Chapter 20
THE HOSTAGE RESCUE TEAM arrived at Tamiami Airport in Florida at four-thirty on Christmas afternoon. Secretary Jerrold Goldberg had arranged for us to fly down in a private jet supplied by the Air Force.
A Miami police escort rushed us to the FBI office on Collins Avenue, near the Fountainbleu and other Gold Coast hotels. The Bureau office was only six blocks from the Western Union office where Soneji had sent the telegram.
Had he known that? Probably he had. That was how his mind seemed to work. Soneji was a control freak. I kept jotting down observations on him. There were already twenty pages in a notepad I kept in my jacket. I wasn’t ready to write a profile of Soneji since I had no information about his past yet. My notes were filled with all the right buzzwords, though: organized, sadistic, methodical, controlling, perhaps hypomanic.
Was he watching us scurry around Miami now? Quite possibly he was. Maybe in another disguise. Was he remorseful about Michael Goldberg’s death? Or was he entering a state of rage?
Private lines of emergency switchboard operators had already been set up at the FBI office. We didn’t know how Soneji would communicate from here on. Several Miami police officers were added to the team now. So were another two hundred agents from the Bureau’s large force in southern Florida. Suddenly, everything was rush, rush, rush. Hurry up and wait.
I wondered if Gary Soneji had any real idea about the state of chaos he was creating as his deadline approached. Was that part of his plan, too? Was Maggie Rose Dunne really okay? Was she still alive?
We would need some proof before the final exchange would be approved. At least we would ask Soneji for physical proof. M.R. fine so far. Trust me, he’d said. Sure thing, Gary.
Bad news followed us down to Miami Beach.
The preliminary autopsy report on Michael Goldberg had been faxed to the Miami Bureau office. A briefing was held immediately after we arrived, in the FBI’s crisis room. We sat in a crescent arrangement of desks, each desk with its own video monitor and word processor. The room was unusually quiet. None of us really wanted to hear details about the little boy’s death.
A Bureau technical officer named Harold Friedman was chosen to explain the medical findings to the group. Friedman was unusual for the Bureau, to say the least. He was an Orthodox Jew, but with the build and look of a Miami beachboy. He wore a multicolored yarmulke to the autopsy briefing.
“We’re reasonably certain the Goldberg boy’s death was accidental,” he began in a deep, articulate voice. “It appears that he was knocked out with a chloroform spray first. There were traces of chloroform in his nasal passages and throat. Then he was injected with secobarbital sodium, probably about two hours later. Secobarbital is a strong anesthetic. It also has properties which can inhibit breathing.
“That seems to be what happened in this case. The boy’s breathing probably became irregular, then his heart and breathing stopped altogether. It wasn’t painful if he remained asleep. I suspect that he did, and that he died in his sleep.
“There were also several broken bones,” Harold Friedman went on. In spite of the beachboy appearance, he was somber and seemed intelligent in his reporting. “We believe that the little boy was kicked and punched, probably dozens of times. This had nothing to do with his death, though. The broken bones and ‘dents’ on the skin were inflicted after the boy was dead. You should know that he was also sexually abused after the time of death. He was sodomized, and ripped during the act. This Soneji character is a very sick puppy,” Friedman offered as his first bit of editorializing.
This was also one of the few real specifics we had about Gary Soneji’s pathology. Evidently, he had flown into an angry rage when he discovered that Michael Goldberg was dead. Or that something about his perfect plan wasn’t so perfect after all.
Agents and policemen shifted from buttock to buttock in their seats. I wondered if the frenzy with Michael Goldberg had a calming or inciteful effect on Soneji. More than ever, I worried about the chances Maggie Rose had to survive.
The hotel we were staying at was directly across the street from the Bureau branch office. It wasn’t much by Miami Beach gold standards, but it did have a large terraced pool on the ocean side.
Around eleven, most of us had knocked off for the night. The temperature was still in the eighties. The sky was full of bright stars, and an occasional jetliner arriving from the North.
Sampson and I strolled across Collins Avenue. People must have thought the Lakers were in town to play the Miami Heat.
“Want to eat first? Or just drink ourselves numb?” he asked me midway across the avenue.
“I’m already pretty numb,” I told Sampson. “I was thinking about a swim. When in Miami Beach?”
“You can’t get a Miami Beach tan tonight.” He was rolling an unlit cigarette between his lips.
“That’s another reason for a night swim.”
“I’ll be operating in the lounge,” Sampson said as we branched off in the lobby. “I’ll be the one drawing the pretty women.”
“Good luck,” I called to him. “It’s Christmas. I hope you get a present.”
I got into a bathing suit, and wandered out to the hotel pool. I’ve come to believe that the key to health is exercising, so I exercise every day, no matter where I am. I also do a lot of stretching, which can be done anytime, anywhere.
The big swimming pool on the ocean side was closed, but that didn’t stop me. Policemen are notorious for jaywalking, double-parking, rule-breaking in general. It’s our only perk.
Someone else had the same idea. Somebody was swimming laps so smoothly and quietly that I hadn’t noticed until I was walking among the deck chairs, feeling the cool wetness under my feet.
