Blood Relations Page 38

  Finley said, “I told Eddie it would be wise to ask the governor to appoint you as the interim state attorney. They have to make a decision by next week, in case you were curious.”

  Sam looked back at him.

  “My motives toward you aren’t necessarily hostile,” Finley said.

  “You don’t want a political enemy running for the office that Eddie left vacant,” Sam suggested. “It would embarrass the people who want Eddie on Senator Kirkland’s ticket. And you want out of Miami, Don’t you, Dale?”

  “Pragmatism is my byword, I guess you’d say.”

  “What did Eddie have to say about your suggestion?” Sam asked.

  “He was noncommittal. That’s Eddie.”

  A cafeteria worker in a brown and orange uniform came by to clear the adjacent table. She put the trays on a cart and wheeled it away.

  Sam asked, “What do you know about Marty Cass?”

  “Marty Cass got himself shot,” Finley said. “Too bad. Looks like somebody’s cleaning house over on South Beach.”

  “Who do you think did it?”

  “Don’t ask me.” Finley picked up his café con leche. He took a sip, then said, “Miami Beach police are looking for a reason to tie him to the other two, the model and Fonseca, but I don’t see the connection.”

  “The connection is, they were all shot with the same gun,” Sam said. Late yesterday Gene Ryabin had called him with the ballistics report on Marty Cass.

  Finley smiled. “True, but the model and Fonseca were involved in that rape case. As for Marty Cass, well, he was just an annoying little shit.”

  Sam said, “He asked the city manager of Miami Beach to persuade the state attorney not to file the sexual battery case. Did you find that annoying, Dale?”

  A laugh scraped out of Finley’s throat. “Indeed. But I didn’t shoot him. No, a man like Marty Cass, he annoyed a lot of people.”

  “Klaus Ruffini?”

  “In spades, but Klaus wouldn’t swat him down for that reason. The first two, maybe. But not Cass, unless Cass threatened him in some way. I can’t figure out what it was.”

  “I heard Klaus Ruffini forced Marty Cass to literally kiss his butt before he made a real estate purchase,” Sam said. “You don’t happen to know the story on that.”

  “Ruffini didn’t take the deal,” Finley said. “And Marty Cass didn’t actually have to press his lips to Ruffini’s derriere. But the property. I do know about that. Marty Cass owned a small share, your ex-partner Frank Tolin the majority. The Englander Apartments. From which, in fact, a certain Ms. Dorn recently departed. I have an idea you might know where she went to.”

  When Sam only looked back at him across the table, Finley sighed and finished his coffee. “Well, on that note of mutual cooperation—” He took his folded newspaper and stood up, his weight on his good leg. He spoke softly. “As I said, counselor, my intentions are not hostile—at this point in time. Here’s a suggestion. You should start worrying about Vicky Duran.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “She had lunch Monday with Klaus Ruffini’s lawyer, Gerald Fine. Not at the Oak Room downtown, you understand. I think it was a couple of burgers in the front seat of Mr. Fine’s BMW, parked in a lot by the Orange Bowl. Much as I respect Ms. Duran as a person and an administrator, I don’t think she’s right for the job of state attorney. You might want to point that out to Eddie before she persuades him otherwise.”

  “What does she have on him?”

  “About what you do,” Finley said. “Guesses. Inferences. But she doesn’t have photos of herself and Mr. Fine in conference.”

  Sam turned the salt shaker around and around, then pushed it aside. “What do you want?”

  Finley said, “It crossed my mind that Eddie might not make it to Washington. Politics is unpredictable. Senator Kirkland could change his mind. The party might nominate somebody else. Who knows? I hope you’ll remember me if you get into office. I might be out of a job someday. A little future consideration of that nature seems like a fair exchange. What do you think, counselor?”

  “No deal.”

  “Well, the offer stays open for a while.” Finley tapped Sam’s arm with his newspaper. “Don’t wait too long.”

