Voodoo Eyes (18 page)

‘You gotta be fucken’ kiddin’ me!’

Max lifted back the turf and exposed an area of dark soil, six foot wide by eight foot long. It had been bashed flat with a shovel. He made out rhomboid imprints. He found the shovel at the far end of the garden, leaning against three dog cages. Milk had had Dobermans, but they were long dead, their bodies stinking and fly infested in the cages. No blood. They’d probably been poisoned.

He went back to the trees and began to dig.

He dug fast, throwing the soil back. As he dug, his arms, chest and lower back stiffened with stress and pain. He ploughed himself lower and lower into the ground, sweat slaking off him, mosquitoes biting at his face and hands. The light was fading fast now. Stars were appearing in the purple-blue sky. Night was falling. He went faster. The stink from what was below started to rise and stick to the back of his throat. Lemons dislodged by the flying dirt fell on him. He mashed them up with the shovel as he dug, the zesty tang mingling with the mounting stench. He knew he’d never be able to drink or smell or look at lemons again without thinking of this moment.

The first thing he found was money. Stacks and stacks of $100 bills in pale pink bands. He shovelled them out and threw them over to one corner, hearing them land with a thud. He figured there was at least two, maybe three million dollars here.

Why bury money?

He dug down more. He was now up to his thighs.

And then he hit something solid.

Thunk.

Down on his knees now, sifting the soil away with his hands, clawing into the ground, fistfuls of dirt flying over him.

It was a black body bag. He felt around it. It was a head. He squeezed the nose without meaning to. He pushed away more dirt until he found the bag’s zip.

A woman he didn’t recognise, Latin. She wore a maid’s white uniform. A dozen bloody holes in her front, part of her head missing, half her hand gone. She was still wearing white espadrilles, which had somehow stayed spotless.

He had to pull the body out of the hole to get at the others.

He found Rudi Milk next. Shot through the neck and chest.

Then the woman he’d known as Fabiana, killed the same way. He guessed they’d been sitting next to each other.

Then came the man who’d played the chauffeur. Max almost didn’t recognise him. His lower face was missing. Bullets had ripped chunks out of his upper arms. Others had gone through his stomach, groin and legs.

The fifth body belonged to Teddy, the night manager of the Zurich Hotel. His torso had been shredded.

Max closed the bags and crawled out of the pit.

He lay on his front, exhausted, unable to move.

With great effort, he managed to get to his feet. He was caked in dirt. His trousers and bare torso had gone black and he reeked of death. Death was in his nostrils, in his throat, in his mouth, all the way down in his pores.

All so familiar, all so terrible.

Two wads of bills lay on the ground in front of him. He picked one up, ran his thumb down the corner. Specks of dirt flew out. Five grand there, all in hundreds. If he took the other deck, him and Prescott would be more than square.

He threw the money on the ground, disgusted at himself for even thinking that way. Is that how low he’d gotten – a fucken’
graverobber?

He’d already irreparably fucked up a crime scene. His DNA was all over the bodies.

He had to get out of here.

He drove back to Miami, taking that smell of death into his home. After particularly brutal bouts, Eldon Burns had made him take ice baths. Said it repaired the body faster. They kept cadavers on ice too. To stop them rotting. It was all relative. He started the bath running, then shut off the hot tap and turned the cold to full. It wasn’t cold enough. He scrubbed and scrubbed himself until his skin burned. Then he scrubbed again.

After, he bagged his clothes and dumped them in an incinerator.

Then he took his car to a twenty-four-hour gas station and had them wash and clean the inside. While they were vacuuming up the dirt and soaping the stink out of the seats, he went and got Petra. She’d fallen asleep. Max shook her awake. She started, gasped, blinked.

‘Did you see Rudi?’

‘No one home.’

The car wasn’t ready. So he walked up Collins, then down Washington, then up Lincoln Road. He heard the pre-recorded bells chiming from Miami Beach Community Church. He stopped by the gates and looked at the stained glass with the gold light behind it. He thought of going inside for a while, just like he used to do when he needed space and quiet to think. Close by was an Irish bar. Lots of people sitting outside. Drinking, talking, looking. He could have done with a drink about now. He as good as needed one. But one had never been enough. One had always lead to two, three, four, five, eleven, twelve. The math of oblivion. He felt the ghost of those old addictions, the lure of the pacifiers, tugging at him, beckoning. They’d never let him be.

