Powder Burn (17 page)

The mourner was one of Mono’s thugs.

Meadows looked hard: ferret’s eyes, small, bulbous nose, ginger mustache, sharply etched cheeks meeting at a small mouth with big lips. Stocky build, about twenty-five, dark complexion. As the killer turned from the waiter, Meadows’s portrait was complete. The man’s left ear was deformed: a cauliflower ear. Meadows pictured the man in boxing trunks, a welterweight.

Meadows signaled the sandwich maker.
“Cafecito por favor, y agua,”
he said slowly in
gringo
Spanish.

The killer walked slowly toward Meadows’s table. Meadows watched anxiously through fingers of a hand thrust quickly to his forehead, as though to massage it. Cauliflower Ear passed without a glance and went to sit at the table nearest the door. Meadows was committed now; there was no other way out.

When the waiter brought the coffee, Meadows swiveled slightly for a better view and was rewarded. Mono’s second assistant was sliding into the spindly chair across from Cauliflower Ear.

“El viene,”
the second man said.

A thrill ran through Meadows.
“El viene.”
He is coming. Who is coming? Who would drink coffee with two killers at a funeral parlor on this particular night?
El Jefe.
Nelson had been right.

Swiftly Meadows registered the second killer. By the time the man had lit a filtered cigarette with a gold Dunhill, Meadows could have drawn him in his sleep: older than the other one, about thirty-five, and bigger. Massive shoulders, about twenty pounds overweight, black hair thinning, round cheeks, pronounced brows, bad teeth, sallow complexion, peasant’s hands, obsidian eyes that showed little intelligence. His nose had been broken and badly set. Funny, Meadows thought, the boxer’s nose is not broken, but the peasant’s is.

A dapper, well-dressed man of about fifty entered the lounge. His gaze swept over Cauliflower Ear and the Peasant. Meadows tensed. This was it. Here was
el Jefe.
He began filing the man’s features away in his memory. Then the dapper man moved on without speaking and ordered a sandwich. Not him after all.

A woman entered; then another man. Neither paid the slightest attention to the two killers at their table near the door.

Meadows felt himself becoming angry. Come on, come on, dammit. I want out of here. How long can I nurse a two-ounce cup of coffee? To relieve his tension, Meadows rose from the table and took a soft drink from the glass-front display case.

When he turned to walk back to his chair,
el Jefe
had arrived.

Could it be? Meadows sat down, stunned. The man standing over the table, lecturing the killers in soft, rapid-fire Spanish, was the matinee idol with the rose in his lapel that Meadows had seen in the hall.

Fragments of the monologue drifted to Meadows’s table. His disused Spanish strained to translate. He hunched forward, trying to hear. He caught a word here, a phrase there. But there was no mistaking the tone.
El Jefe
’s anger was written on the Peasant’s furrowed brow and in the right foot that Cauliflower Ear tapped nervously on the linoleum. Neither uttered a word.

It happened very fast. To a casual observer, the three men might have been exchanging the time of day. Without knowing what to listen for, a passer-by would have understood nothing. There was no greeting. Meadows didn’t get it all, but he heard enough. There could be no mistake.

“Mono was a fool…Not the Colombians, I promise you…The Colombians will soon work with us…”

After what could have been no more than ten or fifteen seconds, a rising commotion drowned the diatribe. Everyone in the lounge heard a thud from the hallway. A woman screamed. Men’s voices rose in alarm and confusion. Then came the staccato tat-tat-tat of a woman running on high heels. Meadows overheard only one more chilling phrase: “That business down in the Grove was stupid.”

In that instant a well-dressed woman burst into the cafeteria, cast frantically about with wide eyes, caught sight of
el Jefe
’s back and screamed,
“¡Venga! Rápido. Es Doña Ines.”

In those terse moments with the thugs the man with the rose had seemed wild, atavistic. Then, as Meadows watched in amazement, his features rearranged suddenly into a mask of suave concern. It was an extraordinary performance. That face in place,
el Jefe
turned to meet the distraught woman and quickly left the room.

At their table, the Peasant ground his cigarette into the floor and stood up sharply.

“Fue el gringo. Vamos a visitarlo.”

As the killers left without paying, Meadows felt the aluminum of the soft-drink can begin to yield under the pressure of his grip. It wasn’t hard to figure out which
gringo
they were going to visit.

