Powder Burn - Carl Hiaasen [62]
In the debris he spied the cut-glass figure of a troubadour he had bought in Venice many years before. It was miraculously unbroken. He picked up the delicate statuette and fondled it. Tenderly he set it back in its place on the mantel over the fireplace, where someone had smeared human feces and food and mustard.
The phone rang. Meadows stared at it for a long moment. Then he spun on his heel and strode out the door without looking back.
Chapter 15
MEADOWS WAS out of breath by the time he reached the top of the stairs, clutching the key to Terry’s condominium. He surged through the door, slammed it behind him and double-locked it with finality. His shirt was soaked. He hunted for the thermostat and twisted the dial to sixty-five degrees. He turned on a small table lamp but purposely avoided disturbing the drapes covering the wide picture window that presented such a grandiose view of the Atlantic. Below were a pool and a small park, Meadows recalled. And people.
No, the apartment should remain dark, closed up.
The package from Clara Jackson was still under one arm as Meadows went to the refrigerator and foraged for a beer. He found a can of Bavaria, a tart Colombian brew, and in it a reason for small rejoicing. It was ice-cold, but even better, it was strong.
Meadows collapsed on a fat throw pillow, decorated with a radically vivid Panama mola, then gulped half the can before surrendering to curiosity and ripping open the brown envelope from the Miami Journal. During the breakneck ride from his desecrated home in the Grove to Terry’s place on Key Biscayne, Meadows had kept the envelope on his lap, fingering it nervously. He could feel the stiff photographic paper inside. Clara Jackson had come through, somehow raiding the Journal’s sacrosanct photo morgue for a picture.
Now Meadows looked at it and could hardly be silent. His sketch had been accurate indeed. The man in the photograph, beaming so self-consciously at a chamber of commerce spaghetti luncheon, was the silky man at Mono’s wake. The man with the yellow rose.
José Bermúdez.
Meadows felt vindicated. The conversation at the funeral home could not have been misinterpreted. Sandy had died because of this man. Mono had merely been the bullet; Bermúdez had been the trigger.
A sheaf of Xerox-copied newspaper clippings accompanied the photograph. Meadows could hear Clara Jackson’s chirpy voice as she stood over the machine, watching it spit out copies: Surely this will convince the paranoid architect that he’s wrong.
Meadows finished off his Bavaria and cracked open another can, the last one. Then he sat down at the kitchen table to read about the extraordinary, esteemed Señor Bermúdez.…
“Banker José Luis Bermúdez was honored Friday by the Greater Miami Chamber of Commerce when it presented the exile leader with its annual Statesman’s Award for his service on behalf of South Florida’s Latin business community.…”
Clip date: December 17, 1979. The article ran beneath the photograph now on Terry’s kitchen table. The biographical material was impressive, and the weight of it afflicted Meadows with new doubt.
Bermúdez was forty-four years old, born in the Matanzas Province east of Havana. He was the son of a wealthy landowner who had turned acres of free-growing royal palms into acres of rich and highly prized Cuban coffee; who had given the best of everything to his three sons, his wife, his friends; who had panicked like a race horse in a burning barn after young Señor Castro had come down from the Sierra Maestra to take Havana. Bermúdez, his wife and two of the boys had made it to Miami with more of the family money than was thought possible in those frantic days of flight. The third son, Luis, had died in the revolution.
A feature article, written for the Journal’s Spanish editions and translated rather clumsily for Anglos, told more of the banker’s history. How José’s father grew dim and withdrawn now in Miami’s