Voodoo Eyes (5 page)

‘I can’t help you on this, Joe,’ he said. ‘I’m not a cop any more. I’m little people.’

‘We’d be working this thing together.’

‘How? No way am I getting inside headquarters. Not even with a visitor’s pass. My name’s mud there.’

‘I’d do all the database stuff. Look at the forensics reports, the ballistics. You’d canvass the street.’

Max choked back a laugh.

‘Canvass the street –
me?
Here? Doing the door to door? What kind of plan is
that?
People don’t talk to cops here. And they sure as hell ain’t gonna talk to some white guy
used
to be a cop in the bad old days.’

‘It’d just be for a week. Maybe two. At the most. See what you find out,’ said Joe. ‘If you turn up any information, better still an eye-wit, let me know, and I’ll handle it from there.’

‘What are you going to do?’

‘I’m trying to stop a murder being pinned on someone who didn’t do it. Because that’s what Ricon’s working on right now – getting himself a yo in the frame. If I can get information that contradicts his, well, I’ll find a way of using it and stopping this. What you say, Max? Look into it. One more time. You and me. Born to Run.’

‘Bruce
fucken’
Springsteen!’ Eldon had christened the pair of them ‘Born to Run’ after the poster of the album cover he’d seen on his daughter’s bedroom wall.

Joe stood a little closer to the spot where Eldon had fallen. Just then he looked old, tired and completely out of his depth. Max knew that Joe wouldn’t let this one go, as long as he could do something about it. His friend was tilting at one windmill too far now. He didn’t have the heart to tell him.

‘Can I think about it?’ said Max.

‘What’s there to think about?’ Joe turned around, looking plain pissed off. ‘A couple of weeks is all I’m asking. Two
weeks,
Max. What are you doing now? Chasing after more bedhoppers?’

‘As a matter of fact, yeah. This case I’m on has gone weirdsville.’

‘A case? You call this crap you’re doing a
case?
This – what we’ve got here – Eldon Burns.
Dead. Murdered.
That’s a
case,
Max. Some guy banging some chick young enough to be his daughter ain’t no case. That’s just some horny middle-aged asshole should know better. A
case.
Damn! Listen to yourself. You were one of the great ones. Now you’re just living on your knees.’

Joe stared at Max. Liston had contempt in his eyes. A lot of anger. He used to scare the living shit out of suspects by giving them that very look. Max finally had an idea how they must have felt. Joe had never before passed judgement on the way he made his money. The hint of disapproval had been there though, whenever their conversation turned to work.

They’d been friends for close to forty years. Twelve years together as cops. They’d been something then, the two of them, Max thought. A great team. And Joe was
still
something. He had every ounce of his integrity. He’d never compromised, never looked the other way, never cut corners, never taken money. Max had no integrity. It hadn’t been prison that had broken him. It hadn’t even been his wife’s death. It was what had come afterwards – the mess he’d made of his life. Fate had thrown him a line and he’d made of it a noose.

That was why he didn’t want to look into Eldon’s murder. He felt so defiled, so removed from everything he’d once been good at and taken pride in, that he didn’t think he could do it any more.

Joe turned away from him and went over to the door of the gym. He opened it wide and stepped aside, as though asking Max to leave for good. Outside, it was pitch black. They heard crickets in the air.

Max walked through the open door and turned to look back at the gym, as if in valediction.

The last time he’d seen Eldon alive was here, almost ten years ago, on December 18, 1998. There’d been a function, a reunion of the old MTF crew, and everyone who was still alive or healthy enough had turned up. Max had had a lot to overcome before deciding to go. Sure, he was grateful to Eldon for protecting him in prison, but his old boss reminded him of the past – a past he spent a small part of every day wishing he could change, and the rest of those same days trying to live down. Max and Eldon had never spoken about the things they’d done. Max had never bothered even trying to bring it up, because Eldon would have thought he was wearing a wire and clammed up; and after he’d patted him down and found he was clean, he would have chewed out his former protégé for being a born-again pussy and clammed up even harder. That was Eldon through and through, always had been – a brick wall; his way or no way.

