saw stark terror. Ten years in the detective game, the last five so experienced from the first five that I knew the scumbucket had no idea what I was talking about.
“Tell me about Kylie,” I said, the hands loosening on his shirt.
“I-I ain’t seen her in four days. I figured she booked.”
“I think I believe you,” I said. “So right now I need the whole ugly truth, T’Shawn. Anything less, I’ll take you downtown and sweat you all night. Your choice.”
He’d probably have done a go-right-ahead bit if I’d been MDPD, but the FCLE had arrived in his squalid little world, which meant things were serious.
“Anything, man,” he said. “But you gotta know, it wasn’t me.”
I asked questions, he provided answers. Matthews had found Sandoval on the streets seven months back, drunk. He’d brought her to one of his two cribs, babied her. He also traded out the booze for H and put her on the street.
“What’d she do before she got to Miami?” I asked at one point.
“She never talked about that, man. Never. Like she’d shut it off. Bad shit at home, maybe. You wouldn’t believe what got done to some of these girls when they lived at home.”
In the end Matthews knew almost nothing of Sandoval; little more to him than an ATM, and as long as she kept pumping out money, he was fine with it. I shot a glance at Belafonte. Her eyes were expressionless but her nose looked like a sewage field was nearby.
“Beat it,” I said, releasing the pimp. Matthews ducked low past me and went to pick up his hat but Belafonte was standing on it. He gave her a wide berth and retreated down the street as we climbed back into the car to press onward into the unrevealed world of Kylie Sandoval. I took a deep breath and rested my head on the steering wheel. My cheek was sore from the punch and my side ached from the kick.
“Quite the interesting play,” Belafonte said, giving me my first-ever sample of what amusement sounded like in her voice. “Your take on Richard III, perhaps?”
“My kingdom for a nightstick,” I sighed.
I dropped Belafonte off at her car and headed to Viv’s. The place was deserted and my heart sank. I gave her a call.
“I’m running a half-hour late … be home in twenty minutes. I’ll make a food grab on the way in. Miguelito’s?”
“Olé.”
Viv arrived minutes later with burritos, chips, salsa and guacamole from a favored tacquería. She grinned as she scampered by to warm the chow and I used the time to admire Vivian’s slender form bending to put the food in the oven. She wore a simple blue skirt over improbably long legs and a gray blouse. The kicks were dark athletic shoes which looked out of place, but were the requisite wear for long hours of hard hospital floors.
We feasted on burritos – chicken for Viv, goat for me – washed down with Negra Modelo. Our conversation veered briefly into the sadness of Roberta Menendez’s loss, then, happier, into a recap of my weekend with Harry and his new prospects.
“Harry’s driving someone around?” Viv said. “He’s already bored with retirement?”
“Harry felt he could stash some playtime cash. And yes, Harry needs to be doing something or he gets mopey.”
“Mopey?”
“That time he got his head bashed in and spent weeks in the hospital? He hated TV so he tried crossword puzzles. Doing them bored him after two days, so he started making them. I remember one had the word ‘heimidemisemiquaver’ crossing the word ‘subdermatoglyphic’.”
“What the hell do those mean?”
“The first has something to do with music, the second concerns fingerprint patterns, and is the longest word where every letter is used just once, the reason Harry wanted to use it. It took him a month to build that damn puzzle but when he was done it made the New York Times Sunday version look like it was written by a ten-year-old.”
Viv gave me a look. “You miss him, don’t you?”
I made a smile happen. “We had some good times. But the world moves on.”
Another look, then a change of subject. “Harry thinks he’ll like being a chauffeur?” Vivian asked, curling the long legs on to the sofa.
“Driver,” I corrected. “We’ll just have to wait to find out.”
“I guess we will,” she said, standing and angling toward the stairs. “But until then, I know something that can’t wait much longer.” She winked.
I was off the couch like a shot.
Viv left for MD-Gen before six a.m. and I awoke at eight twenty with the vague recollection of a fleeting kiss. Breakfast was leftover frijoles refritos and chips and I was ready to attack the Sandoval case when my phone rang: JEREMY.
“There’s a huge commotion down the street, Carson,” my brother said before I could speak. “What is it?”
I suppressed a moan: My brother always wanted something.
“A commotion?”
“An ambulance, a quartet of cop cars. A news van. There’s a goddamn circus out there. What the hell is going on, Carson?”
“Why should I know that?”
“You’re a big-league detective, right? Find out.”
“Jeremy, I’m—”
“It’s a distraction. I can’t concentrate on my work.”
I figured Jeremy had been up at daybreak studying the morning’s financial indicators from Asia, preparing for the day’s buys and sells. I’d seen what a trading floor looked like and assumed part of Jeremy’s success in the market came from years in an institution for the criminally insane.
“What do you want me to do?” I said. “Drive out and shoot them?”
“How much do you pay in rent, Carson?” He hung up.
Through a Byzantine set of manipulations, my brother was my landlord and I paid a hundred bucks a month to live in a home that should have cost three grand. I stared at the phone, sighed, and made a call to King Barlow, an investigator with the Key West PD.
“I got a weird call, King. From a friend, sorta, that lives out there. He says there’s a commotion down the block. He’s kind of a crank, and thought I could assure him it’s not an alien invasion or whatever.” I gave King the block number and he blew out a breath.
“You’ll find out soon enough, Carson. Gonna be on the news any minute, I expect.”
“What is it, King?”
“Amos Schrum has come home to die.”
A picture immediately came to mind: a man of towering height with his face looking hewn from flint, all angles and hollows. His eyes were squinty small and peered from the cave of his brow, and his curling, snow-white hair flowed back from his high forehead like a foaming wave. Schrum’s stentorian voice had once been compared to “a trumpet calling the righteous to battle”.
The Reverend Amos Schrum had been a fixture on the religious scene since I was a kid, my mother dragging me to one of his tent revivals thirty-something years back. Schrum would have been in his late forties at the time, and though I recalled not a word of his message, my child’s eyes were riveted to the figure on the distant stage: diamond-bright in cones of light that seemed aimed from the heavens. People were Amen-ing and Hallelujah-ing. Some wept openly. A black woman beside me began babbling nonsense. A white man fell to his hands and knees and started