Naked Came the Manatee

The man next to him turned in surprise. "Fidel, Comandante en jefe, with all due respect, are you crazy? To Miami? How would you go?"

"The way I went before. Incognito."

"You mean the Lubavitch rabbi suit?"

"Don't be stupid. You expect me to wear that long black coat in the tropics? And you can forget about the fur hat."

"That's precisely my point. So what does that leave?"

Fidel's eyes shone. "It leaves the people. We'll do as we just did in the Big Manzana. By day, we'll stay in Overtown, or in Liberty City. Whatever. I'll shave my beard. By night, we'll blend. Find out the name of that Chinese restaurant I heard about in South Beach, the one with the transvestite waiters. I particularly want to see the one they call Shelley Novak. I always admired Kim Novak. For a gringa, she was very Cuban. You couldn't see the mustache, but you knew it was there."

Fidel Castro waved his hand. "But the most important thing is, what shall I tell El Maniz about the missing cargo? Save me from these gringos with their missions. If Senor Peanut wants to get away from his wife, tell him to get a divorce. Involving himself in complicated matters of state… " He reached for a cigar. "If we could somehow put him together with the one who won't leave me in peace, what a pair, no?"

Jake Lassiter entered the windowless, brightly lit morgue. His swollen knee hurt. He tried not to limp. Overhead, a buzzing fluorescent was starting to go. Jake didn't know how Britt did it. He could never get used to the smell of formaldehyde or the partially masked odor of rotting flesh.

In the center of the room, Britt and Fay stood beside a metal table where a waxen cadaver lay over a trough. The women were talking to a medical examiner wearing steel mesh gloves, who was weighing a liver on a scale.

Jake brightened; the pain in his knee subsided. Attractive women and the pursuit of truth were not mutually exclusive and it was good to hone one's skills.

Fay heard him first. "Jake is coming," she said. "He's like the crocodile in Peter Pan. "

"I never saw the movie," said Britt. "I was too busy hating my mother."

Jake strode toward the women, then stopped abruptly, legs spread apart like the Colossus of Rhodes. He averted his eyes from the fluids running down the trough of the metal table, looked up instead at the buzzing neon light. "That's the second time you stood me up, Britt." Getting no response, he dropped his voice. It was low and husky. Women liked its sound. "You here to find a match for the head?"

Fay turned away from the medical examiner, spoke into her chest. "Heads," she mumbled. "At least there appear to be two."

Jake turned on his high-voltage Jake Lassiter laser beam stare. "No kidding?"

"But that's not why we're here. There's more."

"More heads?"

Fay's eyes glistened. "This is no time to kid around. Phil is missing."

"I hope you'd worry about me if I was missing."

"It's a human rights thing, Jake. It isn't a contest. As far as I'm concerned, you and Phil are both ancient history, so don't ask me the question you always ask, the one-to-ten scale. The answer is, as I've told you before, even when it's bad it's good."

They left the morgue after they had been assured by the medical examiner that although there were hip joints and quarter rounds washing up daily on the shores of Baker Haulover, so far there were no bodies without heads.

Jake decided on a positive approach. "We don't need the bodies. Let's work with what we have. And what we have is a couple of heads that look like Castro. Are they really Castro? Who knows? We need an ID on at least one of the heads. You can do it with photographs or dental records if you can get them, but a positive nail takes DNA."

Fay nodded her head. "We need to get an expert. Does anyone know Barry Scheck?"

"I met him once," said Jake. "At a Bar convention. It was at a plenary session on prokaryotes and nucleopeptides. But I doubt he'd remember me."

Britt fished something out of her memory. "You know Pupi Alvarez, the TV anchor? Pupi has a cousin by marriage, her name is Lilia something. According to Pupi, Lilia had a thing with Castro when she was young. She was a singer, played the Nacional Hotel before the Revolution. She met up with some of Castro's people, they took her into the mountains. Lilia didn't come down for two years. And get this, they said she kept a lock of Castro's hair."

Fay wrinkled her nose. "I thought only santeros did that. Why would she keep his hair?"

"It's a trophy thing."

Jake hooked his thumb into his belt. "You think she still has it?"

"Only way to find out," said Britt. "I'll put in a call to Pupi. Find out where she lives."