The King of Swords

by Nick Stone

  Moyez had gone back to Venezuela but left one of his trusted lieutenants, Pedro de Carvalho, in Miami to act as a liaison with Boukman.

  One night de Carvalho got into an argument with a man in the bathroom of a nightclub. The argument had escalated into a fight which de Carvalho had been losing until he’d pulled a gun on his assailant. Unbeknown to him the man was an off-duty cop. When de Carvalho walked out of the club he’d found the police waiting for him, guns drawn. They searched him on the spot and found his most prized possession on a chain around his neck–Patti Rhinehart’s badge. De Carvalho was arrested for the officers’ murders.

  Facing the electric chair, de Carvalho had cut a deal with the DA. He would lure Moyez back to Miami and testify against him in open court. His sentence would be commuted to twenty years, served in a soft prison in New England.

  It was cold in the courtroom because the air conditioning had been turned all the way up to regulate the heat generated by the hundred or more members of the public crammed close together into the uncomfortable seats–among them dozens of antsy TV, newspaper and radio reporters–as well as the extra lights for the two film crews from rival networks who were covering the trial.

  Today was the big day, the trial’s decisive episode, Pedro de Carvalho’s star turn on the stand.

  The TV cameras were trained on Victor Moyez, a squat and compact man with swarthy weatherbeaten skin, dark eyes, whose intensity was undiminished by the pebble specs he’d worn throughout the trial, and a black beard, with a streak of white running from his chin to his left jaw, so heavy it obscured his mouth. Were it not for the crisp, tailor-made double-breasted navy-blue suit with a white handkerchief in the breast pocket, he could have passed for a political prisoner gone slightly insane during confinement.

  Some of the more perceptive journalists who’d been following the trial since it had started the previous month, noted how Moyez wasn’t simply calm and composed, but actually appeared to be enjoying himself, chuckling as he listened to the translation of the charges against him through headphones, sometimes laughing out loud and clapping his hands as the more daring or violent episodes of his life were described. Flanked by his two lawyers, Harvey Winesap and Coleman Crabbe of Winesap, Mcintosh, Crabbe & Milton of Park Avenue, New York, the country’s most in demand narco lawyers, rumoured to cost upwards of $2,000 a day, he seemed inordinately relaxed for someone facing either the death penalty or life in an American penitentiary, most probably Marion, Illinois.

  Moyez had every reason to be relaxed. In the next few hours, he’d be a free man. When Pedro de Carvalho took the stand to sing his traitor’s hymn, he’d get the shock of a lifetime. His beloved mother, sisters and young daughter would be brought in by two of Moyez’s lieutenants and sat in the front row, right in his sightline. Moyez had had them kidnapped and brought to Miami. De Carvalho knew what it would mean for them if he opened his mamagüebo mouth.

  He’d have to retract everything and the case would collapse. He was all the gringos estúpidos de mierda had.

  At least everyone agreed about what happened in the first five minutes of the trial–and even if they hadn’t, the two cameras captured it all very clearly. The state called Pedro de Carvalho and out of a door to the left of Judge Leo Davidtz emerged a short and pale-looking man who bore only the slightest resemblance to the puffy-faced, mustachioed bandido of his widely circulated mugshot. De Carvalho’s round, double-chinned mien had shrunk back to skin and bone, and he’d lost the facial hair too, revealing a prodigious overbite which made his head look like that of a shrunken Inca. He stopped when he came face to face with his old boss, and for a good few moments stood stock still, like he’d grown out of the ground, staring at him, while his expression began to crumble into tremors and tics. Had he been allowed to stand there any longer he probably would have screamed or burst into tears or both, but courtroom guards moved him along to the witness stand.

  Meanwhile the cameras had swung to Moyez, sitting back in his seat, hands folded across his chest, smiling so hard at his former charge that his beard had assumed a boat-like shape.

  De Carvalho took his oath, sat down and reached for the glass of water on the edge of the stand, but knocked it over. Moyez laughed out loud. The judge scowled at him.

