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By Root 861 0

would have much to explain. Unfortunately there was nothing to connect him directly with Roberto’s unsavory commerce, nothing but the blood between them. To Pincus, that was plenty. To the headhunters at internal review, it might be zero. And it might be Pincus who would be forced to explain his extracurricular spying. So be it, he thought determinedly, if that was how Octavio Nelson wanted it to go. There was always one last weapon: Aristidio Cruz. It was never too late for a naïve young detective to atone for his past sins. Pincus’s honesty, however belated, might even be regarded as an act of courage.

“OK, I think we’ve got ’em all,” Harry Appel announced finally.

“I can’t believe it,” Frank Cline said.

“They were easy to miss, unless you were looking.”

Appel carried a stainless steel surgical tray from the autopsy table to Pincus’s somber seat across the morgue. “Here,” the pathologist said, “are your culprits.”

Pincus swallowed hard and forced himself to study the contents of the tray: a number of gaily colored sacs, moist with blood and rank with body fluids, swollen and elastic.

“Rubbers,” Harry Appel said triumphantly. “Seventeen rubbers.” He used a sharp surgical tool to poke one until it split open. He spun the tool in his hand and used the cupped end to scoop a pinch of damp ivory paste and hold it up to glisten under the morgue’s piercing lights. “Don’t suppose you wanna take any bets on what this is?” Appel said.

“Coke!” Pincus exclaimed.

“Yeah, the lab techs, bless their lethargic little hearts, will tell us for sure. My guess is that the contents of one or more of these little beauties was discharged right into Nelson’s bloodstream.”

“That’s fatal?”

“In large amounts, certainly. Different things can happen. Usually the brain goes haywire and stops telling the lungs to breathe. Massive respiratory failure. If that doesn’t get you, some sort of heart arrhythmia probably will,” Appel explained. “You see, the human body simply wasn’t made to absorb this much of a powerful stimulant. It’s like plugging a hundred-ten-volt toaster into a two-twenty-volt socket. You burn it up.”

“I figured it was a stroke or something,” Cline said sheepishly.

“Just a smuggler’s special,” Appel said. “Another couple hours, and he would have passed these fine. He would have been home free. This kind of constipation is deadly, Wil.”

“I figured he was carrying something,” Pincus said. “I had Customs do a body search at the airport.”

“Well, Customs doesn’t give enemas,” Appel said. “You better call your partner now.”

“No,” said Pincus, his face as gray as the new corpse, “not me, Doctor.”

Chapter 29

VICTOR GLOWERED and tugged peevishly at his Vandyke. The boy was a tease. Either he delivered that night or he went back on the street. Victor could not abide teases.

The old grandfather clock read 8:25, and the small dining room was nearly full. The clink of crystal and the murmur of voices soothed Victor. At least dinner was proceeding as smoothly as ordained. Quiet, elegant.

Several main courses remained to be ordered. There were a few groupers left in the tank, and Victor knew he would have to push them hard, else they would probably die overnight. Wretched beasts.

“Hey!” To Victor the call was like a curse at an opera. He flinched, and several other diners’ heads raised. The Gómez table again. Victor didn’t know who they were, but he vowed they would never be back. Four nasty little men who should be shining shoes. Two pairs of them, really, and not friends either. In their ill-fitted suits and pointy toes they had circled like dogs at first, as though uncertain whether to fuck or to fight.

“Hey! Fat man!”

Victor hurried over.

“Yes, sir?”

“We want to eat now.” The man in the skewed necktie spoke in atrocious gutter Spanish.

“May I suggest grouper? Grilled with a light sauce of butter and garlic, it’s quite delicious.”

“Not fish,” said a dark man with a black mustache. He was from the second pair.

“The veal is very good tonight,” Victor ventured.

“No. Chicken. Arroz con pollo. With plenty of black beans.