The King of Swords

by Nick Stone

  Max and Joe had gone through the available TV camera footage from the courtroom: of the blond man and woman who’d made room for the killer to sit down and then retrieved his gun after the shooting. There wasn’t too much to see, only a few seconds of them standing up and leaving their seats, their faces impossible to make out because they’d kept their heads averted from the camera. They were almost indistinguishable one from the other, the only way to tell them apart was the cut of the beige suits they wore. They were of the same height and build, had similar hairstyles and, according to seven eyewitnesses who remembered them and gave details to police artists, looked almost identical, with high cheekbones, blue eyes and sharp dimpled chins. Some sketches had them both wearing earrings too.

  They’d also checked out the courthouse security camera footage. There were cameras at the entrance and on every floor. The couple had arrived at the building at 8.30 a.m., and passed through the metal detectors. They were then seen waiting together on a bench outside the courtroom, no doubt so they could be first in line to get their places.

  ‘We’re pretty sure they didn’t bring the gun in. A Smith & Wesson .357 would not have made it through the metal detector. The gun must have been taped under the seat before the courtroom opened. Those two were there to occupy the seat until the killer came in,’ Joe said.

  ‘Insiders. Thought so,’ Eldon said. ‘Whole city’s wriggling with worms.’

  ‘We’re currently interviewing everyone–cleaners, security, court staff and as many of the journalists and spectators as we can track down. So far everyone checks out–except for the blonds. Two press passes were issued to a Ryan Connor and Clare Johnson from the LA Times. Only, when we checked with the Times you know who Ryan Connor and Clare Johnson are? Their horoscope writer and cookery correspondent. One’s fifty-five and bald, the other’s a brunette. Airtight alibis for the day of the shooting too: they were at an editorial meeting with thirteen other people.

  ‘Now, we’ve talked to an eyewitness who says the blonds got into a dark green two-door Cutlass Supreme with a white hardtop. Didn’t get the plates. The witness is a guy called Hector Manso who sells ice-cream cones opposite the courthouse. He gave the clearest description because he stopped right by the car to sell a cone to a kid a few minutes before the blonds came out. Says he thinks the car was either a ’74 or ’75.’

  Eldon nodded grimly and then stood up and walked over to the window on the right. His office was on the top floor of MTF headquarters, facing the courthouse and overlooking the street. He stood there for a while, arms behind his back in a loose V, his posture straight yet reluctantly so, as if he was fighting the urge to slump under the burden of responsibilities which had physically manifested themselves on his shoulders.

  He came back and sat down. He glanced from Joe to Max and then settled for the odd way he had of looking at neither and both at the same time, subtly moving his gaze in and out of their orbits.

  ‘Earlier this morning I got a call from NYPD Homicide. The offices of Moyez’s lawyers were broken into and all the files, taped depositions, everything they had on Moyez was lifted. Guys walked in dressed as security and took the files. They had keys and passes.’

  ‘When did this happen?’ Joe asked.

  ‘The night of the shooting. Didn’t get noticed for three days.’

  ‘How come?’

  ‘No one thought to check, I suppose,’ Eldon said. ‘But things get way worse: Winesap and Crabbe always gave copies of all the files of cases that were going to trial to their office manager, Nora Wong, for safekeeping. She stashed them in her country house in the Catskills, and then, when the trial was over she put them back in the office.

  ‘The morning of the trial she phoned in sick. Stomach cramps, food poisoning. Said she was going to see her doctor. Her office didn’t think this was unusual because she’d been complaining of dizzy spells the week before. She’d also recently given birth to a little girl. Her third child.

  ‘NYPD found Nora Wong, her husband and two of her children in the basement of the Catskills place late yesterday night. All shot. They’d all been tortured first. The file’s on its way down here. It won’t be pretty.’

  ‘What about the baby?’ Max asked.

  ‘They didn’t find it. Probably sold on the black market.’

  Just like the Primate Park stiff, Max thought.

