Riptide

CHAPTER 16

There were brown shirts everywhere, the uniform of Metro deputies, county cops standing ankle deep in swampy mangroves that haven’t changed since Ponce de Leon landed on Florida’s shores. Officer Joaquin Morales led Lassiter under the orange rope that cordoned off the side road into the hammock. The cop was young, muscular, and handsome, a recruiting poster.

“Watch your step through here,” Morales said.

It was as if the trees had been yanked up by a celestial gardener, propped three feet out of the ground. The roots were hundreds of reptiles entwined, grabbing at Lassiter’s ankles, trying to spill him into the black, malevolent water. The trees were mostly red and black mangroves, some lignum vitaes, close together, blocking out the sun.

Tiny gnats — no-see-ums, the locals called them — buzzed around Lassiter’s ears. There were patches of dry ground, black dirt pocked with holes the size of a man’s fist, where land crabs dug their homes. Small black mangrove roots stuck out of the ground, hundreds of them a few inches apart, sharp and deadly.

Maybe all life started in a place like this, Lassiter thought, different organic matters fermenting over millions of years until some protoplasm oozed out of the swamp. Maybe, but what a crummy place to die.

By the time they reached a dry spot where a cluster of cops huddled, sweat was splotching his blue oxford cloth shirt. Somewhere over the canopy of tangled trees, the midday sun shone, but in the bowels of the marshy hammock, it was gray and damp.

Lassiter expected to see a body under a white sheet, neat and clean, ready to be hauled away. But there in a tree, his feet dangling just above the brackish water, Humberto Hernandez-Zaldivar hung from a thick mangrove branch by a gold chain the diameter of a thumb. The chain dug deep into the soft flesh of his neck, and his head flopped to one side. A storm of gnats buzzed in his open mouth. Tiny parasites had already hollowed out one eye, and blowfly eggs were deposited in the corner of the other eye.

Jake Lassiter wasn’t ready. He took an involuntary step backward, then braced himself against one of the ugly trees, the skeletons of the swamp. “Berto,” he whispered. “Why?”

The cops watched him. Then one came over. Tired eyes, neatly trimmed hair, a face that could have been thirty or forty and had forgotten how to smile. He was dressed in jeans and muddy running shoes. “Farrell, Metro Homicide. Whadaya know?”

Maybe the last Anglo cop for fifty miles if you didn’t count Carraway at CMB who wasn’t worth counting.

“Berto Hernandez-Zaldivar.”

“No shit. We thought he was the Duke of Windsor.”

Lassiter glared at the detective. “He was a friend of mine.”

The cop shrugged. “Even dopers got friends.”

“Want to tell me what happened?”

“Sure thing. Your buddy was a federally protected witness. Great protection, huh? Best we can figure, he was supposed to meet with a bad guy. DEA agent was tailing the bad guy, maybe gets lost or tails the wrong one. Not rating two babysitters, Senor Zaldivar comes out here after midnight all by his lonesome trying to set up a guy bringing coke in from the Bahamas. Somehow he blew it. That’s the problem with amateurs. Their assholes get all puckered up, they forget their lines.”

“Why’d you haul me out here?”

“To see what you know about it.”

“What would I know?”

“You were seen on the beach with him. And in a restaurant. Plus he’s got your business card in the pocket of his chichi slacks.”

Chichi. Now there’s a word coming from a homicide detective. Guess he’s seen a lot of well-dressed corpses — Italian suits, silk shirts, the whole Latino drug shtick. Berto definitely was not dressed for a walk in a swamp. Soft leather loafers, pleated cotton pants, and a loose linen shirt. Lassiter avoided looking at his bloated face, black tongue sticking out to one side, mouth open with the jaw hanging slack, and bloody mucus protruding from each nostril.

“My card?” Lassiter said absentmindedly. “I don’t know. He could’ve had it a while. Could’ve picked it up in my office earlier this week.”

“That so? What was he doing in your office?”

“Sorry, Officer. Attorney-client privilege.” One word about the ranch property and the feds could try to void the transfer to Great Southern Bank. Still the lawyer, Lassiter would clam up.

“Didn’t know you were his attorney.”

“Didn’t say I was.”

“You wanna get cutesy, I lay a subpoena on you, you come talk to us downtown.”

“Fine, you don’t ruin your shoes in the grand jury room.” It’s tiring to argue with cops all day, Lassiter thought. First, the lard-butt from the Beach and now this guy, probably has two hundred unsolved homicides and wishes they’d just go away.

A third man joined them, toddling over on bowed legs, a lab coat stopping just above green wading boots. “I’ve had my look, Officer, and can give you a preliminary report,” he said.

“Charlie!”

“Hello, Jake,” Doc Charlie Riggs said. “Heard they were calling you. I’m sorry about this, sorry I was right about Berto. As the Romans said, abyssus abyssum invocat, hell calls hell. I’ve just seen it so often…”

“Charlie, what are you doing here?”

“I was fishing for mullet in the bay off Lugo Point. Had my police scanner on, and when I heard the call, I just waded over. The M.E.’s sending someone out, but what the hell, I’ve dragged enough bodies out of swamps to help them for a while.”

“You establish cause of death, Doc?” the detective asked.

“ Mortui non mordent, dead men carry no tales. That’s blatantly false, of course, and a good thing, or I’d have been out of work these last thirty years. Let’s see. There are no bullet or knife wounds. The little hemorrhages on the eyelids, Tardieu’s spots, are consistent with asphyxiation, the marks on the neck consistent with strangulation.”

Lassiter asked, “Did he suffer much?”

