The Good Humor Man

by Andrew Fox

  Playing a hunch, I switch from Referrals to Complaints. Bingo. A Ms. Julia Bonnabel filed a complaint against Trotmann only twenty months ago. She’s local. There’s an address listed: 53 Sunset Lane, apartment 451. In Overtown.

  When I leave NHMS headquarters, I spot a long black sedan, windows darkly tinted, slowly winding its way through the streets of the municipal complex. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen a similar vehicle, possibly that same car, on the highway between New Orleans and Miami. I might’ve even seen it on the road between Memphis and New Orleans. The black sedan pauses at a stop light, the hum of its motor like the watchful purr-growl of a panther. Then it drives away.

  No one needs to ask for directions to Overtown. Not even a newcomer like me. Like Manhattan’s skyline, Overtown is visible from twenty miles away. It sits suspended like a gigantic Sword of Damocles above the relatively low-rise structures of the South Beach Historic Art Deco District. This city-above-a-city was planned and built when Miami Beach’s city fathers believed the world couldn’t get enough of their island. The boom years, just before GD2.

  Overtown, “two-point-seven square miles of brand-new real estate, with spectacular views of ocean and bay, minutes from the famous Deco District, available for luxury retail and residential development,” was built in the shape of a gargantuan table. Its deck, the foundation for dozens of once-planned skyscrapers, hovers eighteen stories above beach level. In order not to throw the denizens of the original city completely into shadow, Overtown’s designers specified that the deck be constructed of translucent glass-polymer, strong as steel, fortified by a web of titanium rods.

  The engine of my little Nash, burdened by the weight of my belongings and the food I’ve brought from New Orleans, whines pitifully as I ascend one of the long spiral rampways that leads up to the deck. Overtown’s builders camouflaged the deck’s four main supports with statuary. Four grand colossi now appear to support Overtown on their massive shoulders — Christopher Columbus, “discoverer” of the New World; Carl Fisher, the developer and impresario who founded Miami Beach; José Martí, liberator of Latin America from Spain; and Elian Gonzalez, liberator of Cuba from Castroism. Winding around and around the spiral ramp, my windshield is filled first with Columbus’s boots, then, more distant, Elian’s Nike sneakers; Columbus’s oilskin tunic, then Elian’s bony adolescent knees; Columbus’s sextant, Elian’s handheld Nintendo game console; Columbus’s flaring Roman nose, Elian’s halo of angelic curls, befitting a miracle child who was rescued from drowning in the Florida Straits by dolphins sent by Jesus… or so the story is told.

  The parking garage at the top of the ramp is eerily deserted. I count only seven other cars. Three of those sit on flat tires. From what I’ve heard, much of Overtown has devolved into low-rent housing for the service workers required by the relatively thriving Art Deco District below.

  I’m at the edge of a vast construction site, frozen by GD2 in a permanent state of incompletion. The skeletons of gigantic towers rise from the yellowed glass of the deck, awaiting concrete and chrome skins that will never come.

  In the sheltering shadow of a derelict trolley car, I check my map for 53 Sunset Lane. It doesn’t look to be too far away, maybe three or four blocks. I walk alongside a grid of moving sidewalks that haven’t moved, in all likelihood, since the year I sold the Elvis to Graceland. Ahead of me, a flock of seagulls hover, their beaks flecked with red, screeching murderously as other birds try to snatch their prizes. They scatter as I walk closer. My nose tells me what they’re fascinated with before my eyes do. It’s a dead cat, its hind parts caught in some rusting machinery.

  The four-story apartment building at 53 Sunset Lane appears to be in much better shape than its neighbors. This isn’t saying much. The security gate is permanently open, its hinges reduced to brown metallic flakes. The building’s foyer is partially filled with reeking trash bags; either garbage pickup is extremely irregular in Overtown, or the building’s tenants are trying to discourage squatters.

