Magic City

by James W. Hall

  “Before my father was a plumber,” Danny said, “he played jai alai at the Miami Fronton. He’d played it as a boy in Bilbao, the Basque country of Spain. He was very good.”

  “Okay.”

  “When he could no longer play well enough to earn a living, he took work as a plumber, but jai alai was in his blood. He went back to the fronton every day and drank wine and hung out with the players, and he bet on the games. He became a gambler. I believe it was an addiction. Something to fill up his heart from no longer being able to play the game he loved.”

  “So he was in debt.”

  Thorn was thinking about the photograph. Humberto Berasategui. How uncomfortable he looked, how out of place. Sitting next to Pauline Caufield, down the row from Meyer Lansky.

  “Yes, he was in debt.”

  “To bookies.”

  Danny nodded.

  “Did you ever hear the name of Meyer Lansky?”

  Danny strained under the weight of the memory.

  “My mother mentioned him, yes. She was afraid. Men were coming by the house. Thugs threatened to hurt him, burn down his business.”

  “And then it all stopped,” Thorn said.

  Danny looked at him.

  “How did you know that?”

  “Maybe your father was forced to participate in something dangerous to wipe out his debt. It’s possible it was his only way out. To join with some other people in killing Snake’s family.”

  “To pay off a debt.” Snake spoke the words as if practicing them.

  “Lansky may have wanted to have his own team member aboard. In that case, your dad was there that night to save his own family. That’s all.”

  Snake stood up, started toward the car. His face was blank, but Thorn could see the emotion clenching his shoulders.

  “Wait a minute,” Danny said. “You’re just going to walk away? You show up, tell me you killed my old man, and then walk off? Not let me know what’s going on?”

  “We don’t know what’s going on,” Thorn said. “Not yet.”

  Danny looked at Snake for some parting word. But there was none.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Snake drove back across the causeway to the other Miami, the one with hourly wages and no water view. He wandered south on Dixie Highway, then turned impulsively into a neighborhood Thorn didn’t know. Old bungalows from an era when only snowbirds vacationing for the winter populated these streets. He’d been inside such houses. Tiny closets, no storage. Built for Yankees living out of suitcases. Nowadays those little cottages seemed absurdly small for the families crammed into them.

  “I don’t see what there’s left to know,” Snake said.

  “The grand project,” said Thorn. “What that CIA gang was trying to accomplish.”

  “I’m going home. I’ll wait for Stanton and Lola. I’ll get it out of them.”

  “You could try, I suppose.”

  Snake stared out his window and chewed on it.

  Thorn opened the manila envelope, drew out the Xeroxed pages. It took a couple of minutes to locate the name Sugarman had spotted.

  “Shepherd Gundy,” he said at last. “Military investigator who worked your parents’ murder.”

  “Military? Why the hell was the military investigating?”

  “I don’t know. The FBI was into it because they believed foreign nationals were involved. And it was a homicide case with the Miami PD. Then there’s this military guy.”

  “He’s in Miami?”

  “I have no idea,” Thorn said. “He was stationed at Homestead Air Force Base forty years ago. He could’ve retired down here like some of them do, or he could be anywhere. If he’s still alive, maybe we could track him down, talk to him on the phone.”

  Snake thought about it for a block or two.

  Then he dug his cell phone from his pocket and dialed.

  “It’s Snake,” he said. “No, I’m not coming to work. I need you to look up a guy’s phone number.”

  According to the cab dispatcher, there was no Shepherd Gundy anywhere from Palm Beach south through the Keys. After another minute he assured Snake there was no Shepherd Gundy in Florida. No Shepherd Gundy anywhere in the contiguous forty-eight as far as Friendly Cab could tell. The name Gundy made only a single appearance in the South Florida listings. Gundy Creations. A phone number but no listed address.

  “Worth a try,” Thorn said.

  Snake got the number, dialed it. It was disconnected.

  “Dead end,” he said. “Any other ideas?”

