The James Deans (20 page)

“You show up on your own. I’m gonna get there ahead of you just to make sure the coast is clear and that he ain’t fucking with us. I’m pretty sure this guy’s on the up-and-up. My sources tell me not to sweat it,” he said in his fifth and final message. “This guy’s a pro, a moneyman. He’s got no use for violence. Bad for business, he says. I’ll see you later.”

I WAS TEN minutes early. The Black Flamingo was an abandoned art deco hotel on the wrong end of Miami Beach. There was nothing unusual in that. The most prominent design features in this part of town seemed to be foreclosure signs. Apparently, the cocaine economy had yet to trickle down to this end of the beach. As seedy as it was, there was a kind of decadent charm to the area, an echo of great things that once were. And the ambient sound of the ocean only added to its down-at-the-heels allure.

There was a gap in the plywood at the back of the old hotel, as Barto had said there would be. In spite of the ex-marshal’s assurances about the remoteness of violence, I felt better for having Mr. Roth’s little .25 in my pocket. There was no getting around it. I’d carried a firearm strapped to some part of my body almost every day going on fifteen years. Although I’d never had occasion to fire a single shot in anger, I felt naked without a gun. Unfortunately, Mr. Roth’s .25 had about as much stopping power as a spitball.

I snapped on my flashlight and stepped through the hole at the back of the hotel into what had been the kitchen. I could see the flickering shadows of candlelight beneath the doors that led out of the kitchen into what I assumed was the dining room. I made my way ahead around the dusty stainless-steel kitchen fixtures. With a flashlight in one hand and my other hand nestled around the .25, I used my right shoulder to push through the double doors.

I used a little too much nervous energy and spilled sideways through the doors. Before I could regain my balance, I stumbled over an old bundle of linens left carelessly in the middle of the floor. Except it wasn’t a bundle of linens at all. I think I knew that even before I hit the ground. The candle blew out.

“Fuck! Barto!” I scrambled to the body, clenching madly at the flashlight. In one panicked motion I flicked the flashlight back on and rolled the body onto its back. “Barto, are you all right?”

Only it wasn’t Barto, and he was as far away from all right as I was from Singapore.

“You’re a little early, Prager. I see you’ve met Gedalia Morenos.” Barto’s voice bounced off the tile floor and plaster walls in the darkness. “He was a big man in Little Havana. He had a special talent for getting
dinero
back to Cuba to help out the families left behind.”

“Like the Alfonsecas, for instance,” I said, trying to keep Barto talking.

“Oh yeah, just like them.”

“So it was you who arranged for Alfonseca to take the fall for Moira’s murder.”

“Too bad you figured that out so late in the game, Prager.”

It was no good. The source of his voice was impossible to locate. But as long as the place stayed dark, I would keep breathing. I pulled the .25 out of my pocket and undid the safety.

If I could buy a little more time to calm myself down, I might have one chance.

“So I was wrong about Spivack,” I called out, pressing my belly to the ground next to Morenos’s body.

“Not completely,” Barto answered in a lower voice that didn’t bounce around the room quite as much. “Using a guy like Alfonseca to take the fall was Joe’s idea, only he wouldn’t go through with it all the way. It was such a good idea, too good to let go to waste.”

“You had no such qualms. Two ex-wives to take care of, right?”

“No problems at all,” he answered. “The bitch was already dead.”

Good. If my guess was right, Morenos’s body was between me and Barto. My showing up early had prevented Barto from getting the body out of the way and lining up a clear shot.

“So you went through with it without Spivack. He didn’t know about it until it was too late. And by then, he had to play along or risk being exposed himself.”

“Yeah, something like that.”

“If you kill me,” I shouted, “they’ll tie you to me through the checks I paid you with.”

“What checks? I got rid of those ten minutes after you gave ‘em to me. Anyway, why don’t you let me worry about that. Your troubles are all over.”

A blinding light flashed, there was a loud crack, and Morenos’s lifeless body jumped. It jumped again, again. I couldn’t afford to hesitate. I aimed the little .25 into the beam of light and emptied the clip, each shot aimed slightly higher or lower, further left or right than the last. Something clanged against the tile floor. Glass broke. The room went dark again. Barto moaned, but I didn’t hear him fall. I didn’t wait around to see how badly he was hurt. I picked up my flashlight and ran, banging through the kitchen doors, into the sharp corners of the kitchen fixtures and out into the night.

