The Death File Page 5

  The last time this happened he’d forgotten where he’d parked.

  “Fuckin’ bank came an’ got it yesterday, the bast—” He belched into his palm, “—ards.” He looked up. “’S’cuse me.”

  Novarro had a mental picture of the repo man hooking up the 2001 Corolla and driving away. Six months back she’d lent – OK, given – Ben the price of the down payment plus two months of installments.

  “You got behind on payments,” she sighed.

  “The insur’nce was killing me, Tash.”

  “Think your driving record has anything to do with it?”

  “I, uh, gotta take a whizzer.” As usual when Ben didn’t like the direction of a conversation, he fled.

  It was five minutes until the toilet flushed, reminding Novarro of the time the family’s commode had been leaking for a week until a nine-year-old Ben removed the tank top, stared at the mechanism as he flushed several times, then, using a bent bobby pin, fixed the toilet in thirty seconds.

  “How are things at your job?” Novarro asked. “They still got you on thermostats?”

  “I got tired of tinkering with little shit.” He winked. “So I disappeared in a puff of smoke.”

  Novarro felt her heart drop. “Disappeared?”

  “I’m the Coyote, Tasha,” Ben grinned crookedly, invoking the mythological, shape-shifting Trickster in many Native American cultures, reckless, self-involved, with a sense of humor both clownish and cruel. “I have the magic in me.”

  Novarro shook her head. He’d quit or been fired. Her voice pushed toward anger, but she fought it. “You have too much liquor in you,” she said quietly.

  “Me Indian,” Ben said in a cartoon voice, a distorted smile on his face. “Me like-um firewater. It make-um me big happy.”

  “Don’t start that crap, Ben. It’s demea—”

  “FYA-WATAH!” he whooped, jumping from the couch and beginning a stumbling circular dance, hand patting his mouth. “Owoo-woo-woo … Owoo-woo-woo … Owoo–woo …” He paused as if taken by a sudden thought. “Me need-um a drum track here, Tash,” he slurred, moving his hands up and down like drumming. “You got-um any tom-toms?”

  “I got aspirin,” she said. “Coffee.”

  Her brother scowled at his choices. “Coyote need-um more firewater.” His hand flashed beneath his jacket and found a pint bottle of red liquid; his favorite grain alcohol into which he’d poured several bags of strawberry Kool-Aid. At 190proof, it was just shy of pure ethanol. Before Novarro could cross the floor it was in his mouth.

  “Give me that shit,” she said, grabbing his arm. Ben spun, his hand pushing Novarro away as his lips sucked greedily at the bottle.

  “I said give … me … that.” Novarro wrenched the spirits from her brother’s hand and held it beyond his reach as he grabbed wildly at the pint.

  “ME NEED-UM FIREWATER!” he railed.

  Novarro retreated across the floor. “You need to go to bed.”

  He raised an unsteady hand, fingers opening and closing. “Gimme, gimme, Tash. Need-um bad.”

  “No fucking way, Ben.”

  “IT’S MIIIINE!” he screamed, kicking over an end table and lamp. The action seemed to surprise him and he stared at the fallen furniture.

  Novarro’s eyes tightened to pinpoints. “Get out, Benjamin.”

  He turned to her. “Hunh?”

  “There’s the door,” Novarro said, finger jabbing toward the entrance. “Get out of my house.”

  It took several beats for her words to make sense. Her brother tipped forward but caught himself with hands to knees. “You can’t throw me out, Tash,” he said, taking a stutter-step sideways. “Me drunk Indian.”

  “Go sleep in the goddamn alley, Geronimo. Or crawl into a trash can.”

  “Don’t be mean, Tash,” her brother said in a voice closer to twelve than twenty-one. He bent to retrieve the toppled lamp but momentum carried him to the floor. He tried to push himself up, but his arms buckled and his nose slammed the carpet.

  “I’m all fut up,” he wailed, face-down, fingers clawing at the rug like trying to get a grip on a spinning world. “I’M ALL FUT UP!”

  “Shhhh, Ben,” Novarro said gently, slipping her hands beneath his shoulders. “Come on, let’s get you to the couch.”

  She wrestled her brother to the couch and got a wastebasket from the bathroom. She pulled the area rug several feet from the couch and set the wastebasket beside him as a vomit pail. He’d miss it, of course. He always did.

