Magic City (23 page)

“Listen, Mr. King,” Sugarman said. “Lower the pistol, okay?”

“Call me
Stanton
.”

They were still facing off in the hallway. Sugarman had moved forward to stand at Alexandra's side. Stanton King's aim was fixed squarely on her chest.

“Maybe we could go in the living room?” Sugar said. “Sit down, talk?”

“No photograph? I didn't think so. But I came anyway. I convinced Runyon we should split up. I needed to get away from that man. Oh, he's masterful with ignitions. He fired up a Cadillac in the motel lot, then took my Jag. I'm no good with practical things like that. Though I admire it in others, the Runyons of the world. Men who can hot-wire cars, field-strip rifles, overthrow dictators.”

“Mr. King?”

“Sure, let's go in the living room. Maybe you can throw together some breakfast. I'm famished. It's been a very long night. You don't have any bagels, by any chance, do you? Cream cheese? I'd love some bacon.”

With King bringing up the rear, they adjourned to the kitchen, and Sugarman and Alex set to work preparing breakfast on one side of the island while Stanton sat on a stool on the other side and watched.

“I think I'm coming undone,” he said. “The stress, you know.”

“You do seem a little lost,” said Alex.

“I'm a dead man,” he said.

“How so?”

Alexandra cracked eggs into a skillet, broke their yolks with a spatula, swirled them together, then looked back at King.

“Oh, they'll kill me. I know too much. I've seen too much. I'm dead.”

“Who's going to kill you? Pauline?”

“Oh, God. You know about Pauline? You must be very good.”

“Is that who you're afraid of?”

“This could be my last chance,” he said, “to bump my karma in the right direction. You believe in karma?”

“Sometimes,” Alex said.

“I tried,” Stanton said. “I tried all that Buddhist stuff, but it never really took hold. I guess I'm just too damn Western.”

Sugarman popped two slices of bread into the toaster and glanced at her, with a “How you doing?” wrinkle in his brow. She nodded at him.

“Is Pauline after you?” Sugar got down three plates from the high shelves and spread them out across the island's tile countertop.

“Don't try to play me, Mr. Sugarman. If I want to confess, I'll do it in my own way.”

“Your gun, your rules,” said Sugar.

Alexandra was stirring the eggs. Stanton looked around the room.

“If I confess, it won't make your lives any easier. People will try to kill you if you know about Southwoods.”

“Southwoods?” Alex said.

Stanton King stared out the French doors, withdrawing into a grave silence. His gaze moved beyond the landscape at hand, beyond the watery distance, the sky and the hazy horizon.

Then he swallowed once and closed his eyes, and when he opened them again he seemed changed, resolved and melancholy, like a man who has let go of his last hope of forgiveness.

“I was just twenty-seven,” he said. “What does anyone know when they're so young?”

“This is when you were mayor?” Alex said.

“Yes, I'd been mayor for a year when I fell in love. Desperately, wretchedly in love. And I acted unwisely. I traded everything for that woman. A Faustian exchange. My career, my future, my dreams, my pride. Everything I had, I swapped for Lola Henderson. A woman who was simply an illusion. A terrible, icy fantasy. Isn't it strange? When you're twenty-seven, everything seems possible. Then one wrong choice and your life is forever altered. One miscalculation.

“How can love be anything but good? The great vibrant fuel of life. Like a rocket lifting off, that rush, that excitement, an explosion of joy. But like that missile rising from the earth, one little nudge, one jostle, the slightest disturbance in the trajectory, and that great ship will simply sail off into oblivion. That was me. That was us, Lola and me. A rocket to oblivion.”

“How so?” Alex said.

He stared into Alexandra's eyes with a frank and bottomless despair.

“I purchased my wife. I didn't win her love. I bought and paid for her.”

Alexandra turned the heat off under the eggs, set the spatula aside.

“Eight hundred thousand dollars. It virtually depleted the family fortune. I gave it as a bribe to Meyer Lansky so he would kill the man my wife truly loved.”

“Morales,” Sugar said.

“Yes, Jorge Morales.”

“Morales was Lola's lover?”

