Magic City (14 page)

“And you'll be staying well behind the lines.”

“As you must realize, it's a delicate moment in the political cycle. If this photo were to fall into the wrong hands, careers would be finished. Think of this as your own personal second chance. An opportunity to clean up a disaster that all of us regret.”

“Are you green-lighting me and Runyon to commit murder?”

She looked around at the Japanese gardens.

“This is critical, Stanton. The director has made it his highest priority. That image must be destroyed and the situation neutralized. So, yes, it's entirely possible you might be called on to perform some health-altering practices.”

“Health-altering practices? That's what you call it now?”

She took a sip of the cooling air, held it, savoring it in her lungs for a long moment like a doper with his weed. When she blew it out, her eyes clicked to Stanton's and her lips tightened into something like a smile.

She unzipped her small leather purse and spread it open in her lap. The black glint of a molded pistol grip caught the dying light.

“Yes or no, Stanton? With us or against us? Speak now or forever hold your peace.”

Thorn waited in the porn-shop parking lot with a crowd of onlookers until Sugarman finally arrived. Sugar spoke to a couple of cops, getting the picture, then went over to Thorn with a dead look.

“I better get rolling,” Thorn said.

“Cops might want to have a word with you.”

“I'm not in the mood for cops.”

“Where you going?”

“I don't know. I'll call your cell when I get settled.”

“This isn't over for you, is it? You're just getting started.”

Thorn watched the stretcher rolling out with the body covered by a sheet. Lawton's white tennis shoes specked with blood.

“I'll call you when I'm settled.”

Thorn led Buck across the street and got into the gray Camry and headed off.

He drove back down 1-95 into the Grove, and on south into Coral Gables. He found the motel where he and Kate and Dr. Bill had stayed that week in 1964. Riviera Motel. It was on the bank of a wide canal across from the University of Miami. It looked exactly as it had forty years before, though everything around it had changed.

He checked in to a room in the back, away from Dixie Highway, and managed to sneak Buck inside. He switched on the window air conditioner, turned the shower on as hot as it would go, stripped off his clothes, and got in and put his face into the scalding water. With the tiny bar of soap he washed his hair and scrubbed at his skin till it was raw. He dried off, put on the same pair of khaki shorts and denim shirt.

He found himself doing everything slowly. Rehearsing each step before he took it. As if he were drunk. Which he supposed he was. Cockeyed drunk. His head spinning, system working overtime to absorb the day's events. Lawton dead, Alex injured. He wasn't sure how bad.

And he'd been sent off alone, exiled from the kingdom he'd been trying to call home. Thorn went outside to the vending machines and bought a razor and blades and a cheap comb.

Back inside the room, he stared at the bathroom mirror. A wild man looked back at him. Red-eyed and confused and without direction. Thorn shaved. He broke half the teeth on the comb trying to part his hair.

Why shaving was so important he didn't know. Why it mattered so much to be showered and comb his hair. It was surely psychological. A need for order. A fresh start. Something basic and stupid like that.

He stood at the mirror and listened to the traffic. Buck was snoring on the bed. The dog was groggy, but he could walk steadily enough.

It was suppertime, rush hour, the workday done for most of the world.

Thorn picked one of the comb's teeth out of his hair and dropped it into the trash. He stared into the mirror and watched the darkness gathering about him, watched his image fade.

After a while he went to the desk beside the air conditioner, turned on a lamp, and sat down and spread out the contents of the envelope. The Xeroxes from
The Miami Herald
, February 1964. He drew out the photograph of the boxing match and set it to the side of the stack of Xeroxes.

Those five people in row three. Mayor Stanton King, Meyer Lansky, a thin blond woman, a chunky man with a diamond on his little finger, and a skinny Cuban man with a pencil mustache. Five people. Maybe they were together, maybe not. Maybe they had something to do with the Morales murders that took place a few hours later that same night, or maybe they didn't. Maybe the photograph was about something else entirely.

Thorn looked at the photograph and he looked at the pages of the old newspaper. He couldn't concentrate. He sat at the cheap wooden table and listened to the air conditioner and the rise and fall of traffic noise outside. Buck was snoring on the bed in the next room. The air smelled musty, as if ancient mildew had taken root out of sight somewhere.

Thorn couldn't remember which room he'd stayed in forty years ago. It might be the same one as he was in now. He'd had a room to himself that week, Dr. Bill and Kate staying next door. An independent kid. He couldn't remember what he'd done alone by himself in that room. So long ago.

