“No,” he said.
Deborah already had one foot lifted, her weight leaning forward, anticipating that Meza, like everyone else in the world, would automatically let her come in. Now she lurched to a pause and then stepped back half a step. “Excuse me?” she said.
“Noooooo,” Meza said, drawing out the word as if he was talking to an idiot who didn’t understand the concept. “Noooo, you may not come in.” And he twitched a finger on the chair’s controls and the chair jerked toward us very aggressively.
Deborah jumped wildly to one side, then recovered her professional dignity and stepped back in front of Meza, although at a safe distance. “All right,” she said. “We’ll do it here.”
“Oh, yeah,” Meza said, “let’s do it here.” And flipping his finger on the joystick, he made the chair pump a few inches forward and backward several times. “Yeah baby, yeah baby, yeah baby,” he said.
Deborah had clearly lost control of the interview with her suspect, which the cop handbook frowns upon. She jumped off to the side again, completely flustered by Meza’s fake chair sex, and he followed her around in his chair. “Come on, Mama, give it up!” he called in a voice somewhere between a chortle and a wheeze.
I’m sorry if it sounds like I am feeling something, but I sometimes get just a little twinge of sympathy for Deborah, who really does try very hard. And so, as Meza whirled his chair in a stuttering arc of minilurches at Debs, I stepped behind him, leaned down to the back of his chair, and pulled the power cable off the batteries. The whine of the engine stopped, the chair thumped to a halt, and the only remaining sounds were a siren in the distance and the small clatter of Meza’s finger rattling against the joystick.
At its best, Miami is a city of two cultures and two languages, and those of us who immerse ourselves in both have learned that a different culture can teach us many new and wonderful things. I have always embraced this concept, and it paid off now, as Meza proved to be wonderfully creative in both Spanish and English. He ran through an impressive list of standards, and then his artistic side took full flower and he called me things that had never before existed, except possibly in a parallel universe designed by Hieronymus Bosch. The performance took on an added air of supernatural improbability because Meza’s voice was so weak and husky, but he never allowed that to slow him. I was frankly awed, and Deborah seemed to be, too, because we both simply stood and listened until Meza finally wore down and tapered off with, “Cocksucker.”
I stepped around in front and stood beside Debs. “Don’t say that,” I said, and he just glared at me. “It’s so pedestrian, and you’re much better than that. What was that part, ‘ turd-sucking bag of possum vomit’? Wonderful.” And I gave him his due with some light applause.
“Plug me in, pedo de puta,” he said. “We see how funny you are then.”
“And have you run us over with that sporty SUV of yours?” I said. “No thanks.”
Deborah lurched up out of her stunned appreciation of the performance and back into her alpha role. She pushed me to one side and resumed her stone-faced staring at Meza. “Mr. Meza, we need you to answer a couple of questions, and if you refuse to cooperate, I will take you down to the station and ask them there.”
“Do it, cunt,” he said. “My lawyer would love that.”
“We could just leave him like this,” I suggested. “Until someone comes along and steals him to sell for scrap metal.”
“Plug me in, you sack of lizard pus.”
“He’s repeating himself,” I said to Deborah. “I think we’re wearing him down.”
“Did you threaten to kill the director of the Tourist Board?” Deborah asked.
Meza started to cry. It was not a pretty sight; his head flopped nervelessly to one side and mucus drooled from his mouth and nose, joined the tears, and began to march across his face. “Bastards,” he said. “They shoulda killed ME.” He snuffled so weakly that it had no effect at all except for the thin wet noise it made. “Looka me, looka what they done,” he said in his hoarse, husky voice, a croak with no edge to it.
“What did they do to you, Mr. Meza?” Debs said.
“Looka me,” he snuffled. “They did this. Looka me. I live in this chingado chair, can’t even pee without some maricón nurse to hold my dick.” He looked up, a little defiance once again showing through the mucus. “Woun’t you wanna kill those puercos, too?” he said.
“You say they did this to you?” Debs said.
