by J. A. Kerley
“Sure. I just wanted you to know Brian is a good tenant, the best. He’s a gentle kid, maybe a little mixed up. But everything’s been mixed up since Alice Cooper.”
Gershwin pushed the door open without using the key. “Check this, Big Ryde.”
The lockset was broken, the splinters facing inward, like when you slam a door with your shoulder to get past. It was a cheap lock and wouldn’t have taken much. And with no downstairs tenant, noise wasn’t a factor.
“Forced entry,” I said, following Gershwin into the apartment. The air was suffused with the scent of sandalwood.
It was like walking into a vintage clothing store: racks of wigs, glitzy sequined gowns, feather boas, black leather undergarments, mostly faux. But it was a messy store, two racks on their sides, garments strewn across a battered sofa and the floor. A wooden chair was tipped over in a corner. The sandalwood came from the incense burner on the floor, spent sticks and sand spilling out and whisked with scuff marks.
While Gershwin scoped out the living room, I checked the kitchen, small and orderly, foodstuffs and spices stacked neatly in the cabinets. The provisions in the fridge were minimal, luncheon meat and veggies, a couple TV dinners in the freezer beside a bottle of Stoli. I checked the bedroom, a double bed beneath framed photos of Caswell in various stages of fancy dress or undress, vamping for the camera. A bedside table held a few gay porn mags, nothing freaky, at least compared to some stuff I’d seen.
The bedroom echoed the kitchen in its order. Books in a neat row on a shelf, his daily clothing arranged by color in the closet. Socks, underwear, tees, sweats … all tucked precisely in their drawers. I returned to the living room.
“Everything else this messed up?” Gershwin asked, twirling a blonde wig on his finger.
I shook my head. “Probably happened when the hallucinations started. Or Brian put up a fight. I’ll tell Elmont to hang around until scene techs can get here.”
We crossed town to see the person who’d called in the missing report on Caswell, Mitchell Peyton, a friend who had gotten worried when Caswell didn’t meet him for lunch the following day. He’d called Caswell two dozen times – Caswell a phone junkie who always answered – then notified police that something was awry.
Peyton lived in a forties-vintage apartment complex in North Miami, seedy in a gentle way, peeling paint, a palm tumbled over in the courtyard. But the architecture was classic and bright flowers bloomed along the walkways, recalling a Hollywood idol on a downhill track, but still able to put on airs.
Peyton was in his late thirties, pudgy and losing hair and affecting a maroon beret when he opened the door in floppy jeans and a wrinkled Aloha shirt. When we ID’d ourselves he shot a look toward an ashtray in the living room. I saw an unlit joint waiting the match, and he saw me see it.
“It’s OK,” I said. “Lots of people roll their own, Mr Peyton. Cigarette tobacco, right?”
“Uh, sure. Exactly. Let me just clean things up and you can come in.”
Gershwin and I diplomatically turned away and when Peyton said, “Come on in,” saw that the doob had disappeared. We entered, but declined sitting, instead leaning against the wall in a neat living room decorated with vintage movie posters: Lost Horizon, The Wizard of Oz, Gone with the Wind.
“You called in a missing report on Brian Caswell?”
“He’s been found? He’s all right?”
I laid out enough to paint an impressionistic picture, the scene without a lot of detail, leaving the door open for a hopeful recovery.
“When did you last see Brian?” I asked.
Peyton needed a glass of white wine to smooth out the news. “After his show at the Metro, a place on Mountrain Street. He was like, sitting at a table and receiving people, getting props for his show. Brianna burns up the stage.”
“People ever buy Brian drinks?”
“Always,” the beret bobbed. “It’s a way to show appreciation.”
“What’s Brianna’s act like?” I asked.
“He does Garland to Gaga, but his comic persona is Ivana Tramp, y’know, like from Trump. He’s triple bitchy, put-downs part of the act. If someone hoots at him while he’s performing, he might say, ‘Girl, why are you here buying drinks? Save that money for dermabrasion.’ It’s all in fun. I’ve got a few videos of his act if you want to see.”
My heart quickened. “From that night?”
“A couple years ago, back when Brian was developing the act.”
No help and there wasn’t much to go on in Peyton’s account of the night. Caswell had been surrounded by well-wishers and drink-buyers and he’d tottered home around one a.m.
