I Don't Like Where This Is Going (9 page)

At six-thirty at the iConnect Café and Yoga Spa on Plumeria, we found two young waitresses asleep, their heads facedown on a table, their extravagant hair (aubergine and caramel) draped over the place mats, their arms in their laps. We cleared our throats. We coughed. Patience shook Aubergine awake. The girl wiped crust from her eyes and tapped her colleague on the elbow. Daisy and Dahlia, their name tags read. I asked for coffee with cream.

Daisy said, “How much cream?”

I said, “Make it blond.”

Patience ordered a latté.

The waitresses looked at each other. Dahlia said, “How do you make a latté?”

Patience said, “Do you really work here?”

Daisy said, “Yes.”

Patience said, “How do you get stoned so early in the morning?”

Dahlia said, “Busted.”

“Make that two coffees,” Patience said.

Another customer walked in, a man who had nicked himself shaving, whose hair was damp and slicked back, and whose tie was unknotted. I figured him for a lawyer who had to stand before a judge in two hours, to defend a predatory client whom he knew was guilty as sin, and he should not have stayed so late at his colleague's retirement party last night, but then he would not have met Saskia the intern, whom he'd recently left dead asleep at his condo, and whom he should give a wake-up call to in about fifteen minutes. He ordered a vegan scramble and a cleanse-and-detox smoothie. He opened his valise and took out his iPad.

Dahlia asked him if he'd like a boost with his wellness drink. Did she have a recommendation? She did. Bee pollen. He told her to go for it and went back to his scrolling.

Patience said, “How's Vegas?”

“Bay's enjoying it.” I told her about Mercedes Benz. Patience said she went to high school with a guy named Ford Falcon. She asked about Layla. Had we learned anything new? I told her about Layla's sister, the drug addict and prostitute.

The customer pulled a Dopp kit from his valise, stood, and asked Daisy, “Dondé esta el baño?”

“Por aquí.” She pointed down the hall.

Patience opened her journal and showed me a fortune cookie fortune she'd pasted on a page:
THIS BOOK SHOULD BE A BALL OF LIGHT IN ONE'S HAND.
“You're not worried at all?”

“About Venise.”

“Not yourself?”

“I've got Open Mike on speed dial.”

“Just be discreet. Don't spend a lot of time in public.”

“I'm here to see you and Venise.”

“Why do you suppose the urgency?”

“I'm her brother.”

“Whom she doesn't talk to.”

“Maybe she's had a change of heart.”

“Pun intended?”

Two bikers parked their Harleys out front, walked in, took off their gloves and their wraparound sunglasses, and sat at a table by the window. Gray ponytails, full gray beards, black boots, blue jeans, black T-shirts, black vests, leather vest extenders, red bandannas, black bi-fold wallets on metal chains, and holstered cell phones. They ordered earth-balance bagels and banana muffin smoothies, hold the boosts, thank you very much. The bulkier one announced that he had a urologist appointment at eleven. “Not looking forward.”

“Everything okay down there?” his friend said.

“Serviceable, but no longer maintenance-free.”

“Ouch.”

“Leaking some oil.”

“Loose plug, maybe.”

“What's on your agenda?”

“Building a gun cabinet for my grandson. Turns fourteen Friday.”

When their breakfast arrived, the bikers held hands across the table, bowed their heads, shut their eyes, and prayed.

Our suppositious lawyer told whomever it was he was speaking with on his cell phone that he was stuck in nightmarish traffic on 95. Some kind of horrific accident ahead. “They're pulling bodies from the wreck as we speak.”

I dropped Patience at Jaunts & Junkets Travel on Mangrove, drove to my empty house, parked down the block, and waited a bit.
My friend Red Soileau had been recently murdered in my front yard, and the people who did the killing, thinking Red was me, those who were not themselves dead or else in jail awaiting trial, might still be after their intended target. I let discretion be the better part of curiosity, decided against a tour of the house, and drove to my office, where I found the door ajar and Mecca Pressman sitting at my desk, wearing a green jumpsuit and a gray cowboy hat. Mecca was the Ephemeral Building's janitor and handyman. He lived in #102, a former dental office. Mecca looked up and said, “Don't you ever knock?” Mecca once pitched for the Bristol White Sox in the Appalachian League for three months (meatballs over the plate and a hanging curve), then struggled for years with a substance abuse problem—the family curse or hobby, depending on whom you asked—became a client of mine, joined AA, straightened out his life—clean and sober six years now. I asked him what he was reading.

