Voodoo Eyes (6 page)

Over the next year he and Tameka got through most of the Haiti millions. They moved into the penthouse. She had it redecorated. He gave her half a million dollars to start up her own gym. He took her to the Bahamas. First class, five star, everywhere. He took her to Vegas, and lost a fortune at the tables, to Mexico and Rio. He bought her a Mercedes and himself a Porsche. After totalling the Porsche, he bought a Mercedes to go with hers.

Joe saw what was happening and where it was all going. He didn’t like Tameka, felt there was something not quite right about her. He ran her prints. Nothing whatsoever on record, not even a parking ticket to her name. But he trusted his instincts and dug deeper. First there was the teenage daughter she’d left behind in Tucson, Arizona. Then the boyfriend in Miami Springs, the one she visited every other day, the one she was giving Max’s money to. His name was Hector Givens. He’d done time in Arizona for an insurance scam.

When Joe told Max, he didn’t believe him and got seriously pissed. Then he went round to Givens’s condo and Tameka opened the door, wearing one of the Chanel towels he’d bought her. She didn’t even bother denying it. He was the biggest dumbass of all, she told him, if he hadn’t so much as suspected what was going on: the only reason her fine ass was with him was money, honey. He told her she was a great actress and a complete bitch. She gave him a weird smile – a smirking grimace he interpreted as sadistic glee – and then slammed the door. Hector came after him with a tyre iron, yelling something about how he couldn’t be calling his woman a gold-digging bitch, or whatever it was he’d said to her. Max busted Hector’s front teeth with one punch and his jaw with another. He thought of going back and doing the same to Tameka, but he didn’t hit women. Instead he went to a bar on Ocean Drive, got too wasted to walk and tripped down some stairs on the way to the bathroom.

He came to in hospital. Broken collar bone, broken left arm, broken leg, Joe standing there with a bowl of grapes and two sets of news: Tameka and Givens had split town for places unknown, and the Twin Towers had just come down in New York. It was September 11, 2001.

When he got out of hospital, Max vowed never to drink, smoke or take drugs again, and if a woman that hot ever so much as smiled at him, he’d make sure he vetted her before he smiled back.

He moved back into the Key Biscayne house. He had trouble sleeping and his healing bones were causing him pain. He took pills for both. On December 19, he woke up on the sidewalk, being slapped awake by a paramedic. His house and the house next door had gone up in flames. How he’d gotten out – or who’d gotten him out – he didn’t know. Investigators later said the next-door neighbour had doused himself and his house in gasoline and set himself ablaze.

They told Max he was lucky to be alive. He wasn’t so sure. The fire had taken almost everything from him. His money was gone, as were every single one of his physical memories of Sandra, which hurt the most. Police later gave him back the only things they’d been able to salvage from the ruins – two photographs: one of him and Sandra on their wedding day in 1985, and the other of Solomon Boukman holding a gun to his head in Haiti in 1996.

There was a kind of sick symmetry to that, he had to admit, the way the fire had taken everything but those two pictures. He’d met Sandra around the time he’d been drawn into Solomon Boukman’s orbit. She died the year Boukman had been released from prison and deported to Haiti.

Solomon Boukman …
Christ.

Thinking about him sent fresh chills down long-distance wires. Max had been as good as broken by that case, the career-maker turned career-ender – the proverbial abyss he’d stared into and seen his true reflection winking back at him. He’d always thought that was some smartass bullshit made up to dodge the burden of personal responsibility, but the truth of it hit him right between the eyes in the shape of Boukman.

Boukman was into everything big and illegal in Miami in his heyday: drugs, prostitution, gambling, extortion, gun-running, money laundering – the works. Yet he was more than the sum of his crimes and the multi-million-dollar organisation that he ran. He used voodoo, black magic and extreme violence to control his people and to keep anyone who ever heard his name in a state of fear. He practised human sacrifice. He zombified his enemies with potions and hypnosis and used them as weapons – his very own suicide killers. And he turned himself into a myth, an urban legend in his own lifetime, a spook story parents told their kids at night to terrify them into goodness. Newly arrived Haitians swore Boukman was the earthly incarnation of Baron Samedi, the voodoo god of death. Others said he was the Devil incarnate because he’d been seen in multiple places at the same time. Most agreed that he was a shapeshifter – he could transform his appearance at will, from a young Californian blonde woman to an old black man, and everything in between. No one knew what he really looked like. Or so went the whispers on the street.

