The Memory Killer

by J. A. Kerley

  “Anyone still out there?” I asked. “From back in the day?”

  Dooley fixed a cigarette in his lips. “What’s left is just a couple shacks, but there’s a house that someone’s been in for years, name’s Wilkens. Woman in her late seventies, mebbe.”

  Miz Wilkens’ house smelled of lilacs and liniment. I could see into two rooms, crucifixes on two walls. Above the couch was a rendition of the Last Supper, garish, like the replicator had added neon to the ink. Across the room a large Jesus looked heavenward, a ghastly crown of thorns dripping blood down his forehead. I took it that Miz Wilkens was devout.

  “Yeah, I knew the Ocampos a bit,” she said, nodding to the west. “They lived up the street from me for years.”

  “What do you recall of Myrtle?” I asked.

  “Big girl, heavy. Homely as a mud hut. Myrtie got pregnant by a little Fil’peen guy when she was a senior. I dunno, maybe she looked sexy to them folks. He got drunk one night over the border and started a fight with some Mes’cans and one of them gutted him.”

  “What do you recall about Mrs Ocampo?”

  “One a her teachers, Miz Bellman, was a friend a mine. She was almost scared at how bright Myrtie was. Said that girl mighta gone on to college, made a big deal of herself.”

  “What happened?”

  “To me she looked like Fatty Arbuckle in a wig, but she thought she was better’n ever’body else, always telling folks how stupid they was. Plus it was just as easy for her to tell you a lie as it was the truth, like if she could make the perfect lie, the world would come around to fit it. I think ever’one got disgusted with her uppitiness and lies and left her be.”

  “You knew she was pregnant. Did you hear anything about the birth?”

  “She had twins, exact ones, couldn’t tell them babies apart. But one of them passed away. Barely made it a week, a terrible thing. She and the living kid moved away a while later.” She paused. “You know anything about the other boy? The one that lived?”

  I nodded. “Yes. His name is Gary. He’s doing fine, owns his own business in Miami.”

  Miz Wilkens thought for a moment and offered a beatific smile. “They own a business.”

  “They, ma’am? What do you mean?”

  “When you’re a twin like that, and one of you dies, God puts the dead twin inside the live one. It’s his way of keeping them together.”

  We were back in Miami by nightfall, heading to HQ. “There’s no way to trace this guy?” Roy said after we provided the results of our rush trip to Texas. “None?”

  “Sheriff Dooley’s gonna keep digging,” I sighed. “Trouble is, there aren’t many places to plant a shovel.”

  The three of us sat in silence, thinking of how to proceed. We stared out Roy’s window as if the glittering skyscape of Miami held the answer. Gershwin was first to break the silence.

  “You said these guys are identical? Everything?”

  “Physically, at least,” I said.

  “Then we know exactly what the perp looks like, right? His face, for sure.”

  18

  I awakened Ocampo at eight the next morning. He told me he’d be “ready to receive visitors” at nine; the shop would be closed, but he’d unlock the door from upstairs, and to ring the bell.

  Gershwin had to give a deposition in a previous case, so I went alone, stopping at a panadería for breakfast. I grabbed coffee and a pastry for Ocampo and was at the shop on time, in his room a minute later, staring out the open window at the streetscape below. Ocampo appeared from the bathroom, a red water glass in hand. It was a big glass and I expected a body the size of Ocampo’s demanded a lot of agua.

  He was wearing voluminous denim shorts and a bright Aloha shirt printed with palms and pelicans. His sockless feet were tucked into outsize suede slippers; I figured he could tie shoes easily enough, just not while he was wearing them.

  “I thank you for the thought,” he said when I offered the pastry and coffee. “But I’m on a regimen: breakfast is a half-cup of Greek yogurt and a protein bar, lunch the same.”

  “Supper?”

  “Four ounces of lean protein and steamed vegetables.”

  “You like veggies?”

  A sigh. “I’m getting used to them.”

  “According to Dr Roth you’ve lost over a hundred-fifty pounds, Gary. She says congratulations, by the way.”

