by J. A. Kerley
“I can’t recall anyone who …” he stopped and frowned.
“What?” I asked.
“Dale got a call on the house phone. That doesn’t happen much, everyone having cells. He was at a table and I yelled over that someone wanted to talk. Dale took the phone and handed it back, said there was no one there.”
“Male voice?”
“Deep and kind of raspy.” He lowered his voice an octave. “‘Hello, is Dale Kemp a-boot?’ Those were his words.”
“You’re using a Canadian pronunciation,” Gershwin said. “Kind of.”
The barkeep nodded. “Or maybe it was kind of British.”
I leaned close. “Tell me this, if you remember. When Dale came to the phone, was he holding his drink?”
He closed his eyes. “He held the phone in one hand and put the other over the receiver, asked who it was. He must have left his drink behind.”
“That’s the picture in your head?” Gershwin asked. “For sure?”
“I always like looking at Dale.”
We returned to the Rover where I tapped my fingers on the wheel. “The perp sits in the corner, watches. When Kemp’s friends aren’t near, he calls the landline, asks for him. The barkeep calls, Kemp gets up …”
Gershwin finished the scenario. “The perp hangs up and walks by Kemp’s booth, pausing to spike his drink with homemade witches’ brew.”
I put the safari wagon in gear and we pulled into a balmy afternoon, the street a festival of brightly plumaged youth bustling from bar to bar, called by music or hormones, the world an endless caravan of vibrant moments. They were young and beautiful and invulnerable.
Or so they supposed.
Debro left his downstairs apartment and walked upstairs with his feet crunching on the wood-plank steps. The ancient building had been a small auto-parts warehouse and the red-brick walls were crumbling on to the steps. The door at the top was metal. He unlocked it and stepped into a spacious antechamber furnished with a table beneath a wall-mounted cabinet. The far end of the chamber held a door with a small wire-reinforced window at eye level.
Debro went to the window and flipped a switch on the wall. The room beyond the chamber lit up, the light from track-mounted spots screwed into the ceiling joists. After purchasing the building last year, he’d machine-sanded the floor to be an inch higher in the center, sloping down to small gutters, the gutters feeding into the drainage system from the roof. He’d then covered the floor in linoleum, caulking the seams.
All he had to do to clean up after his penitents was hook the hose into the wall faucet and rinse the floor. Debro allowed his boys twenty ounces of water a day, which was easily mopped up, food a few nutritional gel packs squirted past their lips daily, nothing solid.
It took time to do things right … to make things right.
Debro put his eyes to the window. Two lovely sluts were in attendance, Brianna in the corner, and his latest penitent, Harold, propped against a wall and dodging invisible birds or missiles or whatever. He tried to scream but only wet croaks emerged. Every couple of minutes he’d try to stand but even his glorious, dancing legs crumpled under the weight of the black locust.
Brianna was a different case, curled in the fetal position, pissing and emitting watery gruel from her sphincter. Brianna and her sphincter had ceased to be fun. Beside, she’d been here for over a week now, and had learned her lesson.
Debro nodded: the choice was made. He stared at Brianna for several long seconds. “Brianna’s leaving us, Brother,” he said. “It’s time to get another.”
Debro returned to his apartment to consult a map of South Florida. Part of his extensive planning had involved sites where the punished could be sent, and over a dozen locations had been ringed in red. He closed his eyes, circled a digit over the map, let it drop. He had a place to drop a used one. Now all he had to do was get a fresh one.
No problem. It would soon be night.
6
We headed to Kemp’s apartment, a furnished house Kemp rented with two male roommates, flight attendants. Both had been away during the time Kemp had been abducted. One roomie, Lawrence Kaskil, arrived as we did, pulling up on a sleek racing bicycle in a white T-shirt over black Lycra biking shorts.
“I called the police on the second day I was back,” Kaskil told us, tossing his blue helmet into a closet and exchanging his biking shoes for neon green flip-flops. “It wasn’t unusual for Dale to be gone overnight, but after two days I got worried.”
“You got back from where?”
“Mexico City.”
“Your other roommate, Tad Bertram, was where during this time?”
