Dutch Uncle hcc-12

by Peter Pavia

  “If I’m going to represent you, I have no choice but to assume you’re telling the truth.”

  Somehow Merrill was managing to make Harry feel guilty, even though every word he’d spoken was true.

  “What we’re going to do is negotiate your surrender, and let them worry about building a case against you for this murder you didn’t commit.”

  “What about all the other charges?”

  “We’ll get to them. Let’s take care of your biggest problem first. You’re going to go spend an extremely quiet evening at home, wherever home is, and you’re going to be back here at nine o’clock tomorrow morning. Do you understand?”

  Harry said, “That’s it?”

  “No, that’s not it,” Merrill said. “But that’s all you need to worry about for now.” He stood up, and Harry was dismissed, like a bad boy who was finished serving his detention.

  He rode the elevator for thirty floors. It was raining again, like it had every day since he got to New York, and it was icy cold. Walking down Third Avenue, trying to get his teeth to stop chattering, it felt more like November than April. He pushed his hands deep into the pockets of his jeans and lowered his chin.

  One of the thoughts Harry tried to keep on the run, with the help of a lot of scotch, was that he’d played an important part in bringing himself to this point. It wasn’t as if things had just been done to him. Bad thinking led to bad decisions, and bad decisions led to stupid actions. It made him feel dizzy, this whole interconnectedness of things. Every event in life was knotted around the thing that happened before it, and led straight into the thing that came after it.

  If he hadn’t been involved with Julia, what were the odds of him meeting Leo? A billion to one? And if he’d ever bothered to make something of himself, he wouldn’t have been delivering cocaine to parties that had guests like Julia. He wouldn’t have worked for Frankie Yin, and he never would’ve met Manfred. Poor old Manfred. His poor Dutch Uncle. Was it Manfred who set off this chain reaction of bad juju? Or was it Harry? Or just destiny?

  Another thought was chasing him, and he let it catch him in the foyer of a Chinese take-out joint. Harry bought a Coke with a ten-dollar bill. He asked for his change in coins. This drew a fractured complaint from the counterman, but he gave it up anyway.

  A Bud Light clock on the wall said it was five after three. Harry pictured Aggie staring at her computer screen, typing in a line, maybe reading it out loud, a halfeaten cup of yogurt sitting on her desk.

  She picked up on the first ring. She said hello twice.

  Harry said, “Hi.”

  She didn’t recognize his voice.

  “It’s Harry,” he said.

  Now that she knew who it was, she wasn’t talking.

  “I called to see how you were doing.”

  “I’m fine,” she said. There was a sinking pause, like she wasn’t going to say anything more, but when Harry let the line stay silent she said, “How’re you?”

  “I’m coming back.”

  “Detective Arnie Martinson will be thrilled.”

  “My brother hired me a lawyer. I’m giving myself up.”

  “So I should look for you on the six o’clock news. What’d you do, call to warn me?”

  “No, I called to say I’ve been thinking about you. And that I missed you. Depending on the way things shake out, I was thinking maybe we could get together.”

  The street door banged open and a deliveryman pushed past. He was wearing a yellow rain slicker and a pair of yellow boots that buckled up the front, like a kid’s.

  “I think we’ve got a chance,” Harry said. “I really do.”

  It sounded like Aggie was smoking. She said, “A chance at what?” Then she said something else Harry didn’t hear because a recorded voice was talking over her, telling him to put in more money or his call was going to get cut off. He dropped in four more quarters.

  When the beeps stopped, Harry said, “A chance at being together.”

  “How could you even be thinking about that? For all you know, you could be going to jail for the rest of your life.”

  “All I’m saying is, I really care about you, Aggie.”

  “Harry,” she said, “I’ve gotta go. I wish you all the luck in the world.”

  “Can I call you?”

  “I didn’t hang up, did I? Although I probably should have. Goodbye, Harry.”

  Davey Boy was talking on the phone with his feet on the desk. Harry nodded on his way to the elevator, but Davey had been blowing hot and cold since Harry rented the room, friendly or not according to his mood. Today, not.

