Blood Relations Read online

  The case upstairs pled out. As soon as Sam came into the courtroom, the public defender asked for a conference. The prospective jurors were sent back downstairs. The judge took care of other business while the defendant slouched sullenly in his chair and the jailer sat by the door reading a newspaper. This courtroom was a small one, with a low ceiling and two short rows of spectators’ seats. Sam and the P.D. went outside to talk. He was in his early thirties, a frazzled man, a month overdue for a haircut.

  The defendant would take life, he said. Minimum twenty-five years.

  Arms crossed, Sam leaned a shoulder against the wall. “Not enough. I want two consecutive life sentences, no parole.”

  “He’s nineteen fucking years old! You read the psychological report on this kid. Sexual abuse. Beatings. He’s got an IQ of eighty.”

  “This kid, your scumball client, also has a rap sheet six pages long. He shot a sixteen-year-old in the back last year and got sixty days on a piss-ass weapons violation because the victim wouldn’t testify. Now we’ve got one man dead and one who barely survived. Like I said. Two life sentences. No parole.”

  “You’d never get the death penalty in this case.”

  “Then let’s go to trial.”

  Neither of them moved. Finally the P.D. said, “I know why you’re bustin’ his chops, man. You’re running for state attorney. It’s politics. All politics.”

  Sam gave him a long look. “Have we got a deal or don’t we? I’m ready to pick a jury.”

  The P.D. nodded wearily.

  If Sam Hagen had been introducing himself to a panel of prospective jurors in the small courtroom on the fifth floor of the justice building, he would not have seen Dale Finley, the state attorney’s investigator, following Idelfonso García into an elevator. Sam had gone back across the street toward his office. Walking through the metal detectors, then around the corner to the elevators in the lobby, Sam first noticed Finley’s white crew cut, then García, with his sunburned, campesino face. Finley hesitated a split second, registering Sam’s presence just as the doors slid shut.

  “What in hell?” Sam looked at the numbers. The elevator stopped at two, three, four, then finally five. People getting on and off. Or Dale Finley not wanting Sam to know where he was taking Adela Ramos’s brother. Sam waited a minute to see who might come down, then took another elevator to the fourth floor.

  The deputy chief of administration had an office not far from Edward Mora’s. The state attorney himself had flown to Michigan for a meeting with Senator Kirkland’s people. Sam had seen the picture in the Miami Herald this morning. Eddie and his wife, Amalia, smiling at the presidential hopeful on the porch of his country house.

  Sam stood at the desk belonging to Beekie’s secretary. The young woman’s hands paused on her keyboard. A second later, she looked up.

  He said, “Would you like to tell Ms. Duran I’m out here, or should I just go in?”

  She paled a little, which told him he’d found Dale Finley.

  Not precisely. Finley had escorted García to Vicky Duran’s office, then had left him in a chair facing her desk.

  “How are you, Mr. García?” Sam beckoned. “Ms. Duran. May I see you outside?”

  She was just hanging up the telephone. Her secretary must have made the call. Idelfonso García, whose thick hands rested on his knees, nodded at Sam. No guilt on that face. It hadn’t been his idea.

  Beekie said, “Oh. Mr. Hagen. I was told you were unavailable in trial.”

  “Ms. Duran? Outside, please.”

  She apparently thought better of arguing in her office. In a conference room two doors down, she let go. “This is outrageous! What do you think you are doing?” Her heavy auburn hair seemed to bristle.

  Sam closed in on her. “The uncle of a murder victim on one of my cases is in your office, and I want to know why.”

  “He came to see you, and you were in court, so I agreed to speak to him.”

  “That’s a lie. You had Dale Finley bring him here.”

  Beekie pivoted away, spreading her hands in a shrug. “I was concerned about the relatives of the Ramos boy. The man who killed him was acquitted, and if this office was responsible in some way for that outcome, then I wanted to make sure—”

  She flinched when Sam slammed his fist on the conference table. “What did you tell him? That you’re personally going to retry Luis Balmaseda? Make sure you get him this time, Beekie, fuck double jeopardy.”