  “I told her I was going to get down to normal weight. But she hears that a lot, I expect.”

  “Few can pull it off.”

  “It comes down to incentive. Picking the one thing you want more than anything in life and focusing on it. Making it the first thing you think about in the morning, last at night.” He pointed to his temple. “It’s something that you do in here, Detective Ryder. You need to find a need that’s stronger than food.”

  “May I ask your incentive?”

  He paused. “Travel.”

  “Travel in general?”

  “I want to … I am going to Rio for Carnevale.”

  “Carnevale? What? Why?”

  His voice grew soft and his eyes were seeing something far beyond the confines of the room. “Because it looks so, so free. And the people are good looking, and they seem so perfectly alive and unashamed of who they are. There’s music everywhere and people dance on the beach and in the streets. Everyone is laughing. You don’t see unhappy faces at Carnevale, Detective Ryder. I don’t think it’s allowed.”

  His version of Carnevale seemed as much fiction as reality, but I sensed how the myth might attract the product of a desperate childhood and lonely adulthood, a man who spent the bulk of his time confined not only within the small apartment, but within the ponderous constraints of his body.

  “I like it, Gary,” I said, meaning it.

  When his pale blue eyes turned to mine I was surprised to see hard resolve and to hear strength in the soft voice. “It may take a couple years of work, Detective Ryder. But I’m going to Carnevale. I’m going to pull off my shirt and dance and not be the subject of jokes. I’ll have nothing to be ashamed of and no one will ever know what I looked like in my days before Carnevale. I’ll be new.”

  I realized I’d thought of Gary Ocampo as a will-deficient eating machine, doing little more than stuffing his mouth with fast food and pizza while playing video games on the screens at the foot of his bed. But it seemed there was more to Ocampo than gluttony.

  “You’re dieting, obviously,” I said with new respect for the man. “What about the exercise?”

  He nodded to the small room beside the bedroom, one leading from the kitchen alcove. “I have weights in there. Free weights and resistance bands. I keep them there to make me walk to them. He bent his arm in the classic body-builder pose. “Don’t laugh, but I’m putting muscle beneath the fat. When the fat disappears I’ll be ready for Rio.”

  “I’m not laughing, Gary. I’m impressed.”

  “I ordered a treadmill yesterday,” he added.

  “A treadmill?”

  “It’s the best. A capacity of …” He paused and seemed embarrassed by letting me into his dreams. “I’m sorry, I don’t like talking about me. What brings you here, Detective?”

  I cleared my throat. “I wanted to give you a report on our trip yesterday. To your hometown.”

  He listened quietly as I told him about the empty grave. And, given the clouded circumstances, what Dooley and I thought it meant. All of Ocampo’s former resolve seemed to vaporize and he stared at his thick hands for a long time.

  “You OK, Gary?” I asked.

  “My mother seems to have sold my brother. How would you feel?”

  “Your mother was a troubled woman living a hard life. She had no husband, no permanent job, and two mouths to feed. She made a poor decision, but poor decisions are part of the human condition. She also seemed to have a problem with alcohol.”

  He swallowed hard. “Did you ever read A Long Day’s Journey into Night? We were living in Gainesville and Mama would go into her room severa
l times a day and close the door. The first few times she’d come out, her eyes would seem brighter, happier. As the day wore on, the room visits became more frequent and her smiles turned to snarls and self-pity. By nightfall she would be sprawled on the couch and raging at everything she saw.”

  His voice had fallen to a soft rasp. “Later on, in my teens, she’d get the DTs and ramble about roaches on her robe and flying saucers and whatnot. I shut most of it out. I didn’t focus on what she was saying, only hoping that it would end soon. That she’d pass out.”

  “When was the first mention of a brother?”

  “One day I told her to stop drinking and act like other mothers. She called me a miserable little fat boy and said she wished she had the other one. I said, ‘What other one?’ She said the one that slid out of her b-before I d-did.”

  A tear trickled down a pudgy cheek and he wiped it with the back of his hand. “I said, ‘What are you raving about, Mama?’ She said, ‘Your twin. The one that died.’ I said, ‘You’re lying, Mama. I don’t have a twin. Stop l-lying.’”

