Charles Willeford_Hoke Moseley 01 Read online

  “I’m new on the beat,” Violet Nygren said, as she introduced herself. “I’ve only been in the state attorney’s office since I finished up at the UM Law School last June. But I’m willing to learn, Sergeant Moseley.”

  Hoke grinned. “Fair enough. This is my partner, Sergeant Henderson. If you’re an attorney, Miss Nygren, where’s your briefcase?”

  “I’ve got a tape recorder in my purse,” she said, holding up her leather drawstring bag.

  “I was kidding. I’ve got a lot of respect for lady lawyers. My ex-wife had one, and I’ve been paying half my salary for alimony and child support for the last ten years.”

  “I haven’t been on a homicide up to now,” she said. “My caseloads so far have been mostly muggings and holdups. But, as I said, I’m here to learn, Sergeant.”

  “This may not be a homicide. That’s why we wanted someone from the state attorney’s office to come down with Doc Evans. We hope it isn’t. We’ve had enough this year as it is. But that’ll be up to you and Doc Evans to decide.”

  “That’s awfully deferential, for you, Hoke,” Doc Evans said. “What’s bothering you?”

  “Here’s what happened. The body under the blanket’s a Hare Krishna.” Hoke looked at his opened notebook. “His name’s Martin Waggoner, and his parents, according to that other Krishna over there, live in Okeechobee. He came down to Miami nine or ten months ago, joined the Krishnas, and they both reside in the new Krishna ashram out on Krome Avenue in the East ’Glades. These two have been working the airport for about six months, their regular assignment. The airport security people know them, and they’ve been warned a couple of times about bothering the passengers. The dead man had more than two hundred dollars in his wallet, and the other Krishna’s got about one-fifty. That’s how much they’ve begged out here since seven A.M.” Hoke looked at his wristwatch. “It’s only twelve-forty-five now, and the Krishna over there said they usually take in about five hundred a day between them.”

  “Pretty good money.” Violet Nygren raised her pale eyebrows. “I wouldn’t have guessed they collected so much.”

  “The security people said there’re two more Krishna teams working the airport besides this one. We haven’t notified the commune, and we haven’t called the Krishna’s parents up in Okeechobee, yet.”

  “You haven’t told us a hell of a lot, either,” Doc Evans said.

  “Our problem, Doc, is witnesses. There were maybe thirty witnesses, all in line at Aeroméxico, but they took the flight to Mérida. We managed to snag these two boys over there”—Hoke pointed to the Georgians, who looked to be in their forties—“but only because the uglier one on the right stole the victim’s wig. The airline employees behind the counter said they didn’t see anything. They were too busy, they said, and at check-in time I suppose they were. I got their names, and we can talk to them again later.”

  “Too bad,” Henderson said, “that we couldn’t find the lady with the Krishna Kricket.”

  “What’s a Krishna Kricket?” Violet Nygren asked.

  “They sell ’em out here in the bookshops and drugstores. It’s just a metal cricket with a piece of spring steel inside. You crick it at the Krishnas when they start bugging you. The noise usually drives them away. There used to be a Krishna-hater out here who gave them away free, but he ran out of crickets or money or ardor—I don’t know. Anyway, the two brothers over there said she was closest to the action, and she kept cricking her Kricket at the Krishna until he stopped screaming.”

  “How was he killed?” Doc Evans said. “Or do you want me to look at him now and tell you? I’ve got to get back to the morgue.”

  “That’s the point,” Hoke said. “He wasn’t actually killed. He bothered some guy wearing a leather coat. The guy bent his finger back and broke it. Then the guy walked away and disappeared. The Krishna went down on his knees, started screaming, and then, maybe five or six minutes later, he’s dead. The security men brought his body in here, and the PR man over there called Homicide. So there it is—the Krishna died from a broken finger. How about it, Miss Nygren? Is that a homicide or not?”

  “I never heard of anybody dying from a broken finger,” she said.

  “He must have died from shock,” Doc Evans said. “I’ll tell you for sure after I’ve had a look at him. How old is he, Hoke?”