  Riding the escalator upstairs, Sam braced his hands on the black rubber rails, thinking. He didn’t need a photograph or even a transcript of the conversation between Victoria Duran, deputy chief of administration of the Dade County state attorney’s office, and Gerald D. Fine, Esquire, to see what it was. Beekie knew about the city manager’s call to Eddie, Hal Delucca’s request that the state attorney ignore a sexual battery to save Miami Beach the embarrassment. She knew that Eddie would have told Hal Delucca to go screw himself, but there had been something there. Eddie had pretended to Sam to be concerned about image: How would it look if the state attorney’s office failed to file a sexual battery case against a movie star? That had been bullshit, and Beekie must have known it. One of the defendants had Eddie by the shorts. Ruffini was the obvious choice. Marquis Lamont was in town for a movie; he had no other connection to Miami. The state attorney would have been insane to do any favors for George Fonseca. In any event, Fonseca was now dead. It had to be Ruffini.

  Apparently what Beekie wanted from Jerry Fine was information. She wanted to know how his client, Klaus Ruffini, had pushed Eddie Mora, in exchange for which she would do the pushing. As payback, Beekie would dismiss the case against Ruffini when she had Eddie’s job. The governor would be likely to go along with whomever Eddie named, and then with positive public exposure in the job for five months, she could be elected on her own.

  The woman was delusional. Jerry Fine may have had his own people taking photos; he may have taped the conversation. He’d be a fool not to. A little something for a rainy day, in case the voters of Dade County ever put Victoria Duran in office.

  Sam wasn’t about to take surveillance photos from Dale Finley. The price was way too high. But the conversation had told him that he had to decide quickly whether to make his own move on Eddie Mora. Ask him how he’d like to have the local TV stations broadcast a story about his wife’s trips to Havana, and Eddie’s attempt to dump a criminal case against the man who knew about it.

  The long, tiled corridor on the fifth floor echoed with voices. People surrounded the entrance to courtroom 5-3, waiting to go back inside to hear Sam finish dissecting a defense witness. Sam spoke to a crime reporter from the Miami Herald for a minute, then went over to talk to a couple of the city of Hialeah detectives on the case. Standing in the corridor, which had no windows and seemed to vanish into darkness at either end, and feeling his heart race in irregular patterns, Sam thought suddenly of Caitlin Dorn. Of lying in bed with her on a rainy afternoon, watching the curtains bell softly inward.

  Frank Tolin was over by his bookcase pouring himself a scotch, neat. The sun was nearly down, slating across the buildings, turning the clouds pink over the Atlantic.

  Sam had called a while ago, told him he’d be coming around to pick up what was left of the cost deposit on the wrongful death case, if there was anything left. Frank had seemed edgy over the phone. He’d told Sam he would mail the check. Sam said no, he’d come on around.

  “Sit down, Sam. My goodness, you look like you’re just about to fly out of here. Have a drink. Scotch. Bourbon. Name something.” The bones in Frank’s face protruded. He’d always been thin, but now he looked gaunt. This is what losing Caitlin had done to him, Sam thought.

  “I can’t stay,” he said. “Mind if I ask what you think I’m going to do? You left the door open, and a minute ago I saw one of your partners looking at me as if I was going to pull out a gun and shoot somebody.”

  With a soft clank, the stopper went back into the scotch decanter. Frank said, “You’ve been seeing Caitlin.”

  “Where’d you hear that?”

  “She told me.”

  Sam sat down in the red leather club chair and put his ankle on the opposite knee. He said, “Dina an
d I are getting a divorce.”

  “No. I don’t know what to say. You and Dina? She didn’t tell me you had problems.” Frank sat behind his desk.

  “And I’m in love with Caitlin. I don’t know if you’re aware of that, but that’s how it is.”

  Frank took a sip of his scotch and laughed. “I’ll be damned.”

  “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t contact her again.”

  “What’s she told you?”

  “That you sent her some letters. You called her till she had to take her phone out. You evicted her from her apartment.” Sam spoke in an even voice, keeping it under control.

  Frank looked at him awhile. “Well, when you’re with a woman that long—eight years, Sam—and she walks out, it hurts. Deeply.”

  “Did you hit her, Frank?”

  He laughed. “Yes. I hit her. My God, she was coming after me with a lamp. In my own living room. What would you have done?”

  Sam could feel the pressure building in his neck. He smiled slightly. “I came to pick up a check, then I’ll be on my way.” It wasn’t about the check, he knew now. Caitlin had been right: He wanted to look in Frank Tolin’s eyes when he told him he had Caitlin Dorn.

