The King of Swords

by Nick Stone

  This was his third time going through the Wong file, making sure he hadn’t missed anything. The NYPD officers had been diligent and conscientious, interviewing damn near everyone who lived on the street. Several witnesses had reported a dark blue Ford transit van with New Jersey plates parked across the road from the Wong house, and three people had described the same man hanging around on the kerb by the Ford–tall, fat and wearing a black bowler hat. The van hadn’t been recovered. They’d run the plates, but they’d turned out to be fake.

  The candy wrapper had been dusted for prints, but nothing had come up. It was the same with the one found at the Lacour house.

  Joe put the file away and got himself a Coke from the fridge. He turned his attentions to the twelve-page computer printout of missing persons reported in Miami between June 1980 and May 1981. Forty-six names per page, 552 in total.

  He scanned the printout for families living at the same address. Nada.

  He scanned it again for matching family names. It was laborious, because the list wasn’t in alphabetical order. Twice the light went out and he lost his place and had to start again.

  He persevered. He sweated through his shirt.

  He got to the twelfth page and swore he’d missed something.

  He went back to the beginning.

  Spanish names dominated, then English. The French and Jewish ones stood out.

  Nothing matched.

  He did it by address.

  Nine pages in, he hit the jackpot.

  Madeleine Cajuste, 3121 North East 56th Street, Lemon City; reported missing: 30 April.

  Sauveur Kenscoff, 3121 North East 56th Street, Lemon City; reported missing: 30 April.

  That was it. Two people living in the same house had disappeared just before the Moyez shooting. It was too late to check it out now; he’d go the next morning.

  Joe wrote it down on the blackboard, which they’d divided in two, Joe on the right, Max on the left. That way they kept track of their current and upcoming tasks, as well as any leads they’d generated.

  Max had written that he was currently talking to tarot card sellers and distributors. So far nothing. The de Villeneuve family in Switzerland had refused to divulge their list of buyers, saying they prided themselves on their secrecy and considered their clients an extension of the family. Some family, thought Joe, who’d heard all about their history from Max.

  At the bottom of the board, in capitals, Max had written: ‘DEVIL WORSHIPPERS/BLACK MAGIC?’

  Max had been to Bridget Reveaux’s house in Gainesville and photographed her late sister’s tarot card. He’d blown up his picture to A3 size and tacked it to the corkboard. Every detail was visible, including the supposed mark of the Devil in the bottom left-hand corner–an inverted five-pointed star with an elongated tip, which, to Joe, looked more like a badly drawn plummeting eagle.

  Joe didn’t buy into any of that hocus-pocus bullshit, but the card sure freaked him out. The King of Sword’s may have had a blank face, but it didn’t feel that way. The thing had some kind of presence–and a human presence at that. It was like having someone in there with him. Even with the lights off. He wanted to turn the fucking thing around, but that was a pussy thing to do. It wasn’t even a card, but a picture of a card.

  Fuck it! He turned the damn thing around.

  After he was done, Joe locked up the garage and went to his car, parked close to the Dorsey house.

  When he was a kid his granddaddy used to take him by there and point it out to him. It was a fine two-storey wooden gingerbread house, with tall trees in the back yard and red rose bushes in the front. D. A. Dorsey was Miami’s first black millionaire. He’d made his fortune in real estate and done a lot of good for Overtown, including, among other things, helping build the Mount Zion Baptists church. Joe’s granddaddy told him that every black man should aspire to being a little like D. A. Dorsey–help yourself first and then, when your pockets are full, give some of it back to the people around you.

  The house had long since fallen into disrepair and neglect. The front entrance and all the windows were boarded up, the white paint was greying, bubbling, cracked and peeling. In some places it had been replaced with gang graffiti.

  A bunch of kids were hanging around on the sidewalk outside it, smoking and drinking liquor out of bottles in brown bags. They eyed Joe up, immediately made him for a cop and one by one started to disperse, shu?ing off slowly, a dip in their walks, left arms swinging lower than the right.

