The King of Swords

by Nick Stone

  ‘Like schizos?’

  ‘Deliriants induce a kind of schizophrenia, yes, but one which comes with a propensity for violence too. I’ve seen people beat the shit out of themselves, thinking they’re attacking an enemy. Most of the time, once the deliriant wears off, a person will have absolutely no recollection of what happened.’

  ‘Like sleepwalkers?’

  ‘Exactly like a sleepwalker,’ Raquel agreed.

  ‘How common’s the stuff you found in the stomach?’

  ‘Garden variety. Except the bean.’

  ‘How soon can you get a result?’

  ‘That’s a piece of string question, Max. It’s a full house in the morgue today. And one of them’s a cop. A DEA sting got stung on the east side. You hear about that?’

  ‘On the way in, yeah.’

  ‘We think he got shot by one of his own.’

  ‘On purpose?’

  ‘We won’t know until the results are in. Cocaine’s turned this city inside out and upside down.’

  ‘Tell me about it,’ Max said. ‘We’re in a blizzard, walking blind.’ He paused, lowered his voice and leant across the desk a little, ‘Raquel, I don’t wanna put any pressure on you, but I really do need to know what that bean is.’

  Raquel looked at him hard for a moment, then leant over the desk towards him and winked. ‘This another of your off-the-books crusades, Max?’

  ‘I’d appreciate your discretion, yeah.’

  ‘I should’ve known when you showed up right at the start of my shift. You normally come in when I’m, you know, right in the middle of something important.’

  ‘I know you’re real busy…’Max began.

  ‘Eldon know about this one?’

  Max shook his head. Raquel drew breath mock-dramatically and mimicked his headshake.

  ‘Let’s keep this between us, huh?’

  ‘Sure. What do I get out of it?’

  ‘What can I do for you?’

  ‘Well, what can you do for me, Max…?’

  ‘You still drink mojitos?’

  ‘When I get the time.’

  ‘Then the next time’s on me. If you can stand my company.’

  ‘You know attempting to bribe an officer of the law is a federal crime?’

  ‘You started it.’ Max grinned.

  ‘Deal,’ she said.

  ‘Can you call me at home, when you get the result?’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Thanks, Raquel. I appreciate it. Can I get a copy of this Haitian’s file?’

  Back in his apartment Max sat down at the phone and started going through his list of tarot-card stores, distributors and individual suppliers, asking if they stocked Charles de Villeneuve cards. Many of the stores and distributors hadn’t heard of them, but the few that had explained they could only be obtained directly from the family. The solo operators were more helpful, offering to get him a deck and quoting him prices varying from $5,000 to $10,000. Had they ordered any for anyone recently? No, they answered.

  After fifteen calls he took a break, made coffee and smoked a couple of cigarettes on his balcony. It was a sunny day with a good cool breeze undercutting the heat; he could smell the sea in the air. Unfortunately the illusion of paradise was shattered when his gaze ranged over Lummus Park below. They should have renamed it Fuckups Park.

  He sat back down on his couch and looked at his call list. The next place was a shop–Haiti Mystique, the owner’s name one he recognized–Sam Ismael, who’d been one of the prospective developers in the Lemon City reconstruction programme that had been awarded to Preval Lacour and Guy Martin.

  Before he could pick up the receiver the phone rang.

  It was Joe, calling from a payphone, sounding out of breath and harassed.

  ‘I know who the Moyez shooter was,’ he said, ‘and I’ve just found his family. Bring the tools and lose your breakfast.’

  33

  It was dark and hot inside Ruth Cajuste’s house. All the curtains had been pulled shut, the windows closed. The stench was intense, close to unbearable; even behind their masks and the Vicks ointment they’d rubbed under and in their noses, hints of its extremity wriggled through.

  Max closed the door and Joe flicked on the light. They were wearing gloves and plastic covers on their shoes. The scene would be examined by forensics and they didn’t want to leave even a hint of their presence.

  They saw the first three bodies immediately: still, dark bundles lying very close together, to the right of the door. There were two more bodies about twenty feet away.

