Charles Willeford_Hoke Moseley 03

by Sideswipe

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Other Books By This Author

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Introduction by Lawrence Block

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Also by Charles Willeford

  Copyright

  ACCLAIM FOR CHARLES WILLEFORD’S

  SIDESWIPE

  and The Hoke Moseley Novels

  “Extraordinarily winning… pure pleasure…. Mr. Willeford never puts a foot wrong.”

  —The New Yorker

  “[A] blend of gripping action and wry off-beat humor.”

  —The Washington Post

  “No one writes a better crime novel than Charles Willeford.”

  —Elmore Leonard

  “Nobody writes like Charles Willeford…. He is an original—funny, weird and wonderful.”

  —James Crumley

  “If you are looking for a master’s insight into the humid decadence of South Florida and its polyglot tribes, nobody does that as well as Mr. Willeford.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “Hoke Moseley is a magnificently battered hero. Willeford brings him to us lean and hard and brand-new.”

  —Donald E. Westlake

  “Willeford has a marvelously deadpan way with losers on both sides of the law.”

  —The Philadelphia Inquirer

  CHARLES WILLEFORD

  SIDESWIPE

  Charles Willeford was a highly decorated (Silver Star, Bronze Star, Purple Heart, Luxembourg Croix de Guerre) tank commander with the Third Army in World War II. He was also a professional horse trainer, boxer, radio announcer, and painter. Willeford, the author of twenty novels, created the Miami detective series featuring Hoke Moseley, which includes Miami Blues, Sideswipe, The Way We Die Now, and New Hope for the Dead. He died in 1988.

  NOVELS BY CHARLES WILLEFORD

  High Priest of California

  Pick-up

  Wild Wives

  The Black Mass of Brother Springer

  Lust Is a Woman

  The Woman Chaser

  Understudy for Death

  Deliver Me From Dallas

  Cockfighter

  The Burnt Orange Heresy

  The Hombre from Sonora

  Miami Blues

  New Hope for the Dead

  Sideswipe

  The Way We Die Now

  The Shark-Infested Custard

  For Jim, Liz, and Jared

  Life is an effort that deserves a better cause.

  —KARL KRAUS

  There’s a lot of bastards out there!

  —WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS

  Introduction by Lawrence Block

  I met Charles Willeford for the first time in 1985. My wife, Lynne, and I had recently moved to Fort Myers Beach, on the Florida Gulf Coast, and one day I got a call from Dennis McMillan. At the time, Dennis was occupying himself by publishing limited editions of the seemingly inexhaustible body of Fredric Brown’s previously uncollected short stories. Before we’d left New York, I’d written an introduction for one of these volumes, a lesser novel entitled The Case of the Dancing Sandwiches. Dennis was living in the Miami area and thought he might drive over for a visit. Great, I said. He added that he might bring Charles and Betsy Willeford. Terrific, I said.

  They came over and we all went out for lunch and sat around talking for a couple of hours. I remember Charles spoke about men in—I think—Haiti, who ate cat meat. (Not meat for the cat, meat of the cat.) “Either you’ve eaten cat or you haven’t,” he said mysteriously. “They’ll look at you like this,” he went on, looking at me like that, “and they’ll say, ‘You eat cat, don’t you?’” We talked some about baseball, too. Betsy was a diehard Cubs fan, and very likely still is; it’s not the sort of thing you get over. “They’ll break your heart every time,” she said.

  I met them again a year or so later at the Miami Book Fair; I think Charles and I were on a panel together, but he may have been in the audience. (It couldn’t have been the other way around because I didn’t get to attend any panels myself. I flew in, did what I was supposed to do, and flew right back out again.) We chatted for a couple of minutes. I don’t recall that anything was said about Cubs or cat meat.

  In January of ’88 we met a final time in Key West, at a symposium on the mystery. We had a couple of conversations during the course of the weekend, and I remember how his eyes glinted when he talked about some of the carefree psychopaths he’d encountered during his years in the service.

  Then a few, months later I got word that he’d died.

