“Look,” Noel said with a thick Creole accent, “I give you a list of all who are fired for what, two years?”
“Two years is good,” I said. “If there aren’t too many.”
He shrugged, a task that somehow looked painful with his bony shoulders. “Less than a dozen,” he said. He smiled and added, “With Jo Anne, many more just quit.”
“Print the list,” I said. “Then we check their files for any unusual complaints or threats.”
“But also,” he said, “we have a number of independent contractors to design projects, no? And sometimes they do not get the bid, and who can say how unhappy they are?”
“But a contractor could always try again on the next project, right?”
Noel shrugged again, and the motion looked like he was endangering his ears with his too-sharp shoulders. “Per’aps,” he said.
“So unless it was some sort of final blowup, where the bureau said we would never ever use you under any circumstances, it’s not as likely.”
“Then we stick to the fired ones,” he said, and in just a few moments he had printed out a list with, as he said, less than a dozen names and Last Known Addresses on it—nine, to be exact.
Deborah had been staring out the window, but when she heard the printer whirring into action, she stalked over and leaned on the back of my chair. “What’ve you got?” she demanded.
I took the sheet of paper from the printer and held it up. “Maybe nothing,” I said. “Nine people who were fired.” She snatched the list from my hand and glared at it as if it was withholding evidence. “We’re going to cross-check it against their files,” I said. “To see if they made any threats.”
Deborah gritted her teeth, and I could tell she wanted to run out the door and down the avenue to the first address, but after all, it would certainly save time to prioritize them and put any real zingers at the head of the list. “Fine,” she said at last. “But hurry it up, huh?”
We did hurry it up; I was able to eliminate two workers who had been “fired” when Immigration had forced them out of the country. But only one name moved right to the top of the list: Hernando Meza, who had become obstreperous—that’s the word the file used—and had to be removed from the premises forcibly.
And the beauty part? Hernando had designed displays at airports and cruise terminals.
Displays, like what we had seen at South Beach and Fairchild Gardens.
“Goddamn,” Deborah said when I told her. “We got a hot one, right off the bat.”
I agreed that it looked worthwhile to stop and have a chat with Meza, but a
small and nagging voice was telling me that things are never this easy, that when you get a hot one right off the bat, you usually end up right back on the bat again—or dodging as the bat comes straight at your face.
And as we should all know by now, anytime you predict failure you have an excellent chance of being right.
NINE
HERNANDO MEZA LIVED IN A SECTION OF CORAL Gables that was nice, but not too nice, and so, protected by its own mediocrity, it hadn’t changed much over the last twenty years, unlike most of the rest of Miami. In fact, his house was only a little more than a mile from where Deborah lived, which practically made them neighbors. Unfortunately, that didn’t seem to influence either one of them into acting in a neighborly way.
It started right after Debs knocked on his door. I could tell by the way she was jiggling one foot that she was excited and really thought she might be onto something. And then when the door made a kind of mechanical whirring sound and opened inward to reveal Meza, Deborah’s foot stopped jiggling and she said, “Shit.” Under her breath, of course, but hardly inaudible.
Meza heard her and responded with, “Well, fuck YOU,” and just stared at her with a really impressive amount of hostility, considering he was in a motorized wheelchair and without the apparent use of any of his limbs, except possibly for a few fingers on each hand.
He used one of the fingers to twitch at a joystick on the bright metal tray attached to the front of his chair, and it lurched a few inches forward. “The fuck you want?” he said. “You don’t look smart enough to be Witnesses, so you selling something? Hey, I could use some new skis.”
Deborah glanced at me, but I had no actual advice or insight for her, so I simply smiled. For some reason, that made her angry; her eyebrows crashed together and her lips got very thin. She turned to Meza and, in a perfect Cold Cop tone of voice, she said, “Are you Hernando Meza?”
“What’s left of him,” Meza said. “Hey, you sound like a cop. Is this about me running laps naked at the Marlins game?”
“We’d like to ask you a couple of questions,” Debs said. “May we come in?”
“No,” he said.
Deborah already had one foot lifted, her weight leaning forward, anticipating that Meza, like everyone else in the world, would automatically let her come in. Now she lurched to a pause and then stepped back half a step. “Excuse me?” she said.
“Noooooo,” Meza said, drawing out the word as if he was talking to an idiot who didn’t understand the concept. “Noooo, you may not come in.” And he twitched a finger on the chair’s controls and the chair jerked toward us very aggressively.