Havana Run

by Les Standiford

  When the chips were down, though, Driscoll was the guy you wanted at your back. He’d made his name during one of the political conventions of the late sixties, out on the Beach, tackling a crazed protester who claimed to be carrying a bomb and headed for the stage while Hubert Humphrey spoke. That action had gotten him decorated and led to assignment on a series of high-profile cases, a remarkable number of which he’d seen through successfully, including the first fall for Dagoberto Saenz, involving a complex kickback scheme connected to lucrative airport-maintenance contracts.

  Two years ago, at an age when most detectives of like grade and service were safely ensconced behind desks downtown, some even retired, Driscoll had taken a bullet in the chest meant for a fellow officer who hadn’t seen his assailant coming.

  Most seasoned detectives would have resented Deal’s presence—if nothing else, it was simply dangerous being partnered up with a rookie. But there hadn’t been a hint of that from Driscoll. His Buddha-like nature seemed to accept it all. If this was a last shot, he’d drawn the best for a mentor, Deal thought, glancing at the stoic profile beside him.

  “Where’d you go to college, anyway, Driscoll?”

  “Is this a job interview?” Driscoll’s gaze remained steady out the windshield.

  “I’m just curious.”

  “I was home-schooled,” Driscoll said. “Einstein used to come by every morning. Bugsy Siegel on the weekends.”

  Deal nodded. “I thought so.”

  Driscoll shrugged, glanced over. “I’m from West Virginia. I started Bluefield State. My folks moved down here, it took me awhile to finish up. I got a degree from FIU now, criminal justice.”

  “You have an interesting makeup for a Miami cop,” Deal said.

  “So do you,” Driscoll said. “Guy joins the department dreaming one day he can bust his old man.”

  “That’s not what I said.”

  Driscoll shrugged. “Same thing.”

  “Who’s the last person won an argument with you, Driscoll?”

  Driscoll thought for a moment. “Bugsy Siegel. Einstein was a pushover.”

  Deal nodded; how two civil servants passed their time together. Still, it was a monumental improvement over solitary traffic patrol, and Driscoll a major step up from Schnecter. “Speaking of criminal justice,” he said, nodding out the open window. “Guess who’s coming to dinner.”

  Driscoll turned to follow Deal’s gaze, his hand already going for the portable radio that lay on the seat between them. A man in a good suit and carrying a briefcase was cutting across the deserted boulevard in front of them, purposeful strides carrying him in the direction of the bank:

  Dagoberto Saenz. Twice indicted and thrice reelected county commissioner from the district north of Miami International, the cradle of crooked politicians in Dade County, a distinction that was saying something around these parts.

  “He’s crossing against the light,” Deal observed. “We’ve got a case already.”

  Driscoll nodded, a rare smile tugging at the corner of his lips. “Oswald,” he said, keying the radio. “You see who’s on the way?”

  “Roger that,” came the response. Osvaldo, the techie on duty, was holed up in a tiny office on the fourth floor of the building beside them, monitoring an array of listening devices tuned to pickups secreted throughout the bank’s inner sanctum. The stakeout had been operational for over a month now, but so far Saenz had proven uncanny in his ability to say nothing even the slightest bit incriminating during his visits to the executive offices.

  What Deal had overheard resembled nothing so much as a slightly duller version of his own conversations with Driscoll, with the main difference being that Saenz and his cohorts tended to discuss the world of business instead of the world of sports. Who was in line for the landfill contract in South Dade? Was the free port project likely to get off the ground? Could Castro ever be convinced to trade in dollars?

  “We’re up and running?” Driscoll spoke into the radio, prompting another affirmative from Osvaldo.

  “Loud and clear,” the techie answered. “Somebody left the boardroom to go down and get the door, somebody else is mixing drinks.” There was a pause before Osvaldo continued. “Sounds like mojitos to me.”

  Driscoll nodded and gave Deal what passed for a hopeful look as Dagoberto Saenz topped the steps of the plaza. A slab of dark glass swung outward as Saenz approached the building, and in moments the commissioner was inside.

  “I’m going to try to patch you through,” Osvaldo’s voice came. “Turn off your scanner.”