  He wished he’d thrown the extra twenty-five a week for a TV. At least it’d take his mind off of things, and he could have drowned out the game show blaring next door, cartoony bleeps and buzzes knifing through the plaster.

  Glancing through the sports section of the Post, he saw the Mets had dropped their home opener, the Yankees got snowed out in Cleveland, and the Knicks were scuffling toward the playoffs. A column by the guy who covered the team predicted they wouldn’t make it past the first round.

  A vampire cult in Florida made page one. Some sixteen-year-old had lured a classmate into the woods, dragged a machete across the kid’s windpipe, and drank his blood. The cops said it was the initiation into a secret society, and a bunch of teenage bloodsuckers who flipped had lined up to testify against the lead vampire. This was outside Orlando. An entire state of freaks, Florida. And Harry was going back.

  Voices filtered through the door. Whispering voices, vibing wrong, a threat in the tenor of their hissing. Harry was about to get up and check it out when the door blew open and somebody screamed police. Two guys pinned him to the bed and turned him on his stomach, the flash of a third guy pointing a gun. They tore back his arms. Harry heard a pop, his shoulder dislocating again, and a spiking pain engulfed the joint. If he ended up in the Florida State Pen after all, he was going to get the surgery done on that shoulder, for sure.

  The cops pulled him to his feet.

  “You guys,” Harry winced through his gritted teeth, “have got this all wrong.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  The lawyers for the union assured Lili the Review Board inquiry would amount to nothing, and Kramer called her reassignment a public relations move, but Acevedo wouldn’t be back in the field until the heat from the Fernandez thing burned out, and that was going to take some time.

  Which was a shame. By all rights, it should’ve been Lili who went to the airport and met the U.S. Marshalls who had Healy in custody. Instead, Kramer sent Robotaille and Martinson. He wanted to make sure there was a Beach detective on each of Healy’s handcuffed arms, and he instructed them to bring the suspect through the front door.

  Martinson wanted to book him as quietly as possible. They didn’t have enough evidence to charge him with Manfred Pfiser’s murder, they were just busting him on a parole violation. But Kramer alerted his friends in the media and every TV station dispatched a crew to Rocky Pomerance Plaza. It was a slow trudge from the street to the entrance, a classic perp walk.

  Healy kept his mouth shut and his chin up. No flashbulb flinching, no shackled peek-a-boo, no burying his face under a hooded sweatshirt. He stared straight ahead, and let Robotaille and Martinson lead him through the front door, where three uniformed cops intercepted the jostling bodies.

  Due to some screw-up between New York and the Marshalls’ office, Healy arrived without his lawyer, but rather than turning to stone, he wanted to talk. He had a lot to say. Unfortunately, he wasn’t able to tell them anything.

  “Just so you know I know,” he told Martinson at one point, “I don’t have to answer a single one of these questions until my attorney gets here. But to tell you the truth, I’d rather be talking to you than sweating my ass off in some jail cell.”

  Lili was standing with Kramer outside the interview room, watching and listening through the two-way glass. Martinson made Healy run through his story another time. Healy wasn’t disres
pectful, but his breezy tone was bugging her. He seemed relaxed, almost relieved, like a man with a weight off his shoulders.

  Martinson told him they lifted a fingerprint that belonged to him off the stereo in Pfiser’s room. Healy didn’t deny being there.

  “I shut it off,” he said. “It was blaring some Patsy Cline thing. I wiped down the scotch bottles and the glasses, but I forgot about the stop button on the stereo.”

  He had drained his second can of Coke, and now he was wondering about coffee. Martinson shifted his gaze toward the mirror, nodding his head yes, and Lili had to go fetch him a cup.

  “Light and sweet,” Healy said.

  Martinson was waiting outside when she got back. Kramer was chewing the inside of his lip, and everybody stayed mute as Arnie took the coffee and went back in. He set the cup on the table.

  Healy led Martinson, for the third time, to the point where he ditched Pfiser’s rented Mustang in Hollywood.