In reality, he was just a man – albeit a clever, manipulative, evil man who dressed himself up as a superstition and played on fear.

Max and Joe caught Boukman in 1981. They’d chased him through Little Haiti, Boukman bleeding from a cut femoral artery. Boukman had collapsed inside a disused building. Max had tied off the wound and given him mouth-to-mouth. Then they’d taken him in.

A year later, Boukman was tried, found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to death. In court he refused to take the stand and said absolutely nothing throughout his trial, until Max had finished giving his testimony. Then Boukman had locked eyes with Max and broke his silence for the one and only time: ‘You give me reason to live,’ he said.

Those words had haunted Max for a good long while. Boukman’s quiet, hissy murmur lodged in some corner of his mind, echoing back at him. He hadn’t understood what the Haitian meant then. Was it a threat, a promise or the desperate bluster of a sinking man? He’d tried to let it go, tried reasoning with himself. But the case had gotten to him, fucked him up good. When Max and Joe were closing in and Boukman’s grip had started weakening, the Haitian had kidnapped Max, tortured him, zombified him and then put a gun in his hand and turned him loose on Eldon and Joe.

In his dreams, Max had relived those memories and woken up screaming, reaching for his cigarettes, his booze, his tranqs. One by one, Sandra got rid of the pacifiers until the only thing he could reach out for when he woke in terror was her. She held him and soothed him back to sleep, telling him it was just a bad dream, that Boukman was long gone, that dreams always passed. And she was right.

Over time the nightmares faded.

Then Max went to prison.

And Sandra died a year before he was released.

Which was why he’d taken the job in Haiti – where he’d last encountered Boukman, unwittingly, unknowingly.

Although he’d been on death row, awaiting the outcome of his penultimate appeal, Boukman had been deported back to Haiti in 1995. The year before, the US had invaded the country to restore its deposed president in the name of democracy. Someone somewhere in Washington had decided to take the opportunity to free up the prisons, by very quietly deporting all Haitian criminals taking up valuable cell space. As Boukman was not an American citizen, he got a plane ride home, the argument being that it was cheaper to ship him than to kill him. At the time, Haiti had no prisons, no courts and no police, just the occupying US Army, and it was too busy stopping the country from sliding into anarchy to play cop. So when they arrived back home, the expelled criminals were set free, unleashed on their vulnerable, near destitute countrymen like starving wolves in a sheep pen. No checks, no balances, no one in authority even crossing their fingers.

Max had been at a club outside Port-au-Prince, when Boukman had crept up behind him, taken his gun out of his holster and held it to his head, smiling. Someone had snapped the picture.

The photograph later turned up in one of the two bags he carried that $20 million reward home in. Boukman had written him a message on the back: ‘You give me reason to live.’

Max
still
didn’t get what he meant, but he knew one thing for sure: Boukman didn’t want to kill him. He’d had ample opportunity to get to him in Haiti and he hadn’t.

So as far as Max was concerned, it was over.

He’d put the partially burned photograph in a safety deposit box and tossed the key into the ocean.

In 2002 Max went back to work as a private detective. He put an ad in the
Herald
and set up a website. He got his first call within a week, a woman who wanted to know if he handled divorce cases. He figured he was well qualified, so said, yes, how could he help.

Insurance paid out $350,000 on the house. It was all the money he had left.

4

Max made himself a four-shot espresso with Bustelo coffee and took the brew into his office. He sat down, turned on his computer and waited for it to power up. His desk was otherwise bare, save a phone and a framed photograph of him with the Liston family taken the previous Christmas. Since splitting with Tameka, he’d spent almost every public holiday and birthday with them. Joe’s kids called him ‘Uncle Max’.

