something real common. Did you try the Ron-Da-Voo?”
“Not yet. Have you seen him lately?”
“Not since the night the short guy pulled the knife. They came in together. Alex’s fucked up, like everybody else who hangs out here, but he wouldn’t hurt a fly. What kind of trouble is he in?”
“I just wanna talk to him.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” the bartender said. “He really is a gentle, sweet-hearted kid. But that other one is a chemical spill. Completely toxic. He’ll never get in here again, I can tell you that. Just do me a favor,” he said, tossing a pigtail over his shoulder. “Don’t give me up, okay? It’d be bad for business.”
“Not a problem,” Lili said. “I appreciate your help.”
“And I appreciate yours.”
This was years before the hype washed over this town like a tidal wave, when all of South Miami Beach was sick with a poverty and an off-the-graph crime rate no European land baron or transplanted nightclub impresario, no Hollywood schlockenstein wanted to touch:
The punk’s name was John Colangelo, a Times Square hustler whose bloom was so long off his rose he’d been niggled into running a short con with his boyfriend, Rudy Burkalter. They took out some classified ads and a PO Box, and had suckers mail in checks and money orders made out to their bogus company. It was a rock-bottom bunco scheme, but they weren’t after any prizes for originality. And it wasn’t like they were making millions or even thousands, though they did have a few hundred bucks coming in every week, enough to cover the rent on their flop, enough to keep them in jumbos and T-Bird.
The fight was most likely over money. Colangelo grabbed the first thing handy, a cast iron frying pan, and whacked Burkalter with it. Then he hit him again. And again. Twenty-six times all together, until Burkalter’s head was a squishy nub on top of his neck. Colangelo emptied their post office box one last time, cashed the checks, and hit the road.
Who knows what he was thinking? Maybe he just wanted to go where the weather was warm.
But Miami Beach was not then and not now an ideal location to go on the lam. First of all, it was an island, and east of the city, you were in the Atlantic Ocean. West, you’d run into the Everglades. South, there was one lonesome road in and out of the Keys. And north was the direction Colangelo had run from. He was at the end of the line.
Before long, somebody made him for John Colangelo, who was wanted for the murder of Rudy Burkalter. That same somebody, his greedy heart set on some imagined reward, phoned the NYPD and informed them that John Colangelo was occupying quarters in an Ocean Drive fleabag, where he was registered as Jerry Collins.
Homicide detective Pat Judice called Beach police and gave them the rundown on John Colangelo. He also gave them the name of the hotel where Colangelo was holed up, a building that had since been torn down to make way for the inevitable forces of progress, a hotel whose name, at the moment, escaped Arnie Martinson.
Colangelo was not there when Martinson and Frank Matzalanis arrived to collect the debt he owed New York State, not to mention the memory of Rudy Burkalter. So they waited. They waited six hours. And during that six hours, Colangelo, with an overwhelming longing to return to his salad days, or perhaps just in need of some company or some cash, made a date with a Philadelphia businessman. The businessman’s wife, it turned out, was in another hotel room way up Collins Avenue.
Martinson was stretched out on the lumpy mattress, and Matzalanis sat on a rickety chair, with the lights off. By then, it was dark. When they heard voices in the hallway, they stood up and positioned themselves on either side of the door. They drew their weapons. The door opened, and as Colangelo reached for the wall switch, Martinson stuck the barrel of his .38 caliber service revolver into John Colangelo’s right ear. The key still clammy between a thumb and a forefinger, Colangelo raised his hands. His trick let out a bark before he broke down in sobs.
Pat Judice arrived the next day with a partner, and they flew back to New York with John Colangelo. Colangelo confessed. He copped a manslaughter plea and was sentenced to not less than fifteen years. He would be just about eligible for his second shot at parole now.
Judice was a ginger-haired man with a dozen years in on the hotshot Homicide Division. Arnie was wondering how he was getting along.
“Pretty good,” Judice said, over the long distance line. “I feel pretty good for a man my age.”
“I don’t know what kind of time you’ve got,” Martinson said, then used up some of it breaking down the Manfred Pfiser case. How they were getting close to a guy named Harry Healy.
“A precinct detective up there’s working something on a known associate of Healy’s, a loser by the name of Jimmy De Steffano. They took a fall together way back when, and this precinct guy, he figures they’re never too far out of each other’s sight.”
Pat Judice said, “What’s the cop’s name?”
“Cop is named Don Kellog and he works out of the, let’s see, Ninth Precinct. The Ninth.”
“Right. Don Kellog, Ninth Precinct.”
“Collared our man not long ago, as it turns out,” Martinson said, “before he made detective.”
“Nice,” Judice said.
“Anyway, I need this Healy soon as I can get him. I’m not squeezing you, but we could really use a hand with this.”
“I’m not making any promises, Arnie, but I’ll help you out if I can.”
“That’s all I’m asking,” Martinson said.
Judice said, “I’ve gotta go rid the streets of crime.”
“Whatever you can do to make this happen,” Martinson was about to say, but by that time he was talking into a disconnected line. Just then, he remembered the name of the hotel where he arrested John Colangelo. It was called the Sao Paulo.
The computer hit thirteen times on the name Alejandro Hernandez. Six of them were incarcerated, and of the two out of seven who were still in their twenties and free for the time being, one was five feet, two inches tall, and the other one was black.
A similar search on the name Alejandro Fernandez spit up eleven names, nine of whom were currently guests of the state, so Lili requested the records of the two on the outside. They were the same height and the same age, but the one who had a criminal record stretching back to his sixteenth birthday had also managed to lose an eye somewhere along the way.
That left one Fernandez, Alejandro, also known as Alex. Born: 7/3/68. Height: 6’2”. Weight: 140. In this photo, he was a doe-eyed kid with close-cropped hair, taken when he got busted for possession of a controlled substance, a quarter-gram of cocaine. The judge suspended his sentence. Lili got into her car and drove to 15th Street in Hialeah, the address listed on his record.
The Medical Examiner’s report stated that if Pfiser was shot while he was standing, then he had been killed by a person shorter than himself. This eliminated everybody but Beaumond. Only they couldn’t ascertain whether Pfiser was standing. In that case, why not Healy for Pfiser? Why not Leo Hannah? And why not Fernandez, Martinson had said, and Lili thought sure, why not?
The house was finished with stucco, like most of the other homes on the block. There was a grapefruit tree in the front yard, and the dug-out circle around the base of its trunk had been filled in with white stones. A line of shrubs banked the front of the place, six squat bushes trimmed to identical height. Two taller ones, shaped to resemble Christmas trees, grew on either end of the row.
The driveway was paved and sealed with tar, giving it a smooth, blue-black sheen. The front stoop was shallow, six feet wide by four feet deep, but evidently, somebody enjoyed watching the world from this perch: A lawn chair leaned against the stucco.
The screen door looked in on a sofa covered with a knitted blanket. A painting of a bullfight’s final stages hung behind it.
Lili pushed the doorbell and got startled by a buzzing twice as loud as it needed to be. The laughtrack of a sitcom was rising and falling somewhere in the house. She was going to hit the buzzer again when Alex Fernandez came into view, tall and lanky, his Soul Train afro intact.
She said, “Alex Fernandez?” She had her badge in her right hand.
The kid tilted his head like he was about to say Yeah, pivoted off his left foot, and disappeared. Lili ran toward the driveway side of the house. Another screen door banged shut. She rounded the corner to see the long- legged Fernandez scrambling over a chain link fence, his feet moving as he hit the sod in his neighbor’s back yard.