I scrambled to my rented car, fumbling for my keys as I went. I forced my hand to steady and turned the ignition. It caught immediately and I was off. It was all I could do not to floor the gas pedal, but I couldn’t risk getting pulled over, not with Irving Roth’s empty pistol in my lap. I could also feel blood begin seeping out of the cuts the kitchen fixtures had gifted me with as I ran for my life. When I was several blocks away and sure I heard no sirens, I pulled to the curb and disassembled the .25. I wiped the individual pieces clean with the sleeve of my jacket. I threw part of the automatic off a bridge as I crossed. I tossed another piece down a storm drain. I dumped the empty clip in a garbage can near the motel.

If Barto was in any kind of traveling shape at all, I didn’t figure to have much time before he showed up at my motel. But I had something to do even before I cleaned up and got out. I put in a call to Israel Roth.

“Mr. Moe”—his voice was happy and a little boozy—“it was a joy to see you today.”

“You too, Izzy. I hear in your voice that you’re still enjoying the vodka.”

“Guilty as charged.”

“Listen, Mr. Roth, I need you to do something for me and I need you to not question me about it.”

“What’s wrong? Are you all right?” The airiness went right out of his voice. “Where are you?”

“I’m okay. I’m okay, but I need you to do this for me.”

“What?”

“Go to the local police station and report your gun missing. Don’t overdo it. Be apologetic. You’re an old man, they won’t be too rough on you. Tell them you had it with you this afternoon when you went to the store and when you checked for it, it was gone. Tell them something like that. Will you do that for me?”

“Are you hurt?”

“Izzy, please. I’m fine. Just do it. Do it now!”

“I’m doing it. I’m doing it.”

“I’ll call you tomorrow and we’ll talk about it then. Just to let you know, you saved my life today. Thanks. Bye, Mr. Roth.”

I hung up. I knew it would be better for me to check out immediately and get out of town, or to another motel at least. But I couldn’t risk the desk clerk at this motel or the next seeing me in the disheveled state I was in. I tore off my clothes and took a fast shower, scrubbing my hands almost raw. Luckily, none of the cuts I’d accrued were either deep or on my face. None were readily visible. I packed in a hurry, careful to keep the clothes I had just removed in a separate pillowcase.

The desk clerk was too busy with hourly customers to pay me much mind. I paid my bill in cash and asked for directions to Cocoa Beach. I had no intentions of going there, I just remembered the name from
I Dream of Jeannie.
It’s weird what you think about. It was an obvious ploy, but anything I could do to put some space between Barto and me was worth a try. In any case, the desk clerk didn’t have a clue how to get to Cocoa Beach. He had just moved to Florida from Madras.

I drove all night, fueled by a sick kind of elation. I was alive. A man had actually tried to murder me and I was still alive. But was he? I’d done it, finally. I’d shot a man. Or had I? I guess I’d find out one way or another. I’d never bought into that crap about violence begetting violence. I believed it now. There was a direct line from Carl Stipe’s murder to Moira’s to Spivack’s suicide to what I’d done tonight. What I failed to recognize was that a chain of violence, unlike basketball, did not come with a twenty-four-second clock. It didn’t matter that Carl Stipe had died almost thirty years ago. Once he was killed, more violence was inevitable.

I dumped the pillowcase containing the clothes I’d worn during the exchange of gunfire in the rear end of a garbage truck parked at a rest stop outside Tampa. A little farther north, I turned in my rental car and took a bus up into Georgia. I flew from Savannah, Georgia, to Charlotte, North Carolina, and from there into La Guardia. I called Katy to tell her I was all right, but lied about where I was. I called Wit’s hotel room in L.A. He wasn’t in. I left a message for him to come home. The second I had hired Barto, our carefully thought out charade was over. I wished I hadn’t found out the hard way.

If, in my exhaustion, I had begun having second thoughts about the chain of violence, they vanished the moment I scanned the headlines at a newspaper stand outside the arrival gate.

Anthony Murano, the brother of one of Ivan Alfonseca’s victims, had several weeks ago gotten himself purposely arrested. Yesterday, while both men were preparing to be bused to court, Murano attacked Alfonseca. Witnesses said it was all over in a flash, that Murano, a recently discharged army ranger, snapped Ivan’s neck like a twig. No one was shedding any tears. Lawyers from as far away as California were tripping over themselves volunteering to defend Murano. Did I think this was part of the master plan? No, not this. This was revenge, pure and simple. If anything about revenge can be pure and simple. Whatever it was, pure or not, it had made my task nearly impossible.