Max had walked into the gym that day in December, but he hadn’t gotten much further than the doorway. He’d looked around and spotted the familiar faces, some withered and soured with age and bad living, others bloated with success, a few looking pretty much the way he remembered them, give or take thinner hair and a few extra wrinkles. Every single one of them had blood on their hands. Every single one of them had gotten away with murder. And him? He was just the newest arrival, the baddest of them all, the tip of the MTF spear.

His former colleagues gradually noticed him and, one by one, they fell quiet, until the gym was silent. Then someone started clapping. And soon everyone joined in. More than that – they stamped their feet and called out his name and whistled and cheered. He was the returning hero, the prodigal son, the last of the Miami gunfighters taking a final bow. He’d felt sick. They weren’t just celebrating him, they were revelling in everything they’d once been and everything they’d done – the planted evidence, the coerced confessions, the perjury, the hundreds of wrongful convictions, the killings – the eternal ‘make it stick, make it fit’ credo. No guilt, no conscience, no accountability.

Then Eldon had stepped out of the crowd and come over to him, smiling, arms open in expectant embrace. Max had suddenly thought of Sandra and how she’d hated Burns. It was in part because of her that he’d left the force. She would never have married him otherwise. He’d seen her face again then, right in front of him, clear as day. He’d frozen up and stepped back. Eldon had dropped his smile and his arms.

They’d managed a polite but awkward conversation, Eldon trying to make inroads, trying to draw Max back, Max retreating, all short sentences, monosyllables, grunts. Finally Eldon had given up on formality and held out his hand to say goodbye.

‘You were one of the great ones,’ he’d said.

Those were the last words he spoke to Max. Same thing Joe had said to him just now, almost in the same damn spot too.

Max headed for his car. He thought about what he’d be doing tomorrow, next week, and for as long as he could hang on. It was all about that now, hanging on – hanging on to a job he hated, hanging on until he’d put enough money away so he wouldn’t wind up a homeless bum on the beach.

He thought of Joe about to go off on a crusade, getting justice for someone he’d despised, because it was the right thing to do, because that was what he did, what he felt he was here for.

What did he think he was doing, walking away?

Joe was his friend.

Eldon had been his friend.

He owed Eldon.

He owed Joe.

He closed his eyes and looked for his wife, Sandra. She wasn’t there.

It was on him.

His decision.

It was OK.

He could do this.

One more time.

Born to Run.

He turned around.

Joe was standing outside the gym, looking at him. He’d either been watching him disappear or waiting around in case he changed his mind – probably knowing that he would, that this was something he couldn’t pass up.

3

Max went home to his beachfront penthouse on Collins Avenue. He’d paid half a million bucks for it in 1997. It was the only smart investment he’d made – or so he’d thought at the time. Shortly after he moved in, Miami had become a magnet for the hip and the beautiful and property value rocketed to the sort of ridiculous levels not seen since the cocaine boom. Now, as then, things had changed.

The economy was in freefall, banks were failing, businesses were going to the wall and house prices were crashing. The country was being sucked feet first into a new Depression and Miami was hopscotching around the plughole.

The penthouse was on the fourteenth floor, and in the evenings he liked to sit outside on the balcony, facing the ocean. When he listened in on the waves and felt the fresh, salty air on his face, he could empty his head and find something close to peace.

Inside, behind the thick floor-to-ceiling windows, it was dark, quiet and practically empty. In the daytime, the sun would pour in, its beams warming the dark mahogany floors, drawn to them like feathers to an oil slick, blunting and dulling the light in the penthouse. It gave the room a graphite tinge. A few pieces of furniture stood off to the far right, almost hidden in shadow, as if abandoned or moved to maximise the vast remaining space.

Max hadn’t done any entertaining nor had any visitors here in quite a while – not since going on the eighteen-month-long bender that had put him in hospital and cost him the bulk of his fortune and his self-respect.

In December 1996 he came back from Haiti with $20 million in drug money. It was payment for finding a missing child. He should have been all right then, set for life, but things hadn’t worked out that way.