“Oh, yes, he was one of many who shared her bed. But Morales was the love of her life. When he threw her away, she despised him for it. She loved him and she hated him. And begged me to make her pain go away.”

Alexandra looked over at Sugarman. His expression was as neutral as if he heard things of this sort every day.

“And what's this Southwoods deal?” Sugar said.

“They're all connected. Lola, love, Southwoods. It's all part of the same dreadful stew. I wouldn't have known about Southwoods if it weren't for Lola. She and Lansky were pals. He liked having her around, such a beautiful woman. Just after Morales jilted her, Lola heard Lansky discussing Southwoods, then she got an idea and came to me and asked if I could help. It was all her doing. Making Morales the target. But Lansky needed persuading. He wanted to go back to Cuba very much and thought Morales was a poor choice. That's what the eight hundred thousand was for. So even if Southwoods failed, Lansky would have something in his pocket.”

“Southwoods was a CIA operation?”

Stanton nodded.

“Why does the CIA give their target selection to a mobster?”

“Oh, they were all kids,” Stanton said. “The ones running the show, they were in their twenties, fresh-faced, naive. It was their first mission. They were doing this with minimal oversight. It was a rogue operation, run by some general up the chain. Caufield and the others were virtually on their own. They didn't know the lay of the land or who to trust. The Cuban exiles were telling them one thing, local Anglos another, blacks another. They knew Lansky better than anyone else. The CIA had worked with him in Havana. To Caufield, Lansky seemed larger-than-life. She trusted him. She was even a little in awe. He knew Miami better than she did, and he spoke her language. Finally, I suppose she believed he was patriotic and wouldn't steer her wrong.”

“Lansky and the CIA teamed up to kill Morales,” Alex said. “That's what you're saying.”

Stanton King nodded, then glanced out the French doors at the lagoon and the sea beyond. Going back there, that time, that place. He frowned and shook his head hard, as if to clear a sour taste.

“Did you go along that night with Runyon and Humberto and the others?” Sugarman was buttering the toast, keeping his voice low and sincere. The concerned interrogator. Helpful, interested, but not pushing it.

“God, no. I went home after the fight and waited. But morally I might as well have been there. I was there in spirit. I have blood on my hands just the same. I knew what was going to happen. I aided and abetted a mass murder. Sitting there at the boxing match, knowing the Morales family only had a few hours to live.”

His voice was growing fainter as he spoke, as though with every sentence he were receding further into that time he described.

“Lola begged me. She was in such agony, I couldn't refuse. Almost a million dollars so Lansky would execute her lover. And Morales's wife as well. It was the wife who put an end to the affair and Lola detested her, too. I thought I wanted Morales dead. I thought it would end her heartache and she'd turn to me. That her gratitude would eventually become love.”

The room was silent for a moment. Stanton King looking off at nothing.

Then he said, “My God, I'm crazy, aren't I? Crazy as a goddamn loon.”

Stanton made a weary smile, and he looked at Sugar, then Alex, an impossible plea in his eyes. The ruby color drained from the birthmark on his cheek, and for a moment it disappeared into the flesh around it.

“We're going to have to take you in,” Alex said. “You know that.”

“I know. Yes, I know. I'm ready whenever you are.”

Sugarman said, “What exactly was the CIA trying to achieve? Why kill Morales? What's this all about?”

“It was a terrible plan, terrible. Sick and evil.”

Stanton resettled on his stool. His eyes strayed out the French doors again, and seemed to come into focus on something nearby. Alex turned to follow his line of sight but saw nothing unusual.

When she turned back around, the glass in one of the doors exploded and Stanton King's head jerked hard to the side and he coughed. From his lips a pink vapor bloomed. He fell forward onto the countertop, and his pistol twirled across the white tile. As it was going over the edge, Alex snatched it.

In the instant she ducked to make the grab, a second slug slammed into the side of the refrigerator exactly where she'd been standing. Electrical sparks spewed from the dented hole.

A third round gouged a trail across the face of the cabinet and sent Sugarman sprawling to the floor. A fourth raked the stove, and the fifth blasted apart a mirror across the room.

