Charles Willeford_Hoke Moseley 03

by Sideswipe

  “And the Honda’s got a roof rack. You go to the front door, Jaime, and I’ll slip on around to the back. Nobody locks Florida rooms, and I’ll come in the back way.”

  “Don’t you think we should get some backup first?”

  “If no one’s there, we won’t need any backup. And if someone’s home and resists, I want to take a shot at the bastard. What do you want to do?”

  “I’m with you, Sergeant. Why don’t we see what happens?”

  Hoke took out his pistol. He circled behind the house to cut through the two back yards. Figueras waited, to give Hoke enough time to reach Stanley’s yard, then walked up the concrete path to the door. He rapped on it with the barrel of his pistol.

  Stanley Sinkiewicz opened the door, left it open, and walked back to his dining room table. Stanley didn’t say a word, but sat at the table and began to spoon tomato soup into his mouth. Figueras followed him inside and closed the door with his foot, covering the old man with his weapon. Hoke entered the dining room from the screened porch, also holding his pistol on Stanley. He looked at the old man’s lined, pigeon-gray face, and shook his head. Hoke knew an old lag when he saw one, and he could tell, just by looking at this old con, that the man had spent most of his life in prison. When they finally got his record, it would probably be three feet long.

  “Sinkiewicz?” Hoke asked. “We’re both police officers.”

  “I been waiting.” Stanley nodded. “But I ain’t ate nothing for two days now. I just fixed this soup, not really wanting it, but knew I had to eat something pretty soon. Maya—that’s my wife—when she fixed it for me, used to put a little whipped cream in it. The milk in the icebox went sour on me, and I had to fix it with water instead of milk. But it still tastes pretty good, once I got started on it.”

  “Are you alone, Sinkiewicz?” Figueras asked.

  Stanley nodded and crumpled two soda crackers into his soup.

  “Do you know Troy Louden?” Hoke said.

  Stanley nodded.

  “D’you know where he is?”

  Stanley pointed down the hall with his spoon. “In the bedroom.”

  “I thought you said you were alone.” Hoke had reholstered his pistol, but he quickly withdrew it again. “’Cuff him, Jaime.”

  Hoke started down the hall. Figueras handcuffed Stanley’s wrists behind his back. Hoke hesitated outside the closed bedroom door, waiting for Figueras to cover him. Figueras, holding his pistol with both hands, stayed ten feet behind Hoke. Hoke twisted the knob, threw open the door, and jumped inside with his gun in front of him.

  There was no one else in the room. Figueras joined him. The bed was piled high with a half-dozen sheets, a comforter, a bedspread, and was topped by a woman’s red plastic raincoat. There was a discernible mound beneath all of these coverings. Hoke peeled them back from the head of the bed, one at a time, and uncovered Troy Louden as far as his waist. The corpse was ripe, and the washcloth over Troy’s face had dried. Hoke picked it gingerly away and thought he could detect the odor of burning almonds, but later he was never sure whether he had or not. Dale Forrest’s little .25 caliber slug, a crisscrossed lead dumdum, had hit Troy’s left cheek, penetrating the bone, and then fragments had been deflected upward, exploding the left eye and skating through the eye socket. Troy had suffered a good deal of pain before he died. Hoke covered the dead man’s face back up with the dry washcloth, then drew the bottom sheet over the upper body and head. He and Figueras went back into the dining room.

  Stanley, with his thin arms handcuffed behind his back, was staring at his cooling soup, but he had apparently lost interest in it.

  “How long’s he been dead?” Figueras asked the old man.

  “Three days. I didn’t know what else to do. He was suffering, but he wouldn’t let me call no doctor or let me take him to the hospital. I brought him home, and when I thought he couldn’t stand it no more I gave him two cyanide pills. I didn’t know what else to do for him.”

  “Cyanide?” Hoke said. “Where in hell did you get cyanide?”

  “Inside my cane. Sometimes people keep vicious dogs that bite strangers and little kids. They won’t bite their owners because they feed them, you know, but you can walk down any sidewalk and they’ll come right at you before you know it. So I always kept some pills to poison a bad dog once in a while, when I got the chance. Troy was a good boy, good to me, anyway, maybe because I fed him, too, I guess. But he was a lot like a bad dog. I didn’t want to do it, but I didn’t know what else to do. I even thought about taking some pills myself. But then I thought, Why should I? I ain’t done nothing wrong. Troy managed to keep me out of everything so I wouldn’t get involved, so all I’m responsible for is putting to sleep the only person who ever really loved me. Anyone who ever heard Troy cry and carry on that way would’ve done the same. You just can’t imagine.”

  “Why did he kill all those people?” Hoke said. “Did he say?”

  Stanley shook his head. “He never said, but I think I know why. It was the responsibility. Me and Dale and James. We was all too much for him, and he couldn’t stand the responsibility. That’s what it was …”

  Stanley began to cry then, and Hoke didn’t try to stop him. He realized that the old man had been holding it in for a long time, and that it would be best to let him get it all out. There would be time for more questions later.