  “It’s off,” Driscoll said. Deal had switched the Vic’s radio off shortly after they’d parked.

  “It doesn’t sound like it.”

  “Trust me,” Driscoll said. “We’re silent.”

  “Shit,” Osvaldo said. “I’m getting a lot of noise from someplace.”

  “Not from us,” Driscoll insisted. He glanced at Deal, who checked the radio switch and shrugged.

  “Hold on a second,” Osvaldo’s voice came again. “There. See what you get now.”

  There was a crackling noise from the speaker of the handheld unit, then the echoing sounds of a door closing as if at the bottom of a well.

  “Commissioner,” Deal heard someone say.

  Driscoll gave him a smile. “Bingo,” he said, in a soft voice.

  “Alberto,” came Saenz’s response. “How good to see you. Con mucho gusto.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Driscoll muttered. “Spill the beans, you assholes.” There was a sudden burst of salsa music then, as if someone had abruptly switched the channels.

  Driscoll rekeyed the radio, but the salsa music blared on. “What the hell? What’s going on up there, Oswald?”

  Driscoll banged the radio against his meaty hand, then gave Deal a questioning look. Deal took the unit and pressed the key himself. Frank Sinatra’s voice now, “Strangers in the Night.”

  “Call Oswald on the cell,” Driscoll said.

  Deal snatched the phone from the glove compartment and punched in the number. The connection rang once before Osvaldo’s voice broke in. “Don’t waste your breath,” the techie said in his nasally voice. “You guys are listening to the Chairman of the Board, correct?”

  “That’s right, Oswald. What’s the trouble?”

  “That’s all I’m getting, too,” Osvaldo said. He’d cut the feed from his listening equipment and his words now echoed over the radio Driscoll was holding. The sounds of Sinatra traced faintly in the background.

  “Tell him to try the gun mike,” Driscoll said. It was a device rigged to a boom that resembled a rifle stock. You pointed it at a window a hundred yards away and the thing could read the vibrations of someone talking in a room on the other side.

  “Tell him I already did,” Osvaldo said. “They must have pulled the curtains in the boardroom.”

  “Sonofabitch,” Driscoll said, swinging his gaze toward the bank’s façade. “Fucking bastards.”

  “They’re on to us, then,” Deal spoke into the phone. “They’re jamming the equipment.”

  “We can’t be sure,” Osvaldo said. “Let me get to work up here.” The phone connection broke. The sounds of Sinatra carried on over the handheld radio.

  “They’ve probably known the place was bugged the whole damn time,” Driscoll said, pounding the wheel with the heel of his palm. “No wonder Saenz has been so tight-lipped all along.” He keyed off the radio and tossed it on the seat in disgust. “Now they’re having fun. Frank Sinatra my ass.”

  Deal glanced at the building, a shaft of darkness deeper than the night sky. “Why do that, though?” he said. “Why go to the trouble?”

  Driscoll shook his head. “Because they’re assholes.”

  Deal gave him a look. “Or because they’ve finally got something to say to each other and they don’t want to take any chances somebody overhears.”

  Driscoll shrugged. “Either way, we’re screwed.�
�

  They sat in silence then, both of them staring across the broad avenue. Deal imagined Dagoberto Saenz inside the building with a glass raised to his partners in crime, some clever phrase passing his lips. He’d heard the man often enough on the evening news, never at a loss for words, nearly as good with the bon mot as Deal’s old man. Get indicted often enough, he thought, maybe you learn to master the sound bite.

  He was about to turn to share this observation with Driscoll when there was movement at the façade of the bank building again. The double doors swung open wide, and Saenz reappeared, moving quickly back across the plaza, his briefcase at his side.

  “You see that?” Deal said, watching Saenz descend the steps.

  “Yeah,” Driscoll said. “It’s a turd wearing a three-piece suit. Somebody call the Herald.”

  “Look how he’s holding his briefcase,” Deal said, pointing. “He was swinging it every which way when he went inside.”

  Driscoll gave him a look, then turned to stare at Saenz who stood at the curb now, waiting for the light to change. The case was in his right hand, his shoulder clearly drooping toward the ground.

  “Looks like he’s carrying lead all right,” Driscoll said mildly.

