These were not your garden-variety murders. There was a very clever serial killer out there all right, and Jake Bricker meant to get to the bottom of it.
All he knew, of course, was that this guy was really pissed off at meter maids. But hell, problem was: that made every single motorist in the entire city a prime suspect. Not to mention every tourist who ever rented a car. Millions of suspects. Millions.
And people were getting out of control. Not with the usual fear you get gripping a city when a serial killer is on the loose. No, the city was gripped with joy! Every time a new meter maid murder occurred, streams of cars would parade down Washington Avenue—right in front of the police station—honking horns and cheering.
Cheering!
Like the University of Miami had just won the national championship. Or the Dolphins the Super Bowl. Or the (whatever the Miami soccer team was called) had just won the World Cup.
The situation was threatening to get out of hand.
“So why should I come down to Clarke’s?”
“’Cause Raffy Ramirez just put me on the case.”
“Ah! Be there in ten.”
Bricker had wondered ever since the messy ordeal of the meter maid murders began why every free detective had been put to work on the task force assembled to find the perp—every man but him—but to be honest he hadn’t thought too much about it, leaving such matters in more important hands (and heads) than his. He just went about his business tackling the assignments sent his way: interviewing victims mugged on Lincoln Road (in broad daylight), collecting elderly shoplifters at Publix (they really swarmed around the new Publix up at Sunset Harbour “because it has such a wide selection”), rousting out homeless guys from the parks in the morning as they woke up, and other such policing efforts designed to enhance life on South Beach.
Turning into First Street, Bricker found a parking space past a Brazilian steakhouse called Fogo de Chao and walked back half a block to Clarke’s, a really good meat-and-potatoes restaurant with an Irish pub feel—all dark woods, draft beers, and a real Irish owner (well, from New York) named Laura. Place didn’t “feel” like Florida at all. And don’t even think of asking Laura for a frozen daiquiri or any of those frou-frou drinks they served up to the tourists at those joints like Wet Willie’s on Ocean Drive—she’d just look you in the eye and stare you out the door.
Bricker walked in—five or six tables were occupied by people having a late lunch—and moseyed over to the end of the bar closer to the street.
Laura was her usual charming self.
“Why don’t you ever take that fuckin’ hat off when you come in here, asshole?” she smiled. (That word again.)
“And good afternoon to you.”
“Usual?” she smiled.
“Yep.”
Laura went to the other end of the bar to draw a cold glass of Smithwick’s. Bricker was never able to figure out if Laura’s bite was worse than her bark or the other way around. She brought the Smithwick’s back and he reached for his hat.
“I’m just kidding, Jake,” she smiled.
He pulled his hat off and put it on the bar top.
“Like that better?”
“Well, you do have a beautiful head o’ hair, Jake Bricker. Shame to cover it up with that fedora.”
“It’s not a fedora. It’s a Trilby.”
“Whatever, handsome.”
There was a couple sitting catty-corner to him a few seats down the length of the bar eating Laura’s famous burgers. Laura introduced him.
“This is Jake, folks. He’s a police detective, and the one who advised me to open an Irish bar on South Beach when my heart and soul told me to become a meter maid.”
There was a sick giggle from everybody, but it died quickly.
Bricker nodded.
“Bricker... Jake Bricker.”
He always liked to introduce himself as “Bricker... Jake Bricker,” but he always came off a little more lackluster than Sean Connery when he uttered those famous three words, “Bond... James Bond.”
Not that Bricker didn’t look the part. The thirty-five year old detective sergeant with the Miami Beach Police Department was everything Sean Connery was at thirty-five: tall, dark, handsome, a soft winning smile accentuated with excellent dimples, and a hard body the ladies loved. His beautiful baby blues were framed by that huge mass of thick black hair, a shapely nose and full, sensuous lips, finished off with a square jaw.
He was as handsome and dashing as Dick Tracy.
Not as smart, maybe, but still handsome and dashing.
Which explains why he was still a sergeant and everybody else in his class had made lieutenant by now.