  “Calm down, Gary. Relax. It’s just a memory.”

  He took a deep breath. “Mama ran to her room and I heard her rooting through all the bottles and shit in her closet. She returned with a beat-up shoebox full of photographs and letters. She pulled out a faded photograph of two babies on a bed beside her. One was me, the other was too. Identical. What she’d told me was she wished I was the one that died.”

  I blew out a breath, a terrible thing to hear from your mother, impaired or not.

  “You still have the shoebox?”

  “All I kept was the photo of Mama with Donnie and me.”

  “May I see it?”

  He padded to his closet, scrabbled through some boxes, and returned with a yellowed envelope. When he opened it a small faded photo fell into his palm and he handed it to me. I stared at the picture: a chubby and homely woman. In each arm was a baby, each an exact copy of the other. I flipped the pic over. The blue-ballpoint script said Myrtie, Donnie and Gary. The date put the photo at three days after birth.

  “Is there a chance it’s not Donnie doing these things?” he asked.

  “None. I’m sorry. He’s obviously having mental problems.”

  “But it’s not all that terrible, is it?” he said, a note of hope in his voice. “He’s not really hurting them. Not for life.”

  “He’s making them sick, Gary. Terrifying them with hallucinations. Raping them.”

  Ocampo turned away for a long moment. The face that returned was dark and troubled. “We’re twins, right? Exact copies? If Donnie’s a bad person and he’s identical …”

  I waved it away. “Doesn’t work that way, Gary. If Donnie’s bad it’s because of his choices. Or how he grew up. Don’t worry, Gary. You’re normal – one of us.”

  I wanted to cheer him up. He’d been turning his life around, keeping to a tough diet, working out, planning for the future. Given the revelations of the past two days I hoped he could keep it together and not seek solace in food; to keep Carnevale foremost in mind.

  19

  I had just thanked Ocampo when a thought crossed my mind. We’d known about the brother connection less than forty hours and assumed his presence in the area owed to his adopter – or purchaser – being from the region. Gary had known of a brother, but we’d not considered whether the same was true of Donnie Ocampo, or whatever he’d been named. There’d barely been time to think.

  “You’ve not had anyone trying to contact you, Gary?” I asked. “No unusual phone calls … or strangers loitering near the store?”

  He frowned. “Last month the shop got a call from someone wanting to sell comics – at least, that’s what he said. But when I picked up the phone, the caller got all weird.”

  “Weird how?”

  “I said, ‘Hello, I understand you have some issues for sale.’ The guy says, ‘I don’t have issues. You’re the one that has issues. Did you ever wonder where your issues come from?’ It was odd, but he seemed to have a bit of an accent and I wondered if English was his first language, maybe that was the problem. I said, ‘I buy my inventory from sources around the world. What are you offering or what do you need?’”

  “And the answer was?”

  “The caller said …” Ocampo turned white as the sheet on his bed. “My God,” he whispered.

  “What, Gary?”

  “He laughed. And he said, ‘Peace, Brother.’”

  “Peace, Brother?”

  “Then he hung up. I thought he was just some smart-ass. Then there was the incident outside. This was the day before yesterday. Some guy was being weird. That’s about all I know. Jonathan was the one who told me. It kinda freaked him out.”

  I went downstairs. Jonathan pulled his knit cap tighter to his scraggly hair and pointed to the wide front window. “The guy was looking inside. It was fuckin’ weird. He was pushing himself against the window. Like humping it. He had this big-ass grin on his face.”

  “His face? What did he look like?”

  “I couldn’t see his face because he was doing that mask thing.”

  “Mask?”

  Jonathan pinched his thumbs and forefingers into O’s, pressed the tips together, then turned his hands around as he brought his hands to his face, the palms pressing his temples as elbows pointed skyward. “All the while he’s pushing his crotch against the glass and flicking his tongue in and out like he’s fuckin’ Gene Simmons.”

  “What’d you do?”

  “I ran over and locked the door. I was thinking about calling the cops, but what am I gonna say: ‘There’s some dude making circles around his eyes and humpin’ a window’?”