  She sat in the chair across the room and stared at her brother, his eyes rolled back as he neared sleep. Fixing the toilet was just the start, the harbinger of an innate ability with mechanical systems that led to a job in an uncle’s garage at thirteen. His skills flourished in a high school geared to technical pursuits and he’d received a scholarship in mechanical engineering at Arizona State.

  He’d dropped out one semester into the program, claiming to be bored, but Novarro suspected Ben had the same problem afflicting so many lower-class kids in college: Fear that he didn’t belong in that world, that he was insufficient, miscast, hearing whispers only spoken in the mind …

  How did that one ever get in?

  Despite entreaties from his university counselor and two professors – one who took Ben under her wing like a relative – her brother went to work for a company that installed industrial HVAC systems, actually a decent job, his natural abilities impressing higher-ups from day one. But from the moment he’d quit school, the drinking and pot smoking ramped up. He fell in with a loose crew of ambition-free young men content to hang out near the res and do odd jobs, selling loose joints to needy tourists the most profitable.

  Three months later the accumulating hangovers and stink of liquor on Ben’s sweat and breath ended with a pronouncement from his supervisor.

  “We really like you, kid; you got an incredible gift. But you also got a problem. Get it fixed and we can …”

  A succession of mechanically oriented jobs followed, diminishing in complexity, the most recent reconditioning used hot-water heaters for twelve bucks an hour, a task he claimed – usually drunkenly – that a trained chimp could learn in a day.

  Novarro watched her brother until his snoring became regular and unlabored. She bent and kissed his forehead and snuggled a comforter beneath his chin. Sighing, she picked up the half-full bottle and took it to the kitchen sink and turned on the tap. When she started to tip the flask over the drain, her hand froze and she stepped back.

  Something on the far side of the planet whispered Coyote.

  Novarro retreated to the kitchen table and sat with the blood-red liquid between her and the vase of fresh flowers purchased the previous day, their soft perfume scenting the air.

  “Woo-woo,” she whispered. She tipped back the bottle and drank with surprising naturalness.

  Fifteen minutes later she was weeping like a baby.

  8

  Rather than drive from Miami to Upper Matecumbe Key, I went to the Coral Gables home of Dr Vivian Morningstar. Viv was my longest-ever significant other (the term always seemed ridiculous … other what?), our relationship entering its second year. I’d met her in the last months of her previous employment as a pathologist with the state forensics lab, but shortly thereafter Vivian had an epiphany: She needed to work with the living. Specializing in trauma medicine, she was completing her internship at Miami-Dade General, which involved long hours at the hospital and often sleeping there.

  Harry was staying at the Palace, a former hotel owned by a scumball the FCLE had busted for human trafficking. All his other confiscated properties had been sold, but Roy convinced the accountants to retain the Palace as lodging for visiting agents and consultants to stay and as a safe house for the occasional snitch wanting to stay alive.

  It was just past one a.m. when my phone rang: Vince Delmara.

  “What are you doing to me?” he said.

  “I’m not tracking,” I said, wondering if I was dreaming. “But the
n it’s two minutes after—”

  “I’m in a front yard in Coral Terrace, Carson. I’m looking at a body that has your and Nautilus’s cards in his shirt pocket. They’re next to a U of Miami ID. You know a Professor John Warbley?”

  My phone went off less than a minute after I hung up: Harry. Called by Vince, he was on his way to Viv’s to grab me up.

  We arrived at a single-story ranch-style house, two jacarandas up front, a bank of azaleas to the side, plus some big overhanging tree I couldn’t identify. The ME and forensics vans were in place, plus three cruisers and Vince Delmara’s black unmarked. The uniforms were working crowd control, horrified neighbors looking on as emergency lights bathed the night in pulses of white and blue and red.

  We pulled in behind a massive step van, one of the forensic department’s mobile labs and headed into the crowd, looking for Vince.

  “There he is,” Harry said, pointing to the right. We jogged over and brushed aside overhanging limbs to see the face of a man we had spoken with scant hours ago. Warbley stared into the sky with lifeless eyes, one reddened with blood seeping from burst veins, the grass beneath his head glistening with scarlet.