Bricker didn’t really mind, or you couldn’t tell if he minded, if in fact he did. He just rolled along in a perpetual state of cool mellowness. If he never seemed happy (too happy was not cool), he also never seemed very sad. He was too busy posing with his Joyita, a small panatela in the Montecristo line he got from a smuggler who gave him two boxes a month. He was very upset when they changed the rules and he had to go outside to smoke. Just wasn’t the same smoking outside when he should have been at his desk, pretending to go through all the paperwork piled up there, smoking away, looking serious, looking like things mattered. Looking like he mattered.
He wore a hat when nobody else on the force did, a Trilby, not quite as wide-brimmed as the fedora worn by Bogart or Ladd. Bricker spent money on his clothes, always looking great. And even here on South Beach, where half the street cops wore shorts (some of them a little too tight for Bricker’s taste in manly dress), and even the detectives worked in shirtsleeves and open collars, Bricker always wore a tie.
True, the Trilby was warm in the summer, but Bricker didn’t mind. It was his “look.” He had a girlfriend once who quoted Coco Chanel one balmy evening when they passed the Chanel shop up in Bal Harbour.
“You know what she said, Chanel?”
“No, what?”
“Everybody needs a ‘look’.”
Well, he had his and that was that.
“Eatin’?” Laura asked as she slid a menu in front of him.
“Yeah, I’ll have the chicken wings and the Reuben. Waitin’ on Billy.”
“Don’t call him Billy. He hates that.”
Bricker looked at Laura, dead serious.
“Laura, I grew up with Billy and he’ll always be Billy.”
“But it sounds so stupid, Billy Willoughby?”
“He should get mad at his mother, not Jake Bricker.”
Just then, Billy rushed through the door and over to the bar to take the stool next to Bricker’s.
“Hey, Laura... hi, Jake.”
“Guinness?”
Billy nodded.
“So tell me, Jake, what happened? You’re finally on it?”
“Yeah,” Bricker said, a cocky edge to his voice that gave you the impression Bricker was the first cop assigned to the case instead of the last.
Laura brought the Guinness back.
“So’d the chief ask you what you thought about the meter maid murders?” Billy took a long drink of his Guinness and smacked his lips.
“No. Just told me to get to work on it. Said I couldn’t do any worse than everybody else was doin’.”
Billy looked a little like Bricker, so much so that he could’ve been mistaken for his younger brother: he was nice looking, but not as drop-dead handsome as Bricker. Like Bricker, he had dark hair, blue eyes, but he was a little shorter than Bricker, and had rounded shoulders, not the big broad-shouldered look Bricker had.
“Well, what do you think... about the meter maid murders?”
“Haven’t really given it much thought. But I am now.” He winked.
Billy remained unimpressed.
“Well, I’ve got a hunch—it sorta came to me the other day, and I might as well share it with you.”
“What?”
“Better yet, I’ll show you. There’s something I’ve got on tape that might be a clue. It�
�s from a year ago. I’ve got it at home.”
Though Bricker begged Billy to tell him what his clue was, he couldn’t get it out of him. Had to wait till tonight when he got off work.
Bricker’s cell phone went off to the tune of The Halls of Montezuma.
“What the fuck—?” Billy tried to say.
“I always wanted to be a Marine.”
“You always wanted to be a Marine?”
“What are you, deaf?”
“Bricker here.” He listened for a minute. “Okay, Rwanda, I’ll be there in half an hour.”
“That Rwanda bitch in the chief’s office?”
“Who else? The unique and wondrous Rwanda Tutsi-Hutu.”
“What the hell kinda name is that?”
“She changed it back in the mid-nineties during the genocide over in Rwanda. Her real name is Earleen Jaleesa Smith, but she went to court and got it changed, all legal like, ya know? Boobs McCoy told me the whole story, ‘cause I asked her.”
“Tutsi-Hutu?”