At that same time Lawton was a young man. A cop. Picking up extra cash working security at the fight. Alexandra Collins was just a child.

Thorn stared at the photograph but saw nothing he hadn't seen before. Five people bracketed by the rope rings. Two he had names for. A gangster and a mayor. A man sitting between them with a blocky head and big diamond. A woman sitting beside the mayor, blond and young and intense. A small man next to the blond woman. Looking nervous and awkward, like he didn't belong.

Thorn stared at the pages from the newspaper. The old photographs, and the words some reporter had written, so full of the urgency and drama of the moment. Then the next day the reporter moved on to the next story and the one after that. Forty years of stories between that one and today.

Thorn couldn't concentrate. He wasn't sure he'd ever be able to concentrate again.

 

The eleven o'clock news was just beginning when Sugarman arrived. The Porn Shop Massacre was how they were tagging it. A big deal, even in that city of gaudy crimes. Fifteen minutes of coverage, going over and over the same sketchy details. A retired homicide detective shot dead, his daughter, a crime-scene technician with Miami PD seriously injured, and the adopted son of a former mayor of Miami brutally beaten to death in his own place of business.

The segment included a salacious camera pan across the porn magazines, a shot dreamed up by smirking juveniles in the newsroom. The shot replayed several times as the reporter spoke.

Sugar stood inside the door and watched in silence. They hadn't spoken a word yet. But Thorn could see from the rigid set of his jaw that Sugar's usual calm was under serious strain.

When the segment was over, Thorn switched off the set and drew out a chair at the desk and sat. Sugarman stayed put, his back against the door. Like he might be about to leave.

“She's at Baptist Hospital, in case you're interested.”

“How is she?”

“Shoulder's busted up. They put metal pins in. Arm's in a cast, shoulder to elbow. Five months, six. She's going to be rehabbing awhile.”

“Pain?”

“Doped up,” Sugarman said. “Awake but groggy. Not feeling much.”

“She recognize you? Say anything?”

“Said a couple of things, yeah.”

“I suppose she mentioned a baseball bat?”

“She did, yes.”

Sugar opened the miniature refrigerator, cracked ice from the tray and dropped two cubes into a glass, and filled it with water from the tap. At the Riviera Motel every room was an efficiency with a tiny kitchen tucked along a wall and separate bedroom.

Sugar drew out the other dinette chair, sat heavily, and stared into Thorn's eyes. Outside on Dixie Highway cars rumbled past.

“Goddamn it, I loved that old guy. Seeing him go down, I flipped out.”

“You couldn't wait for me. You had to rush in there.”

“Straight-Arrow Sugarman. Knows every word of the rule book by heart. Swears allegiance to all things honorable and good.”

“That's not smart, Thorn, insulting the only friend you got.”

“I'm going to see Alex,” Thorn said. “I've got to talk to her.”

“I don't know if that's a great idea.”

“I'm going, Sugar.”

“How in God's name did you get yourself into this shitstorm?”

“I jumped off the roof.”

“What roof?”

“I jumped on Carlos Morales, the guy who shot Lawton.”

“The one you killed?”

“Yeah, that one.” Thorn slid the photo across the desk so Sugar could see it. “Carlos snuck inside Alex's house and stole this photo. He and his brother, Snake, were waltzing away, I jumped on the guy's back.”

Sugarman tapped a finger on the tabletop. Looked toward the window. Keeping all judgment out of his face.

“Yeah, I know, Sugar. You don't have to say it. If I'd stayed put, let them walk away with the picture, none of this would've happened. They walk, I go about my business, Lawton is alive, Alex isn't facing months of pain, Buck is smelling the roses. All's right with the world. Any normal citizen would've waited till they left, climbed down, called the cops. But me, I fucking jump.”

“You're Thorn.”

“What's that mean?”

“Thorn jumps. We don't get to rewrite our genes. You're Thorn, you pull rusty hooks out of an old snook's lip. Risk killing some worn-out fish to spare it a little pain. And you're right. I climb down the ladder, call the cops.”

“And everyone would still be alive.”

“I don't know about that,” Sugar said. “In my experience, jumping off the roof works about as often as following the rules. Neither has a particular advantage. And I don't think either one is morally superior.”

“That's supposed to make me feel better?”

A siren passed by on Dixie Highway. Both of them looked at the window until it had passed. Not for them. Not this time. Not yet.