  In one of his Hoke Moseley novels there’s a little man who retired to South Florida after a lifetime spent painting pinstripes on the sides of automobiles. When we meet him he’s walking through his neighborhood with a kind word and a cheerful smile for everyone he meets. He carries a walking stick, its hollow interior stocked with poisoned meat pellets; the affable old boy delights in poisoning every dog that crosses his path.

  I’m crazy about that character. And nobody but Charles Willeford could have dreamed him up.

  Quirky is the word that always comes to mind. Willeford wrote quirky books about quirky characters, and seems to have done so with a magnificent disregard for what anyone else thought. He started out writing soft-core paperback porn, and while I could name a score of writers who began that way, myself among them, he’s the only one I know who chose to publish the books under his own name. He didn’t mind seeing them republished years later in hardcover, either. Does this mean that he took them seriously? Or just that he took them no less seriously than he took anything else?

  Perhaps he simply regarded everything he wrote as part of a body of work, and perhaps he was right. The best of his books (except for two impeccable volumes of autobiography) are flawed, while the least consequential contain bits and pieces that redeem them. Cockfighter succeeds in spite of an insupportable premise. The Burnt Orange Heresy is at once a solid crime novel and a fierce send-up of modern art while constituting perhaps the longest shaggy dog story ever told.

  The Hoke Moseley novels are Willeford’s finest and most durable work, yet the series was almost nipped in the bud; in his first attempt at a sequel to Miami Blues, he had his unlikely hero commit an unforgivable crime, and ended the book with Hoke contentedly anticipating a life of solitary confinement. Wiser heads prevailed, and each succeeding volume in the series brought the author a wider audience and more critical recognition.

  And, just as he was on the brink of the success he so richly deserved, he went and died. You have to figure it was the sort of joke he’d have appreciated.

  —Lawrence Block

  New York City

  Store owners Gunned Down in Daring Daytime Holdup

  Los Angeles (UPI)—In a daring daylight holdup, Samuel Stuka, 53, and his wife, Myra, 47, owners of Golden Liquors, 4126 South Figueroa Street, were shotgunned and wounded fatally by a tall man wearing a gray cowboy hat at ten this morning, according to Detective Hans Waggoner, University Station, investigator of the case.

  “There was an eyewitness,” Waggoner told reporters, “and we are tracking some leads now. The man was alone and drove away in a red vehicle th
at was either a Camaro or a Nissan two-door with a horizontal fin across the trunk.”

  The eyewitness, who was not named, heard the two shots, the detective said, and dived behind a hedge next to the store. He looked up when the killer got into the vehicle and drove away, but did not get the license number.

  “The M.O. is familiar,” Waggoner said, “and we have some good leads.” He did not elaborate, because the investigation was continuing.

  Mrs. Robert L. Prentiss, the couple’s daughter, who resides in Covina with her husband and two children, Bobby, 4, and Jocelyn, 2, said that her father had bought the store three months ago, after moving to Los Angeles from Glen Ellyn, Ill., to be closer to his grandchildren.

  “He was semi-retired, but needed a place to go every day,” she said, “and that’s why he bought the store. My mother was only helping him out temporarily—” Mrs. Prentiss broke down then, and could not continue.

  The robbery of Golden Liquors was the third liquor store robbery this week in southwest L.A., but the Stukas were the only proprietors killed, Waggoner said. A shotgun was employed in the other two holdups as well.

  “Mr. Stuka probably put up some kind of resistance,” Detective Waggoner said, “which is a mistake if the robber has a sawed-off.”

  1

  Detective-Sergeant Hoke Moseley, Miami Police Department, opened the front door of his house in Green Lakes, looked to the left and to the right. Then, barechested and barefooted, and wearing droopy white boxer shorts, he dashed out to pick up the Miami Herald from the front lawn. At six A.M. there was little need for this modesty. His neighbors were not up, and the eastern sky was barely turning a nacreous gray.