  “I didn’t brush them off, Sam, as you did. I didn’t embarrass Mr. García by using him as an object lesson for two new lawyers.” Her brown eyes had dilated to black. “You know that Luis Balmaseda has been threatening Adela Ramos.”

  “What the hell can we do about it that we haven’t done? Have him arrested? I told them to go the police. Have they?”

  “Yes. And nothing has happened.”

  “Then let’s get some rope and string him up!”

  “I won’t take your shit.” She spun toward the door.

  “Jesus Christ.” Sam leaned on his hands. “Vicky, let me say this. You are out of line. So far out of line it staggers comprehension. And I thought when you shot off your mouth to the Miami Herald it was bad.”

  Pushing himself from the table, Sam said, “We’re going back to your office. We will speak to Idelfonso García together. I don’t care what words you choose, but you will be sympathetic. Tell him to make a police report. Tell him we’ll prosecute.”

  “I have told him! I know the law!” Her body stiffened. “You don’t give me orders.”

  Sam put a hand flat on the door when she went toward it. “You’re afraid Eddie won’t take you with him if he makes it to Washington, aren’t you? His wife would raise a stink about it. So you want his job. And you want to make sure I look bad before the governor names an interim state attorney.”

  “Get out of my way.” Her voice was a low growl. He was so close he could see the pockmarks under the makeup and smell her heavy perfume.

  “We’ve got a quandary here, Beekie. I don’t want to pick up the paper and read your opinions about Luis Balmaseda’s acquittal. It would be embarrassing for Eddie, allowing the chief of administration to get into areas that are none of her business, and he’d have to fire your ass. Or send you to prosecute traffic cases in Liberty City. But I don’t plan to bring this up with Eddie unless I have to.”

  Her mouth twitched. “What bothers you the most, Sam? That I’m telling the truth about Balmaseda? It was mishandled. You fucked up. Now the sexual battery case is falling apart. The main witness is dead, and the others are getting scared.” She smiled. “Will you sacrifice yourself to put Miss Dorn on the stand? I doubt that your precious integrity would go that far. You’re going to lose, and I think you know this already.”

  With great effort Sam kept himself from shoving Beekie Duran into the wall. He took a slow breath. His shirt collar was cutting into his neck.

  She gestured toward the door. “Open it. Mr. García is waiting.”

  Her appointments with Frank Tolin had become as necessary to Dina as breath, or prayer. His office was so peaceful: the faraway buzz of a telephone, voices fading in the corridor, muffled traffic on the street ten floors below. Sunlight poured in like a benediction on the clean white walls. It gleamed on polished wood and rows of law books with their titles in gold. Sometimes Dina sat on one end of the sofa, Frank on the other, their cups of coffee in their hands. More often they took their traditional places across his desk: attorney and client. Dina would sit in an English club chair with wings, a buttoned back, ball-and-claw feet, and bright lines of upholsterer’s tacks, not a hairsbreadth between any of them; she had looked. The leather itself was slightly mottled, its imperfection a reminder that once it had been alive.

  The windows in the office faced east, toward the Atlantic. Listening while Dina talked, Frank would watch out the windows as if from a train moving steadily, steadily north. His chair was black leather. He would lean on one elbow, stroking his thin face with his
fingers. Or he would lean farther back with his feet crossed on a corner of the desk. She had pointed out the mark his heels made on the wood, but he had said she shouldn’t worry. Polishing would take it out. He had many pairs of boots. She had counted seven.

  Dina always called before coming. Sometimes she stayed ten minutes; sometimes hours. They had established a protocol. Upon entering the office, she would inquire about progress in the wrongful death action. Samuel J. Hagen and Constandina P. Hagen vs. Uncle Andy’s, Inc., et al. Her question: How is the lawsuit coming along? Frank’s response: We’re still in the process of investigation. Then he would invite her to sit down; he would buzz his secretary to bring tea or coffee. Dina had worried about fees, the original retainer long gone. Frank said it didn’t matter. When they recovered in the lawsuit, they would settle up.

  Thus freed, she had talked and he had listened. As if a plug had been stuck in her throat for months, the words came tentatively at first, then in a rush, a frothing swirl, a flood. She was swept in the current, sucked under, then thrown clear, then racing on a thundering tide of words.

