rest were either on second or third marriages, divorce-stunted loners, or – like him – widowers who lived with ghosts.

This city wasn’t a place for long-term commitments. Its nature was transient, its spirit restless. It was ever evolving; shedding one glitzy layer of skin after another, like a rhinestone snake on speed. Miami was the midpoint between somewhere else and somewhere better, so hardly anyone was from here and hardly anyone ever stayed. People passed through, moved on and made way for more of the same. That was Max’s theory, how he understood things. Miami was a river rushing over quicksand: you couldn’t stand up in it and you sure as hell couldn’t build on it.

He wiped the sweat from his brow. He hadn’t been in the room long, but his handkerchief was already soaked to the corners. The air con was broken. The heat was damn near stifling and the place smelled of puke and food fights. He didn’t want to open the window because the noise from the street would drown out the goings-on next door. Right now the two of them were talking. That’s what they liked to do first. Talk. And laugh a little. Her mostly.

*

He’d been watching the couple for six weeks. Fabiana Prescott and Will Cortland. They were both married to other people. Cortland, thirty-one, worked for a chauffeured-car company called Island Limos. He was tall, blond, gym-built and had the sort of safe, wholesome, all-American good looks you’d see in TV ads for banks or holiday resorts. Fabiana, twenty-five, was the fourth trophy wife of Emerson Prescott, Max’s client. She was a Latin firecracker: long black hair, olive skin and big dark eyes set atop the kind of body whose curves were too perfect and generous to be real. She turned every straight man’s head wherever she went.

Max really didn’t blame either of them. Especially not Fabiana.

Emerson Prescott was a wealthy dentist who catered to an upscale clientele from three practices in LA, New York and Miami. Max had met him at his office Downtown. He’d hated him on sight. Prescott was a small, sixty-something remnant of a man, trying to cheat time with hairplugs, facelifts, botox and buy-a-brides like Fabiana. So, naturally, Max had taken the job. He really had no choice, financially; and, anyway, one look at Prescott and he’d figured it’d be quick and easy. Of course his wife was cheating on him.

They lived in Los Angeles. Their marriage had been rocky for the last couple of years, Emerson had explained, ever since his business started doing well in New York, where he was spending more and more of his time.

Each Thursday morning Fabiana would fly in to Miami from LA and Will Cortland would meet her at the airport with a blank expression and a sign with her name on it. They’d act like strangers. He’d drive her to the Shore Club, where she kept a suite. In the evening he’d collect her and drive her to the Zurich Hotel. Cortland would follow her in after a few minutes. When they were done, he’d drive her back to the Shore Club. He’d return his car to the Island Limos garage and go home to a rented condo in Hallandale.

The next morning, he’d return to the Shore Club at around 10 a.m., collect Fabiana and drive her around town. She visited a doctor, an accountant and then met a friend for lunch. Afterwards Cortland drove her to the airport, stopping off along the way for a back-seat farewell. By 6 p.m. she was on a plane back. When they met up the following week they started the charade from scratch. Max guessed the role play was part of the whole thrill, the way they made it work.

Max had spent the regulation two weeks following Fabiana Prescott, photographing everything from a distance with a zoom lens. He kept a record of the times of each assignation, as well as a description of what he saw. He was struck by how Fabiana and Will had kept a professional distance, allowing for only the slightest thaw on the second day, totally in keeping with surface appearances. He decided to omit this last observation from the report he took to Emerson Prescott. It was none of the creep’s business – even if he was paying for it to be.

Max was good at delivering bad news. It was all about expression and timing, something he’d learned and perfected in ten years as a Miami cop. He had a routine, an act. He let his clients know what was coming by wearing sombre clothes and a matching look – profound disappointment with a strong hint of crushed optimism, as if he’d somehow been expecting a different result. He didn’t have to try too hard either. He wasn’t one of life’s smilers. His lined and craggy fifty-eight-year-old mien was well suited to the dour, seen-it-all, done-it-all, so
-please
-go-fuck-yourself expression he wore like a uniform. It stopped people looking too hard, kept them moving on. That way they missed the sadness about him, the trail littered with regret.

Once he’d set the scene, he got straight to the point. He didn’t soften the blow. ‘Mr/Mrs Cheated-On, you were right. Your husband/wife
is
having an affair.’ He talked for a minute to a minute and a half, covering the basic details. He handed them his report, complete with photographs. Then he let the client register and absorb. Once they had, he went into customer-support mode. He apologised. Then he empathised or comforted, or listened to the poisonous and pained rant – or all three. When they were done, he told them they could call him whenever they wanted, and said his goodbyes. A week later he mailed his invoice.

That’s the way it had always gone.

Until Emerson Prescott.

When Max had walked into Prescott’s offices with his game-face on, his client’s reaction threw him completely. Prescott read Max’s look and smiled. And the smile had just gotten broader – or as broad as his surgically stretched and botoxed skin would allow – his lips thinning out to near-translucent pink slivers, like elastic bands pulled close to snapping, displaying tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of perfect white teeth. They made Max think of rows of toilet bowls in a showroom.

Before Max could finish running down the details, Prescott asked him if he had any pictures of the couple actually fucking. When he told Prescott no, the client was unmistakably crestfallen.

Max didn’t know what else to do but stay in character and finish off his routine. He got within a breath of cueing up the apology when Prescott waved him silent.

‘This is a good start. A very good start,’ the dentist said.

‘A good start?’

‘You’re to get me more.’

‘More?’

‘Proof.’

‘Proof?’

‘Yes, proof, Mr Mingus. Proof of actual penetration. You know – gonzo shit,’ Prescott said. When Max looked at him nonplussed, he’d made it perfectly clear. ‘Fuck pics. Lots ’n’ lotsa fuck pics. No hidden cameras either. I want the hand-held touch. That herky-jerky feel. And I want them by the end of next month, right in time for Halloween.’

And that was how Max Mingus found himself in a room at the Zurich Hotel.

*

First he’d come to an arrangement with Teddy, the night manager, a red-haired guy with rimless glasses who looked all of eighteen. He and a security guard were the only visible people on duty.

For $400 Teddy told him the couple stayed in Room 30 every Thursday night, between 7 p.m. and 9 p.m., and that Fabiana had booked the place until the end of the year. Max took the room next door for a month.

Rooms 29 and 30 were separated by an adjoining door. Teddy explained that the rooms used to be let out as suites, back when the Zurich catered to families and an older clientele. Max had Teddy give him the key to the adjoining door for another $400. Teddy oiled the squeaks and stiffness out of the hinges for free. Another $400 – with the promise of more later – bought Teddy’s silence, discretion and vigilance.