Cane and Abe

by James Grippando

  “I got this covered,” she said.

  Victoria stepped closer to the one-way glass, studying her subject. Salvo was a big man, six-foot-three, well over two hundred pounds. Muscular, but not like a gym rat. He had the physique and weathered look of a farmer who’d spent his life working the field. His salt-and-pepper beard was not at all groomed, just the scruff of a man who didn’t like to shave. A buzz cut made it less obvious that his hair was thinning. At forty-eight he was older than Victoria had profiled, which explained the Viagra they’d confiscated from his residence. Erectile dysfunction only partially explained the abundance of dildos, all black, all of which fit Victoria’s profile of an angry white male who targeted white women with black boyfriends. Still like it black, bitch?

  “Phase two,” said Victoria. It was time to go back inside.

  Victoria had done this many times before in so many cases. This was when the smart ones started to bargain. I’ll tell you where I dumped the five bodies you don’t know about if you don’t go for the death penalty. Victoria didn’t expect that from Cutter. He needed to show her how smart he was. Look how many clues you missed, how I was right under your nose and laughing at your incompetence. Cutter was a bragger. She could feel it.

  She laid a pack of Marlboros in front of him. “Cigarette?”

  He took it. She slid a lighter across the table, and he lit up.

  “I knew you smoked,” she said.

  “Good one, Sherlock. Was it the ashtrays all over my house or the cigarette cartons that tipped you off?”

  Bragger. “It was the burn marks on your victims,” she said.

  He breathed out a cloud of smoke, saying nothing.

  Victoria methodically laid four autopsy photographs in front of him, four of the five Palm Beach County victims, excluding the one who had been burned beyond recognition in the field. Only their faces were in the photos.

  “But that’s not cigarette ash smeared all over their faces,” she said. “Is it?”

  He took another drag. “You know what it is.”

  “Why don’t you tell me?”

  He sat back, flicking his ash on the floor. Getting comfortable, thought Victoria.

  “Do you know why women used to be called the fair sex?” he asked.

  She knew it had to do with an archaic sense of beauty and purity—Mirror, mirror, on the wall—but she wanted his view. “I’ve never really given it much thought.”

  “It’s because when you compare them to men, they really are fairer.”

  “In what way?” asked Victoria.

  “Are you even trying to pay attention? What do you think we’re talking about here? I mean their skin. There’s a difference in pigmentation between men and women.”

  “I would have thought it depends on the person.”

  “That’s because you’re stupid,” he said. “And I’m much smarter than I look.”

  Talk to me, smart boy.

  “It’s a chemical and molecular fact,” he said. “Obviously it’s not as dramatic as the difference between a black man and a white man. But if you compare a white man to a white woman, or a black man to a black woman, the male has more melanin and hemoglobin. Men are darker. Women are paler. The female is the fair sex.”

  Victoria couldn’t wait to see what this guy had been reading on the Internet. “Is that so?”

  “Don’t talk down to me.”

  “I’m not.”

  “I see that look on your face. You think I’m a Confederate-flag-waving racist and card-carrying member of the Ku Klux Klan.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “People think because I went into farming and didn’t go to college, I couldn’t hack it in school. I was actually a good student. Chemistry was my best subject.”

  Translation: you cooked meth.

  “And I’ve lived all over the world. Nicaragua, Dominican Republic, Brazil.”

  “That’s impressive.”

  “I’m not trying to impress you. I’m making a point. My brain, and what I see with my own two eyes, tells me that skin color is less and less about race.”

  “I’m not sure I understand what you just said.”

  “Pay attention, will you? It’s simple. You go to a place like Managua or Santo Domingo or São Paulo, who the fuck knows what race those people are? Black? White? Hispanic? Indian? Multiracial, whatever that means? Truth is, the labels are all bullshit. It’s a thousand-year process, but the world is evolving into a single human race where skin color is important for one thing only: sex. The darker male is attracted to the lighter female.”