  Thorn thought of the address in his pocket, the one Mariana Cielo had given him. It hadn’t sounded promising at the time, and it still didn’t.

  Before he could reply, Snake called back the dispatcher and told him to look up the address of Gundy Creations in the reverse phone book. Put in a phone number, find the street.

  The dispatcher came back in two minutes, and Snake repeated the address aloud for Thorn. It was somewhere in the center of the city, Overtown or Liberty City, the black ghetto. One of those areas of Miami that had been full of raucous nightlife when Thorn was a kid.

  Then about the time Cassius left town with his new championship belt, Miami’s city fathers decided to cut the interstate through that disposable part of town. Businesses closed forever, churches failed, homes boarded up. Forty years later it was a nearly deserted sector of the city. Breeding rats and despair.

  “Tell him to do it the other way,” Thorn said. “Use that address to find the phone number.”

  “We already got the phone number. It’s disconnected.”

  “Try it and see.”

  The Overtown address did indeed have a second phone number attached to it. One line for the business, one for the home. Business line disconnected, home not. Snake hung up from the cab company and said, “Why are we doing this?”

  “Okay, forget it. You don’t want to know why your sister was killed. You’re content with what you got.”

  “You’re a pushy bastard. Anybody ever tell you that?”

  “You’re the first.”

  Snake punched in the number and handed the phone to Thorn.

  A woman answered. She sounded southern and polite, and African American.

  “I’m looking for a man named Shepherd Gundy.”

  “May I ask why?”

  “Was he once an investigator for the military?”

  She thought about it for a moment, then said, “What’s this about?”

  “It concerns a case he worked a long time ago.”

  “What case was that?”

  “The Morales family. A father and mother and daughter murdered. Five others, too.”

  “Oh,” she said, and there was another pause. “Are you a newspaper writer?”

  “No, just a normal citizen.”

  “Well, he doesn’t like reporters. I’m just warning you.”

  Shepherd Gundy’s house was in Overtown, infamous for its race riots and street-corner drugs. In a city where Cubans and Anglos battled for all available resources, the people in that part of town had fallen to an even lower rung on the social ladder than where they once were. Odd man out, surviving on the table scraps.

  Overtown had been Cassius Clay’s home base for six years, between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four, while he trained for Liston. Thorn remembered that Clay stayed at a hotel named the Sir John. The motel had a swimming pool, and that’s where Cassius was photographed underwater in his boxing trunks. Thorn could still picture the Life magazine spread, the tall, handsome Cassius, powerful as a god, submerged in that swimming pool, throwing crosses and jabs and hooks. The trails of silver bubbles his punches made through that water.

  He doubted the hotel had survived. Nothing much from that era had.

  Gundy’s house was yellow and made of concrete block. It was on the corner of a shady street that was full of houses exactly like it, though none was quite as well maintained. A rock toss away were the low-cost housing projects and the crumbling buildings and vacant l
ots full of giant weeds and the carcasses of dead animals. But the street Gundy lived on seemed like an island of hope in that sea of hopelessness.

  Mrs. Gundy met them at the front door. She had white frizzy hair and a quiet smile. She was tall and frail and she wore a bright green apron over her white dress. There was baking flour on her hands, which she dusted against her apron as Thorn and Snake entered.

  “You’re sure you’re not reporters?”

  “Very sure,” Thorn said.

  “He’s tried to tell his story to a couple, and they just laughed in his face.”

  “Maybe he spoke to the wrong ones.”

  “Maybe.”

  She looked at the manila envelope in Thorn’s hand but said nothing.

  She shifted her attention to Snake. He had fallen silent and his face was busy with thought, as if he were staging his next acts of mayhem. Blood burned in his cheeks, and his chest rose and fell with seething breath.

  “He’s in his shop,” Mrs. Gundy said. “Through the kitchen, out back. He’s expecting you.”

  Thorn thanked her, and he and Snake were out the kitchen door when Mrs. Gundy said, “He’ll claim he’s writing a book about that Morales thing. But he’s no writer. Though I often wish he was, ’cause he needs to unburden himself. It eats at him, keeps him awake. So I wish you luck in getting it out.”

