The Death Box (24 page)

“Boy?” Gershwin said. “Ouch, Detective Ryder. Snap.”

Gershwin scanned the seven addresses where the Benz had been parked overtime or picked up a speeding citation. “All over town,” he said. “Except for the two speeding cites, which were on I-95 between exits eight and ten, and two parking tix … one for parking too close to a hydrant, another for parking in a loading zone. They’re on the same block.”

There are names for the location where we ended up. Some call it the Strip, to others it’s the Combat Zone. Some cities euphemistically refer to it as Nightclub Row, or Clubtown. I called such places Dregsville, because it’s where the dregs of society felt most at home: shot’n’beer bars, strip joints, pawn shops, used-car lots, liquor stores, storefront sandwich shops, hot-pillow motels; there was always a bail-bondsman’s office nearby. These establishments were interspersed with windowless warehouses and car-parts outlets and whitewashed shops selling second-hand tires, the sad stacks of balding rubber protected by high fences encircled with razor wire, like ten-buck tires were worth stealing.

“What do you call this neighborhood, Ziggy?” I asked.

“Technically, it’s part of Hialeah, but this part I call Shitsville.”

“No argument there. Where’d the cites get issued?”

Gershwin pointed at a fire hydrant. “The hydrant cite was here.” We continued slowly for another block and he had me pull to the curb. “And there’s the loading zone where he got ticketed.”

“Times?”

“Both Friday mornings, one at eight-fifteen, the other at nine twenty-five.”

We got out. The smell of urine rose from a gutter clogged with cigarette butts, fast-food wrappers, broken liquor bottles, crack vials and used condoms. A bus roared past and added its oily exhaust smell to the miasma.

“What a hellhole,” I said, scanning the block, seeing a warehouse on the far side, flanked by a two-story strip club called the Paraíso, beside it a broken-down motel. Closer was a closed
taqueria
and a muffler outlet. On the other end of the block stood another strip joint called the Pink Pussycat, another brick warehouse, and a pawnbroker. I watched a skinny, miniskirted hooker step from between two buildings, make us – they were as fast to ID cops as I was – then turn and disappear into the bricks. “What brought Perlman here?” I wondered aloud.

“Getting his knob polished,” Gershwin said.

“On Friday mornings?”

“Yeah, I’ve never been horny on a Friday morning, Detective. I save it for Tuesdays and Thursdays between two-seventeen and three twenty-two a.m.”

I ignored the sarcasm as probably warranted and nodded toward the Paraiso. “Think he was looking for love at one of the titty bars?”

“They don’t open that early. Gotta have time to mop up the previous evening’s diseases. Think Perl-O-Man might have been keeping the books for one of these joints?”

I waited until traffic on the four-lane was stopped by lights and stepped into the street to study all the businesses. The lights changed and cars rushed my way.

“I don’t see any of these ratholes bringing in enough money to need an accountant,” I said, jumping from the street as a garbage truck rumbled by, the driver giving me a blast of horn. “Unless they’re selling more than lap dances and tires.”

“We can always ask. I’m sure they’ll be happy to answer our questions.”

“Right now I got just one question, Ziggy,” I said.

“What did Perlman do to end up in a cistern beneath a stack of Hondurans?”

“Nope. Perlman’s hacked-off hands tell us he stole something. My question is, Who did he steal it from?”

We jumped inside the Rover and I watched the rearview for an opportunity, squealing out a U-turn. I was looking into oncoming traffic when I snapped my head to follow a dented gray sedan rushing past in the oncoming lane, the suited, tie-wearing driver now seeming to duck away as he slipped on a pair of shades.

“What?” Gershwin asked, seeing the swerving trajectory of my gaze.

“That guy in the beater gray Caprice,” I said, looking in the mirror as the car turned a hard right without signaling. “I swear he looked just like Lonnie Canseco.”

“A Latin-lover type?”

“I know, not exactly a rarity in Miami. Plus there was a woman beside him, blonde like Valdez, but her face turned away.”

“Canseco’s in Jacksonville,” Gershwin said. “And Valdez is off today. It’s on the board at the department. Besides …”

“Yeah,” I realized, still shooting glances at the rearview. “I haven’t exactly spent a lot of quality time with my colleagues. I’m amazed I can remember their names.”

36

Gershwin and I retraced our steps to the department. I passed Degan’s office and saw him at his desk, sleeves rolled up, the huge revolver in a shoulder rig and looking like an upholstered cannon. A case file was spread across the desk. Tatum stood beside the hulking Degan. Instead of tormenting a Styrofoam cup, he was shuffling pages in a file. I stuck my head in the door.

