by J. A. Kerley
And maybe the lovely young Tawnya had a sportier past than the aw-shucks-gee act suggested.
Tawnya waved and zipped away in the cart. Head reeling with odd images, Nautilus headed to the parking lot, passing by the gift shop at the exit. In the front window were small tear-shaped bottles, beside them a sign: Hallelujah Jubilee Anointment Oil, from olives grown in America’s Holiest Site!
You could buy an ounce of the pale yellow fluid for $39.99. Though on the bright side, Nautilus thought, a park-logoed cap was only $19.99. He walked outside as a trio of buses were unloading, happy pilgrims exiting and streaming through the gates, wallets pulled, bills waving, credit cards shining in the sun.
Hallelujah, indeed.
23
Judge Hubert Hawkins turned his jowly visage to me. “You can step down, Detective Ryder.”
I exited the witness stand, shooting a glance at the jury box where a dozen faces weighed my testimony. I shot a look toward the defendant, a mercurial little psychopath named Hugo Valenciana, his face coated with tattoos, like he was going trick-or-treating as a sketchpad. He gave me dead eyes and I gave him a smile and turned my next glance to Ronnie Billings, the prosecutor from the DA’s office. He shot me a wink and tapped his thumb to his lips, Ronnie’s sign for You did a great job, go grab a drink.
I left the courtroom, happy to have finished a day of testimony and full-bore cross-examination by Valenciana’s ruthless lawyer, but bemoaning a lost day for the Sandoval and Mailey cases. The Valenciana case had been looming for months and my presence was absolute, since I’d been the lead on the investigation.
I stood in the Halls of Justice and looked at my watch: 4.30 p.m. A voice called from behind.
“How’d it go, Detective Ryder?”
I turned to Holly Belafonte, dressed in a blue blouse and pressed denim jeans, a light jacket with a simple pin, a cloisonné conch.
“Valenciana’s toast. How’d your day go?”
She nodded, as prim and businesslike as ever. “Several things were accomplished, I believe. I checked the flow rate.”
“Pardon me?”
“In the canal. Where Teresa was found … you asked me to—”
I’d forgotten, the thought lost in mental minutiae. “Sorry. What do you have?”
“Slack tide that period, with outflow beginning near dawn. Absent rainfall in the previous twenty-four hours, the flow was approximately nine hundred feet per hour.”
I smiled. “Pretty precise. You toss two cigarette butts in the water this time?”
She dug in her bag for a notepad, flipping through pages of tiny, perfect script. “I obtained concurring opinions from the US Meteorological Service, the US Geological Survey, the Everglades Protective Association, and the Metro Miami Water Authority, which monitors four electronic stream-flow meters on the canal, situated approximately one-point-three miles apart and stretching from—”
I held up my hand to cut her off and recalled the interstate near the site where the body was found, Highway 441 upstream of the interstate. “If I remember, that would indicate the body could have been dumped from the 441 bridge – your original conjecture. But there’s another highway crossing the waterway, plus a large lake further upstream.”
She shook her head. “Not if we assume the body was placed in the water after midnight, which keeps to approximate time of death per the postmortem. It’s either the always-busy interstate or the less-traveled 441, at least at that time of night.”
I thought it through. She seemed right. But she had more.
“I also spoke to several of the odious T’Shawn Matthews’ stable, if that’s what it’s called.”
“You talked to Shitzidoodle’s girls? By yourself?”
She nodded to the courtroom doors. “You were busy.”
“Was Matthews there?”
She leaned the wall and crossed her arms. “He crawled from under his rock. I asked if he was going to intrude, and if so, it would be best to hold off on repainting his vehicle. He returned to his pub, looking out the window and pulling rude faces.”
“How many girls did you interview?” I said, hoping she’d managed two or three.
“Eleven.”
“Eleven?”
“One led to another. Most knew Kylie hardly at all, just another working girl. None of the girls knew Teresa, I showed a photo.”
“Anything from the interviews?”