  “Twenty-one—according to his driver’s license.”

  “That’s what I mean,” Doc Evans said, compressing his lips. “Young people today just can’t stand up to pain the way we could when we were younger. This one was probably malnourished and in lousy shape. The pain was unexpected and just too much for him. It hurts like hell to have your finger bent back.”

  “You’re telling me,” Violet Nygren said. “My brother used to do it to me when I was a kid.”

  “And if you bend it back all the way,” Doc Evans said, “until it breaks, it hurts like a son of a bitch. So he probably went into shock. Nobody gave him hot tea or covered him up with a blanket, and that was it. It doesn’t take very long to die from shock.”

  “About five or six minutes, the Peeples brothers say.”

  “That’s pretty fast.” Doc Evans shook his head. “Shock usually takes fifteen or twenty minutes. But I’m not making any guesses. For all I know, without examining the body, there could be a bullet hole in him.”

  “I don’t think so,” Bill Henderson said. “All I saw was the broken finger, and it’s broken clean off—just hanging there.”

  “If it was an accident,” Violet Nygren said, “it could still be simple assault. On the other hand, if the man in the leather jacket intended to kill him this way, knowing that there was a history of people dying from shock in the Krishna’s background, this could very well be Murder One.”

  “That’s really reaching for it,” Hoke said. “You’ll have to settle for manslaughter I think.”

  “I’m not so sure,” she continued. “If you shoot a man and he dies later on from complications caused by the bullet, even though he was barely wounded when shot, we change the charge to either Murder One or Murder Two. I’ll have to research this case, that’s all. We can’t do anything about it anyway until you catch the man in the leather jacket.”

  “That’s all we’ve got to go on,” Hoke said. “Leather jacket. We don’t even know the color of the jacket. One guy said he had heard it was tan; another guy said he’d heard gray. Unless the man comes forward by himself, we haven’t got a chance in hell of finding him. He could be on a plane for England or someplace at this minute.” Hoke took a Kool out of a crumpled package, lit it, took one drag, and then butted it out in a standing ashtray. “The body’s all yours, Doc. We’ve got all of the stuff out of his pockets.”

  Violet Nygren opened her purse and turned off her tape recorder. “I should tell my mom about this case,” she said. “When my brother used to bend my fingers back, she never did anything to him.” She laughed nervously. “Now I can tell her he was just trying to kill me.”

  3

  Frederick J. Frenger, Jr., who preferred to be called Junior instead of Freddy, was twenty-eight years old. He looked older because his life had been a hard one; the lines at the corners of his mouth seemed too deep for a man in his late twenties. His eyes were a dark shade of blue, and his untrimmed blond eyebrows were almost white. His nose had been broken and reset poorly, but some women considered him attractive. His skin was unblemished and deeply tanned from long afternoons spent in the yard at San Quentin. At five-nine, he should have had a slighter build, but prolonged sessions with weights, pumping iron in the yard, as well as playing handball, had built up his chest, shoulders, and arms to almost grotesque proportions. He had developed his stomach muscles to the point that he could stand, arms akimbo, and roll them in waves.

  Freddy had been given a sentence of five-to-life for armed robbery. The California Adult Authority had reduced the sentence to four years, fixing an earlier parole date for two years. After serving the two years, Freddy had been offered a paro
le, but he turned it down, preferring to do two more years and then get out of prison without any strings attached. He accepted the label in his jacket—the file folder that held his records in the warden’s office—which had him down as a career criminal. He knew that he would commit another crime as soon as he was released, and if he was on parole when he was caught, he would be returned to prison as a parole violator. Violating a parole could mean eight or even ten more years of prison before beginning the new sentence for whatever it was that he was caught doing after he got out.

  San Quentin is overcrowded, so there are not enough jobs for everyone and a man must earn a job. Freddy liked to work (when he worked), and he was efficient. Assigned, after several months of idleness, to kitchen duty, he had observed the operation closely. He had then written a ten-page memorandum to the warden, explaining in detail how the staff could be cut and the service improved if certain correction officers and prison chefs were removed and replaced. To Freddy’s surprise, he found himself back on the yard.