  “That’s your theory?”

  “Not a theory. It’s factual. That’s why black men have always wanted our women.”

  “Does that make you angry?”

  “Not at all. I’ve been surrounded by dark-skinned men in the cane fields all my adult life. Got no problem with them. Physical attraction to the fair sex is completely natural.” He leaned closer, the smoke from his cigarette trailing toward Victoria. “What pisses me off is white women who want to pop out little brown babies.”

  Victoria had heard enough. With the homemade videos of his victims on his computer, the physical evidence collected by the forensic team, and his demonstrated desire to fill the world with anthropological bullshit, Cutter was on his way to a very long sleep at the end of Death Row. It was time to see what he knew about the crimes outside of Palm Beach County.

  Victoria collected the victims’ photographs and tucked them into the file. “There’s another reason I knew you smoked,” she said. “Aside from the burn marks on the victims, I mean.”

  He crushed out his cigarette and lit another. “Is this part of your brilliant criminal profile? White male chain smoker?”

  She opened another file and laid a single photograph of Tyla Tomkins on the table. Not Tyla the victim. It was Tyla the lawyer, a professional black-and-white image from the BB&L website.

  “I saw you standing across the street from Tyla Tomkins’ memorial service,” said Victoria.

  He smiled.

  “That was you, wasn’t it? That glowing orange dot in the overflow parking lot?”

  Silence.

  She leaned closer, staring him down from across the table. “Did you kill Tyla Tomkins?”

  “Nope,” he said, no hesitation. “We would have liked to, though.”

  “What do you mean, ‘we’?”

  “All of us in Nicaragua. She was part of the team of Miami lawyers who came over to bust our balls.”

  This wasn’t a turn Victoria had expected. “Who else was on that team?”

  “Bunch of suits. I don’t remember.”

  “They came to bust your balls about what?”

  “Everything. The whole cane-cutting operation in Nicaragua.”

  “What, specifically?”

  “Same old bullshit. Labor issues. Ask the lawyers if you want to know more.”

  Victoria glanced at her partner, who made a note of it. They would ask the lawyers.

  She laid another photograph on the table. It was a frame from the security camera at the restaurant in Orlando, Tyla having dinner with Abe Beckham.

  “Why did you send this to Angelina Beckham?”

  “Who’s Angelina Beckham?”

  Victoria ignored his question. She laid a duplicate of the restaurant photograph on the table, right beside the other, but this one showed the smudge of ash on Tyla’s face.

  “Angelina Beckham found these photos in her mailbox. I know it was you who sent them. That’s your signature.”

  “My signature?”

  “Sugarcane ash on Tyla’s face.”

  He took a closer look, almost chuckling. “Why would anyone smear black ash on a face that’s already black?”

  “I don’t know. Why would they?”

  He took a long drag from his cigarette. “Doesn’t make any sense to me.”

  It didn’t to Victoria, either. She laid a photograph of Angelina on the table. “Where is Angelina Bec
kham?”

  “Is that her?”

  “You know it is.”

  “Never heard of her,” he said.

  “Why did you go to Tyla Tomkins’ memorial service?” she asked, a quick gear shift, just to trip him up.

  “I didn’t go to her service.”

  “Why were you having a smoke in the parking lot across the street?”

  “I got a better question: Why did you dumb shits think Cutter killed her?”

  Cutter, a name the media had created. Obviously he’d been following the story in the news. “Did Cutter kill her?”

  “Ask Cutter.”

  “I am asking.”

  He took another drag on his cigarette, his eyes narrowing. It was one of those breakthrough moments that could never be duplicated, and Victoria could only hope that the video would show that he was talking about himself in the third person. “Cutter doesn’t do that black shit,” he said. “You should know that, genius.”

  Victoria pushed the other photograph toward him. She hated to talk on a psychopath’s level, but sometimes it was necessary. “Did Cutter ‘do’ Angelina Beckham?”