“Brian was feeling crappy and went home. He was afraid he was getting a cold and he had a show to do the next night. He’s a trouper.”
Morningstar said symptoms could appear within fifteen minutes following a dosing, including dizziness, dry mouth, increased heart rate, flushing and a sense of general weakness … similar to the onset of a cold or flu. The effects ramped up until the victim was incapacitated.
We left Peyton to his buzz and were wondering where to go next when my phone went off: Roy. The excitement was back in his voice.
“I’m back at HQ,” he trumpeted. ‘We just got a hit on the DNA. A name. It’s over!”
We were three steps out of the elevator when Roy was in front of us, waving a report in our faces, his grin stretching from earlobe to earlobe.
“He’s nailed to the wall,” he said, snicking the page with a fingernail. “The positive on the DNA.”
“Did it just arrive?” I asked. With no former hits, the only possible way to get a match was for the perp’s chromo-map to have just entered the system, meaning he’d been arrested somewhere.
“Nope. It’s been around for twenty-six months.”
I stared. “What? How?”
Roy put a cautionary finger to his lips and motioned us to follow him to his office. We entered and he closed his door, not a typical move for Roy.
“I had a meeting with Homeland Security yesterday, the usual trading of notes. I was telling Major Rayles about the case, that we’d had no hits from the national d-base. He said he’d have our results run through Home-Sec’s database which, it seems, is more extensive than ours.”
“More extensive how?”
“We’ll get there. The main thing is, we got a solid positive on one Gary Ocampo. Right here in Miami.”
“Particulars?”
“This Ocampo is thirty. No record. I had a couple pool dicks do some fast digging. Seems Ocampo owns a small shop, Gary’s Fantasy World, selling comic books and video games. He’s the owner of the building and resides upstairs.”
I considered the information. “No priors, Roy? A bit odd.”
“Every rapist starts somewhere, right?”
I pulled my jacket from the hanger and headed toward the door. “I’ll take a team and go fetch Mr Ocampo. Can’t argue with the genetics.”
“Hold on, Carson,” Roy said. “It’s not quite that easy. Ocampo was part of a health study at the University of Florida about three years back. The DNA was taken then, consensual, part of the study.”
I gave him a so-what? look.
He said, “Those folks at HS toss a wide net, chromosomally speaking. Sometimes the net lands in a gray area.”
“You’re saying a smart lawyer might argue though the DNA sampling was consensual, its introduction into a nationwide database wasn’t?”
Roy nodded. “I just got off the phone with the state Attorney General, wanted to know if we could bust this SOB. They promised an answer within a couple hours.”
I checked my watch. We could afford to wait if it meant the difference between a clean bust and giving some shyster ammunition to muddy a case.
“I think Gershwin and I will do some shopping until the decision comes down,” I said.
“Lemme guess,” Roy grinned. “Comic books?”
11
The locale was strip malls and free-sta
nding shops, a laundromat on the corner, a pizzeria across the street. A light breeze coaxed tree-line palms into a green hula against a cerulean sky. Down the block was a fortune teller, a second-hand clothier, a storefront tacquería, a muffler shop and a uniform store. The little shops were there because the transitional nature of the street – straddling between slums and gentrification – meant low rents, but the street was a four-lane thoroughfare in and out of downtown, with ample traffic to attract customers.
Centering the block was Gary’s Fantasy World, the brightest structure on the street, freshly painted and as white as snow. A broad front window beamed with neon signage pulsing New and Vintage Comics and Video Games and Collectors Welcome. There were two upstairs windows, both with closed curtains.
Lonnie Canseco, a senior colleague, was a block behind. He’d assembled a unit of two more FCLE dicks and alerted Miami-Dade, who’d provided four patrol cars with two-man teams. Also, as a precaution, a SWAT unit was a block away. We could have gone with a major-league assault, but it was my call, and I preferred surgical strikes to carpet bombing. If that failed, I was fine with Bombs Away.
I radioed Canseco to pull down the alley behind Ocampo’s shop in case the guy bolted out the back. My phone rang, Roy. “You’re clear, bud,” he said. “The AG says it’s fine. Nail the fucker, but be careful, right?”
