“If it’s not a phone, put it back,” I said.
Santos pulled on latex gloves, reached inside, and retrieved a newspaper.
I was getting nervous. All kinds of things were wrapped in newspaper. “Didn’t see periodicals listed in the search warrant,” I said.
She opened the newspaper. It didn’t seem to be concealing anything, at least not from where I was standing. But Santos was riveted, apparently by the story. She came toward me, newspaper in hand, and stopped a few feet in front of me in the doorway. The newspaper was yellowed with age. She showed me the headline.
Sugar Company Indicted for Slavery.
It was a copy of the Miami Tribune—from 1941.
“I know what you’re thinking,” I said. “A serial killer attacks his victims with a machete and dumps their bodies in a cane field. Here’s J.T., a guy with a criminal record, a history of emotional illness, and who’s probably never read a newspaper in his life. But for some reason he keeps an old newspaper about sugarcane cutters at his bedside.”
“If you have an explanation, I’m all ears.”
“J.T.’s father was a cane cutter for National Sugar Corporation in 1941. It was guys like him who got the company indicted.”
“Are you saying that this newspaper belongs to J.T.’s father?”
I started to answer, then stopped. “Actually, I’m not saying anything. And neither is J.T. Except to point out, once again, that the only item listed in the search warrant is a cell phone.”
She walked across the room and laid the newspaper on the nightstand. “Keep looking,” she told the officer.
“This is a waste of time,” I said. “You know J.T. doesn’t have the phone. And you know he’s not the killer. J.T. was right here, under house arrest with a bracelet on this ankle, when the last victim was murdered.”
She looked at me from across the room, but I still felt it. “J.T. was under house arrest when the last victim was found. The medical examiner puts her time of death at least two days before J.T. went under house arrest.”
I suddenly realized why it had been so difficult to compare Angelina’s photograph to the face of the victim. After that much time in the Everglades, bloating and decomposition could make facial recognition problematic.
Santos walked toward me again. “Do you know where your brother-in-law was on that night?”
I didn’t answer.
“I didn’t think so,” she said.
“Bag the newspaper,” she told the officer. “As far as I’m concerned, it’s evidence. We’ll let the judge decide if it’s admissible.”
Chapter Forty-Seven
I got the newspaper from Samantha,” J.T. said.
It was just J.T. and me in his TV room. The police were gone. No cell phone. They’d left only with the old copy of the Miami Tribune. I gathered up the couch cushions from the floor, arranged them exactly as they’d been before the search, and told J.T. to have a seat. He ignored me and took his beanbag chair.
“It’s your fucking couch, Abe. You sit on it.”
I did. “When you say you got it from Samantha, do you mean it was left behind here, like the couch and all the other furniture, and you happened to find it when you moved in? Or do you mean she literally gave it to you?”
“It was a gift,” he said.
“When did she give it to you?”
“Right before she went into the hospital,” he said, then swallowed. “The last time she went in.”
Not our favorite subject. “Tell me what happened.”
He groaned, pressing the heels of his palms to his eyes, clearly not wanting to make this journey.
“J.T., this is very important.”
“All right!” he said in an angry voice.
I gave him a minute. He collected himself.
“She told me she probably wasn’t coming home again.” He paused to catch his breath. “She says, ‘J.T., Momma’s gone. Devon’s gone. Daddy won’t be here much longer. When I go, that leaves you.’”
Devon was the oldest brother, whom I’d never met. “Go on,” I said.
“That’s when she told me the story,” he said.
“What story?”
“The fucking story in the newspaper, Abe. My old man was one of the men that these sugar companies brought down from Memphis like slaves. It’s part of our family. It’s a piece of history. We need to keep it, pass it on. Let people know that fucking slavery didn’t end in 1865.”
“Where did she get the newspaper?”
“Where do you think? She said there was other stuff, too.”
“Other stuff?”
“Yeah, Luther had all kinds of crap from when he cut cane. The sugar company made him buy it with his own money—a blanket, all that gear and equipment. He’s such a cheap son of a bitch. He paid for it, so he kept it.”
I remembered that part of the story. Before the first row of cane was cut, the men were so far in debt that they could never leave the plantation. As I recalled, they’d also made each worker buy a machete. I didn’t go there. Not specifically.
“Where’s the other stuff?”
“I don’t know, Abe. She gave me the newspaper article and said more shit was in a box somewhere. I never looked for it. Samantha says I needed to pass it on to the next generation, but who the hell am I gonna pass anything on to, Abe?”
“Did Samantha tell you where that box is?”
“It’s with all my old man’s shit. I don’t know where. Whatever happened to it when you guys moved him into the nursing home?”
Finally, a question I could answer. “It’s in mini storage,” I said. Along with some other personal items of Samantha’s, things that I couldn’t bring myself to just donate to Goodwill and that I knew Angelina wouldn’t want around our house.
“Then that’s where it is,” said J.T. “In storage. But why does it matter? Why does any of this matter?”
“It doesn’t,” I said.
J.T. popped up from the beanbag, pacing. “It matters to Santos. That bitch is crazy. She comes to my house last night, asking questions like you was the one who killed Angelina. Now she comes to my house with a search warrant, acting like I killed her. Or maybe she thinks I killed all these women. Is that what she thinks, Abe?”
