Blood Relations (37 page)

For a minute Sam stood with his hands in his pockets watching the activity around the red Mustang. A routine patrol from the north district had spotted the car in the parking lot about five o’clock, then noticed it again an hour later. The man behind the wheel seemed to be asleep. The officer drove over to check it out. The driver was dead, shot once in the thigh, once in the stomach.

They ran the tag. The car was owned by George Fonseca.

The crime-scene techs gathered what evidence they could find, which didn’t amount to much: a tiny vial of brown powder in the glove compartment, a cellular phone in the front seat, and several beer bottles on the floor.

These items would be dusted for prints. The pitted asphalt parking lot held no fresh tire tracks or footprints. Several officers had started canvassing the immediate area for possible witnesses, so far without result. No one had heard gunshots.

Ryabin had given him this information by phone, and now Sam walked over to take a look. A head of dark curly hair rested on the edge of the open window. The windshield was spattered with blood, and the police lights coming through the glass cast a weird, dappled pattern inside the car and on George Fonseca’s face. The dark brown eyes were half open. His mouth and nose were smeared reddish brown. There was blood and what appeared to be vomit down his shirt. He had a lapful of blood and a chunk missing out of his right thigh, just above the knee.

Pulling back from the window, Sam continued to stare at the body, trying to sort out his thoughts. As if he’d willed this murder into being, here was the corpse. Half an hour ago he had imagined such an end for George Fonseca, not precisely this scene, but something similar, proceeding from a desire as sharp and compelling as sex, a need to inflict pain. Not by gunfire, that would be too quick. Sam had wanted to use his hands. But this had happened without him. He felt distinctly ambivalent: both responsible and cheated.

Flashes of light came from the other side of the car. The medical examiner was taking photos through the passenger’s door, which the police had opened. Then he let someone hold the camera while he put on his gloves and walked around to the driver’s side. He spoke to one of the techs. “You guys finished over here?”

“For now. You want to open the door, doc, go ahead.”

“You do it. He might fall out.”

The fingerprint technician was a big man with a trimmed blond beard. The door came open, a screech of rusty metal, and George Fonseca’s body began to tilt sideways. While the tech leaned on the door, the officers took a quick vote and the losers put on latex gloves. Grunting and cursing, they maneuvered the body out of the bucket seat, past the steering wheel, and onto the asphalt. Fonseca was slightly curled up, neck twisted to one side, more or less his position in the Mustang.

Sam forced himself into a dispassionate consideration of the evidence. There were no powder burns on the pant leg. The shooter must have been several feet away, aiming either through the open window or open passenger’s door, which he had the presence of mind to close before leaving. But if he’d wanted to kill Fonseca, why not one neat shot into his head? These shots-one in the thigh, one grazing the gut-seemed rushed, even unplanned.

Corso aimed his camera. Light flashed for an instant on the long gouge across Fonseca’s abdomen. Again at another angle. Right thigh: flesh missing, bone exposed.

More shots, side and top. Fonseca’s face, the smears of blood and vomit.

One of the plain-clothes detectives stopped popping his gum long enough to ask, “What’d he do, hurl his lunch?”

Corso sat on his heels beside the body. “Did you guys find any drugs in the car?”

“Yeah. Little bottle of smack in the glove compartment, inside a flashlight. Looks like smack, anyhow. No works, though.”

A young patrolman said, “You mean he O.D. I ed?”

The fingerprint tech laughed. “He was fuckin’ shot, man. He might’ve O.D.“ed, but it ain’t what did him in.”

Corso returned his attention to the body, lifting the eyelids, going through the routine. Petechial hemorrhages could indicate strangulation, though that didn’t seem to apply here. He levered down Fonseca’s arms, which resisted. “No obvious needle marks.”

“Maybe he snorted it,” someone said.

Another cop agreed. “It don’t take more than a piece of tinfoil and a lighter.”

Someone laughed. “You can’t overdose that way.”

“So the guy that killed him had a syringe.”

A young officer with a blond crewcut asked, “Hey doc why’d the shooter blow him away if he was overdosing?”

Corso looked up. “Well, that’s for you to find out, isn’t it?”

Holding a magnifying glass, Corso got closer to Fonseca’s nose and mouth. “I can’t tell if we’ve got a nosebleed or a brachial hemorrhage. Bullet might’ve nicked a lung.” He pressed on the jaw to open the mouth and flashed his penlight inside. “Not much blood in here.