Still, it was not so bad, Meadows reasoned. An hour or two at the drawing board, and all three men would come to life. With the sketches Nelson would have all he needed. The killers would be in his pocket then, and
el Jefe
would follow.

The crowd in the central hallway had resolved itself into a babbling knot around what Meadows presumed was an old woman who had collapsed. He slipped through the door without trouble, curiously elated and pleased with himself. Caught in a terror not of his own making, a pawn—to use Nelson’s term—Meadows had acquitted himself well. He had what Nelson wanted; in fact, in one macabre interlude he had achieved more than Nelson and all his professional pawns.

He had found
el Jefe.
There could be no thought of any criminal charges against Meadows now. He had done his job. The rest was up to Nelson. Meadows would go away for a few days, and when he came back, it would be all over. He searched the street in both directions—above all, he didn’t want to bump into the killers now—and walked across the intersection to the darkened gas station where Nelson was waiting.

But Nelson did not wait there. There were only the broken pumps, a pregnant gray grimalkin and the smell of decay. In agitation Meadows walked to the corner. He found only a faceless line of traffic.

A squall sprang out of the night sky, and Meadows huddled in the doorway of a bakery. He waited there for what seemed a long time, but Nelson never came.

Chapter 14

T. CHRISTOPHER MEADOWS
lay in a coffin of burnished wood. His flesh was as white as talcum, as rigid as steel. The mourners came in solemn procession. “So young, so sad, so tragic,” they said, and each laid an empty cup of Cuban coffee on the coffin lid. The lawman came late. A tarnished star glinted from his forehead. He leaned close, and when he thought no one was looking, he ground his cigar into the corpse’s folded hands, just to be sure.

T. Christopher Meadows could feel the pain, just as he could smell the yellow roses and hear the empty lamenting and see through lids sewn closed by a mortician’s apprentice. But he could not move. He could not even cry. The lawman watched expressionlessly as the cigar burned the white flesh with the smell of embalming fluid. He shrugged.
“Adios, amigo,”
he said, and tossed his cigar on the teetering mountain of empty cups.

The widow wept. She wore a black bikini and the white peaked cap of a pilot. “Ay, ay, ay,” she wept, and embraced the mourners in turn, tight, grinding embraces that climaxed when the widow directed each mourner’s hand to her firm cocaine breasts.

The man with the shark eyes came from the espresso machine to say the rosary.
“Gringo, gringo, gringo, gringo,
feenesh, unlucky
gringo,
feenesh.” Blood spewed from his coffee cup and gave birth to a whirlpool on the corpse’s chest.

The mourners never understood that the shark-eyed rosary man was the killer and the corpse his victim. They watched without comprehension while a gust of indifference toppled the mountain of coffee cups and they fell, one by one, into the whirlpool. Taxi! cried the corpse. I must get away. Why are there no taxis in this fucking city? Taxi! Taxi for a
gringo.
Please.

Meadows awoke with an erection, every pore open. The pale blue sheets clung to his body. His mouth felt like steel wool. Flares of pain chided his intemperance with every blink. A breeze had sprung up off the sea, rattling the Venetian blinds. That was what had awakened him. Rattling blinds, toppling coffee cups. Meadows shivered.

Meadows rolled out of Terry’s bed, heading for the shower.
El Jefe,
the Peasant and Cauliflower Ear hated him from the wall opposite the bed where he had pinioned them with thumbtacks. Again, Meadows shivered. No more pisco, he promised himself.

The empty bottle of the deceptively clear, seductively smooth Andean
aguardiente
lay at the foot of the kitchenette table where Meadows had worked through the night. He had drawn to remember, and he had drunk to forget. As he’d done so, a part of Meadows’s brain had analyzed the Gothic night with the myopia of a jeweler assaying a gem. Every analysis had floundered on the same unanswerable question: Why had Nelson left him?

Meadows’s new-found assurance had dissolved in those first few minutes outside the funeral home. He was alone. What should he do? Was he still a fugitive from a murder charge? Where should he go? Not to the Buckingham, surely. He couldn’t go home. The Peasant and Cauliflower Ear had gone home. Should he try to leave Miami? He could, but if he was a fugitive, the police would be watching. That left Terry’s apartment on Key Biscayne. It was the only refuge he had.