  ‘Now, these are bad times we’re living in, gennellmen. The worst I’ve ever known,’ Eldon spoke quietly but very firmly. ‘We’re getting hit from all sides and we’re sinking. We’ve got the Colombian drug gangs, we’ve got the Cuban crimewave, we’ve got the blacks, we’ve got the Aryan Defence League. These fuckers are walking right over us.

  ‘So we need a result on this one. And I mean one big loud result. Something that yells from every rooftop, something everyone will remember, something that lets these scumbags know that no one fucks with our justice system. I want you to bring me not just the guys who did this, but every piece of shit who helped them. Everyone.

  ‘Every week we’re gonna feed the press a success story. Every week there’ll be people in custody, every week there’ll be a breakthrough. Starting next Tuesday.’

  ‘Tuesday?’ Max began, but Eldon silenced him with a raised hand and a shake of the head.

  ‘You don’t have until Tuesday. You have until Monday. A week.’

  Max and Joe exchanged perplexed glances. They were doing all they could: every cop in Miami was working on this and every single one of them was getting nowhere.

  ‘We’ll do our best, Eldon.’ Max sighed. He would have protested more–a lot more–but he sensed there was something else behind Eldon’s mood, something he hadn’t yet got to, so he held back.

  ‘Gennellmen, you’re MTF not MPD. We don’t “do our best” here, we are the best. That’s what’s expected of us, that’s what we deliver. Now this is the biggest case we’ve had. They’ve hit us. We’re on the ropes. We need to hit back. And hard. So get to it.’

  Max and Joe stood up to leave.

  ‘Not you, Max. You stay a moment. Liston, please wait outside.’

  ‘Yes, Mr Burns,’ Joe said and left the office.

  15

  Yes-suh, Masser Burns, no-suh, Masser Burns–go fuck yo’ self Masser Burns, Joe thought as he sat fuming outside the office, angry and humiliated, and real close to getting up and walking out. It was always this way at these face-to-face meetings, had been ever since he’d joined MTF. Sixdeep–that’s what he called his boss, short for Sixth Degree Burns–treated him like he wasn’t there, never looked at him, never asked his opinion, never asked him a single question about anything, only ever addressed him when he was with Max, and then just hello, goodbye and wait outside. He was letting him know he didn’t count for shit around here.

  Sixdeep’s secretary sat behind her desk right opposite him, tapping away at her computer keyboard. She hadn’t even looked at him when he’d come out, treated him the same way her boss did. Helga Martinez–aka Miss Irontits, although no one said that too loudly in case the wrong ears heard it–real fearsome, no nonsense and every bit as scary as Sixdeep in her own way. Stout, dark-skinned Cuban mother of five, with an extra roll in her neck and the beginnings of a second chin. She’d worked for Sixdeep ever since he’d been important enough to have someone do his paperwork.

  The phone was ringing but she ignored it. She was locked deep into the mechanical groove of pecking out words on the keyboard, her green nails and the piping of the jacket over her chair matching the phosphorescent letters marching left to right across the black monitor screen. She’d been the first member of staff in the Miami PD to learn how to use a word processor, and was probably one of only five or six who were on first-name terms with the things in MTF. Joe had signed up for a night course at Miami University, starting in a month. Computers were the future and he wanted to be five steps ahead of police policy, just like he was with his Spanish lessons.

  Max and Sixdeep were up on the roof, discussing wh
atever clandestine shit that got plotted when he wasn’t around, quite possibly even discussing him. Max never told and he knew better than to ask. Max was loyal to Sixdeep; they went back years and years, to when Max was a teenager and Sixdeep had taught him to box at the 7th Avenue gym in Liberty City. If it ever came down to it Joe was sure Max would throw him over if his boss asked him to. He wouldn’t like doing it, but he’d do it just the same. Max was a great detective, true, but he was a soldier in Eldon Burns’ private army, following orders and executing commands.