“Your case files.”

“That's illegal.”

“And fascinating.”

I pointed at the files. “Did you read your own?”

“Only the two you left on the desk.” He held up a file folder. “When this Wayne here told you he cried when his dog died but not when his dad died—that was a red flag.”

“Thank you, Dr. Pressman.”

“Save your sarcasm for therapy, Dr. Melville.”

“Did I get any mail?”

“I tossed it.”

“Why?”

“Gullibility is not a desired trait in a therapist. The bills are on the windowsill.”

“Listen, Mecca, I got to run, but before I do . . .” I held out my hand, and he gave me the files and some narrative advice.

He said, ”Show us the eyes. The eyes are the windows into the abyss.”

ON THE WAY
to the hospital I stopped at Bay's to see Open Mike, who was watching Bay's canal-side home in our absence. I found him out on the dock with a Bloody Mary, the
Daily Racing Form
, a head of lettuce, a pile of currency, and a hair dryer hooked up to an extension cord. I asked him what the lettuce was for. He said, “Watch.”

He picked up the lettuce, walked to the end of the dock, and dropped the lettuce into the canal. In a few moments, the water bubbled, a shadow appeared below the surface, and a manatee emerged, caught the lettuce in its mouth, rolled over, and dove.

I said, “Holy shit, that was a big manatee.”

“Twelve feet, I figure.”

“And the hair dryer?”

“I'm straightening all my bills. I hate a messy wallet,” he said.

We went into the kitchen and Mike fixed me a Bloody Mary. I told him I wasn't hungry. Mike had crammed Bay's substantial freezer with a hundred or so stacked fast-food burgers wrapped in their paper jackets. He told me he didn't cook. This way, he explained, you just pop one or two of these puppies in the microwave and you're good to go. Mike inherited his baggy cognac-brown eyes from his mom and his widow's peak from his dad. The orange hair came courtesy of a mutation in the Lynch family DNA. “Every other generation,” Mike told me, “the Connemara Lynches punch out another ginger.” And like all the male Lynches, Mike was built like a drystone pillar.

Mike answered his phone. And passed it over to me. Bay told me that the Vegas police were looking for a man in connection
with a kidnapping. A fifteen-year-old girl was on the TV news, her face in shadow, describing to a reporter her abduction last night by a man who claimed to work at the Crisis Center. I told Bay what actually happened, and then I wondered if she'd shown up with the cops at the Crisis Center at ten when my shift was set to begin, and then I realized I hadn't called in to tell them I couldn't make it. Would that make me look guilty? I wondered why she would do this to me. Bay said the artist's sketch made me look a tad shifty. They've got you on video, too. He told me to stand by. He'd find out what he could and get back to me. He told me to put Mike back on the phone.

I called Oliver from the car to get Venise's room number. “Oliver, it's me.”

“How is she?”

“I haven't seen her yet. Are you in her room now?”

“You know I can't stand hospitals.”

“But you do call her, right?”

“Whenever the Weather Channel does the local report.”

“You keep the Weather Channel on all day?”

“There's quite a bit of tornadic activity in the upper Midwest right now.”

“What's going on, Oliver?”

“I can't live without her.”

“You'll have to unless she loses some weight.”

“I know.”

“They can't do another gastric bypass.”

He told me he had a confession to make. Venise did not want to see me. He wanted Venise to see me. “I want you two to end this nonsense. I think it's the stress killing her.”

“She thinks I squandered her inheritance on Dad's assisted living facility and on our trip to Alaska. She thinks I killed him.”

“You need to try, Wylie.”

“I will, but we both know she's not a reasonable woman.”

“You two need to reconcile before anything . . . happens.”

“And you have to do more—”

“You're breaking up, Wylie.”

