Sideswipe (31 page)

The pantyhose robber with the empty gun had died instantly. His partner with the sawed-off shotgun had wounded Ellita Sanchez and murdered four store employees for what was estimated to be less than twenty thousand dollars.

CHAPTER 17

The supermarket robbery-massacre got considerable play in the Miami press and on the radio and television stations. Very little information was released to the media by the Homicide Division, but pictures were printed in the papers, and the headline, SUPER-MASSACRE AT SUPERMARKET, frightened everyone who read it, especially old-line Miamians. The story revealed that all of the victims were white, Protestants, and native-born Americans. There had been mini-massacres in Miami before, with four or five men and their women and children killed all at once, but those victims had been Colombians, or other Latins, or blacks; and usually they had been connected in some way with the drug industry or with organized crime. These innocent victims, on the other hand, were not only white, they were respectable middle-class people, and all of them were residents of the predominantly native-born Green Lakes subdivision.

The night manager, Victor Persons, forty-five, was married, the father of three children, and a paid soloist on Sunday evenings at the Green Lakes Methodist Church.

His assistant, Ms. Julia Riordan, fifty-eight, was a former schoolteacher who had taught fourth grade in Dade County, at various schools, for twenty-two years. According to one of her Green Lakes neighbors, she had retired under the old Florida Retirement System, before Social Security had been withheld from teachers' pay, and she had taken the night-shift job at the supermarket so she could build up enough credits to obtain a second retirement from the Social Security system when she reached sixty-two. The gruesome photographs of Mr. Persons and Ms. Riordan beside the open safe, which appeared in both Miami papers, though not on television, brought dozens of angry letters to the editors of both papers, protesting their publication.

Sally Metcalf, twenty-three, the blonde checker, or "scanner-assistant," as her position was called by the supermarket chain (her job, apparently, was to assist the electronic scanner in its task), had been a member of the Miami-Dade Community College's South Campus volleyball team before she graduated, and she was engaged to be married to her high school sweetheart as soon as he finished his first hitch at Fort Benning, Georgia.

Randolph Perkins, seventeen, the bag boy, a high school student at Miami-Norland, was remembered by his fellow students as "a real good guy who was always ready with a joke, and liked to kid around alot (sic)." His principal also told the same reporter that Randy had already passed Florida's 11th Grade Achievement Test, and that he had a "very high C average" in all of his classes. There was a black-and-white photograph of four of Randy's buddies and two crying girls in the paper, all of them wearing black ribbons pinned to their T-shirts, in mourning for their classmate.

Fred Pickering, twenty-eight, the produce manager, who had rushed through his closing work at the store so he could leave early to watch a tape of Ghostbusters his wife had rented that afternoon, credited his Sony VCR with saving his life. "God," he told the TV reporter, "evidently has other plans for me!" He broke down, then, on camera, and cried. "Here I was," he sobbed, "laughing my head off at home at -Ghostbusters-, while Ms. Riordan was getting her head blown off down to the store! It could've been me. It could've been me!"

Letters were written to the Cuban-born mayor and to the multi-ethnic members of the city commission. The tone of the letters varied, but the essential message was the same, reminding the commissioners that when they ran for their six-thousand-dollar-a-year seats that they had all claimed that they would serve -all- of the people in Miami if elected, not just their ethnic groups. They were also reminded that WASPs, although they only numbered approximately eight percent of Miami's population, still had a lot of money to spend in future elections.

The mayor and the other members of the commission put considerable pressure on the city manager. The city manager, who had the authority to hire and fire police chiefs, applied even more pressure on the chief of police to find the killers. He, in turn, appointed a Special Task Force to solve this crime, to be headed by Major Willie Brownley. Major Brownley, in turn, made Commander Bill Henderson his operations officer, to coordinate activities, and Bill Henderson, in turn, canceled Hoke Moseley's leave without pay and called him back to do the actual work on the investigation with the help of Detective Speedy Gonzalez.

