“What do you want me to tell you? You don’t.”
He turned his face flush into a slap and he blinked twice, reeling Aggie back into focus. Then he thought of something. What stopped her from rolling right over on him? If she got that in her head, they’d grab him before he got to Orlando.
“Look, I know this isn’t nearly as romantic as you boarding a plane with some hero of the Resistance, and me walking away to run my gin joint.”
She got the reference. She wasn’t digging it.
“The last four weeks, Aggie... I’ve been happier than I’ve ever been. I guess I just wasn’t meant to live like that. I guess God is saying, Harry, you can’t have this kind of life.”
“How moving,” she said. She squeezed back the tears. They came out in spite of her. “Get out.”
“Sweetheart?”
“I said get out,” she said, gunning the idle. “Get the fuck out.”
He lit another cigarette and walked over to where a dozen or so riders waited with their luggage, Aggie leaving rubber in second gear.
Chapter Eight
Manfred Pfiser had never been arrested in the United States, in his native Netherlands, or anywhere else. He chipped out a nice living for himself with his imports and exports, he was even-steven with the Dutch taxman, and he was all caught up on his alimony and child support. Another Euroman on an extended vacation, soaking up sunshine and neon. The difference between him and a few thousand other guys, besides his cocaine sideline, was that Pfiser left the party early, and against his will.
The traces in his suitcase tested out almost eighty percent pure. That much was rare in quantities under a kilo. Your strongest kick-ass street gram came in around twenty-five, and if you were copping in some after-hours dive, ten percent would be about the best you could get your hands on. Martinson theorized Pfiser went down holding large, a package that’d be worth killing for.
Being the savvy businessman he was, Pfiser no doubt had profits of his own to maximize, but to the heavyweights, to the real gangsters, he would’ve been a customer, and these people had grown far too shrewd to cut into their own market share. And the murder weapon, which Martinson didn’t have, was a piece of evidence that mitigated against a professional hit.
Crime Scene recovered one bullet fragment from a chair and dug another out of the plaster. A third piece was removed from the wound during the autopsy. A small bit remained missing and it probably always would, but there was enough of the slug for Dade Ballistics to determine it had been fired from a Lorcin 380, a classic Saturday Night Special that could be bought brand new in the box for about a hundred bucks.
Cheap automatics had a reputation for jamming, and this particular model, manufactured after 1990, had had something shoved into it, scratching the inside of the barrel. That made it more inaccurate than it would ordinarily be. Actual discharge of this firearm was indulging in unintentional Russian roulette. The shooter would be lucky if the thing didn’t blow up in his hand.
No self-respecting hood went anywhere near a gun like this.
The bad boys were goofy for sophisticated hardware. Berettas and Glocks, Walthers. It was a point of pride and street cred for these knuckleheads, who at least knew the difference between the real McCoy and a piece of shit like the Lorcin. So Arnie took a guess: The shooter was a punk who stumbled across a payday, a small-timer with the luckiest chance of a short, wasted life.
They found loads of fingerprints it took nearly a month to account for. Shug’s team lifted a full set of ten from a windowsill, and there was a partial on the portable stereo that they couldn’t match up with anybody, maid, electrician, or cable TV guy, who might reasonably been in the room. After exhausting his Florida resources, Martinson had the unidentified prints forwarded to the FBI’s Science Crime Lab in Washington. It had already been a week, and it could easily take another, to find matches in their infinite computer files. That’s if they had them at all.
The current crime of the century occurred in Colorado, and it might not have been a crime at all. A packed-to-the-vents 747 went down over the Rocky Mountains, shortly after take-off from the Denver airport. That was the plane-crash phrase. Shortly after take-off. The disaster cast suspicion on foreign terrorists and the usual knot of pissed-off white guys who blew up Federal Buildings and shot it out with over-armed G-men, but the FBI, backed up by the FAA, refused to issue any definitive statement until all the evidence was in, and since it was spread out over five or six square miles, it’d be a while before all the evidence was in.
The Colorado crash ended Pfiser’s brief run in the headlines, the same way the Pfiser murder displaced the attack on Josephine Simmons, which had left people sufficiently appalled for several slow news days.
At approximately two o’clock on a February afternoon, Ms. Simmons, a seventy-nine-year-old woman, was trundling toward the efficiency she’d lived in since 1963, carrying a can of chunk light tuna, a frozen box of spinach, and two grapefruits. Her handbag dangled from her right arm. When an assailant ran up behind her to snatch it, Josephine Simmons, out of pride or fear or stubbornness, decided she wasn’t going to give it up. Or maybe there hadn’t been any decision-making process. Maybe she merely reacted the wrong way. Whatever it was, she fought for the purse. This left the perp no course of action but to pound the woman into submission, and in his rush to escape, he left the handbag on the sidewalk. It contained the grand total of eight dollars and fifty-four cents.
The media seized on the sum as if to say, See? See how cheap the life of an eighty-nine-pound old lady really is? Like if there’d been a few thousand in the bag, they would’ve understood.
Nobody witnessed the crime, or nobody came forward and admitted they witnessed the crime, and that was odd, considering it occurred in a residential neighborhood at two o’clock in the afternoon. Robotaille and Acevedo canvassed the area, but no one could furnish even a partial description of the attacker, and after two weeks, their investigation was pretty much dead in the water.
Until one concerned citizen responded to a call of conscience and a televised Crime Stoppers program, and phoned Beach detectives. Acting anonymously, the tipster fingered one Anton Canter, an area crackhead and two-bit dealer who’d taken a few raps for possession and sales, and was between jolts in the Florida penal system.
With some assault beefs on his record, Canter fit the profile flush, and Arnie, Acevedo, Robotaille and even Kramer at one point gave him the latter-day hot light and rubber hose. They held him for twenty-three hours without charging him. They kept him awake and they kept him hungry.
Through it all, Canter stuck to the alibi that he’d been in his outpatient drug-rehab program. The counselor vouched for him, and so did some of the other druggies in his group. His name was in the clinic’s daybook. Anton Canter was a largely worthless human being, more than capable of this crime. However, the facts he based his alibi on suggested he didn’t do it.
Martinson was driving north on Washington Avenue when he pulled over and made a quick dash across the street into Burger King. He ordered two Whoppers with Cheese. Hoping nobody would catch him committing this crime against his cholesterol levels, he skulked back to the car and wolfed down the burgers with a side order of guilt, one after the other. He polished off the last few bites of the second and wiped his fingers on the bag, before heading into the florist’s. After selecting three yellow tulips and three sprigs of honeysuckle, he drove to Mt. Sinai hospital.
Josephine Simmons had lain in this bed, comatose, since the day of her attack. She looked like a child dying of starvation, minus the bloated belly. She was wired to one machine that displayed her heartbeat on a screen and a second that monitored her breathing. IVs pierced either arm and a hose pumped oxygen into her nostrils.