  The paper was usually delivered by five-thirty each morning by an angry Puerto Rican in a white Toyota, whose erratic throw from his speeding car never found the same spot on the lawn. The driver was still angry, Hoke thought on those mornings when he stood behind the screen door waiting for the paper, because Hoke had returned the delivery man’s stamped, self-addressed Christmas card without including a check or a five-dollar bill as a tip.

  In the kitchen, Hoke pulled the slippery transparent cover from the paper, wadded it into a ball, and tossed it into the overflowing grocery bag that served as a garbage receptacle. He read the first paragraph in all of the front-page stories. Another American hostage had been killed by a Shiite skyjacker in Lebanon. The new fare for Metrorail would (perhaps) be a quarter, a half-dollar, or a dollar, but the newest fare system would probably depend on which station the rider used to board the train. An eighteen-year-old Haitian, a recent graduate of Miami-Norland High School, had miraculously managed to obtain an appointment to the U.S. Air Force Academy, and the congressman who had appointed him had just discovered that the boy was an illegal alien and was awaiting deportation at the Krome Detention Center. This item reminded Hoke of the tasteless joke Commander Bill Henderson had told him yesterday in the department’s cafeteria.

  “How can you tell when a Haitian’s been in your back yard?”

  “How?”

  “Your mango tree’s been stripped and your dog’s got AIDS.”

  Hoke hadn’t laughed. “That won’t work, Bill.”

  “Why not? I think it’s funny.”

  “No, it doesn’t work, because everyone doesn’t have a mango tree in his back yard, and not every Haitian has AIDS.”

  “Most of them have.”

  “No. I don’t have a mango tree and neither do you.”

  “I mean AIDS. Most Haitians have AIDS.”

  “Not so. I think the figure’s less than one-half of one percent.”

  “Go fuck yourself, Hoke.” Henderson got up from the table and left the cafeteria without finishing his coffee.

  Hoke’s reaction to Henderson’s crummy humor had been another sign, but Hoke hadn’t spotted it and neither had Bill Henderson. Ordinarily, when Bill told one of his jokes, Hoke at least grinned and said, “That’s a good one,” even when it was an out-of-context gag Bill had written down from the Johnny Carson monologue.

  But Hoke hadn’t smiled for more than a week, and he hadn’t laughed at anything for almost a month.

  Hoke sprinkled a liberal helping of Grape-Nuts into a plastic sieve and ran hot water from the tap over the cereal to make it soft enough that he could eat it without putting in his false teeth. When the cereal had softened sufficiently, he dumped it into a bowl and covered it with half-and-half. He then sliced a banana into the cereal, upended a pink packet of Sweet ‘n Low over the mixture, and took the bowl and the newspaper out into the Florida room.

  The sun porch had open, jalousied windows on three sides, and a hot, damp breeze blew through them from the lake. The Florida room faced a square lake of green milk that had once been a gravel quarry. The backs of all of the houses were toward the lake in this Miami subdivision called Green Lakes. Not all of the homeowners, or renters, had glassed-in porches like Hoke. Some of them had redwood decks in back; others had settled for do-it-yourself concrete patios and barbecue pits; yet all of the houses in Green Lakes had been constructed originally from the same set of blueprints. Except for the different colors they had been painted, and repainted, and the addition of a few carports, there was little discernible difference among them.

  Hoke sat at a glass-topped wrought-iron table in a webbed patio chair and then realized that he didn’t have a spoon. He returned to the kitchen, got a spoon, sat at the table again, and slowly gummed his Grape-Nuts and chopped bananas as he read the sports section. Ron Fraser, the Miami Hurricanes’ baseball coach, who had coached the team to its second win in the college World Series in Omaha, said he might retire in three, maybe four more years, or he might even renegotiate a new contract. It must be hard, Hoke thought, for a sports writer to turn in something every day when there was nothing worthwhile to report.