I took a cab to a hotel across the Grand Central Parkway. Inside my room, I called my brother. There are times when only family will do, and this was one of them.

AARON HAD DONE as I asked, made the phone calls, delivered the messages. He was an awfully efficient messenger. Everyone I had asked to call had called. Everyone I had asked to see had come. But I did not fool myself that it was all Aaron’s considerable salesmanship which had produced these remarkable results. It was as if the sense of inevitability which now dominated my waking hours had seeped into the lives of all the people connected to this case, from the perpetrators of the crimes to their accomplices to the people on the periphery. This case, which, in the end, was not about kidnapping or rape or even murder, but about a bicycle and a silly gang of wealthy boys who called themselves the James Deans. I clipped my old .38 to my belt, clicked off the room light, and checked the door handle behind me. Today, I had determined, the chain was to be broken. The violence that began twenty-six years and eleven months ago was going to come to an end.

YOU HAD TO admire Steven Brightman. He was out and ready for jogging early, the sun barely hinting at its arrival. Far enough away that he wouldn’t notice me, but close enough to see his face, I watched him stretch for five minutes on the steps of his brownstone. Although he could not have anticipated what was about to happen, he had to have some idea that the things he had so skillfully manipulated for so many years were about to spin wildly out of control. Yet his calm expression never changed. If he was frightened or worried, he didn’t show it. I could not make the same boast.

When he started down the block toward me, I was almost tempted to stay hidden and let him pass. I couldn’t. Like with Barto, I would probably get only one chance. In spite of his cool, collected demeanor, he wouldn’t be expecting this, not here, not now. I needed him off balance, but also feeling he had the upper hand. He struck me as the type of man who would always feel he had the upper hand. As he ran past, I stepped out from behind some brownstone steps.

He startled. “For chrissakes, what the fuck—Prager?”

“We need to talk.”

“You look like shit. Go home. Shave and shower, then call me later. We can talk about anything you want then.”

“Now!” I whispered angrily, letting him see the barrel of my gun pointing at his belly.

“Okay. What’s this about?”

“I just got back from Florida.”

“How nice for you.” He sneered. “You don’t look like you got much of a tan.”

“Barto tried to kill me.”

“Who?”

“Look, Brightman, we can do this a few ways.”

“And they would be …?”

“One is I hand you my pistol, let you pat me down to see I’m not wearing a wire, and we have a talk out here in the nice empty street about compensation.”

“I’m listening.”

“The other is I stick this gun in your ribs and take you for a ride.”

“You won’t kill me.”

“You’re right, I won’t, but John Heaton’ll be happy to. You ever meet his friends Rocky and Preacher Simmons? They won’t need much encouragement, Brightman, and I bet you I can be awfully fucking convincing.”

That put a chink in his armor. Though he was still smiling at me with his mouth, his eyes had withdrawn from the performance. They were too busy sizing me up.

“Tick … tick … tick …” I waved the .38 from side to side. “Clock’s running.”

“What is it you think you know?”

Good. Good. He’d given me an opening. I held my revolver out to him, flat in my palm, my finger nowhere near the trigger.

“It’s one or the other, Brightman, no free samples. It’s a limited menu. We talk or you die; those are your choices.”

He swiped the .38 out of my hand and stuffed it in the waistband of his shorts. Without him asking, I removed my shirt and spun around slowly. I put the shirt back on. I spread my legs and let him run his hands and up and down both legs, inside my socks.

“Check under my balls,” I instructed.

He laughed, but did it anyway. I moved to the car parked closest to us, sat on the fender, and removed my shoes and socks.

“Okay?” I asked.

“Not yet.” He looked down the block in either direction, stepped into the street to see if he could spot anyone lurking about. The early Sunday sky was a bit brighter now, and the new light afforded him a pretty good view. Satisfied that we were alone, he said: “Talk.”

“I want you to know that I think you’re a piece of shit and if I was able to prove anything I was about to say, we wouldn’t be having this little chitchat. I’d throw the proof up in the air between the DA and John Heaton and let them fight for it like a jump ball. Fortunately for you, all I got is a bag full of circumstance and supposition.”