  ‘Yeah, go on, walk off,’ Joe muttered under his breath. They didn’t know shit about where they’d been standing.

  He looked up at the sad old house, dirt under the slats, smashed roof tiles in the grass. There should’ve been a statue of Dorsey in Overtown, but the city wouldn’t spring for that and who’d come see it anyway? Nobody came to Overtown any more unless they lived here, had a score to settle or a crime to commit. It hadn’t always been that way, but it sure was now.

  Overtown was one of the oldest neighbourhoods in Miami. In the 1930s it had been called Colouredtown, and its entertainment district, known as the Strip or the Great Black Way on North West 2nd Avenue had almost rivalled Harlem’s, right down to the Lyric Theatre, Miami’s very own version of the Apollo, where all the greats had played. His granddaddy had talked about seeing Nat King Cole, Cab Colloway, Lady Day, Josephine Baker and many others at the Lyric. The area had been home to the Cola Nip Bottling Company, as well as dozens of hotels, grocery stores, barber-shops, markets and nightclubs. It had been a happening place, and a happy, prosperous one too–or as happy and prosperous as black people were allowed to get in the Jim Crow era.

  Ironically, Overtown had started dying when segregation laws were repealed. There was a slow exodus of businesses and talent as people relocated to other parts of town. Then the powers that be had driven a stake right into its heart by building the I-95 Expressway right through it, which devastated the already struggling community. Now the place was barely there and easy to miss; somewhere people literally drove over on their way downtown or to get their kicks at the beach.

  Joe felt angry as he pulled out and got on the road. Angry at the city, angry at the world he lived in, and mostly angry at himself for burying his emotions behind his badge and uniform. He’d looked the other way and stayed quiet when he should have been pointing his finger and screaming his head off. He’d played the white man’s game for the sake of his bullshit career and lost. Stevie Wonder could’ve seen that coming. He couldn’t help but feel that he was being punished for the way he’d done things–and for the million things he hadn’t done. He’d let his people down. He’d watched them take beatings and humiliations they didn’t deserve, and he hadn’t lifted a finger or raised his voice in protest. He’d lied for racist cops who would’ve done exactly the same thing to him, if he hadn’t been a uniform. He could’ve taken a stand and done the right thing, but he hadn’t because he’d thought he needed his job more than his soul and his pension more than his peace of mind. He thought of his granddaddy again, trying to instil those good values in him as he’d held his hand in front of the Dorsey house. He’d failed him.

  And even now, with what he was doing in that garage–who was he fooling? Max, that was who he was fooling. His best friend–shit, his only damn friend. The guy had always been a straight arrow as far as he was concerned, always looked out for him, no matter how unpopular it made him. Max just didn’t care. Joe was his friend and you didn’t bail out on a friend, no matter what.

  Max was helping him because he thought this was about getting some proper justice and to see Joe go out in a blaze of glory. But it wasn’t really. It was about Sixdeep, about bringing him down.

  With Max’s help, Joe was going to build the real Moyez case, uncover the people behind it and hand every detail over to Grace Strasburg at the Herald. She was a good reporter, one of the few who didn’t think Sixdeep walked on water. He’d do it the day he officially left MTF. It would be his parting shot, his farewell and
by the way fuck you to Sixdeep.

  It would mean the end of his and Max’s careers. Max would come out of it worse–both betrayed and betrayer–and Joe felt genuinely bad about that, but Sixdeep had to be stopped, and that made the ends justify the means.

  31

  Madeleine Cajuste lived on a stretch of North East 56th Street cops called ‘Shantytown Central’, because all the houses there looked like they’d been sucked up by a Third World hurricane and dumped on the nearest available strip of Miami wasteland.

  The houses stood on bricks or breezeblocks, just like gutted cars, and were made up of five pieces of wood so thin that if you stamped your foot in anger it went through the floor. The roofs were slim sheets of corrugated iron, which split in heavy rain, buckled and ripped open in the heat, or blew off in the wind. Many had clear-plastic sheeting instead of glass for windows. They were hard to tell apart because their colours, although not the same or even similar, all seemed to blend together into a universal shade of pallid grey, like the tone of an overcast day.

