Blood Relations (25 page)

Tommy ate another cookie. Ali was packing used makeup sponges into a plastic bag. He spoke to her so nobody else could hear. “I’m sorry about what happened.

I guess you don’t want to be reminded and all, but I wanted to, you know, tell you.” His face was getting hot.

“That’s it.”

Her hands stopped moving. She laid them flat on the table, then looked at him. “I’ve been meaning to tell you something, too. You have chocolate on your upper lip.”

He brushed at his mouth, laughing a little.

“Eurotrash, if you want my opinion,” Rafael was saying. “At least they shaved their legs. The agent must have told them to. You have to tell these girls, the Germans especially, about personal hygiene.”

The guy came from the back in long pants and a wind breaker, said hi, then went out.

Ali went over to Caitlin’s boyfriend. “Excuse me?

Frank? I mean, Mr. Tolin? Can I ask you a question, as a lawyer?”

“Sure.” He was stirring some sugar into his coffee.

“Somebody came by my apartment yesterday who said he worked for Klaus Ruffini’s lawyers, and he wanted to take my statement. I tried to call Mr. Hagen but it was Saturday. I told the guy to go away. Was that all right?”

He nodded. “You don’t have to talk to anybody unless Sam Hagen says so. Call him tomorrow, let him know what happened.”

“Yeah, I will. Thanks.”

Frank Tolin went over to see Rafael put makeup on the model.

Ali picked up the magazine the model had left, then plopped down in one of the bench seats at the table.

Tommy slid in across from her. “Hagen. He’s the prosecutor.”

“Uh-huh.” Ali’s head was bowed over the magazine.

MEL. She had a pink shirt on with a thin gold chain. He could see the pulse in her neck.

He said, “Yeah, Caitlin said you and her went to see him. How’d it go?”

Ali lifted her face. “All right.”

“That’s good.”

“They’re friends from a long time ago,” Ali said, “She told me all about him first, so it was okay. I have to see him a few more times, but I don’t mind. Except he wants me to move back home.”

“Are you going to?”

“No way. Me and my mom do not get along. And how would I get to work? I don’t have a car.”

“I do.” He ate the rest of the cookie, then brushed his thumb across his mouth. “I mean, if you need to go somewhere I could take you. I’ve got the red Jeep. That’s my car. I guess you saw it already.”

She only looked at him, then started reading the magazine again.

Tommy asked, “Did you ever meet his son? The one that died?”

“Yeah, a couple of times. He was nice. A little wild, but he was okay.”

“Know what I heard?” Tommy would have mentioned Charlie Sullivan by name, but Rafael was there. “Somebody told me he was hittin’ the drugs. Some serious shit.”

“Yeah, I know,” Ali said.

“Stupid, man. Stupid.”

“I know,” she said. “Well, I tried coke, but not anymore. Stavros was doing crack, which is the worst.

George Fonseca got him started on that, plus heroin.”

Tommy heard the clack of a brush getting thrown onto the table at the makeup mirror. Rafael said, “For your information, children, Stavros was not a junkie. He wasn’t that messed up. He was a delightful, intelligent young man.”

Frank Tolin was eating a wheat cracker. He said to Rafael, “How well did you two know each other?”

The way he asked it made Rafael stare at him through his round, red glasses. Then he turned his back and started looking for something in his makeup case.

Frank glanced at Tommy and Ali, then left the van. He was whistling through his teeth.

When the door closed, Rafael said, “Why she’s in love with him I fail to comprehend.” He held his hand over the model’s eyes and sprayed her hair.

Ali settled back into the corner with the magazine.

Tommy said, “So. You Rollerblade.”

She turned a page. “Yeah. How’d you know that?”

“I saw you a couple of times at Lummus Park. You’re pretty good.” She looked over the top of the magazine. He made the cookies into a stack, then a line of four. “Maybe you’d like to go out sometime.”

“Thanks, but I’m busy.”

Tommy could feel himself blushing. “No, I mean, we could, like, meet there and skate. At the park.” Her blue eyes were on him like spotlights. He shrugged and looked back down at the cookies.

“People might talk about you,” she said.

He laughed. “I don’t give a damn. And they’d better not say anything about you either.”

:‘Sometimes they do, right to my face.”

‘if you were with me, they wouldn’t. I wouldn’t let anybody bother you.”