“J.T., relax. She doesn’t think you killed anyone. She’s putting pressure on you in order to put pressure on me.”
“So she doesn’t think I did anything?”
“No.”
“She thinks you did it?”
I looked away from J.T., toward the middle distance. “Honestly, I don’t know what she thinks anymore.”
I rose from the couch and dug my car keys from my pocket.
“Where you going?” asked J.T.
“Nowhere,” I said as I headed for the door.
He followed me. “What do you mean, nowhere? You’re going somewhere.”
I pulled the door open. “Get some sleep, J.T.”
He grabbed me by the arm. “Where you going, Abe?”
I said nothing, but my expression was stern enough to make him release my arm. “I’m going to get some answers. Lock the door and go to sleep.”
I didn’t wait for daylight. AAA Mini Storage was open twenty-four hours, seven days a week. I drove home, got the key to the unit, and went to the warehouse. The five-story building was deserted, more like a mausoleum. Sensors triggered the lights in the lobby as I entered.
Pod 403 was on the fourth floor. The elevator was out of service, so I walked up. Technically the building was air-conditioned, but I was breaking a sweat in the stairwell. More sweat as I walked down the hallway. Maybe it was the stale air. Maybe it was nerves.
I unlocked the garage-style metal door and rolled it open. It was cooler inside the unit than in the hallway, but that was my only sense of relief. Memories stared back at me, making it difficult to enter.
My last visit to Pod 403 had been about six months after Samantha’s funeral. Some of her things I had given away. Some things
I felt like I should keep, though not necessarily keep around the house, especially after I started dating Angelina. Carmen had gone through the same exercise with the passing of her husband. She’d told me to tackle one drawer, one closet, at a time, and to create three piles: the save pile, the donation/trash pile, and the not-sure-what-I-want-to-do-with-it pile. It was a fine line between “Save” and “Not sure.” On the one hand, it was pointless to save a framed college diploma, but it represented four years of Samantha’s life. And what about the enormous dollhouse that Luther had made for her with his own two hands, and that Samantha had been saving for her own daughter?
I stepped into the unit and saw the boxes I’d packed so carefully, still not sure what to do with these things. They had all ended up in Pod 403—along with the personal effects that Samantha had gathered from Luther’s apartment when he went to the nursing home. Samantha had sealed up the boxes, etched Luther’s name on them with a black marker, and stored them in our garage. I had never looked inside any of those boxes. They had remained sealed from the day Samantha had packed them. When Samantha died, “Luther Vine” was the bulk of my “Not sure” pile, but it was mostly procrastination on my part. I had planned to go through them some day.
This was the day.
The boxes were stacked floor-to-ceiling on the left. I started at the top, taking two boxes at a time into the hallway, cutting through the tape with the key. Some of Luther’s stuff, I had no idea why Samantha had kept. Who needs a TV Guide from 1972? My guess was that she’d packed up his entire apartment without deciding what to save and what to discard. If Luther kept something, it was important. I understood. It was a safe bet that, ten minutes after throwing out that TV Guide, Samantha would have gotten an urgent phone call from the nursing home: Hey, whatever happened to that 1972 . . .
The ninth box got my attention, but only after I’d pulled it down from the very top of the fourth stack of boxes. On the side that had been shoved against the wall and hidden from sight, in black letters, Samantha had written: “Luther Vine 1941. SAVE.”
I carried the box into the hallway and placed it on the floor. The sharp edge of the key ripped through the tape. I peeled open the flaps. It had all the anticipation of opening a time capsule, except that I knew exactly what I was looking for.
An old blanket was on top, neatly folded. I removed it and laid it on the floor. Beneath it I found a loose collection of things. Some were easily recognizable, and I removed those first. A water canteen. A lunch pail. A pair of work gloves. Heavy boots with steel toes. Other things I had to examine more closely to figure out what they were. A pair of metal knee guards. Wrist shields. There was even a badge with Luther’s name on it, which identified him as an employee of the National Sugar Corporation. The wage record and task log was interesting. It said that Luther cut forty-three tons of cane his first week on the job. He owed the company nineteen dollars and twenty-seven cents.
I emptied the box completely, Luther’s dark piece of history laid out across the floor. I went back inside the unit and searched for more boxes, but there was just the one from 1941. I looked a second time. I was there till midnight.
I found no cane-cutting knife.
Chapter Forty-Eight
I should have gone to bed, but sleep was out of the question.
Part of me wanted to go see Luther and ask what had happened to his machete. There were two problems with that. One, he was surely asleep at this hour. Two, he probably had no memory of it. For all I knew, he’d lost it doing yard work when Truman was president.
Get a good night’s sleep. That had been Carmen’s advice. I was supposed to sit for another polygraph examination in the morning, one with “better” questions. I needed to be rested and ready for it. But I was tired of other people dictating my needs.
I needed to find my wife.