Hoke and Gonzalez had lots of help from within the division and the department. Ellita, not only because she was a wounded cop, but because of her cheerful disposition and willingness to lend small sums of money, was popular with all of the detectives in the Homicide Division. They volunteered their off-duty time to Hoke the moment their shifts ended. Hoke gave them things to do, like the routine roundup of tall, black holdup men with previous convictions, who were then interrogated about their whereabouts at the time of the robbery-massacre. These interrogations didn't get any concrete results, but were considered necessary to eliminate possible suspects and on the off-chance that some information would turn up.

Gonzalez and Sergeant Armando Quevedo interviewed the day-shift employees at the supermarket, and the day manager quickly identified the dead mulatto's photograph as that of a bag boy he had fired for stealing a couple of months back. The man's name, according to the three-byfive employment card, was John Smith, but the roominghouse address on the card did not exist, and the Social Security number on the card belonged to a forty-sevenyear-old John Smith in Portland, Oregon.

"We don't run background checks on bag boys," the manager said. "They don't handle money, and they come and go too fast. Smith had a Caribbean accent, so maybe he gave us a phony name and Social Security number because he was here in Florida illegally. That sometimes happens with foreigners on student visas, who ain't supposed to work either. All I know about Smith is, he was a thief, and as soon's I spotted him stealing I canned him."

Quevedo then checked the dead man's clothes in the lab with the head technician. Here their luck changed, and they got a valid lead.

Hoke, of course, had to read and cross-check every supplementary report with the others, and the pile of paper mounted hourly on his desk. Hoke's phones, as well as Bill Henderson's, were busy night and day, after the numbers were listed in the newspapers. But Hoke welcomed the activity, knowing, from experience, that it was the kind of things they were doing now that eventually provided a breakthrough in any investigation.

Hoke would have returned to Miami anyway, whether his leave had been canceled or not. He considered himself partly responsible for his partner's injuries. If he had been home instead of trying to "find himself again" up in Singer Island, he would have been the one to go to the store instead of Ellita, and she wouldn't have been wounded. Her face, the surgeon told him, when Hoke talked to him at some length in the hospital, would be okay when the surgery healed. The hole could be filled in with a piece of plastic, and the skin would stretch over it. Except for a small dent, and a fine line across her cheek, which could be camouflaged easily with pancake makeup, no one, unless he looked very closely indeed, would notice the repair work. The arm, unhappily, was a more serious injury, because of the nerve damage. In time, Ellita would regain partial use of her arm, eighty to eighty-five percent perhaps, with a lot of therapy, but the disability meant the end of her career insofar as full-time police work was concerned.

The surgeon would recommend a thirty-percent disability pension for Ellita Sanchez, and because disability pensions paid a higher sum than regular police pensions, Ellita would make almost as much money as she would have made if she had stayed on the force for twenty years. In fact, in the long run, she would make a little more, because she still had eleven years to go for normal retirement, and she would be drawing the disability pension for those eleven years without working. Moreover, the disability payments would continue for the rest of her life, with a three percent COLA every year. She also received a Heroism medal from the Chief of Police, and considerable space in the newspapers.

On the even brighter side, she would be able to stay home and raise her son, and the boy, Pepé Roberto St. Xavier Armando Goya y Goya Sanchez, was a healthy, beautiful blue-eyed baby. And, the surgeon added, he wished that Hoke, if he had any influence with Ellita at all, would ask her to reconsider and let him circumcise the boy before she took him home from the hospital.

Hoke told him that he would think about it, although he didn't intend to say anything about it.

Mr. and Mrs. Sanchez, Ellita's parents, were in Ellita's hospital room when Hoke and Sue Ellen visited her. One or the other had been there every minute since the time she had been brought back to a private room from Recovery. They sat quietly on metal folding chairs beside the bed. Mr. Sanchez, who had disowned his daughter when he had discovered that she was pregnant, still didn't speak to her, but the fact that he was there, and smiled in spite of himself when the baby was brought in for nursing, was a sign that there might be, eventually, some kind of a reconciliation. Hoke shook hands with the tight-lipped Mr. Sanchez, and smiled at Mrs. Sanchez, who merely pursed her lips and shook her head. Hoke kissed Ellita lightly on the forehead.