  Frank said. “Sure. I made it out after you called.” He opened a drawer. “Two thousand dollars. Payable to Mr. and Mrs. Samuel J. Hagen.” He extended it across the desk. “There you go.”

  “I didn’t want all of it back. You must have spent something.”

  “My pleasure to help. By the way, I’ll miss seeing Dina. How is she taking this?”

  Sam folded the check and put it in his shirt pocket.

  “Ironic, isn’t it?” Frank said. “We’ve been talking to each other’s women.”

  Halfway to the door, Sam said, “Don’t push it, Frank.”

  “Wait a second. You need to hear this. We aren’t friends—according to you—but still, I owe you something for saving my neck when we were kids.” Frank had one of his fancy cowboy boots on the edge of the desk. “I know Caitlin Dorn better than you do, and there’s something you need to hear.”

  Sam laughed. “She said you’d do this.”

  “Maybe she told you herself, but I doubt it. She lies. She lies constantly. I knew she was having an affair with you three years ago. She denied it. I know about her drug use, and an arrest in New York for grand theft, but she’ll deny that, too. You ask her, but she’ll deny it.”

  “Frank, shut the fuck up.” Sam headed toward the door.

  “Ask her about Matthew.”

  He looked back.

  “Ask her.”

  Sam kept looking at him. Frank’s eyes were sharp and hard as knife points.

  “Ask her if she slept with Matthew. Ask her if she didn’t take nude photographs of him in her bedroom. I’ve seen them. Ask her if she wasn’t fucking your son up to the day he crashed his motorcycle. You ask her. Don’t take my word for it.”

  In two seconds Sam was around the desk, hauling Frank Tolin out of his big leather chair, Frank kicking, everything hitting the floor. Sam dragged him into the room and rammed a fist into his stomach. When Frank doubled over, Sam jerked him back up and hit him twice in the face. Frank spun into the red leather chair. It crashed over, Frank with it. Sam went after him.

  He heard men yelling, then felt himself being pulled backward. Two of Frank’s partners had come in. Sam wrenched himself away, stumbled into a table by the sofa, and ended up on the floor.

  The two men stood over him. Everybody was breathing hard. The table leaned crazily on a broken leg. Frank was wiping blood off his mouth.

  Sam sat up, holding his right hand.

  One of the men said, “I’m going to call the cops.”

  Frank staggered across the room. “You want her? Take her.” He laughed. His lips were swollen, and one eye was closing. “Find out what hell is like.”

  chapter thirty-one

  Waiting for Caitlin Dorn to arrive at the station, Detective Ryabin stood outside with a cigarette and watched the late afternoon traffic on Washington Avenue. He had obtained Ms. Dorn’s address and phone number this morning from Sam Hagen, who had apologized for his bad mood: not enough goddamn hours in the day.

  Ryabin didn’t worry about the time it took to solve an unwitnessed murder. It was more often a matter of pure luck. A friend or lover of the killer would have a fight with him, then come to the police. Or the killer would confess. Freely. People wanted to talk, to explain, to justify. People liked to clear their consciences. More often than not, the killer was sorry. His temper had flared at a bad moment. A weapon had been available: a gun or knife, an iron, a skillet, a baseball bat, his fists.

  Many killers were simply careless. They left fingerprints. They left their wallet on the nightstand in their dead lover’s bedroom. They left a message on the answering machine announcing their purpose before arriving with a shotgun. The man who had beaten and robbed Anna’s mother, for example. He had been stupid. He had traded her watch for crack cocaine. The police failed to catch him because they had not looked in the right crack house in the derelict apartments south of Fifth Street. If the man had been intelligent, he would have gotten away with it. But then, if he had been intelligent, he would have been in some other line of work, not committing robberies to support a drug habit.

  The murders of Sullivan, Fonseca, and Cass, on the other hand, were not so easy. The killer was smart and without remorse. He—or perhaps she, not to leave anyone out—had planned well, picking the right time and leaving few clues. No fingerprints, no footprints, no witnesses. No advance warning or public threats. No blood except that of the victim. The crime scene technicians had vacuumed Fonseca’s car and Cass’s living room for hairs, but there were many different lengths and colors and no way to tell when they had been shed.