Monday was half an hour old when I reached Little Havana. I parked down the street from Pawn 24, which of course was open for business. From the sidewalk, through the iron security bars over the plateglass window, I could see Manny with a client at the counter. They were haggling over the “loan” value on a stolen wristwatch or some such thing. I didn’t go inside. Manny and his uncle had already given us all the help they were willing to give. Manny had reviewed dozens of photographs at the police station, and not one of them was the guy who had sold him Samantha’s ring. The police had walked the streets for hours and asked every homeless person in the neighborhood about the ring. Nothing. The problem was that the police had done their search in the afternoon, not after midnight, when the sale had been made. They had told me to leave the investigation to them, but we were beyond that forty-eight-hour mark since Angelina had gone missing, no leads. My choice was to lie in bed awake or give it a shot myself. It was an easy decision.
“Hey, got a second?” I asked the first guy I saw. He was standing in the recessed doorway of a farmacia that had closed at midnight, straightening out his bed of cardboard.
“Get lost,” he grumbled. “This is my spot.”
I handed him a couple bucks, then flashed a photograph of Samantha’s ring on my iPhone. “Know anyone selling a ring like this?”
“Nope.”
I flashed a photo of Angelina. “I’m looking for this woman.”
He looked closely, as if he might actually want to help, then turned away. “Don’t waste your time. Lousiest blow job I ever got.”
This wasn’t going to be easy. The next six conversations were even less productive, and not just because my Spanish was marginal. The seventh guy grabbed my phone. I managed to hang on to it, but he wouldn’t let go until I pushed him to the ground.
“Asshole! Why’d you hand me the phone if you don’t want me to have it?”
He stayed down, which made me feel even worse. He reminded me a little of J.T. I was heading back to my car when I spotted a woman outside a cigar shop. Her world was wrapped in a green garbage bag inside the shopping cart that she pushed along the sidewalk.
“Ask you a question?”
She stopped, seemingly surprised that I’d spoken to her. I showed her the photograph of the ring and asked the same question I’d asked the others.
“Jerko sold that,” she said.
My turn to be surprised. “What did you say?”
“My friend Jerko sold a diamond ring like that.”
“When?”
“This weekend. Five hundred bucks. Or so he says. Shithead wouldn’t give me ten cents, so I calls him a liar.”
My heart was pounding. “Is your friend dangerous?”
“If you were dangerous, would you let people call you Jerko?”
That made sense, but he didn’t exactly sound like a prime suspect in my wife’s disappearance. “How do I find this Jerko?”
She raised an eyebrow, negotiating. “How bad do you want to find him?”
“I’ll give you ten bucks.” I didn’t want to appear too eager.
“I wouldn’t tell you what city he’s in for ten bucks.”
To hell with looking eager. “How much, then?”
“Fifty. I’ll take you right where he sleeps.”
“Twenty to take me to his spot,” I said, fishing the bill from my wallet. “Fifty if he’s actually there.”
She snatched the twenty from my hand. “Done.”
I offered to push her cart, but she would have sooner cut off her arm. Or mine. She led, and I followed behind the rattle of the wheels on the cracked sidewalk. This stretch of Calle Ocho was a one-way street, still a couple miles from downtown Miami, but we were headed in that direction. We walked five blocks, and just as the journey was starting to seem pointless, she stopped outside El Presidente Supermarket. Across the street was a vacant lot. A huge For Sale sign said it was suitable for commercial or residential, “approved for 323 units.” My gaze drifted beyond the chain-link fence toward the far corner of the lot, where the homeless had decided not to wait for the approved units to be built.
“He’s over there,” sh
e said.
“You need to point him out to me if you want your money,” I said.
“Cheapskate,” she muttered.
I followed her across the street, and she knew exactly where to find the unauthorized opening in the chain-link fence, which was more than big enough to accommodate her cart. The ground was packed hard, patches of grass and weeds here and there. Bulldozers had left a few trees standing across the back of the lot, and the farther away from the street we walked, the more homeless we saw. Cardboard houses stood beneath the trees. Sheets of plastic served as blankets. The pungent odor of urine wafted from behind the bushes. If I squinted, turning the night into grainy black-and-white footage, it was like a scene from The Grapes of Wrath.
At the very back of the lot were several picnic tables, presumably stolen from a nearby park and brought here for shelter. We were beyond the glow of streetlights, but in the moonlight I saw the silhouette of a man lying on the ground beneath one of the tables.
“That’s him,” she said.
I started toward the table, but she stopped me. “You owe me thirty bucks,” she said.
I kept my end of the deal. “Ten more if you’ll make a nice introduction.”
She smiled, took the extra ten, and shouted into the darkness. “Hey, asshole! There’s a fucking idiot here to see you!”
She stuffed the money into one of her many pockets and pushed her cart across the lot, back toward Calle Ocho. The man stirred and then sat up, but he didn’t come out from under the picnic table.
I made a quick judgment. I knew I wasn’t dealing with Cutter, a serial killer with the wherewithal to dump multiple victims in the Palm Beach County cane fields ninety miles from here and to avoid detection for over two months. In theory, it was still possible that this was the man who had taken my wife, perhaps even killed her. But something told me that if Jerko had indeed pawned Samantha’s ring, he’d come into possession of it secondhand, maybe even third. I went with my gut and operated from that premise.
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