  His report, which would have earned a management major in college a B+, earned Freddy the enmity of several kitchen screws. These officers, with their solid links to the prisoner power structure, directed that Freddy be taught a lesson for his temerity. Two black prisoners cornered Freddy in the yard one afternoon and worked him over. At the yard captain’s hearing, they claimed that Freddy had jumped them for no reason and that they were merely attempting to defend themselves from his psychopathic, racist attack. Inasmuch as Freddy had tested out as a psychopath and sociopath (as had the two other prisoners), he was sent to the hole for six days for his unprovoked attack on these innocent inmates. The black yard captain also gave him a short lecture on racism.

  During the six dismal days in the hole, which included revocation of Freddy’s smoking privileges and reduction to bread and water with a plate of kidney beans every third day, Freddy reviewed his life and realized that altruism had been his major fault.

  Back when he had been a juvenile offender, he had been sent to the reform school at Whittier, where he had organized a sit-down strike in the dining hall in an effort to get seconds on Sunday desserts (rice pudding with raisins, of which Freddy was very fond). The campaign failed, and Freddy had stayed at Whittier for the full three years of his sentence.

  Again, at Ione, California, in the Preston Institute for Youthful Offenders, Freddy had extended himself, planning the escape of a boy named Enoch Sawyers. Enoch’s father, who had caught his son masturbating, had castrated the boy. Mr. Sawyers was a very religious man and considered masturbation a grievous offense to God. Mr. Sawyers was arrested, but because of his religious connections and the laudatory testimony of his minister, he had been sentenced to two years’ probation. But when young Enoch, only fifteen years old at the time, had recovered from his unelected surgery, he had become a neighborhood terror. Deprived of his testicles and taunted by his schoolmates, he had demonstrated his manhood almost daily by beating one or more of his tormentors half to death. He was fearless and could take incredible amounts of punishment without, apparently, noticing or caring how badly he was hurt.

  Finally, at seventeen, Enoch had been sentenced to Preston as an incorrigible menace to the peace of Fresno, California. At Preston, among some very hardened young prisoners, Enoch again felt compelled to prove his manhood by beating up on people. His technique was to walk up to someone—anyone—and slam a hard right to his fellow prisoner’s belly or jaw. He would continue to pummel his victim until the person either fought back or ran away from him.

  Enoch’s presence in the dormitory was unsettling to the other prisoners. Freddy, to solve the problem, had befriended him and worked out an escape plan, telling Enoch that he could prove his manhood to the authorities once and for all by escaping. Escaping from Preston was not so difficult, and Enoch, with Freddy’s help, got away easily. He was caught in Oakland four days later when he tried to beat up three Chicano beet-pullers and steal their truck. They overpowered him, kicked out his remaining front teeth, and turned him over to the police. Enoch told the officials at Preston that Freddy had planned his escape, so Freddy’s good time was revoked. Instead of eighteen months, Freddy spent three years there. Moreover, Freddy had also taken a severe beating as soon as Enoch was returned to Preston.

  In the hole at San Quentin, which was not altogether dark—a pale slice of light indicated the bottom of the door—Freddy thought hard about his life. His desire for the good of others had been at the root of his problems, making his own life worse instead of better. And he hadn’t really helped anyone else. He decided then to look out only for himself.

  He quit smoking. If your smoking privileges are revoked but you don’t smoke, the punishment is meaningless. Back in the yard, Freddy had quietly joined the jocks in the daily pumping of iron and had worked on his mind as well as his body. He read Time magazine every week and took out a subscription to the Reader’s Digest. He also gave up sex, trading his pudgy punk, a golden brown Chicano from East Los Angeles, for eight cartons of Chesterfields and 200 Milky Way candy bars. He then traded the Chesterfields (the favorite brand among black prisoners) and 150 of the Milky Ways for a single cell. He also made his peace with the prisoner power structure. He had turned selflessness to self-interest, learning the lesson that everyone must come to eventually: what a man gives up voluntarily cannot be taken away from him.