“Why not open the bag and let me have a look?” he said, his eyes still locked on my face. “Then maybe we can determine the value of your assets.”

“Let’s start with the James Deans.”

“The James Deans … You’re very good, Prager. What a bunch of jerks we were. You know, one other person’s mentioned them to me in twenty-seven years.”

“Yes, I know. Kyle Lawrence, the boy who helped you murder Carl Stipe. He’s one of the missing pieces. Something happened around the time of his death that caught Moira’s attention. That’s why you had to kill her. But I’m getting ahead of myself.”

There was no denial. Brightman said nothing. He didn’t have to. The cocky smile he’d been showing me for the last several minutes slid off his face. He noticed me notice.

“As you were saying …”

“Okay, so to get into the James Deans you had to take a scalp, steal something, right? You had balls, so you took the Hallworth Harrier. Mike stole a box of sanitary napkins from Wiggman’s. Pete grabbed Mr. Hart’s glasses. Jeff was a pussy and stole his father’s watch. That leaves Kyle. What did Kyle steal? Mike Day told me that no one but you knew and you vouched for him. What did he steal, Senator?”

“It’s impolite to ask questions you think you know the answers to, Mr. Prager. Didn’t your mama ever teach you that?”

“She was too busy teaching me not to steal and murder. The way I figure it, you and Kyle saw Carl Stipe’s bike outside Ronny Bishop’s house. You knew he would take the shortcut through the woods to get to his house. What a scalp that bike would be, and from the mayor’s kid, no less. It was close to Halloween, right? So you two got your masks and went into the woods to wait for him. How’m I doing.”

“It’s all very fascinating, so far.”

“So Carl comes riding by and one of you shoves a stick through his front wheel and he topples over, headfirst. You should’ve just taken the bike and split, but, of all things, one of you is worried the kid might really be hurt. So Kyle or you go to check on him. A fatal mistake. When you get close, he rips off your mask and sees who you are. Then he starts screaming and struggling. He threatens to tell. You threaten him back. If he doesn’t shut up, you’re going to kill him. Now he’s panicked and struggles harder, screams louder. You ask Kyle to help hold him down, but the kid still won’t shut up. One of you reaches for something to shove into his mouth to quiet him—the stick you used to knock him off the bike.

“You shove it in to scare him, but it’s gone too deep. It snaps. Now the kid’s gasping for breath, struggling even harder because you
are
going to kill him. You’re panicked too. You
have
to kill him. You ram the stick in again and again. Then the kid’s dead. You take the bike and split. I think maybe you weighted it down and threw it into the reservoir. I don’t know. Why don’t you tell me where the bike is?”

He actually started laughing. “If you knew where the bicycle was, you’d have more than supposition and circumstance, wouldn’t you? We couldn’t have that.”

“Okay, all right,” I relented, “you can’t give me any physical proof. I didn’t suppose you would. But I want to know who killed the Stipe kid. You don’t have to say a word. Was it you?”

He shook his head no. He was shrewd. He knew that if he asked me the same question, my reaction would be much the same. It would hold no water in court, but I wasn’t worried about the rules of evidence at the moment.

“I know you were a bright and ballsy kid, Brightman,” I moved on, “but I was confused about the statement you and Kyle made to the cops afterward. Even if you had thought to do it, to go to the cops and feed them a story about a drifter leaving the woods on a bicycle, I couldn’t picture any fourteen-year-old clever enough to know just exactly what to say. Most kids would have given themselves away, saying too much or too little. You and Kyle, though, gave just the proper amount of detail to throw suspicion away from you, but not enough to point at any one person in particular. Then I realized that had to be your father’s doing. He would know what to say, how to say it, and to whom. He would know how to keep your names out of it, how to get the cops to shield your identities. He knew, huh? All these years, he knew.”

Again, Brightman was silent, but his fists were clenched so tightly I thought his nails must be biting into the skin of his palms.

“Then that poor schmuck Martz got picked up by the cops. You and Kyle would probably have gotten away with it without him, but he made it a done deal. When he was unlucky enough to drown, you guys were home free. Your dad waited a respectful amount of time and then got you the hell out of Hallworth. I’m curious, did you and Kyle ever talk about that day? Did you two keep in touch?”

“So you don’t know everything,” he chided. “There’s holes in that bag of yours.”