  The Cajuste house stood out. It was painted pale yellow. There was glass in the windows, which were protected–as was the door–by thick steel bars, painted pea green. It told Joe that Madeleine was doing better than her neighbours.

  The illusion was somewhat shattered when he reached through the bars and knocked on the window and made the whole structure shake.

  No one answered. He knocked again. Rivulets of dry dirt poured off the ridges in the roof and ran down onto the ground, building up in little mounds. The curtains were drawn. He saw coloured lights glowing on and off in the room to the left of the door.

  Outside the house next door, a Rottweiler started barking furiously at him from where it was tethered by a studded collar and chain to a hunk of cement, lunging at him impotently from its spot, half choking itself every time. From behind the flimsy steel fence separating them, Joe flipped the beast the finger and went round the back of the house.

  He was surprised to find freshly laid grass there instead of dirt. A child’s swing and a paddling pool with a rubber Donald Duck were there too. The water was filthy and smelled rank. Mosquitoes were hovering over it. Madeleine Cajuste wasn’t home and hadn’t been for a while: someone this house proud–even if that house was a cereal box turned on its side–wouldn’t have left that pool out in that state.

  There were bars on the back door and windows too. Just to be sure, he knocked again on the windows.

  He went to the house next door. The dog snarled and drooled as he approached.

  A woman’s voice asked him who he was when he knocked on her door. This house was sturdier, but the windows were made out of greaseproof paper.

  ‘Police, mam. It’s about your neighbour,’ Joe said, holding up his badge.

  The door opened a crack. A tiny, very dark-skinned woman with a wild shock of unkempt snow-white hair and white bushy eyebrows peered out and looked him up and down.

  ‘You comin’ by now? I made that call a month ago. Why ain’t nobody come see me?’ Her voice was a croak buried so deep in her throat it barely made it into her mouth.

  ‘I don’t know, mam, but I’m here now. Is Madeleine Cajuste your neighbour?’

  ‘Thass right. An’ I ain’ sin her since Easter, juss like I tole the lady police on the tele-fone.’

  The Rottweiler was still barking, and there was more barking and growling coming from inside the house–a whole chorus-load. There must have been over half a dozen dogs in there with her. Joe briefly thought about their welfare and the old lady’s, but he wasn’t here for that and let the thought blow off his conscience.

  The old woman stepped out the door and pulled it to behind her as she stood on one of the tiered breezeblocks that made up the makeshift steps to the entrance of her home. She was barefoot and wearing a lavender nightdress down to her ankles. The fabric was so thin and faded it was almost transparent. Joe could see she was naked underneath and wanted to wrap his suit jacket around her to give her back some dignity, but she didn’t seem to mind the state she was in, so he let that one go too.

  ‘You made the call on 30 April, right?’ Joe said, speaking louder to make himself heard over the dog. The woman looked at it fiercely and clicked her fingers. The dog quieted immediately.

  ‘Thass right. I use ta see her ev’ry day out there, playin’ wit’ dat baby.’

  ‘She had a child?’

  ‘Not hers. She tole me it belonged to that man she had livin’ with her.’

  ‘What was the man’s name?’

  ‘Sauveur. She said his name was Sauveur. Means “Saviour” in Hayshun. They’s from Haydee, you know, them people.’

  ‘So they weren’t married?’

  ‘She callt him her man. Dinn say nuttin’ ’bout no marriage.’

  ‘When d’you last see them all together?’

  ‘On a Sunday. In the mo’nin’. I think they was goin’ to church.’ ‘Why?’

  ‘They was dresst up all fine an’ dandy. Like what you do when you goin’ to church. You go to church?’ ‘Me? Yeah, sure I do. Every Sunday, mam.’ Joe smiled. ‘What church did they go to?’

