by Jon L. Breen
“Swine’s in the Dade County lockup. I need you to go down and post his bail—a hundred thousand. And I want you to waive the ten thousand fee.”
“Yeah right. So when that little bug-eyed jerk takes off and you don’t show up with Breen, I’m out of business.”
“Think positive. I’ll get Breen. If I don’t, I’ll work the ten thousand off. Swine won’t go anywhere. I’ll make sure of that.”
“If I weren’t desperate, I’d tell you to shove it.”
“I know you would.”
A brief pause ensued. “All right, it’s a deal,” said Donk. “But you only got three days.”
I told Donk to bring the papers on Kyle and meet me outside the courthouse. Kyle Breen, six foot six, two hundred seventy pounds, played backup tight end for the Jets for six years. He was kicked out of the NFL because of a manslaughter charge for killing a man in a barroom fight. After that, he turned ugly—arrested for assault during the commission of a crime. Served only about three years. One detective lost an eye trying to take him the last time.
I’d educated myself on Kyle’s history when Donk offered me the job originally. It’s always a good idea to know what you’re dealing with. I turned Donk down because I’m not that young any more . . . and not that hungry. Besides, you don’t stay all that fit if the only exercise in the sport you enjoy involves flipping pages in the Form and walking back and forth from the track parking lot. Then too, the idea of Donk, the greedy little weasel, dropping fifteen or twenty thousand kind of gave me a warm feeling all over. But . . . things change.
Outside the county jail Swine was jubilant. He gave me an awkward hug. Donk handed me the sheet on Kyle. “A bench warrant’s been issued,” Donk said. “There’s the arrest authorization—there in the blue envelope. You got to get this miserable #%@*&%$, Joey.”
“Don’t call me Joey,” I said, studying the documents he gave me. “What’s this address you have listed for him?”
Donk shrugged. “That’s the address Kyle gave me. It’s his mother’s house. But he ain’t there, I can guarantee you that.”
I took the picture of Kyle from the packet. Ugly bastard, even his face had muscles. Donk continued his dialogue of hand-wringing despair as Swine and myself piled into my vintage Mustang.
Donk shouted at our departure: “Remember, you only got three days before the bond forfeiture to the state!”
“What’s got him all excited?” Swine wanted to know.
I explained the arrangement I’d been forced to make with Donk to get the bail for his release. I went on to tell him what I knew about Kyle Breen. Then I asked him what happened with Mona Phillips.
“I didn’t do it, Joe. You know I couldn’t do nothin’ like that.”
“What happened, then?”
Swine was in the dark. He told me that Mona Phillips was a seller at Calder, a dispenser of pari-mutuel tickets. He said that he took her a cup of coffee now and then when she was on the job. But they weren’t lovers, he insisted. He asked her out once. She refused, so he never tried again. Sometimes they rode the bus together. She had an apartment just down the street from his efficiency.
“So what was she doing in your apartment?” I broke in.
“I ain’t sure. She knocked on the door, so I let her in. She said she ran out of cigarettes and wanted to know if I had any. Well, you know I don’t smoke. Hell, she knew that. She . . . she acted like she was kinda coming on to me. She asked me to go down to the corner and get her a pack of cigarettes . . . said that while I was down there maybe I should pick us up a six-pack of beer.”
“So what did you do?”
“What the hell do you think? I took off down the street for the corner store.”
“Hmmm. What about when you got back?” I prompted.
“I was gone maybe fifteen minutes tops. When I got back, I was gonna knock for her to let me in, but the door looked busted in. It was partway open, so I pushed it open all the way and walked in. Bang, the lights went out. Somebody conked me on the noggin.”
“Then what?”
“Then nothin’. Old man Chainy comin’ back from the liquor store stuck his sorry drunken face in my open door and called the cops.”
The yellow crime-scene perimeter tape still stretched across the broken door to Swine’s apartment. We tore it down and went inside. The dwelling was dark, Racing Form-strewn, and decorated in antique chipped enamel. A lone hundred watt bulb suspended from mid ceiling on a scraggly cord illuminated, but failed to overpower, the utter dinginess.