  The guard nearest de Carvalho picked up the glass and went to refill it. The DA stood up and began to go through the preliminaries, asking the witness his name, age, place of birth and relation to Moyez.

  De Carvalho had begun to answer when he heard the main courtroom door open and glanced to see who had walked in.

  No one paid much attention to the bald black man who came into Court 15. He was dressed in a grey suit, white shirt and black and white striped tie. He didn’t stand out too much unless you looked at his face and noticed that his eyebrows and eyelashes were missing. But then people in the courthouse didn’t stare too hard at each other because they never knew who they might be looking at and what the person might do. The black man was virtually invisible here, just another guy in a suit in a place where almost everyone wore one.

  The man proceeded up the aisle between the pews.

  Although the first five rows nearest the defendants were full, the man was able to find a seat in the middle of the third row because two people–a man and a woman, both blond–parted to give him a seat. The man took his place as the DA was asking de Carvalho about his association with Victor Moyez.

  When he saw the black man walking in instead of de Carvalho’s family, Moyez scowled at Coleman Crabbe. Crabbe made a small placating gesture and gave his client his most reassuring smile. They’d be here shortly. Everything was going to plan. Not to worry.

  Moyez turned his furious look on de Carvalho who was telling the DA how he’d first met Moyez in the town of Cabimas when he’d been looking for work in the oil re-fineries. De Carvalho caught his boss’s eye and the words, up until then coming in a fluent flow, suddenly curdled in his throat and stopped.

  Then Moyez saw his deputy’s eyes leave him and move to his left, towards the courtoom door. His face suddenly turned ashen.

  Moyez smiled and the edges of his beard stretched outwards with glee.

  The man in the grey suit stood up slowly, as if he was trying to leave while causing the least disturbance. Then he raised his right hand and shot Victor Moyez through the back of the head with a .357 Smith & Wesson Magnum. Moyez’s face exploded all over the legal papers piled up on his table and his body fell forward.

  In the next five seconds the gunman felled Winesap with a shot through the cheek as he turned his head in instinctive curiosity to look at where the first bullet had come from, without properly realizing what had just happened to his client. Coleman Crabbe was quicker. He managed to crawl under the table and curl himself into a foetal ball, with his arms covering his head, but the gunman killed him with a shot that smashed through his overlapped hands and punctured his brain.

  There was pandemonium in the courtroom as everyone hit the ground. Then the guard nearest the judge–who’d also thrown himself to the floor–shot the assassin four times, the bullets all hitting him in the heart in close formation. He dropped his revolver, tilted backwards on his heels and then collapsed forward, going head first over the pew onto the people cowering below.

  Bonbon let the phone in the booth opposite the courthouse ring twice before answering. He heard what he needed to hear and walked back to the car as the air around him began to swarm with the sound of approaching police sirens.

  PART THREE

  May 1981

  14

  ‘So, gennellmen. Where we at?’ Deputy Chief Eldon Burns asked, looking sternly from Max to Joe and then back to Max, where he let his gaze settle and stay.

  Eldon was harassed and pissed off, Max could tell, not just from the strained sound of his voice and the colour of his eyes–usually a clear grey-blue, now dark and murky like a low-lying cloud–but also from the purplish tinge of the small wart on the right side of his forehead. Normall
y the blemish blended in with his swarthy skin to the point where it was unnoticeable, but when he got angry it took on the hue of an overripe grape. Eldon was also wearing his wedding band. Although he’d been married for thirty-one years, he never wore his ring to work, something he’d learned in patrol: criminals were more inclined to mess with you if they thought you had something to lose and someone to live for. When he had to meet his superiors and paymasters, however, he made sure his ring was on, to better project the image of dependability and security that went hand in hand with being a high-level, high-profile cop.

