Bad Monkey

“Sorry. Not our case.” Dr. Campesino was mindful of the blue crabs when she returned the orphaned arm to the cooler. “I’ll call you if we get something that looks like a match.”

Yancy was aware that the Miami-Dade medical examiner’s office sometimes assisted other jurisdictions in difficult cases. He was also aware that his boss hadn’t sent him to Miami to initiate a murder investigation.

“Can we call it an accident? I mean, if you had to guess.”

“Not without a more thorough exam,” said Dr. Campesino, peeling off her latex gloves, “which I’d be happy to do if we had an official request from Monroe County.”

“Which you won’t get.”

“Can I ask why?”

“I’ll tell you over a strictly platonic lunch.”

“Nope.”

“Fine,” Yancy said. “So what would you do if you were me?”

“I’d go back to Key West and advise Dr. Rawlings to pack the arm in his freezer. Then wait for someone to show up looking for a missing husband.”

“And what if nobody does? It’s a cold business when true love goes south. Take my word.”

“Can I ask you something? Did you bend his middle finger up?”

“God, no! They found it that way!” Yancy moved the arm aside as he pawed through the cooler in search of another mango Popsicle. “Dear Rosa, what kind of sick bastard do you take me for?”

The person responsible for Yancy leaving the Miami Police Department was a sergeant named Johnny Mendez, who at the time was working with the Crime Stoppers hotline. To augment his salary Mendez would recruit friends and relatives to call in with tips on crimes that had already been solved, providing detailed information that detectives already knew. Then Mendez would backdate the tip sheet and personally sign off on the reward money, half of which he took as a commission.

Yancy had discovered the scam when he’d read a Herald story about a bus driver who’d received forty-five hundred dollars from Crime Stoppers for providing “crucial information” leading to the arrest of a man who stuck up a pedicure salon in Little Havana. Yancy himself had busted the robber, with no guidance whatsoever from the general public. The suspect had helpfully dropped his fishing license at the crime scene, and two days later Yancy jumped him while he was waxing the hull of his Boston Whaler.

The bus driver who’d phoned in the bogus tip turned out to be a second cousin of Sergeant Mendez’s. One morning Yancy boarded the cousin’s bus and sat in the first row and opened a notebook. After thirty-three blocks the driver spilled the whole story. He said Sergeant Mendez was upset to have opened the newspaper and seen the item about the reward, and had punished him by pocketing all but a grand.

That night, after too many rum and Cokes, Yancy decided it would be fabulously clever to dial the Crime Stoppers number and report Sergeant Mendez for grand theft and embezzlement. Mendez wasn’t a big fan of irony, and in any case he’d been busy covering his tracks. Yancy was eventually accused by Internal Review of making up lies about a fellow officer and of trying to extort money from Crime Stoppers. Yancy’s position was weakened by the transcript of his phone call to the tip line, in which he suggested that a reward of fifty thousand dollars would be appropriate for the “courageous and upright deed” of exposing a crooked cop.

Yancy had delivered that line in a snarky and facetious tone, but the review board never got to hear the original tape, which had been mysteriously damaged by magnets while in Johnny Mendez’s possession. Suspended without pay, Yancy quickly ran out of money for his lawyer and had no choice but to resign from the department, in exchange for not being indicted. Sergeant Mendez denied all wrongdoing but was quietly reassigned to the K-9 division. Soon thereafter he was bitten in the groin by a Belgian shepherd trainee named Kong, and he required three operations, culminating in a scrotal graft from a Brahma steer.

Mendez retired from the police force on full disability at age forty-four. He lived on Venetia Avenue in Coral Gables. Parked in the driveway was a silver Lexus coupe undoubtedly purchased with Crime Stoppers proceeds. One solution to the severed-arm dilemma would be for Yancy to plant the limb in Mendez’s car, perhaps strung to the rosary that hung from the rearview mirror. Yancy discarded the idea—if by some chance Mendez overcame his panic and called the police, the arm would end up at the county morgue, where it inevitably would be traced back to Yancy based on information provided by the exquisite Dr. Campesino.

Over the years Yancy had conjured many irrational revenge fantasies about Johnny Mendez. For a time he considered seducing Mendez’s wife until he realized he’d be doing Mendez a huge favor. Mrs. Mendez was an unbearable harridan. Her features were a riot of futile surgeries, and she laughed like a mandrill on PCP. Yancy once bought her a margarita at the InterContinental, and for two solid weeks he’d slept with the lights on.