The Memory Killer Read Free Page A

nastiness in a drink. The black locust makes the target head home with cramps and muscle weakness, the datura makes him hallucinate like Timothy Leary squared, and this last stuff …”
    “Makes it impossible to call for help,” I said.
    Roy turned back to his desk and picked up the phone.
    “You’re tight with Vince Delmara, right?”
    I nodded. Vince was a senior investigator with the Miami-Dade County Police Department. We’d worked together on my first case in Florida last year, and I’d found Delmara a first-rate detective, old school, the kind to visit a crime scene just to sniff the air. We’d hit it off from the git-go.
    “Good,” Roy said. “Let Vince schmooze you through the transfer and it’ll go easy.”
    “You think?”
    He grinned. “Unless some honcho has a burr under his saddle, they’ll be delighted to pass the potato to us.”
     
    My partner in most operations was Ziggy Gershwin. I gave him a call and was outside his Little Havana apartment minutes later, waiting until a slender man with coal-black hair pushed from the door, jamming a scarlet shirt into tan chinos, his cream jacket hanging across his shoulder, a rolled tortilla in his mouth like a cigar. An ancient woman was walking a tan puff of dog down the sidewalk and Gershwin’s cordovan boat shoes leapt over the bewildered canine, earning an icy glare from the woman. I filled him in as I drove, as much as I knew.
    “
Oy caramba
, Big Ryde,” Gershwin said as he buttoned his cuffs. “That’s some crazy cocktail
.
”
    A few months back Ziggy Gershwin would have been wearing threadbare jeans, a T-shirt advertising a beer brand, and orange skate shoes, but becoming an active agent in the FCLE had upped his fashion game. The product of a Jewish father and Cuban mother, his full name was Ignacio Ruben Manolo Gershwin, and he’d been Iggy as a child. But a teacher had started calling the hyperactive, darting kid Ziggy, and it stuck.
    “Morningstar thinks Kemp received repeated and heavy doses of the tox mix, Zigs, maybe starting at a bar.”
    “What, we’re doing legwork for Miami-Dade?”
    “We’re appropriating the case. The Doc figures it’d take a psycho to sicken and weaken people, turn off their screams, then fill their head with hallucinations while he rapes them.”
    “No matter how lovely Señorita Morningstar may be, isn’t she a pathologist and not a—”
    “Heard it from Roy,” I said, cutting him off.
    I called and found Vince at his desk in MD’s headquarters and said we’d be by in minutes. He had two words:
Bring coffee.
He meant real brew, not the stuff cooked up at cop houses across the land, desiccated brown crumbles boiled into a bitterness no sugar could blunt. We stopped at a bodega and filled my large Zogirushi with righteous espresso thunder and were at MD in minutes.
    Vince Delmara was in a cluttered cubicle in the Homicide unit, his wingtips on his desk as he reviewed jai-alai scores in the
Miami Herald
. He looked up, saw us approaching, and folded the paper. Vince was medium height and slender and his dark complexion was marred with acne pocks, his black hair brushed straight back. His dark eyes were large and piercing and with his prize-sized proboscis Vince called to mind a thoughtful buzzard. He always dressed in dark suits, white shirts and neon-bright ties, capping the ensemble with a Dick Tracy-style fedora to enter the bright Miami sun, which he regarded with vampiric suspicion.
    I poured his ceramic mug full of caffeine and Vince’s toucan-sized beak sniffed. He drank, leaned back his head, moaned, then, as if his day had been re-booted, set his eyes on Gershwin and me. “Jesus … too much Scotch last night. I’m surprised I didn’t wake up wearing a fucking kilt.”
    “Your wife still make you stop and get a few pops before you come home?” Gershwin asked.
    He nodded. “Says it makes me easier to live with.”
    “She must have found you real easy to live with last night,”