The King of Swords (max mingus) (27 page)

'No, I was…'

'Impersonatin' a police officer?' the cop said. He was holding Carmine's badge. How the fuck did he get that? Shit! He'd handed it to Janet.

'This is as phoney as a three-dollar bill. And you are under-'

Carmine noticed the cop wasn't wearing his gun belt.

The cop reached out to grab him, but Carmine took a step back and pulled out his piece. The receptionist screamed.

'ID's fake. This ain't. Now back the fuck up!' He pointed the gun at the cop's chest.

The cop didn't move.

'I ain't playin'!' He cocked the gun, but his hand was shaking.

'Do like he says, Timothy!' Janet pleaded behind him.

The cop moved back a step.

'Hey-all the way!' Carmine said. The cop didn't look scared, but the bitches did. That turned him on a little.

'Toss me that ID.'

The cop flicked it at him.

The gold glint of the badge caught his eye.

Next thing he knew the cop had grabbed his gun arm and was twisting it like he wanted to snap it.

Carmine pulled the trigger.

The cop screamed loudly and fell flat on his back. There were screams all over the salon. The bitches got down on the ground.

There was blood on the floor and a hole in the cop's foot where the bullet had hit. The sole of his shoe looked like a dripping red rose, the leather splayed and twisted in a whorl, blood was pumping out of the hole in the middle.

The cop wasn't holding his foot though; he was shaking, going into convulsions.

Carmine grabbed the ID and ran out of the salon.

'
You want to tell me what's behind the long face?' Sandra asked Max.

'Work,' he said.

'I figured that. You want to tell me about it?'

Max shook his head. It was the day after he and Joe had been to Ruth Cajuste's house. He hadn't stopped thinking about the way Neptune and Crystal's fingers were intertwined. He'd heard the paramedics had had to use a saw to separate them.

They were sitting in Dino's off Flagler, a diner with tables outside and two long rows of wide booths with crimson leather seats inside. There were pictures and posters of Dean Martin through the ages on the wall, from young drunk to old drunk, comedian to cowboy to crooner, and a working Wurlitzer jukebox filled with his records.

Sandra was eating a flaked tuna-steak sandwich on rye with fresh orange juice. Max hadn't been able to eat anything since the previous day, so he was sticking to cigarettes and coffee.

'Not even a general idea?'

'You really don't wanna know, Sandra. Trust me,' he said, nodding to her food.

She pushed her plate aside. 'What if I do?'

'I'm still not gonna tell you,' he said, but he wished he could talk to her. She looked and sounded like she wanted to know, and her big, steady, attentive eyes showed she was a natural listener; the sort who thought about what the speaker was saying instead of waiting to speak herself, the sort who never missed a thing.

'Is this the way it is with cops? Silence over dialogue?'

'I guess, some, yeah. We got a way higher than national average divorce rate in the force.'

'And you think that's an OK way to be?'

'No, but that's the way it is.'

'Pretty vacant,' she said.

'I can't argue with that.' He shrugged.

'You ever talk about your work to any of your exes?'

'No, never. I figured if I did they wouldn't wanna be around me.'

'Looks like they didn't anyway,' Sandra said.

'You're funny.' Max smiled.

'I have my moments.' She winked mischievously, which made him laugh. He was glad she'd called him earlier that morning and glad he'd come out to meet her. Even though he hadn't been in the mood for small talk and the polite pretences of fledgling courtship, this was turning into their easiest and most relaxed meeting so far. His guard was down and he was letting her take a look at him as he really was instead of throwing up diversions and detours.

Sandra was in her office clothes: a short-sleeved pale blue blouse, undone at the neck, a brown knee-length pinstriped skirt and brown high-heeled shoes with rows of small blue flowers on the sides. She wore a thin white-gold chain around her neck and small white-gold crucifix earrings. It was a conservative look, but a stylish one too, and, judging from the shoes, Max thought, one she'd tweaked to suit her more than her superiors. She was wearing very little make-up, but still looked stunning. In fact, she seemed to get more beautiful every time he saw her.

'There, see, you've lightened up. You know a person uses less muscles smiling than frowning.'

'Is that right?'

'That's what I read.'

'You read a lot?'

'Yeah, I do. I'm one of those people who, when they get interested in something go out and find out everything there is to know about it. Do you read at all?'

'No. Well, outside police stuff and the papers, I don't get a lot of time, you know. Besides books ain't really my kind of thing, tell you the truth.'

'So, d'you follow sports?'

'I ain't a ball games kinda guy, but I keep up with boxing. I told you I used to box, right?'

'Yeah, I looked you up.'

'No shit?'

'No shit.' She smiled, and told him his entire Golden Gloves record, significant titles he'd won and the dates of his first and last fights. He was impressed.