  Joe thought about his lot, second fiddle to Max Mingus, star cop. He thought of Lina and how they’d talked about moving in together, getting a place, an apartment or maybe a house, but in a good neighbourhood. That would cost money. He’d need a promotion and a bigger salary. That would only come if he carried on riding Max’s coat tails and keeping up the dutiful house/nigger act. It hurt his pride and it pissed him off. He knew it wasn’t like that for Horace Calderon, the only other black man in MTF, or for Sara Valdeon, one of the few women on the squad, also black. They were in Sixdeep’s inner circle, part of the gang within the gang, part of the Cutmen.

  And the shit he’d heard about them was enough to fill a city sewer ten times over. People talked plenty about the Cutmen and plenty more about Sixdeep–mostly black cops, a few of the younger Latinos, no whites–and none of it was pretty, let alone legal. He’d once mentioned the rumours to Max and his partner had told him it was all bullshit, stories envious losers made up to feel better about having been stepped over and left behind. Joe thought otherwise, but he hadn’t said anything so as to keep the boat he was in on a straight and even keel.

  Play the game, brother, he told himself. One day you’ll be the man up in this beast.

  Max liked it up on the roof. There was always a cool salty breeze blowing in from the sea, even in the hottest days of summer when the atmosphere was at its heaviest and the air tense and thick with building storms. You could lose the sense of the sea in the streets, where man-made fumes stunk out nature. Down there it was predominantly the dead heady smell of fuel being belched up into the sky but recently, with all the demolition work that had been going on around the city, Max had sometimes picked up a strong accent of fried cordite in the wind, especially where the contractors had used cheap illegal dynamite from South America. Then he’d feel on edge, like he was walking through the middle of a shoot-out, expecting to run into an ambush at any moment.

  He could see much of the city from the roof: on one side the yellowy-grey spread of the streets and low-lying buildings broken up with dashes of intense tropical green, which went on to dominate the landscape the further out you looked; and then, when he turned around, he saw the port, marinas, hotels, beaches, the ocean and the bridges reaching out across it like fossilized tendrils.

  The roof was where everything really happened at MTF; everything that counted and made a difference. It was where Eldon communed directly with his inner circle–no bullshit, no filtering out his words, no playing by the rules for appearance’s sake; it was a place where no records were kept and every word spoken was carried away and dispersed in the wind once it had been heard.

  ‘The Turd Fairy came by this morning,’ Eldon said.

  ‘Right,’ Max replied as he lit a cigarette. That explains your mood, he thought.

  The Turd Fairy was Victor Marko, but people only called him by his real name to his face. He was the mayor’s fixer and all-round performer of unpleasant tasks, many of ambiguous legality. For the last twelve years he’d worked for whichever politician was running Miami. He had no party affiliations and no identifiable ideological convictions. In fact he was only loyal to whoever would pay him the substantial sums of money he commanded for his services. He’d earned his nickname because he either got shit done or fucked shit up. Today, Max guessed it was the latter.

  Max had only seen him once: tall, bald, unsmiling and with udder-like jowls. His face and the way he carried his large head at a slightly upward angle from the rest of his body made Max think he might have modelled himself on the bust of a particularly nasty Roman emperor. His skin had all the radiant pallor of someone who spends most of his days indoors with the air conditioning on at full blast, and his upper body had a cushioned set to it that hadn’t quite declared itself fat. Max imagined the Turd Fairy rarely exercised and had a balanced diet of wrong and right foods.

  ‘He’s all over the Moyez case,’ Eldon said.

  ‘Figures.’

  ‘This isn’t for the mayor though. Not this time. Oh no. As of now the Turd Fairy flies a higher path.’ Eldon paused for effect and looked at Max with a wry smirk. ‘None other than our beloved President Reagan.’

  ‘Who’d he fuck over to swing that?’ Max was incredulous and suddenly worried about the dimension the Moyez case was going to take. He hated it when it got political, because it became about more than just solving a crime and punishing the perps; when there were elections to be won, minorities would be charmed and pandered to, only to be ignored and bypassed once they’d delivered victory.

  ‘There’s only two places to go in politics–somewhere or nowhere. And these days the Turd Fairy is going somewhere.’