Kaskil flapped to the small kitchenette and studied a calendar stuck to the fridge with a magnetic Scotty dog. “Tad overnighted in London, then to Cairo. He dead-headed to Rome for two days and is now back in London. He’ll be in tonight. I dread telling him about Dale.”
“Dead-headed?” Gershwin said.
“Taking a flight, but not working it. He took a couple days off to see the sights.”
I took a look at the calendar, new to us, the Missing Persons unit having neglected to do any follow-up. But Rod Figueroa had it all figured out: just a case of sexed-up boys. And why work when you can gawk at nekkid wimmen in your Hustler?
“These notes on the calendar,” I said, checking the previous month. “Dale – Tampa, Dale – SA, Dale – ORL … What’s that about?”
“Overnight sales trips. Tampa, St Augustine, Orlando. Dale put out-of-town days on the calendar.” Kaskil paused. “But sometimes he was gone overnight and it wasn’t indicated.”
“When he’d meet someone?” I said. “Like on a date?”
Kaskil nodded. “Those could be, uh, impromptu.”
“You and your other roomie, Tad Bertram … you’re gone a lot?”
“We’re here maybe eight or ten days out of the month. We joke that we each pay a third of the rent, but Dale gets the place to himself seventy per cent of the time.”
“When you arrived home from Mexico City, did anything seem amiss?”
Kaskil’s features tightened in thought. “It was like Dale had played with rearranging the furniture, then put it back almost in place, but not quite.”
“Let’s talk enemies – did Dale have any?”
“A lot of times Dale gets cruised, and if he’s not in the mood he can be fast with put-downs. But no, there’s, like, no one who has it in for him. Not enough to do such an ugly thing.”
We asked everything we could think of, then walked to the door. Kaskil asked if he and Bertram could visit Kemp and I discouraged it, telling them to wait until he regained consciousness.
I didn’t mention it was a crapshoot as to that ever happening.
We interviewed neighbors and friends of Kemp, getting nothing. When the day dwindled to dusk, Gershwin headed home and I decided to crib at the Palace, saving the hour-long drive. The Palace was a recent addition to the FCLE’s ongoing accumulation of confiscations. Gershwin and I had nailed a piece of garbage who’d made big money trafficking in human beings, hiding his gains in real estate. One property was the Palace Apartments, a small building on the west side of downtown, near the Tamiami Trail.
Roy McDermott was a director of the FCLE not for deductive abilities, but his artful wrangling of funds and favors from the lawmakers in Tallahassee, a group the masterful McDermott milked like plump cows. Roy had convinced legislators to sell off all Kazankis’s properties except the Palace, to be used as quarters for visiting FCLE staffers and an occasional safe house for witness-protection efforts.
I arrived and grabbed my overnight valise from the rear of the car. My ID card buzzed me through two bulletproof doors – an addition for the witness-protection aspect – and into a small lobby with framed seascapes on the walls. A clipboard on an elegant mahogany table indicated three rooms were occupied: two agents from Jacksonville and a departmental attorney from Tallahassee. They were on floors one and two, leaving the top floor, the fourth,
fully mine.
My suite resembled an upscale extended-stay facility: twin couches and chairs in the main room, plus a large TV screen and modest sound system, a desk, a wardrobe, chest of drawers. The galley-style kitchen held cooking necessaries and a half-size fridge. The bathroom had both shower and Jacuzzi. The bedroom had a queen-size bed, another desk and chair in the corner.
Though a part of the FCLE’s inventory for three months, the Palace had already developed a fine tradition: if a visitor brought potables to the room and had something left when departing, the beverages stayed. I held my breath and opened the refrigerator …
Three cans of Bud, two of Heineken, two Cokes, and seven airline-sized bottles of liquor, including two Bacardi golden rums. Bless you, I thought, mixing a rum and Coke – no lime, but I could rough it – then tucking the file beneath my arm, and heading out. The fourth-floor suite had one aspect I prized above all others: a stairway to the roof.
I climbed and opened the door to the night skyline of Miami. Buildings towered like glass and metal hives with a skeleton staff of bees still buzzing within, whole floors dark, others alight for the cleaning staff and workers pulling all-nighters. A helicopter rumbled in the distance as traffic sounds drifted up from the street.