  Shepherd Gundy stood with his back to them at a scarred-up pine table. He wore a blue jumpsuit, its arms and cuffs encrusted with sawdust. Over his workbench hung an elaborately carved sign with raised letters that read, GUNDY CREATIONS. Some of those creations were displayed on the shelf in front of him.

  Wood of every color and grain, carvings both abstract and tourist-shop hokey, like the tableau of a redneck with his finger hooked through a moonshine jug, stumbling over his coon dog. And there were redbirds and blue birds and jays and robins and every reef fish Thorn had ever seen, and many he had not. There were hundreds of sculptures no more than a few inches high. The abstract pieces were elegant loops and coils of wood that seemed to have been fashioned like sculptors are said to shape rock sometimes, following the seams, the veins, discovering the hidden shape inside the wood.

  It was the work of someone both fanciful and reflective. A lot more than a hobby, though maybe not quite art.

  “I’m writing a book on the Morales murders,” Gundy said without turning around. “So I won’t be giving you any hot exclusives.”

  Thorn stepped to his side and lay the photograph beside Gundy on his bench. He was gripping a detail knife, carving on a small ragged nugget that looked like a peach pit.

  Gundy looked down at the photograph, then looked back at the object in his hand, then looked at the photograph again and set his work aside and turned around.

  There was a scattering of white hair on his shiny scalp, and one or two longer hairs sprouting from his chin. His eyes were dark and glossy, the color of tobacco juice.

  “She tell you about my book?”

  “She mentioned it,” Thorn said.

  “She makes fun of it. But I intend to get it all down. People should know the truth. I think I could make a few dollars, too.”

  Thorn said nothing. Snake was standing in the doorway. He looked like he needed air. As though murdering one man and meeting the son of another man he’d killed long ago were starting to back up inside him, cramp his breath.

  “How you boys come by this photograph?”

  Gundy’s chin was pulled back, his shoulders erect, and his spine was ramrod-straight. He was no taller than five-five, a bantamweight, and he was nearing eighty, but he struck Thorn as a man who could still hold his own. Someone whom the punks that roamed his neighborhood probably knew well and no longer tangled with.

  “It fell into our hands,” Thorn said.

  “You know what you got here?”

  “Some of it,” Thorn said.

  “What’s your name, and yours?” He looked at Snake.

  “I’m Thorn. And he’s Snake Morales.”

  Gundy nodded as if he’d known this all along. Looking at Snake for a full minute. Then he turned and picked up his knife and his carving and went over to a recliner that was crammed into the corner of his workshop. It was fake leather and was ripped along both sides, the stuffing showing. The room was hot, and the fan that revolved overhead did little to alter that.

  He sat down and focused his attention on the carving.

  “That a peach pit?” Thorn said.

  “My brother sends them down from Georgia. He’s got a dozen peach trees. All the pits a man could ever need.”

  “Isn’t that awful hard to whittle on?”

  “Softer than oak.”

  “You make that skew knife and that double-cut skew on the bench?”

  Gundy squinted at Thorn with an investigator’s prying eyes.

  “You a woodworker, are you?”

  “Nothing as nice as this.”

  “Yeah, my tools are homemade. I grind the steel, carve the handles. I can’t afford the fancy stuff from the stores.”

  “They’re obviously doing the job.”

  Gundy rubbed his thumb across the rough surface of the seed.

  “See for yourself how hard it is.”

  Gundy held out the pit in one hand, the skew knife in the other.

  Thorn had been carving fishing plugs for years, and his hands were practiced with smoothing the edges away, making small fish eyes and tapered fins, but nothing like the detailed work Gundy did.

  He took the knife and the peach pit, looked at Gundy, then focused on the nugget of wood and dug the tip into a groove of the fruit seed. He found it more cooperative than he’d imagined. The face that Gundy had been working on had only a nose so far. Thorn scraped out the beginning of a smiling mouth, lips spread wide. It took him only a minute.