  “Then what happened?”

  “I went behind the counter to grab my phone, at least get a shot of the creep. But when I turned back around he was gone.”

  I got Jonathan’s sparse description: dark hair, maybe, blue jeans, dark T-shirt. I went to the rear and elevatored back up to Ocampo’s apartment.

  “I’m putting a guard on this place,” I told him. “Night and day.”

  It took an hour to get surveillance outside the shop. I booked to HQ and found Gershwin back from his deposition.

  “You think Donnie knows Gary is his brother?” he asked.

  “He’s in Miami, and something’s pressed his button. I think Donnie’s got an agenda that somehow involves Gary.”

  “So why’d Donnie wait until now to make contact?”

  “Maybe he just found out an adoptive parent died and he discovered evidence while going through the estate. Maybe someone left the truth in a posthumous letter. Or maybe Donnie’s known, but only recently started obsessing. A big possible is that Donnie’s been in prison. You’re checking that angle?”

  “Three pool investigators are on it: Tyler, Ruiz and Bell. They’re checking everyone fresh from prison in the past six months who has a sexual history.”

  “We don’t have a name,” I muttered. “Or a past. Not a freakin’ atom’s worth of info about the guy.”

  “We know his DNA. We know he’s got some kind of accent. And we know he’s six-two with blue eyes and dark hair. Not to say he looks like that now, but on that note, did you …?”

  I pulled a sheet of paper from my pocket. I’d had the art types manipulate a facial photo of Gary, taking off weight, adding various hair styles and colors, beards and mustaches. I handed the sheet of photos to Gershwin, who smiled and nodded.

  “Cool, Big Ryde: Fifty shades of Donnie.”

  20

  Debro was pumping iron on a foam mat in his living room, the barbells rising and falling in time with his unlabored breath, the fifty-pound load for building strength, not bulk. He was naked save for a red thong and the knit cap. One windowless wall of the room was mostly mirror, so he could watch himself.

  The television screen that dominated one end of the room was turned to the gay channel, LOGO, an endless procession of delicious-looking men and some lesbians. Debro liked lesbians b
ecause they had often been the target of hatred, and it had made them tough and resilient. He particularly enjoyed the young diesel dykes in their camo pants and clodhoppers, a pack of Marlboros rolled into a short-sleeved tee. It was a cool look.

  Debro wasn’t interested in the television, however. He was planning an event that would allow him to continue his work. It would be challenging, but reap huge rewards.

  He heard a muffled thump and held the barbell at its apex and listened. Another thump, this one loud. He cursed, set aside the weights, and headed upstairs and into the room.

  Jacob Eisen sprawled on the floor in a puddle of piss. Harold Brighton was at the far side of the room, lying on the floor. He was raising his leg, then slamming it down on the floor. Wham. Raise. Wham.

  You never knew the reactions, different with each one. The slut on the floor, Jacob, had settled down after a day, content to be a placid fuck. But Harold had been the hardest to subdue at the capture, and since then had spent all of his time fighting to get to his feet. Even when his mind seemed shut down he rolled and moaned.

  Harold had to be replaced.

  Debro opened a door at the far end of the room, revealing a small utility bathroom and the bucket and mop he used for maintenance. He pulled a reinforced plastic tarp from a cabinet and returned to the large room, flinging the tarp over Harold as if covering a mattress. He gathered the ends of the tarp and yanked Harold to the floor. Harold’s hands pressed against the plastic like flowers trying to break from the soil.

  Debro returned to the bathroom for his supplies, filling a syringe from a small brown bottle. He preferred oral dosing while they slept, but Harold needed faster calming, his fingernails scratching at the tarp as his cries grew more frantic.

  When Debro was within a step, Harold kicked, catching Debro’s ankle and sending him flailing to the floor. Debro hobbled back to the bathroom, searching the cabinet until he found the steel pry-bar used to open the painted-over windows when he’d bought the place. He twirled it like a baton and went back to Harold, his harsh croaks agitating Jacob, whose head was craning from the floor.