“Kylie was quite the close-mouthed girl, but one of her companions shared a flat with her for a few weeks. They used to get high together. The roommate, Candi Fyne – I do believe it’s fake, don’t you? – recalled the pair talking about how they’d fancied going into acting when younger. Miss Fyne laughed about how the only acting she’d done was in a low-level porn film, fornicating for drugs, she called it.”
“She really said fornicating?”
“No. Anyway, Kylie had told Miss Fyne that she’d spent five months acting and had even gotten paid for it.”
“Porn as well?”
“Miss Fyne didn’t think so. But that was the extent of the conversation, since they shot up subsequently.”
“We’ll have to look into the various perform—”
She was flipping pages again. “Performance unions, yes. I spoke with Actors’ Equity, Screen Actors Guild, the American Federation of Theatrical and Recording Artists. All had no records of Kylie ever being a member, and that’s from a national database. But those tend to be professional organizations; there are many amateur venues and others that simply disregard union membership.”
It was a helluva day’s work, the work of two. Or three. But Belafonte had more to come.
“From there …” she said, gesturing me to her vehicle, “I proceeded to Kylie’s apartment, a rather sordid little place. I did find this …” She opened the car door and came up with a large square of rough cloth, gray, two meters by a meter. I rubbed a thumb over its nubby surface.
“What is it?”
“No idea. The size of a scarf, but too coarse to be comfortable. What made it unusual is where I discovered it … in a plastic bag inside a paper bag, the paper bag jammed in the back of a closet with a board over it. It was like Kylie needed to keep it, but at the same time didn’t want to keep it, so she did rather a bit of both.”
I studied Belafonte. She had to have been in constant motion, and the eyes showed it, darkened beneath. The usually perfect hair was limp, strands hanging loose. I even spotted nascent wrinkles behind the knees of the flat-pressed slacks. While I’d spent a day in a courtroom, she’d made strides that would have been a good day’s work for the both of us, an amazing day’s work.
“I’m bushed and you look the same,” I said. “Let’s get a night’s sleep and start afresh in the morning.” She nodded agreement and started away.
“Hey!” I called after her, shooting a thumbs-up. “Helluva job, Belafonte.”
She stared. “What happened to ‘Officer’?”
“Consider my newfound familiarity a promotion,” I said, turning toward the street.
“So my next advancement is when you call me ‘fonte’?” she called back.
It took me a second to realize it was meant to be humorous. I turned to see what she looked like when joking, but she was walking away.
I made a mental note to turn faster next time.
24
Nautilus was in his hotel room sipping a bottle of Edmund Fitzgerald Porter and watching Jeopardy. A contestant called for the category “Ships”. The answer was revealed: Freighter that sank in Lake Superior in 1975.
“Edmund Fitzgerald,” Nautilus whispered, glancing at the bottle of brew; weird coincidence, Carson was gonna like hearing about it.
“The Edmund Fitzgerald,” the contestant said, adding four hundred bucks to her pile. A knock echoed in the room. Nautilus switched off the television and opened the door to find Richard Owsley framed against the hushed and carpeted hall.
“May I come in?”
Nautilus waved entry
, glancing at the porter and figuring he should have tucked it back in the fridge. It was the first time Nautilus had seen his employer suitless, now in pressed green chinos and a polo shirt, argyle socks, tasseled cordovan loafers.
“Can I get you a refreshment, Pastor?”
A frowning glance at the porter. “No, thank you. I’m fine.”
Nautilus sat as Owsley paced the room, stopping at the window and looking toward the cross.
“How can I help you?” Nautilus said.
“I’m afraid I invited you here under something of a, uh, mischaracterization, Mr Nautilus.”
“Interesting. In what way?”
“I preach a doctrine that some call materialistic and selfish. That’s far too … reductionary, simplistic. I postulate that believing in Jesus Christ the Redeemer results in rewards in the here and now. The faithful don’t have to wait for Heavenly remunera-shun, the payback for righteousness.” He paused and raised one eyebrow. “Do my words make sense to you?”