 

Lansky was only showing off by inviting them to the championship fight. His seats were three rows back, practically ringside. Such a smug man, making them all place bets, putting down as much cash as they could afford to wager. Saying the fight was rigged, a sure thing. Bragging
.

She went along with the others. Something to do to pass the hours before the assault
.

She sat and watched the two black men, the plodding one and the dancing one, the gorilla and the prince, watched them hit and sweat, plod and dance. Amazing. Around her all the men cheered as the fighters hammered each other. She was young and horny, and it was a carnal feast. While the men rooted, she imagined tugging the silk trunks down, pulling the jockstrap aside, exposing the prize. The prince and the gorilla. She pictured that while she watched them slam and dance and plod
.

After the fight, passing a bottle in the tense car, a slug of bourbon each. They drove to the house, sat for a moment in the drive, readied their weapons. Got out
.

The night was warm, the stars bright, a slice of moon. Up the concrete steps, halting at the door, looking into one another's eyes one last time. And she, the only woman, was first through. First through that door to the other side
.

As she entered two men emerged from the sunporch. Cigars clamped in their mouths, looking at her, at the gun, then she fired and their round stomachs ripped open, eyes rolling back, a bark from each. Two fat men dying, then the others poured out with guns and she fired and fired but hit only two more. The husband, the wife. Meeting their eyes, killing them, the husband, then the wife. The dreadful wife
.

She killed four that night. Lived with the memories for forty years. Over time it became just a high whine, a dentist drill buzzing far back inside her skull
.

But now it was starting again. An intruder had poked the fragile nest. Threatening the colony. One by one the swarm gathered and the buzz grew. Ready to sting, to sting to protect the hive
.

She loaded the eight-shot pellet gun and aimed it out of the slats of the attic vent, into the black heart of the night. She fired at nothing, fired at everything. Fired and fired, reloaded and fired some more
.

“That was Detective Mark Jacobs, Miami-Dade Homicide. He'll be here in five minutes.” Stanton set the phone down and came around his desk.

“It's after midnight,” Lola said. “It's too late for police grilling. Call him back; tell him we'll do it in the morning.”

“I held him off all evening,” Stanton said. “He's coming.”

“I'm not talking to any cops.” Snake rose and headed for the door.

Lola said, “No, stay. The three of us need to talk.”

He minded his mother and went back to the love seat. He'd always minded her. Not that he feared or loved her. He obeyed out of instinct. Duty to the female race. Some vestige of his loyalty to Carmen.

They were in the study where LBJ had shaken Snake's hand. Two leather wingback chairs for Lola and Stanton, the white brocaded love seat for Snake.

Lola wore a simple navy dress. Her bright red hair was pinned up, a single coil broken loose and hanging down her right cheek like a strand of yarn. She'd been upstairs in her bedroom when the news came. Her adopted son dead, the victim of a savage beating.

Snake could see Lola's eyes were swimming. Her face hot and dizzy.

Through the evening helicopters hovered over the estate. News crews were camped at the front gates with satellite trucks and klieg lights, cameras trained on the front of the house, waiting for action.

Stanton made calls, managed to banish all but one of the choppers. A helicopter from the single local station where he had no pull was still hovering. Every minute or two its spotlight raked the grounds, and the beam passed across the velvet curtains and sent a slash of light into the study where they sat. Lit up the swirls of dust.

“That sweet boy,” Lola said. “That innocent, damaged child. And look at you, Stanton, sitting there so detached, like it didn't happen. Like Carlos wasn't clubbed to death. Like it's all just some technical problem to be solved.”

“He was an adult,” Snake said. “Not a child.”

Stanton sighed. He rose from his chair, went over to Lola, touched a hand to her shoulder, but she cringed, and Stanton removed his hand and returned to his chair and looked at Snake and shook his head.

Snake shifted his weight on the bench, and a quiet groan escaped him.

“Are you hurt?” Lola bent forward.

“The guy threw a bat at me. Same one he used on Carlos. It clipped me in the back. But I'm okay, I'm fine.”

Lola closed her eyes and sank back into the chair, looking for a moment as if she were going to start weeping again. But she drew a fortifying breath and shook her head in a way that mingled sadness and disgust.

Stanton said, “Snake, this man. Describe him again. Anything you may have left out.”

“His name is Thorn.”

“First name or last?”

“He doesn't know,” said Lola. “You've asked him that over and over like some stupid cop. Leave him alone.”