  I climb the worn stairs to the fourth floor, find apartment 451, and ring the bell. I hold my physician’s identification card up to the peephole and wait for Ms. Bonnabel. I can’t get my father’s voice out of my mind, the bile in his voice as he described Eric Trotmann’s crimes. They had been friends and roommates in their med school days (Trotmann had been one of the youngest students ever admitted to UCLA’s Medical School). They both opted to specialize in reconstructive surgery. Not long after I was born, they established a practice together in Beverly Hills. But their partnership didn’t last long. It dissolved over a dispute regarding billings and record-keeping.

  This was just a minor speed bump in my father’s career. When my father’s practice took off like a Saturn V rocket, his ex-partner was left very much on the ground, breathing rocket exhaust and hating it. He, too, went to France to learn liposuction. But by the time Trotmann returned to Beverly Hills and reestablished himself, the one-time boy wonder found himself relegated to the minor leagues of the plastic surgery business, forced to witness my father’s major league triumphs.

  Still not a peep from Julia Bonnabel. Just as I’m beginning to wonder whether I should return later, I hear footsteps from the other side of the door. A woman’s voice asks, “Who is it? What do you want?”

  “Ms. Bonnabel? Julia Bonnabel?”

  “Yes…” the voice answers, warily. “Who are you?”

  “I’m Dr. Louis Shmalzberg. With the American Society of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgeons.” I hold my physician’s ID closer to the peephole. “I’m part of a team investigating allegations of malpractice made against Dr. Eric Trotmann.”

  A chain latch clinks loudly as Ms. Bonnabel pulls the door open three inches. I’m only able to see half her face. The one eye I can see floats in a dark, sunken socket. “Sure as hell took you long enough. I put in the complaint on that bastard a year and a half ago.”

  “I’m sorry it’s taken so long for someone to contact you. I’m not connected with NHMS. My organization is a professional standards body, a kind of self-policing agency for plastic surgeons. We’re seeking to build a case to strip Dr. Trotmann of his license and keep him from harming any other patients. But he’s been very hard to catch up with. Would you have a few minutes to answer some questions?”

  The eye on the other side of the chain twitches briefly. “No one’s come to see me for a very long time.” Another few seconds of silence. Then a sigh. “Give me a minute. I’m not… just give me a minute to put some things on.”

  I wait ten minutes in the dim, musty hallway, staring out a dirty window at the stunningly blue winter sky. Rehearsing in my head what I’ll ask her. Wondering how difficult it will be to steal the Elvis away from Trotmann, once I find him.

  So many advances in medicine have resulted from the obsessive tinkerings of isolated eccentrics. After my father became a minor celebrity in Beverly Hills, Trotmann emerged from his workshop with a brand new type of cannula. Traditional cannulas relied upon a prior injection of hyaluronidase and saltwater to loosen subdermal tissues. Trotmann’s cannula supposedly made the chemical injections superfluous; he designed the cannula with a mechanical cutting head, a miniature grasping claw, each pincher sharp as a scalpel. Liposuction was passé, he declared in television interviews. The wave of the future was liposculpture.

  At first Trotmann did quite well. Plastic surgery is a trend-driven business; by appealing to the media’s baser instincts, he was able to attract a sizeable clientele of cocktail party braggarts and worshipers of the new. But problems with his technique soon became apparent. Serious problems. Women who had extensive procedures on their thighs or stomachs developed hideous furrows where the fat had been excised. A good part of my father’s practice in the early and mid-1980s consisted of corrective work on Trotmann’s patients.

  I hear a dead bolt sliding clear. Ms. Bonnabel gestures for me to enter. Her eyes look less sunken than they did before; but looking closer, I realize this is due to a careful applicati
on of heavy makeup. I wonder if she’s put on a wig. Her flowered dress hides her from neck to toes. Her computer record listed her as thirty-eight; she looks to be in her sixties.

  Drapes are pulled tightly shut across her windows. Her apartment reeks with the mothball-and-cough-syrup odor of a sickroom. She limps heavily to a leather reading chair, but she hesitates before sitting down. “There was a time,” she says, “when I would’ve spat in your face if you told me he’d done anything wrong. But that’s what cults are like. Meat. Stupid, stupid meat. That’s all I was to him.”

  I’ve never seen one of Trotmann’s patients before. My father told me some developed immune system disorders similar to those suffered by some recipients of silicone breast implants. Ms. Bonnabel appears to be one of those unfortunates.