  He cut a fearsome figure. His face was broad and damaged. His nose, twice busted in the boxing ring and both times badly set, was out of alignment with the natural order of his features. It listed to the right and threw his physiognomy out of whack, to the point where the opposite halves of his face differed quite distinctly one from the other: the left side sagged a little and puddled about the bottom lip, while the right was firmer and tauter, and belonged to a man ten years younger. Boxing also accounted for his disjointed eyebrows, split in two with a thin vertical band of scar tissue replacing hair. Whenever he frowned his eyebrows steepled and looked like a drawbridge stuck in mid-opening, letting nothing through either way.

  There were other scars on his face too, cruel gouges and corrugations which bore testament to a time when policing Miami hadn’t been the desk-bound bureaucratic endeavour of modern times, but a daily hand-to-hand war with the criminals who’d followed the new money into the city during its major boomtime in the 1950s.

  And then, of course, there was Eldon’s reputation–the myths, rumours, stories and quasi-legends which preceeded him like pilot fish announcing a great white shark; none of which Eldon refuted, all of which he encouraged. He liked to tell people how he’d got his scars and leave it to others to describe how he’d avenged them. Max wasn’t sure how much bullshit the stories had leaked in the hold from being passed around from teller to teller, but he believed their core and, most of all, he understood their point–you fucked with Eldon Burns at your deepest peril.

  ‘No ID as yet on the shooter, so he wasn’t the crazed, lone-gunman type, ’cause they always have ID on ’em–wanna be remembered. This was a well-planned hit,’ Max said, looking through the four sheets of notes he’d bashed out on his electric typewriter ahead of the meeting.

  It had been a week since the Moyez murder. The case hadn’t just gone nationwide but worldwide: the shocking footage of a gunman striking at will right in the heart of Miami’s judicial system had been beamed out into billions of homes, prompting two hour-long TV documentaries, marathon radio debates and countless newspaper and magazine articles about the city’s decline from comfortable retirement home to lawless war zone. The more sensationalist types were labelling Miami one of the five most dangerous cities in the world after Moscow, Tehran, Kabul and San Salvador. The shootings made the covers of Time and Newsweek. It was bad for business. A third of all hotel bookings and holidays had been cancelled, inbound flights to Miami were half empty and outbound ones oversubscribed, the same for trains and buses. Max and Joe had caught the case because they’d been the first homicide dicks on the scene. They both wished they hadn’t. High-profile cases were the worst, everyone from politicians and top brass to the media and public breathing down your neck, demanding a speedy resolution, everything done in TV time, like you were Starsky & Hutch.

  There was no point in snowing Eldon with the positive side of things because he was the sort who looked for the bad in the good, the down before the up, the price tag on every favour rendered. You gave him the worst-case scenario first and then slowly walked back to find something to smile about. And Max did have some good news to tell him.

  But first the bad.

  ‘No match on the prints,’ Max continued, ‘no serial number on the gun–that was filed off. The only prints on the gun and casings were the shooter’s. The clothes were all from JCPenney, right down to the socks. Nothing whatsoever in the pockets. Now, the soles of the shoes were near spotless, barely used outdoors, which means that the shooter only wore them a very short time outdoors–I’d say enough to walk a short distance to the courthouse.’ Max glanced briefly at Joe in case he wanted to say something, even though they’d agreed Max would do the main presentation and they’d answer Eldon’s questions between them. He turned to the last page of his notes, the abbreviated autopsy report.

  ‘Whoever put this guy up to the hit knows basic forensics. The shooter’s fingernails and toenails were cut and scrubbed clean. Every hair on his body wasn’t just shaved, it was waxed.’

  ‘So, so far absolutely nothin’, huh?’ Eldon said, lacing the fingers of his shovel-sized hands together and leaning forward over the thick slab of highly polished mahogany that was his desk. To an outsider, the desk would have appeared a size too small for someone of Eldon’s stature, but Max knew this was deliberate and completely in keeping with Eldon’s thinking: the smaller desk made his boss look bigger, more imposing. Eldon was already slightly over six feet tall, but he wore his greying mousey blond hair in a modest pompadour which added a couple of extra inches to his height.

