James Hall - Miami Noir

“No,” I say. “You’re looking for something about you — or you and her. Which one are you? Robineau or the vet?”

“I’m...” He sits in the other armchair across from me. “Cash Pryor. As you say, the vet.”

“Lucas turned into Cash?”

“No one ever called me Lucas much,” he says. “Newspapers always use your formal name. I got the nickname as a boy because other kids were always hitting me up for small loans and I was generous. You wouldn’t think it now, I realize.”

“You killed the second husband,” I say.

Sadly, he says, “And I killed the horse.”

“Well, then you served your time,” I say. “Can’t be tried twice. So it wasn’t that she had evidence. It was—”

He pulls out a gun.

“Oh jeez,” I say. “I’ve got one too.” And I show him my Glock. “Yours looks rusty.” It’s a Jennings J25, dregs of the gun world, and the finish is gone on it. “Ever shot it?”

He shakes his head and lowers the gun, some. His hand is trembling so much I’m afraid he’s going to shoot me accidentally. Those pistols jam a lot, but every once in a while one manages to emit a bullet.

I say, “Put it down and let’s talk.”

He sets it on the broad arm of the chair. I lay mine on my thigh, where I can get to it if needed.

He says, “You were expecting me.”

I nod. Though to be honest, I’d also worked out a theory where Hank Kussrow was Robineau.

I say, “I figure you killed her. Are you looking for something you touched when you were there before? Something that might have your fingerprints that you couldn’t explain? Maybe this?” I point to the picture in the Lucite frame, on the table beside me. “Did you expect Sharon to have it?”

“You don’t understand,” he says.

“I probably don’t. Let’s go back. What was it all for? You killed Dorsett for her?”

“She needed him dead.”

“Oh,” I say. “Did she ask you?”

“She... implied it.”

“Why’d she need him dead?”

“Dorsett was a bully. And a killer. Let me explain how it was. She told me that he’d seen her when she and her first husband came to Miami Beach. And he wanted her, naturally. But she was married with a child. And then someone ran her husband down and she was a widow, so when Dorsett courted her, she married him. It was only later — years later — that she found out he’d hired the man who hit her husband. This is what she told me, you understand?”

“Dorsett hired Robineau?”

“She said that when she expressed a desire to leave Dorsett, he told her so and frightened her.”

“And Robineau, what happened to him?”

“She said Dorsett took him out on his yacht and drowned him, in the Bahamas somewhere. And let it be thought he’d moved away, west. This was right after Hogarth was killed, she said.”

“More death by transportation,” I say.

“It’s not funny.”

“So she told you all this, and you decided you could take him on, this brute?”

“I was thinking about it.”

“She was worth killing for?”

“You should have seen her. At the racetrack, in blue linen. She was a dream. Then Dorsett asked me whether I could make it seem that the horse was having problems, to jigger the odds. So I did that, God help me. He was, as she said, a bully — he bullied me, never knowing what I was thinking. I stopped doping Panama Sailor in time for him to run. That was the plan. But on the day I gave the horse a little something else, Dorsett handled him rough and the horse knocked him down and I... helped.”

“And then you didn’t tell.”

“I kept my mouth shut for her,” he says.

“Did she ask you to?”

“We only had a moment,” he says. “At the stables. She came in after he was dead. They didn’t let her see his body, but then she asked to see the horse, and I was in with Panama Sailor, trying to fix his leg, but it was no good. She said, ‘Thank you, Cash,’ and it might have been thank you for the horse, but... And after that, we couldn’t speak again because the cops had me.”

“You hadn’t slept with her?”

“Oh,” he says. “I had. Twice. She was a dream, I told you. Your loveliest, dirtiest dream.”

I’m thinking that’s a quote from somewhere, but I’m not

“Did you figure if you killed him, you’d keep her?”

“I didn’t think that much. I felt she was a creature in trouble and I would get her out.

“The police took me in right after I put the horse away, and all I could do was try to keep her out of the story.”

“You’re an idealist,” I say. “You could have cut a deal and given her to the law.”

“I was an idealist,” he says. “Certainly so.”

“And when you got out of prison, you didn’t look her up?”

“No,” he says, “I stayed away.”

“Why?”

He shakes his head. “Well, prison... broke me, I suppose you’d say. I didn’t do well there. I loathe violence.” He clears his throat, his sandy old voice wearing thin. “When I got out, I hated that I’d killed and I didn’t want to see her or for her to see me. I didn’t try to find her, I didn’t want to know where she was. I couldn’t earn a living as a vet, just did odd jobs and picked up money and lived close to the ground and tried to... recuperate. You could live cheaply here then. I’ve been over ten years in Palm Grove. I’m just down the street from Alex. It cost very little, till lately. I live in a building they’re about to redo now, but for years it was full of poor folks. Nobody bothered us, Archie and me, because we didn’t have anything worth taking, as you said this morning about your house. When you were implying you had something I’d want.”

I ignore that. “Okay, so you steered clear of her. Then?”

“About a month ago, we did a job at the Delphi, a small estate. You weren’t there. Just Jeff and Hank. I was lugging stuff out for Alex. And she saw me. She caught me outside when I was alone putting things in my van and... asked me to come see her.”

“Did you recognize her?”

“She hadn’t changed nearly as much as I had. And she recognized me.” He clears his throat. “Like I say, prison broke me. But I did learn to think more — what would be the word — more cunningly . And I had thought about her story.” He gives a dry smile. “Often. As you can imagine. It was too...”

“What?”

“I kept seeing patterns. I killed the second husband, somebody killed the first. The guy who killed the first got killed — at least that’s what she’d said. It couldn’t be simpler, I felt. I did it for her. So maybe the others did it for her.”

“Wait. Robineau killed Hogarth for her?”

“Could have been. Could have been just because Dorsett paid him, but I looked up what I could find and he hadn’t been a bad guy, just a silly rich drunk. So I think he may have done it for her, yes sir.”

“And Dorsett killed Robineau?”

“So she said. For her, I think. I mean, at her behest. Possibly.”

“And you killed Dorsett.”

“Indisputably. So, if you pay attention to the pattern, someone ought to kill me. I’m the loose end. She could have been looking for me, but I would have been hard to find. I’d entered the cash economy. I have no phone. And maybe she just didn’t have a man to sic on me.”

“Well, maybe,” I say.

“I don’t have a lot of evidence. But she said she was happy to see me. Now, should she have been happy?”

“Well, you’d been a stand-up guy and gone to jail without ratting on her. You might have been her idea of a hero,” I say, though I know he’s right.

He shakes his head. “But I could still have sent her to prison. Now.”

“Let me get this straight: She knew you were going to kill the husband ahead of time?”