  Now Freddy was out. Because of his good behavior they had let him out after three years instead of making him serve the full four. They needed the space at San Quentin, and inasmuch as some two-thirds of the prisoners were classified as psychopaths, that could not really be held against him. On the day Freddy was released, the assistant warden had advised him not to return to Santa Barbara, but to leave California and find a new state.

  “That way,” the assistant warden said, “when they catch you again, which they will, it will at least be a first offense in that particular state. And bear in mind, Frenger, you were never very happy here.”

  The advice had been sound. After three successful muggings in San Francisco—with his powerful muscles, it was a simple matter to twist a man’s arm behind his back and ram his head into a wall—Freddy had put three thousand miles between himself and California.

  Freddy turned on the water in the tub and adjusted it for temperature. He undressed and read the information on the placard beside the corridor door. Checkout time was noon, which gave him twenty-four hours. He studied the escape diagram and what to do in case of fire, then took the room service menus into the bathroom. When the tub was filled, he turned off the faucet. He went back to the bar, filled a tall glass with ice and ginger ale, and got into the tub to read the menus.

  He glanced at the room service menu, and then studied the wine list. He didn’t know one wine from another. Vintage years meant nothing to him, but he was amazed at the prices. The idea of paying a hundred dollars for a bottle of wine, even with a stolen credit card, struck him as outrageous. The thought also made him cautious. He knew that as long as he did not buy anything that cost more than fifty dollars, most clerks would not call the 800 number to check on the status of the credit card. At least this was the usual policy. And in hotels, they usually didn’t get around to checking the card until the day you checked out. But he had taken a $135-a-day suite. Well, he wouldn’t worry about it, and as he thought about the mugging of Herman T. Gotlieb in the alley, he felt a little more secure. That was the safe thing about mugging gays; the police didn’t worry much about what happened to them. At the very least, Mr. Gotlieb had a bad concussion, and he would be a very confused man for some time.

  Freddy got out of the tub, dried himself with a gold bath sheet, and wrapped it around his waist. He needed a shave but had nothing to shave with; his face was clean but felt dirty with its blond stubble. He went through his stuffed eelskin wallet again. He had $79 in bills and some loose change. The San Franciscans he had mugged had carried very little folding money. He had seven credit cards, but he was going to n
eed some more cash.

  He put the stolen Cardin suitcase on the coffee table. It was locked. If there was a razor in the case he could shave. He didn’t have a knife—perhaps there were bar implements. Yes, a corkscrew. It took five minutes to jimmy the two locks. He opened the suitcase and licked his lips. This was always an exciting moment, like opening a surprise package or a grab bag. One never knew what one would find.

  It was all women’s stuff: nightgowns, skirts, blouses, slippers, and size 6 ½ shoes in knitted covers. There was a black silk cocktail dress, size seven, a soft blue cashmere sweater, size seven-eight, and a pair of fold-up Cardin sunglasses in a lizard case. The items were all expensive, but there was no razor; apparently, the young mother who had owned the suitcase didn’t shave her legs.

  Freddy dialed the bell captain and asked to speak with Pablo.

  “Pablo,” he said, when he got the bellman on the line, “this is Mr. Gotlieb up in seven-seventeen.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I’d like a girl sent up. A fairly small one, size seven or eight.”

  “How tall?”

  “I’m not sure. How tall are sevens and eights?”

  “They can run pretty tall, from five feet on up to maybe five-six or more.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense. How could one dress fit a woman five feet tall or five feet, six inches tall?”

  “I don’t know, Mr. Gotlieb, but women’s sizes run funny. My wife wears a size twenty-two hat. I wear a seven and a quarter, and my head’s a lot bigger than hers.”

  “All right. Just send me up a small one.”

  “For how long?”

  “I don’t know. What difference does it make?”

  “You’re still on nooner rates. I’ve got one small one for you now, but she gets off at five. That’s all I got now. Tonight, I can get you another one, even smaller.”

  “No. That’s okay. I won’t even need her till five.”