  “They loaded him down good, is what happened,” Deal said, pointing. “He’s carrying so much loot, he’s afraid to cross the goddamned street.”

  “You could be right,” Driscoll said.

  “We could pop him,” Deal said.

  “We could, indeed,” Driscoll said.

  “But we won’t.”

  “Right again.”

  Deal sighed, leaning back in his seat. “Because maybe all he’s got in that case is twenty pounds of contracts, or half a dozen copies of the Cayman Island Yellow Pages. We’d blow a month long undercover operation and end up with major egg on our faces.”

  “Give the boy a gold star,” Driscoll said.

  “We could run him over,” Deal said, as Saenz finally stepped from the curb and into the crosswalk, “claim it was an accident.”

  “But he’s waiting for the light this time,” Driscoll said.

  “That’s a technicality,” Deal said.

  “Technicalities,” Driscoll repeated. “That’s what makes lawyers rich.”

  Deal laughed, though his heart wasn’t in it. “How much you figure he’s carrying?”

  “A fucking lot,” Driscoll said.

  “Sonofabitch,” Deal said.

  “You’re learning,” Driscoll said. By then, Saenz was out of sight.

  ***

  “Don’t you feel the least bit like a stereotype?” Deal asked. They were still sitting in the Vic, outside a Krispy Kreme shop out on Seventh Avenue now, an Anglo holdout in what had largely become a Latin neighborhood over the last forty years. Driscoll seemed to know every such outpost in the county. Ride around with him long enough, Deal thought, you might think Castro had never happened, Little Havana was just a myth.

  Driscoll popped the rest of his doughnut into his mouth and brushed powdered sugar off his shirtfront. “I’m no stereotype,” he said, swallowing. “You’ll note I paid for my doughnut.”

  Deal nodded. “Thanks for the coffee,” he said, raising the Styrofoam cup.

  Driscoll waved it away. “I gave up coffee myself,” he said.

  “Was this some health issue?”

  “Issue of stakeouts,” Driscoll said, shaking his head. “I just got tired of peeing in a cup.”

  “That’s an attractive thought,” Deal said, glancing at his coffee.

  “That’s reality,” Driscoll said, before his gaze turned suddenly intent. He was pointing at the radio, Deal realized. “Turn that thing up, will you?”

  Deal glanced at him, then reached for the dial. “…Shots fired,” the dispatcher’s voice was saying. “Repeat, three-three-two at twelve-fourteen Bayview Drive. All units that can clear proceed to one-two-one-four Bayview Drive…”

  Deal stared dumbly at the radio for a moment, feeling the same kind of numbness as when you hear your name called over a loudspeaker or you pick up the phone to find someone there even though you haven’t dialed and there hasn’t been a ring.

  He turned to say something—he wasn’t sure what—but Driscoll already had the Vic in gear, his foot mashing the gas pedal. “Hold on to that,” he said, nodding at the coffee in Deal’s hand.

  “Right,” Deal said, his mind still whirling. He tossed the coffee out the window as the Vic’s tires squalled in a backward power slide. They were out onto Seventh Avenue now, still sliding backward as Driscoll yanked the shift into drive. The heavy car shuddered, then its tires shrieked again as the big V-8 kicked in, Deal back in action, slapping the magnetic blue flasher onto the Vic’s roof without any prompting from Driscoll.

  Half a block west in seconds, then a screaming left, and then another, and then they were powersliding out in front of the advancing traffic on Southwest Eighth Street, what passed for the Via Veneto or the Champs-Élysées where Little Havana was concerned, headed back in the direction from which they’d come, on their way to that impossible address, on their way to Casa Deal.

  ***

  Driscoll held the pace at redline all thirty blocks back to Biscayne and another quarter mile southward down the boulevard, but eased off once they’d swung off onto the curving lane that flanked the bay. The distant end of the oak-shrouded street was alive with flashing cruisers, what seemed like half the force gathered in the few minutes it had taken them to arrive.

  Deal was out of the Vic before Driscoll had fully stopped, the door slamming shut behind him and the older detective’s “Easy now.”

