The King of Swords

by Nick Stone

  Max didn’t reply. The thick veins in Eldon’s muscular neck had sprung up like a nest of snakes and his face was beet-red. Max hadn’t seen him so mad at him since his boxing days.

  ‘I didn’t fucken’ hear you,’ Eldon said, getting right up in his face, so close their heads were practically touching.

  ‘I got it, Eldon.’ Max backed off a step, feeling pathetic and whipped and all kinds of small. Back when he was training him, Eldon had used one of two approaches to get results. Patient, friendly encouragement when he’d lost confidence in his abilities, or full-scale public verbal bombardments when he’d lost sight of his ambition. Eldon had known him so long he knew exactly which buttons to press and how hard.

  ‘You what?’

  ‘I said I got it. I understand,’ Max said more loudly, keeping a firm hand on his wounded pride so it wouldn’t turn to anger.

  ‘Good.’ He stood glowering at Max, soaking up his protégé’s capitulation. And when he’d had his fill, he packed the anger away, smiled, and put a firm but friendly arm around Max’s shoulder and walked him over towards the edge of the roof. ‘A little disagreement’s always healthy, huh?’ he said. ‘Clears the bad air.’

  Max replied with a noncommittal, ‘Hmmm.’

  ‘Me and Abe, God, we used to fucken’ disagree all the time. You know why? Abe was extra efficient when it come to dealin’ with his own people. He was rougher and nastier and more intolerant than any o’ those Klan-affiliated Patrol cops ever were. Whenever we was interrogatin’ nigras, he had this bat he used to take out, intimidate ’em with. Thing was filled with lead shot. One tap’d turn bone to powder. Know what he used to call it? His “nigger knocker”. Can you imagine that? Abe was a great cop, one of the best ever had a badge, and the finest I ever worked with. But, you know, sometimes he went way too far trying to prove he was bluer than black, one of us. Boy did we argue! Things he used to say. Close your eyes and you woulda sworn that was some redneck talkin’ to you.’

  Max had heard all the stories about Abe, although never directly from him. Abe didn’t talk about the past much. Joe despised Abe, called him a self-loathing sellout–and that was when he was being polite.

  Eldon took a deep breath of the dense dead air and sighed.

  ‘I love this fucken’ city, don’t you?’ Eldon swept his free hand across the view of the flat landscape, his tone now warm and friendly.

  ‘It’s all right, I guess.’ Max shrugged his shoulders. He wanted to get Eldon’s paw off him.

  ‘It’s “all right, you guess”?’ Eldon laughed. ‘You’re Miami born and bred, Max. You don’t know no better. Me? I love this city more’n I love most people. That’s the honest truth. Always been that way, always be that way.

  ‘First time I came here, I was ten years old. Came here with my daddy, Eldon Burns the First. He was a sheriff in Mississippi. Caught himself a fugitive wanted by Miami PD. So we drove him down. Guy was in the back seat. I was up front with Daddy. We handed him over and went down to Miami Beach. The first sight o’ that was so fucken’ beautiful. The beach, the sea, them rows of art deco hotels. Those places were really somethin’ back then, you know? Not like the dumps they are now. To me they were little palaces and everyone stayin’ in ’em was royalty. I made myself a promise that when I grew up I’d be sheriff of Miami. Look at me now, huh?’

  Yeah, look at you now, Max thought bitterly. Your daddy woulda been real proud of you, Eldon Burns the Second.

  ‘There ain’t no place like Miami,’ Eldon continued. ‘We got it all here. Back in my days in uniform it was whites, tourists, Cubans, kikes and nigras who knew their place and were happy to stay there. Now we got World War Three going on out here with these Colombians and the street gangs. They’re bringing this shit into our city, right under our noses and fucken’ it up for everyone. They’re walkin’ into our courtrooms killin’ people on national fucken’ television! Tourism’s down, money’s dryin’ up. Breaks my heart to see what this place is comin’ to.

  ‘Only, you know what? Miami ain’t gonna get no lower than this. Things are gonna stop and things are gonna change. Like it or not, Max, we’re at war. They’re winning right now, but we’re fightin’ back. We’re like a guerrilla unit. We’re the Miami Resistance. We’re outnumbered, out-gunned, outfinanced. And we’re fighting not one but fifty invading armies, and they’re all at war with each other, and they’re all at war with us. The Cubans are fighting the Colombians. And the Colombians are fighting each other. But we’re gonna win. ’Cause this is our city and our country. We’re gonna reclaim Miami, bullet by bullet. We’re gonna help turn it around, give it back its looks, its glamour and its money. We’re gonna make it beautiful again.