He wasn’t going there either.

The Mariposa was open for business, people eating at the very spot Joe had died, just like he knew they’d be. The Miami Money Train never stopped. Just rode roughshod over all and sundry.

Eleven p.m.

He dialled 911 from a payphone.

He told the police operator where to find five bodies and a lot of money.

23

November 4.

Election day.

Morning TV on local news. Sound low. Nothing but weather and then pundits predicting a high turnout and how Obama would take Florida by a slim margin – and therefore win the Presidency. Sarah Palin at a rally the day before. John McCain at another.

He thought of Joe. An African-American might be elected President later today. Joe had been so excited about Obama, hadn’t quite believed it when he started beating Hillary Clinton in the primaries, had cried when he got the nomination. Moments before he was killed, Joe had invited him to watch the election with the family. The invitation still stood. And he’d be there.

Max wanted Obama to win. Not for the good of the country, not even for what it would mean to millions of black Americans, the descendants of second-class citizens in the Land of the Free, but for Joe, his best friend, not yet in the ground, and for the memory of Sandra.

He closed his eyes and tried to think of her, but all he could see were those bullet-ridden bodies, buried in dirt and money. Who’d killed them? And why bury all that money? Maybe they were counterfeit bills. Maybe Milk had been mixed up in way more than porn.

And how much was
he
– Max – involved? Were the murders related to the film or not?

The police would want to talk to him. They’d find his DNA on the bodies, on the money, on the shovel. And Petra would tell them he’d been to the office, pissed, looking for Rudi. He pondered whether to turn himself in as a witness. He couldn’t decide now.

Somehow he pushed all this out of the way and found sleep.

When he awoke it was broad daylight.

And there, on the TV he’d left on, was footage of bodies being stretchered out of Milk’s house, intercut with footage of Milk and Sharona at an AVN ceremony.

‘Coral Gables Massacre.’

He turned up the volume. The reporter – a woman – said that two black men were already in custody. The screen cut to the detective in charge being interviewed outside police headquarters. He gave more details. Patrol cops had spotted the men driving a stolen Lexus. They’d refused to pull over and there was a short freeway pursuit, which ended after the getaways rammed a Ford Bronco and flipped over. When officers looked in the trunk, they found a MAC-10 and about two hundred rounds of ammunition. Ballistics matched the Coral Gables slaying.

Then the news went back to live election coverage, long lines of voters stretching around blocks.

His cellphone started ringing. ‘Private’ flashed up under caller ID.

‘Hello.’

‘It’s decision day, Max,’ Wendy Peck said. ‘What’s your answer?’

24

‘I’ll be going away, after the funeral,’ he said.

He sat with Lena and Jet around the Listons’ kitchen table. The rest of the family was gathered in the living room, watching the election results. A small TV was playing on the counter, tuned to CNN, the sound down to the meagre murmur of men in suits and studio make-up around a desk.

Max had got to the house around seven, the last to arrive. Everyone was dressed in dark-blue Obama T-shirts, a thermo image of the candidate’s face dominating, the set jaw and skyward gaze rendered in lysergic-bright national colours. Lena gave Max one of his own to put on. It squeezed him like a corset, but the sight of him raised a laugh, the way he looked like a dweeb trying desperately to blend in. The family all joined hands in prayer before sitting down to eat. They talked politics, polls and projections the whole time, no mention of Joe, no one even asking Max how he was doing. He didn’t mind because he understood: it was all too close. He hadn’t taken much food off the table and pecked at the morsels on his plate, the tastes indistinguishable. Around 8.30 p.m., they turned on the TV and sat down, everyone close to Joe’s La-Z-Boy, but no one touching it, let alone sitting on it. Max stole glances at it, that bought-in-a-store slothbucket male recliner with built-in cooler. He could see the ridges the big man’s arms and back and haunches and feet had pressed into the leather over time, a record of his presence, a trace of life. Max imagined, for a moment, that Joe was back among them; he swore he even sensed Joe’s presence, almost caught a glimpse of him. Then he remembered the promise they’d made each other, the sign they’d pledged to send. What was taking him so long?

