He took one look at her and thought, full-on, manhating bull-dagger. She was wearing no-nonsense wirerimmed glasses and her mouse-brown hair was short and thick like the rest of her, pushed back in a no- nonsense cut. She kept thinking it could’ve been her.
“This happens right upstairs while you’re sleeping, it shakes you.”
Martinson understood that.
“My entire life in New York, nothing even close to this, ever.”
She was wide-shouldered and widened some more at the waist. Her massive thighs touched from the knee up. She had both sandaled feet on the floor.
“When did you check in, Ms. Lowenstein?” This was sensitivity training in the field. That Ms. couldn’t have been any clearer.
“Wednesday night, for a long weekend. I was going to stay until Monday, but now I don’t know.”
“You told Detective Acevedo that you heard loud music coming from the victim’s room. What time was that?”
“All day. Patsy Cline. All day and all night. You know, they made the movie with Jessica Lange.”
“Sure,” Martinson said. He remembered when Patsy Cline’s records were hits, sometime before this woman was born, and she wasn’t all that young.
“I called the desk and complained.”
“Do you remember what time that was?”
“After eleven. I was watching the news, getting ready for bed.”
“And the music was turned down?”
“The music got turned off, and I fell asleep before the weather. I wanted to see what the weather was going to be. But then it came back on again, even louder. I tried to sleep through it, because I didn’t want to be a bitch and call the desk again.”
Martinson zeroed in. His headache was a minor sinus flare-up. Nothing to worry about. “Can you remember the time?”
“When it went off for good? Ten to two. I was actually looking at the clock. I couldn’t believe anyone would be so inconsiderate, and I couldn’t believe I was the only one it was bothering.”
“And after that?”
“Like in the song,” Marcy Lowenstein said. “Sweet dreams.”
“Is there anything else you can think of, Ms. Lowenstein” — there, he said it again — “that might assist us in our investigation?”
“I’ll tell you this much. He’s going to be missed. He was a really popular guy. People coming and going at all hours. He must’ve had a lot of friends here.”
Martinson was waging a ferocious battle against his first impression, recalling the sensitivity trainer’s words. Remember the old saying. You can’t judge a book by its cover. Lowenstein was homely, with her glasses and her big schnozz and her fat thighs. But fat thighs did not a dyke make. Half the female population looked like Marcy Lowenstein, and they weren’t all lesbians. She liked to spend long weekends in South Beach. And she went to sleep after the news. Just another dull vacationer, spending a lonely time in an overpriced Ocean Drive hotel. So what if she had hairy shins? That didn’t make her one thing or another. What business was it of his, anyway?
Arnie needed to review his sensitivity training.
The house was way up Pine Tree Drive, behind a high row of hedges that hid it from the street. It featured a gravel driveway and a two-car carport, an aluminum overhang with shingles nailed to its roof and tacked to the side, a whim the owners thought would make their property more rentable. But what did the owners know? They hadn’t lived in Miami in years. They were from Montana, or was it Missouri or Minnesota, some place with an M, and were now in either Saint Moritz or Saint Bart’s, Saint Somebody’s, Leo forgot what they told him.
Renting this pad was the first move he made after he got his inheritance. Leo turned thirty, and the money was his, just like it said in grandpa’s will. Thinking of his grandfather, wearing a powder-blue cardigan and finishing the back nine in the pinkish pre-twilight, made Leo feel like puking. It was a good thing the old man was dead. First, because Leo didn’t get the money until he died, but second, had he been able to see how his loving legacy was being squandered, it would’ve blown the toupee right off his head.
The house seemed like a good idea. The South Beach thing was getting hotter and hotter with each passing season, the narrow streets swarming with pussy, fine young pussy, pussy from all points of the compass. The world’s next supermodel had to start somewhere, and she needed to have a good time before the appointment of that divine hour, a good time that Leo, with his six rented rooms and his Jaguar and his Jacuzzi, was more than willing to provide. Boozed-up, coked-up nineteen-yearold Icelandic blondes, two at a time for Christ’s sake, that first month felt like a dream. But all that changed so fast. Where did it go?
Leo steered the Jaguar, British Racing Green and leased, through the opening in the hedges. He parked it next to the Eldorado that JP Beaumond had arrived with, and told Rex, the neighbor’s Rottweiler, to go home. Rex woofed. Off he loped.
Leo picked his way through the piles of shit, the grenade-sized turds Rex laid down — he was going to have to speak to those people about their dog — and the thinner, neater work of Mimi, the long-haired teacup Chihuahua. Mimi was her own set of problems, and Leo didn’t particularly care for her. Come to think of it, he never much liked dogs, and now he had one under the same roof with him. But Mimi was tiny, and quiet, for a twitching, trembling mutt. When she wasn’t in Vicki’s lap, she was sniffing out new hiding spots around the house. Mimi was a dog Leo could live with.
Vicki, on the other hand, he could not. She was in the Jacuzzi with Mimi, in the water up to her neck, holding the Chihuahua’s head just above the churning surface. She was a friend of Lawrence the Model Dude, who Leo hadn’t seen since his New Year’s Eve party, the night he introduced Leo to Vicki. New Year’s Day, Leo woke up next to her, and she’d been at the house ever since. It turned out to be a chore just getting Vicki to keep her clothes on, which was fun at first, but by now Leo was so over her that a mere glimpse of her nude, evenly browned body gave him a headache.
“Hey,” Vicki said. “C’mon in, the water’s fine.” She splashed some his way.
The lawn chair where a towel or a bathrobe should’ve been hanging was empty.
Leo said, “Are you naked under there?”
“Get in and find out for yourself,” Vicki said.
“Because this Lady Godiva routine is getting tired.”
“That’s the way mommy likes to dry off,” she babytalked to the Chihuahua. “It’s good for her. Sun-dried, like a tomato.”
“Over-ripe,” Leo said. “Like a fucking hothouse cantaloupe. Okay, new rule. No walking around the yard without a bathing suit. Period.”
“If somebody wants to look, let them look. I don’t mind.”
“The neighbors mind,” Leo said. He jabbed a thumb at their exposed southern flank. “Their kids can just gander this way and set their little brains on fire. They mind that. And let that poor dog out of the water. Look at her.”
Mimi had been appealing to Leo with her eyes. Just her luck her mistress would be the one person in the world who thought this was a cute idea, a Chihuahua in the hot tub. Mimi sighed.
Vicki set her on the ledge and the dog hopped down with a single yip of gratitude.
The sliding glass door was locked. Leo tapped the Jag’s ignition key against the pane, a clinking that brought Beaumond’s eyes, yellow and dilated, out from behind the curtain. The dining room table was cluttered with boxes of baking soda, a roll of sandwich-sized baggies, and a jar of unlabeled powder. A bunch of bananas was going brown in the fruit bowl.
Beaumond and Fernandez had gotten hold of two triple-beam scales, strategically angled near their places at the table. Dumped on the Business section of the Sunday
Like the house, the plan to rob Manfred had seemed like a good idea the night it was born, over an eight-ball