Ali laughed, but not like she thought it was stupid, what he’d said. “Well. Thanks.” He noticed that she had dimples.

For the last series of photos, Caitlin set up her camera close to the shore for a view of Fisher Island’s greenery and red tile roofs. These would appear in the background to give the impression that the models were in the Mediterranean.

She glanced around when Frank handed her the ice water she’d asked for ten minutes ago.

:‘Where’s Tommy?”

‘Hitting on Ali Duncan,” Frank said.

JeanLouis nodded and laughed. “Man, I thought he didn’t have the guts to talk to her. I bet him five bucks he wouldn’t.”

“Well, go tell him to get his fanny out here, will you?

caitlin flipped the mouthpiece open on the container and drank. It wasn’t hot yet, but in another month summer would set its teeth and not let go till late October.

“Aren’t you supposed to see Marty Cassie?” Caitlin said.

She picked up some Polaroids that JeanLouis had just taken.

“Marty can wait.” Frank took them out of her hand and laid them on the cart. “Before the little rascals come back, I want to know: Was George Fonseca giving heroin to Matthew Hagen? Ali and Tommy were talking about it.”

When Caitlin stared at him, he explained, “It matters for the lawsuit I’m doing for the Hagens.”

“I thought it wasn’t going anywhere,” she said.

“So far, no, it isn’t, but if I find a defendant who isn’t out of state, insolvent, or immune from judgment, then maybe I’ll file it to see what happens. But if Matthew was not only drunk but nodding off because he’d been shooting smack-”

“What are you going to tell Sam and Dina?” she asked.

“That depends on what you tell me,” Frank said. “Was he or wasn’t he?”

Caitlin finally said, “He’d had some problems, but I don’t think he was seriously hooked on anything. He was trying hard not to be. Don’t tell them if you don’t have to.”

Tommy and JeanLouis came running out of the van.

Tommy came over to get the exposure meter, and JeanLouis picked up one of the big reflectors on the ground near the models.

“Get over there!” The art director was jabbing at his watch. “Places to go, things to do, people.”

Looking through the lens, Caitlin focused on a young man and a girl in matching windbreakers, both smiling.

The girl was leaning lightly against his chest. Caitlin pressed the shutter and the camera clicked and buzzed, two frames per second. The art director came over to check the angles, then shouted for the models to stand in another position.

“Catie? I have to go.”

“Okay.” She looked through the viewfinder and pressed the shutter release. “I’ll call you later.”

“We’ll talk about what I asked you before.”

“All right.”

Tommy told her to wait a second, the sun was going behind a cloud.

Frank said, “You don’t remember what I asked you before.”

She turned around and made a guilty smile. “I’m sorry.”

“Come live with me. I’ll buy us a fantastic place. You can have your studio right there if you want.”

He was happy, she could see that. She knew she’d have to tell him no. “We’ll talk about it later,” she said.

A motion caught her eye. The brim on the art director’s hat had turned toward the production van. Now the client and the costumer looked in the same direction, and so did the woman they were talking to.

Then Caitlin heard someone wailing.

Rafael Soto was at the door of the Winnebago, swinging from the frame. He took the steps down, walked a few feet, then sank to the ground.

Everyone ran to him. Caitlin pushed through. “Rafael”’ She knelt beside him. “What happened?” Looking up she saw Ali Duncan’s wide-eyed face at the door.

Rafael pressed into Caitlin’s shoulder. “He’s dead! Oh, God. Oh, God. They shot him.”

“Shot who? Rafael, please.”

He sobbed. “Sullivan. He’s dead. I called the agency about the job tomorrow, and they told me. Someone shot him. Oh, my God, he’s dead.”

t Pier Park, the southernmost point on Miami Beach, a long mound of sand ran parallel to the beach as a storm Abreak. A boardwalk had been constructed along the top of it, and sea oats had been planted to keep it from blowing away. Just past the point where the sea oats ended and the ground sloped gently toward the ocean, Jay the body of Charlie Sullivan. A Canadian couple out walking at dawn had at first thought he was asleep, then began to wonder how he could breathe with his face in the sand.

Sam Hagen was not the assistant state attorney on call, but Detective Eugene Ryabin beeped him. When Sam arrived there was yellow crime tape across the entrance to the boardwalk and an officer posted. He showed his ID, went under the tape, and climbed the wooden steps. From the top he could see a group of about a dozen Miami Beach Police detectives and uniformed officers gathered in a ragged semicircle twenty yards up the beach.