Then the shooter ceased. There was only the trickle of glass and the sizzle of sparks from the guts of the fridge and the pounding in Alexandra's ears.

Stanton King coughed another time and a moment later his dead weight shifted and his body tumbled from the stool onto the kitchen tile floor.

By then she and Sugar were squatting side by side between the stove and the breakfast island. Near his collar blood seeped through the fabric.

“A nick,” he said.

“Let me see.”

But he raised a hand to wave her off.

“A nick.”

It was clear from the sound of the blasts and the shattered glass in the French door that the shooter was in the woods near the lagoon.

“Your weapon, where is it?”

“Down the hall in my laptop bag.” His voice was raspy.

“You take this. I'll get it.”

Alexandra held out King's .45.

“I'll get mine. I know where it is. You stay here, Alex.”

“You're okay? You're sure?”

“One way to find out.”

Sugarman held his left hand hard against his neck and rose.

When he was gone, Alex duckwalked to the end of the counter. From there she had a view out the doors to the lagoon and the mangroves and scrub palmettos that formed the border of Thorn's property. To make those five shots, the shooter had to be in one of two clumps of shrubbery.

But a smart man would've repositioned himself already.

If it were Alex, she'd slip around to the front of the house. That was the brazen approach. What a pro would do. Enter through the door that Stanton used. Just walk in. A slow prowl while the two civilians cowered in the kitchen. Reload, strike again before the targets could regroup.

She cut back to the long hallway. Her arm ached and a ligament or tendon in her neck was badly strained from the weight of the cast—a sharp crick burned deep in the meat of her shoulder. Alex held the pistol in her good hand and advanced down the hall.

Inside one of the bedrooms she heard Sugar moving around. She didn't wait for him but got to the door to the foyer, flattened her back against the wall. A long breath, another, listening for the latch to click.

She waited another half a minute. She checked the wall for shadows but saw nothing. Just the coatrack, an old wind-breaker hanging there. A brass pot on the floor with two umbrellas in it.

She lowered the .45 from the ready position.

She must've had it wrong. The shooter wasn't coming through the front. Maybe he was gone, or maybe he was circling the house to break into one of the bedrooms on the north side. Sugarman was taking too long.

Alex turned and made a first step back down the hall toward the bedrooms when she heard the latch. She pressed her back to the wall and raised the pistol shoulder high. She heard nothing. Half a minute went by and still nothing.

The shooter was a quiet bastard. Probably waiting just inside the door to absorb the floor plan. Choosing which way to head, just as Stanton had. Forward into the house or left to the doorway where Alex stood.

Alexandra bent her knees into a half squat, inched the barrel to the edge of the door frame. She didn't count to three, didn't take a breath, just went.

The woman wasn't expecting her. She'd taken a step forward, apparently deciding to proceed into the main house.

“Lower your weapon,” Alex said.

The woman was blond, slender. Wearing black chinos and a blue shirt and a dark jacket. She stared forward, her pistol still directed into the house.

“I'm not telling you again.” Alex came up from her squat.

“You're Alexandra Collins, crime-scene tech with Miami PD. You're training for search and rescue, a mid-career course correction.”

“And you're Pauline Caufield. Now lower the weapon. Last chance.”

The woman was at least sixty, but in the right light she might've passed for ten years younger. With the bright sun flooding from the transoms, however, Alex could see the grooves around her mouth and eyes, not deep but lots of them. Frown lines, growl lines, pissed-off lines.

Pauline was still weighing her chances, the Glock's muzzle tipping down an inch. She was watching Alex in her peripheral vision the way cornered animals study their attacker just before they choose fight or flight.

Alexandra stepped to her right, exposing her cast, her full body.

“Just lower it. Stop thinking. Do it.”

“Okay,” Caufield said. “You win. I'm lowering.”

She dipped her weapon a few inches, then fell backward, dropped hard on her butt and rocked her legs upward, sighting between her uplifted feet at Alex. Somewhere in the first half second of her evasive move, Alexandra squeezed the trigger of the .45 and got the metal click of an empty chamber. And a second click.