  “Any idea what happened?” Harry asked.

  “The rear of his skull is bashed in,” Vince said. “Something big and heavy, ball bat, hammer, rock.”

  I saw Harry wince; he’d been struck from behind some years ago, sparking a long hospital stay and convalescence.

  “Warbley worked with Angela Bowers at the U,” I said. “His specialty is medical ethics. We talked to him today.”

  “Jesus,” Vince said. “Think there’s a tie with Bowers?”

  “If not, it’s a strange coincidence.” But we’d seen strange coincidences before. Fate sometimes likes to play with you.

  “Wallet around?” Harry asked.

  “Nope. I got a tan line indicating he wears a watch most of the time. It’s not there. No phone, either, if he was carrying one.”

  Classic robbery signs. And like a lot of cops I knew there was a statistical probability that hours after interviewing Warbley, he would fall victim to an unrelated attack. But the hollow in my gut told me my belly wasn’t believing those odds, not just yet.

  “Who found him?” Harry asked.

  “Penn and Ortega,” Vince said, nodding toward one of the MDPD cruisers. “Standard patrol, Penn driving, Ortega flashing the spotlight over the houses, yards. Then they see the bottom of shoes.” Vince checked his watch. “That was at11.56.”

  “And this is his home?”

  “No,” Vince said, nodding down the street. “He’s four doors down.”

  We looked across the yards and saw a similar house, but lacking the heavy growth.

  “Opportunistic,” I said. “It’s a perfect ambush point.”

  “No call, no reports of anyone in the area?” Harry asked Vince. “Creepers, peepers, people out of place?”

  “Not that I’ve heard so far.”

  Harry got to his hands and knees and leaned his nose over Warbley’s open mouth, sniffing delicately, his bulldozer-blade mustache almost brushing the victim’s lips. “Scotch,” Harry said, standing and dusting his hands. “And he’s wearing a pair of Rockport walkers.”

  I caught the glint of an object on Warbley’s belt and leaned down to inspect it. “A pedometer,” I said. “Combine that with the walking kicks and whisky breath …”

  “There’s a neighborhood-type bar about four blocks over,” Vince said. “The Lucent. It’s the kind of place you find academic sorts: craft beers and single malts, a couple bookshelves with everything from Aristotle to Zen koans. A jukebox that plays the latest from Mozart.”

  “You keep a catalog of all the bars, Vince?” Harry asked.

  “I live about a mile north of here,” Vince said. “It’s on my radar.”

  Vince put his uniforms and pair of detectives on interviewing the onlookers while Harry and I booked to the bar. Vince and his folks would take Warbley’s house.

  We rounded the corner to The Lucent two minutes later, a corner bar with a side courtyard. The hardwood sign over the door was handcrafted artistic, the smooth name in scarlet in reverse-relief.

  “Damn,” Harry muttered, trying the door and finding it locked. “Closed.”

  Closing time was likely two a.m., ten minutes ago, but a light was on and tapping the window with badges brought a face to the embossed and decorative door, one Larry Milsapp. Milsapp was pudgy, in his sixties and sported a waxed and pointed mustache that would have sparked envy in Salvador Dali. Milsapp wore khakis and threadbare blue dress shirt under a white and damp-spotted apron. In the corner of the bar I saw a mop bucket; cleaning up.

  “John Warbley?” Milsapp said in response to my question, his eyes sighting between the twin antennae. “John was in here earlier. I guess from maybe nine until eleven or thereabouts.” He frowned. “What’s this about, if I may ask?”

  It was technically Harry’s case, which meant he pulled the ugly duty. He leveled his eyes into Milsapp’s eyes. “Mr Milsapp, I’m sorry to say Professor Warbley was killed earlier this evening, likely on his return home.”

  If the bar hadn’t been in front of him, Milsapp would have gone down. He grabbed it for support, wavered, but Harry had an arm under Milsapp’s shoulder and guided the man to a chair, where he buried his face in his hands.

  “Oh …” he said, trying to find a place to put his hands so they’d stop shaking. “Oh, oh, oh …”

  Harry pulled two tumblers from the glassware rack, poured a treble shot of Pappy Van Winkle in one, spritzed soda water in the other and handed them to Milsapp.

