Dutch Uncle hcc-12

by Peter Pavia

  They found loads of fingerprints it took nearly a month to account for. Shug’s team lifted a full set of ten from a windowsill, and there was a partial on the portable stereo that they couldn’t match up with anybody, maid, electrician, or cable TV guy, who might reasonably been in the room. After exhausting his Florida resources, Martinson had the unidentified prints forwarded to the FBI’s Science Crime Lab in Washington. It had already been a week, and it could easily take another, to find matches in their infinite computer files. That’s if they had them at all.

  The current crime of the century occurred in Colorado, and it might not have been a crime at all. A packed-to-the-vents 747 went down over the Rocky Mountains, shortly after take-off from the Denver airport. That was the plane-crash phrase. Shortly after take-off. The disaster cast suspicion on foreign terrorists and the usual knot of pissed-off white guys who blew up Federal Buildings and shot it out with over-armed G-men, but the FBI, backed up by the FAA, refused to issue any definitive statement until all the evidence was in, and since it was spread out over five or six square miles, it’d be a while before all the evidence was in.

  The Colorado crash ended Pfiser’s brief run in the headlines, the same way the Pfiser murder displaced the attack on Josephine Simmons, which had left people sufficiently appalled for several slow news days.

  At approximately two o’clock on a February afternoon, Ms. Simmons, a seventy-nine-year-old woman, was trundling toward the efficiency she’d lived in since 1963, carrying a can of chunk light tuna, a frozen box of spinach, and two grapefruits. Her handbag dangled from her right arm. When an assailant ran up behind her to snatch it, Josephine Simmons, out of pride or fear or stubbornness, decided she wasn’t going to give it up. Or maybe there hadn’t been any decision-making process. Maybe she merely reacted the wrong way. Whatever it was, she fought for the purse. This left the perp no course of action but to pound the woman into submission, and in his rush to escape, he left the handbag on the sidewalk. It contained the grand total of eight dollars and fifty-four cents.

  The media seized on the sum as if to say, See? See how cheap the life of an eighty-nine-pound old lady really is? Like if there’d been a few thousand in the bag, they would’ve understood.

  Nobody witnessed the crime, or nobody came forward and admitted they witnessed the crime, and that was odd, considering it occurred in a residential neighborhood at two o’clock in the afternoon. Robotaille and Acevedo canvassed the area, but no one could furnish even a partial description of the attacker, and after two weeks, their investigation was pretty much dead in the water.

  Until one concerned citizen responded to a call of conscience and a televised Crime Stoppers program, and phoned Beach detectives. Acting anonymously, the tipster fingered one Anton Canter, an area crackhead and two-bit dealer who’d taken a few raps for possession and sales, and was between jolts in the Florida penal system.

  With some assault beefs on his record, Canter fit the profile flush, and Arnie, Acevedo, Robotaille and even Kramer at one point gave him the latter-day hot light and rubber hose. They held him for twenty-three hours without charging him. They kept him awake and they kept him hungry.

  Through it all, Canter stuck to the alibi that he’d been in his outpatient drug-rehab program. The counselor vouched for him, and so did some of the other druggies in his group. His name was in the clinic’s daybook. Anton Canter was a largely worthless human being, more than capable of this crime. However, the facts he based his alibi on suggested he didn’t do it.

  Martinson was driving north on Washington Avenue when he pulled over and made a quick dash across the street into Burger King. He ordered two Whoppers with Cheese. Hoping nobody would catch him committing this crime against his cholesterol levels, he skulked back to the car and wolfed down the burgers with a side order of guilt, one after the other. He polished off the last few bites of the second and wiped his fingers on the bag, before heading into the florist’s. After selecting three yellow tulips and three sprigs of honeysuckle, he drove to Mt. Sinai hospital.

  Josephine Simmons had lain in this bed, comatose, since the day of her attack. She looked like a child dying of starvation, minus the bloated belly. She was wired to one machine that displayed her heartbeat on a screen and a second that monitored her breathing. IVs pierced either arm and a hose pumped oxygen into her nostrils.