“Guy looks like a boat bum,” Snake said. “Dark tan. Works outside.”

“About six feet tall?”

“That's right.”

“One seventy-five, one-eighty?”

“Yeah, late forties, blondish hair. Some kind of blue-collar hero. A roofer maybe, but something tells me that's not his line of work. The boat shoes. I don't know, he just has the feel of a dock rat.”

Stanton gave him a curious look, as if he'd detected the fury in Snake's voice. Snake was trying to hide it. Act the way he had for those long months after his family was slaughtered. Dead and cold and focused. He'd deal with Stanton King when all the pieces were in place. Hack off his head if he had to. But for now he was staying cool.

“Carlos had such potential,” Lola said. “But he needed direction. He was lost. So lost.” She shifted her eyes to the grand piano wedged into a corner of the room. An instrument that Snake had never seen opened.

“We did everything we could for both boys,” Stanton said.

“Money,” Lola said. “That's what you did. Your great solution to everything. Pour money on it.”

True enough, by Snake's reckoning.

When he and Carlos each turned eighteen, Stanton presented them with a bank account, replenished it when it was empty. Using Stanton's political contacts and a chunk of cash, Snake had secured a taxi license and bought his own cab. A few years later Carlos acquired an interest in the porn business. Not the professions Stanton or Lola had in mind.

Snake had spent the decades roaming the city in his taxi just as he'd done as a boy on his Schwinn, mindless motion. Searching for something, he didn't know what. Some insight, some human revelation. In the meantime, distracting himself with empty movement, the clamor of the city. Surviving as Cassius did. Falling back, dancing, pushing the big ugly bear out of range.

In forty years he'd barely lived. He'd had only one lover. Back when Snake was twenty-five. The woman was ten years older, a dentist he'd picked up at the airport. Cindy Marcus. They struck up a conversation, and by the time they reached her South Beach condo, Cindy invited Snake inside. It lasted five years. Two nights a week. Snake in her bed, Snake taking her to dinner and clubs and the beach. Snake going through the motions. Cindy was short and blond and an atheist. Carmen's opposite. She said she loved him, and kept waiting for him to say the same. Five years. Snake couldn't bring the words to his lips. Couldn't lie. He drove his cab, picked up fares, went back to Stanton King's house each night. When she ended it, Cindy wept and beat her fists against his chest as if trying to bring his heart to life. It didn't work. Nothing worked.

Carlos indulged in flesh. Stuck in the soft mud of early adolescence. Fascinated by sex. Spending his nights with strippers and whores. Visiting swing clubs every chance he got, long nights of anonymous sex. Behind his locked bedroom door dirty movies played constantly, the fake grunts and moans of fake ecstasy. Nothing Lola or Stanton could do to pry him loose from his obsession. Carlos was Carlos. Bruised fruit. A boy whose bedroom wall had once exploded. Never the same.

Stanton tried money, Lola lavished them with affection. Coming into their life a few months after they were adopted by Stanton, she assumed a smothering familiarity with the boys. Tried to befriend them, coax their love. Carlos played along, milked what he could. Cash, toys, later a car, a speed-boat, and clemency for his many transgressions. Snake gave Lola what politeness he could muster and was never openly hostile. But he could never answer her warmth with warmth of his own. That part of him was scooped out, buried in the casket with Carmen's body.

Lola's attempts at maternal passion struck Snake as desperate and foolish, as though she was driven by some emotion more complicated than motherly love. Nor had Snake ever grasped why a woman of such beauty and class would enter such a businesslike marriage with a man she showed no fondness for. What words she exchanged with Stanton were no more intimate than the chitchat of strangers on a bus. Once or twice he'd heard hints of her shady past. Lola the party girl. But he never saw a trace of that woman.

Across the room Stanton rose and poured himself an inch of scotch and leaned against the mahogany bar.

“Only got a few minutes, Snake. We need to get your story straight.”

“I'm not wasting time with cops.”

“Well, you might have to. If you do, then this Thorn fellow, leave him out. And no mention of the photo. We're going to call this a robbery attempt. I've spoken with the clerk at the store. She's cooperating.”

Lola leaned forward to catch their words.

“The photograph?” Lola stood up. “Where is it? Who has it?”

“I'm working on that, darling. Be patient.”

“You and I need to talk, Stanton. Alone.”

“We will. I promise. But there are things I must handle now.”

