Keyes asked, “What did happen to the legs?”
“The legs were removed after death occurred, probably so the body could be concealed in the suitcase. But it’s the way the legs were removed that’s so interesting.”
Keyes said, “Joe, are you doing this just to make me sick?”
“The legs weren’t just hacked off with an ax, which is the most efficient way,” said Dr. Allen, pausing to choose his words. “It appears from the wounds that Sparky’s legs might have been removed by a large animal. They might actually have been … twisted off.”
“God! By what, wild dogs?”
Dr. Allen shook his head somberly. “Judging from the bite pattern, it was no dog. It was something much bigger. Don’t ask me what, Brian, because I just don’t know.”
“Joe, you always brighten my day.”
“Happy hunting, my friend.”
Brian Keyes’s office was on the sixth floor of a dreary downtown bank building off SW Second Avenue, near the Miami River. The consulate of El Salvador was located down the hall, so most of the other tenants lived in perpetual fear of a terrorist attack and behaved accordingly. They all had chipped in to hire extra security guards for the lobby, but the security men had turned out to be professional burglars who one night looted the entire building of all IBM office machinery.
Brian Keyes was not affected by this crime because the only typewriter in his office was an old Olivetti portable, a leftover from his days of covering politics for the Miami Sun. The other items of potential value were an antique desk lamp and a telephone tape recorder, but the lamp was broken and the tape recorder was made in Korea so the burglars wanted no part of either.
The highlight of the office was a fifty-gallon salt-water aquarium, a going-away present from his friends at the newspaper. Keyes had erected it in the foyer, where a secretary ordinarily might have sat, and filled it with whiskered catfish that sucked the algae off the glass.
Except for the aquarium, the place was just as cramped, ratty, and depressing as Keyes had feared it would be. He was rarely there. Even when he had nothing to do, he’d find an excuse to leave the bank building and stroll around downtown. He had an answering service, and an electronic beeper that fit onto his belt. The beeper didn’t make Keyes feel particularly important; every shyster lawyer, dope dealer, and undercover agent in Dade County wore one. It was mandatory.
On the morning of December 5, Keyes was down at Bayfront Park, munching a sandwich and watching the tugboats, when the beeper on his belt went off loudly enough to wake a derelict two benches away.
Keyes found a pay phone and called his service. Al Garcia was trying to reach him. It was important. Keyes phoned Homicide.
“Meet me on the beach,” Garcia said. “The Flamingo Isles, near Sixty-eighth and Collins. Look for the cop cars out front.”
The Flamingo Isles was not a classic Miami Beach motel. There was nothing charming about the color (silt) or the architecture (Early Texaco). At this motel there were no striped canvas awnings, no wizened retirees chirping in the lobby, no lawn chairs lined up on the front porch, no front porch whatsoever. Basically the Flamingo Isles was a dive for pimps, chicken hawks, and hookers. Rooms cost ten dollars an hour, fifteen with porno cassettes. It was rumored that some of the vestibules were equipped with hidden movie cameras to secretly record the sexual antics of Florida tourists. It was not a good place for an innocent man, but Keyes was hopeful that this was where Sparky Harper had spent his final earthly moments. If so, it meant that Harper had likely died in some bizarre sexual accident and not at the larcenous hands of Ernesto Cabal.
Keyes goosed his little MG convertible across the causeway and made it to the motel in eighteen minutes flat. Al Garcia already was interviewing a Jamaican maid in the lobby. He kept hollering for an interpreter and the maid kept insisting in perfect English that she spoke perfect English, but Garcia wouldn’t believe her. He finally enlisted a black Miami Beach detective to take the maid’s statement, and went upstairs, Keyes in tow. They entered room 223.