  She had talked about Matthew. His life. His wrongful death. Matthew. A long drop, a cataract! Her tongue and lips moving, words filling the room till she thought the windows might crack from the pressure. Everything she had wanted to say to Sam, who hadn’t wanted to listen. Scenes thought of, dreamed and raged about and wept for. Sickening spins of anger, betrayal, and despair.

  Frank listened to her talk about loss and death, love and betrayal, matters philosophical and mundane. They discussed justice, violence, decay, and the soullessness of cities. They had talked about their own lives. Dina’s work, which meant nothing to her now. Frank understood; he could hardly bring himself to the office anymore. Somehow, yes, she had let go of the words about Sam’s affair, but Frank said he already knew, not to worry. It doesn’t matter anymore to me either, she had said. They talked about the burden of knowledge and the pain of truth.

  Sam had been discussed in those many hours of conversation. His ambition, which had consumed him from inside. He was disintegrating. She could see cracks, as if he were a block a granite on unstable ground. They had talked about Melanie, about Frank’s two boys, about the sweet ignorance of children. Dina had told Frank how Matthew rescued the cross on Epiphany Day, and how Sevasti Pondakos had killed a Turkish soldier with an ax when she was only sixteen. How she herself, Constandina Pondakos, would go back to Tarpon Springs before she died. And if she died tomorrow, she wouldn’t be afraid. She would be with Matthew again, who was at peace. She told Frank, what matters is not how or when we die but what we do in those final hours, when our lives are brought to account. How dimly we see, when we are young. The closer to ultimate darkness, the brighter the light.

  Such talks we have had, Frank.

  The joy of it, the pleasure of moving lips and tongue and hands. An unburdening, a letting go, a nakedness, a primitive unawareness. Eden. If such a word as happy had a meaning anymore, she knew what it was.

  Then she saw Frank staring at her.

  She touched her hair. Asked why he was looking at her that way.

  He took so long to answer that she thought he’d been struck dumb, paralyzed, or even had died with his eyes still open. Finally he said, “Sorry. I’m just now beginning to understand you, Dina.”

  Then she noticed the windows. How dark they were. The sky had turned a strange, sickly green. Dina walked over to see. From the west a huge mass of black, a summer storm, was moving quickly across the sky, pulling with it a dark curtain of rain. Lightning flashed inside towering clouds, making them glow and flicker. Her father had told her this meant quarrels among the gods and goddesses, who were hurling thunderbolts at each other. Dina wondered what it would be like inside the dark clouds, being carried up in a long spiral, arms outstretched, her cloak swirling behind her.

  Turning back to the room she told Frank she’d taken too much of his time. There was no reason, was there, for continuing the lawsuit? Or even for these visits? She should go home before it started to rain.

  “Is it going to rain?” He came to the window, frowning. “The sky’s clear, Dina.”

  She pressed her fingers to the glass, felt the trembling of thunder, and told him of course it was going to rain, couldn’t he see the lightning?

  He looked at her for a long time, then took both her hands and brought them to his lips. His mustache prickled against her skin. She tugged, but he held her fast.

  “Don’t leave, Dina. I need to talk to someone I trust. I need that so much. Can’t you stay a little longer?”

  Finally she said she would. He led her to the wing chair and had his secretary bring them tea.

  They talked while the storm rolled over the city. The lights flickered and went out, then came back on, and rain poured down the windows.

  chapter twenty-six

  On Wednesday morning, Sam drove to Miami Beach police headquarters to see Gene Ryabin. He found him at his desk, talking on the telephone to someone who’d had her chain ripped off her neck while she dozed by the hotel pool. As Ryabin talked, he poked at a slice of chocolate cake with a plastic fork.

  When Sam rolled a chair over, Ryabin slid some papers toward him—initial forensics reports on George Fonseca. Sam sat down and put on his glasses. The ballistics report was on top.

