18
I called Charlie Riggs from a pay phone on Hypoluxo Road just east of the entrance to 1-95.
I had only said hello when he asked, “What’s wrong, Jake?”
“Can’t talk now. I need some help.”
How many times had I used those words over the years? But it was always true. Whether I needed Charlie to solve a dilemma in a case or to sort out my personal life, he was always there for me. Like I should have been there for Francisco Crespo.
When he was younger, Charlie used to ride the graveyard shift with homicide detectives. As a result, he knows the county like a mapmaker. He knows how to find Avocado Drive in Homestead and Satinwood on Key Biscayne. If you ask him to meet you on Anastasia Avenue, he’ll know it runs along the Biltmore Golf Course in Coral Gables. He knows Sedonia Road from Segovia Street, Paradiso Place from Paradelo Court. So, he was the one to ask about the place of the fish.
“Now if it was a bird, there’s the Flamingo Hotel, the Pelican Place Apartments, and of course, the Meadowlark Motel,” he said.
“Fish, Charlie.”
I heard his friendly growl over the line. It meant he was thinking. “There’s Snapper Creek Apartments, but that’s out in Kendall, and all long-term rental,” Charlie said. “Fish, fish, what else can there be? Can’t imagine a hotel named after a grunt or hogfish. I do remember a Hotel Pompano in Surfside, but that burned down in fifty-seven.”
“C’mon, Charlie, this is important.”
“Fish,” he repeated. “I recall a dismembered body once at a place in South Beach. There was a marlin mounted in the lobby. Now what the heck was the name?” He thought about it some more. “The Blue Marlin. Rough place, even the palmetto bugs carried guns. Can’t say I’d want to stay there.”
“Maybe you would,” I said, “if you didn’t want anybody to find you.”
I got back into Eva-Lisa’s Saab and headed south on the expressway. Squeezed into one of Reino Haavikko’s diplomatic gray suits, I felt as anonymous as Robert Foley. In Miami, I took the flyover to the MacArthur Causeway where I got stuck at the drawbridge while a wooden sloop used its motor to put-put through. When the bridge came down, I headed toward South Beach, looking for Nikolai Smorodinsky.
Hoping Kharchenko hadn’t found him first.
T he morning sun was playing hide-and-seek with heavy rain clouds, and the clouds were winning. A light sprinkle gave the causeway a silvery glow.
Which made me think of St. Petersburg. Just as in Helsinki, it never got dark there this time of year. What was the name for it?
I couldn’t remember. My brain was fuzzy from the endless night. I fought to keep my eyes open as I swung south on Alton Road south of Fifth Street. I yawned. I must have been operating on adrenaline and strong coffee ever since…
I pushed it away again. My mind was slogging through the muck of a dozen haphazard thoughts, struggling to think of anything but…
Try not thinking of a brick wall.
Eva-Lisa.
I had tried to push her out of my mind. She was still there, of course, tucked away in one of the dark corners, the sensations of heat and fear, the smell of the hot, sticky blood.
Now, on the way to deliver hideous news to a man about his brother and his lover, I thought about it all. I tried to summon the right emotions. They wouldn’t come.
Just dead, dumb numbness.
It hadn’t registered yet, watching a woman gutted in front of me, seeing the life ooze out of her. I had been there, had tried to stop it, and had come up short.
But had I tried to save her or me? I didn’t know. I just did what comes naturally: I hit somebody. But when it counted, I missed, and a young woman was dead. I hardly knew her, but she was flesh and blood and brains and possessed of the great conceit of the young-an imagined immunity from harm. She had played a very rough game with some characters with too much to lose. Characters who found her expendable. She was one of the courageous, idealistic breed, risking all for her lover and her country. In the end, neither returned the favor.
As usual, I hadn’t called the police. What could they have done, besides detain me for questioning and foul everything up? “You say the killer was a Russian who shot your friend?”
I could see their cynical cop faces. The locals would call Miami, and who knows? Maybe Foley already had Socolow dancing to the tune that I killed Crespo. Palm Beach County would fight Dade County to see who would provide me room and board.
White Nights. That was it. The phrase came to me through the haze in my skull.
White Nights. It was a movie with Mikhail Baryshnikov. He was a Russian defector who ended up back in the U.S.S.R. after a plane crash, and he had to dance his way out. Something like that.
My mind was dancing, too, playing a game of free association. Names and faces kept popping into my head. Charlie Riggs. Thanks for the help, you old coot, but it’s up to me now.
Lourdes Soto. Her beautiful liquid eyes. The way she wheeled that forklift around, she could have killed me if she wanted to.
Robert Foley. Where do you fit into this? Whose side are you on?
Kharchenko. I have tasted the blood you spilled. We will meet again.
T he Blue Marlin Apartment Hotel was jammed between Commerce Street and an alley in a dingy neighborhood of South Beach that has yet to see the benefits of either restoration or redevelopment. In earlier times, it would have had a flashing neon sign with a couple of missing letters. Now that neon is trendy, it just has a painted sign that once could have been blue, but that was before years of sun and salt-laden air blanched it. A few blocks away is prime oceanfront real estate. Here, where a kid with a strong pitching arm could hit the cruise ships plowing through Government Cut, the neighborhood is a minighetto of recent Russian immigrants sharing a few run-down buildings with Cuban Marielito s.
To say the Blue Marlin was drab would be to exaggerate its charm. The building was a three-story brownish square box with not enough paint left on its hide to be considered peeling. Rusty air conditioners poked out of windows like boils on an unwashed back, oozing moisture and noise. A stuffed blue marlin minus its sword hung cockeyed in the lobby. There was a darkened staircase to the second floor and a single elevator that didn’t work, or so said a hand-lettered sign in English, Spanish, and what I took to be Russian, Cyrillic characters and all.
A sallow-complexioned man of perhaps sixty sat in a blue haze of cigarette smoke behind a scarred counter. He wore a stained white T-shirt and was drinking what smelled like cheap whiskey from a Styrofoam cup. The clamor of a baseball game squawked from a black-and-white portable television on the counter. I asked him about Nikolai Smorodinsky. He squinted at me through the smoke, stared at my suit coat that wouldn’t button, and hacked up a wad of phlegm.
“Friggin’ Ruskies, who can tell one name from another?” A southern accent, Tennessee maybe. He spit into a metal waste can. “All commies and spicks here, never seen nothing like it. They sign the book, I cain’t even read it, and I read good. Spick writes down ‘Jose Delgado Diaz,’ somebody comes asking for Senor Delgado, I say he ain’t here. An hour later, Jose comes down from his room, all pissed off, but I figure it ain’t my fault they cain’t tell their daddies from their whore mommas. The Ruskies, they just bark at you and go up to their rooms.”
“I’m looking for a Russian man named Smorodinsky,” I repeated. “Maybe thirty. He would have checked in today.”
“Couple of hours ago, one of ’em came in.”
I waited.
“Talks English as good as you. Looks like a gypsy, but he’s a Rusky. Room two-twelve.”