Powder Burn - Carl Hiaasen [61]
Meadows did not even know the killers’ names. And before he talked about them, assuming anyone would even listen, he would have to explain what had happened in the parking garage at Miami International. And that would leave T. Christopher Meadows, AIA, up shit creek.
MEADOWS NEARLY DID NOT GO to Coconut Grove the next day to retrieve the picture Clara Jackson had sent him. Being on Key Biscayne was tolerable, but getting on and off was torture. On this day Meadows needed to get to the mainland, and if luck was not with him, he knew, he could spend the better part of the morning on the journey.
There was only one way in and one way out of the key, which meant that the causeway became the island’s lifeblood and the frequent scene of the worst vehicular madness Meadows had witnessed north of São Paulo.
The bridge nearest the mainland was a drawbridge. It rose at the imperious behest of any plutocrat with a mast tall enough. Thousands could swelter for an eternity in the afternoon sun while some uptown slob in white shoes steered his ketch through the bridge, a doff of his gleaming white cap to the cracker who tended the infernal machine from a hutch atop the center span.
“How’s the traffic?” had become to the insular Republicans of Key Biscayne a salutation more common than “How’s the family?” by the time Meadows first knew the island.
But Meadows was not intercepted by the bridge that summer afternoon. Traffic was light. He slid across to the mainland as smoothly as if he had sailed across the bay. The damn thing is probably broken, he thought, as he crossed the grated center span of the drawbridge.
Even the traffic in Coconut Grove was tolerable, but as Meadows neared his house, he grew cautious. He drove twice around the block, slowly, looking at the parked cars. Nothing. He could not see the house from the street because of the foliage, but there was no one watching from the street. Of that he was sure.
Meadows parked Terry’s Ford a block away, scaled the four-foot limestone wall and approached the front of the house through the trees, shrubbery and undergrowth that were the silent sentinels of his privacy. He stopped at the mailbox, extracted a buff Miami Journal envelope and a Mailgram from the assorted trivia of bills and leaflets, and stuck them in his back pocket.
Even before Meadows reached the house itself, he knew something was wrong. He crouched for a long time behind a cabbage palm, but he heard nothing. So he went in. And immediately wished he hadn’t.
They had destroyed the house and everything in it. Systematically, viciously, calculatingly. Vandals run amok.
They had begun with his books, it seemed. Books of art and literature. Architectural reference works and leftover college textbooks. Dictionaries and paperbacks. Some lay shredded on the floor. The rest lay on the bottom of the pool.
The glass cases that housed his architectural models—what Meadows called his ego gallery—had been shattered. The models themselves had obviously puzzled the intruders. They had destroyed them capriciously. One had been burned; the top of another, a multitiered housing development, had been ripped from its base. A third had been stepped on.
Meadows’s Haitian paintings had been slashed with a knife, except one, coated now by what looked like dried ketchup. The entrails of Meadows’s leather living room furniture littered the floor. The blades of his ceiling fans had been snapped, one by one.
The kitchen was a lake where cheese rind floated next to soggy bologna. The tap was still on, and Meadows let it run. Water from the bathroom cascaded by the staircase and seeped along the oak floor, out the door and into the pool.
Over by what had been his stereo system the oak was scarred where filter-tip cigarette butts had been ground into the wood. Cauliflower Ear and the Peasant had obviously waited a long, impatient time for the gringo to come.
Meadows touched nothing.