Octopus Alibi (2 page)

Sam once wisecracked, “If you or I ever go broke, we can blame domestic taxes and imported beer.”

His one-liner was going south. Along with my bank balance.

*   *   *

At ten after twelve a white cab rolled into the morgue’s parking lot. The woman at the wheel yelled, “Yo, you Rutledge?”

I nodded.

“We waitin’ on somebody?”

I nodded again.

“Man inside saw your cab leave. Happens a lot, they call for another one, they call for me. Your friend got a relative in there?”

“That’s what they told him.”

“You’re on the clock, honey. Damn, you’re a tall one.” She shut off her motor, dropped the keys in her shirt pocket, pulled out a box of Benson & Hedges. She had yanked her hair into a ponytail and was dressed twenty years younger than her face, fighting time. She had spent a few years on the beach, or smoking had parched her skin. Probably both.

“Cross your fingers,” she said. She fired a cigarette, held it high so the smoke wouldn’t blow my way. In her other hand she held the cigarette box and a Bic pinched between her thumb and two fingers. She waved that hand toward the building. “They’ve been wrong in there before.”

“You don’t look as nervous as the man who brought us here.”

“Black man?”

“Yes.”

“They’re immigrants from the voodoo league of nations. They’re afraid that their spirits will escape to the morgue, or their souls will be ravaged to the sound of a hundred batá drums. Or, worse yet, dead people walking—zombies and fire hags—will dance a
rada
in their rearview mirrors. This is the tissues-and-sympathy hack. I get sent here a lot.”

“You deal with it okay?”

She waved again, toward the flagpole. “I used to work inside a door that’s inside that door. I saw what came through the back, the sad messes they off-loaded. I never got used to it, but it didn’t weird me out. When I was inside, I taught myself not to react, not to have feelings. I don’t know how I did that, I really don’t. Looking back, I worry about that part of me. I worry about it more than ghosts or bad luck or whatever.”

“So it’s immigrants fighting their imaginations?”

She nodded and inhaled hard, sucked smoke down to her knees, then picked a nonexistent tobacco flake off her tongue. Old habits hang in.

“Imagination can be more powerful than reality,” I said.

“They’d be shitless for sure if they ever saw the real thing.” The smoke leaked from her lungs as she spoke. She patted the taxi’s roof. “The heat of the day, in nutso Gold Coast traffic, this job is heaven. Take my word.”

“Heaven?”

“Well, raw heaven.”

*   *   *

Sam stepped out of the building, flinched, and put on his sunglasses. He walked toward us without expression. His walk carried more resolve, as if he had reached a decision, promised himself a course of action.

“You hungry?” he said.

The question surprised me. “Are you?”

“It was somebody’s sister, but not mine. Fish sandwich okay?”

I shrugged.

Sam asked our driver to take us to Ernie’s Restaurant.

“Eighteen-hundred block of South Federal,” she said, then looked me in the eye. She had told me that people behind those doors sometimes got it wrong. She wanted to win her point.

I nodded, and silently gave it to her.

2

T
WENTY MINUTES LATER OUR
cabdriver pulled into the restaurant lot. She turned to Sam, pulled an unlit cigarette from above her right ear. “Be careful, buddy,” she said. “I used to work in that county lab. Six years, and I seen it all. The news you got sounds good, but you didn’t win no lottery. I’ll tell you why. Unless you’re one in a thousand, you went into the grieving process, and coming out unscathed isn’t automatic.”

Wheeler pulled out his wallet. “I don’t feel this way because I skipped breakfast?”

“Was your sister’s ID on the body? Current ID, photo of the victim?”

“Nothing current. Her Social Security card, a copy of her birth certificate, a few photos, personal papers. Stuff no one ever carries around.”

“No valid driver’s license, no unexpired credit cards?”

He shook his head.

The woman bit her upper lip and nodded. “You look like the kind of guy, you can handle straight talk. Take it from an old hand, for what it’s worth. This ain’t scientific, but it’s up here.” She tapped her forehead. “The doctors call it empirical evidence. Better than fifty-fifty, your grieving might be right on. You follow me?”

Sam paid our fare, opened his door, then turned and looked her in the eye. “You mind if I ask your name?”

