“You must be very proud,” Keyes said.
This place never changed. The hum and clang of the electronic doors were enough to split your skull, but the mayhem in the lobby was worse, worse even than the cell blocks. The lobby was crawling with bitter, bewildered souls, each on the sad trail of a loser. Girlfriends, ex-wives, mothers, brothers, bondsmen, lawyers, pimps, parole officers.
And me, Keyes thought. The public defender’s office had tried to make the case sound interesting, but Keyes figured it had to be a lost cause. There’d be some publicity, which he didn’t need, and decent money, which he did. This was a big-time case, all right. Some nut hacks up the president of the Chamber of Commerce and dumps him in the bay—just what South Florida needed, another grisly murder. Keyes wondered if the dismemberment fad would ever pass.
From the governor on down, everybody had wanted this one solved fast. And the cops had come through.
“Mr. Keyes!” The sergeant’s voice echoed from a cheap speaker in the ceiling.
Keyes signed the log, clipped on a plastic visitor’s badge, and walked through three sets of noisy iron gates. A trusty accompanied him into an elevator that smelled like an NFL locker room. The elevator stopped on the fifth floor.
Ernesto Cabal, alias Little Ernie, alias No-Way Jose, was sitting disconsolately on the crapper when the trusty opened the cell for Brian Keyes.
Ernesto held out a limp, moist hand. Keyes sat down on a wooden folding chair.
“You speak English?”
“Sure,” Ernesto said. “I been here sixteen years. By here I mean here, dees country.” He pulled up his pants, flushed the John, and stretched out on a steel cot. “They say I kill dees man Harper.”
“That’s what they say.”
“I dint.”
Ernesto was a small fellow, sinewy and tough-looking, except for the eyes. A lot of cons had rabbit eyes, but not this one, Keyes thought. Ernesto’s brown eyes were large and wet. Scared puppy eyes.
Keyes opened his briefcase.
“You a lawyer, Mr. Keyes?”
“Nope. I’m an investigator. I was hired by your lawyers to help you.”
“Yeah?”
“That’s right.”
“You’re a very young guy to be an investigator,” Ernesto said. “How old? Dirty, dirty-one?”
“Good guess.”
Ernesto sat up. “You any good?”
“No, I’m totally incompetent. A complete moron. Now I’ve got a question for you, chico. Did you do it?”
“I tole you. No.”
“Fine.” Keyes opened a manila file and scanned a pink tissue copy of the arrest report.
Ernesto leaned over for a peek. “I know what that is, man.”
“Good, then explain it.”
“See, I was driving dees car and the policeman, he pull me over on a routine traffic stop … “
Oh boy, Keyes thought, routine traffic stop. This guy’s been here before.
“ … and told me I’m driving a stolen be-hickle. And the next thin I know I’m in jail and dey got me charged with first-degree murder and robbery and everythin else.”
Keyes asked, “How did you come to be driving a 1984 Oldsmobile Delta 88?”
“I bought it.”
“I see. Ernesto, what do you do for a living?”
“I sell fruit.”
“Oh.”
“Maybe you see me at rush hour. On LeJeune Road. I sell fresh fruit in bags.”
Somewhere down the cell block another prisoner started to bang on the bars and scream that his TV was broken.
Keyes said, “Ernesto, how much does your very best bag of fruit sell for? Top-of-the-line?”
“Mangoes or cassavas?”
“Whatever. The best.”
“Maybe one dollar … oh, I see what you getting at. Okay, yeah, that’s right, I doan make much money. But I got some great buy on this Oldsmobile. You can’t believe it.”
‘Probably not.”
“I got it from a black guy.”
“For?”
“Two hundred bucks.”
Ernesto seemed to sense he was losing ground. “Some buy. I dint believe it either.”
Keyes shrugged. “I didn’t say I didn’t believe you. Now, according to the police, you were arrested on Collins Avenue on Miami Beach. You ran a series of red lights.”
“It was tree in the morning. No one was out.”
“Where did you meet the man who sold you the car?”