'You like boxing?' he asked.

'Not much. But I've seen Rocky and Rocky 2.'

'That wasn't boxing, that was ballet.'

'What about Raging Bull? Did you see that?'

'Nah.' Max shook his head. He'd heard about it but hadn't been curious enough to check it out. 'That's the one where De Niro got himself all fat for the part, right?'

'It's a great movie. Sad and disturbing.'

'You should see a real fight,' Max said. 'They're always sad and disturbing-for the loser.'

'Would you take me to one?'

'Any time.' He smiled, realizing he had an opening, the perfect opportunity to ask her out on a proper date.

But before he could suggest anything, she looked at her watch.

'I've gotta go,' she said.

'Too bad,' Max said. 'We never give each other enough time, do we?'

She looked at him and held his stare. Some women he'd gone out with had told him they couldn't handle the look in his eyes, which they'd said, was somewhere between piercing and accusing and something like getting a light shone into their souls. He'd made them feel like they'd done something wrong. Cop's eyes, in short. Sandra didn't seem to have that problem.

'When do you finish today?'

''Bout six.'

'You got any plans for the evening?'

Sure, Max thought. Going back to the garage and talking things through with Joe-zombies, missing babies and a guy called Solomon-and asking himself where this investigation of theirs was going, and how long they could hope to keep it a secret.

'Want to get a drink? You look like you could use one,' she suggested.

'Sure,' he said.

'I know a great spot-great drinks, great food, great music.'

'Where?'

'Little Havana, real close to mi casa.'

L'Alegria on South West 11th Avenue was a bar-restaurant with a nightclub downstairs. Max had driven past it many times but had never gone in, hadn't even been tempted. The outside looked unprepossessing, the kind of place which probably framed its health code violations in the kitchen. But the interior proved far classier-dark wood floorboards, tables draped with spotless white tablecloths, laid out with sparkling silverware, napkins in rings and, in the middle, a blue or orange lantern.

He let Sandra do the talking and asked the kind of questions which prompted her to give long answers. She gave him the Passnotes guide to what she did. She talked about her office, about her bosses and co-workers, the different clique, and their power plays. She told him about how she was going to have to fire someone in her team soon and how she was dreading it. Max thought about Joe. Then he thought about Tanner Bradley and how he hadn't wanted to kill him. Then he chased the image away by looking over at a couple sitting, as they were, side by side at a table, holding hands, but he saw again Neptune and Crystal's final frozen clasp.

Sandra noticed the change in his face.

'Are you OK?' she asked him.

'I'm good,' he lied. 'You?'

'Do you dance?'

'Like a gringo,' he said.

'Racist!' She laughed.

They went down to the club. It was very dark and packed solid with moving bodies, everyone doing that damn Casino Dance to that damn saldisco music. Max rolled his eyes and shook his head. Sandra grabbed his hand and tried to teach him some moves, but he could barely master more than the initial steps and was drunker than he'd realized, because he quickly forgot what he was supposed to be doing and had to start all over again.

'You're right,' she yelled over the galloping bass and ear-shredding horns coming out of the speakers. 'You do dance like a gringo.'

Then the music slowed as the DJ spun a Spanish-language ballad which reminded him of Julio Iglesias, like every Latin crooner did. Sandra draped her arms around him and pulled him into her and they began to dance together, close, body to body, eyes locked. He felt the heat of her on his skin as they moved-her gracefully, him swaying in lugubrious time. She held him by the neck and stroked his nape and smiled. He held her loosely by the waist, telling his hands to keep off her ass. It would have been the perfect moment for a kiss, but as he started to lean towards her the DJ turned up the beat and another saldisco classic announced itself with a shriek of horns and gate-crashed their moment like a drunken relative desperate for attention.

'You wanna get out of here?' she offered.

'Please,' he said.

Sandra lived in a two-bedroom condo in the pink and blue San Roman building on South West 9th Street. It was the tidiest place Max had ever been in. She paid a cleaner to keep it that way.

They went into her living room, which was painted and carpeted in beige and smelled faintly of incense and peppermint. The right-hand wall was lined with books; atlases and encyclopedias on the top shelf, travel guides, biographies and history books on the next two down, and the rest was given over to fiction. On the other walls were a large map of Cuba and a painting of two women and some kind of upside-down fish, which Max thought so amateurish he assumed it was something she'd done in tenth grade art class.

Sandra went out to the kitchen to make coffee and told him to put on some music.

Max flicked through her albums. There was a lot of Latin music, none of which he knew, and some classical stuff, which he didn't know either, but she had Diana Ross's Chic-produced Diana, plus Bad Girls, Innervisions, Songs in the Key of Life, Let's Get It On, some Bill Withers and Grover Washington records, Barry White's Greatest Hits…

She came back in, carrying two white mugs on a tray. She'd changed into faded jeans and a baggy white T-shirt, which made her skin seem a shade darker.

