“You know that gentleman you were just dancing for…,” I said to her. “He’s a friend of ours. We’d love to buy him a special birthday dance.”
The girl was intrigued and more than willing to take requests for $200 an hour. So I told her exactly what I wanted her to do.
Moments later, she slithered around in a private room as Winrock watched from a velour sofa. Gina and I watched, too, from the hallway, through a slit in the curtains.
“I’ll be right back,” the girl said to her customer.
“Where you going, pumpkin?” he said.
She blew him a kiss and disappeared through the curtains. The next thing he saw was a tanned, shapely leg peeking through.
“That’s right, baby,” he said, squirming in his seat. “Come on in.”
And she did. The dancer slinked in wearing a red strapless dress and skinny heels. But it wasn’t the girl—it was Gina.
“Let me have that pretty dress,” said the customer.
“Not yet. This is a special kind of dance. You go first,” Gina said.
Winrock seemed confused but eager to play along. He unbuttoned his shirt and dropped his pants.
“Come on, dance with me,” Gina said.
“I’m not much of a dancer,” he said.
“It doesn’t matter. Nobody else is here,” she said. “Just me and my girlfriends.”
“Where the heck are they?”
Gina called out to the hallway and the stripper came back inside. I followed.
Winrock looked straight at me and didn’t recognize me. But I didn’t feel invisible, not the way I had in the courtroom as I listened to his testimony. This time, I was in control of the situation.
“Come on, big guy, boogie down,” Gina said to him.
And the good lieutenant danced with abandon as we formed a merry circle around him. Gina shimmied down to the floor and scooped up his clothes. Out of his sight, she shoved them behind the curtain.
“Nice moves, Lieutenant,” I said.
“Thank you, doll,” he said, perplexed. He looked at me as if trying to place my face. “How’d you know I was a lieutenant?”
“Wild guess,” I said.
“Wild is right. Why don’t you and I get wild together?” he said.
“I think not,” I said, nudging him onto the sofa. “Sit down. Party’s over.”
“Do I know you?”
“I look a little different in my prison jumpsuit,” I said.
“You. Are you stalking me?”
“No, just here to have a conversation,” I said, giving Gina a nod. She motioned the stripper to follow her to a corner loveseat, where they would cool their heels for a while. “I have some questions about the case.”
“Right now?” said Winrock as he tried clumsily to get up from the sofa.
“Who is Francisco Cardenal?” I said, pushing him back down.
“I have no idea. Where’d my dancer go?” he said, searching the musky darkness.
“I’m the only dancer you have right now, so settle down,” I said.
“What do you want from me?” he said.
“I want names, places, every detail you remember. I’ve reserved this room for as long as it takes. I have all night,” I said. “And you have no clothes.”
Fast-forward to one hour later and there was Gina, lounging in the corner, trading beauty tips with the stripper. (Stripper: “They call it J.Lo in a bottle ’cause it gives you this bronzy glow.”) And I was finally getting somewhere with Winrock. He had remembered the feds had shared with him some Colombian police audiotapes of conversations between La Reina and one of the Cardenals. According to a DEA interpreter, they were heard discussing contacts, drop locations, and delivery dates. But when one of their key associates was arrested on a traffic violation in New Mexico, the associate, a Florida resident mentioned in the conversation, swore to police interrogators that his friends were discussing the sale of soccer merchandise, not cocaine.
“You remember the guy’s name?” I asked Winrock.
“Nope. But he had a crap-load of money on him. About a hundred and twenty K,” he said, swigging his whiskey.
“What was his name—try to remember,” I said.
“It’s on the tip of my tongue, but I can’t recall.”
“Think.”
“Jimmy what’s-his-face,” he said.
“Come on…”
“Jimmy Paz. That’s it. Jimmy Paz,” he said, surprising himself.
Jimmy Paz was a notorious name in Miami. But I hadn’t heard it in years, and I didn’t see him mentioned anywhere in the documents.