On my last stay I’d purchased a sturdy folding chair, and bungeed it to a vent. I set it up, put the drink beside me and my feet on the two-foot ledge. Below my soles was sixty feet of open air and three a.m. traffic, half taxicabs. I sipped rum and Coke, pulled my phone, and took another stab at my errant brother.
Per Clair’s instructions I thought so hard that my mouth formed the words Answer the phone, Jeremy. I visualized my brother cocking his head to the phone ringing in his office and lifting it to his ear … visualization another of Clair’s suggestions.
Answer …
The phone again directed me to his voicemail. Two dozen of my calls already lay in the electronic wasteland of my brother’s VM box … so much for synchronicity. Anger boiling in my gut, I held the phone to the night sky, growling, “God-dammit, Jeremy. Call me now and let me get on with my life.”
Five seconds later my phone riffed an incoming call. I checked the screen and saw the name AUGUSTE and stared in disbelief: Jeremy’s alter ego, Auguste Charpentier. I wondered if I’d already gone to bed and was dreaming.
Elmore replayed the riff, too strident for a dream, and a triumph for either Clair or coincidence. My finger hesitated over the connect button, wondering whether to voice relief or ire. Given the number of messages in Jeremy’s voicemail, I figured irritation was my due.
“Where the hell are you?” I snapped. “Why haven’t you been answering?”
“Goodness, so testy,” Jeremy said, his voice melodically Southern, not the Frenchified accent he affected with others. “I’ve been busy, Carson. No time for your idle chit-chat.”
“Idle chit-chat? I had no idea whether you were in Kentucky or Florida or … worse.”
“You mean back home in dear ol’ Alabammy?”
“Jail,” I said. “Prison. You might have been caught and I’d never know.”
“Don’t I get one call? I’d probably call you, Carson. Unless I used it to order a pizza.”
“You’re fine, then?” I sighed. “You’re still in Kentucky?”
“I’ll look for clues. I see endless trees outside my window, Carson. And the goddamn whip-poor-wills are screeching like banshees. Yes, I’m in Kentucky. Why do you ask?”
“Last year you implied you were moving to Key West. It never happened. The whole Key West thing … it’s just to unsettle me, right?”
My brother was a world-class manipulator and since he lived in isolation with no one to jerk around, I got to be the puppet.
“Why would I wish to unsettle you, dear brother?” he said, his voice a study in innocence.
“You enjoy keeping me off balance,” I said. “It’s your hobby.”
“Such drama,” Jeremy yawned. “I’ve simply been traveling, Carson. Too busy to return your calls.”
“Travel is dangerous for you. Traveling where?”
My brother’s face was on every Wanted list in the country. The photo was from his last year at the Institute, when he’d done a Brando before sitting for the photographer, filling his cheeks with tissue, propping his ears forward, flaring his nostrils. Though never expecting – at that time – to escape, he had planned for the occasion, the just-in-case kind of thinking that exemplified my brother’s mind. As a result of his planning, Jeremy resembled his photo only slightly, but a seasoned eye might see through the façade, and it would be over.
“Traveling hither and yon,” he said. “Seeing old friends.”
“You have no friends.”
“Don’t be a Negative Nelly. Of course I have friends.”
“Who?”
He changed course, affecting the high and tremulous voice of an elderly woman. “I’m … muh-muh-moldering here in the w-woods, Carson. Now th-that I’m … nearing my duh-dotage … I need h-human cuh-cuh-contact.”
“Spare me the routine. You’re not even forty-five yet. And human contact means danger.”
“I disagree, Brother,” Jeremy said, back to normal voice. “In populations where the locals are known for a live-and-let-live attitude and a soupçon of eccentricity, I can hide in plain sight if I’ve planned well.”
My irritation was turning to uneasiness. When my brother grew restive, bad things occurred. He was being cryptic as well, another dark sign.
“Planned how?”
“I’m building my final chapter, dear brother. I’m coming back to the world.”
He chuckled and hung up.