“Roy in today?” I asked.

“Jacksonville,” Degan grunted. “In tomorrow.”

“Hot case?” I asked, nodding at the file.

Tatum shrugged, not looking at me. “Counterfeiters.”

“I thought you were in Boca Raton today, Detective Degan.”

“Guess I got back.” He didn’t look up.

Six words from two colleagues, I tapped the door frame and continued down the hall. “You know McDermott’s in Jacksonville,” Gershwin said. “You told me that yesterday. What’s with the question?”

“Just gauging today’s enmity quotient.”

“And?”

I waggled a hand. “Chilly but not frosty. I think they’re starting to love us.”

“Yeah. And tomorrow’s forecast is for twelve feet of snow.”

We went to the office and I kept my phone close, but nothing from the girl. I tried not to think of her brave face at the information desk a dozen stories below my feet, but kept wondering how she was surviving. Twice I stood from my desk and went to the window.
Call me
, I thought, trying to beam my thoughts through the city.
Call me.

My friend Clair Peltier – physician, pathologist, scientist – believed in synchronicity: hidden interstices below time and space where wishes, dreams, actions and events formed linkages unfathomable to the human mind. Clair might say that if I wished hard enough, I could create a ripple in the bosons that would nudge Leala to a phone.

My bosons weren’t rippling, and I was at the window a third time when my cell rang, Delmara. “We need walkie-talkies,” he said. “So I don’t have to dial every time I have something cool for you.”

“I’ll get Roy to buy us some. What you got, buddy?”

“A guy got busted yesterday for a smash and grab, Blaine Mullard. For some reason Mullard asked to see me, hoping I could get him a break. I asked what he had to trade. It’s a story you’ll want to hear.”

“Mullard’s not your snitch?”

“Never heard of him before. I checked the others in the can with the guy, nobody there I knew. It’s kinda strange that Mullard called me.”

“Maybe the cop he usually snitches to cut him loose for lying.”

“Possible. The guy’s a walking ball of nose drool. I had Mullard transferred to a holding cell here, so run on over.”

We were at Delmara’s mid-Miami Division HQ in fifteen minutes. Delmara led us to an interrogation room, a twelve-by-twelve box with bland blue walls, a single table, four simple chairs, and a gray wastebasket in the corner. A horizontal mirror filled one wall, a one-way, behind it a room where interested parties observed conversations. The observation room would smell of coffee and perspiration and tobacco and no amount of cleaning could ever dislodge those signature odors.

The occupant of the interrogation room was a small and twitchy man in his early thirties, his brown hair long and ragged, his cheeks hollow and pocked with acne scars not concealed under the wispy attempt at a beard. His brown eyes were tiny and seemed to operate on independent gimbals, the left one finding me before the right one did.

“These are the guys you need to talk to, Blaine,” Vince said. “Tell them what you started to tell me, and maybe it’ll buy goodwill with the DA.”

Mullard swallowed hard. “It c-can’t g-get out that I’m t-talking or I’ll b-b-be dead.”

Mullard’s fingers twiddled at a button on the front of the soiled black shirt shrouding his bone-thin frame, the body of a man whose primary nourishment was junk food and methedrine. I figured his stutter was exacerbated by nerves and withdrawal.

Delmara put a shiny loafer on a chair beside the man and laid a hand gently on his shoulder. “You’ll be fine, Blaine. Your words will never leave this room.”

“Oh yeah?” Mullard challenged, pointing at the mirror. “Wh-who’s back there?”

“No one, Blaine. These two gentlemen would customarily be watching from behind the glass, but that would be subterfuge, right?”

“Wh-what’s a s-s-sutter-fuge?”

“A cheap trick, Blaine. By having these gentlemen here rather than behind the glass, I’m showing you the only other people who will hear your story.”

The guy was in his thirties but chronologically an adolescent, likely a permanent condition. I’d seen hundreds of Blaine Mullards, directionless, doomed by savage or absent parenting, and assuming the liquid mores of whatever group or gang they found in early teens, their nascent personalities and individualism replaced by a street culture that lacked any concept of responsibility or future.

“I huh-heard you was a good dude, D-Detective D-Del-m-mara. That you might help me slip the beef.”

Delmara shot me a look. “Who told you that, Blaine?”

“I-I-I … it’s just s-something a guy said. I don’t remember his name.”

“Some guy you met in jail?”