  They checked the rooms: kitchen on the right, empty; two bedrooms on the left, both empty. Last there was the bathroom. The door had been kicked or bashed clean off its hinges. Another body was in a seated position on the end wall, right under a small rectangular frosted-glass window.

  There was no back door. They’d checked before going in the front.

  Six bodies.

  They went back to the beginning and examined the house.

  They were in a wide open-plan space which served as both front room and dining area, tiled pale yellow. The area around the bodies was moving, armies of black beetles scurrying and swarming to get a piece of what palatable flesh was left. This wasn’t the orderly disciplined stripping and carting off they’d witnessed at the Lacour house, but a frenzied free-for-all. The beetles sensed that time was running out. The temperature in the house had accelerated the process of decomposition.

  ‘What’s the date today?’ Max asked.

  ‘Third of June.’

  ‘These look well over a month old. I’d say they were killed on the twenty-sixth of April.’

  The five-week-old bodies had passed the bloated stage and were liquefying from the inside. Puddles of shiny translucent slime had formed about the torsos, mingling with the halos, commas and wings of dried and now black blood that had poured out of the wounds; skin was slipping off bone and turning into grey-green mush. Each body had its own cloud of blowflies hovering right above it.

  Joe named the ashen-haired woman as Ruth Cajuste, the man two feet away from her as Sauveur Kenscoff, and the girl lying face down in the red and white gingham dress, he initially mistook for Crystal Taíno, except that her hair and body type were wrong. She looked more like a teenager. He corrected her identity to Jane Doe.

  Ruth Cajuste had been shot in the forehead. A writhing nest of yellowy blowfly maggots filled the hole. She was lying on her back, in the corner, hands folded across her chest. Max and Joe agreed she’d most likely been killed first, way before she could realize that her son Jean Assad had just put a bullet in her brain.

  Sauveur had realized what was happening and had tried to fight back. There was a silver .38 Special next to his right hand, but the safety was still on. He’d had just enough time to pull his weapon before being hit in the shoulder, chest and through the left eye. That last shot had voided his cranium and splattered the contents over the wall behind him. He too was lying on his back.

  The blood-wipe pattern between the edge of the door and the teenager’s head told them her body had been moved post-mortem. There was an upward arc of high-velocity spatter covering the inside of the door; stray spots of blood had hit the wall above and touched the ceiling, indicating that the girl had been close to the door handle when the bullet struck the back of her head. There were shell fragments studding the wood and wall, along with pieces of bone and two teeth. She’d been shot at close range, the circle of singed hair around the entry wound suggesting the barrel had been mere inches away.

  ‘No one heard it,’ Joe said.

  ‘Silencer–must’ve been,’ Max suggested. It was the only explanation he could come up with. The house was in the middle of a row of one-floor homes, each about fifteen metres apart. The walls were on the thin side of functional.

  Max looked around the scene. He thought he’d seen something unusual about the bodies, but he couldn’t find it again.

  The two other corpses in the middle of the room were tho
se of Neptune Perrault and Crystal Taíno. Neptune’s right leg was slung across both of Crystal’s, his puffed-up, rotting right-hand fingers were interlocked with those of Crystal’s left, and his ruptured head–shot clean through the temple–was leaning into Crystal’s neck, as if he’d been nuzzling her when he’d died. Crystal was lying face down, shot through the crown.

  Max stared at them a good long while, unable to take his eyes away from the sight, as touching and tender to him as it was grotesque.

  ‘He didn’t even try to get away, or resist,’ he said to Joe. ‘He just lay down and grabbed her hand. He couldn’t live without her, but he could die with her. They deserve justice.’

  ‘That’s why it’s just the two of us here, right?’ Joe said, looking at Max quizzically, seeing an altogether new side to him. They’d seen far worse than this–a comparatively clean straight kill and relatively painless for the victims, no signs of torture, no dismemberment–and Max hadn’t blinked out of turn. He’d studied the bodies, read the scene, come to initial conclusions. The only thing that upset him was when they found children, but that got nearly all cops. They usually got angry, some cried, some couldn’t do their jobs. Max was in the first category. But how he was now was new to Joe. Max looked sad, as if he had known the victims. Joe wondered if this new girl Max had started meeting for lunch hadn’t opened up his emotional side, if he wasn’t a little bit in love with her. He’d been awful quiet about her, which was really unusual for him. He hadn’t even told Joe her name.