  ‘And you, Max, are gonna help me do it.’ Eldon looked him hard in the eye and squeezed his shoulder. ‘You’re the next best cop it was ever my honour to know. And I mean that. Together, you, me and this division–we’re gonna make a real difference. And when the smoke clears and the dust settles, Miami won’t be Murder Capital USA no more. It’ll be the greatest city in America, the place everybody wants to come to and be part of. Just like it used to be.

  ‘And do you know what the best part about it is? After I’m gone, one day, this’ll all be yours. Everything you can see. What do you think of that, Max?’

  I think you’re full of shit, Eldon, Max thought. Bullet by bullet? Are you totally fucken’ insane?

  ‘I think that sounds real great, Eldon,’ Max said flatly. ‘Real great.’

  24

  “‘One day this will all be yours”. Kind of fucked up shit is that?’ Joe laughed sourly and then took a pull on his Miller. He was sitting on Max’s balcony looking out over Ocean Drive. The balcony was wide enough for Max to stretch out in, but Joe was so tall the only way he could sit anywhere near comfortably was by resting the backs of his ankles on the iron railing.

  It was late afternoon, but the sky was so dark and thick with cloud it felt like night had come early. The beach was the colour of graphite, while the sea had the tone and stillness of mercury. There was going to be one hell of a storm.

  ‘What he said,’ Max replied. He’d related the whole conversation to him as soon as they’d sat down.

  ‘Crazy muhfucker,’ Joe grumbled.

  ‘What I thought.’

  ‘But you didn’t tell him, right?’

  ‘What difference would it’ve made?’

  ‘Were you serious about quittin’?’

  ‘Still here ain’t I?’

  ‘’Preciate the loyalty man.’ Joe clicked his bottle against Max’s.

  ‘It was an empty gesture,’ Max said.

  ‘Not to me, man,’ Joe countered. ‘Not to me.’

  It had taken Joe most of the day to recover his public composure. After they’d taken him through his statement, he’d gone back to his desk and sat there for an hour with his chair turned away, facing the wall. He hadn’t said a word. The phone had rung and he hadn’t answered it. People had talked to him and he hadn’t acknowledged them. Then he’d got up and left the office. When he came back two hours later Max had smelled the booze on him, but he’d been more communicative and had managed to laugh at the way Max got his finger caught in the typewriter keys when he was writing up the report.

  They hadn’t discussed what had happened and wouldn’t for a while. It was too close to Joe. He never talked about traumatic events until he’d got a good distance away from them.

  ‘Emperor Burns was right ’bout one thing though,’ Joe said, looking down the street with its still pretty pink sidewalks. ‘This used to be one helluva beauty spot. Sure ain’t like it now.’

  ‘I hear that,’ Max said.

  ‘Why d’you live here, man?’

  ‘So I can tell chicks I gotta view of the sea,’ Max quipped and lit a Marlboro. ‘Besides, it’s cheap.’

  The press called Ocean Drive ‘the ghetto by the sea’. They had a point. On either side of Max’s building were some of the old exclusive art deco hotels Eld
on had talked about–the Shore Park, the Pelican, the Colony, the Carlyle–now exclusively home to Cuban refugees and infirm Jewish retirees living out their last days in the sun. Fifty dollars or less got you a room for a week. The buildings were cracked and crumbling, pastel paint flaking off the walls in chunks, and the neon signs barely came on any more, either because the tubes were burnt out or because the owners were saving on electricity. Washing hung on lines from almost every balcony, and Spanish-language radio playing Spanish-language tunes to drown out Spanish-language arguments was all you ever heard. In the daytime, in Lummus Park, on the other side of the road, the old women would sometimes sit out in groups on folding metal chairs. They’d knit and talk in Yiddish about the past, hair covered in headscarves, drab-coloured dresses down to their knees, flip-flops on their feet. Between the 1940s and 60s the park had been a lush stretch of nature, densely planted with palm trees, but many had been uprooted in storms and never replaced; now it was mostly grass, ratty and clogged with trash. It was a magnet for bums, drifters, runaways, junkies and dealers. Every day one or two bodies would be found in the park.