'Probably not your kind of music, huh?' she said, setting the tray down on a table opposite the couch.

'What do you think I'm into?'

'Gringo music: Springsteen, Zeppelin, the Stones-stuff like that?'

'Nah. And don't ever talk to me about Brucey baby. My partner's in love with him, plays that shit all the time. Drives me nuts. You got any Miles? Kind of Blue, Sketches of Spain?'

'I forgot. Your jazz genes. No, sorry, I don't. Do you think I should?'

'Everyone who likes music should have at least one Miles Davis album in their collection. Better still, ten,' Max said. 'And, seein' as you're into Grover, you should be lookin' into John Coltrane too. People say Charlie Parker was the corner stone of jazz, but nearly everyone who's ever picked up a sax from '65 onwards sounds more like 'Trane.'

He carried on looking. He found just what he wanted at the end-Al Green's Greatest Hits.

'This OK?' He held up the sleeve.

'The Reverend Al? Sure.'

Max went over and sat next to her on the sofa as 'Let's Stay Together' kicked in. They looked at each other for a moment and there was silence between them, not the kind of uncomfortable, embarrassing void that opens up between people who've run out of ways to hide the fact that they have nothing to say, but a natural pause in dialogue.

Max looked at the painting behind her.

'You do that at school?'

'I wish,' she said, turning around. 'It's El Balcon-The Balcony-by Amelia Pelaez. She was an avant garde Cuban artist. She was famous in her homeland for murals.'

'Sorry,' Max said, 'I don't know too much about art.'

'It's all right. At least you don't pretend to.'

Max heard a hint of recrimination in her voice and guessed then she'd been lied to by someone close to her, maybe a boyfriend who'd cheated on her or had led her on pretending to be something he wasn't-in other words, by someone a little like him.

Although they were sitting real close on her couch in the dead of night, there was an element of the forbidding about her. He decided to hold back, be the passenger, take everything at her pace. He sensed that was the way she wanted things and that was fine by him.

'Do you remember all the cases you worked?' Sandra asked, putting down her cup on the table.

'Sure.' Max nodded.

'Raffaela Smalls?'

'Yeah.' He sighed. 'That poor poor kid.'

It had been in 1975. A black, twelve-year-old girl, fished out of the Miami River, naked, arms and feet bound, a bag over her head. She'd been raped and then hung.

'Don't tell me you looked all my cases up too? Same way you did my boxin'.'

'Sort of. I remember when it happened,' she said. 'I remembered your name coming up and thinking you were black on account of it.'

'It's a common misconception,' Max said.

'You never gave up on that case, did you?'

'Took two and a half years, yeah.'

'That's unusual in this city, in this state, a white cop being that dedicated to solving a black kid's murder.'

'I was just doin' my job. Me and Joe got handed the case. Me and Joe solved it. There's criminals, there's crime, and we're cops. We do what we do. That's all there was to it.'

'The family said how nice you were to them, how you promised to catch the guy.'

'They were decent people who'd had a child taken away. Ain't no black and white in that, Sandra. Just right and wrong. They deserved justice, and they got it.'

'Her uncle did it.'

'Piece of shit called Levi Simmons.'

'He claimed you and your partner roughed him up bad.'

'He also claimed he didn't do it.'

'He looked pretty beat up in his mugshots.'

Max didn't say anything.

'Did you rough him up?'

'He tried to make a move,' Max lied. 'We stopped him.'

'Innocent till proven guilty,' Sandra said.

'He was makin' a move,' Max insisted, looking her right in the eye, just as he had Simmons' defence lawyer in court when he'd thrown up the same accusation. 'We did what we had to do in the circumstances.' Max needed a break from examining his career history. 'Can I go and smoke on your balcony?'

'Be my guest.'

She came outside with him. The air was still warm, and a limpid breeze shook the leaves of nearby trees. She didn't have much of a view-more apartment buildings, mostly dark, directly opposite-and then Calle Ocho behind, almost deserted. It was still way quieter than Ocean Drive, where no one ever seemed to sleep if there was an argument to be had or a fight to be fought.

'You know, every day when I leave my home I know there's some poor bastard doin' the same thing, only they won't be comin' back,' Max said. 'They'll get caught in crossfire between rival posses of cocaine cowboys, or else some young kid'll roll up on 'em and blast 'em just to watch 'em fly in the air. That's the way it's gettin' around here now-thrill kills, killing for kicks and braggin' rights. And that's a family they've left behind who'll look to me for answers, who'll look to me to put things right. And that's my job. What I signed up for. Makin' things right.