  Ryabin took a final pull on his cigarette and flicked it into the bushes. In the afternoon, the entrance to the Miami Beach Police Department was in the shade, but the heat was still intense, over ninety and humid. He went inside the lobby, watching through the high, turquoise-tinted windows for Miss Dorn to arrive.

  The toxicologist in the medical examiner’s lab, as part of his routine blood work on George Fonseca, had done a cholinesterase determination. He had found traces of an organophosphate toxin, probably Parathion, a readily available insecticide. It would have worked even faster if mixed with Malathion. The poison had broken down the acetylcholine in Fonseca’s blood.

  Ryabin had inquired what that might mean. Well, you need acetylcholine for your muscles to function. As the toxicologist explained the symptoms of cholinergic poisoning, Ryabin had imagined Fonseca’s death. He had begun to sweat heavily and to salivate. His muscles twitched. He felt nauseated. Severe abdominal cramping followed. His pupils contracted to pinpoints. The blood vessels in his nose ruptured, causing heavy nosebleed. His bladder and bowels let go and he went into convulsions. This may have occurred within five minutes. Shortly thereafter he was paralyzed. His breathing stopped. His heart stopped. The bleeding from the gunshot wounds had speeded the process.

  The same poison had been found inside one of the beer bottles on the floor of the car. The bottle had spilled perhaps half its contents. The stuff had an odor, but such a small amount was required, a teaspoon, or so, it would hardly be noticeable in strong beer. Death could occur within minutes, or could take an hour, depending on the quantity ingested. Fonseca had died relatively quickly.

  The killer had probably introduced the toxin into the beer in advance and had given Fonseca the appropriate bottle. Perhaps Fonseca had tasted it, refused to drink any more, and the shot into the thigh had been a way of encouraging him to finish. There was no way to tell.

  Cass’s murder had probably occurred during the day, as most of the neighbors came in or out in the morning or late in the afternoon and had seen nothing. The medical examiner had not been too helpful on this point. Cass had died sometime between noon on Thursday and midnight on Friday.

  During that time, then, and p
robably during daylight hours, Cass had let the killer in. They had discussed real estate, perhaps one of the properties on the computer printout. Unfortunately, no one at Tropic Realty had been able to tell the police when the list had been printed, or for whom.

  Being a good host, Cass had poured soft drinks. At some point, the killer got up with the bag which contained the gun. He stood behind Marty Cass, who sat at the table. He fired once. Cass’s body slammed forward—the M.E. had found a horizontal bruise—then back, knocking over the chair. As Cass lay on the floor, the killer stabbed his right hand. One blow nicked the second and third fingers near the palm. One nearly severed the thumb. A third pierced the palm, and the last sliced completely through the hand, the carpet, and the padding, and had grazed the wood floor underneath. A post-mortem wound: the blood had oozed out, not pumped. The heart had already stopped.

  Because of decomposition, Dr. Corso could not be certain of the width or thickness of the knife. However, it had been very sharp, or the killer had been very powerful. Why had he committed this final act of violence? It had been as gratuitous as the coup de grâce given to Charlie Sullivan as he lay facedown on the beach.

  Ryabin had not discussed any of this with reporters from the Miami Herald and the TV stations. They had come around asking for details of the three latest homicides in a season plagued by them, but Ryabin had only shrugged and said the cases were still under investigation, and so far, there was no proof that they were linked.

  Since Marty Cass’s death, Ryabin had interviewed more than twenty people; Nestor Lopez, his partner, a like number. Many were the same ones they had spoken to regarding the deaths of Charlie Sullivan and George Fonseca.

  Lopez had gone back to the condominium at different times of day. There were twelve units in the two-story Delancy, six up, six down. He talked to all the neighbors who had been in town during the time in question. As the murder had occurred several days previously, their memories had faded. Contradictory statements were made, and a man even reported having seen Cass on Saturday. One woman said she had heard a fight on Friday morning, but her husband reminded her it had occurred in some other apartment. Many of the people in the building didn’t know who Marty Cass was. The most useful piece of information came from an elderly woman across the street who had come out of her apartment to get the newspaper. She had seen a man with black hair going into the Delancy at about eight o’clock on Saturday morning. Not so young, but not old. She remembered because he had been wearing cowboy boots, and wasn’t that stupid, this time of year?