  He glanced at the photo, a sick smile creasing his lips. “He would. If she needed to be reminded to suck the pink finger.”

  “Did Angelina need that reminder?”

  He shook his head, then shrugged. “Fuck if I know. Never seen the woman before.”

  Victoria locked eyes with him, refusing to blink. He didn’t look away. She could have worked him harder, pushed his buttons, asked him the same question over and over, fifty different ways. But she didn’t see the point.

  She believed him.

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Rid met me at the entrance to the FBI’s Miami field office. He’d been right. I got through the security clearance checkpoint in the main lobby but no farther. Santos was keeping a tight fist on the interrogation. She probably wouldn’t have even allowed me in the building if Rid hadn’t been with me.

  “She should at least let you observe,” I said. “You’re one of the lead Miami-Dade detectives on the task force.”

  We were alone in a windowless waiting area. I was pacing. Rid was on the couch, seated beneath a bronze plaque that honored fallen agents from the Miami office.

  “She thinks I’m a pipeline to you,” he said.

  “Maybe we shouldn’t have canceled that redo of the polygraph this morning.”

  “Abe, you’re in no shape to take another polygraph.”

  “You can see that. You’re sitting right here with me. But what if Carmen thinks I’m just afraid to retake the test?”

  Rid gave me a sobering look. “You know how I feel about it.”

  He’d said it when Carmen had suggested a second examination. He wasn’t going to come right out and say it again, but his advice “as a friend” was reheard nonetheless: What you probably need is a lawyer.

  “Let’s see how this plays out,” I said.

  I stopped and dialed Angelina’s mother again. No answer. It was the same with her father. I didn’t bother leaving a fourth message for them to call me. I wanted to be the one to tell them about Cutter in custody. After the way Jake had spoken to me before their press conference, it troubled me that neither one would answer.

  “You go ahead and call them, Rid. See if they pick up.”

  He dialed. First Margaret. Then Jake. Neither one answered. I dialed the main number at the hotel, then Angelina’s sister. I tried Sloane at the command center. No sign of Angelina’s parents.

  “This is getting weird,” I said.

  Getting weird? The expression on Rid’s face had almost asked that question, but he’d caught himself. It could have been funny if this weren’t so unfunny.

  My phone rang, and I answered without even checking the number, hoping that it was Jake or Margaret. It was Ed Brumbel.

  “I heard they got Cutter.”

  We hadn’t talked since the message I’d left him about talking to the reporter, but that already seemed like ancient history. “How did you hear?”

  “I read every press release the sugar industry issues. Cortinas just put one out on Tommy Salvo, basically disowning him.”

  “Can you send that to me?”

  “Sure. I can also tell you a thing or two about Tommy Salvo. I took his deposition twenty years ago in the class action lawsuits.”

  “The wage-shorting cases?”

  “Right. He was one of the supervisors who reviewed the task wages. And a lying son of a bitch.”

  “My understanding is that he’s in the Nicaragua operations now.”

  “I saw that in the press release. And that’s what really interests me. Compared to Central America, the old H-2 program on the Florida plantations was like Club Med.”

  “Ed, I’m looking for my wife. I don’t have time to talk—”

  “I understand. And, hey, I’m really sorry about slipping up and mentioning Tyla to that reporter Saturday night. Or Sunday morning, whenever it was.”

  “Forget it.”

  “But listen to me. Cortinas issued this press release proactively for damage control. They know the company is going to take serious heat.”

  “Because one of their ten thousand employees turns out to be a killer? I don’t buy it.”

  “No. Because Salvo left Nicaragua three months ago, just before the harvest season started in Central America, right before these killings started in Florida. Cortinas obviously knew he wasn’t showing up for work, and they must have known he had a house that isn’t very far from where the bodies were being dumped in the cane fields. But the company never told the FBI that Salvo should be on the radar. As far as the FBI knew, Salvo was in Nicaragua the whole time.”