He sniffled again. “Happened on the job,” he said a little defensively. “I was on the clock, but they said no, car accident, they don’t pay for it. And then they fire me.”
Deborah opened her mouth, and then closed it again with an audible click. I think she had been about to say something like, “Where were you last night between the hours of three-thirty and five,” and it occurred to her that he had most likely been right here in his powered chair. But Meza was sharp if nothing else, and he had noticed, too.
“What,” he said, snuffling mightily and actually moving a small stream of mucus, ever so slightly. “Somebody finally killed one of those chingado maricones? And you don’t think it could be me ’cause I’m in this chair? Bitch, you plug me in, I show you how easy I kill somebody piss me off.”
“Which maricón did you kill?” I asked him, and Deborah elbowed me, even though she still had nothing to say.
“Whichever one is dead, motherfucker,” he wheezed at me. “I hope it’s that cocksucker Jo Anne, but fuck, I kill them all before I finish.”
“Mr. Meza,” Deborah said, and there was a slight hesitation in her voice that might have been sympathy in somebody else; in Debs, it was disappointment at realizing that this poor blob of stuff was not her suspect. And once again, Meza picked up on it and went on the attack.
“Yeah, I did it,” he said. “Cuff me, cunt. Chain me to the floor in the backseat with the dogs. Whatsa matter, you afraid I’ll die on you? Do it, bitch. Or I kill you like I kilt those asshole suckers at the board.”
“Nobody killed the board,” I said.
He glared at me. “No?” he said. His head swiveled back to Deborah, mucus flashing in the sunlight. “Then what the fuck you harassing me for, shit pig?”
Deborah hesitated, then tried one last time. “Mr. Meza,” she said.
“Fuck you, get the fuck off my porch,” Meza said.
“It seems like a good idea, Debs,” I said.
Deborah shook her head with frustration, then blew out a short, explosive breath. “Fuck,” she said. “Let’s go. Plug him in.” And she turned and walked off the porch, leaving me the dangerous and thankless job of plugging Meza’s power cord back in to the battery. It just goes to show what selfish and thoughtless creatures humans are, even when they’re family. After all, she was the one with the gun—shouldn’t she be the one to plug him in?
Meza seemed to agree. He began running though a new list of graphically vulgar surrealism, all directed at Deborah’s back. All I rated was a quick, muttered, “Hurry up, faggot,” as he paused to catch his breath.
I hurried. Not out of any desire to please Meza, but because I did not want to be standing around when he got power back to his chair. It was far too dangerous—and in any case, I felt that I had spent enough of my precious and irreplaceable daylight listening to him complain. It was time to get back out into the world, where there were monsters to catch, even a monster to be, and with luck, there was also at some point a lunch to eat. None of this could happen if I remained trapped on this porch dodging a motorized chair with mouth to match.
So I pushed the power connection back on the battery and vaulted off the porch before Meza realized he was plugged in again. I hurried to the car and climbed in. Deborah slammed the car into gear and accelerated away even before I got the door closed, apparently worried that Meza might disable the car by ramming it with his chair, and we were very quickly back in the warm and fuzzy cocoon of Miami’s homicidal traffic.
“Fuck,” she said at last, an
d the word seemed like a soft summer breeze after listening to Meza, “I was sure he was going to be it.”
“Look at the bright side,” I said. “At least you learned some wonderful new words.”
“Go shit up a rope,” Debs said. After all, she wasn’t exactly new to this herself.
TEN
THERE WAS TIME TO CHECK TWO MORE NAMES ON THE list before we broke for lunch. The address for the first one was over in Coconut Grove, and it took us only about ten minutes to get there from Meza’s house. Deborah drove just slightly faster than she should have, which in Miami is slow, and therefore a lot like wearing a “Kick Me” sign on your back. And so even though the traffic was light, we had our own sound track along the way, of horns and hollering and gracefully extended middle fingers, as the other drivers swooped past us like a school of ravenous piranha darting around a rock in the river.