He didn’t know what to do with the money. The only time he’d ever been near that much was as a cop on drug raids. By the time he’d left the Miami PD, traffickers were making so much cash they were literally buying up fields to bury it in. The cops built mini-mountain ranges out of the seized cash and had their pictures taken next to them. Some made the pictures into personalised greetings cards.

He knew he couldn’t put the money in a bank because questions would be asked and he’d be investigated – by the police, the FBI and the IRS. They’d confiscate the money and put him on a shitlist. He didn’t need the hassle.

He bought a safe, which he installed in the house on Key Biscayne he’d shared with Sandra. He planned on staying there the rest of his life, close to the physical memories of his wife. While he was in prison, she had kept the place looking exactly the same, probably so that when he came out he’d have something familiar to return to and build upon. She’d died of a brain haemorrhage a year before his release. He’d found her clothes still in the wardrobe and chest of drawers, a faint trace of perfume weaving through the fabric. In dreams he’d be lying next to her, holding her, listening to her breathing. In the mornings he woke up with his arms folded over empty space. He went to her graveside every Sunday with fresh flowers; he sat on a hunting stool and read one of her many books to her. Rain or shine. Life was simple. No one would replace Sandra, so he hadn’t bothered looking, hadn’t given it any thought.

He placed $6 million in trust funds for Joe Liston’s kids: $2 million for Jet, $1 million apiece for the others. They couldn’t access it until they were thirty. He reasoned that they’d be mature enough by then to handle the money responsibly.

In 1997 he met Yolande Pétion, a Haitian-American ex-cop, at Joe’s house. She talked about opening a private detective agency in Miami’s Little Haiti devoted to handling local cases. They went into business together. Max put up the capital for an office. They called it Pétion-Mingus Investigations.

The agency was Max’s way of giving something back to Haiti, the country and the people who’d made him rich – and of turning bad money to good. After a slow start, the clientele started coming in. They handled everything from insurance jobs to missing persons. They cleared every case. Then, in August 1999, Yolande was shot and killed after surprising burglars at her home. Jewellery, credit cards and cash were missing from her house.

Max closed down the agency.

He turned fifty in March the following year. Joe threw him a surprise party. They went to a stripclub. He felt uncomfortable being there, all that gyrating bare flesh. He thought of the five years he’d been grieving. He started drinking some of the overpriced cheap champagne. It went straight to his head. He loosened up and a smile came to his face. By evening’s end he was wasted and smoking cigarettes, a girl grinding her bare ass on his crotch, him getting aroused as hell, her asking him how bad he wanted her, him saying bad as hell, baby, bad as hell. They negotiated a fee.

The big five-o hit him hard. He knew he’d never be young again, and that he only had a limited amount of time left to enjoy life before his body started falling apart. Winter was tuning up. He didn’t want to add on more regrets and let potential good times pass him by. He had a lot of money, and he still had his health and some of his looks.

All those things he supposedly couldn’t do any more he did as much as possible. He carried on smoking, sparingly at first, no more than five or six a day. But he soon rediscovered that bygone comfort in nicotine and the routine of addiction: it was something to organise his aimless life around. He started drinking again too. And chasing after women.

Then he fell in love.

Tameka Barber.

Or Hurricane Tameka, as Joe later called her.

They met in May 2000. She was a trainer at his gym. A six-foot-tall ebony goddess, fit, muscular, lean, beautiful. He deliberately took her abs class to have a pretext to talk to her, noticing the red rose tattoo on her ankle, the other on her right breast, when she bent over. He liked her wicked smile and the laugh that went with it, a knowing, earthy cackle, three parts sex, one part danger. Eventually he asked her out and they got together. On paper it didn’t look too bad – she was thirty-seven (although she looked ten years younger, thanks to a healthy lifestyle). In public, however, they looked like the typical Miami Beach couple – the rich, bald old white man with his young, statuesque exotic trophy squeeze. It couldn’t be helped. It was what it was.

They had some great times. The sex was wild – intense, gymnastic and inventive. He found it went even better with coke – which he’d only ever tried once before. He fell in love and told her so. She said she loved him too. He contemplated marrying her. She told him he’d make a good dad.