“This place gets worse every time I come in here,” I commented. “Did you ever get the drains fixed?”
“Everything works fine,” said Swine, stepping carefully over the chalk outline of Mona in the middle of the concrete floor. “You think it’s okay to erase that?” he asked.
“I imagine it’ll wear away in a day or two,” I told him, an answer he accepted eagerly. On the floor near the chalk outline was a cereal box with cornflakes spilling out. Half a dozen pari-mutuel tickets were strewn about on the countertops and floor. An unopened box of Rice-A-Roni lay conspicuously by the door along with a six-pack of beer. I pointed out these items to Swine and asked if he remembered their being there when he woke up.
He pointed at the six-pack by the door. “Yeah, that’s the six-pack I bought. The cops took the cigarettes. I had them in my pocket. And I know the cornflakes was there. Every time the cops stepped in them there was a crunching noise.”
“So, except for the six-pack, how do you explain the rest of the stuff?” I asked. “Who scattered the tickets all over? Who put the cornflakes on the floor and tossed the Rice-A-Roni over there?”
“Hell, I don’t know. It wasn’t me.”
“Okay if it wasn’t you and it wasn’t the cops, it must have been Mona or the killer. Don’t you figure?”
“Uh, yeah, that’s right,” Swine said. “But why would Mona want to dump my cornflakes on the floor?”
I pointed out to Swine that he was failing to grasp the essence of the picture presented here. Obviously somebody was looking for something. It appeared as if they stopped before they got into the search in earnest. Either they found what they were looking for or they were interrupted. Otherwise there would have been a lot more stuff dumped from the shelves and cupboards.
“Can you tell if anything is missing?” I asked him.
Swine did a quick perusal of the tiny room. “I don’t see nothin’ missing,” he said.
I picked up one of the mutuel tickets from the top of the small refrigerator. It was dated two weeks before. “What’s these tickets?” I asked.
“Oh, I keep all my losing tickets in a shoebox for the year. Then when I hit the biggy I got some losers so’s I don’t have to pay the income tax. You was the one that told me to save ’em.”
“It might have been a needless precaution,” I told him. “I don’t remember you ever hitting a payoff big enough to get near the IRS window. Where’s the shoebox?”
Swine pointed to a small floor shelf in the corner. “I keep it right over . . . damn. It’s gone.”
Before I had time to absorb this new turn of events, a small mouse scooted in little spurts across the floor. We stood stock-still and watched it make its way to the pile of cornflakes and begin to nibble away.
“Don’t move,” said Swine. “That’s Martha.”
“Martha? How do you know it’s a female?”
“She’s got her babies behind the refrigerator,” Swine explained.
“Jeez, are you nuts? How the hell can you live like this?” I asked.
“Like what?”
Now you understand why it was hard for me to believe that Swine could kill anything with malice. I told him that he was on me for the next few days until I could find Kyle and figure out what happened with Mona. I convinced him that if we were going to clear him it would take both of us to unravel his predicament. Which was true. But mainly I wanted to make sure I could find him. I trusted him not to jump bail, but
if things should turn sour—well, you never know.
I have my office in the back of the Sunbelt Realty Building. It’s only one room with a community toilet down the hall, but it works for me. While Swine was calling Security at Calder from my office to explain why he hadn’t shown up for work, I supplied Bonnie in the Sunbelt Realty office with Kyle Breen’s Social Security number and the address from Donk’s documentation. In a matter of a few minutes I handed her twelve dollars, and she handed me a credit report on Kyle Breen. It was standard procedure. Sometimes it paid off, sometimes not. I took the report with me into the office.
Swine was stretched out on my cot beneath my gigantic photograph of the matchless Seattle Slew edging away from Cormorant approaching the far turn in the 1977 Preakness Stakes.
“I told them I was gonna take a coupla days vacation,” he said. “Where we gonna start at?”
