“Whatever.”
“I’ll need to impound the truck,” the coroner said. “And this fancy toothpick machine.”
Garcia said he would have them both towed downtown.
The coroner stuck his head into the maw of the wood chipper and examined the blood-smeared blades. “There ought to be bullet fragments,” he said, “somewhere in this mess.”
Garcia said, “Hey, Sherlock, I told you what happened. I shot the asshole, okay? My gun, my bullets.”
“Al, don’t take all the fun out of it.” The man from the medical examiner reached into the blades of the wood chipper and carefully plucked out an item that the untrained eye would have misidentified as a common black woolly-bear caterpillar.
The coroner held it up for Al Garcia to see.
The detective frowned.”What, do I get a prize or something? It’s a sideburn, for Chrissakes.”
“Very good,” said the coroner.
Garcia flicked the soggy nub of his cigar into the bushes and went looking for George Graveline’s crew of tree trimmers. There were three of them sitting somberly in the backseat of a county patrol car. Al Garcia got in front, on the passenger side. He turned around and spoke to them through the cage. The men’s clothes smelled like pot. Garcia asked if any of them had seen what had happened, and to a one they answered no, they’d been on their lunch break. The officers from Internal Review had asked the same thing.
“If you didn’t see anything,” Garcia said, “then you don’t have much to tell the reporters, right?”
In unison the tree trimmers shook their heads.
“Including the name of the alleged victim, right?”
The tree trimmers agreed.
“This is damned serious,” said Garcia. “I don’t believe you boys would purposely obstruct a homicide investigation, would you?”
The tree trimmers promised not to say a word to the media. Al Garcia asked a uniformed cop to give the men a lift home, so they wouldn’t have to walk past the minicams on their way to the bus stop.
By this time, the ambulance was backing out, empty. Garcia knocked on the driver’s window. “ Where’s the guy you were working on?”
“Blunt head wound?”
“Right. Big blond guy.”
“Took off,” said the ambulance driver. “Gobbled three Darvocets and said so long. Wouldn’t even let us wrap him.”
Garcia cursed and bearishly swatted at a fresh-cut button-wood branch.
The ambulance driver said, “You see him, be sure and tell him he oughta go get a skull X-ray.”
“You know what you’d find?” Garcia said. “Shit for brains, that’s what.”
Reynaldo Flemm picked up an attractive young woman at a nightclub called Biscayne Baby in Coconut Grove. He took her to his room at the Grand Bay Hotel and asked her to wait while he ran the water in the Roman tub. Still insecure about his impugned physique, Reynaldo didn’t want the young woman to see him naked in the bright light. He lowered himself into the bath, covered the vital areas with suds, double-checked himself in the mirrors, then called for the young woman to join him. She came in the bathroom, stripped, and climbed casually into the deep tub. When Reynaldo tickled her armpits with his toes, the young woman politely pushed his legs away.
“So, what do you do?” he asked.
“I told you, I’m a legal secretary.”
“Oh, yeah.” When Reynaldo got semi-blitzed on screwdrivers, his short-term memory tended to vapor-lock. “You probably recognize me,” he said to the young woman.
“I told you already—no.”
Reynaldo said, “Normally my hair’s black. I colored it this way for a reason.”
He had revived the Johnny LeTigre go-go dancer disguise for his confrontation with Dr. Rudy Graveline. He had dyed his hair brown and slicked it straight back with a wet comb. He looked like a Mediterranean sponge diver.
“Imagine me with black hair,” he said to the legal secretary, who flicked a soap bubble off her nose and said no, she still wouldn’t recognize him.
He said, “You get TV, right? I’m Reynaldo Flemm.”
“Yeah?”
“From In Your Face.”
“Oh, sure.”
“Ever seen it?”
“No,” said the secretary, “but I don’t watch all that much television.” She was trying to be nice. “I think I’ve seen your commercials,” she said.