Gary’s Fantasy World reminded me of an old-school record store, except the wooden bins held glassine-sleeved comic books instead of vinyl albums. Hand-lettered signs hung above bins, denoting Superman, Batman, Fantastic Four and so forth. A far wall held video games. Two glass counters in the rear held more comics. I took it they were the crème de la crème, priced from two hundred and fifty to over two thousand dollars.
“Two grand for a freakin’ comic?” Gershwin whispered.
I heard a rustle and spun to see a young male enter from a door behind the counter, early twenties, skinny as a rail, with the bleached pallor that comes from junk food and avoidance of sunlight. There was a single tattoo inside his right arm: Spider-Man in lavish color. Per current trend he affected a knit woolen hat of thick yarn, black, pulled almost to his eyebrows. Unwashed brown hair poured several inches from the hat, ending in jagged spikes.
The kid’s brown eyes stared at us without saying a word. I doubt we resembled the typical comic-book purchaser, though what did I know?
“We need to see Mr Ocampo,” Gershwin said.
“He’s not in.”
I pulled the badge, evoking puzzlement from the kid. “Where is he?” I asked. “Mr Ocampo.”
The kid looked toward the ceiling. Or maybe heaven. “Upstairs.”
“Can you call him down here?”
“Gary don’t come down here a whole lot.”
A voice appeared in the air, wheezy and almost breathless. “This is Gary Ocampo. What do you want?”
My eyes went to the corners, the front door, back. No one.
“Where are you?” I said.
“Jonathan just told you: I’m upstairs.”
He was talking through speakers. I looked around but couldn’t see the camera. “We need to talk to you, now, Mr Ocampo,” I said. “We need you downstairs.”
“I can’t,” the disembodied voice said. “Have Jonathan take you to the elevator.”
I pulled the clerk close, figuring the store was thick with microphones. “Ocampo,” I whispered. “Is he armed, Jonathan?”
“Hunh?”
“Don’t lie to me, kid. Is Ocampo sitting on a stack of guns up there?”
The clerk looked at me like I’d started making chicken sounds. “Fuck no. Gary usually ain’t even sitting.”
“What’s that mean?” Gershwin said.
The clerk rolled his eyes and waved us through the door behind the counter and into a room of inventory, boxes of magazines and games in various stages of sorting and packaging. The kid pointed to a grated opening in the corner. “The elevator. Push ‘up’ and guess what … it takes you up.”
The scene was less threatening than odd. I keyed my mic and told Canseco and the unit we were heading upstairs, then stepped into the elevator. It wasn’t a freight elevator, but not one of those house-sized lifts either; a meter and a half square or so, big enough to carry a large fridge with a couple guys beside it. It groaned between floors and stopped behind a gray panel. Gershwin and I were pressed to the sides and had our weapons at our sides, just in case.
I slid the gray panel aside, finding a room so dark we were momentarily blinded. All I could see, backlit against the vertical bands of light between the blinds, was a pale hill constructed on a low table and for a split-second my mind showed me Richard Dreyfuss creating the mud tower in Close Encounters. At the base of the hill, against the wall, was a pair of flat-screen televisions, the screens dead.
Was the rapist hiding behind the mound … aiming a weapon at our heads?
Someone sneezed. “Ocampo?” I said, crouching in the elevator. “Where are you?”
“Oh, for crying out loud,” sighed a whining voice. “Stop your dawdling and come in.”
Stepping into the room was like entering a fog made from body stink, stale air and, for some reason, a background smell of onions. Drawing closer, the mound resolved into a rounded blue sheet atop not a low table, but a large bed. The apex of the sheet fell like a ski slope to a pudgy roll of chin. The chin rounded up into a head atop fluffy pillows.
I stepped closer and heard a whirring sound as the head began to ascend, the bed mechanically inclining. Curious blue beads of iris watched me as Ocampo rose to sitting position.
“What do you think I’ve done that you enter my home with drawn weapons?” His voice was angry.
“May I see your hands please, Mr Ocampo?” I instructed.
“You think I have a gun? Is that it?”
“Hands in sight, dammit.”
He sighed and produced two fat hands, the fingers like pink overstuffed sausages. He wiggled them. “See a gun anywhere? What on earth do you want?”