  He handed the seed back, and Gundy looked at it and looked at Thorn.

  “You’ve done this work before.”

  Thorn shrugged.

  “I’ve put some hours in with knives and wood. Fishing lures.”

  “I see,” Gundy said. “You’re a practical man.”

  Gundy leaned out and drew open the drawer in a desk beside him and Thorn stepped over to view another display of the man’s work. Dozens of peach pits were lined up in neat rows. Each was pared down into a human face. Each was different from the other, a vast range of emotions. Expressions of doubt, of joy, of contemplation. Laughter and frowns. Gundy had painted some, left others natural. Long noses and short, white men, black men, red men, Arabs and Jews. Lined up neatly like a platoon of international warriors.

  “Couldn’t make a go of it,” Gundy said. “Wasted nearly a thousand bucks out of our nest egg, and only managed to sell about five carvings before I had to shut up my business. Isn’t any great pent-up demand for whittling. Not that I could discover.”

  “This is a waste of time.” Snake opened the screen door and stepped outside. “You can find your own way home, Thorn.”

  Gundy looked at him.

  “Your parents were killed to start a war.”

  Snake halted. He turned around and looked back through the screen. Then went back inside.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  “Defensible grievances,” Gundy said. “That’s the term the Pentagon liked to use. He hit me, so I get to hit him back. What’s good enough for the schoolyard is good enough for our nation’s foreign policy.”

  “I’m not following you,” said Thorn.

  Snake came closer and eyed Gundy suspiciously.

  Gundy took a breath and blew it out.

  “All right, then,” Gundy said. “I’ll slow it down for you.”

  He worked his peach pit as he spoke, the air around them fragrant with sap and the lemon oils and varnishes that kept the wood shining. There was the sharp scent of epoxy underneath those natural smells.

  “They brought me into it a few days after the killings. I was just a kid, never worked anything more complicated than a barroom fight or a stol
en car. I took it as an honor, but that’s not how it was meant. They wanted me ’cause I was just a second lieutenant, someone they could manipulate. They were just going through the motions, doing it because someone in civilian leadership was having a hissy fit and forced them to investigate. Some senator, I don’t think I ever knew his name.

  “Top brass didn’t think I’d uncover anything useful, and when I did, they weren’t much happy with it and I was relieved of duty.”

  “What’d you find?”

  “Southwoods was its code name.”

  Gundy shaved at the peach pit, eyes on his delicate work.

  “I came across the paperwork. Top-secret. Classified. But I read it anyway. It was my job.”

  “Why was the military investigating at all? It was a civilian crime.”

  “Not entirely,” Gundy said. “Right from the get-go it was clear the killers had had military training. At least a couple did.”

  “You knew that from what?”

  “Weapons they used, ammo. Fingerprints.”

  “What fingerprints?” Snake said. “Nothing I ever read mentioned prints.”

  “There weren’t any,” Gundy said. “Not the kind you could dust for.”

  Gundy was silent for a moment. He looked up at Thorn and took a long breath, as if he were starting to reconsider his confession.

  “The two fingers left behind,” Thorn said. “The ones Snake chopped off.”

  “Correct,” Gundy said. “Took me the better part of a month, ’cause I didn’t have computers doing the work like they do now. I compared the prints against military records, and a few hundred hours later a name popped up.”

  “The prints belonged to Edward Runyon.”

  Gundy stopped his whittling and stared at Thorn.

  “You boys better watch yourselves. You’re digging in some perilous holes.”

  “Southwoods,” Thorn said. “Tell us about it.”

  “Well, now, when I got those prints back and I tracked down this Runyon fellow, he was in some special army unit, answering directly to people at the Pentagon. I tried to sit down with him and ask a few questions, and that’s about the exact minute I was relieved of duty. They wanted me to do my job, but they didn’t want me to do it so well I brought down the government. So that was all she wrote for my military career.”