“Well, Earleen Jaleesa, I mean, Rwanda, learned from her mother that their ancestors were from Rwanda, and she felt so bad about what was going on over there, she decided to change her name to Rwanda. In the Rwanda genocide, the Hutus were killing the Tutsis and the Tutsis were killing the Hutus, and Earleen Jaleesa, I mean Rwanda, couldn’t get her mother to say whether they were descended from Tutsi stock or Hutu stock, so she couldn’t figure out who to root for, so she added both names to her last name.”
“Well, now that all makes pretty good sense if you stop’n think about it.”
“Yeah, if you stop’n think about it.”
Billy quickly finished his Guinness and skedaddled back to WHY-TV.
“See you at my place.”
“Right.”
Bricker ate his Reuben with extra mayo (for the fries), drank another Smithwick’s, bantered with Laura and headed out.
He walked past Fogo de Chao, giving some thought to what Billy’s mysterious clue could be.
Two of the waiters were leaving for the break between lunch and dinner, wearing what looked like a pretty dumb outfit: gaucho pants and billowing blouse-like shirts. Bricker guessed that all the gauchos wore this get-up down in Brazil. (If all the gauchos in Brazil knew how gay their outfits looked, they’d make some changes pretty quick, Bricker figured.) He’d never been to Fogo de Chao, primarily because he wasn’t sure how to pronounce it, and he didn’t want to look dumb by asking somebody to meet him there if he mispronounced it.
But Billy had been there and told him all about it: they called it a churrasqueria in Spanish and a churrascaria in Portuguese, both of which mean a steakhouse: the kind where they bring the different meats to you on these long swords and slice a piece of it off and you use a pair of tongs to grab the slice before it falls in your lap and then you put it on your plate and eat it. They give you a little round piece of cardboard, green on one side and red on the other. When the green side’s up, one waiter after another wearing these gaucho style outfits with the billowy pants comes by with a different kind of meat: sirloin, tenderloin, chicken, pork, sweetbreads, sausages, quail, lamb—and you can say Yes or No as they pass. When you have enough on your plate, you turn the cardboard over to red and they pass your table by. Want more? Flip the card to green and they descend on you like birds flocking to breadcrumbs. Anyway, that’s the gist of it.
Bricker sat in his car with the window down, thinking and smoking a four-inch long Montecristo Joyita. He heard the familiar putt-putt-putt of a meter maid mobile coming down the street and looked into his rearview mirror to catch a glimpse of the vehicle (about the size of a golf cart) as it zoomed past his window. It pulled to a stop two cars past Bricker’s and a meter mister got out to write a ticket, not a meter maid.
Officially, of course, they weren’t meter maids or meter misters. They were “parking meter specialists.”
None of the murder victims had been a meter mister—all the victims were women. Bricker pondered this fact. Of course, that could be simply because over ninety-eight per cent of the PMS Force were women.
Bricker’s mind drifted back to the first meter maid murder four months ago, in January. These murders weren’t very pretty, if a murder can ever be called pretty. Everybody thought the first one was an accident.
It’d been classified as a “simple hit ‘n run,” according to the chief.
But forensics had discovered that after hitting the meter maid at a fairly low speed, the car had backed over the body no less than ten times, as if to make certain the meter maid was dead.
The way Bricker saw it, with your average hit ‘n run, you have a “hit,” followed quickly thereafter by a “run.” Problem was, the chief couldn’t explain why the offender committing the hit and run backed over the meter maid all those times before getting into the “run” part of the crime. Some people in the department thought this might have been pre-meditated murder. Unfortunately, not Raffy Ramirez.
“Naw, it was an accident,” Ramirez said at the briefing the next day. “Pure ‘n simple, hit ‘n run.”
The next meter maid was found in February hanging from a rope attached to an old oak tree in the middle of Flamingo Park.
The chief’s immediate response on hearing the news:
“Suicide.”
Even when forensics told the chief the meter maid had been stabbed twenty or more times, he kept insisting it had to be suicide.