“We’re interested in where you were this morning,” Gershwin said.
Ocampo’s eyes squinted tight in what I took as anger but instead exploded in a huge sneeze. He scrabbled for a tissue from a box beside his pillow. He blew his nose, rolled the tissue in a ball and dropped it in a basket beside the bed frame, almost full of used tissue. I was getting a bad feeling about this bust.
“What did you say?” Ocampo demanded, his eyes red and wet.
“This morning,” Gershwin repeated. “About daybreak. Can you tell me where you were?”
Ocampo stared in what seemed disbelief. He snapped the plump fingers, making a thub sound. “Oh, now I remember. I was running a marathon.”
“Be serious, Mr Ocampo.”
“Then I seriously assure you I was right here. Why?”
“We’ll ask the questions, Mr Ocampo,” I said, studying the mass beneath the sheet. His body couldn’t be that large. It had to be a ruse.
“What is your mobility, sir?” I asked as my hand crept toward the edge of the sheet.
Again the stare of disbelief. “My mobility?”
“It’s important.”
“I walk around the block when weather permits. Sometimes two or three times a week.” He sneezed again, repeated the motion with the tissue.
I reached out and snapped away Ocampo’s sheet, expecting to find the body of a football linesman padded out with pillows. Instead I saw a vast landscape of naked flesh, folded and dimpled and lolling, the man’s breasts drowsing down his sides like deflated porpoise heads, his genitals hidden under rumpled pouches of pimpled overhang. Several wadded tissues tumbled to the floor.
“YOU SWINE!” Ocampo screeched, scrabbling to cover himself as his face reddened. “You filthy PERVERT! You SCUM!”
I shot Gershwin a glance. Something was hideously awry. I returned the edge of the sheet to Ocampo’s hand and he yanked it back in place.
“You NAZI FILTH!” he railed. “My lawyers will destroy yo
u!”
Gershwin nodded me to the corner of the room. “This guy couldn’t assault a box turtle, Big Ryde,” he whispered. “He’d never catch it.”
“What are you talking about over there?” Ocampo railed. “What are you plotting?”
I nodded. No matter how dangerous or desperate Ocampo’s inclinations, he would be too slowed by his volume to abduct anyone. As for slyly doping someone’s drink, the floor would shake with his approach, as surreptitious as a tractor.
“Somewhere along the way the DNA got messed up, Zigs.”
“What do we do?”
“Do you hear me you, you … fascists?”
I shot a glance at Ocampo, his face equal measures of anger and humiliation. “First, we try to mollify him. If this hits the headlines, Roy’ll tear his hair out.”
“It’s harassment, pure and simple! Storm troopers!”
We both shot glances at the huge man, scrabbling through a tabletop of crumpled tissues and allergy meds and finding an iPhone. He brandished it like a scimitar. “I’m phoning my lawyers. Then I’m calling every news station in town.”
My mind raced. Ocampo was taking photos of us, grist for his lawyer, no doubt. “I’m gonna call the lab and give them hell,” I whispered. “Get ready.”
“What lab? Who?” Gershwin said. Then, “Oh.”
I retreated to the elevator and fake-dialed my cell. “Give me fucking Pedersen,” I growled, tapping my toe impatiently. When I saw Ocampo’s eyes move to me, the act began.
“YOU ABSOLUTE IDIOT,” I howled. “We’re at Ocampo’s house now. GARY-FUCKING-OCAMPO. IT’S NOT HIM! Never mind why, you asshole … It was your goddamn lab that ID’d this poor man as the perp. NO FUCKING EXCUSES. We embarrassed an innocent man and MADE OURSELVES LOOK LIKE A PAIR OF HORSES’ ASSES IN THE BARGAIN.”
“What’s he doing?” Ocampo demanded of Gershwin. “Who’s he talking to?”
“Some lab moron whose ass he’s personally gonna kick when we leave here, sir,” Gershwin said.
“I should drag you over here to apologize to Mr Ocampo in person,” I snarled. “You will?” I held my hand over the cell and turned to Ocampo. “Excuse me, sir, would it help if we had the guy responsible for this—” I pulled the phone to my mouth “AMAZING FUCK-UP”, then re-aimed it at Ocampo – “come over here and apologize to you in person?”