  “That seems like an important point,” I said. “But I’m having trouble connecting it to the only thing that matters right now, which is finding my wife.”

  “It’s one piece of the bigger puzzle,” he said. “It explains Tyla Tomkins.”

  We were getting warm. “How?”

  “Tyla was trying to tell you about some kind of criminal conduct involving the Cortinas companies. The Central American operation is out of control. Do you know what the second most common killer of men in Nicaragua and El Salvador is? Chronic kidney disease. You know where ninety-nine percent of those men work? In the sugarcane fields. It’s a mystery illness. They don’t know if it’s exposure to pesticides or if the sugar companies are literally working these men to death. They call it ‘the malady of the sugarcane.’ Healthy men in their twenties are ending up on dialysis and dropping dead. This is criminal, Abe.”

  “Yeah, but I’m a prosecutor in Miami. Why would Tyla come to me about crimes in Central America?”

  “She was blowing the whistle on her own client, and she trusted you. Something or someone told her that Tommy Salvo was deep into what was happening in Central America. It bugged her that Cortinas didn’t want local law enforcement interviewing him—even if he was involved in these serial killings.”

  “Wait a minute. Are you saying that Cortinas knew he was the killer?”

  “No. I’m saying they didn’t give a shit if he was or he wasn’t. Which is the way that this company has always operated. The only thing they cared about was the fact that Tommy Salvo has information about ‘the malady of the sugarcane,’ and the last thing the company wanted was Salvo talking to the FBI. I think that’s what Tyla Tomkins was trying to tell you. Maybe she uncovered something about his background, or maybe she just had a hunch about this guy because he was back in Florida illegally. But she was trying to tell you that local law enforcement needed to talk to Tommy Salvo.”

  I had to discount anything Ed said about Big Sugar. But he was actually making sense.

  “It might have gotten her killed,” he added.

  “Except that Agent Santos seems pretty certain that Cutter didn’t kill Tyla.”

  “Maybe Agent Santos is wrong.”

  She also didn’t think Cutter had anything to do with Angelina’s d
isappearance. “She could be wrong,” I said. “Or we could be missing something.”

  My phone vibrated with an incoming text. It was from Angelina’s mother.

  “Ed, thanks, I’ll call you later,” I said, and quickly hung up. Rid asked me something about the call, but I was too focused on Margaret’s message to hear him.

  IMPORTANT. You are going to get a phone call from the law office of Jeffrey Winters. Pick up the call. Do not ignore it!!!

  I knew Winters. He’d left the state attorney’s office when Carmen promoted me, and not him, to senior trial counsel. Hard to say who “won.” He was one of the top criminal defense lawyers in Miami.

  “Rid, what do you know about this call from Jeffrey Winters?”

  Rid looked at me, confused. “Winters? Nothing.”

  I wasn’t buying it. “You’re the one who’s been telling me I need a lawyer. Did you and Margaret cook this up?”

  “I haven’t talked to Margaret.”

  I was getting angry. “Rid, I can sniff this one out a mile away. Jake is not on my side. Margaret is. You told her I need a lawyer. She’s paying for Winters behind Jake’s back. That’s what this call is about, isn’t it?”

  “Abe, I got nothing to do with this.”

  The door opened. One of the FBI agents on the Cutter task force stepped into the waiting area. “Detective Riddel, you can come in, if you like. Agent Santos and I are available now.”

  “What about Abe?” he asked.

  “Sorry. Task force only.”

  My phone rang. The caller ID said it was the law office of Jeffrey Winters.

  “You go ahead,” I said. “I’ll wait.”

  Rid and the agent disappeared behind the door. My phone continued to ring. I had no desire to talk to Jeffrey Winters, but I suddenly did want to know if Rid had “nothing to do with this”—or if, for the first time since I’d known him, he’d lied to my face.

  One more ring and it would have gone to voice mail. I picked up and said hello.

  “Abe?”

  I froze.

  “Abe, it’s me.”

  I nearly dropped the phone.