“Don’t know yet,” I mumbled, studying Kyle’s credit rating. The report was about what you would expect. Nobody was going to sell this guy a used car. There was one item that caught my eye: Kyle had an active credit card. And it wasn’t yet maxed out. It was a beginning. I explained my plan to Swine.
“What kinda weirdo are you?” Swine asked. “We can’t break into his mama’s house.”
“We’re not going to break into her house,” I reassured him. “Hopefully she’ll just hand it over if we play our cards right.”
On the way Swine issued relentless warnings about the cruelty of harassing old ladies, posing various scenarios: she could get excited and have a heart attack, or fall and break her hip, or call the cops. All this needless concern rushed from memory when Mrs. Breen opened the door. She was anything but frail. Old but tall and big-boned, she filled the doorway. “What do you punks want?” she asked.
Meeting Mrs. Breen could only add to the wonder of how nasty Kyle must be. But I forged onward.
I pointed to Swine. “This is Mr. Squeege. My name is Colbert. We are representatives of Visa, the credit card company.” I waited for her reaction, but she simply stared at us in sinister silence. I struggled on. “There is a credit card for a Mr. Kyle Breen listed at this address. We are here to pick up the card for non-payment.”
“Kyle’s not here, neither is the card,” she told us. “Anyway, I sent a payment in on his card two weeks ago—so hit the bricks.”
I put my hand against the door she was about to slam in our face. “Well, if you have a statement from us that reflects the card as being current, I guess there could have been a mix-up at the main office. Have you got your last statement?”
She swore and thudded across the living room, leaving us in the open doorway.
“Jeez, ain’t she a load,” Swine commented in her absence.
She returned with the smirk of virtuous right on her side and thrust forth the vindicating document. “Here’s the statement,” she said. “See for your ownself. Then get the hell out. Never heard of such a thing . . . Visa got their own police. World’s goin’ to hell.”
The statement was only eight days old. “We’ll need to keep this,” I said. “You know, to straighten things out back at the main office.”
“Well, you can’t have it,” she shouted back. She made a grab for it but missed. She might have been big, but she was slow. Me and Swine were in the Mustang halfway down the street before she even got to the sidewalk.
Back at the office Swine sat on the cot while I studied Kyle’s credit card statement. “When we gonna work on my case?” he asked. “I got a preliminary hearing in a few days.”
“First things first,” I said. “I had to find out if Kyle was still in Miami. According to his credit card statement he was still in town ten days ago. But since you bring it up, let me ask you a few questions.”
“Shoot.”
“Were you still knocked out when the drunk looked in the door and called the cops?”
“Yeah, one of the cops woke me up. Chainy was standin’ in the doorway yellin’ at the cops, tellin’ them what a vicious bastard I was.”
“You told the police what happened?”
“Yeah, I told ’em. I showed ’em the lump on my head.
They booked me anyway.”
“How did they identify Mona?”
“Whaddaya ya mean?”
“I mean, did they check in her purse for an I.D. or a driver’s license, or what?”
“No, I told them who she was,” said Swine. “Come to think of it, there wasn’t any purse.”
“Mona didn’t carry a purse?” I asked in surprise.
Swine was thoughtful for a moment. “No, she had a purse. One of them bag things that hung on her wrist. But it wasn’t there when the cops was diggin’ through my stuff. At least, I don’t remember seein’ it.”
“I’ll check with Crook and see if we can persuade him to get some details from the D.A. Sounds to me like there are a lot of holes in their case. Cops usually take the path of least resistance. In this case you were it. As far as I can tell, the facts are as follows: Somebody struggled with and killed Mona. Somebody attempted to search your apartment. Not necessarily in that order. The killer took with him or her your box of losing pari-mutuel tickets and Mona’s purse. He or she might or might not have found what they were looking for. My guess is, they didn’t. If the killer had the item and knew it, only the item would have been taken . . . whatever the item is. There would have been no reason to take your tickets and Mona’s purse, unless they thought the item was in the purse or the box. So, they were in a rush and not sure they had it. Now we need to determine what ‘it’ is. What have you got in your crappy apartment that somebody would kill for?”