  He was past the first phalanx of uniformed officers in seconds, his shield held high, and past the pair at the gated entrance ready to stop him, shield or not, when an older cop he recognized vaguely pulled his partner aside at Deal’s brusque command.

  “This is my old man’s house. Get the hell out of the way.”

  The hallway in front of him led to a vast, high-domed and drafty room that was rarely used, except for the most formal occasions. His mother liked to tell visitors that Paul Whiteman’s orchestra had once played there in the twenties, for the former owners, of course. His old man liked to add that Al Capone had been among the guests the night it happened. The things that made his parents happy, Deal thought, striding hard down the marble corridor.

  His mother sat now on a Louis XVI love seat in a distant corner of the room, her forehead propped on her hand, a female officer at her side. A pair of detectives conferred nearby, one with a pad in his hand.

  One of the men turned at Deal’s approach, then relaxed at something his partner said. Deal realized that something had happened to his hearing. He was vaguely aware of words being spoken, but the sounds seemed odd and dissonant, washed over and distorted by a roar that was growing steadily inside his head. It had been growing since he’d heard the address crackling over the Vic’s radio, he realized, growing louder with everything he’d seen and sensed since then.

  His mother’s gaze was teary and unfocused when she raised her head at his approach. Blasted out of her gourd, he saw, but nothing unusual about that. Behind the blur of alcohol, her game good-hostess gaze was gone, replaced by one of utter desolation. She put her hands out for him, but standing would have required something far beyond what she had left. The lady cop beside her seemed almost as distraught, Deal noted. The roar inside his head kicked up another notch.

  “Where is he?” Deal said. He could barely hear his own voice. His mother’s hands were still stretched toward him. Trembling, he noticed; her son come home at last. “What’s happened?” he said. The back of his hand brushed her weathered cheek.

  She rocked backward, running her tongue over her lips. She reached one hand toward him, used the other to point. He saw her lips move, but whatever she said didn’t really matter. He was already on his way to the study.

  One of the detectives put out a hand to stop him, bu
t Deal shook it off. There might have been footsteps following in his wake, but it was impossible to tell. It didn’t matter; one man or two. It would have taken more than that.

  A dozen paces down the hallway to the left, a dark corridor with rarely used guest quarters on either side, toward the open, glowing doorway ahead, he saw Ernie Martinez, an assistant M.E., standing inside the room mopping his brow with a handkerchief. The flash of a photographer’s strobe ricocheted down the hall.

  Martinez saw Deal coming and pointed. A uniformed cop met him at the doorway, but the guy was a step slow and thirty pounds too light. When the backpedaling cop hit Martinez, they both went down.

  The two detectives from the Paul Whiteman room had caught up by then, each latching on to one of his arms. They couldn’t have held him, though, not if he hadn’t allowed it.

  He didn’t fight them, though, just held his ground, long enough to see what he’d been expecting to see for a good long time now. What was left of his old man was sprawled in the big leather swivel chair behind the desk he’d bought in Cuba, though you’d have to recognize the blood-spattered, custom-made guayabera and the linen trousers he favored to realize who had been sitting there. The shotgun, that had etched the particles that had once been his face and the top of his head up the side of the plastered wall and into the ceiling above, lay across the desk where the recoil had sent it. Was the roar inside Deal’s head even the tiniest fraction of what his old man had heard before the lights went out?

  “Get him out,” he heard someone say. “Get him the fuck out of here.”

  Not two men, not a dozen, he thought. The trouble’s just beginning…but then he saw Driscoll’s face in front of his, saw the big man’s arms come his way.

  “Let him go,” he heard as Driscoll pulled him close. “Come on, Johnny-boy, you come with me.”

  ***

  “Funny thing about that desk,” Deal said to Driscoll, who sat in a chair across the long mahogany table in the formal dining room.

  An hour or so had passed. He’d helped get his mother into their longtime housekeeper’s car, the two women headed now for the Grand Bay Hotel where there was the hope of some rest and, at the very least, a twenty-four-hour bar, courtesy of room service. During and after, there’d been a parade of department brass in and out of the house, but Deal had kept away from it. Maybe his father’s corpse was still slumped in his favorite chair in that blood-splattered room; maybe it wasn’t.