Looks like it’s coming out the nose. That’s odd.”

Sam asked, “Why is it odd?”

“Because a heroin overdose doesn’t give you a nosebleed.” Corso pushed his rimless glasses up a little farther with his wrist; his gloves were bloody. “It makes you go to sleep. You might twitch a little, but that’s it.”

“What about coke?”

“No, not with coke either. Or any opiate or morphinebased drug, or any synthetic that I know of-meth, PCP.

You want a list?”

“What else could have caused this?”

Corso glanced up at Sam. “You don’t usually ask me for opinions at the scene, Hagen.”

“Yeah, I know, but how about it?”

“I don’t like to give opinions at the scene,” Corso muttered. His hands dangled between his knees as he sat silently on his haunches. “I think he was sick, but I don’t know from what, and I don’t know at this point if it made a difference. These gunshots weren’t necessarily fatal. He might have survived if he’d made it to a hospital, but I’d say the man bled to death. Wait for the toxicology report, will you?”

Sam said, “That’s going to be five or six weeks. Can you push it?”

“For you, I’ll ask the toxicologist pretty please.”

“How soon can I get an autopsy report?”

“Call me tomorrow. He’s scheduled for the morning.

I’ll have him done by noon.” Corso raised his hand. “It won’t be written, okay? Come on. I’ve got a life.”

He took off Fonseca’s jewelry: a heavy gold watch, an ID bracelet, a gold chain.

The blond cop said, “Damn, look at that watch.”

“It’s a fake,” Corso said.

Sam asked if the wallet was still in the back pocket.

Corso took it out, held it up, then bagged it. With a short, curved pair of scissors he started slicing through Fonseca’s clothes, matching holes in the garments to bullet holes in the body. As the clothes fell away, a stench of body wastes hung in the unmoving air. Corso gestured with the scissors. “The victim urinated and defecated all over himself. Consistent with a toxic reaction to something, okay? But don’t ask me what.” He stood up and took some photographs. Grit and pine needles stuck to Fonseca’s back when they rolled him over. His genitals and buttocks were mottled red-purple from livor mortis, and smeared with feces.

Sam looked around for Gene Ryabin, and saw him watching the crime-scene technicians examine the interior of the Mustang. The backseat and floors were buried under yellowed newspapers, food containers, and crushed beer cans. After a cursory examination the techs would roll up the windows and take the car to the police garage, where they could go over everything with tweezers and a magnifying glass.

Ryabin noticed Sam and told him to come look at what they’d found. He held up a bag sealed with red evidence tape. There were some misshapen pieces of lead inside.

“We found these on the floor. Whatever is in the side door we’ll dig out at the garage, and there’s a bullet hole in the seat. So. At least three shots, and the shooter had terrible aim.”

Moving out of his own shadow cast by the spotlights, Sam put on his glasses. He felt the fragments through the thin plastic. “What’s your guess? Forty-five’s?”

Ryabin made a gap-toothed smile. “As with Charlie Sullivan? Maybe ballistics can make a match-although you are aware, Sam, how many forty-five-caliber handguns there are in Dade County, and how many of those shoot hollow-points.” He gave the bag to one of the uniformed men.

“What now I am wondering is why, if the same person did both these gentlemen, he chooses first a witness, and then a defendant on the same rape case. Is this logical?”

Sam said, “Fonseca called me yesterday.”

“Did he?” Ryabin’s bushy eyebrows rose.

“He offered to testify against Klaus Ruffini if I made a deal. I think he was looking for his own deal.”

“Money from Ruffini not to testify,” Ryabin concluded.

“Did you offer him a plea?”

“Sure, to put him away for the maximum. He didn’t like my attitude,” Sam said. “I told him to have his attorney call me. I didn’t hear back. You might want to talk to Ruffini’s bodyguard. I think his name is Franco.”

“We’ve met.” Arms crossed just above the curve of his belly, Ryabin said, “Here’s another possibility for a shooter. Asking around, I’m finding out Fonseca had no money for bond.”

“Who put it up for him? Not Ruffini.”

“No. Alberto Gusman is the name I’ve been given. A midlevel trafficker who was, I believe, Fonseca’s source.

He and Fonseca share the same attorney, Don Gessing.”

Sam said, “And you think Fonseca could have leaned on Alberto Gusman, and Gusman pushed back.”

“It’s a theory,” Ryabin said.