  “I’ll Mirandize him, Jaime, while you call Chief Sheldon. This is going to be a jurisdictional ordeal, but no matter what you people up here in Palm Beach County think you want to do, Pm taking this old fart back to Miami with me to be tried first for the supermarket murders.”

  “What difference does it make, Hoke,” Jaime said, “whether he’s tried down there first, or for the guy?” Figueras pointed down the hall.

  “There’re lots of reasons, but I’ll give you one you can understand. Before the old man and the whore are tried to fry in Raiford, Pm going to make lieutenant out of this case. When the next promotion list is posted, Pm going to be at the head of it.”

  Hoke was so pleased with the way it sounded that he left off the part about the answer sheets Major Willie Brownley still had in his briefcase.

  It was well after nine P.M. that night before Hoke got onto the Sunshine Parkway and headed south for Miami. Stanley, handcuffed to the D-ring Hoke had welded onto the passenger door, sat quietly beside him in the dark. Stanley had promised not to try and run, so Hoke hadn’t put leg-irons on him. Ordinarily, the drive to Miami would have been a six- or maybe a seven-cigarette ride, and for the first time, Hoke truly missed his Kools. But he was over the habit, and he wouldn’t smoke again. Not smoking, and counting the weight he had lost, his blood pressure was almost normal again for a man his age.

  To get around the heavy, crazy traffic at the Golden Glades exchange, which every wise Floridian avoided, if possible, Hoke left the Sunshine Parkway at the Hollywood exit and picked up 1-95 for the rest of the way into the city. As the thousands of lighted windows in the tall Miami buildings came into view, Stanley spoke for the first time on the trip.

  “What’s going to happen to me, Sergeant?”

  “Hell, Pop,” Hoke said, not unkindly, “except for the paperwork, it already has.”

  ALSO BY CHARLES WILLEFORD

  “Extraordinarily winning… pure pleasure…. Mr. Willeford

  never puts a foot wrong.”

  —The New Yorker

  Coming soon from Vintage Crime/Black Lizard…

  THE WAY WE DIE NOW

  When Miami homicide detective Hoke Moseley receives an unexplained order to let his beard grow, he doesn’t think much about it. He has too much going on at home, especially with a man he helped convict ten years before moving in across the street. With his former partner, who happens to be nursing a newborn, and his two teenage daughters living with him, Hoke immediately assumes the worst. It doesn’t help matters when he is suddenly assigned to work undercover, outside of his jurisdiction and without his badge, his gun, or his teeth.
Impersonating a drifter, he tries to infiltrate a farm operation suspected of murdering migrant workers. But when he gets there for his job interview, the last thing he is offered is work.

  In this final installment of the highly acclaimed Hoke Moseley novels, Charles Willeford’s brilliance and expertise show on every page. Equally funny, thrilling, and disturbing, The Way We Die Now is a triumphant finish to one of the most original detective series of all time.

  Crime Fiction/1-4000-3250-4

  NEW HOPE FOR THE DEAD

  Miami homicide detective Hoke Moseley is called to a posh neighborhood to investigate a lethal overdose. There he meets the alluring stepmother of the decedent, and begins to wonder about dating a witness. Meanwhile, he has been threatened with suspension by his ambitious new chief unless he leaves his beloved, if squalid, suite at the El Dorado Hotel and moves downtown. With free housing hard to come by, he is desperate to find a new place to live. His difficulties are amplified by an assignment to reinvestigate fifty unsolved murders, the unexpected arrival of his two teenaged daughters, and a partner struggling with an unwanted pregnancy. With few options and even fewer dollars, he decides that the stepmother of the dead junkie might be the solution to all his problems.

  Crime Fiction/1-4000-3249-0

  MIAMI BLUES

  “A marvelous read. Do yourself a favor and go buy Miami

  Blues immediately.”—Harry Crews

  After a brutal day investigating a quadruple homicide, Detective Hoke Moseley settles into his room at the un-illustrious El Dorado Hotel and nurses a glass of brandy. With his guard down, he doesn’t think twice when he hears a knock on the door. The next day, he finds himself in the hospital, badly bruised and with his jaw wired shut. He thinks back over ten years of cases wondering who would want to beat him into unconsciousness, steal his gun and badge, and most importantly, make off with his prized dentures. But the pieces never quite add up to revenge, and the few clues he has keep connecting to a dimwitted hooker, her ex-con boyfriend, and the bizarre murder of a Hare Krishna pimp.

  Crime Fiction/1-4000-3246-6

  VINTAGE CRIME/BLACK LIZARD

  Available at your local bookstore, or call toll-free to order:

  1-800-793-2665 (credit cards only).

  Copyright © 1987 by Charles Willeford

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by St. Martin’s Press, New York, in 1987.

  Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Crime/Black Lizard and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Copyright © 1996 by Lawrence Block.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Willeford, Charles Ray.

  Sideswipe: a novel / by Charles Willeford.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-49094-0

  1. Moseley, Hoke (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Police—Florida—

  Miami—Fiction. 3. Miami (Fla.)—Fiction. I Title. II. Series.

  PS3545.I464S5 2005

  813′.54—dc22

  2004057187

  www.vintagebooks.com

  v3.0