saying he needed something temperamental to work with now that I was gone. I’m pretty sure it was a joke.
“Great stuff,” I said. It truly was, but Harry mastered anything he did. “How much kick is in that freakin’ stout?”
“It’s about eight per cent alcohol.”
I shook my head. My brain didn’t rattle, the aspirin kicking in, along with snatches of last-night’s conversation.
“You’re really thinking about the job?” I asked, recalling one of our conversations. “You retire one week, take a new job the next?”
Harry slid a chair near and sat. He was wearing an electric orange shirt and sky-blue cargo shorts. His sockless feet crowded the size-thirteen running shoes, yellow. The colors were strident to begin with, and seemed neon against skin the hue of coffee with a teaspoon of cream.
“It’s hardly a job, Carson. I’ll be driving a lady around when she wants to go out. Sometimes her daughter comes along. It’s maybe ten hours a week. Did I mention the gig pays twenty clams an hour?”
“For turning a wheel? Now it’s making more sense.”
“Mostly it’s taking the lady shopping. Or to church, the hair stylist, doctor, stuff like that. The lady lives in Spring Hill, just a couple miles away. She calls, I’m there in minutes.”
“You didn’t say who the lady was.”
Harry’s turn to frown. “Can’t, Carson. It’s confidential, part of the agreement.”
“She’s in the Mafia?”
“It was her husband who hired me, actually. And no, he’s sort of on the side of the angels.”
“Who you think I’ll tell?”
“Sorry, Carson. I gave my word I’d be mum.”
That was that. Harry’s word was a titanium-clad guarantee of silence. I switched lanes. “The wife unfamiliar with the operation of automobiles?”
“I guess she can drive, but doesn’t like to.”
“Damn,” I said, “Harry Nautilus, chauffeur.”
“Driver,” he corrected.
I bought a Miami Herald for the flight and returned to Miami. The headlines hadn’t changed much since Friday: “No Progress in Menendez Murder” blared the main story, with another headline, inches below, saying “Miami Mourns Loss of Favored Daughter”.
Last Thursday had been a horror for local law enforcement. Roberta Menendez was an MDPD administrator who’d started as a beat cop, putting in eight years before a fleeing felon’s gunshot shattered her hip. Undaunted, she worked a desk at the department while pursuing a degree in accounting – delighted to find an unrealized ability with numbers – and becoming a supervisor in MDPD’s finances department. Balancing books was work enough, but Menendez gave her remaining time and talent to a host of social and charitable organizations throughout the region, helping volunteer organizations manage their finances on a professional level.
I’d met Roberta Menendez a couple of times, a stout and handsome woman with an unfailing smile and sparkling eyes. She had a gift for public speaking and was a flawless representative of the department.
Then, in the early hours of last Thursday, someone had broken into her home in the upper east side and put a knife in her upper abdomen. Robbery was ruled out because nothing seemed missing. The perp simply entered, killed, retreated.
It was a tragedy and I read for two minutes and set the paper aside, knowing the frustration taking place in local law enforcement, news outlets screaming for meat, leads going nowhere as live-wire electricity sizzled down the chain of command: Get this killer; get him now.
I hit Miami in mid afternoon, stopping at the downtown Clark Center before heading home to Upper Matecumbe Key. My boss, Roy McDermott, was at his desk rubber-stamping paperwork.
“Hey, Roy. Anything happening on the Menendez case?”
My boss frowned, a rare look; Roy normally resembled a magician who’d just finger-snapped a bouquet from thin air.
“Nada, Carson. MDPD’s working double shifts. They’re angry.”
“No doubt. We in?”
Roy tossed the stamp aside. “I’ve got Degan and Gershwin working with the MDPD, but everyone figures it’s MDPD’s baby, one of their own gone down. Even if our people figure it out, we’ll dish the cred to the locals. They need the boost.”
“You want me on Menendez?” I asked.
“You’re on something else,” he sighed. “Call Vince Delmara.”
Vince was a detective with MDPD, an old-school guy in his early fifties who believed in hunches and shoe leather. My call found him working the streets on the Menendez case and he asked could I meet him briefly at five, which meant Vince needed a Scotch.
We met at a hotel bar in Brickell, Miami’s financial district. Vince was dressed as always: dark suit, white shirt, bright tie and a wide-brimmed black felt Dick Tracy-style fedora, which he wore even when the temperature was a hundred in the shade. It kept the Miami sun from his face, Vince regarding sunlight as a cruel trick by the Universe. The bartender saw Vince and began pouring a Glenfiddich. I studied the taps and ordered a Bell’s Brown Ale. I started to pull my wallet but Vince waved it off.
“I’ve run a tab here since the Carter administration. You’re covered.”
I followed Vince to a booth in a far corner. There was a middling crowd, men and women in professional garb, dark suits prominent, few bodies overweight. The women tended to pretty, the men to smilingly confident. It reminded me of the book American Psycho and I wondered who kept an axe at home.
We sat and Vince set the fedora beside him on his briefcase. His hair was black and brushed straight back, which, with his dark eyes and prominent proboscis, gave him the look of a buzzard in a wind tunnel.
“You read the paper day before yesterday?” he asked.
“Out of town.”
Vince popped the clasps on his briefcase and handed me a folded Miami Herald.
“Page two, metro section.”
The table had a candle in a frame of yellow glass. I pulled it close to read five lines about a twenty-three-year-old prostitute named Kylie Sandoval found dead along a lonely stretch of beach south of the city.
“Sad, but not unusual, Vince.”
Vince rummaged in his briefcase and passed me a file. “Story’s missing a few details, Carson.” The file contained photos centering on a tubular black shape on sand studded with beach grass.
“Is that a