  ‘Not quite,’ Max said. ‘Remember the Primate Park stiff?’

  ‘How could I forget the fine job you two did there? You know they scraped two dead gorillas off US1 just this morning?’ Eldon retorted, his sarcasm made worse by his Mississippi drawl, which added a mocking dimension to his tone. He’d been born and raised in Hattiesburg and hadn’t lost a hint of his accent, despite moving to Florida when he was seventeen.

  ‘There’s a connection with the Moyez shooter.’ Max ignored him and spoke a little louder to stake out his ground. Eldon had already torn into them over Primate Park, but that fiasco had made a laughing stock of both MTF and, by association, him, so he made a point of bringing it up every time another escaped monkey turned up. Max knew better than to complain because it only made things worse. Eldon didn’t like getting talked back to, especially when he was right. ‘Got the toxicology report this morning. The Moyez shooter had the exact same contents in his stomach as the Primate Park stiff: sand; crushed sea shells; three sorts of vegetable matter, as yet unidentified; seeds or beans, also still unidentified; plus Kool-Aid and semi-digested scraps of cardboard. Put them together and it made up part of a card–a tarot card–sort you can tell the future with: the King of Swords.’

  ‘The King of Swords?’ Eldon frowned and his split eyebrows turned into thick circumflex accents.

  ‘I did a basic read-up. All tarot cards have two meanings, positive and negative, depending on which way up they are,’ Max explained. ‘If a tarot card is the right way up its meaning is positive. If it’s upside down it’s negative. The positive meaning of the King of Swords is an authority figure, like a judge or a general or a company director. It can also represent the outcome of a legal situation. On the flipside, the card represents cruelty, evil, a very powerful and destructive person.’

  ‘Like a hit man?’

  ‘Yeah, could be. Now, we’re still lookin’ into this but I’m guessing it’s some kind of black magic thing, and that other shit they found in the shooter’s stomach? That’ll turn out to be some kind of potion. Either he drank it a few hours before he went out, or else he was force-fed it. Maybe it was something to pump him up, ’cause this guy must have known he was walking into certain death. We’ll know the exact composition when the lab comes back to us in a week or so. And there’s another thing. As far as I know, all tarot cards have faces. These don’t. The faces are blank. Means they would be exotic. Easy to trace.’

  ‘OK,’ Eldon nodded. ‘What about the stuff they found in the Primate Park stiff?’

  ‘North Miami PD didn’t analyse it.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘They figured it was a done deal. The guy flipped out, killed everyone close to him and then dropped dead himself.’

  ‘They keep any samples?’

  ‘No, just a few Polaroids of the tarot card.’ Max
took them out of the file and handed them to Eldon, along with the dozen autopsy snapshots of the card taken out of the Moyez shooter’s stomach. The latter had been more corroded by stomach acid, the colours faded to mere outlines in many places, but the overall design was still recognizable. ‘Same card.’

  Eldon sat back in his chair and studied the Polaroids for a moment then handed them back.

  ‘What about the shooter’s helpers?’

  ‘We’re still looking,’ Max replied, shifting in the uncomfortable, thinly padded pine chairs Eldon had his subordinates sit in when conducting official business. The chairs creaked and were too narrow to settle in without being pinched and squeezed at from the sides. Whenever a case was successfully concluded, they’d sit at the opposite end of his spacious office, where there was a black leather couch and two thick armchairs around a large glass coffee table. Eldon would pour the drinks–high-grade malt whisky or bourbon–and hand out Cuban cigars and compliments to celebrate jobs well done. Then the jokes, laughter, gossip and backslapping would go on for a good few hours. But they were pretty far from that now, still at the foot of a steep and slippery mountain. Professional hits were next to impossible to solve, even if it was obvious exactly who was behind them. A good hit man would leave no traces, collecting his victim’s life like a ghost. Yet this was different, something they’d never seen before–a suicide-assassin.