  ‘I dunno. Fact, I ain’t sure they went to church, zactly. You know, they’s from Haydee. They still eatin’ folks out there, what I heard.’

  ‘Did she have the baby with her, when they went out that day you told me about?’ Joe asked, trying not to laugh at what the old woman had just said.

  ‘I think so. I didn’t look too good though, you know. She wood’na left home without him.’

  ‘Was the baby a boy or a girl?’

  ‘Lil’ boy. Sweet thang. Smiled a lot at me–and my dogs.’

  ‘Was there anyone else with them when they left?’

  ‘Juss the man drivin’ the car.’

  ‘What car?’

  ‘A shiny black one. Fancy and long, kinda like you see at a funeral.’

  ‘What did the driver look like?’

  ‘I dinn’ see no dryva. See, I guess’t there were a man there cause they’s all get in the back. Ain’t no car can drive itself–yet.’

  ‘Did you notice anyone coming to the house afterwards?’

  ‘Except you, no. Why it take you so long to come anyway? A whole month done gone by from since I callt.’

  ‘We’re pretty busy, mam,’ Joe said. ‘I apologize.’

  ‘You think somethin’ bad happened to her, right? Else you wouldn’t be here.’

  ‘I hope not, mam. This is a routine visit. Miss Cajuste might’ve moved. Did they have any visitors? People who came by regularly?’

  ‘No. But Madlayne’s brother used to live wit her for a lil’ time.’

  ‘Her brother? What was his name?’

  ‘John or Gene, somethin’ like that.’

  ‘What did he look like?’

  ‘I never sin him. Just heard he was there, what she tole me.’

  ‘When did he leave?’

  ‘A long time back. I ain’t sure when. One year. Longer. I dunno. He was good to her though. She tole me he sent her money regular. How she get them bars on the house, and that green grass there.’

  ‘You ever see a man with a hat hanging around the house?’

  ‘Near every man arown here wear a hat, ’cept you.’

  ‘Tall guy, maybe my height. Fat.’

  She shook her head and the thick white explosion she had for hair swayed like ghost wheat in a field.

  ‘Did Madeleine mention any other relatives she had here in Miami?’

  ‘Said somethin’ ’bout a cousin over in Liberty. Went by the name o’ Neptune,’ she said.

  ‘Neptune? Was that it? Anyone else?’

  ‘Not that I can think of.’

  ‘Well, thanks, mam, you’ve been mighty helpful.’ Joe closed the notebook he’d been scribbling in. ‘You did the right thing calling us.’

  ‘You coulda got here sooner.’

  ‘I wish we had,’ Joe said. ‘You have a nice day now.’

  Back in his car he went
through the missing person’s list, running his finger down first names, looking for Neptune.

  He found it.

  Neptune Perrault, 29 Baldwin Gardens, North West 75th Street, Liberty City; reported missing: 27 April.

  Baldwin Gardens was a project building. In Miami they built them way lower than in other cities, on account of the weather, but the principle was exactly the same: officially, affordable housing for the poor with great views thrown in; unofficially, concrete pens to crowd the minorities in like sardines. Meant for four to five people, the tiny apartments housed anywhere up to twice or often three times that number.

  Joe took the stairs to the fourth floor, breaking into a sweat as he went up. The building reeked of piss, garbage, alcohol and too much humanity crammed into too small a space.

  Neptune Perrault’s corridor was dark, hot and wet. Joe heard TVs and radios bleeding through the thin doors, as well as conversations and arguments, most of them in a foreign tongue he recognized as Haitian Kreyol, a hybrid of French and West African.

  There was no answer when he knocked at No. 29. He tried the apartment next door. Same thing.

  Someone stuck his head out of a door at the end of the corridor.

  ‘Police, do you know…?’

  The head went back in.

  He tried the next apartment along.

  A young girl opened the door wide and stared up at him. She had wet cereal on her face and her hair in braids. She couldn’t have been older than eight.

  ‘Hello, sweetie. Are your mummy and daddy home? It’s the police.’