Coming back to the world? Heeding a shiver at the base of my spine, I folded my chair and retreated from the roof, suddenly feeling small and vulnerable under the vast dark plain of sky.
7
The megaphone on the wall of the south Miami bar is a two-foot tin cone that legend has stolen from ancient crooner Rudy Vallee while on a swing through Florida in the 1930s. If true, it’s safe to say that while in Vallee’s possession the cone was not embellished on both sides with a twenty-inch-long penis rendered in pink glitter, the penis aiming toward the conic apex, making the user appear to be, well … the point is obvious.
The bartender pulls the megaphone from its pegs and climbs atop the bar. He’s wearing skin-tight black jeans and an orange bowling shirt. Those who notice begin yelling No! into an atmosphere of beer, sweat and a hundred lotions, potions, and colognes.
The disco music dies in mid-air. Sweat-dripping dancers flail for a few seconds as more yells of No! echo from the walls. The barkeep raises the megaphone to his lips to catcalls. “Last call,” he says, the peniphone giving his words stentorian depth. “We close in twenty minutes. ONE drink a person … None of this ordering five, you ladies hear me?”
The barkeep takes a showy bow. Good-natured hoots follow him to the floor. The music returns. A dozen young men rush to the bar as a pair of waiters race from table to booth to take orders. “A last drink, hon?” the waiter passing Debro yells atop the shuddering bass line.
Debro shakes his head and averts his face to tap out a fake message on his phone. The waiter sprints away as Debro pats his knit cap and turns his gaze to a young man beside a table. The man is wearing a safari-style shirt atop coral shorts and for most of the evening kept his tanned legs crossed as he entertained a succession of friends and friend wannabees.
But now the feet are on the floor and legs spread wide as the man clutches his belly. For the second time in five minutes he rushes to the bathroom. Debro presses the illumination on his watch: forty-seven minutes since slipping across the shadowy bar and – pretending to stop and read one of the racy cocktail napkins – squirting five drops of the mixture into the young man’s drink. Debro has also been watching the bathroom, empty until the man entered, everyone frantic for a final drink.
He pulls his knit cap tight and walks quickly to the restroom, hearing vomiting from
the far stall. He checks the other stalls to assure no one’s hooking up, arriving at the final stall as the man exits, wiping his lips with toilet paper.
“You all right, brother?” DB’s eyes frown with concern.
The man leans against the stall divider for support. “I think I just puked up my liver. Jesus, all I had was three daiquiris. Ooops …” The man spins back for another round of vomiting.
“It’s probably Fraturna Mortuis,” Debro says, knowing Jacob Eisen has no connection to Latin or medicine. Eisen turns and blinks in confusion.
“What?”
“The virus causing it. Gut started aching ten–fifteen minutes ago? Dizziness? You feel weak, right?”
The man nods. “You a doctor or something?”
“An intern,” Debro lies. “You got a ride home, right?”
“Walking. I live eight blocks away.” Eisen turns green and grabs his belly.
“How about I give you a lift, bro?” Debro says. “This will pass fast, but you’re gonna be too sick to walk.”
“I … I already am. Damn … can barely stand.” Eisen’s head spins to the left as his eye widen to their limits. “Holy shit.”
“What?” Debro asks.
“I just saw a fucking parrot. How’d a parrot get in here?”
Time to move fast, Debro thinks. Eisen’s knees buckle and Debro keeps him from dropping. The attack passes and Eisen wipes cold sweat from his forehead and studies Debro through pain-tightened eyes. “You look fum-uliar,” Eisen says, his words garbled. He touches his throat with fear. “Wha- t’ fu? My froat … I -an’t – alk.”
“Laryngitis from the virus,” Debro says, pulling Eisen close. “Here, lean on me. We can go out the back.”
“Fanks, bruver,” Eisen chokes, grateful arms encircling DB’s neck like a sick child clinging to a parent. “Yura … life … saver.” He starts to stumble and knocks Debro’s hat to the floor. Debro grabs the hat, stuffs it in a pocket, then enters the alley. He has researched every footstep. They reach the street as a quartet of men pass by.
“Is your friend OK?” one asks.