The swimmer was a woman, in a black or dark blue swimsuit. She was slender and athletic, with long arms and longer legs. She was a pretty sight on a not-so-pretty day. Her stroke looked effortless, and it was strong and rhythmic. It seemed her private place, and I didn’t want to disturb it.
When she made her turn, I saw that it was Jezzie Flanagan. That surprised me. It seemed out of character for the Secret Service supervisor.
I finally climbed down very quietly into the opposite end of the pool and started my own laps. It was nothing beautiful or rhythmic, but my stroke gets the job done, and I can usually swim for a long time.
I did thirty-five laps easily. I felt as if I was loosened up for the first time in a few days. The cobwebs were beginning to go away. Maybe I’d do another twenty, then call it a night. Or maybe have a Christmas beer with Sampson.
When I stopped for a quick blow, Jezzie Flanagan was sitting right there on the edge of a lounger.
A fluffy white hotel towel was thrown casually over her bare shoulders. She was pretty in the moonlight over Miami. Willowy, very blond, bright blue eyes staring at me.
“Fifty laps, Detective Cross?”
She smiled, in a way that revealed a different person from the one I’d seen at work over the past few days. She seemed much more relaxed.
“Thirty-five. I’m not exactly in your league,” I said to her. “Not even close. I learned my stroke at the downtown Y.”
“You persevere.” She kept her smile turned on nicely. “You’re in good shape.”
“Whatever my stroke is called, it sure feels good tonight. After all those hours cooped up in that room. Those boxy little windows that don’t open.”
“If they had big windows, all anybody would think about is escaping to the beach. They’d never get any work done anywhere in the state of Florida.”
“Are we getting any work done?” I asked Jezzie.
She laughed. “I had a friend who believed in the ‘doing the best you can’ theory of police work. I’m doing the best I can. Under impossible circumstances. How about you?”
“I’m doing the best I can, too,” I said.
“Praise the Lord.” Jezzie Flanagan raised both her arms joyously. Her exuberance surprised me. It was funny, and it felt good to laugh for a change. Real good. Real necessary.
“Under the circumstances, I’m doing the best I can,” I added.
“Under the circumstances, praise the Lord!” Jezzie raised her voice again. She was funny, or it was late, or both of the above.
“You going to catch a bite?” I asked her. I wanted to hear her thoughts about the case. I hadn’t really talked to her before.
“I’d like to eat something,” she answered. “I’ve skipped two meals already today.”
We agreed to meet up in the hotel’s dining room, which was one of those slow-spinning affairs on the top floor.
She changed in about five minutes, which I found impressive. Baggy tan trousers, a V-necked T-shirt, black Chinese slippers. Her blond hair was still wet. She’d combed it back, and it looked good that way. She didn’t wear makeup, and didn’t need to. She seemed so different from the way she acted on the job—much looser and at ease.
“In all honesty and fairness, I have to tell you one thing.” She was laughing.
“What’s the one thing?”
“Well, you’re a strong but really clunky swimmer. On the other hand, you do look good in a bathing suit.”
Both of us laughed. Some of the long day’s tension began to drain away.
We were good at drawing each other out over beers and a snack. A lot of that was due to the peculiar circumstances, the stress and pressure of the past few days. It’s also part of my job to draw people out, and I like the challenge.
I got Jezzie Flanagan to admit that she’d once been Miss Washington, D.C., back when she was eighteen. She’d been in a sorority at the University of Virginia, but got kicked out for “inappropriate behavior,” a phrase that I loved.
As we talked, though, I was surprised that I was telling her much more than I’d expected to. She was easy to talk to.
Jezzie asked about my early days as a psychologist in Washington. “It was mostly a bad mistake,” I told her, without getting into how angry it had made me, still made me. “A whole lot of people didn’t want any part of a black shrink. Too many black people couldn’t afford one. There are no liberals on the psychiatrist’s couch.” She got me to talk about Maria, but only a little bit. She told me how it was to be a woman in the ninety-percent macho-male Secret Service. “They like to test me, oh, about once a day. They call me ‘the Man.’” She also had some entertaining war stories about the White House. She knew the Bushes and the Reagans. All in all, it was a comfortable hour that went by too quickly.
Actually, more than an hour had passed. More like two hours. Jezzie finally noticed our waitress hovering all by her lonesome near the bar. “Shoot. We are the last ones in this restaurant.”
We paid our bill and got on the local elevator down from the spinning-top restaurant. Jezzie’s room was on the higher floor. She probably had a view of the ocean, too. From her suite.
“That was real nice,” I said at her stop. I think that’s a snappy line out of a No?l Coward play. “Thanks for the company. Merry Christmas.”
“Merry Christmas, Alex.” Jezzie smiled. She tucked her blond hair behind her ear, which was a tic of hers I’d noticed before. “That was nice. Unfortunately, tomorrow probably won’t be.”
Jezzie pecked my cheek, and went off to her room. ‘I’m going to dream about you in swimsuits,” she said as the elevator doors closed.
I went down four more floors, where I took my Christmas cold shower, alone in my Christmas hotel room. I thought about Jezzie Flanagan. Dumb fantasies in a lonely Miami Beach hotel room. We sure weren’t going anywhere together, but I liked her. I kind of felt that I could talk to her about anything. I read some more about Styron’s bout with depression, until I could sleep. I had some dreams of my own.