  With a little bad luck, and who didn’t have that, life could come to this. Three quarters of a century of loneliness and struggle, and here you were in a hospital, stranded between living and dying. It was scary. The chances were pretty good Martinson could wind up the same way, after a heart attack or a stroke or a bout with cancer. Retired and out of the loop, a couple people who remembered him from his cop days, Lili and Robotaille, say, would visit him and bring him flowers he couldn’t see, until he became a nuisance people would rather forget about, wondering why he didn’t just hurry up and die. Life was seldom fair. Martinson had gotten his mind around this a long time ago, but the cruel tricks it managed to come up with sometimes knocked the breath right out of him.

  The water in the vase he filled last week had evaporated to an inch from the bottom, murky with dust and shriveled petals. He threw the old flowers in the garbage, rinsed the vase in the bathroom sink, and filled it about halfway. He put the fresh flowers inside. The scent of honeysuckle filled the room and chased away the modern, antiseptic smell.

  Martinson chattered, arranging the flowers on a night-stand. “Here’s a card,” he said, spotting a religious greeting from an order of nuns. “It’s signed by a Sister Bridget in Des Moines. A picture of some saint.” The icon had its arms spread, palms out and ready to embrace. “It says they’re praying for you to get well.”

  The doctor told Martinson his visits might not be helping, but they couldn’t possibly be doing any harm. He encouraged him to keep it up. This was an honest doctor, a short guy with tight curls, who gave Arnie the truth early on when Arnie was wondering who else came to see her. And when he asked about her condition, whether it was like being asleep or being knocked out or what, the doctor admitted coma was something they didn’t know that much about. The young doctor hadn’t honed his bluffing instinct. He was the first doctor Martinson heard say, I don’t know.

  Arnie took the chair at Josephine’s bedside and let three meaty fingers rest in her palm. Josephine wrapped her hand around them, the way she always did. The first time, he jumped up to find that honest doctor and tell him what happened, thinking he’d been present for some major breakthrough. The man informed him it happened all the time. A reflex. Again, it wasn’t bad, but it didn’t necessarily mean all that much either.

  But it convinced him Josephine Simmons was in there somewhere. Shallow chest moving up and down, eyes shut, bony fingers squeezing with a surprising strength, the way a baby could startle you with how much power they had in their tiny fists. Under the wires and tubes and plastic attachments, a human being whose life had basic fundamental value was fighting to get out.

  He said, “You rest up and try to get better, Josephine. I gotta get back to work, but I’ll be by to see you next week. The flowers are beautiful. Yellow tulips. And you can’t miss that honeysuckle, right?”

  Martinson made a move to get out of the chair, and as he stood, he thought he felt Josephine’s fingers tighten their grip, but it was possible he only imagined it.

  The prevailing sentiment around the job was that John Kramer’s ascension to lieutenant had as much to do with his skill at navigating Department politics as it did with any leadership qualities he may have possessed. Kramer was in place before Acevedo got here, but Robotaille and other veterans related the disappointment they felt when Arnie Martinson didn’t get the promotion.

  Arnie would’ve claimed he wasn’t interested in the job. He would have said Kramer made a fine lieutenant, and he would’ve denied there was any rivalry between them, but they often disagreed on policy. Like whether or not to make the composite of their suspect in the Pfiser murder
public. Kramer was for, Martinson dead set against.

  The following events proved the Martinson instincts sharp:

  1) Patrolman Kenneth Simms, recovering from a gunshot wound and probably considering another line of work, dropped by the station to visit his buddies. Taking note of the composite on a bulletin board, he said it bore a glancing resemblance to a guy who broke his jaw at Lefty’s, a bar on Washington that was now a coffee shop. The guy’s name, Simms recalled, sounded Irish and started with an H. He asked somebody to look it up. Harold James Healy.

  2) Later that day, a Fort Lauderdale sergeant called Beach detectives and told them they might want to take a look at a bouncer in a joint called Sailor Randy’s.

  And 3): Yesterday, an FBI fingerprint search spit out a match for a partial that had been lifted from the stereo in Manfred Pfiser’s room. It was identified as belonging to one Harold James Healy, last known address, New York City. With no help from the general populace, Harold James Healy was glowing super-nova hot.