Nautilus was on the verge of saying “No, Mista Owzley. Ise jus’ a simple country boy, I is,” but changed it to, “I think so.”
Owsley jammed his hands in his pockets and rocked on his heels. “It’s a different way of interpreting the gospel than the quotidian, the everyday. People need hope.”
“Sure,” Nautilus said, wondering how much the guy spent on Word-a-Day calendars.
“But it’s wholly in the vision of Christ,” Owsley said. “He came to bring hope to the downtrodden, the neglected. There are people that don’t comprehend, find it beyond their ken. People become frightened by what they don’t understand, and anger is a stepchild of fright. Simply put, some people are angry with me, resentful.” Owsley bowed his head, as if unable to comprehend such thinking. After a suitable pause he lifted his eyes to Nautilus and changed track. “How many years were you with the Mobile police force, Mr Nautilus? Did you say twenty?”
“Almost thirty.”
“May I ask, did you ever have protection duties, like when a celebrity came to town, an important personage?”
“Now and then.”
“Because there were people who resented the celebrities, their success, their popularity … maybe even wished them bodily harm?”
Nautilus laced his fingers behind his neck, wondering where this new road would end up. “That was the general concept.”
“An hour ago I received a phone call. A man called me an apostate, Mr Nautilus. Do you know what that means? It’s a person who has lost his way, turned from the truth.”
Nautilus had known the definition of apostate since he was as tall as a parking meter. But he simply nodded.
“The caller told me I should repent and ask God for forgiveness. And if I didn’t …” Owsley paused, as if replaying the call in his head.
“Go on.”
“That I’d be sent to Hell in flames and smoke.”
“Anonymity means people can say anything,” Nautilus said. “They vent, they put down the phone, they finish eating their Spaghetti-O’s.”
“I’ve had people differ with me on a theological level, Mr Nautilus. This was different. It was venomous, frightening. The man sounded insane.”
He is frightened, Nautilus thought. Under the façade of being scared, Richard Owsley actually was scared.
“And what you want from me is …?”
“I want you to be my driver, as agreed. But I also want you to be my bodyguard. To keep an eye out for those who might do me harm.”
“I’d pretty much do that anyway,” Nautilus said. “It’s visceral.”
“Vizral?”
“Vis-cer-al. As in felt in the viscera, the internal organs. Simply put, I operate on a gut feeling. My guts, my intuition, often spot trouble before it begins.” He paused to enjoy the moment. “Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“That … you have a feeling for these things?”
Nautilus pretended to lick his thumb and pressed it toward the preacher. “You get a gold star on the forehead, Pastor Owsley. And yes, I’ll take care of you.”
Owsley’s thousand-watt smile returned to his face. He put his hand on Nautilus’s shoulder and gave it a squeeze. “Hallelujah, Mr Nautilus, you are surely a gift from God.”
Nautilus had no response to his sudden beatific status. He simply nodded and pictured himself as glowing.
“I have to fly to a crucial – and very hush-hush meeting in Key West tomorrow morning,” Owsley continued. “I can then depend on you to be with me, Mr Nautilus?”
He needs me, Nautilus thought, recalibrating the employer–employee relationship; the weight had just shifted. He crossed his legs, picked up the Edmund Fitzgerald and slowly finished the bottle, nodding at Owsley as he set the empty back on the table.
“Depend away, Pastor.”
25
The six-hundred-dollar Ferragamo slings of Sissy Carol Sparks clicked the Miami Beach sidewalk like castanets. A pair of middle-aged businessmen turned to watch the leg show, Sparks’s skirt inches above the compact knees and rippling seductively in the light breeze smelling of salt water, a Victoria’s Secret bag in her hand. She watched the businessmen watching her through her outsize Raybans, noting the name tags on the lapels of their suitcoats.
Hello, my name is …
Conventioneers. Money on the hoof.