After a moment or two, Lola saw she would get nothing more from Stanton and sat back down with a helpless glower.

The spotlight blasted against the bayside window. It searched out the slit between the curtains, illuminated the frayed patches where the ancient fibers had worn to velvet cobweb. Then moved on.

A single lamp on a side table lit the high-ceilinged study. Snake glanced around at the furniture. Same pieces from the night with LBJ. Forty years and nothing had changed. Air the same, same dust circling in the slants of light. Aroma of leather and stale fabric and pipe smoke from Stanton King's father and grandfather. Same Oriental carpets, heavy mahogany furniture, pool table, deep-set casement windows. Stained glass, crystal chandeliers. Same port and brandy bottles positioned on the shelves of the study exactly as they always had been. Shadowy portraits of Kings going back five generations. The imperial style of a British outpost in the jungles of Malaysia.

Stanton finished his drink and set the glass aside as the single whoop of a siren sounded outside. Spinning blue lights brushing the heavy curtains.

“Before we let them in, I want a word with Snake. In private.”

“Stanton, I have to know what you've done. What you intend to do.”

“Of course. Soon, I promise, we'll have a long talk. Now please greet our guests and delay them a minute or two.” His tone, coolly dismissive.

Lola lifted her gaze, staring into the shadows that hovered at the edge of the ceiling. Listening to the racing heartbeat of the chopper overhead.

She brought her eyes down from the gloom, showed them to the men. As bright and dangerous as shards of shattered glass.

She stared at Stanton with black hatred until he could weather it no more and turned away.

“Everything is going to be fine, Lola. Snake and I will put it right.”

“You've never put anything right in your life, Stanton King. Everything you ever touched, you destroyed. Everything.”

Stanton wouldn't look her way until she'd given up and marched from the room. With a shaking hand, he reached for the decanter, poured another glass, swigged it and refilled.

Snake waited for him to swallow the next slug, then said, “Who's the man with the diamond ring?”

“What?” Stanton bumped the glass and spilled liquor on his hand.

“The man sitting next to you at the fight. I recognized that ring, the clothes, the physique. It's the man whose fingers I chopped off. He was sitting beside you earlier that evening. What's his name?”

“You're insane, Snake. You've lost your mind.”

“I always wondered if you were involved. Now I know you were. I just don't know how. Not yet.”

“This conversation is finished. You've crossed the line.”

“It had something to do with LBJ. The way you brought me in here that night and put me on display. You were trying to win the president's approval, weren't you? Because something went wrong. But LBJ didn't buy it. You fucked up, and that was the end of everything. No more politics. Career over.”

In the hallway Snake heard the approach of subdued voices—men showing respect for Lola's loss.

But Snake wasn't running yet.

“You were planning to take it all to the grave, but this picture cropped up, brought it back.”

“All this time, Snake, you lived under my roof, ate my food, wore the clothes I provided, and you harbored this hatred, these wild fantasies?”

“I don't hear you denying it.”

“It's absurd. I won't even discuss such a thing with you.”

“You saved me and Carlos, brought us into this house. I used to think it was just a political trick, taking in these two destitute boys, just a way to get reelected. But it was more than that, wasn't it? A lot more. You killed my parents and my sister, then you took me and Carlos in. Why? Was it just guilt? Your pitiful attempt at making amends?”

“You believed this, Snake, but did nothing, said nothing?”

“There was a woman that night at my house. I heard her voice. She was in charge. Running the show. That's her, isn't it? The one in the photograph. The blonde sitting next to you. What's her name?”

“Enough,” Stanton said.

“Does Lola know what you did?”

Stanton bowed his head and refused to speak.

“I promised myself,” Snake said, “that I would find out why Carmen died. And I'm going to do it. I'm finding out what this was about.”

“Not that you deserve a response to these charges, but I had nothing to do with your sister's death. I had nothing to do with any of it.”

“Who was the man with the diamond ring? Who was the blonde? Tell me or don't tell me, it doesn't matter. I'll find out, then I'll be back.”

He heard the men speaking with Lola only a few feet from the door. Snake crossed the room, parted the heavy curtains, dragged open the window.

Outside, the helicopter's beam raked the grounds, probing the branches of the oak trees, lighting up the swimming pool and cabana.

The police were at the door, knocking softly.

“That lady cop that Carlos shot. She knows about the photograph. She's Thorn's lover. She's going to be a problem for you.”

“Don't worry about the lady cop. She'll be dead within the hour.”