Through the gaps between them he glimpsed a prone figure which he assumed to be the remains of Charlie Sullivan. The body, clad in tan slacks and white shirt, lay on a diagonal axis, legs pointed roughly toward the water, head near the grass-covered dune.

On the beach uniformed officers kept the onlookers back about fifty yards on either side. A few tourists had their cameras out. Crime scene techs walked slowly back and forth, picking up a soda can here, a cigarette butt there. Two news photographers had their telephotos trained on the activity, and a helicopter from a local TV station was hovering overhead, not quite close enough to be a nuisance.

As Sam descended the steps, Ryabin noticed him and waved him over. Sam could feel the sand going over the tops of his leather shoes. Nobody was going to get castings of footprints from this terrain.

A thin, young-looking man in a plaid sport shirt and casual stacks squatted beside the body-David Corso from the Medical-Examiner’s office. The police wouldn’t touch the body until he had finished his examination.

Sam stopped beside Ryabin.

“Anything so far?”

Ryabin shook his head. “Nothing.” The word came out as nothink. “No witnesses, nobody coming to us to say he heard gunshots. No footprints, no weapons, nothing left on the sand. The money and credit cards were still in his wallet.”

The wind was lifting Charlie Sullivan’s blond hair, and the sun shone through it, turning it golden and silky.

There was a dark red entry wound at the base of the skull.

Dr. Corso, his hands in latex, brushed aside the hair and pressed a thumb on the hole. Sam felt his scalp prickling.

Blood had seeped into the sand. The bullet had gone all the way through the skull.

“Fabric,” Corso announced. His fingers combed through the dead man’s hair. “There’s fabric around the wound.”

Hands braced on knees, Ryabin leaned over to say, “Fabric?”

“Fabric, fuzz, cotton. Green, I’d say.” Corso held up a piece and squinted through his rimless glasses. “It’s charred, probably from the gun, wouldn’t you think?”

Corso’s rail-thin physique, thick glasses, and mop of light brown hair often caused others to peg him for a computer nerd rather than a ten-year veteran of the M.E.“s office.

Ryabin gestured. “Look down the back of his shirt.”

Corso did so. Some blood had oozed down the sides of the neck, not much getting on the shirt. He retrieved several irregularly shaped bits of tattered fabric, dropped them into a plastic bag, then slit the shirt halfway down, not finding anything more. The skin on Charlie Sullivan’s back was pale and bloodless.

An older detective on Ryabin’s shift said, “The shooter could’ve wrapped the barrel to keep the noise down.

Possible?”

Ryabin agreed that it was. He told one of the crime techs to get an evidence tag. And to bring something to lay under the head when they turned the body over. He didn’t want sand in the wound, and didn’t want to lose any fabric samples that might still be present around it.

After a piece of plastic tarp had been laid next to the body, Corso stood up and motioned for the nearest officer to help him. He was a burly kid in his twenties who flexed his hands a couple of times before he touched the corpse.

Together he and Corso pulled on an arm and shoulder.

Rigor mortis had set in. For a moment the face seemed to cling to the sand, then come away slowly, a mass of glistening red and purplish brown. The jaw and forehead were still intact, teeth exposed but twisted. A clump of something meaty slid out where the mouth and nose used to be.

“Holy shit,” someone said. More profanities followed, including a remark about the ultimate blow job.

Taking a sharp breath, Sam concentrated for a few seconds on the ocean. Morning light shone through the breakers as they crested and curled. The tide was out, but wind whipped up the foam, Beneath the salt smell of the Atlantic lay the darker scents of blood and human waste.

When he looked back he noticed the red circle on Charlie Sullivan’s white shirt. The bullet had gone into the chest but hadn’t exited the body.

Sam asked one of the crime scene techs, “Did you find any shell casings?”

“Uh-uh. Shooter probably had a revolver, or he picked them up, which I doubt, because it’s black-ass dark out here at night.”

The shirt was some grade of cotton that said money.

Likewise the thin gold watch. One slip-on shoe was upside down beside its foot, and the socks were tan like the slacks, patterned with white squares.

Sam had seen dozens of corpses, and they all looked peaceful to him, like sleeping children. Even the worst of them, the most brutally slashed or bludgeoned, seemed to have passed beyond pain to a state of ultimate serenity.