Crabbe then called the Feds to let them know Matisse hadn't just given up all the Haitian cocaine high command, but he'd also given him his contacts in Customs, the Miami PD, the DEA and the FBI.'
'Christ!' Max sat down. 'And Crabbe gave that stuff to his secretary, Nora Wong, right?'
'Yeah.' Joe nodded slowly and heavily, remembering the NYPD's crime scene report and the photographs. 'The Feds never got to see any of it because they didn't free Pierre-Jerome. They wanted to change the terms of the deal.
They said they'd have no way of knowing if Matisse wasn't making the whole thing up, so they'd only let the kid go home after they had people in custody. And they wanted Matisse to testify against Boukman in open court. Matisse
said no dice. Crabbe was in the middle of renegotiating when he got gunned down with Moyez.'
'So Moyez was never the target: Crabbe was.'
'That's right.' Joe nodded.
'Shit. Didn't he make any fucken' copies of the deposition?'
'If he did, they ain't turned up. My guess is they're gone,'
Joe said.
'What about Matisse?'
'He's dead. On the morning of May the fourth the same day as the Moyez trial Matisse, his wife and their two other children were all shot dead as they ate breakfast at their home in Port-au-Prince.'
'And Pierre-Jerome?'
'Found dead in his cell.'
Wasn't he in solitary?'
'Yeah. Someone put ground glass in his oatmeal. It's an old trick.'
'Mother-FUCKERV Max yelled, getting up. 'How in the fuck did Boukman pull this shit off?'
'Everyone has a price, Max, and everything can be bought.
Those drug guys have got a lot of money.'
'So Boukman hit everyone on the same fucken' day - in two countries!'
'Yup.' Joe sighed.
'But think of that! That's high-level counter-intel! That takes meticulous planning! You can't get shit like that together in what? - a week?
Well, he did it,' Joe said wearily, as Max paced back and forth across the garage. 'Boukman must've had a guy close to Matisse. It's the only explanation.'
'What are the Feds doing now?' Max asked.
'They're tryin' to plug their leak. Then they've gotta start on Boukman all over again. Their last report said Boukman has recruited himself a brand new employee Ernest
Bennett, father-in-law to Baby Doc Duvalier, the president of Haiti himself.'
'Wouldn't surprise me if it was true, wouldn't surprise me if it was bullshit,' Max said gloomily. He crushed out his cigarette and lit another.
Joe knew Max's angers: there was the cold, speechless kind that was always the prelude to physical violence; frustrations and other people's fuck-ups would make him yell and shout; hitting a brick wall in a case would make him do the same - until he went and sat in a church and got his head together. Joe had seen him close to tears when they'd found the bodies of missing kids but they weren't tears of sorrow, they were tears of rage. Now he was mad as hell all right, yet there was a worry about his anger, almost a fearful tone to his venting. Joe knew what he was going through. He'd been there this morning, feeling so stunted by the length of Boukman's reach he'd wanted to quit the case. He'd got as far as starting to dial Max's number from a nearby payphone to wake him up and tell him, but then he'd thought of the reasons he'd started this whole thing in the first place and put the receiver down.
Max stopped pacing. He thought of Sandra. He saw again her smiling face on his pillow last night when he'd told her he loved her. He saw her sitting at his kitchen table yesterday morning, dressed in one of his shirts, reading the paper.
He'd stood in the doorway just looking at her without her noticing, thinking how beautiful she was and how he was the luckiest guy in the world right then. If they carried on with this case the way they were, he'd be putting her in danger. But he couldn't let Joe down.
Max sat on the couch and looked at the black, sticky oil-stained floor. Outside he heard the rumble of thunder.
49
Carmine parked the dark green Ford pickup in the lot of the Hervis Family Supermarket on South West 8 th Avenue and discreetly checked himself out in a mirror. He was delighted with the results. He'd always wished he'd been born with straight hair, like his dad's, and now he'd fulfilled his wish. OK, so it was a wig, but it wasn't an obvious wig like some of the spades wore, or those ridiculous, blowaway-in-a-breeze toupees those white old timers in South Beach wore, this one was subtle - a short straight head of real black hair, parted in the middle with a little fringe falling over his right brow. He looked bona ride Cubano now.
It wasn't the first time he'd had straight hair. A few years back he'd had it 'chemically relaxed'. That was a nice moment, driving down Biscayne Bay in his coupe, sea wind blowing back his hair; it even had a little bounce to it when he walked just like white folks in shampoo commercials.
Things had of course gone critically wrong when he'd gone home for his bath that evening. His mother had freaked out and hacked it all off with a pair of kitchen scissors damn near ripped it out, when she couldn't work those shears fast enough - and then she'd stuffed it in his mouth and tried to make him swallow it. He'd almost choked to death. But, still, looking back at the momentary happiness he'd felt that afternoon, it had somehow been worth it. She'd never be able to take that away from him, no matter what she did.
Carmine had made other changes to himself too - a whole new disguise. He was pretending to be a house painter, after seeing a bunch of them driving by Haiti Mystique to go and work on the houses Sam was renovating on the corner of
62nd Street and North East 2nd Avenue, close to the Dupuis Building. Carmine had bought a pickup second hand, eight gallons of white and yellow paint, brushes and floor sheets to put in the back; and then, to complete his transformation, he'd got himself a set of khaki overalls and steel-capped boots, which he'd dripped multicoloured paint on for that 'used look'. When Sam had seen him he'd told him he looked like he'd stepped out of a Jackson Pollock exhibition.
He'd tried his disguise out on a couple of Clubs. He'd solicited them in espanol. They'd taken one look at him and said they weren't no soup kitchen pussy. He hadn't blown his cover. He'd just turned, walked out and punched the air in triumph. No one looked twice at a painter not even hos so this way he'd be safe from the cops. Not that he'd actually heard anything more about the guy in the salon on the news, but that didn't mean they weren't looking for him.
He checked his watch: 2.37 p.m. Good, he thought, she'd be right in the middle of her shift. He'd catch her unawares, just sneak right up on her. Julita Leljedal.
He'd been looking for Julita for a year and a half. She skipped town, owing him $1,250. Last week one of his Spades had told him they'd seen her working at the - get this meat section of HFS.
When he'd first seen her, in 1976, Julita had been a stripper over at an upmarket club called Luckies on Le Jeune. Back then he used to go trawling a lot of titty bars for potential Diamonds and Clubs, and the girls were usually real easy pickings.