"Have you seen the baby?" Ellita asked, smiling.

"I sure did. He's a monster with black hair and blue eyes."

"Didn't I tell you he would be a boy?"

"I never doubted it. They wouldn't let Sue Ellen go up there, though, and she's dying to see him."

"She can see him in here, when they bring him back to nurse. But you'll have to leave then."

"I've quit my job, Ellita," Sue Ellen said. "So I'll be there to help you with the baby when you come home."

"You didn't have to do that--"

"It was my idea," Hoke said. "Aileen's coming back from L.A. next Saturday, and she's going to spend the rest of the summer with my dad in Singer Island. Those sisters at the convent straightened her out in a hurry. But she'll be back home when school starts, and the manager at the car wash said Sue Ellen could have her job back anytime she wanted it."

"How's the investigation going?"

Hoke turned to Sue Ellen. "Wait in the waiting room, honey. You can come back when they bring in the baby. Could you ask your parents to leave while we discuss this, Ellita?"

Ellita said something to her parents in Spanish. They didn't reply, but they didn't move, either.

"They won't leave, Hoke." Ellita shrugged. "But they won't repeat anything you say, don't worry."

Sue Ellen went out, closing the door softly behind her.

"The dead guy with the stocking cap was identified," Hoke said. "There was a numbered yellow cleaning tag stapled on his jacket, and I gave it to Sergeant Quevedo to track down. He was on the phone for four hours, tracing itto Bayside Cleaners. He went down there, but they didn't have any slip for the cleaning on file. The woman in the shop, though, a woman from Eleuthera, recognized his picture, because of his little car. He had an old Morris Minor, and when he came in she told him she hadn't seen a car like that since she left Nassau fifteen years ago. They had talked some about the islands, and she remembered that he told her he brought the car from Barbados with him. So Quevedo did some legwork in Bayside, found the mail carrier on the route, and the mailman knew him because he delivered his mail from Barbados. He was living in a garage apartment that belonged to Sidney Shapiro, watching their house while they were up in Maine. His name was James Frietas-Smith, and the little Morris was parked in the yard, all packed up with his stuff, and there were some weird paintings stacked up in the garage. Quevedo called Smith's father in Barbados, and he's going to make some kind of arrangements with a shipping firm to take the body back to the island."

"That was good police work on Quevedo's part."

Hoke grinned. "That's why Quevedo's a sergeant, and also why I'm thinking about sending Gonzalez back to duty in Liberty City. Gonzalez ain't gonna make it as a detective, and he should be back in uniform."

"Give him time, Hoke."

Hoke shrugged. "Anyway, that garage apartment was incredibly clean. The furniture was polished, and you wouldn't believe how neat it was. Not a dirty dish. But there was no evidence of anyone else living there. But that wasn't the main discovery. Quevedo asked Shapiro to come down to see if anything valuable was missing from the big house in front of the garage. Shapiro flew down, and when he and Quevedo went through the house, they found a dead guy and a dead baby rolled up in a carpet in one of the guest bedrooms on the second floor."

"A dead baby? I don't under--"

"The baby, about eighteen months old, had been strangled, but the dead man, a guy named James C. Davis, had been shotgunned. The baby had been kidnapped at Dadeland, and we got an ID from the mother already. They took the car and the baby, and then dumped the car and kept the baby to kill it. Davis was a detail man--"

"A detail man?"

"From a pharmaceutical firm. Lee-Fromach Pharmaceuticals, in New Jersey. A detail man is a guy who goes around and talks to doctors about his products. These guys work alone, you see, and Dade County was Davis's territory. That's why no one reported him missing. He was a bachelor with a pad in the Grove. We found his car, a blue Lincoln town car, parked at a Denny's on Biscayne Boulevard."