“So why wasn’t he in the indictment?” I said.
“He got a deal, I think,” said Winrock.
“What kind of a deal? What do you remember?” I said.
“Don’t remember anything more,” he said. “Now can you please leave me alone?”
With that, Gina and I left Winrock in the company of his sultry Latina, who still had a good twenty minutes left on her dance card, more than that bungling lump ever deserved.
At the end of the night, Gina and I shared a bottle of wine on the beach, just like we used to when we were in college. We lounged on wooden chaises at the edge of an inky, luminous ocean, recounting the events of the past few hours.
“Jimmy Paz. Everybody’s favorite gangster,” Gina said.
“Never had the pleasure—too many degrees of separation,” I said.
“Maybe not,” said Gina. “You know someone who knows him.”
I had no idea what she was talking about, but I was sure she was wrong. I bet not even my delinquent brother knew him. Jimmy Paz existed in a realm apart from your average delinquent.
“Who are you talking about?” I said.
But then I knew. It was something we no longer talked about, something I had tried to bury years earlier.
“I’m not going there,” I said.
“That’s who you need to talk to.”
“I can’t. The world can’t be this upside down.”
“Isn’t it worth a try?” said Gina, grabbing her purse from the sand and putting it on the chaise. It was bursting at the seams. “It’s okay to look back sometimes. For clarity, you know.”
“What the hell’s in that purse?”
Gina opened the bag and pulled out a crumpled pair of John Henry gabardines. She balled them up and ran barefoot toward the water. I watched her splash along the shore and throw Winrock’s pants into the ocean, an offering to the gods of fresh beginnings.
RAPTURE LOUNGE—DAY 26
A dive bar in an industrial corner of town.
I heard the song before I reached the front door. It wafted through the parking lot in front of the place I had vowed never to enter again.
“I’m an ever-rolling wheel/without a destination real…”
I should have taken it as an omen to turn around and drive away. But instead I followed it inside, where on a small stage a not-very-convincing drag queen sang in a stunning, crystalline voice:
“You got me going in circles / oh, around and around I go…”
I took the only seat I could find at the bar, next to a middle-aged couple locked in a graphic kiss. A group of young toughs played a rowdy game of pool as their overly primped girlfriends drank pink wine. As I watched them, I felt a tap on my shoulder. It was Eddie, the bartender, leaning across the bar for a hello kiss.
“Hey, beautiful,” he said. “Seen Joe yet?”
“Is he around?”
“Give me a minute,” he said as a cocktail girl approached with an empty tray.
The girl ordered two Chivases on the rocks. Eddie filled her order, sending her back to the employees-only area in the rear of the building. I should have left then.
“He’ll be out in a minute,” said the bartender. “What’cha drinking these days?”
“I’ll take a mango sour,” I said.
“The Dulce Maria special,” he said with a wink. “Coming right up.”
Th
e reference took me back to a time I hadn’t thought about in years. I tried not to dwell on the memories as I watched Eddie squeeze a couple of key limes into a glass; sprinkle the juice with three spoonfuls of sugar; add a good splash of vodka, ice, and a little bit of mango juice; and give it all a good shake.
“Here you go,” said Eddie, placing a chilled, sugar-rimmed tumbler before me with flair and pouring into it the sheer mango-lime cocktail.
“Thanks, honey,” I said, taking a sip.
I waited through a stream of hopeless love songs. After a while, the cocktail girl reappeared, empty glasses on the tray, her blouse slightly askew.
“You can go on back,” the bartender said.
At the end of a narrow hallway, I found Joe Pratts in a Co-hiba haze, tallying the day’s numbers in his cramped back office. I almost didn’t recognize him because he seemed haggard and unkempt, nothing like the boy once voted “Most Handsome” at Hialeah High. Then he glanced up and I remembered his eyes, soulful, deep café eyes.
“So what brings you around?” he said in a hardened tone I didn’t recognize. He was annoyed to see me, I could tell.