“If y-y-you can’t help m-me I guh-got to …”

Mullard started to rise but Delmara’s hand gently pressed the man back into his chair. “OK … so my rep got to you. But you’ve fucked up a bit, my man. Busting into a vehicle in broad daylight, snatching a laptop as a cruiser came down the block.”

“I-I-I …”

Delmara did empathy. “I know how it was … you were hurting and needed to score. The true idiot was the one who left the laptop on the seat, right? An unwarranted temptation.”

Mullard nodded vigorously. “Y-you don’t leave a c-computer laying in puh-plain sight. It’s s-s-stupid. Wh-what’s wrong with p-people?”

“Look, Blaine, I think I can convince the prosecutor that the temptation was too strong. You’ll have to do some time, but weeks, not months, right? Maybe in a program. Clean sheets, hot food, counseling you can sleep through.”

A puppy smile. “Y-y-you’re a g-good dude, Duh-Detective Del-ma-m-mara. Like I heard.”

“But you’ve got to tell the story. That’s the trade.”

Delmara patted Mullard again and sat. Gershwin and I followed. Mullard picked at his beard. “I h-heard this a f-few times. It’s on the street but no one says it ou-ou-out loud. There’s this guy, a p-p-pimp. He had a woman, owned her, she was pure, y’know. Undone.”

“You mean a virgin?” I said.

“Some c-c-chick in her t-teens. Came here in a truck fresh from some Mexican f-farm or whatever. Never even s-saw a dick. The p-pimp was gonna sell her to some guy who paid buh-big bucks for a weekend with the chick. The g-guy wanted t-to open the b-bitch up, y’know.” Mullard gave me a grin like we were conspiratorial children. “Puh-party time.”

I kept the grimace from my face. “When was this, Blaine? Recently?”

“I-it’s bub-been a while. A couple years, at least.”

“Go on, bud,” Delmara said.

“A-anyway, some coyote on the c-crew bringing this ch-chicklet to town got drunked up and horny. He can’t help himself, buh-bangs the bitch. She’s ruined, so big bucks good-bye. The gangster who owned her stayed cool, told the crew boy he owed him twelve grand. The guy’s a low-level smuggler, says he c-can’t pay it all right then. So the gangster man says, ‘It’s cool, c-come to my place and we’ll puh-put together a p-payment p-plan.’ So the coyote goes to the g-guy’s place. Buh-buh-buh …” The nerves ramped up.

“Take it easy, Blaine,” Vince crooned. “One word at a time, bud.”

“Bu-but instead of a payment plan th-the g-guy is there with a h-huge bald fuh-fucker who strips the c-coyote’s clothes off and t-t-tapes the guy to a chair wi-wi-wi …”

“Shhhhh. Easy.”

“With his dick and buh-balls hanging over the e-edge of the chair. Then the guy puh-puh-pulls out a long buh-black knife and kisses it.”

“Kisses it?”

Mullard mimed bringing a knife to his lips and kissing it slow and lovingly. “Then he took th-th-that black fuckin’ blade and slices all the coyote’s junk off. He does it r-real slow and the gangster fuh-fucker’s smiling while he d-does it. And then he he he …”

“He what?”

“He has the huge bald dude hold up a mirror so the coyote can see his face as the guy jams the coyote’s p-p-pecker into his mouth. He … the guy … the m-m-man, he he …”

Mullard was patting at his eyes in disbelief of something. I recalled a similar torture from years back in South Alabama, a psychopath who wanted to be sure a husband watched his wife’s rape.

“The gangster cut off the coyote’s eyelids so he had to watch, right, Blaine?”

Mullard started gagging. Vince smoothly moved a waste can into place and the guy spewed thin brown gruel into the bucket.

“Others were there, right, Blaine?” I asked when the sickness passed and Mullard was wiping his mouth on the back of a dirty hand. “An audience. The torture was supposed to be a lesson.”

The unhinged eyes stared at me. “M-m-motherfuckin’, yes. A s-s-s-
serious
lesson.”

“Do you have a name, Blaine? For the knife man?”

A long inward squint. Even the eyes stopped moving. “Sometimes when the story gets told he’s called Double Ought. Or maybe that was someone else.”

Mullard wavered on the chair, his energy draining. “Anything else?” I pushed. Again Mullard retreated into his head for snatches of conversation or street lore, a difficult task, I figured, given the prodigious amounts of drugs the man had ingested over the course of a sad and small life.

“Uh, uh … someone m-might have once said he wuh-worked in a club or something like that. Or maybe it was a strip j-joint. Was it a strip joint?”