She pointed to the license on the passenger-side visor. “Irene Jones. Unique handle, eh? The assholes at the morgue used to call me ‘Goodnight Irene.’ I guess that’s not the most sensitive thing to say to you right now.”

Sam waved it off. She asked his name and he told her.

We walked past a military-straight row of newspaper, real-estate-flyer, and coupon-pamphlet boxes. Sam said, “Let’s hope the place smells like grease. I want this stench out of my nose.”

Inside the restaurant’s door, a dozen people waited for tables. Sam gave the greeter his name. She ignored the line, led us to a remote booth, and took our drink order. Sam ordered us two beers apiece.

“Preferential treatment?” I said.

Sam said, “We’ve got a meeting when the local fuzz gets here. Macho boy, said he’d buy our food, which is unlike a cop. I have no idea what he wants. He said to try the conch chowder.”

“Local knowledge is good,” I said.

We watched a server spritz a vacant glass-top table as if he owned stock in Windex. The mist floated our way, made us grateful our drinks and food hadn’t arrived yet. I let Sam have his quiet, his time to consider what might come next. I figured he was pondering the “straight talk” from the woman in the taxi.

Detective Odin Marlow showed up four minutes later. I spotted the red polo shirt and muscular build immediately. He was the deputy I had seen in the morgue lot. He clutched a box of Benson & Hedges in his left hand. The pack and a Bic, just like Goodnight Irene Jones. Sliding a breath mint into his mouth, Marlow introduced himself as “BSO, CIU,” as if the initials meant big stuff to us. He wore a badge. That said it all. The greeter appeared with an iced tea, made special with two straws and two lemon slices on the rim. She put the glass down, gave the deputy a flirtatious sneer.

Marlow took his tea, then said, “Mr. Rutledge, you mind sitting over there? I’m a lefty. I’ll bump your arm fifty times while I’m eating.”

He didn’t give a crap about arm bumping. He wanted to face us and not worry about his gun being next to my hand. Sam slid over so I could fit on his bench. Marlow placed his cigarettes and lighter on the table as if they were ceremonial objects and settled into the booth. He smelled like a sniff sample in a fancy magazine. He wore a diamond pinky ring and an antique Gubelin watch on a leather strap. One more piece of jewelry and his department’s internal team would be on his butt. The men at the top don’t like to see their boys display wealth. Perhaps Marlow had shown his supervisor a receipt for zirconium. Maybe that’s how they all dress in Lauderdale.

The server took our food order, and Marlow started right in. “We found her out in District Eight, in what we call the I-75 Corridor, the extension of 595. You got your housing developments popping up like palmettos, your wealthy folk from south of the Gulf Stream, most of them from south of the equator. Where they come from, you know, they’re kidnap targets, they can’t shop, can’t spend their money. It’s low profile for survival. This is the comfort life. They got their Expeditions, their cable TV, slate tile floors, the built-in vacuum cleaner systems, pools, the malls, red tile roofs. They also got public schools, no more political strife, no more family security guards.”

Sam said, “This has to do with a dumped murder victim?”

“The last thing they want in their new neighborhood is a body. I got no proof, but I say no way this was Latino connected…”

Neither Sam nor I had suggested such a connection.

“… and that improves our chances of solving this thing. Bumps it up from one percent to, say, three percent. So we know it’s not your sister. All we got is fingerprints and a dental imprint, which, with women, who are less often in jail and rarely in the military, drops our chances back to two percent. Take into account, women change their names when they get married, we’re back below the one percent chance.”

“That relates to the victim,” said Sam. “Let’s go sideways. What’re the odds my sister’s alive?”

“I hate to use the word ‘zilch,’ but here’s how it works. Criminals working credit scams swipe names from the living. People who want new identities grab names from the dead.”

“And here we’ve got…”

“New identities go to people hiding from the law, or hiding from partners they’ve screwed over, or hiding from abusive spouses.”

“So, if I found old dental records for my sister…”

“Don’t even think about it. It’s bad enough looking for a name to match a body. Working backward don’t cut it.”

“You don’t call a slim chance better than none?” said Sam.

“I know where you’re coming from. The M.E.’s investigators called you in, got you jacked up, put you on a mission. Before you knew it wasn’t her, you were thinking ‘eye for an eye’ to even the score. Call it a private retribution. You figured you owed your dead sister that much. Am I correct?”

