The Way We Die Now (4 page)

"It's very complicated, Ellita. It has something to do with transference, but I haven't read any Klein for several years, and I'm not sure exactly how it works. I do remember that Karen Homey supported Klein's theories."

"We read Karen Homey at Miami-Dade. There was a chapter from Horney's book -Self-Analysis- in our textbook. But I don't remember any mention of Melanie Klein."

"It's just a theory, I guess, like everything else in psychology. But if Pepe begins to favor one breast over the other, maybe you'd better look into it."

"I think Dr. Klein is full of shit," Ellita said.

Pepe dug his fat knuckles into Ellita's left breast, trying to increase the flow. Ellita, eating awkwardly with her right hand, dropped a forkful of lettuce saturated with Thousand Island on Pepe's head. She put down her fork and wiped the baby's head with a paper napkin. She smiled.

"Are you making all this up, Hoke?"

"As I go through life"--Hoke shook his head--"I find that when I tell people something they don't already know, they almost always think it's a lie. Dr. Klein was a famous pioneer in child psychology. Just because you never heard of her doesn't make her a nonexistent person."

"Daddy wouldn't make up a story like that," Aileen said. "He doesn't have that much imagination."

Ellita and Sue Ellen laughed.

"Thank you, sweetheart," Hoke said, "for defending your old man."

Pepe squirmed, and Ellita shifted him over to the right nipple. He suckled and gurgled. The four of them smiled at the red-faced baby's greediness.

"So much for Melanie Klein," Hoke said.

After dinner Sue Ellen and Ellita cleared the table and retreated to the kitchen to wash the dishes. Aileen, who usually helped, had a baby-sitting job down the street, and she left the house wearing the earphones to her Sony Walkman, listening to her new Jimmy Buffett tape.

Hoke went into the bathroom, scrubbed his false teeth, and then put them into a plastic glass with water and Polident to soak overnight. He sat in his La-Z-Boy recliner, after turning on the set, and tried to change channels with the Telectron garage opener. It didn't work on the TV either, so he turned off the set. He went over his theory in his mind.

Three days before his death Dr. Paul Russell had parked in his marked space at his clinic--the clinic he owned in partnership with Dr. Leo Schwartz and Dr. Max Farris. Sometime during the day his garage door opener had been stolen from his white Mercedes. Nothing else had been taken. He missed the garage door opener when he got home because it wasn't in the glove compartment where he always kept it. He parked in the driveway and entered his house through the front door. His second garage door opener-- the one Hoke held in his hand--was kept as a spare, according to his wife, Louise, on a small side table in the foyer.

For the next two days Dr. Russell had intended to get another opener but hadn't got around to it. He was a busy doctor, and he still had the second opener. However, instead of taking the spare opener with him in his car, where it might be stolen again, he opened the garage from inside, backed his car out to the driveway, got out of his car, closed the door with his opener, and then went into the house through the front door. He put the opener on the little table in the foyer again. The procedure was annoying but not onerous, and he didn't want to have the opener stolen again--not until he obtained another spare.

On the third morning, after he had backed onto his driveway and closed the door, as he crossed the lawn to the front door of his house, someone stepped out from behind an Australian pine on Dr. Russell's front lawn and shot him between the eyes with a.38-caliber revolver.

Dr. Russell had had a gallbladder operation scheduled at 7:00 A.M. at the Good Samaritan Hospital and had backed out of the garage at approximately 6:15. His dead body, still warm, had been discovered at 6:30 by the -Miami Herald- deliveryman when he threw a paper onto the lawn. He had then knocked on the front door to call the police. Mrs. Louise Russell wasn't home. She had gone to Orlando the day before to visit her younger sister, who taught the second grade. The deliveryman had then gone next door and called the police. He waited until the police came, standing beside the body, and said he didn't touch anything. Dr. Russell had been killed instantly, and the garage door opener had fallen from his hand. His expensive gold Rolex wristwatch continued to keep accurate time on his wrist. The Russells' Mexican maid didn't get to the house until 7:30, and when she did arrive and saw the homicide team and the dead body, she became hysterical. It took Sergeant Armando Quevedo, the detective in charge of the case, several minutes to calm her down before she could tell them that Mrs. Russell was in Orlando. Sergeant Quevedo had called the clinic to inform the nurse about the murder. Dr. Farris had gone to the hospital to take out the gallbladder Dr. Russell had been scheduled to remove.