  Score one for Martinson.

  The one thing they gained by releasing the composite was the likelihood of alerting the suspect to his status. And they created a task that would tie up Ron Robotaille for days. He was watching a tips hotline right now, unwrapping a piece of candy and sticking it into his mouth.

  The FBI faxed a nice, neat package. Healy was born on 12/16/61 in Manhattan, and took his first fall on 5/23/78, for being a passenger in a stolen car. He earned an Adjournment Contemplating Dismissal.

  On 11/12/90, he was arrested for possession of a controlled substance, codeine, and issued a summons. The judge slapped his wrist and Healy managed to outmaneuver the law until 8/15/94, when he was charged with assault in New York. His attorney plea-bargained it down to being a patron of a disorderly premises.

  He did his very first bit a year later right here in the Dade County Jail. Tumbling on a slew of charges, including assaulting an officer, he got off easy. Nine months inside. Acevedo studied the mugs from Healy’s most recent bust. The French chick had a point. He did kind of look like Robotaille. It was a stretch, but Lili could see it.

  She slanted her eyes at Robotaille, who was wearing a bored expression, taking an obligatory note from somebody on the phone. She looked from the mug shot to the composite to Robotaille. Healy wasn’t what you’d think of as ugly, but he was no Ron Robotaille.

  Ron was great looking, and he was a nice guy, too, but he was so dull he made you want to scream. It took Lili two dates to figure it out. They had a decent, unexciting time at a restaurant in Aventura, and another night they went to see a boring movie, Robotaille’s choice, then for drinks in the Grove. Somehow or other, they wound up in Lili’s apartment.

  Wait a minute. This was dishonest thinking. They wound up in Lili’s apartment because she was entertaining the idea of having sex with him, but when they got there, he wouldn’t shut up about his soon-to-be-ex-wife, which turned off Lili like a light switch. Robotaille managed to put two and two together. He wasn’t sure how, but he knew he’d blown it, and he didn’t ask Lili out again. Only now, even their most mundane exchanges were strained with a clumsiness that wouldn’t have been there if not for those two dates. Lili was sorry she’d bothered. If he wasn’t so handsome, and Lili hadn’t been so flattered, she wouldn’t have.

  Robotaille looked over, and Lili quickly averted her glance to Healy’s mug shot. The look in Healey’s eyes was one of half-drunk exasperation, not that dead-lensed, clench-toothed, tough-guy stare that jumped out of so many of these pictures. Healy was trying out the you’ve-got-the-wrong-man stare. You saw a lot of those, too. Annick Mersault, that syrupy little pain in the ass, hadn’t done much with the shape of Healy’s face, or his nose, or his chin. But the eyes, she had gotten the eyes exactly right.

  Wispy clouds splashed white like brushstrokes against the sky. It was a bright afternoon, a day for the Department of Tourism. Martinson was driving with the windows down. It was hot enough for the AC, but Arnie held out for the muggiest weather to run it, afraid that the shock of the cold air blowing on him could trigger a migraine.

  Traffic was one fact of South Florida life the tourism people never got around to mentioning. This ride between Miami and Ft. Lauderdale got more aggravating every time he made the drive, and he did it only when it couldn’t be helped. The state started a highway improvement program a decade ago, and Martinson couldn’t remember the last time all the lanes on the interstate were open. He drove past coned-off quarter mile sections. Long stretches of road he swore were finished the last time he came this way had somebody in florescent orange flagging traffic to a virtual standstill. What used to be a forty-minute trip could sometimes take an hour and a half if you weren’t lucky. Highway improvement. He got off on Sunrise Boulevard.

  Sailor Randy’s was in a strip of yahoo-joints that catered to a young crowd, go-go bars and indoor-outdoor booze shrines roping them in with goofball promotions. A sandwich board at the entrance to the parking lot said TUE: DRESS TO KILL WED: LADIES DRINK 2-4-1 ETC. Arnie wondered what you got for that ETC.

  The club featured two outside bars and a cinderblock building that looked like a warehouse standing behind them. Inside, the concrete and cement trapped the stink of stale beer. Two Latin teenagers were dealing with a delivery, restacking cases of Heineken on a handtruck that was as tall as either of them. They wheeled it into a storage room, one kid pushing, the other bracing the load so it didn’t wind up on the floor. The deserted space had a weird feel.

