Breaking the Ice
They had already zipped the body into a plastic bag when I made a final pass through the living room. The assistant ME had packed his bag and capped his camera. The cops were growing bored and filing out; there were other bodies in other apartments and the night was young. Charlie Riggs was on the staircase outside with Pamela Metcalf, reminiscing about murders most foul. I looked around and struggled to remember everything the old canoe maker had taught me.
Be alert to every detail. I tried to memorize everything in the room. The computer was an IBM clone, the desk white oak, the telephone a new Panasonic. Michelle Diamond had been sitting at the computer when she was killed. I looked closer at the phone. Two lines, a bunch of buttons. One button was for making conference calls, another put you on hold, a third activated the speaker phone.
Then the last one. “Redial.”
I congratulated myself on how smart I was. Half a dozen cops and nobody thought about it-maybe the last person Michelle Diamond spoke to just a dial tone away. And maybe with some luck, that last person was the guy who squeezed the life out of her. Don’t you dare come over here, Harry, we’re through!
Then again, it could be the weather number, a wrong number, or the public library. Only one way to find out. I picked up the receiver and hit the button. Seven electronic notes played do-re-mi in my ear.
A click and then the whir of a woman’s recorded voice. “Welcome to Compu-Mate, where the person of your dreams awaits you. Dial ROMANCE, 766-2623, on your modem, and we’ll put you in touch. Why not let Compu-Mate find your life mate?”
“Or your death mate,” I answered the mechanical voice, “as the case may be.”
I put the top down on my ancient Olds 442 convertible, deposited Charlie Riggs in the back and Pamela Metcalf in the passenger bucket seat. It’s the Turbo 400, yellow body, black canvas top, black interior, rallye wheels, four-speed stick. An overgrown kid’s toy.
“No sign of a break-in, nothing missing from the apartment,” Charlie yelled over the roar of three hundred sixty-five horsepower. “No apparent motive.”
It was a cloudy June night; the air was humid with a hint of salt. We were approaching the Miami Journal, just on the Miami side of the MacArthur Causeway. The boxy building sat there, lights twinkling against the blackness of the bay, taunting me.
“An organized crime scene,” Pamela Metcalf added.
Above us, on the superstructure, yellow lights flashed and we came to a stop at the drawbridge. When the lights turned red, the traffic gate lowered into place, the tender yanked on a long steel lever, and the bridge started clanking skyward. Below us, a nighttime sailor aimed a sleek Hinckley with a towering mast through the opening.
“Based on a cursory review,” she continued, “I would say you’re looking for a white male in his late twenties or early thirties, probably firstborn, height and weight within norms, higher-than-average intelligence, though an underachiever in school. He probably knew the victim or at least had seen her and followed her. His socioeconomic background is at least average, and he probably had a two-parent household, but he never formed a stable relationship with his father.”
“I suppose the family dog got run over by a truck when he was going through puberty,” I said, with just a hint of sarcasm.
The psychiatrist stared at my profile. The sight did not weaken her knees. “Actually, he probably tortured and killed pets. Slicing open a cat’s belly and pulling out the intestines would be typical.”
That muzzled me for a moment. The bridge dropped back into place, the gate lifted, and we were moving again. I swung onto the 1-95 connector and headed south, tires singing on the concrete thirty feet above the mean streets of Overtown. Then I said, “I’m not sure that shrinks have all the answers they think they do.”
“Don’t sell forensic psychiatry short,” Charlie Riggs shouted from the backseat.
“I don’t. But the data doesn’t do any good. We can’t haul in all the firstborn sons in town.”
“No,” Pamela Metcalf said, “but we can predict this killer’s future behavior based on studies of past serial killers. He has fulfilled the fantasy of murder. He will repeat it, and will add to it his other fantasies he has so far repressed.”
“You’re assuming it’s a motiveless crime. Not a jealous boyfriend or a bumbling robber.”
“Unless you discover a pecuniary motive or an emotional one, you will find the murder quite motiveless, except in the deranged mind of the psychopath who committed it.”
It’s hard to argue with someone so obviously used to being right. We rode in silence as I pulled off the interstate and onto the Rickenbacker Causeway. The moon was coming up over Key Biscayne, spreading a creamy glow across the water. I pulled up in front of Tugboat Willie’s. On the front porch a couple of old salts were debating the merits of rubber jigs-the Zara Spook versus the MirrOlure-for catching jack crevalle. Charlie got out and came around to the driver’s side.
“Why would Nick Wolf appoint you to head the investigation? Why not one of his cronies, someone he could control?”
“Says he wants to do the right thing. Not even an appearance of a conflict of interest.”
“You believe that?” Charlie asked.
I shrugged. “Why shouldn’t I?”
“ Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes.”
“That’s what I always say,” I said.
Dr. Metcalf helped me out. “Loosely translated, ‘Beware of an enemy bearing gifts.’”
Charlie nodded, then climbed into his mud-spattered pickup truck for the drive westward to the Glades. Pamela Metcalf had taken a cab from her hotel, so I graciously offered to drive her back. Her eyes shot a look toward Charlie’s truck, as if to ask if I was trustworthy, but he was gone. Either she decided to risk it, or she couldn’t get out of the shoulder harness, because she wordlessly stayed in her seat.
It was a short ride to the Grand Bay Hotel in Coconut Grove, but the doctor made it seem like a transatlantic flight. I mentioned the beauty of the moon and she said, “Umm.” I remarked on the nighttime feeding habits of the turkey vultures, gliding above the sewage plant at Virginia Key, and she said, “Umm.” When she gave me the same reply to the question of how long she’d be in town, I asked if she was practicing her mantra. That drew only silence, so I slipped a Beach Boys tape into the slot, and keeping time with palm slaps on the steering wheel, provided my own off-key praises to California girls, doubtlessly adding to the doctor’s impression of me as a simpleton and rapscallion. To her credit, she never once complained about my singing or the dank evening air. When a few fat drops from a passing shower splattered our windshield, she never once asked me to put up the top. The wind blew her long hair straight back, and like a California girl without the tan-or the smile-she stared ahead into the nighttime breeze.
When I finally pulled under the canopy of the hotel, a teenage valet crept from the darkness and appraised the old yellow chariot.
“No shit, my old man used to talk about his 442,” the kid announced, “but I never seen one.”
I held him off and asked the doctor if she’d like a drink before retiring.
She studied me. “Whatever for?”
That one stumped me. “To… uh… wet the whistle. To talk.”
“Talk? What about?”
“I don’t know,” I said defensively. “I don’t plan that far ahead.”
“I can see that. Then why invite me to share spirits?”
I thought of Jack Nicholson telling Shirley MacLaine that a stiff drink “might kill the bug you got up your ass.” I thought of John Riggins, the great, wild running back of the Redskins, telling Justice Sandra Day O’Connor at a White House dinner to “loosen up, Sandy baby.” But what I said was, “Because we can work together on the Diamond murder.”
She paused long enough for me to toss the keys to the valet, and I escorted her to the glitzy bar on the mezzanine. The usual crowd was there, Colombian cowboys, businessmen delaying the inevitable confrontations at