  Max was playing the album he’d been listening to all week because he hadn’t bothered to take it off the turntable–Donna Summer’s Bad Girls. The album had hit its dull ballad quarter. He usually skipped these tracks when he was on his own and dropped the needle on the synth-heavy anthems at the end, starting with ‘Our Love’.

  ‘I reckon you only like this shit ’cause o’ the covers,’ Joe said, picking up the sleeve of Bad Girls. ‘You’re too embarrassed to go get yourself a copy of Black T ’n’ A, so you go to the record store instead.’ Joe looked at Donna’s half-open mouth, and come-hither stare. ‘She sure is fine though.’

  ‘Gimme that.’ Max snatched the cover back. ‘Fucken’ hypocrite. Get your own copy.’

  ‘Yeah, take it.’ Joe laughed. ‘Fuckin’ disco, man! Shit’s over. Thank goodness and good riddance. White man annexed that music soon as he saw how much money it could make. Same with rock ’n’ roll. Elvis was that poster child, same way John Travolta was disco’s blue-eyed boy. Hell, they even dressed him up in a white suit to make sure we got the message. Might as well’ve put a white hood on him too.’

  ‘That was a film, Joe, c’mon!’ Max laughed. ‘You been smokin’ reefer again?’

  Whenever they’d smoked weed together, Joe would start talking conspiracy theories about everything from Christianity to the Iranian hostages, and every conspiracy had racism as its prime motive. Some of them had a kernel of debatable truth, but most were utterly ludicrous.

  ‘Nah, man, I’m off that shit for good. I’m just makin’ an observation. Hollywood’s the best propaganda machine the USA has. See, we do as much if not worse stuff around the world than the commies, but Hollywood always has Uncle Sam as the good guy, always doin’ the right thing, savin’ the planet; so simple-minded people see it and believe it. You know Birth of a Nation was the biggest recruitment ad the Klan ever had, right? Same with Saturday Night Fever. People see that, they believe the white man can dance!’

  ‘And you can?’ Max laughed loudly, remembering Joe’s dancing. ‘You move like George Foreman on valium.’

  ‘Fuck you, Mingus!’ Joe cackled.

  ‘You wanna another brew?’

  ‘Let’s talk about our thing first.’

  They hadn’t had time to discuss how they would go about tackling the real Moyez case, but Max had jotted down a few ideas on a notepad, as had Joe.

  Max started.

  ‘Here’s what we gotta go on–similarities with the Lacour case. Both Lacour and the Moyez John Doe were completely hairless and they’d had their lips sewn up. Contents of stomach: squares of tarot card–the King of Swords–plus a mixture of bone, sand and vegetable matter. The tarot cards were already part digested, which means they were in their stomachs before they did their hits. I’m thinking this was part of a potion, and I’m also thinking these guys didn’t know what they were doing. Lacour killing his family was like a dry run, a test to make sure whatever it was he had inside him was working–that he’d kill on command and without hesitation.

  ‘And there was someone else there with him when he killed his folks. And whoever this person was was the same one who did the Wong family.’

  ‘The Candyman,’ Joe said. ‘I’m gonna contact NYPD, see if they got a print off that wrapper they found. And I’ll see if North Miami PD came up with anything on their side.’

  ‘Good.’ Max nodded. ‘Then we’ll have to look into gangs who use black magic.’

  ‘That’s five phone directories’ worth–just for Miami alone,’ Joe said. ‘Seein’ that shit more times than not now. The Mariel crims all got Santería altars in their homes. Most of ’em offer up prayers and sacrifices to their gods before they go out and commit felonies.’

  ‘I could be wrong, but I don’t think this is a Cuban thing,’ Max said. ‘I’m thinkin’ Haitian.’

  ‘Haitian? If they ain’t drivin’ cabs or cleanin’ floors here, the most they do is muggings and stick-ups in 7-Elevens–strictly small-time shit.’

  ‘You gotta keep an open mind, Joe.’ Max ri?ed through a couple of pages. ‘Preval Lacour was Haitian. As was his business partner, and so’s the only guy he didn’t kill–Sam Ismael. And Sam Ismael runs a voodoo store in Lemon City called Haiti Mystique. He was one of the bidders for the redevelopment project Lacour won. Ismael’s on my list to interview.’

  ‘He clean?’

  ‘Totally.’