The Obama victories started coming through quickly. Illinois, Ohio, Pennsylvania, the old red map turning blue. No fuss, no recounts, no hanging chads. McCain was in the toaster and history was in the making. No one could quite believe what they were seeing, what they were on the verge of living. Apart from Lena. Max had watched her getting quieter and quieter, shrivelling, disconnecting, getting further away, the corners of her mouth drawing down to her chin. He knew she was thinking what he was thinking. Where was Joe and that way he’d dart up out of his chair and scream victory or howl defeat at the screen? The bigger and more significant Obama’s victories, the sadder and smaller she became. When Florida appeared on the screen and the room cheered and someone started singing ‘The Big Payback’, Lena had stood up and gone to the kitchen. Max followed her out a few moments later. She was crying by the sink, the tap running hard to drown out the sound. He wondered if Joe hadn’t told her about that old tactic suspects used when they thought they were being bugged. Blast the taps and turn up the TV. Max had held her for a good while. Then she made coffee and they sat at the table over their steaming cups and said nothing. Jet walked in, smiling, saying Florida was looking good. He saw them sitting there like two neighbours who’d lost everything to an Act of God. Lena asked him to turn on the TV and sit with them.

‘Where are you going?’ Lena asked.

‘Just away,’ said Max.

‘How long for?’

‘A while.’

‘Has this got anything to do with Joe?’

He could have lied and said no, he just needed a break, but that would have been callous in every way. So he told the truth with a nod.

Lena closed her eyes, bowed her head and let out a slow, quiet, exasperated breath.

‘What have you found out?’ Jet asked.

How much did Jet know? His eyes and expression indicated that he knew next to nothing. He hadn’t heard the name Vanetta Brown. That was being hushed up from on high, nothing filtering down: the code of silence. For now, it was best to keep it that way. Max didn’t want to be the one to tell about Joe’s past.

‘It’s out of your jurisdiction,’ Max said.

Mother and son looked at each other. Jet took his mother’s hand and held it. Then Lena looked at Max, into his eyes, down at his forearms and the faded blue tattoos on the inside of each. They were relics from the MTF days, permanent reminders of the mistakes of his youth. On his left arm he had ‘Born to Run’ written in what were once block blue capitals. Time and the loss of elasticity in his skin had blurred the script so that the letters ran together in a solid smear. On the other arm he had the unofficial MTF emblem – a shield bearing a skull and two crossed six guns, with the legend ‘Death is Certain, Life is Not’ scrolling around it. Everyone in the unit had one – apart from Joe, who objected to being branded. It was typical of the fatalistic attitude Miami cops had back in those days, half-expecting to die on the job. The emblem tattoo was more legible, although it had faded from dark blue to a varicose pale green that reminded him of mould.

‘Haven’t you done enough?’ she said, her stare liquefying. Max took out his handkerchief and offered it to Lena, but she wiped away her tears with her hands, smearing her cheeks with wet silver.

Max looked into his half-finished cup of coffee, at the fine rainbow film on the surface. That was how drunken evenings had sometimes ended at Joe’s old apartment in West Miami – in the kitchen, over cold unwanted coffee, after too many cigarettes and cigars, the world put to rights and making sense in the wee small hours only to get fucked up and senseless again by sun-up.

‘Joe always said you were the worst one. You knew where the line was and you used it as a starting point,’ she sighed. ‘But I knew that anyway. About you. I knew you were no good. The first time I met you, you had blood on your collar. You’ll always have blood on your collar.’

He remembered that day all too well, Joe introducing Lena as his fiancée. She’d been frosty from the moment they shook hands. By the end of the night she wasn’t even looking at him, let alone talking to him. The blood was that of a suspect he’d interrogated earlier that day. He hadn’t even noticed it.

Things got worse between them after a disastrous double date with Sandra. Joe didn’t tell her Sandra was black, or that all of Max’s girlfriends had been black. As Max found out that evening, Lena didn’t mind white people, as long as they stayed in their own beds. Relations started gradually thawing after Jet was born and Max took his godfatherly duties seriously. He didn’t think she’d let him darken her door after he came out of prison, but by then she’d mellowed quite considerably. They were now good friends. Time eventually destroys everything.