  Martinson knocked on a half-opened door and pushed it in. A man was sitting at a desk. He looked to be in his late thirties, with a rock star haircut and a beard flecked with grey. He looked up, saw Martinson, and said, “Hi.”

  Martinson badged him.

  The man introduced himself as Bryce Peyton, and stood up to shake hands. He was about 6’2” and he had huge hands, his right covering Arnie’s like a catcher’s mitt. He said he owned Sailor Randy’s.

  “I’m investigating a homicide that occurred on March fifth,” Martinson said. “We got a tip from the Sheriff’s Office that this guy might be working in your place.” Arnie showed him Healy’s mugs.

  Peyton pulled a variety of faces, squinting, bringing his eyebrows together, pursing his lips and pushing them out. No question in Martinson’s mind he knew the suspect, but he might’ve been debating whether to give him up.

  Peyton said, “Healy, huh? He told me his name was Harry James.” He handed back the photos. “Am I gonna need a lawyer? Because if I’m gonna need a lawyer, you’re supposed to tell me. That is, if I’m not mistaken and I don’t think I am.”

  Where was this guy coming from? Martinson said, “What would you need a lawyer for?”

  “In case I was under arrest.” Peyton lit a Chesterfield. Now there was a brand you didn’t see every day. He took a sip from a glass on his desk.

  “I’m just trying to run a business here,” he said. “Make a living and pay my taxes. Trouble with the law? I don’t need it.”

  Martinson thought, pretty shaky. Maybe he was worried about the illegals he had stocking his beer.

  The first two fingers on his smoking hand were stained to the second knuckle, from sucking those lung-busting Chesterfields right down to the nub, probably a good forty or fifty a day. Martinson wanted to tell him, There’s a reason people quit smoking.

  “Listen,” Martinson said, “whatever you got going here, I don’t give a shit about it. I’m asking you what you know about Harry Healy.”

  “He was this drifter type looking for work.” Peyton picked up his glass and drained it. It wasn’t water, it was vodka. “I felt sorry for him, but to tell the truth, I needed the help. By the time March rolls around, I get a thousand heads a night in here. Somebody’s gotta control ’em. Harry seemed like a nice guy, and he did a good job.”

  Martinson said, “Where is he now?”

  “I haven’t seen him in a week. He took Tuesday off, and he was supposed to work Wednesday, but he never showed
up. He said he had experience and he worked like he had experience. He’s from New York, you know. He dropped the right name, so I hired him.”

  “What name?” Martinson said. He had his notebook out.

  “Frankie Yin.” Peyton inhaled a chestful of smoke and blew it toward the ceiling. “You ever hear of Frankie Yin?”

  “Why would I have heard of Frankie Yin?”

  Peyton’s irises shined with a reverential gleam. His hands gestured loosely, as if words wouldn’t do justice to the admiration he had to express. “Why would you have heard of Toots Shor? Or Josephine Baker? They’re legends of this industry.”

  Martinson didn’t know who the other two were, either. He said, “Is that right?”

  “Legends of the time-honored profession of showing people a good time. Frankie Yin is a legend.”

  “And Healy worked for him, is that it?”

  “Detective Martinson,” Peyton said, switching gears, “May I offer you a cocktail?”

  “Can’t do it,” Martinson said.

  “Beer or something?”

  “Thank you, no.” This Peyton was a prize.

  “Then if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to help myself. You don’t mind, do you?” Not really expecting an answer.

  “This’ll only take a minute,” Martinson said, “if you’ll bear with me.”

  “No problem,” Peyton said. “I’ll be right back.”

  His boots clopped across the concrete, and then Arnie heard the sound of bottles clinking. He checked out the photographs Peyton had mounted on a wall, pictures of himself with members of the Dolphins, the Marlins, the Miami Heat. He couldn’t get over how tall the basketball players were, like they had to duck down to fit in the frame. The seven-footers dwarfed Peyton, a paw here or there on his shoulder, like he was a little kid.