  ‘Moyez wasn’t Haitian.’

  ‘Wasn’t Cuban either.’

  ‘Best you keep an open mind too.’ Joe winked, jotting down some notes.

  ‘Sure will.’ Max smiled and lit another cigarette before going on. ‘We don’t know who the Moyez shooter was yet. No fingerprints on file. But he may have killed before–possibly a person or persons close to him.’

  ‘So we gotta check on families or such reported missing or murdered in city and state,’ Joe said.

  ‘If he was from around here. If not, we’ll have to do a nationwide search. Shouldn’t take long if it’s multiple murder. He used a .357 Magnum with semi-wadcutters. If it’s the same MO as Lacour, he woulda used the same piece on his family or friends, so that’ll narrow it down some. Then we’ll search for similar-type killings.’

  ‘I got that down too,’ Joe said. ‘Hairless hitmen with stitch marks on their lips and tarot cards in their guts.’

  ‘Next,’ Max flipped over a page, ‘the tarot cards. Normally used in fortune telling, but here they were part of a potion. We’ll do a search on the cards themselves. There are literally hundreds of different makes and manufacturers. But these have to be exotic. They’ve got no faces. Plus we need to talk to card readers too, find out what they know.’

  ‘Check,’ Joe said. ‘What about de Carvalho?’

  ‘He’s on my interview list, along with everybody who was in that courtroom–everybody we can trace.’

  ‘De Carvalho’s in a Fed safehouse right now.’

  ‘Know who’s in charge?’

  ‘Bill Forsey. He’s real tight with Burns.’

  ‘Shit, I know,’ Max said.

  ‘We could pretend we’re talking to him as part of our official investigation.’

  ‘Won’t fly. Forsey’s a Cutman. Probably knows as much–if not more–about what Eldon’s up to than me.’

  ‘What are we gonna do if Eldon finds out?’

  ‘Say we’re tyin’ up loose ends.’

  ‘You mean cuttin’ tripwires.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Max nodded. ‘We’ll just have to make sure we lie convincingly. He gets so much as a hint of the truth and you’re done. We can’t have that.’

  ‘Let’s focus on the positive.’ Joe frowned. ‘This is gonna involve a lotta paper–reports, lists, photographs. We can’t keep it in the office.’

  ‘I’ve thought of that.’ Max grinned. ‘Mi casa.’

  ‘You got the space?’ Joe looked back through the windo
w at the untidiness that was Max’s living room.

  ‘I got plenty of room,’ Max said. ‘We’ll use here as a base.’

  ‘Dunno,’ Joe said. ‘Wouldn’t put it past Burns to break in here, bug the place, knowwhumsayin’? Why don’t we rent us somewhere? My cousin knows a couple of places we can use.’

  ‘You gotta point. Let’s do that. Other thing is, we’re gonna have to fund this all ourselves. I wanna put my informant, Drake, on this, find out what he knows. He don’t come cheap. I got some cash put away. You?’

  ‘Some,’ Joe said.

  ‘Then there’s time. We do this right, it’ll mean doin’ double shifts.’

  ‘I know that.’

  ‘Your old lady gonna be all right with that?’

  ‘If she ain’t, I ain’t…with the right girl. She’ll be cool. She already knows how it is.’

  ‘We’ll start on this next Tuesday, after the news conference,’ Max said. ‘Which end you wanna bite on?’

  ‘I’ll look into missing person reports and multiple murders of families.’

  ‘OK. I’ll do the tarot cards and deal with the lab. How soon can you get our base camp set up?’

  ‘I’ll call my cousin tonight, soon as he gets home. He should be able to hook us up with somewhere in the next twenty-four.’

  ‘OK. We’re on.’

  They shook hands.

  ‘How’s about that brew now?’ Joe asked.

  After Joe had gone, Max poured himself a shotglass of Jim Beam and sunk it in one. He took Bad Girls off the turntable and put it back in its sleeve. He went to the room where he kept his records. It was supposed to be an extra bedroom, but three of the walls had floor-to-ceiling shelves with over two thousand albums lined up in alphabetical order on them.

  There were more on the floor too–wooden crates of LPs, and 12-and 7-inch singles. He’d won half his collection at a SAW auction. It had originally belonged to a drug dealer called Lovell the Lodger, who’d doubled as a DJ. The rest he’d bought himself, or confiscated during busts and kept, if they were rare.