  Fragments of two .45-caliber hollow-point bullets had been removed from Fonseca’s abdomen and thigh, and other fragments had been found in the driver’s side door and on the floor of his car. A third bullet, nearly intact, had been recovered from the seat. They matched the fragments taken from Charlie Sullivan’s chest and head. No cartridge casings had been found at either scene, but the bullets were identified as 185-grain Remington hollow-points. As they’d been designed to do, these heavy, lumbering bullets had mushroomed, then had broken up as they tumbled through the victim’s bodies.

  Sam flipped to a narrative written by the crime-scene technicians. After hauling the Mustang to the police garage, they had sifted through the trash, bottles, and beer cans, finding scraps of polyester fluff and heavy, woven vinyl of the type used for luggage and gym bags. Some of the vinyl bits were partially melted.

  Last Friday Sam had spoken to Dr. David Corso at the medical examiner’s office. Corso said he had pulled a few fragments of black plastic and polyester fluff from the hole in Fonseca’s thigh. It seemed likely to Sam that the shooter had fired through a bag. The blow-out had carried the melted vinyl into the wound, along with scraps of whatever the shooter had used to muffle the noise, probably a small pillow stuffed with polyester fill. Wrapping the barrel tightly in a loose fabric, such as a towel, might have jammed the slide. The bag also explained the absence of cartridge casings at the scene. Normally the casings would have been ejected from the chamber as the slide moved back.

  The autopsy had been inconclusive on the subject of the shooter’s height. The trajectory of the first shot had been slightly upward, but Sullivan had been six feet tall.

  Now Ryabin was telling the robbery victim on the other end of the line to come in, make a police report, look at some photos. He’d take care of it personally. Then he grinned into the phone, saying thank you, he’d been told that many times about his accent. No, not France. Ukraine. On the Black Sea. Yes, very romantic.

  His cork bulletin board was thick with notices, schedules, cop cartoons, Polaroids of suspects, snapshots of grandchildren, and postcards from Odessa. A drawing of an electric chair bore the caption: “Justice Done Well Is Justice Well Done.” Across the room a detective was tapping a report into the computer, and Ryabin’s partner, Nestor Lopez, was on the phone speaking Spanish.

  Beyond the open door a uniformed sergeant sat on the desk near the holding cells. His feet swung slowly. Sam couldn’t see who he was talking to. “You can’t keep doin’ this shit. You won’t be sixteen forever. Wait’ll you get to Raiford. They got guys up there that would love to get hold of you. You goin’ up the state, Mario?… You sure about that?”<
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  Ryabin finally hung up. He looked down at the little plate of chocolate cake. “It’s getting stale. Someone left it in the refrigerator last week. At home I’m eating only grapefruit and toast for breakfast.” His smile lifted the hound-dog pouches under his eyes. “Anna has put both of us on diets. This is what happens when you take your wife browsing in expensive boutiques.”

  Sam said, “Pretty cheap of you, Gene, not to buy her a dress.”

  Ryabin nodded, swallowing another bite. “If this were better, I wouldn’t feel so guilty about eating it.” He stuck the fork in the remaining cake and tossed it into his trash can. He flicked a brown crumb off the front of his immaculate shirt.

  Sam gestured toward the police reports. “Looks like whoever killed Fonseca used a pillow as a silencer.”

  “Probably. The lab will do an analysis. Maybe they can tell us what kind of pillow. An airline pillow stolen off an Alitalia flight from Milan! Maybe we’ll get lucky.”

  Nestor Lopez came over and leaned on the desk. “You can use anything for a silencer. Newspaper, oil filter. Grapefruit. I seen grapefruits on the floor next to a body. Said, man, what’d they do to this fruit? It’s all squashed, juice all over. Then I observed the gunpowder.”

  Ryabin patted his pocket for his cigarettes—a habit; smoking was banned in the building.

  Sam asked, “What about the beach where Sullivan was shot? I know that Corso found those bits of green cloth around the back of his head. Did you find any vinyl on the sand?”

  Lopez shook his head. “We weren’t looking for that, and now, Christ, people have been walking all over the sand for two weeks. The shooter might have shot through a bag, but we don’t know.”

  Standing up, Ryabin said, “Sam, go with me outside. I need a smoke.”

  It wasn’t a cigarette he wanted, but privacy. They climbed the stairs to the third floor and found a vacant office.