“Was it a robbery?” said Sam.

Marlow shook his head. “You’d find high-end clothing. Tan lines where the watch and the rings are gone. This victim, she was a WalMart customer. She was small change. She was a poor target. I’d guess revenge, or she knew too much about bad people. Or, like I said, spousal abuse.”

Sam shrugged, wandered off in his thoughts.

No one spoke as our food arrived. We began to eat. Marlow shifted gears. “Tell me about that island of yours,” he said. “You really like Key West?”

Sam didn’t look up from his food. “Other than the military, not many people live there because they’re forced to.”

“It’s been years since I’ve been south of Florida City. Key West was full of gays and people smoking dope on the beach. That still the deal?”

“It’s strange down there,” said Sam. “And loud. Chain saws, cockatoos, straight pipes, roosters, and sirens. You’d probably hate it, Officer Marlow. Don’t waste your gas money.”

The detective gave Sam a minute of silence, then said, “It’s
Detective
Marlow, and I’m reading your mind.”

“It’s blank,” said Sam.

“You were thinking of ways, and don’t tell me it ain’t true. You’re riding revenge energy. Nine times out of ten we appreciate that type of reaction. It reduces our job load. Ten times out of ten we bust you for it.”

“I’m not the violent type.”

“You may not be the type, but you were a paratrooper. You’re the right age, you pulled a tour in Southeast Asia. It’s my guess you were trained for … what did they call them, contingencies? So you find out it ain’t her. You shift your mission, you try some freelance snooping. We like that about the same as two-bit vigilante work.”

“Think what you want.”

Marlow pulled a ballpoint and a tiny Spiral pad from his trouser pocket. “When’s the last time you saw her?”

“’Eighty-six.”

The detective stared at Sam. “All these years, could she have found you? How long you lived in the same place?”

“Since ’eighty-one, the same place. My number’s in the book.”

Marlow stared at his pen, then began to snap it back and forth between the two bottles in front of Sam. The pen was not for writing. It was a prop, and the cop had taken notice of Sam’s desire for two beers. “So if she had gone online, clicked ‘People Search,’ typed your name, you’d have popped up on her screen?”

Sam nodded, shrugged again.

He said, “You got pictures of her?”

“Nope.”

The pen went to the edge of the table, its use as a prop expended. “We wanted to let you know, ask your cooperation. We’re gonna run a squib in the
Sun-Sentinel
, announce that the body was ID’d as your sister. It could work for both of us. I’ll maybe learn something about the victim, and you’ll maybe connect with a lost relative. The squib won’t show up in Miami. It won’t show in the Keys. We plan to keep it strictly local.”

Marlow went to a vacant expression, waited for Sam’s reaction. I didn’t look at Sam, but I knew he wasn’t showing emotion, either.

Marlow found another prop, a subtle distraction. He used a french fry to trace designs in his remaining ketchup. “Your own sister,” he said, “and not a single photo? Can I ask why?”

Sam looked him in the eye. “You have your methods. I have my limits.”

“Nifty answer. What’s it mean?”

“You want to blow her out of the weeds. I’d like to coax her out.”

“Look at it this way,” said Marlow. “Her fifteen years to find you goes the other way. You’ve had fifteen years to find her. I take it you haven’t tried.”

Sam shrugged.

“And you’re worried about her picture in the paper?”

Sam nudged me. “What do you think, Alex?”

“There’s more to gain than lose,” I said. “But if she’s alive, could it put her in danger?”

Marlow leaned toward Wheeler. “This guy your roadie?”

Sam said, “No, my witness.”

“You got a business card?”

Sam pulled out his wallet and handed one to the man.

The detective read the card, stood, snatched his cigarettes. “Do yourself a favor, Captain Wheeler. Do like you’ve been doing since Ron and Nancy were in Washington. Wait for her to call. Thanks for the club sandwich. You’ll find a taxi out front in five minutes.”

Marlow sucked in air, tensed the muscles in his chest, then walked from the table. Ten feet away he hesitated, then looked back at me. “The watch was my father’s,” he said. “Right to the day he died, he was police chief in Greenwich, Connecticut.”

Marlow exchanged patter with two waitresses on his way out.

“Real sweetie,” said Sam.

“His next smoke was more important than our talk,” I said. “He neglected to ask if you had other brothers or sisters.”