“I am not. You're just saying that.”

“If you're talking, I can't hear you.”

AT EVERGLADES GENERAL
I found Venise in her private room, sitting up in bed in her pink waffle-net pajamas, watching Rachael Ray and eating an alarming Rabelaisian meal of mashed potatoes
and
french fries; beef
and
chicken; fried pie
and
chocolate cake. I asked her where she'd gotten the food.

“Downstairs in the lobby.”

I said, “Maybe you're at the wrong hospital. You've just had a heart attack, Venise. And here you are eating mounds of saturated fats and carbs.”

“It makes me happy.”

“You're morbidly obese.”

Venise lifted the sesame seed bun off her three-story bacon cheeseburger, applied a handful of fries to the tower, squeezed a packet of ketchup onto the unsettling agglomeration, reset the bun on top, looked me in the eye, and took a predacious bite out of the ungodly mess.

I said, “I'm not going to watch you kill yourself.”

She lifted a flap of fried chicken skin from her bowl of gravied mashed potatoes, held it above her mouth, and dropped it in.

I said, “I'm going to speak with your doctor.”

“You do and I'll kill you.”

I gave her a kiss on the forehead. She did not pull away or stop chewing.

I TOOK A SEAT
at the beachside bar at Slappy's Wonderland and ordered a dozen oysters and a beer while I waited for Donny L., he who had lost his family and his job, to arrive. Quentin, my shucker, welcomed me back and called my attention to a lovely young woman on Rollerblades, gliding past us on the boardwalk, weaving gracefully through the crowd in her stunning blue bikini with a matching hyacinth macaw perched serenely on her bronzed shoulder. When I asked Quentin what was new, he told me he had developed these polaroids that itched like hell. He said, “Tried Benadryl on them and everything.”

I said, “What are you talking about?”

“Cold sores on my ass. Polaroids.”

I got the joke and laughed.

He said, “No joke, Wylie. Hurts like heck.”

“You're serious?”

“As a Pentecostal preacher.”

Donny and I ordered fried grouper sandwiches. I told him he looked like shit and he told me why he did. He'd recently interviewed a fifteen-year-old Filipina, who had been enslaved for three years by her “employers” in their home in Grassy Haven, a tony enclave of CEOs, professional athletes, and diplomats in west Everglades County. The girl was purchased from her parents in Manila and brought to the States by a development officer with the Philippine Consulate in New River and his wife. The girl's passport was taken away. She was charged for her transportation to the U.S. and for her room and board. She was forced to cook, clean, and care for the
couple's two preschool children. She was beaten regularly by the wife, a pediatrician, for perceived violations of house rules. She was not allowed to contact her family. She was told her parents would be killed if she ever tried to run away. But run away she did.

One afternoon, she walked the children to the neighborhood park, sat them in the sandbox, told them to wait right there while she went to the ladies' room, and she left. She walked to an Asian market she often shopped at with the wife and told the clerk her story. The clerk called the police. When the children did not arrive home for the dinner that had not been prepared, the parents contacted the police, who were just then interviewing the girl. The children were with Child Protective Services. When the police charged the couple with kidnapping and enslavement, the couple invoked their diplomatic immunity, collected their children, and returned to Manila.

After he heard the girl's story, Donny decided to investigate slavery in South Florida. He identified three areas of concern: domestic workers, farmworkers, and sex workers. He told me about young girls, mostly, but a few boys, being recruited into sex work in the halls of juvenile court by men and women posing as lawyers and social workers. The kids weren't told they were being recruited, of course. These were kids that no one would miss. Once the recruiter earned the child's trust, then the cycle of intimacy and violence began. Kiss, kiss! And then bang, bang!

Donny looked around, leaned forward, and whispered, “Here's a story I'm trying to confirm. A seventeen-year-old Guatemalan told me she was smuggled into the country at fourteen to work the fields in Homestead. She was forced into prostitution. She had a baby. The baby was branded with a heated belt buckle by the pimp. And then he sold the baby when the mother gave him some sass.
She and three other girls were brought to a house in Naranja and gang-raped in front of each other.”