“Been a long time,” I said.
“Has it?”
His words hung in an awkward silence. I sat down across from him. He put aside his work.
“I read about what happened to you,” he said. “They picked up the wrong Maria, huh?”
“I need to find the right one.”
“Why are you here?”
“I thought maybe you’d know some people,” I said. I pulled out a list of names from my purse.
“I don’t know anybody.”
He leaned back into the torn leather cushion of his swivel chair and laced his fingers behind his neck in an uneasy stretch. He seemed exhausted, like a man who hadn’t slept in days. The angled light of his desk lamp revealed a thin, faded scar just above his left eyebrow, remnant of a time I wanted to forget. He volunteered nothing else, not even a shrug of feigned concern. He left it to me to break the silence.
“You’re the last person in the world I want to ask for help,” I said. “But I don’t know where else to go.”
He thought about it for a minute.
“Some people go to church. Why don’t you go to church?” he said.
“I have some names,” I said. I handed him the list. “I don’t know what that’ll get me, but I have to try.”
“Why?” he said.
“Because I need to get my life back,” I said.
“Which life, Mary?” he said.
I walked right into that one, but I ignored the innuendo.
“I’ve lost custody of my son,” I said.
Joe hated me for being there. He hated it because even now, ten years after we split up, he still couldn’t say no to me.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” he said. He hunched forward to rest his elbows on the desk. He glanced at the names on the list and seemed to stop at one. “Why don’t you leave this with me. I’ll call you.”
I didn’t stick around long enough to make real conversation. Part of me hoped he’d toss those names in the trash and forget he ever saw me.
EIGHT
THE MINUTE I got home, I realized I had made a terrible mistake. There, surrounded by the tangible evidence of my life with Max, my life as a single mother, a businesswoman with a solid plan, I knew I had done something potentially lethal. I had looked back.
I had always believed that one day I could do such a thing. I would be deep into a new life, a sound and successful life, and it would be okay to take a glance. It would be like peering at a brushfire from atop a plateau, where I could safely contemplate the flames with appropriate curiosity. But it only took one glance at Joe to let me know that day had not yet come. Why had I gone there? It was the last thing I needed as I struggled to recognize myself, the person I had worked diligently to become. It was hard enough to recognize myself without Max in the house, without my work routine, without all those well-made plans that once filled the pages of my agenda. Who needed the phantom of a chaotic love?
I spent the next two days burrowed in the Spider-Man sheets of Max’s bed. I kept myself locked in a Benadryl-induced slumber. If I slept, I didn’t have to think. I existed in a kind of holding pattern, vaguely aware of the life that marched on without me, the shift of sunlight, the flow of traffic, the drone of the cellular on the nightstand. I felt paralyzed before it all, and I came to understand what it must feel like to be in a state of profound mourning. It is a state of being that transcends ordinary sadness, one that comes with the cruel realization that you will never be whole again.
Strangely enough, what roused me from sleep was an explicit vision: Joe gasping for breath on my body, grinding himself into me. The scar above his eye was fresh, jagged red.
The vision was so real it sent a shudder across the top of my camisole. I gathered myself at the edge of the bed, and I went to take a bath. Scrubbed fresh and newly alert, I dove into a cleaning frenzy—I stripped down the beds and tossed the sheets into the washer, vacuumed the carpets, yanked open all the blinds. Enough with the self-pity, I thought. Enough with the deadly visions. I was determined to steel myself against useless emotions, regret, and attempted manipulations.
When the phone buzzed again, I picked it up, ready to handle my business.
It was Joe.
“I may have something for you,” he said.
“What do you know?” I said in a tone that bordered on sharp.
“I’d rather talk in person,” he said.
“Say when,” I said, keeping my voice distant.
“Tomorrow,” he said.