“But what motive did Gusman have to kill Charlie Sullivan? Sullivan had nothing to do with drugs,” Sam said.

“You believe the same person killed them both.”

“Don’t you?”

“So many complications.” Ryabin sighed. His heavy beard had broken into stubble this late in the day. “Better not to assume anything yet, although I think what you do, Sam, that the bullets came from the same forty-fivecaliber semiautomatic pistol.”

“How soon can we get an answer?”

“A few days.”

They watched a couple of officers unfold a tarp and spread it over the naked body lying on the asphalt parking lot. A carcass now.

“Gene, I wanted to prosecute the son of a bitch,” Sam said. “I was looking forward to it.”

“What now?” Ryabin asked.

“The caseis still on. I’m not too fond of Klaus Ruffini, either, and I’d be particularly annoyed if somebody shoots him.”

Sam told Ryabin to come over to his car for a minute.

They sat in the front with doors open and the dome light on, looking at the contact sheets he’d borrowed from Caitlin Dom. Ryabin lit a cigarette and blew smoke into the darkness.

Pointing at one of the frames, Sam said, “This woman with Claudia Otero is her sister, Amalia Otero Mora. Eddie Mora’s wife.”

“Give me your glasses. I’m going blind.” Ryabin held them a few inches over the page, squinting through one of the lenses. “Lovely women. Both of them. I like women with dark eyes. Did Eddie ever mention to you that Charlie Sullivan, now deceased, was sleeping with Amalia’s sister?”

“It must have slipped his mind,” Sam said.

Still studying the tiny photographs, Ryabin said, “How wonderful to be so rich and to know so many people.”

“Fabulous.”

“Yes. Fabulous people, a fabulous party.” Ryabin moved the contact sheet, following the lines of negatives printed on it. “George Fonseca is here.”

“He planned the party,” Sam said.

“And look. Hal Delucca, our city manager.” Ryabin added, “Before he became our city manager. That’s how you get elected on Miami Beach, Sam. You go to parties given by rich foreigners.” Ryabin went to the next contact sheet. “Here’s Marty Cassie.”

“Show me. I met him a couple of times at Frank Tolin’s office, but that was a few years back.” Sam put on his glasses. Cassie was a short man with a big smile, his arm around a former mayor of Miami Beach who had eventually gone to prison for tax evasion. “Yeah, this is Marty. I remember the ponytail.”

Ryabin gazed for another moment at the small, grinning face in the photograph, then tossed the contact sheet aside.

Sam remembered that Marty Cassie had handled the sale of the Englander Apartments, where Ryabin’s sisterin-law had burned after telling him she’d never sell the building. The fire department had called it arson. Ryabin had never accused Marty Cassie, but neither had he forgotten.

They got out of the car just as an unmarked Dodge van turned slowly into the parking lot, its headlights sweeping over the people watching from the sidewalk, then illuminating the trees at the property line. Two men got out and rolled a gurney over to George Fonseca’s covered body.

They slid the body onto a board, lifted the board to the gurney, then loaded the van and slammed the door. Onlookers parted to let the van through, and it turned south on Collins, heading for the morgue.

It was late when Sam got home. He’d bought a beer along the way. Coming in through the garage, he threw the empty bottle into a trash can, let the automatic door down, and went into the house through the kitchen. He flipped on the light.

Melanie, in a pink nightshirt, was standing at the refrigerator, pouring herself a diet soda. She looked at him, not speaking.

He reached out and ruffled her hair. “Hey, how’s the kid?”

“Stop it, Dad.” She jerked away.

“Jesus.” He reached past her for a beer out of the sixpack on the bottom shelf. “Am I still on your shit list for unnamed crimes, or is this a phase of adolescence9”

Dina’s voice came from around the corner in the dining room “Melanie, are you still up? I told you to o to bed an hour ago.” 9 “I’m thirsty, do you mind?”

Sam said, “Hey. Watch your mouth.”

Melanie dropped two ice cubes into her glass. “Wow, Dad. You just used the word shit, plus you took the Lord’s name in vain. Can I do that?”

“No.” He twisted the top off the beer and flipped it into the trash. “Do what your mother told you. Get upstairs.”

He watched her go, then turned off the light. A dim rectangle of yellow fell across the kitchen floor from the dining room.

Dina sat at one end of the long, polished wood table, which was stacked with files and tax manuals. The dark windows looking out on the backyard were behind her.