“Afraid so. Sometimes strangulation can be very peaceful. Take a hanging. If the rope just shuts off the carotid artery, no blood gets to the brain, you get drowsy, just fall asleep in two or three minutes. Here, we’ve got broken laryngeal cartilage, a fractured hyoid bone, and the first collapsed trachea I’ve seen since a Brazilian carpenter rolled his van over his best friend’s throat in what the papers called a love triangle. Amantes sunt amentes, lovers are lunatics. Now you crush somebody’s trachea, we’re talking major-league pain, the body gets air-hungry, involuntary gasps, a lot of struggling.”

Lassiter turned away. The fetid darkness of the swamp enveloped him. Tiny insects found his neck, searching for blood. Unseen animals rippled the still, black water.

Detective Farrell listened with a look of casual indifference. Just another corpse, and this one a doper — so much the better — save the feds all those relocation expenses. Finally, he asked, “So what’d the killer use to do all that damage?”

Charlie Riggs scratched his beard. “No ligature marks, except where the gold chain is supporting his weight, so there’s no rope or garrote involved. A single bruise on either side of the midline right over the thyroid cartilage. Here, let me demonstrate…”

From behind, Charlie Riggs placed his hands around the detective’s throat. “See, when I press, the tips of my fingers close over the thyroid. Now, ordinarily in manual strangulation, you have little crescent abrasions or cuts on the throat.”

“Fingernails,” the detective said.

“Exactly. But no such marks here. I would say to a reasonable medical probability the deceased was strangled by two very strong hands wearing gloves. Football player, weight lifter, guy who swings a pick all day, not a nearsighted pathologist with pencil wrists.”

Detective Farrell looked hard at Jake Lassiter. “Awright, Counselor, whadaya know?”

Lassiter thought of seeing Berto on the beach. He wouldn’t mention Keaka Kealia, not until he sorted it out. He could remember that later.

“Have you talked to his girlfriend, an Asian stew?”

“Yeah, Lee Hu. Goes by Little Lee. Flies for Avianca. Bogota, Buenos Aires, Guatemala City.”

“Bogota?”

“Yeah, ain’t that interesting? She’s dicking a guy who’s a known trafficker and every two weeks, just like clockwork, she’s in the capital of cokedom. She’s bid the route for the past year. Even switched a couple of trips to get it.”

“Any priors?”

“Nah, nothing. Looks clean, Japanese parents, grew up on the West Coast. Junior college education, lived with a guy owns a restaurant in the Grove, kind of a hangout for the high-rise cokers. Then she starts shacking up with your late friend here.”

Two cops were hauling Berto down, lifting him up by the legs to get the thick gold chain to unhook from the tree limb. The detective continued, “There is one thing, though. On trips she used to room with a Cuban chick. Carmen Ramos. Both of them get off a flight from Bogota at MIA one day, Carmen Ramos collapses in shock, they carry her off the concourse, dies on the way to the hospital. Had two condoms filled with coke in her vagina… one broke.”

“Must have figured no one would look there,” Lassiter said.

“Well, all the girls know we do body-cavity searches on South American flights if we got probable cause, unless it’s the girl’s wrong time of month. Well, Carmen Ramos was under surveillance ‘cause she had a prior, simple possession here. But get this — she’s on the rag — at least she’s wearing a Tampax, but the canoe maker downtown says she was clean enough to eat.”

Charlie Riggs clucked his tongue in disapproval.

“I don’t get it,” Lassiter said.

“Must have borrowed the Tampax, maybe from her roomie, Lee Hu,” the detective said. His eyes flicked over the corpse. “After all, how many people can you ask for something like that? And if Lee Hu knew what was coming down, she’d have been an accessory. Regardless, the feds have reason to believe that the late Carmen Ramos was working for the late Heraandez-Zaldi var.”

“Berto told me the marijuana load in the Glades was his first and last job.”

“Counselor, you’d make a shitty shamus if you believe everything a doper tells you. Your pal was a middleman, a wholesaler. Some Colombian cowboys would get the shit to the Bahamas, he’d buy it there, arrange to get it here by boat, plane… who knows… pussies.”

“You think Lee Hu was a mule?”

“Maybe. Though I doubt if she’d stuff it up her chute after what happened to her roomie.”

“I doubt much would fit,” Lassiter said.

“Really?”

“From outward appearances.”

“Careful, Counselor, you could be a suspect if you’re bird-dogging his chippy.”

“That’s great. One cop accuses me of stealing a million bucks from my favorite client, now you think I killed an old friend. You want to talk about anything else?”

“No. I just wanna know what this slimeball friend of yours was doin’ in your office.”

“Get a court order.”

“You protecting somebody? ‘Cause if you are — “

“Don’t threaten me. Don’t even talk to me.”

Lassiter turned and splashed back through the swamp. When he got back to the road, he saw Biscayne Bay on the other side of the clumps of palms. A small wading beach emerged from the dark of the swamp into the bright sunlight that ricocheted off the wide expanse of flat bay. A dozen white egrets flew low overhead, scouting the shallow water, on the lookout for dinner. The breeze that couldn’t find its way into the mangroves formed small whitecaps on the clean, open bay.

To the east he could see Key Biscayne and to the north, where the shoreline curved, his high-rise office building dominated the horizon. He walked into the water, leather shoes sinking into the sand, scattering crabs no larger than a toenail. He dropped to his knees, his gray suit pants soaking up the bay. Then he dunked his head and held his breath, held it as long as he could, letting the water cleanse him. When he came up, Jake Lassiter ran his hands through his sandy hair, wringing it out, and he rubbed his eyes, the saltwater from the bay mixing with his tears.