Bricker couldn’t figure out, if you were going to kill yourself, how you’d manage to stab yourself (in the back) twenty times before climbing a tree, putting a rope around your next and taking a swan dive. Even the chief expressed some concern.
“I’m concerned,” he’d said at the morning briefing.
The third meter maid was killed in March after a violent two-day storm, washed up on the beach like a bloated whale, purple, fat and smelling of death. Two elderly residents, out from their million-dollar condo in the Continuum Tower for a healthy morning jog down by South Pointe, discovered the body.
The poor thing had one of those “No Parking” canvas bags over her head, and a rope knotted around her throat, her hands tied behind her back.
To Bricker’s mind, it couldn’t have been clearer that they were dealing with a homicidal maniac, a serial killer that made Charlie Manson look like your favorite Uncle Fred.
“I think we have a serial killer on our hands,” Raffy Ramirez said at the morning briefing.
There was another one the following month, in April. The murders always occurred at night, one each month during the New Moon, at night when the killer had complete protection on the darkest nights of the month.
As the murders added up, one detective after another had been told to drop everything and get to work on the meter maid murders. Everybody but Bricker, that is.
Until today.
“Now maybe we’ll get somewhere,” Bricker said out loud, tossing the butt of his Montecristo into the street.
3 – The Secret Video
Billy lived in one of those quaint little houses on Farrey Lane on the Venetian Causeway, just a few steps from The Standard Hotel, the trendy L.A. hotel with the upside down sign out front.
“Fuckin’ stupid sign,” Bricker muttered under his breath as he pulled up to Billy’s little house, which was more like a bungalow and had the feeling of a place in the Grove with lots of tropical foliage all around the place, a little garden out back where they’d grill steaks sometimes or eat stone crabs from Joe’s when the weather was good.
Bricker parked his car and ran up the steps and into the house, not bothering to knock.
“It’s me! I’m here!” he called out, heading straight for the fridge where he grabbed an Amstel.
Billy came out of the bedroom.
“Get me one, willya?”
Billy popped the top and gave him a beer.
“Now what about this clue?”
“Sit down—I want you to watch a tape from a year ago.”
; Billy shrugged and sat on the rumpled sofa.
“You need a maid in here,” he said as he surveyed the wreckage of Billy’s bachelor pad.
“Shut up and watch this tape.”
Billy hit the clicker and a DVD started to play.
The WHY-TV logo popped up and Bob Blunt, the anchorman, spoke up.
“We are back on Channel 69’s News Prime Time. Our next story has to do with those people you love to hate, meter maids. And William Willoughby is here to tell us all about it.”
The camera cut to Billy in front of Scilly Hall.
“We’re here, Bob, so the top twelve ticket writers on the PMS Force can be honored by the City of Miami Beach for their efforts in enforcing parking regulations. I have here with me the Mayor of Miami Beach, Johnny Germane, Major Enid Bunstable, Matron of All the Meter Maids, so to speak, and Melissa Cuthbert, the top ticket writer on the whole force.”
“Thanks, William,” said Mayor Germane. “Missy has done a wonderful job in the last fiscal year by writing 20,801 tickets and generating over $374,000 dollars in revenue for the city.”
“How much is raised by the parking department every year?” asked Billy.
“Oh, about $30 million, William, um-hmm.”
“Wow! Let’s see, $30 million divided by $18 a ticket equals, well, a blizzard of tickets.”
“But William, you have to remember what our parking staff is there for. They’re not there to make life miserable, or to make the city”—he said it like a dirty word—“money.... No, They’re there to enforce the parking regulations on Miami Beach, because, as anybody who’s ever been to South Beach knows, there isn’t anywhere to park.”
“That would create a lot of, uh, enforcement opportunities, yes?” Billy asked the mayor.
While the tape was running, Bricker spoke up.
“Where is all this crap leading?”
“Just wait, be patient,” Billy said.
At this point in the tape, Major Bunstable interrupted with what Bricker thought was an unseemly snicker.
The Meter Maid Murders Page 2