Debs didn’t seem to notice. She was thinking hard, which meant that her brow was furrowed into such a deep frown that I felt like warning her that the lines would become permanent if she didn’t unclench. But past experience had taught me that interrupting her thought process with that kind of caring remark would invariably result in one of her blistering arm punches, so I sat silently. I did not really see what there was to think about so thoroughly: we had four very decorative bodies and no clue who had arranged them. But of course, Debs was the trained investigator, not me. Perhaps there was something from one of her courses at the academy that applied here and called for massive forehead wrinkling.
In any case, we were soon at the address on our list. It was a modest old cottage off Tigertail Avenue, with a small and overgrown yard and a FOR SALE sign stuck in front of a large mango tree. There were a half-dozen old newspapers scattered across the yard, still in their wrappers, and only half visible through the tall and untended grass of the lawn.
“Shit,” said Deborah as she parked in front of the place. It seemed like a very sharp and succinct summary. The house looked like it had not been lived in for months.
“What did this guy do?” I asked her, watching a brightly colored sheet of newsprint blow across the yard.
Debs glanced at the list. “Alice Bronson,” she said. “She was stealing money from an office account. When they called her on it, she threatened them with battery and murder.”
“One at a time, or together?” I asked, but Debs just glared at me and shook her head.
“This won’t be anything,” she said, and I tended to agree. But of course, police work is composed mostly of doing the obvious and hoping you get lucky, so we unbuckled our seat belts and kicked through the leaves and other lawn trash to the front door. Debs pounded on the door mechanically and we could hear it echo through the house. It was clearly as empty as my conscience.
Deborah looked down at the list in her hand and found the name of the suspect who was supposed to live here. “Ms. Bronson!” she called out, but there was even less response, since her voice did not boom through the house like her knocking did.
“Shit,” Debs said again. She pounded one more time with the same result—nothing.
Just to be absolutely sure, we walked around the house one time and peered in the windows, but there was nothing to see except some very ugly green-and-maroon curtains left hanging in the otherwise bare living room. When we circled back around to the front again, there was a boy beside our car, sitting on a bicycle and staring at us. He was about eleven or twelve years old and had long hair plaited into dreadlocks and then pulled back into a ponytail.
“They been gone since April,” he said. “Did they owe you guys money, too?”
“Did you know the Bronsons?” Deborah asked the boy.
He cocked his head to one side and stared at us, looking a lot like a parrot trying to decide whether to take the cracker or bite your finger. “You guys cops?” he said.
Deborah held up her badge and the boy rolled forward on his bike to take a closer look. “Did you know these people?” Debs said again.
The boy nodded. “I just wanted to be sure,” he said. “Lots of people have fake badges.”
“We really are cops,” I said. “Do you know where the Bronsons went?”
“Naw,” he said. “My dad says they owed everybody money and they prolly changed their name or went to South America or something.”
“And when was that?” Deborah asked him.
“Back in April,” he said. “I already said.”
Deborah looked at him with restrained irritation and then glanced at me. “He did,” I told her. “He said April.”
“What did they do?” the boy asked—a little too eagerly, I thought.
“Probably nothing,” I told him. “We just wanted to ask them a few questions.”
“Wow,” the kid said. “Murder? Really?”
Deborah made a strange little shake of her head, as if she was clearing away a cloud of small flies. “Why do you think it was murder?” she asked him.
The boy shrugged. “On TV,” he said simply. “If it’s murder, they always say it’s nothing. If it’s nothing, they say it’s a serious violation of the penal code or something like that.” He snickered. “PEEnal code,” he said, grabbing at his crotch.
Deborah looked at the kid and just shook her head. “He’s right again,” I said to her. “I saw it on CSI.”
“Jesus,” said Debs, still shaking her head.
“Give him your card,” I said. “He’ll like that.”
“Yeah,” the boy said, smirking happily, “and tell me to call if I think of anything.”