  Arnie went soft. Acevedo was waiting for the chance to burn Healy down, hopefully before his lawyer got there.

  “Tell me about your relationship with Leo Hannah.”

  “There was no relationship. I saw the guy exactly twice, once in jail, once on Ocean Drive. That’s how much I know him.”

  “Were you aware of a conspiracy to rip off Pfiser?”

  “I told you who’s gonna help you is that chick, Vicki, who was in his room. She told Manfred her name was Jennifer. What does that tell you?”

  “Why did you agree to meet with Pfiser when Hannah suggested you go see him? Didn’t that make you the least bit suspicious? You just said there was no relationship.”

  “What can I say? I needed the two hundred.”

  Martinson said, “Who got the package, Harry?”

  “What difference does that make?”

  “I thought you said you wanted to talk. Help me out with this.”

  “Two queers in a motel room. This is the worst cup of coffee I’ve ever had in my life.”

  “What do you want for free? Tell me about JP Beaumond.”

  “I told you I don’t know the guy,” Healy said, and Martinson pushed Beaumond’s mug shots at him again.

  “JP Beaumond,” Martinson said. “I’m just trying to get this clear in my mind.”

  “I don’t need to look at him any more. I don’t know him.”

  “What about him?” Martinson gave him a picture of Alex Fernandez.

  “Ditto.”

  “In or out of the company of Leo Hannah.”

  “Look, you guys want me to help you make your case, I’ll help you make a case, but I can’t tell you what I don’t know. You seem like a decent guy, but I think we’re about done here. Where’s that fucking lawyer? He’s costing my brother a fortune.”

  Kramer was worrying a button on his sleeve, and he hadn’t stopped chewing his lip. He was looking at Lili but she refused to meet his eyes. She was getting the awful, empty-gutted feeling that Healy was telling the truth, that while he might have been guilty of a lot of things, the murder of Manfred Pfiser wasn’t one of them.

  Healy was lawyered-up tight with a hot rod from New York named Connor Merrill, and Merrill hired a Palm Beach bulldog, Otto Wagner, to help him navigate Florida statutes. Kramer gave Acevedo her crack at Healy, but she didn’t have any more luck with him than Arnie did. For his final interview, it was Kramer, Martinson, Acevedo, and both attorneys, with Assistant DA Whitaker Graves observing through the glass. Healy gave them a written statement. It didn’t sway one letter from what he had been saying all along.

  Graves was a serious young man with a pinkish complexion and scowl lines creasing his forehead. Kramer’s lantern jaw was pulsing.

  “What do you make of this guy, Arnie?” Kramer said.

  Martinson said, “He didn’t do it.”

  “What have we got left?”

  “We’ve got Victoria Leonard,” Lili said. “We figured she was lying to protect Fernandez. I wonder if she’ll stick to her story now that he’s dead.”

  “Would we have any shot at all with a grand jury?” Kramer asked Graves.

  “John, your own detectives think somebody else did it.”

  “The Medical Examiner’s opinion eliminates Healy,” Martinson said. “Any grand jury would have to hear from him.”

  Graves said, “Forget this guy, John.”

  Kramer took a deep breath, let it out slowly. He was thinking about the bank of cameras set up in front of the building. He’d need to throw them something. He said, “What’s happening with that thing on Pine Tree?”

  Dade investigators recovered gravel from the cuffs of JP Beaumond’s camouflage pants, and its composition matched the mix lining the driveway of Leo Hannah’s house on Pine Tree Drive.

  They also found fibers, manufactured by a company that sold carpets to General Motors in the late ’80s, stubbornly clinging to those same fatigues. Martinson figured Hannah shot Beaumond on Pine Tree, dragged him out of the house, and loaded him into the trunk of an ’89 Cadillac. Then he drove to the Glades and dumped the body. The car, what was left of it, had been found in Liberty City. It was registered to a Theodore Kistler of Biloxi, Mississippi, who identified Beaumond as the man who carjacked him in St. Cloud.

  Martinson picked up the ringing phone. A voice talking through a handkerchief asked for him.