“Nothin’. And you can believe that.”
“If that’s true, Mona must have had something on her that she hid in your apartment while you were off at the store . . . something somebody wanted pretty bad. Something that fit in her handbag.”
I could just make the eleventh race at Calder. I ripped off a piece of notepad, scribbled a phone number, and handed the slip to Swine. “That’s the number to my new mobile phone. I got something I want you to do.”
“Get out,” said Swine. “You got a cell phone! When did this happen?”
“I’m trying to move into the twenty-first century here,” I told him.
Kyle’s credit report showed that he had used the card recently four different times at the same restaurant, The Boathouse in north Miami. I explained this to Swine. I handed him the photograph of Kyle that Donk had given me. “Stake out the restaurant. If you spot Kyle, follow him when he leaves and give me a call on the mobile phone.” I handed him two twenties. “Here’s busfare and some lounging money.”
“What are you gonna do?” he wanted to know.
“I’m going to the track,” I told him. “Maybe I can get filled in on Mona—talk to the other sellers, see if I can pick something up. Where was her window?”
Swine instructed me as to where in the large Calder racing plant Mona did business.
It was twelve minutes to post for the eleventh race when I went through the grandstand turnstile. One of the benefits of a well-run and beneficent racetrack like Calder, they let you in free after the seventh race.
The crowd had thinned; most were probably busted out by now. I grabbed a discarded program from a trash barrel and did a quick survey of the eleventh race: seven furlongs on the main track for two-year-old fillies. It was a long race for young, inexperienced contenders. A smart handicapper should be looking for a horse that had at least been the distance or gone longer.
After digging a little deeper in the trash barrel I managed to salvage a Form and ripped out the page with Calder’s eleventh race. It was in bad shape, damp with what I hoped was coffee, but still legible. Number three, Dainty Lady, had gone a mile and a sixteenth last out—a terrible race. But there were no worldbeaters entered, and she was the only entry that had gone more than six furlongs. The trainer was good with two-year-olds. The jockey was competent and usually sober. Dainty Lady was nine
to one. It was a chance to get back the forty that I’d given Swine.
I went to the third window in from the University Drive side, the north entrance on the ground floor of the grandstand—Mona’s old window. There was a Cuban woman there now, with orange hair.
“Ten and ten on the three horse,” I said to her. She punched up the tickets and grabbed the twenty I offered. “Did you know Mona, the gal who used to work this window?”
She told me in broken English that she had worked upstairs; this was her first time in the grandstand. I moved over to the guy working window two from the north entrance. “How about you? Did you know Mona?”
He was Cuban also, but his English carried only the faintest Latino trace. I explained that I was a private investigator looking into her death. “Yes, I knew Mona,” he told me. He seemed cooperative. I asked him what kind of person she was.
“She was okay,” he responded. I waited several seconds for the expanded version.
“What does that mean?” I asked, in an effort to draw him out. “She was a good seller? She gave to the Salvation Army? She didn’t pick her nose? What?”
One window to my right and four windows to my left were open with no customers. So you can imagine my consternation when an old nimrod with a cane poked me in the back.
“Hurry up,” he said. “I want to make a bet.”
“Go over there,” I instructed him, pointing to the woman with the orange hair.
“I ain’t goin’ over there,” the old man shouted hysterically in my face with beer-stained breath. “This is my lucky window. Bet, or get the hell out of the way.”
This I well understood and let him pass. He bet twenty to win on the six. The horses were out of the gate as he turned from the window. We both stood stock-still watching a nearby monitor as his six horse broke on top and drew off to a two length lead. Dainty Lady, my three horse, was last into the first turn.
“Come on, Cholee!” he shouted. “Open up with that six horse, Benny, open up!”
Cholee had already gained a five length lead at the far turn. My three horse had only beaten one horse.