Marcoux gave her the request and Annick lifted her head and nodded gravely. She was new enough in life to believe in a few too many things, a girl solid with the unshakeable convictions of youth. She spoke directly to Acevedo in French, knowing full well Lili couldn’t understand a word she was saying.
Marcoux handled the interpretation. “She says it would be an honor. She has a sense of justice that is,” the man groped for a word, “visceral.”
Martinson had the image of an old television commercial in his head. There wasan animated, cut-away model of a skull on the screen. The sinus areas of the skull were highlighted in blue. When sinus membranes are inflamed, a voice-over explained — here the blue parts turned to red and red lightning bolts shot off them — the sinus headache sufferer experiences pain. The commercial was for an over-the-counter medication that Arnie swore by until a few years ago, when it stopped working, and he developed headaches that were less like sinus and more like migraine.
Eusasky let him know his sinus status was unchanged, but he was concerned about the severity of these new headaches. He referred Arnie to a specialist named Boring — that was the physician’s name, Dr. Boring — and Boring ran a raft of tests on the Martinson noggin, up to and including a CAT scan that to Arnie’s immense relief revealed nothing. Dr. Boring scribbled a prescription for another kind of medicine that sometimes worked and sometimes didn’t.
He sensed a real monster coming on, but that feeling could be deceiving. It might turn into a migraine, or it could just be a sinus thing. He didn’t have enough experience with the migraines to differentiate between the two, at least not at their outsets.
But there was something starting behind his eyes as he stood in the first floor room directly under the room where Pfiser had been shot. He was talking to a woman named Marcy Lowenstein, and his sensitivity training was flunking him, maybe due to his fear of a headache.
He took one look at her and thought, full-on, manhating bull-dagger. She was wearing no-nonsense wirerimmed glasses and her mouse-brown hair was short and thick like the rest of her, pushed back in a no-nonsense cut. She kept thinking it could’ve been her.
“This happens right upstairs while you’re sleeping, it shakes you.”
Martinson understood that.
“My entire life in New York, nothing even close to this, ever.”
She was wide-shouldered and widened some more at the waist. Her massive thighs touched from the knee up. She had both sandaled feet on the floor.
“When did you check in, Ms. Lowenstein?” This was sensitivity training in the field. That Ms. couldn’t have been any clearer.
“Wednesday night, for a long weekend. I was going to stay until Monday, but now I don’t know.”
“You told Detective Acevedo that you heard loud music coming from the victim’s room. What time was that?”
“All day. Patsy Cline. All day and all night. You know, they made the movie with Jessica Lange.”
“Sure,” Martinson said. He remembered when Patsy Cline’s records were hits, sometime before this woman was born, and she wasn’t all that young.
“I called the desk and complained.”
“Do you remember what time that was?”
“After eleven. I was watching the news, getting ready for bed.”
“And the music was turned down?”
“The music got turned off, and I fell asleep before the weather. I wanted to see what the weather was going to be. But then it came back on again, even louder. I tried to sleep through it, because I didn’t want to be a bitch and call the desk again.”
Martinson zeroed in. His headache was a minor sinus flare-up. Nothing to worry about. “Can you remember the time?”
“When it went off for good? Ten to two. I was actually looking at the clock. I couldn’t believe anyone would be so inconsiderate, and I couldn’t believe I was the only one it was bothering.”
“And after that?”
“Like in the song,” Marcy Lowenstein said. “Sweet dreams.”
“Is there anything else you can think of, Ms. Lowenstein” — there, he said it again — “that might assist us in our investigation?”
“I’ll tell you this much. He’s going to be missed. He was a really popular guy. People coming and going at all hours. He must’ve had a lot of friends here.”
Martinson was waging a ferocious battle against his first impression, recalling the sensitivity trainer’s words. Remember the old saying. You can’t judge a book by its cover. Lowenstein was homely, with her glasses and her big schnozz and her fat thighs. But fat thighs did not a dyke make. Half the female population looked like Marcy Lowenstein, and they weren’t all lesbians. She liked to spend long weekends in South Beach. And she went to sleep after the news. Just another dull vacationer, spending a lonely time in an overpriced Ocean Drive hotel. So what if she had hairy shins? That didn’t make her one thing or another. What business was it of his, anyway?
Arnie needed to review his sensitivity training.
Chapter Three
The house was way up Pine Tree Drive, behind a high row of hedges that hid it from the street. It featured a gravel driveway and a two-car carport, an aluminum overhang with shingles nailed to its roof and tacked to the side, a whim the owners thought would make their property more rentable. But what did the owners know? They hadn’t lived in Miami in years. They were from Montana, or was it Missouri or Minnesota, some place with an M, and were now in either Saint Moritz or Saint Bart’s, Saint Somebody’s, Leo forgot what they told him.
Renting this pad was the first move he made after he got his inheritance. Leo turned thirty, and the money was his, just like it said in grandpa’s will. Thinking of his grandfather, wearing a powder-blue cardigan and finishing the back nine in the pinkish pre-twilight, made Leo feel like puking. It was a good thing the old man was dead. First, because Leo didn’t get the money until he died, but second, had he been able to see how his loving legacy was being squandered, it would’ve blown the toupee right off his head.
The house seemed like a good idea. The South Beach thing was getting hotter and hotter with each passing season, the narrow streets swarming with pussy, fine young pussy, pussy from all points of the compass. The world’s next supermodel had to start somewhere, and she needed to have a good time before the appointment of that divine hour, a good time that Leo, with his six rented rooms and his Jaguar and his Jacuzzi, was more than willing to provide. Boozed-up, coked-up nineteen-yearold Icelandic blondes, two at a time for Christ’s sake, that first month felt like a dream. But all that changed so fast. Where did it go?
Leo steered the Jaguar, British Racing Green and leased, through the opening in the hedges. He parked it next to the Eldorado that JP Beaumond had arrived with, and told Rex, the neighbor’s Rottweiler, to go home. Rex woofed. Off he loped.
Leo picked his way through the piles of shit, the grenade-sized turds Rex laid down — he was going to have to speak to those people about their dog — and the thinner, neater work of Mimi, the long-haired teacup Chihuahua. Mimi was her own set of problems, and Leo didn’t particularly care for her. Come to think of it, he never much liked dogs, and now he had one under the same roof with him. But Mimi was tiny, and quiet, for a twitching, trembling mutt. When she wasn’t in Vicki’s lap, she was sniffing out new hiding spots around the house. Mimi was a dog Leo could live with.
Vicki, on the other hand, he could not. She was in the Jacuzzi with Mimi, in the water up to her neck, holding the Chihuahua’s head just above the churning surface. She was a friend of Lawrence the Model Dude, who Leo hadn’t seen since his New Year’s Eve party, the night he introduced Leo to Vicki. New Year’s Day, Leo woke up next to her, and she’d been at the house ever since. It turned out to be a chore just getting Vicki to keep her clothes on, which was fun at first, but by now Leo was so over her that a mere glimpse of her nude, evenly browned body gave him a headache.