  “This is Martinson,” he said.

  The muffled voice said, “People are saying Junior Fabricant for Josephine Simmons.”

  “Uh-huh,” Martinson said. “Who’s this?” He knew who he was talking to, he just wanted to string him out.

  “Don’t worry who’s this. Junior Fabricant for the old lady.”

  “Junior Fabricant.” Martinson wrote the name on a slip of paper.

  “That’s right.”

  “Good work. You get an A in citizenship,” Martinson said. “A for Anton.”

  There was a short lapse of dead air, and Anton Canter clicked off.

  Lili was standing at the window, the late sun throwing an aura around her body. She stepped out of the fading light and headed over to where he was sitting. “It just seems like a lot of work for nothing.”

  He wanted to tell her that disappointment and frustration were a big part of this job. If that’s all she learned from this case, she could take it with her through the rest of her career, which would continue decades after Martinson was comfortably retired, a notion he was giving more and more thought.

  He asked her, “Did you ever try to keep a garden?”

  Lili said, “I live in an apartment.”

  “Nothing but work,” Martinson said. “Weeding and planting and watering, and then the animals get after your tomatoes or whatever, and you wonder why the hell you bother.”

  “I didn’t know you had a green thumb.”

  Arnie said, “I don’t. I’m drawing a comparison. The same way you have to trust that one season it’s all going to come together and you’re going to harvest that bumper crop, in this job you’ve got to trust that your work is worthwhile, even when the results suggest otherwise. Does that make sense? As you get older, you roll with the punches a little better. That’s all I’m saying.”

  She walked away, and Arnie called her back.

  “Hey, Lil,” he said, “have you ever taken that drive to Key West?”

  “Not since I was a kid.”

  “The weather’s supposed to be beautiful Sunday. I was thinking of going for a ride. An old friend of mine owns a restaurant there, and if you’re not doing anything...”

  Lili laughed. “Are you asking me out?”

  “That’s what it sounds like to me.”

  “Would that be appropriate? In light of current sexual harassment guidelines, I mean.”

  “I’m not sure,” Arnie said, “I’d have to refer back to my sensitivity training manual.”

  Arnie didn’t think he was her type, and he didn’t think Lili was his, either, but maybe it was time he found out.

  She said she could be ready
by around eleven. “By the way, we’re supposed to be in the lieutenant’s office for a pow-wow on this Hannah thing. Robotaille’s working a lead, and Kramer wants to fill us in on the details.”

  “Alright,” Martinson said, “let’s get on it.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Four months after Harry moved in, Aggie started throwing up in the morning, and it was obviously more than a virus or some fluke stomach bug. She went to the drug store and brought home a test, and when that came back positive, she made an appointment to go see her doctor. He said she was eight weeks pregnant.

  Harry did not think this was bad news. Just the opposite. He was thrilled.

  Although Aggie had been wanting to have a baby, she didn’t know if she was ready for it. She didn’t know if this was the right time.

  Fair enough. Who was ready to be a parent? But if everybody thought that way, they might as well give the world back to the monkeys.

  His attitude was good, but his attitude alone didn’t do enough to reassure Aggie.

  “Think of it as having nothing to do with me,” she said.

  “That’s stupid,” Harry said. “It has everything to do with you.”

  “Then think of it as an independent event. Think about being a father. Think about me being dead, and you having sole responsibility for this child. How’s that look?”

  Harry despised hypothetical problems. They were a waste of time. He’d rather deal with the reality of a situation, and the reality of this one was, there was going to be a third tiny existence in the apartment that was going to need to be fed and burped and have shoes bought for it.

  “Statistically,” he said, “I’ll be around for another thirty-five years, minus a few on the back end if I don’t quit smoking soon. What’re you now, twenty-nine?”

  “Twenty-nine,” she said.

  “Odds are you make it to seventy-eight. Not a bad run, all things considered. That’s almost fifty years. You’re going to be tied to me for thirty-five of those fifty years.”

  There. Right back at her. “Which is like what, seventy percent of the rest of your life? Think about it.”