  My father served as an expert testifier at Trotmann’s first and second malpractice hearings. Later, he participated in an effort to bring criminal charges against him. But the profession was notoriously reluctant to permanently censure one of its own. Trotmann refused to abandon his innovation, clinging to it like he would a favored but sociopathic child. He avoided the proliferating lawsuits by vanishing. Every few years he resurfaced in a new place. The Bahamas. West Palm Beach. Barbados. Always staying close to open waters and escape.

  “I’m so sorry, Ms. Bonnabel. I hope that my organization will be able to help somehow. Or at least prevent him from hurting others.” The deeper I head into this, the more lies I tell.

  “I’m sorry,” she says, “what was your name again?”

  “Dr. Shmalzberg. Louis Shmalzberg.”

  “Please sit. Like I said, I’m out of practice having guests. Out of practice seeing people, period.”

  “Thank you.” I settle myself onto a worn leather sofa. “When was the last time you had any contact with Dr. Trotmann?”

  “Doctor Trotmann?” She half sits, half falls into the chair. “That man’s no doctor. A witch doctor, maybe.” She laughs weakly.

  “Have you spoken to him since you filed the complaint? Can you tell me where he is?”

  She blasts me with a sour look. “Aren’t you going to ask what he did to me?”

  Her question brings me up short. “Of course. Please describe your full history with Doctor, uh, Eric Trotmann.”

  “It was a bad time in my life,” she says, staring at a shapeless glass paperweight on the coffee table. “My marriage and business had just fallen apart. I didn’t have anyone to turn to. Family — who the hell has any family anymore? I remembered reading somewhere that chocolate has this magical anti-depressive effect on women. Real chocolate; it had to be the real stuff. So I went looking for it. I found it at Lansky’s. One of those ‘eat-easies’ that sometimes get raided. And that’s where they found me.”

  “Who? Trotmann?”

  “No. Trotmann’s women. Two of them. I guess they could smell the despair on me. They came over to my table, sat with me. They seemed so sweet, so sympathetic. Like angels. I was too far gone, too goddamned needy to question their motives. By the end of my second visit to Lansky’s, they’d dug my entire life story out of me. At first I thought they might be Jesus freaks. But I liked their company, needed it, so I ignored the alarm bells. They told me my coming to Lansky’s was a sign. That without knowing it, I’d already started on the path to redemption. A power greater than me had guided me onto the right path.”

  Religion. I live the bulk of my life ignoring it, and now, these past three weeks, I can’t escape it. “But what does this have to do with Eric Trotmann? What was he getting out of all this?”

  My hostess sighs, then smoothes her dress across stick-thin upper legs. “What does he get? He gets money, for one thing. As new church members, we had to tithe fifteen percent of our gross incomes. That could get reduced later, depending on how many new ‘converts’ we could drag in. And he gets bodies, women’s bodies, to play with. To abuse and mutilate. He hates women, did you know that? But it doesn’t matter. They worship him like he’s a god, that sadistic, horrible, withered old man. I’m one of the only ones to ever get out.”

  She fixes me with an unyielding stare. “Would you like to see just how much he hates women? How much he hated me?”

  Before I can say a word, she painfully rises from her chair. She lifts her dress slowly, a few inches at a time. Queasy anticipation makes me sweat. Her long calves are marked with a web of blue varicose veins. It’s when the dress rises to the thighs that the damage begins. Even though I’ve seen dozens of burn and accident victims, seeing this premeditated violation of a human body makes my gorge rise.

  Gullies. Fissures. Dry riverbeds. It’s easier on me to reimagine those legs as geological features than to see them with the eyes of a man. Trotmann really did a job on her. She turns around so that I get the most complete view. The subdermal damage clearly extends above her thighs, crossing her buttocks, winding around her hips. Even his incisions were crude, the work of a beginning med student. Or a surgeon who simply doesn’t care.

  She lets her dress fall to her ankles. If I had months to spend, and if she were wealthy enough to have her own fat tissues cloned, I might be able to fix half of what Trotmann has done.

  “Tell me where to find him,” I say, “and I’ll try to ensure he doesn’t repeat what he’s done to you. Tell me where his church is.”