All this had happened three years before--three years and three months ago--and now the case was very cold indeed. Some of Quevedo's notes were in Spanish, but they were reminders to himself. The supplementary report was written in Quevedo's clear, easy-to-follow English. There were no leads whatsoever, except that the killing had all the earmarks of a professional hit.

Quevedo could discover no motive. Dr. Russell had no known enemies. He had been a hardworking professional, and he had put in long days. He earned more than $i 50,000 a year, and he also owned an eight-unit apartment house in Liberty City. The apartment house was managed for him by a company that specialized in renting properties to blacks, and the company kept fifteen percent of the rents it collected. And it always collected, or the residents were evicted immediately. Although the black people who rented the substandard apartments might have resented Dr. Russell if they had known that he was their slumlord, they were unaware of his ownership.

Dr. Russell owned the two-story house in Belle Meade, where he lived with his wife, Louise (they had no children), and she had said that they had a limited social life because of his busy schedule. He wasn't robbed. In addition to the expensive gold Rolex, there was a gold ring set with an onyx and a diamond on his ring finger. His wallet contained eighty-seven dollars and a half dozen credit cards. It was possible, Quevedo suggested in his supplementary report, that the hit man, whoever it was, had hit the wrong man.

Hoke didn't accept that. The stolen garage door opener interested Hoke. Whoever had stolen the opener from Dr. Russell's Mercedes had had to be familiar with his habits. The man--or woman--who shot the physician must have known that he would cross the lawn at that point to get back to the front door and put the opener away before returning to his car.

Who had profited from Dr. Russell's death? Dr. Schwartz and Dr. Farris hadn't brought in a new doctor to replace Dr. Russell in their clinic. After his death they had split Dr. Russell's practice between them. They both had profited because of their partnership insurance. Also, and this is what piqued Hoke's curiosity, four months ago Dr. Leo Schwartz had married the widow, Louise Russell. He now lived with her in the Belle Meade house, a house Dr. Russell's mortgage insurance had paid off in full at his death. Dr. Schwartz now drove the white Mercedes, and Hoke wondered if Dr. Schwartz was wearing Dr. Russell's Rolex and ring as well. And why, Hoke wondered, had Louise Russell decided to visit her sister in Orlando at that particular time? The sisters were not close; the Orlando sister had never visited the Russells in Miami. All this, of course, was not known by Sergeant Quevedo.

Whoever had stolen the garage door opener from Dr. Russell's locked car at the clinic, and then relocked the car door afterward, was probably the murderer or the person who had hired the killer. Hoke suspected that that person was Dr. Leo Schwartz, or perhaps it was Dr. Schwartz and Dr. Max Farris--with an assist, perhaps, from Louise Russell Schwartz? All he had to do was find some proof.

The garage door opener, the spare, had been locked away as evidence, and Hoke had checked it out of the property room (it took Baldy Allen, the property man, more than two hours to find it, three years and three months being a long time for evidence to be stored away), but Hoke was convinced that the opener was the key, somehow, to the case.

Perhaps Dr. Schwartz had taken the original door opener, and if so, instead of throwing it away, he still had it? If so, and if he had also planned three years ago to marry Louise, and if they had been having an affair at that time, he was currenty using the original door opener to get into the garage now that he was married to Louise and living in her house--and driving the white Mercedes. Everything seemed logical; the killer could very well be Dr. Schwartz. Tomorrow, when he got to the office, he would see where Leo Schwartz had been when the murder was committed. There was nothing much in the report about Schwartz, except that he and his partner, Max Farris, both had attended the funeral. Sergeant Quevedo had attended Dr. Russell's funeral and had copied down the list of everyone who had signed the register. But Quevedo hadn't checked on any of these people to see where they had been during the murder. It might be a good idea to check the Belle Meade house, too. He would see if this spare opener still opened the garage. If it did, it might mean that Dr. Schwartz did indeed have the original opener--the one stolen from the Mercedes. If the spare didn't open the garage, it could mean that a new radio signal and new openers had been ordered and that he was on the wrong track...