Deborah stopped shaking her head and snorted. “Okay, kid, you win,” she said. She flipped him her business card, and he caught it neatly. “Call me if you think of anything,” she said.
“Thanks,” he said, and he was still smiling as we climbed into the car and drove away, although whether because he really did like the card, or because he was just pleased to have gotten the best of Deborah, I couldn’t say.
I glanced at the list beside her on the seat. “Brandon Weiss is next,” I said. “Um, a writer. He wrote some ads they didn’t like, and he was fired.”
Deborah rolled her eyes. “A writer,” she said. “What did he do, threaten them with a comma?”
“Well, they had to call in security and have him removed.”
Deborah turned and looked at me. “A writer,” she said. “Come on, Dex.”
“Some of them can be quite fierce,” I said, although it seemed like a bit of a stretch to me, too.
Deborah looked back at the traffic, nodded, and chewed on her lip. “Address?” she said.
I looked down at the paper again. “This sounds more like it,” I said, reading off an address just off North Miami Avenue. “It’s right in the Miami Design District. Where else would a homicidal designer go?”
“I guess you would know,” she said, rather churlishly I thought, but not much more than normal, so I let it go.
“It can’t possibly be worse than the first two,” I said.
“Yeah, sure, third time’s a charm,” Deborah said sourly.
“Come on, Debs,” I said. “You need to show a little enthusiasm.”
Deborah pulled the car off the highway and into the parking lot of a fast-food spot, which surprised me a great deal because, in the first place, it wasn’t quite lunchtime and, in the second place, the things this place served were not quite food, no matter how fast.
But she made no move to go into the restaurant. Instead, she slammed the gear lever into park and turned to face me. “FUCK it,” she said, and I could tell that something was bothering her.
“Is it that kid?” I asked. “Or are you still pissed off about Meza?”
“Neither,” she said. “It’s you.”
If I had been surprised by her choice of restaurants, I was absolutely astonished at her subject matter. Me? I replayed the morning in my head and found nothing objectionable. I had been the good soldier to her crabby general; I had even made fewer than normal insightful an
d clever remarks, for which she should really be grateful, since she was usually the target for them.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“I mean YOU,” she said, very unhelpfully. “All of you.”
“I still don’t know what you mean,” I said. “There isn’t that much of me.”
Deborah slammed the palm of her hand on the steering wheel. “Goddamn it, Dexter, the clever-ass shit doesn’t work for me anymore.”
Have you ever noticed that every now and then you’ll overhear an amazingly clear declarative sentence when you’re out in public, spoken with such force and purpose that you absolutely yearn to know what it means, because it is just so forceful and crystalline? And you want to follow along behind whoever just spoke, even though you don’t know them, just to find out what that sentence means and how it would affect the lives of the people involved?
I felt like that now: I had no idea at all what she was talking about, but I really wanted to know.
Happily for me, she didn’t keep me waiting.
“I don’t know if I can do this anymore,” she said.
“Do what?”
“I am riding around in a car with a guy who has killed what, ten, fifteen people?”
It’s never pleasant to be so grossly underestimated, but it didn’t seem like the politic thing to correct her. “All right,” I said.
“And I am supposed to CATCH people like you, and put them away for good, except you’re my BROTHER!” she said, slamming her hand on the wheel to emphasize each syllable—which she didn’t really need to do, since I heard her very clearly. And I finally understood what all her recent churlishness had been about, although I still had no idea why it had taken until now for her to blow up on the subject.
My sister had only recently found out about my little hobby, and upon reflection, I realized that there were many sound reasons for her to disapprove. Of course there was the act itself, which I freely admit is not for everyone. Add to that the fact that all I was had been sanctioned, even constructed, by her father, Saint Harry of the Blue Suit; Harry, whose clean and shiny path she thought she had been following. And now she had discovered that there was an alternative path, stamped out by those same hallowed feet, and this path went into the dark places in the forest and reveled in them. All she was stood firmly against everything that made up wonderful me, and both of us designed by the same blessed hand. It was rather biblical when you thought about it.