The penthouse’s workspace looked out on the city – a spray of multi-coloured lights caught in the burnt-ochre wash of thousands of street lamps. He could see all the way to the illuminated towers that formed the Downtown skyline. In a few hours the same view would become a dull, flat sweep of hard greys and beiges, concrete, glass and extinguished neon. For somewhere so famous and popular, Miami was short on memorable landmarks. It had nothing that instantly defined it, no cultural shorthand symbol – no Statue of Liberty, no White House, no Hollywood sign. It was just beaches, hotels and palm trees – any ocean resort anywhere hot and affluent. Maybe that was the point. Maybe that was all there really was. A blank canvas. Miami was what you made of it.

Max called Emerson Prescott’s cell. He left a message asking his client to call him, and followed it up with an email. It was the way he operated, confirming everything in writing just in case he got sued.

When he was done, he checked his inbox.

Nothing.

*

The following morning Max stood on the gym steps and looked up and down 7th Avenue. Boarded-up stores on either side, a row of burned-out or boarded-up houses opposite. Beyond them a long stretch of open ground, all dirt, wild untended grass and piled trash.

Eldon had been shot around midday on Tuesday October 28. Broad daylight. Someone must have seen or heard something.

Or had they?

In a place like Liberty City, where a wrong look could land you in a sea of shit, people tended to mind their own business, which meant they saw and heard only what they wanted to and nothing else.

Then there was the triggerman. With his skills, he’d be nothing less than a consummate pro. He would have calculated his ins and outs, checked for regular passers-by, gone in when it was quietest. He wouldn’t have drawn attention to himself. People might have noticed him but no one would remember him.

So, Max guessed, that made the hitman black and – from the crime-scene photos of Eldon’s face – slightly over six foot tall.

It wasn’t much, but it was a start.

He crossed the road to look at the gym. A faded mural covered the outside, the faces of all the fighters who’d won titles, most of them local kids. It had been a point of pride for them to come by, years later, and see themselves still up there, a reminder of their achievements. Something to show their kids or impress their girlfriends with. The press said this was why the gym had remained unscathed in the riots of the 1980s, but that wasn’t altogether true. Rage wasn’t big on nostalgia. The main reason it hadn’t been looted and torched was that a lot of people in Liberty City had been scared of Eldon and what he could do. Simple as that. Max searched for his own face on the wall. He found it again quite easily, the only white face there. Not a bad likeness of how he’d once been.

He headed left, determined to talk to the first person he found.

He met no one. Midday, Friday, Halloween, and it was completely deserted. Not the natural stillness of a Sunday or a public holiday, where people stayed home to relax or left town to visit their relatives, but an abiding desolation that had settled on the area, as if it had been hastily abandoned in the face of a plague or other calamity. He passed more rows of empty houses with clusters of boarded-up stores in-between. Nothing was open, nothing was working. He half-expected to see tumbleweed bouncing across the road.

After ten minutes he came across two little girls standing on the sidewalk, identical twins in matching clothes – black T-shirts emblazoned with a picture of a smiling man cradling two babies in his arms. Max noted the family resemblance before noticing what was written around the photograph:

Pookie Brown. 1985–2008. We Will Always Luv U.

The girls stared up at him with the kind of look locals always gave cops, white ones in particular. The cops even had a name for it: the Liberty Clock. The look was one part suspicion, one part hostility, two parts fear, undercut with a resigned weariness. The girls already resembled little adults. He smiled at them and said, ‘Hi’, but they backed away, looks intensifying. It made him sad – for them and for their future – to see in their faces that long history of hatred and resentment, handed down in the DNA and whispered in the wind that blew through these wretched streets. It was said that the sound of gunfire was so common in Liberty City, kids could tell calibre by ear and knew to hit the deck before they could walk and talk.

He continued up the road. He noticed how grass and weeds were growing tall and wild through cracks in the sidewalk, how nature was exploding with abandon around the vacant buildings. It felt like the neighbourhood was gradually being dismantled from below, to be sucked back into the earth.

A little further on he heard the sweet sound of Al Green singing ‘Belle’, and he followed it all the way to the open entrance of a bookstore called Swopes.