Next, I called Miami Homicide where I am known, but not necessarily liked. A woman with a faint Cuban accent took down the information, calmly checking the address three times, and politely asking me not to leave the premises. From her tone, she might have been taking an order for a pizza with anchovies, but that’s the way cops act, particularly in a city where homicides are as plentiful as mosquitoes. Next I called Abe Socolow at home, figuring if I hadn’t, the cops would have, and Abe’s the kind of guy who remembers the small stuff.
At first, I tried not to touch anything, having been educated by television that I might foul up the crime scene with my fingerprints. Once every hundred years or so, a crime will be solved by finding an unknown assailant’s fingerprints at the scene. Usually, fingerprints merely corroborate what everyone already knows: Three witnesses in the liquor store identify the gunman, and a fingerprint specialist confirms his prints are on the gun dropped at the scene.
Then, I remembered Kip was still in the car. I didn’t want him to see the body a second time, so I hit the switch for the fan, went into the kitchen, hauled out a high stool, and climbed up until I was looking straight into the face of a dead man. A thin copper wire circled his neck and was looped through the motor housing of the fan. But that’s not what killed him. The bright splash of cloth was an imported silk tie knotted by someone unfamiliar with the double Windsor. The knot dug deeply into the neck, just below the Adam’s apple.
The tie was a palette of blues and reds and would have looked swell with a dark suit and a white oxford cloth shirt. In fact, it always looked swell just that way.
I should know. It was my tie.
I climbed down and went into the kitchen where I found a knife I use for cleaning fish. Up again, and this time, I hoisted the body with one hand placed under his chin and sawed through the copper wire. He dropped like a tree, banging the floor. I got down, covered the body with an old beach towel, and went out to the car.
I hustled Kip inside, told him he had been right, apologized for doubting him, and said everything would be okay, the cops would be here soon. I turned on the TV to distract him from the lump in the corner of the room, but in what must have been a first, he wasn’t interested. It took about ninety seconds, but he wasn’t scared anymore. He began babbling excitedly, asking questions, wanting to help, telling me how totally awesome and off-the-Richter it was to have a murder in the house, and did it happen often, and was somebody trying to set me up, like Gene Hackman did to Kevin Costner in No Way Out, which was a remake of The Big Clock with Charles Laughton and Ray Milland, in case I didn’t know, which I didn’t. He asked if we could keep the body a while, like the boys did in Weekend at Bernie’s. I told him to calm down, but he kept chattering away, and I finally figured that it wasn’t quite real to him. Just another movie.
I was trying to concentrate, to figure it out, but Kip was carrying on about murder plots, so I led him to the kitchen, opened the refrigerator and popped the porcelain top on a sixteen-ounce Grolsch. I found two glasses that didn’t appear to carry contagious diseases and poured half into one and half into the other.
“ How ‘bout a beer, Kip?” I asked, handing him a glass.
“ Wow, that’s completely broly of you, Uncle Jake,” Kip said, which I took as well-deserved praise of my child-rearing skills.
I drained my beer while Kip sipped at his, making a face.
Then I had another, sitting on a stool at the kitchen counter, feeling my pulse rate subside. I needed to think, to consider what I knew and what I didn’t. There were a hundred questions, but they all boiled down to two.
What was Kyle Hornback doing in my house, and who killed him?
To answer those two, I needed to consider what Charlie Riggs called the threshold question in any unsolved crime. Cui bono? Who stands to gain? If I couldn’t figure that one out, Abe Socolow would be the first to tell me. First, though, he’d probably ask me something I’d been wondering ever since I cut down the body.
Where the hell was Blinky Baroso?
Two detectives showed up first, an Anglo major near retirement age and a young Hispanic who didn’t give his rank. The older cop had tired eyes and wore a lightweight brown suit with shiny black shoes. The younger one wore a short-sleeved white shirt and a blood-red tie. He had the sloping shoulders and bulging arms of a weight lifter. I had known the major from my days as an assistant public defender, but we’d never had a case together. The young one was a stranger to me.
Abe Socolow walked in five minutes later. After they convinced themselves that there was indeed a death not from natural causes, they called the assistant medical examiner lucky enough to be on weekend duty. Socolow spent the next ten minutes chewing me out for contaminating the scene, as he put it. Then the younger detective flexed his triceps and called the station, asking for what used to be called the crime scene boys, who turned out to be an African-American woman and an Asian-American woman. They arrived, toting their cameras, tape measures, fingerprint kits, and assorted technological doodads.
Kip followed them around for a while, eyes wide, mouth closed, except when he asked the difference between the Glock nine-millimeters city cops carried and the Beretta used by Mel Gibson in the Lethal Weapon movies.
I was sitting on the battered sofa with the two detectives in mismatched chairs at slight angles to me. Abe Socolow paced in front of me. He wore his trademark black suit, white shirt, and black tie, but it being a Sunday night, the tie was loosened at the neck.
The major asked all the right questions, and I had none of the answers. No, I didn’t expect Kyle Hornback here. That’s right, I leave the front door unlocked, preferring burglars to walk in, rather than busting up the place. Besides, unless you know to batter the door, it’s stuck shut by the humidity.
Where was I earlier in the evening? On South Beach. That’s right, I left the youngster here alone.
The crime scene investigators had shooed Kip away while they photographed the body, and now the lad joined me, moving close on the sofa, where I put my arm around him. Even under the paddle fans, it was about eighty degrees in the house, so the goose bumps on Kip’s arms couldn’t have been from the temperature. Maybe it was starting to sink in. Maybe it was becoming real.
The major asked Kip what he saw, and he ran through the story. Footsteps, his door opening and closing, someone in my bedroom…
“ That’s when they must have taken my tie,” I chimed in.
“ Shut up, Jake,” Socolow said, still pacing.
Voices downstairs, Kip continued, furniture moving, the front door closing again. He sneaked down the landing, saw the body spinning, tossing shadows across the moonlit room, ran back upstairs and climbed out his window. Same story he told me with no embellishments.
“ Good try, Abe,” I said, “but I don’t think the kid killed him, even though he doesn’t have an alibi.”
“ What about you, Jake? What’s your alibi?”
“ What’s that supposed to mean?”
“ Hey, Jakie, let’s get something straight here. This is a murder investigation, so I ask-”
“ The questions,” Kip interrupted. “Or if you want, we can finish this downtown.”
I hushed the kid with what passes for a stern look. “Go ahead, Abe. Fire away.”
“ Where’s your client?” Abe Socolow asked.
“ Which one? I’ve got two or three, you know.”
“ Jake, don’t jerk me around. Where’s Louie Baroso?”
“ I don’t know,” I answered, truthfully.
“ When’s the last time you saw him?”
“ Three days ago.”
I could have added, “in my office,” but the question was when, not where, and I preach to my clients just to answer the question, no more, no less.
“ Where?” Socolow asked.
“ In my office.”
“ What was he doing there?”
“ The usual, dropping ashes on the carpet, flirting with my secretary.”
Socolow gave me a pained look. “Did he mention Kyle Hornback?”
“ Yeah, he asked if he could use my house to kill Kyle, maybe add him to the living room furnishings along