The next day, I drove deep into the industrial core of Hialeah, past rows of boxy factories abuzz with workers on their morning break. They swarmed around lunch trucks for greasy steak sandwiches and hits of Cuban caffeine. I turned onto a residential block lined with flat-roof homes and oversized driveways of painted cement, a few of them displaying elaborate shrines to saints. Anywhere else, a real estate agent might take one look at the woeful expressions on the faces of those saints and deem the houses not sellable. Who would buy a house with a friggin’ statue of San Lazaro on crutches, bleeding from a chest wound? But you have to be from Hialeah to understand the saint code. Those shrines symbolize promises fulfilled. They symbolize the direct opposite of FOR SALE signs. A saint on the lawn means “Not for sale— never for sale.” That house, it says, is a miracle granted. It is home forever.
The very thought made me claustrophobic. Why would anyone—anyone besides dead-end types like Joe Pratts—want to stay there forever?
Farther up the road I came to a four-way stop at a familiar corner. Yet, in the hyper glare of daylight, I couldn’t read the street numbers. It took me a moment to realize I had driven to the edge of Walker Park. I stopped for a minute to glance in at the swimming pool, the same pool where I learned to swim. A group of kids splashed around as their swim instructor patiently waded between them. The instructor, a balding man in his early seventies, demonstrated the basic freestyle technique, slicing the water with slow, steady strokes. The sight of him sent a wave of sadness over me. There he was, Mr. Bennett, bronzed as ever, his strong shoulders now slightly hunched. I remembered how calm and confident I felt just watching him glide across the water with strokes so precise they barely made a ripple. The gentle rhythm of his swimming always lulled me into a serene state. Now, in the same turquoise water, I found fragments of a memory:
I drift across the shallow end of the pool on a summer afternoon, after all the other swimmers have gone home. I feel a hand tug at my bikini bottom. I dive under to find Joe swimming away. I race to catch him at the deep end and I yank him underwater, but he’s too fast for me. He swooshes upward and sweeps me to the pool’s edge, his arm gripping my waist. I break loose and swat him with a hard jolt of water and a voice-cracking, adolescent shriek.
“Get away, asshole!” I say. But I don’t mean it.
I’m loving the way his should
ers glisten in the pink light of the afternoon. I’m loving the sexy way he laughs at me. I’m loving the fact that Mr. Popular himself is pressing his bare chest against my back and stroking my thighs. I’m not his kind of girl—and I never aspired to be his kind. I’m studious, smart, borderline prudish. But today, July twenty-third of my seventeenth year, I swivel my body around to face him. I let him run his fingers along the sides of my breasts and lower his lips to my neck. As the water laps against our bodies, I kiss the lobe of his ear, then his cheek, then his lips. My first kiss. It is a kiss so deep it turns daylight to dusk and two unlikely souls into lovers.
But now, as I drove up to the overgrown, grassy swale outside the old yellow house on East Sixth, my swimming pool reverie was shattered by the sight of Joe on a peeling stoop, dragging on a cigarette. Pale and sunken, he nodded at me as I reached the front porch.
“The house still looks the same,” I said, reaching for a little bit of small talk.
“Same as the day I was born,” he said in a dull tone.
He made no move to ask me in, so I took a seat beside him.
“What do you know about those names?” I said.
“Looks like this woman’s involved with some foul people,” he said.
“You know them?”
Joe looked at me and let out a big laugh.
“It’s something, you know,” he said.
“What?”
“You’ve got this drug queen doing business out of a Red Roof Inn—that should’ve been their first clue that it wasn’t you,” he said, laughing himself into a coughing fit.
“Yeah, whatever,” I said.
“Think about it…”
“Never mind. Who do you know?” I said. “Jimmy Paz?”
Joe glanced away for a minute.
“Nah,” he said.
“You know someone who knows him, don’t you?”
“I got a source in the Keys,” he said. He glanced off again.
“I want to meet your source,” I said.
“No way,” he said.
“This is urgent—you know it is.”
Sweet Mary Page 10
