“Then we stick to the fired ones,” he said, and in just a few moments he had printed out a list with, as he had 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 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, any time you predict failure you have an excellent chance of being right.

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 little 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 on to 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 inaudibly.

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 at us. “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 Orange Bowl?”

“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.

Deborah jumped wildly to one side, then recovered her professional dignity and stepped back in front of Meza, although at a safe distance. “All right” she said. “We'll do it here.”

“Oh, yeah” Meza said, “let's do it here.” And flipping his finger on the joystick he made the chair pump a few inches forward and backward several times. “Yeah baby, yeah baby, yeah baby” he said.

Deborah had clearly lost control of the interview with her suspect, which the cop handbook frowns upon. She jumped off to the side again, completely flustered by Meza's fake chair sex, and he followed her around in his chair. “Come on, mama, give it up!” he called in a voice somewhere between a chortle and a wheeze.

I'm sorry if it sounds like I am feeling something, but I sometimes get just a little twinge of sympathy for Deborah, who really does try very hard. And so, as Meza whirled his chair in a stuttering arch of mini-lurches at Debs, I stepped behind him, leaned down to the back of his chair, and pulled the power cable off the batteries. The whine of the engine stopped, the chair thumped to a halt, and the only remaining sound was a siren in the distance and the small clatter of Meza's finger rattling against the joy stick.

At its best, Miami is a city of two cultures and two languages, and those of us who immerse ourselves in both have learned that a different culture can teach us many new and wonderful things.

I have always embraced this concept, and it paid off now, as Meza proved to be wonderfully creative in both Spanish and English. He ran through an impressive list of standards, and then his artistic side took full flower and he called me things that had never before existed, except possibly in a parallel universe designed by Hieronymus Bosch. The performance took on an added air of supernatural improbability because Meza's voice was so weak and husky, but he never allowed that to slow him. I was frankly awed, and Deborah seemed to be too, because we both simply stood and listened until Meza finally wore down and tapered off with, “Cocksucker.”

I stepped around in front and stood beside Debs. “Don't say that” I said, and he just glared at me. “It's so pedestrian, and you're much better than that. What was that part, “turd-sucking bag of possum vomit?” Wonderful.” And I gave him his due with some light applause.

“Plug me in, perro de puta,” he said. “We see how funny you are then.”

“And have you run us over with that sporty SUV of yours?” I said. “No thanks.”

Deborah lurched up out of her stunned appreciation of the performance and back into her alpha role. She pushed me to one side and resumed her stone-faced staring at Meza. “Mr Meza, we need you to answer a couple of questions, and if you refuse to cooperate I will take you down to the station and ask them there.”

“Do it, cunt” he said. “My lawyer would love that.”

“We could just leave him like this” I suggested. “Until someone comes along and steals him to sell for scrap metal.”

“Plug me in, you sack of lizard pus.”

“He's repeating himself”1 said to Deborah. I think we're wearing him down.”

“Did you threaten to kill the director of the Tourist Board?” Deborah asked.

Meza started to cry. It was not a pretty sight; his head flopped nervelessly to one side and mucus drooled from his mouth and nose, joined the tears, and began to march across his face. “Bastards” he said. “They shoulda killed me.” He snuffled so weakly that it had no effect at all except for the thin wet noise it made. “Looka me, looka what they done” he said in his hoarse, husky voice, a croak with no edge to it.