  Hoke then turned to Doonesbury, which was poking fan at Palm Beach for requiring mandatory ID cards for non-resident blue-collar workers on the island. Hoke was overwhelmed instantly with a formless feeling of nostalgia. Palm Beach was right across the inlet from Singer Island, and Singer Island, at the moment, was where Hoke wanted to be. Not in his father’s huge four-bedroom house up there, on the Lake Worth intracoastal waterway, but in a hotel or motel room facing the sea where no one could find him and force him to read the fifteen new Incident Reports, with their fifteen attached Supplementary Reports, or “supps” as they were called in the department.

  Hoke shook his head to clear it, glanced at the box scores, and noticed that the Cubs had dropped another game to the Mets—three so far in a three-game series. He threw the paper down in disgust. The Cubs, he thought, should be able to beat the Mets every game. What in hell was the matter with them? Every season it happened this way. The Cubs would be three or four games ahead of everybody, and then drop into a mid-season slump, and then down and down they would plummet into the supps, the supps, the supps …

  The drapes were pulled back suddenly inside the master bedroom by Ellita Sanchez. Hoke turned slightly and waved languidly with his right hand. Ellita, still in her pink shorty nightgown and wearing a purple satin peignoir, smiled broadly and waved back. Then she waddled away from the sliding glass doors toward the bathroom, the one she shared with Hoke’s daughters, Sue Ellen and Aileen—and with Hoke when he could find it unoccupied.

  The morning had begun, another broiling, typically humid June day in Miami. It was Thursday, but it could just as easily have been a Tuesday or a Friday. The summer days were all alike, hot and blazing, with late-afternoon thundershowers that did nothing to relieve the heat and only added to the humidity. Ellita Sanchez, eight months pregnant and now on indefinite maternity leave from the department, would make a pot of Cuban coffee and bring it out in a Thermos to Hoke. She would have one quick cup with Hoke before returning to the kitchen to fry two eggs, sunny side up, and to toast four slices of Cuban bread that she would slather with margarine. Ellita’s doctor had told her not to drink any more coffee until after the baby w
as born, but she drank the thick black Cuban brew anyway, at least one cup, and more often two.

  “My baby,” she explained to Hoke, “will be half Cuban, so I don’t see how one or two little one-ounce cups of coffee can hurt him before he’s born.”

  Ellita didn’t know the father’s last name. His first name was Bruce; she had picked him up for a one-night stand (her first, she had told Hoke) and gotten pregnant as a result. Bruce, whoever he was, did not know that he was going to be a father, and he had probably never thought of Ellita again after the two hours he spent with her in his Coral Gables apartment. A blond, blue-eyed insurance salesman twenty-five years old—that was almost all Ellita knew about Bruce. That much, and that he had two black tufted moles one inch below his left nipple. Ellita was thirty-two years old, and she was not only reconciled to having the unplanned baby, she was looking forward to it. If it was a boy, she was going to name him Pepé, after her uncle who had died in one of Castro’s prisons; and if it was a girl, she was going to name her Merita, after her aunt, Pepé’s wife, who still lived in Cuba. Ellita didn’t care whether it was a boy or a girl, just as long as she had a healthy baby. She had prayed that her child would not have any tufted moles beneath its left nipple—in either case—but she was prepared to accept them if that was the will of God.

  When her eggs and toast were ready, Ellita would bring her plate out to the glass table and rejoin Hoke. With her knife and fork she would fastidiously cut away the white part surrounding the barely cooked yellow yolks and eat the white part first. Then she would eat the yolks, scooping them up one at a time and shoveling them into her mouth without breaking them. This was the part Hoke could barely stand to watch, the runny yellow yolk oozing through Ellita’s strong white teeth. But he couldn’t say anything to Ellita about this practice, this disgusting habit, because she paid half the rent and half the utilities on the Green Lakes house. Ellita was Hoke’s partner in the Homicide Division, and she would be his active partner again when her maternity leave was over and she came back to work, so Hoke could only give her criticism or suggestions as a police officer. His supervisory status did not extend to the home, to her eating habits, to her sleeping with earrings on, or to her wearing a layer of sprayed musk on top of her overdose of Shalimar perfume.