The sun was hidden behind the tall downtown buildings, falling in the west and turning the twilight sky into a glowing blue promise of a gentle night ahead. Sissy walked to Lincoln, crossed to Meridian and headed south, entering a street-level bar in an upscale hotel. Taxis swept past.
Sissy went to the bar and sat, feeling the eyes. Two-thirds of the tables were filled, mostly men, mostly smiling or laughing. Getting hammered in Miami Beach, beautiful women on every corner, Mama and the kiddies back home in East Backwater.
The thirtyish, Hispanic barkeeper had a napkin and a soda water and lime in front of Sissy within ten seconds. He gave her a wink. She smiled back and nodded to the full tables.
“My, aren’t we busy tonight, Julio.”
“A car dealer convention in town, Sis. Not the chumps on the floor, the owners. But you know that, right?”
All Sissy had to do was check the Miami Beach Convention Center’s website to see conventions due in town. To see if it was her type of clientele: men away from home with money to spend.
“Thursday through Sunday,” Sparks said. “The business news expected over eight hundred dealers in town, a biggie.”
Sissy Sparks worked under the name Cecily Silk and charged eight hundred dollars a session. Six minutes or six hours, it was eight hundred bills. The average gig ran five hours and fifteen minutes. Fifty went to Julio if he set the job up, and another fifty went to whoever was handling hotel security that night. That left seven. Twenty went for a new black silk thong, since she threw the old ones away, not wanting to wear clothing that one of her clients had removed – either with hands or often with teeth – or held his slop.
That was disgusting. Washing them out would be worse.
Another twenty gone. Then there was cab-fare from her Wynwood digs to downtown, thirty round-trip, tip included. Manicures, pedicure, tanning and incidentals … another hundred a week.
So five bills a gig times the seven gigs she worked weekly, averaged over the last seven months. Thirty-five hundred a week, a bit under two hundred grand a year. Not bad for a twenty-five-year-old woman from rural Ohio. And it would only get better as she developed repeat clientele and didn’t have to rely on the Julios of the world or her miserably expensive escort service.
“You got eyes on you, babe,” Julio whispered. “One guy looks like he’s about to wet his undies. You want to take a walk?”
Sissy set the half-finished drink on the bar and headed to the restroom. Hopefully one of the dealers was now talking to Julio.
“The lady at the bar … is she …?”
“If you leave me your room number, sir, I can have her visit, if that is all right with
you.”
It would be, and if lucky, Julio might score another fifty. Sissy gave it ten minutes. Her phone rang, Julio.
“He’s a guest here. Room four-twenty-seven. The guy’s a bit tipsy, but has diamonds in his cuff links and five hundred bucks on his feet. I saw him pull his wedding ring before he talked to me.”
“Isn’t that sweet,” Sissy said. “I think I’m in love.”
26
Nautilus had Owsley at the airport by seven and they were in the air ten minutes later. The rental Towne Car was ready in Key West and Nautilus drove a pensive Richard Owsley across the island.
“It’s a house behind the Schrum home,” Owsley said, consulting directions on his smartphone. “We’re to pull into the drive.”
Nautilus swerved into the wide driveway as a gray-haired and bespectacled man exited the house waving. On his heels was a large man, Nautilus gauging his height at over six and a half feet.
“I don’t know how long I’ll be, Mr Nautilus,” Owsley said, opening the door.
“I’ll keep the meter running.”
Introductions and handshaking over, the trio crossed the yards to the Schrum residence. Nautilus stepped to the sidewalk, walking around to the end of the block where the Schrum house was located.
Several hundred people were out front, some milling and holding signs proclaiming their love for the ailing minister, others singing, or on their knees at the curb, praying behind lit candles. A wild-haired guy was dragging a six-foot wooden cross down the center of the street. Police cruisers were parked at both ends of the block, allowing residents entry. Two news vans were on site, uplink antennae raised like diabolical engines. The porch of the corner house was occupied by a dozen laughing folks wearing colorful garb and funny hats, drinking Bloody Marys and applauding when one of the choirs finished a song.