I ignored him. “Well, did you two talk?”

“Not ever, not once from the day I moved. I put Hallworth behind me.”

“You mean you thought you did, until about two years ago. Then something happened. And here I’m only guessing, but I think I’m pretty close. Kyle must’ve found out he was dying. That fucks with a man’s mind, you know, knowing he’s about to die. It’s bad for a young man, especially one who has murdered a little boy. Maybe that’s why he turned to a life of drugs in the first place. Who knows these things?

“Then I remembered how weird my mom started acting when she found out how sick she was. Suddenly, she remembered the shitty things she’d done to people over the years. There weren’t many, but what few there were ate her like the cancer. She made a list of people she felt she needed to apologize to and either called or wrote to everyone on the list who was still alive. But when you’ve committed murder, who do you apologize to?”

Brightman looked a bit puzzled. “Are you asking me?”

It was my turn to laugh. “Don’t waste your energy on it now. You’ll have to ask yourself that question eventually, unless you plan on living forever.”

“Get on with this or I’m leaving.”

“So Kyle knows he’s dying,” I picked up. “He writes you a letter. Something about how guilty he’s felt all these years since what happened in Hallworth in ‘56 and how he needs to unburden himself before he dies. When people find out they’re dying, they get religion chop-chop. He suggests you do the same before it’s too late. But you two were close when you were kids, so he says he’ll keep your name out of it. You don’t panic. You did that once and it cost a kid his life. No, you’re working on some sort of plan to prevent or delay Kyle from going to the authorities. Then Kyle has the good form to drop dead a little sooner than expected. You think you’re off the hook. Unfortunately, Moira Heaton’s seen the letter or overheard the phone call. I know this for a fact.”

“How would you know that?”

“HNJ1956. It’s a notation I found in Moira’s checkbook under a check she’d written to a research firm. You know that already. Sandra Sotomayor told you all about it. It’s why I got offered reinstatement. It’s why you had Sandra call me up and offer me some bullshit story about the meaning of HNJ1956.”

“She’ll never testify against me.”

“No one’s asking her to testify to anything,” I said. “This is between you and me, remember?”

“Yes, a little chat about compensation.”

“Exactly. You know the funny thing about Moira, Brightman?”

“Was there something funny about her? I hadn’t noticed.”

“That’s my point. By all accounts, she was unfunny, unattractive, and unexciting. But she was a bulldog. When she was curious about something, she wouldn’t let it go. The way I see it, Moira didn’t confront you about the letter. She figured she’d do a little research first. She probably made the mistake of confiding in someone like Sandra, or maybe she asked one too many questions and word got back to you. Once again, you didn’t panic. This time, however, the person on your ass didn’t have a terminal disease. You waited her out, hoping she’d lose interest. Eventually, though, she forced your hand. She was making progress, getting close. That’s why she started asking around about the statute of limitations. You had to get rid of her.”

“Did I?” he said smugly.

“I have to admit, this is the thing I had the most trouble with and the thing I’m still most iffy about. At first, I thought you might actually have paid Alfonseca or somebody else to do it, but that would have been too risky. You would have been far too exposed. No, you did it yourself. You were the only one you could trust to do it right.”

“And how did I accomplish this miraculous feat? Through the use of prestidigitation? There’s the issue of my alibi, you remember.”

“That alibi works only if you accept other facts. Once you open up your mind to alternative notions, you, Senator, become a very obvious suspect. The cops assumed all along that it was Moira that witnesses saw leaving the office that night. But I looked at those witness statements very carefully. Eyewitness testimony is notoriously inaccurate. None of the witnesses got a look at Moira’s face that night. The closest witness was in a passing car. The others were fifty to a hundred yards away. And by the time these witnesses came forward, the papers had already tainted the information.

“Witnesses are suggestible. If you tell them they should have seen a five-foot-seven woman leaving an office at around eight p.m. that’s what they see. That wasn’t Moira leaving at all. It was either you wearing her coat or someone like Sandra or maybe even your wife. Moira was already dead by then, neatly wrapped in plastic. Then early on that Thanksgiving morning, you went jogging before the sun came up. No one would question that. You do it every day. You got in your car, drove to the alley behind the office, loaded Moira’s body into the trunk, and disposed of her. You got home when you were expected, sweaty as usual, but not for the usual reason. Dead weight is always harder to handle than people expect.”