  “I… I don’t know, not anymore. I’d tell you if I knew. But he was always moving it around. Do you know how many empty auditoriums, ballrooms, and social halls there are in Overtown? Owners are desperate for any rents at all. And half the buildings up here don’t even have owners anymore; just squatters.”

  “Can you put me in touch with any of your old friends? Women who might still be members of the church?”

  “I told you before. I’m black-balled. I’m not a person to them anymore.”

  “Would any of them still go to that Lansky’s you mentioned?” Ms. Denoux told me about Lansky’s. She has contacts there.

  “Probably. They have to keep putting on weight if they ever want a shot at one of that old bastard’s ‘cleansings’.” Her gaze turns hard and purposeful. “I might have a photo of me with one of the girls. One of the younger ones. Would you like to see it?”

  “That would be very helpful, thank you.”

  She returns from her bedroom a few minutes later and hands me a photograph. “Here. Keep it. I can’t stand to look at it anymore.”

  In the photo, a much younger-looking, healthier Ms. Bonnabel stands on the beach with her young friend. Both wear two-piece swimsuits. I think I can see one of Trotmann’s trademark jagged incisions on Ms. Bonnabel’s left inner thigh. Her companion appears unmarked. The younger woman has an unusual combination of features — dark olive skin, bright red hair, and green eyes. Her figure is coltish, pre-adolescent, with negligible breasts and boyish hips. She wears her hair shoulder length, with prominent curled bangs, just like Emily did.

  “What’s her name?” I ask, beguiled by the younger woman’s smile.

  “Margo. I never knew her last name.”

  “You think she still goes to Lansky’s?”

  “I have no doubt. Lansky’s is the only place that can get her big enough for one of Trotmann’s… mutilations.”

  She grasps my hand and presses it onto her thigh. I feel her scars through the cheap dress. “Find her,” she says. “Stop him before he makes of her what he’s made of me.”

  CHAPTER 11

  I check into a room in a nicer part of Overtown; “nicer” being purely relative. According to Ms. Bonnabel, the crowds don’t begin hitting Lansky’s until after eleven P.M. I still have a few hours. I want to talk to Harri, hear how she’s progressing in the fight against Metaboloft.

  She picks up just after the fourth ring. “Harri, it’s Louis.”

  A sharp intake of breath. “Good. I was wondering when you’d check in next.”

  “Is this a good time for me to be calling? Do you need to get back to me?”

  “It’s all right, Louis. It
’s all fixed. I got a friend to doctor up my phone. If anybody’s listening in, all they’re hearing is static and bits of prerecorded conversation.”

  “Wonderful. Have you had a chance to see my father?”

  “Last Sunday. He wanted to know when you’d be coming by to see him.”

  “Are they giving him the high-calorie supplements I prescribed? Is he still losing weight?”

  “They’re feeding him the supplements, even though he hates the taste. He’s still losing, but the rate of loss has slowed considerably. That head nurse you spoke to has started giving the supplements to all the patients on the ward. It scared me to see them. I’ve been fighting the spread of Metaboloft for the past eighteen months. But I’ve never seen the vanguard effects so up close and personal.”

  I try to sound upbeat. “How’s the fight coming?”

  “Honestly? Like shit, Louis. I feel like a quadriplegic who’s been ordered to perform a trapeze act. We still don’t have the tools to even begin working.”

  “What about those databases that were supposed to come from India and China?”

  “We got them…”

  The hanging pause at the end of her reply makes me nervous. “And?”

  “They’re useless.”

  “I thought you said those databases would take months to completely mine?”

  “You don’t have to examine every object in a Dumpster to know what’s in there is garbage. Almost a third of the records in the databases were stripped. Empty of useable data. Another fifteen to twenty percent were corrupted with viruses. It’s out of our hands now. The State Department is reviewing their options. The Chinese and Indians aren’t exactly our bestest buddies. State’s trying to decide whether this was an official provocation.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I don’t think the Chinese or Indians had anything to do with this. Metaboloft may not be an immediate threat to them, but give it three, four years, some of those spores are going to make their way across the ocean and take root.”