  “I, I, I …” Milsapp said. His wiring was shorting from sudden overload.

  “First a deep breath,” Harry said.

  Milsapp sucked in air.

  “Now the booze.”

  Milsapp downed half the bourbon, then half the soda. He closed his eyes and waited until the blast hit, then nodded thanks.

  “Take your time, sir,” Harry said. “Then we need to ask about Professor Warbley.”

  Milsapp polished off the bourbon. “John was part of the soul of this place,” Milsapp said, shaking his head. “The conscience, maybe. John never knew an enemy, only friends. This place will never be the same.”

  “Was he married?”

  “Married to his classes, his studies, his books. Married to the concept that reason, correctly constructed and passionately argued, would always win out.”

  “Anyone in here earlier seem especially interested in Professor Warbley?” I asked.

  A sad head-shake. “It was a small crowd, the usual regulars, most have been coming here for years. People came and went, maybe forty over the course of the eveni …” He paused and narrowed an eye.

  “What is it, Mr Milsapp?” Harry asked.

  “There was someone else. A man came in, looked the place over for a few seconds, then turned and left. I got the impression he was looking for someone who wasn’t here. Or maybe he saw that it wasn’t his kind of place.”

  “How’s that, sir?”

  Milsapp studied a memory and frowned as it gained focus. “He was hardlooking, dangerous looking. Latin, I’m sure. Big shoulders, small waisted. Wore one of those knit caps. Though he had a jacket with the collar popped up, I saw tattoos on his neck. He looked like one of those guys in prison documentaries who lift weights all day. You don’t think—?”

  “We don’t think anything yet, sir. We’re just gathering data.” Harry scanned the ceiling, the rafters. “Speaking of that, do you have any security cameras?”

  “Never had any need.”

  We asked a few more questions and went to Warbley’s house to find Vince sitting on the couch and making notes as techs worked beneath porta-lamps out front. He gave us what’d you find? eyes.

  “He’d been at The Lucent,” Harry said. “Left around eleven. Fits the timeline for an ambush.”

  “He have much to drink?” Vince asked.

  Harry nodded. �
��The owner said Warbley liked single malt. Had four in two hours. Not smashed but happy.”

  “Not much to go on here,” Vince said, grunting up from the couch. His eyes looked tired, but then it was past two in the morning. “It’s like the standard-issue intellectual’s digs: Lots of books, an office where he graded papers, a stack of student essays on John Stuart Mill, a briefcase with more papers. Nothing out of place, tossed … I doubt the perp was ever inside.”

  “Find a wallet?” Harry asked. “Phone?”

  “Nada. There’s a bowl in a drawer by the door, got loose bills, coins, keys, an old uncharged flip phone, but a new charger hooked in a plug. I’ll bet it’s where Warbley tossed the wallet when he came in and charged his phone.”

  “You’re thinking robbery?” I asked.

  Vince nodded toward the outside. “You’ve seen the street. Dark. Some broke junkie’s driving around and coming down hard, maybe looking for houses to creep until he sees an older guy trotting in the shadows. Or maybe he saw Warbley exit the bar a little wobbly and thinks he’ll be an easy target. The junkie pulls over, grabs the steel pipe or cut-down ball bat beneath the seat and tiptoes down the lawns while Warbley trots the sidewalk. As he walks by the darkest yard bang … he gets pulled into the shadows and stripped of anything worth a nickel.” He looked at us expectantly. “You guys get anything besides Warbley sipping at The Lucent tonight? Something we can follow?”

  “Maybe,” Harry said. “If I understand how things work, Vince, you can do a few things for us, the FCLE, while we lead?”

  Vince nodded. “I’ve got more manpower, you’ve got more specialists.”

  “I’d be wondering if there are any security cameras in the area that might have caught shots of a tattooed mutha in a dark skullcap, bodybuilder type, Latin maybe …”

  Harry finished the brief description and Vince went to put people on it ASAP. Harry and I waited until the big white box took Professor John Warbley on the grim ride to the morgue. When there was nothing to do but watch techs pick through the grass, we headed toward the car.

  “Carson, Harry!” Vince yelled. We turned to see Vince waving us back. “Ortega just interviewed a woman lives four doors down. You should hear what she’s got to say.”