  There were half a dozen spent shells on the ground near the bodies. The shooter had reloaded. Joe bagged two of them and left the rest for forensics.

  Up ahead of them was the bathroom, a mess of smashed tiles and blood stains everywhere. Madeleine Cajuste had been shot at least five times in the torso and once through her right hand. The bathroom door had been dead-bolted from the inside.

  The window was unlocked and opened out from the side onto a view of the garden–a small strip of lawn, rose bushes and a palm tree at the end.

  Max noticed small scraps of white fabric stuck to splinters at the edge of the sill. He plucked one and showed it to Joe.

  ‘You said she had a baby? I think she dropped it out of the window. When the shooting started she ran in here, bolted the door and put the kid out of the way of the bullets. Maybe she screamed for help too. Either way, they took the baby. Let’s take a look at the other rooms.’

  Joe went to the kitchen. Dry dishes and cutlery on a rack by the sink, rotting and withered fruit in a large bowl on the counter. Everything in the refrigerator had gone off.

  Max looked through the bedrooms. Ruth Cajuste’s was nearest the bathroom. She’d slept in a double bed, with a Bible and a wind-up alarm clock at her side. The curtains were drawn. There were bars on the windows. Next door was where the teenage girl had slept. Her name was Farrah Carroll. She was fifteen. He found her Haitian passport and return-flight ticket for 5 June. In two days’ time her parents would be expecting her home. By her bedside was a photograph of her, Ruth and Mickey Mouse taken at Disneyland. She had kept her room neat and tidy.

  Max made for the front door.

  He went and stood where he’d been when they’d first come in and scanned the scene of slaughter one more time, first casually, then body by body, trying to find what he’d missed.

  The bugs were crawling up Farrah’s right leg but not her left.

  He looked at her feet. There was a small pile of dead beetles by her shoe. He bent down and studied the sole. There were white stains on it, absent from the other shoe.

  She’d trodden in something, maybe slipped. He turned around and looked behind him.

  There, that was it: a small circle a few feet away, clearly defined by the crust of dead black beetles all around it. It was a white splash with scraps of dark green matter in it, shredded leaves or herbs, and something small, shiny and dark brown, but unmistakeably part of a bean.

  ‘I think the shooter puked here,’ Max told Joe.

  Joe went back to the kitchen, got a knife and spoon which Max used to scrape the dried mess into an evidence bag. Then they left the house, turning off the light as they went.

  ‘I’ll call it in from a payphone,’ Max said.

  ‘Say you heard gunshots,’ Joe suggested. ‘Otherwise it’ll be another year before they send someone round.’

  34

  ‘You’re a piece a dogshit on wheels.’ Carmine sighed as he drove his new ride–a white Crown Victoria–down North West 2nd Avenue. It was a cop car, an honest cop’s car; only kind of ride pigs could afford on the minimum wage they made outta bein’ pigs. The pigs on the cocaine payola drove flashier autos: fresh-off-the-ramp sports cars and rides they’d seen in James Bond movies.

  There was method to his downshifting in the style stakes, because today, and every day until he got a location on Risquée, he, Carmine Desamours, was playing at being a cop. He wasn’t just driving this shitty ride, he’d changed his look too. He was wearing ugly straight-off-the-rack clothes from JCPenney–a grey sports coat, shitty black slacks that itched the inside of his thighs, a white shirt and scuffed black wing tips. He had himself an authentic-looking fake ID and a pearl-handled .38 snubnose on his hip. He was a regular Richard Roundtree motherfucker. OK, that wasn’t strictly accurate–RR was a private dick not a cop, but he couldn’t think of no black cops he wanted to be in the image of, so Shaft did him just fine.