  ‘What’s Reagan want with Moyez?’

  ‘Didn’t you follow his campaign?’ Eldon feigned indignation with a smile.

  ‘No, I just voted for him,’ Max said.

  ‘Like the good registered Republican you are!’ Eldon laughed and clapped Max on the back, which made him choke on the smoke he’d just drawn into his lungs, and provoked a coughing fit. Eldon watched with distaste as Max first struggled to clear a thick blob of phlegm from his throat and then spat it out with a retching noise.

  ‘Reagan’s planning a new offensive in the war on drugs. He wants to stop our kids getting high–bring the fight into the home,’ Eldon explained. ‘As you know there are two main drug cartels in Colombia, the Cali and the Medellín. The CIA’s decided to go after the Medellín cartel. They’re the bigger of the two, and they’re exporting most of the coke that’s coming into Florida. The cartels are headed up by the Ochoas, José Gacha, Pablo Escobar and Carlos Lehder. Moyez worked for Lehder.’

  ‘But I thought Moyez was an independent. In the case file it says he got his stuff straight from the Bolivians. De Carvalho backed that up and was going to testify to it,’ Max said, puzzled, but then saw the expression on Eldon’s face–anger mixed with resignation and impatience–and knew what was coming next.

  ‘Evidence from the investigation you’re conducting will prove Moyez was really working for Carlos Lehder all along. And that it was Lehder who had him killed so he wouldn’t name him.

  ‘Lehder’s the one they’re going after first. He’s the easiest one to get ’cause he’s operating out of Norman’s Cay in the Bahamas. Him and his crew have taken over the whole island. They’re importing something like three hundred kees of coke an hour from Colombia and shipping that shit back here. We build a case against him and our government will send Special Forces out there to get him and his whole crew.

  ‘So, first up, I need you to haul me in a low-level chain of command–bottom-to mid-level street guys, all spics–South Americans, not Cubans, and Colombians best of all. Usual drill: bring me the people, bring me a story, make ’em fit and make it stick. Can you do it, Max?’

  ‘Yes, Eldon.’ Max nodded. ‘I can do it.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘What about the Wong murders?’

  ‘Put it this way,’ Eldon smiled, ‘by the time we’re through with him, Lehder will have killed the Kennedys.’

  And this was the way it sometimes went at MTF, and how it had sometimes gone from the moment Max had started working for Eldon Burns. Crimes got solved, but the guilty didn’t always pay and politics and politicians sometimes rigged the scales of justice.

  ‘That’s the first thing,’ Eldon said, and then looked Max directly in the eye. His pupils were back to their usual light steely grey. ‘After this case is done, I’m as
signing you a new partner. I’m replacing Joe Liston.’

  ‘What?’ Max reeled. ‘Why? What do you mean “replacing” him?’

  ‘He’s off the unit.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He’s not one of us, Max.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘He doesn’t fit in here. Never has. No matter how hard you’ve tried to make it so.’

  ‘No matter how hard I’ve tried? I wasn’t the one started calling the two of us “Bruce and Clarence” and Born to Run. That was you. You made us the Dynamic Duo, Eldon–you! ’ Max was angry now and starting to yell. It was hardly a surprise. Eldon didn’t like Joe and never had. He made it quite obvious: no eye contact, no warmth in his exchanges. Joe had only spoken about it once when Max had brought it up, and all he’d said then was that he was sure Burns was one of those hard to get to know types and that they’d get on in time. Max hadn’t wanted to put him straight, tell him that Eldon cold-shouldered people he didn’t like–kept contact to a minimum and civility at a functional level because that would have made him feel he wasn’t part of the unit.

  ‘I made an effort with him, sure, more than usual. I cut him some slack on account of how tight the two of you are and what you represent.’

  ‘What we represent?’

  ‘It’s a great look for the press and TV, a salt and pepper crime-fighting duo for a salt and pepper crime-choked city.’

  ‘Then why are you changin’ it?’