Hoke fell asleep in the recliner. Ellita brought him a cold beer at ten o'clock and woke him in time to watch the rerun of -Hill Street Blues-.

CHAPTER 4

The next morning, when Detective Teodoro Gonzalez came into the office, Hoke handed him the garage door opener and told him to go to the late Dr. Russell's house and see if it would open the garage door. Hoke didn't tell Gonzalez why. All he had was a theory, even if the opener did open the garage. If it worked, however, his suspicion would be stronger, and it would confirm that he was at least on to something.

"After I open the garage," Gonzalez asked, "should I go inside, or will I need a warrant?"

"All I want you to do," Hoke said slowly, "and I want you to do it as inconspicuously as possible, is open the door---if- it opens. Then, if it opens, push the button and close the door again. If anybody's around, don't do it. Drive past the house. Keep circling the block, and don't let anyone see you open and close the door. If you think Mrs. Schwartz is at home or see her out in the yard, just drive away. Go back later when she isn't home."

Gonzalez slipped the opener into his outside jacket pocket. He was wearing an iridescent lime green linen sports jacket, a black silk T-shirt, with pleated lemoncolored gabardine slacks, and tasseled white Gucci slip-ons.

"And take off that jacket. Your T-shirt's okay, but that jacket isn't inconspicuous, and neither are your slacks. So don't get out of your car either."

Gonzalez nodded. He removed his jacket and draped it, silk lining side out, over his arm. "Don't I check and see what's in the garage after I open it? I mean, take a quick little survey, something like that? What exactly am I looking for?"

"Nothing. Just see if that gadget opens the door. Then come back and tell me. Do you know where the Belle Meade neighborhood is? How to find the address on Poinciana?"

"I know about where it is. There's a Publix market at the corner of Poinciana and Dixie, so all I have to do is turn there and follow Poinciana till I get to the address."

"Okay, then, move out. And come straight back here when you finish trying the opener."

Gonzalez hadn't been promoted to detective-investigator because he had earned it. He had been promoted after only one year of patrol duty in Liberty City because he had a degree in economics from Florida International University. Gonzalez had a poor sense of direction and often got lost in Miami, even though he had lived in the city for the last ten of his twenty-five years. Hoke almost always found it necessary to brief him about directions before he sent him out of the office to do legwork. On the other hand, Gonzalez was excellent with figures and had saved both Ellita and Hoke money when he had prepared their income tax returns for them.

Hoke hadn't realized how much he had depended upon Ellita for detail work until she was no longer his partner. Gonzalez was barely adequate at best, if he was told exactly what to do. He had no initiative, and Hoke had already asked Brownley for a replacement for Gonzalez at the earliest opportunity. But the Homicide Division was shorthanded, after three recent suspensions and several resignations, and it was unlikely that Gonzalez would be replaced.

After Gonzalez left, Hoke took a clean yellow file folder out of the cabinet. He began to grid it with a black felttipped pen and a ruler to make up a pool card. There would be forty squares. At two bucks a square, if he sold them all, the winner of the revocation of the no smoking pool would win seventy-eight dollars. After he finished the card, Hoke wrote his name in number three, and Ellita's in number five and left his cubicle to look for Commander Bill Henderson.

Henderson emerged from the elevator, carrying a Styrofoam cup of coffee in his left hand and his clipboard in his right. He grinned broadly as Hoke approached him, holding up the pool card.

Henderson shook his head. "Forget it, Hoke. There's been a compromise. There'll be no smoking in vehicles, but it'll still be okay inside the building. Not out here in the bull pen, but in offices like yours it'll be okay. Men can smoke in the john, too. We finally persuaded the new chief that it would be impractical to have men going to and coming from the lot all day and all night."

"Shit. It took me twenty minutes to make up a pooi card."

"Hang on to it. The new chief's really gung ho about this no smoking business and may change his mind back again."

"I don't see anything wrong about smoking in a patrol car, unless a man's partner objects."

"I don't either. But that was the compromise. Besides, it doesn't apply to you because you drive your own car. But it will apply to unmarked cars from the motor pool."