  He wasn’t the only one out looking for Risquée. He’d put Clyde Beeson on her trail. Beeson said he’d tried every dentist and hospital in Florida and none of them had any record of her. Beeson said he’d asked around on the streets too. He was sure she’d disappeared; most likely left the state. It would’ve been the sensible thing to do, what he would’ve done himself if he’d almost been killed, but Carmine didn’t buy it. He knew Risquée: when she was pissed any common sense she possessed went out her ears. And she’d be real pissed at him. She’d think he’d sent that creep who’d tried to kidnap her outside the store. If Risquée had read any of the papers, she’d know her attacker’s name was Leroy Eckols, out of Atlanta, said he had ‘criminal connections’. Eckols had been killed by the driver of the car he’d shot at. She’d want payback. And he didn’t blame her, the way things looked.

  So, he was out here, searching for her himself too.

  He passed a stretch of dismal row houses and had to slow down for an ambulance that was pulling up outside one of them. Looked like a lot of death had happened there. Another ambulance was already in place, doors open, plus three prowlers and a blue version of his own ride with a red light on the hood. The front door was open and medics with masks on were stretchering out a stiff in a bodybag. There was a whole lot of commotion, as a heavy crowd of onlookers jostled for a view. Uniforms told them to stay back.

  This kinda shit always happened around O Town. When he made proper money in Nevada, no way would he be living in the nigger towns of this world. No, he was gonna get himself a condo in a fancy high-rise block with white folks for neighbours and security at the door, kind that said ‘Good morning’ and ‘Good evening, sir’ and told you who your visitors were.

  Today, he might’ve been a pretend cop, but he still had pimp business to attend to for Solomon. Apart from recruiting and breaking in new Cards, today was when he collected from the two street Suits–the Spades and the Clubs.

  He turned onto North East 6th Street and saw a Spade called Frenchie getting out of a tan Olds. He waited until the car had disappeared and let her get a good stride in her step. She had on a red vest, red heels and a pair of Daisy Dukes so small and tight they squeezed her big fat wobbly ass cheeks half down her big fat wobbly thighs. She was forty or fifty, something around that–he didn’t properly know because she was full of shit, always lying about the time of day–dark skin, hard face, shitty teeth, shitty reddish brown wig she either wore up or all the way down to her elephantine behind. When she was far enough into her walk, he drove up and hit the brakes hard, squea
ling to a stop right next to her. She scoped out the car in an instant, turned around and started heading in the opposite direction.

  The look was good. She’d made him for a vice cop.

  He reversed, winding down the window.

  ‘Hey, Frenchie! Git yo’ ass back here!’ he called out to her.

  She let out breath and smiled at him.

  ‘Shit, Carmine, baby, I thought you was a cop,’ she said, hurrying over to him. She had a jamambo pair of titties that were the only reason she ever made money.

  ‘Just testin’ yo’ reflexes, baby.’ Carmine gave her his nicest smile. Bitch smiled back at him. She’d always told him she liked his smile the most, said it reminded her of one of her little boys–or was she the one that had girls?–he couldn’t remember and didn’t give a fuck either way. ‘Get yo’ cute lil’ ass in here.’

  She got in the passenger seat and closed the door.

  Lil’ ass? My ass! thought Carmine as she took up the whole seat.

  ‘Watcha got for me, baby girl?’

  ‘Bidniss been slow, baby.’

  Even if he hadn’t seen her getting out of the Olds, he could smell cum and sweat on her.

  ‘That right?’ Carmine smiled. ‘Whose car was that I saw you gettin’ out of? You got a chauffeur now?’

  She looked down at her knees, the skin on them all scarred and tough from the amount of time she spent on ’em.

  ‘Like I said, and like I keep on sayin’, I got eyes everywhere, kind see round corners, so don’t try ’n’ play me, baby girl, else I’ll send my man Bonbon over to see you.’ Carmine enjoyed the fearful look she got in her eyes at the mention of Bonbon’s name. He could’ve used a Bonbon on his payroll to keep his private Cards in line–the likes of Risquée wouldn’t’ve dared go up against him. Sam had suggested it and he’d said, nah, I’ll be man enough for them bitches. He was regretting it now.