In a city notorious for its poor public transportation, Meadows had walked the rain-fresh streets for twenty minutes in search of a cab. Taxis do not cruise in Miami. They lie in wait. Meadows had found one, finally, in front of a hospital. He pounded on the window to awaken the driver, who, faithful to the tradition of all Miami cabdrivers, switched on the meter before unlocking the door to let him in.

Why, Nelson, why? He had asked himself that a hundred times that long night. He found no answer now in the finely chiseled features of
el Jefe
on the paper before him or the finely numbing lash of the pisco in his gut.

After he had showered and jolted his quarreling nerves with black coffee, Meadows examined the three sketches again with a critic’s eye. He was pleased to see that neither confusion nor alcohol had cheated his skill. The broad-faced ferret looked exactly as Meadows had seen him: huge, stolid and dumb. The dominant pug characteristic had come through nicely in the second sketch, the head half turned to show the cauliflower ear.

The drawing of
el Jefe
was the best of the three, Meadows decided. Breeding, distinction, magnetism were all there. The deep-set eyes promised depth and intelligence. The mouth was a trifle too small, though, and not sensual enough. Meadows fixed it.

Then he tried to call Terry to say he was using her apartment. She lent it out sometimes, and the last thing Meadows needed right now was a gaggle of South Americans on their annual pilgrimage to the great PX in the north.

Predictably Terry was nowhere to be found, and the secretary at CAN’s main office in Asunción, Paraguay, seemed even thicker than usual.

“When will she be back?”

“Long time no back.”

“Tell her to call Chris at her house.”

“What her house?”

“Su casa está quemada,”
said Meadows, summoning his best Spanish and hanging up in disgust.

Meadows washed the dishes, made the bed, threw out the dead bottle of pisco, found Terry’s keys and coaxed life from the old clunker Ford she kept in the building garage—just in case. Then he went back upstairs, drank a glass of ice water and realized suddenly he had nothing to do. He tinkered with the sketches. He turned on the television and turned it off again quickly. He tried to read. Terry had a good collection of Latin American literature, and Meadows picked up an English translation of Garcia Márquez’s short stories. The Colombian wizard’s sense of timelessness suited Meadows’s mood perfectly, but he tossed the book aside after a few minutes. He had enough mythical reality of his own to cope with just then.

Meadows kept coming back to Nelson. His disappearance was perplexing, outrageous. Several times he had picked up Terry’s beige bedside phone to dial police headquarters, only to stop himself.

Nelson had set a mouse loose in a nest of snakes and then had abandoned him. Why? Something was wrong. No matter how Meadows juggled the pieces they would not fit.

Nelson should have waited. If the sketches were so precious to the case, nothing would have driven him away.

The logic eluded Meadows. Was Nelson trying to set him up? Suppose Nelson were allied with the dopers. Suppose the whole mission at the funeral parlor had been a charade, Nelson’s way of feeding the killers their victim.…

Meadows recoiled at the thought. It was a possibility, but it did not square with his intuitions about the cynical, intense Cuban.

There was one other explanation: Nelson had used him for bait. Knowing Meadows would be recognized by the killers, Nelson had waited outside the funeral home for the architect to be dragged out, like a gaffed fish. And when Meadows had emerged alone, Nelson had simply waited some more, keeping his distance to see if the minnow really would get away. It was plausible. More than that, it was probable.

Meadows could not swallow the rage. Nelson, who had railed so bitterly about the impotence of the law, had found a cruel but clever way of subverting it. Give the
loco
dopers a target, someone scared and naïve enough to wear a bull’s-eye on his own chest. Then step in and pick up the pieces. If one of those pieces happened to be broken…
que sera, sera.

Meadows walked out to the balcony and surveyed the ocean’s horizon, purple under distant clouds. Nelson’s scheme had failed; the detective would get no more chances. Next time, Meadows thought, the plan will be mine.

OCTAVIO NELSON
was not in a good mood.

“How’s Garcia?” Pincus asked.

“He’s OK.”

“Where’d he get hit?”

“Left shoulder, left knee.”

“I heard it was the chest,” Pincus said.

“You heard wrong.”

“I heard it was his own gun.”