by J. A. Kerley
Nancy continued reading. “It seems Ms Hammond found other employment. Her last prostitution arrest was eleven months ago.”
“Maybe she got faster running shoes,” I said. “Or went the outcall route. She listed as a Missing?”
More keystrokes. “Nope. But if she was abducted and murdered in the last few days …”
“She wouldn’t be listed. Got her last-known address? We gotta start somewhere.”
We drove to east Miami Gardens, where Hammond had lived in a shabby apartment building with a dozen units, double locks on the doors and steel grating over the windows. The manager was Letha Driscoll, a woman fighting middle age with the full arsenal: make-up applied with a trowel, jet-black hair dye, the over-reliance on Botox that turns a face into an expressionless mask. She wore a white tube top and red Spandex slacks, poor choices given the effects of time and gravity on human tissue. But I expect Miz Driscoll saw something completely different in the mirror.
She was one of those smokers who stick a freshly lit cigarette between their lips and don’t remove it until ember touches filter, gray tubes of ash falling to the floor as she led us down the dank hall to Hammond’s apartment.
“Excuse me, ma’am,” Belafonte said, “but you’re dropping ashes.”
Driscoll turned to me, like Belafonte was invisible. “Darlene’s been on the street,” she said, pushing the door open. “That was over a year ago. It made her sick and she got out.”
We entered an apartment so small that cell seemed more apt, the wallpaper a bilious green, one water-damaged section peeling away. The window air conditioner sounded like a blender full of marbles. The only reading material was pulp astrology mags sold in supermarket check-out lanes.
“You know where she works now?” I said, raising my voice to compete with the AC as Belafonte went to inspect the bedroom.
“Exotic dancing,” Driscoll said, smoke pluming up as ashes tumbled down. “Call it stripping, you want. If you’re not selling yourself, it’s a better way to live.”
I leaned the wall, arms crossed. “Tell me about her.”
“Kept to herself. Live that kind of life, you always got a head full of stuff make a regular person throw up.”
“She have a pimp when she was hooking?”
“A sicko named Flash. I took it he got hisself shot. If so, the best thing that guy ever did was dying.” Driscoll’s coffin nail was done. She pulled the butt from her lips and looked for a place to stub it out.
“I’ll take that,” I said. Forensics needed to get here fast.
She handed me the butt and jammed another cigarette between the red-caked lips. I could have told her not to smoke, but then all she’d be thinking about was getting another hit of the blue drug. I held the smoking butt above my shoulder, looking like the Statue of Liberty. Belafonte exited the bedroom shaking her head, finding nothing.
I handed Belafonte the butt. “Do something with this.”
“Do what?”
“There’s a whole world outside the door.”
She gave me a glance and went out to toss the smoke away from the potential-evidence field.
“You know where Darlene danced?” I asked Driscoll.
“The Velvet Pony in Hialeah. Some places take all your money, but Dar made enough to get by.”
Belafonte returned holding a beer can found on the ground and handed it to Driscoll. “Try using this, ma’am.”
“I own the place,” Driscoll snapped, ashes crumbling from her mouth to the floor. “I’ll goddamn do what I want.”
I realized her odd anger had nothing to do with smoking procedure and everything to do with the request coming from a woman having youth and beauty. Belafonte affected her best Concerned Public Protector face.
“In a teensy bit, ma’am, our evidence unit will be here. They’re a meticulous lot, and will find ashes on the floor. They’ll want to make sure they’re your ashes and not from the person who harmed Miss Hammond. You’ll have to undergo a hemochromatic nicotinic analysis. Have you given blood before?”
Even the Botox-relaxed features of Driscoll crinkled into fear.
“It takes blood, this hemo-whatever?”
“Hardly any. The only problem is, the blood has to come from your lip because that’s where the cigarettes are.” Belafonte smiled sweetly.
Driscoll couldn’t grab the can fast enough. “Will I still have to do that, that thing?” she said, eyes wide.
Belafonte’s big browns scanned the carpet. “I don’t believe you’ve reached critical ash mass yet, Ms Driscoll. You should be fine.”
I started to laugh, but twisted it into a throat-clearing sound. “Was Darlene smart, would you say?” I asked, resuming my questions.
Driscoll carefully tapped ash into the can before answering. “Poor Dar wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed, tell the truth. She didn’t finish high school, always talking about getting her GED. Never would have happened.” Driscoll paused to think, and I saw sadness reach her eyes. “Dar was the kind of girl always hoping for something better, and wanting it so badly that anyone who come along and promised it … well, she’d fall right under their spell. Innocent, in her own way.”
We got all we could get from Driscoll and left, after getting her to promise to lock the apartment until scene forensics came by later in the day. Our next stop would be the Velvet Pony.
“Hemochromatic?” I side-mouthed as we headed back to the Rover. “Critical ash mass?”
“The stinky old bag was dripping bloody ashes everywhere. I had to do something.”
I laughed, a moment of mirth in a long and dark day.
34
We pulled into a parking lot of broken asphalt with weeds pushing from cracks, cans and bottles and debris strewn about. Shadows owned the inside of the Velvet Pony, the sole light above the unoccupied stage, one side fronted by the bar area, a smattering of men hunched over drinks. My nose wrinkled on entrance and I recalled Harry Nautilus’s take on the smell: “Every strip joint in the country is connected by tubes pumping fumes of stale beer and dead cigarettes back and forth between them, Carson. They been pumping this same air since 1953 and no one ever thinks to change it.”
The barkeep made us as cops within an eye-blink, and stifled a yawn. “We’re here about Darlene Hammond,” I said.
“She ain’t showed up for two days.”
“The owner around?”
“Lives in Jacksonville, comes in once a month. You want to talk to Monica Dwell, the club manager.” He nodded toward a back booth holding a woman in a blue pantsuit going through what appeared to be receipts and clicking on a calculator. The woman was in her forties, bone skinny, with a tiny mouth and bulgy eyes that made her look like a mix of human and insect. The extra mascara calling out the eyes didn’t help. Neither did the frizzed-out hairdo. Or the tattoo encircling her neck, two strands of barbed wire.
“Yeah?” Dwell said in a nasal voice, not looking up. “What’s Miami’s Finest need?”
I showed the gold.
“FCLE? What the hell you think we did?”
“We’re here about Darlene Hammond. I’m sorry to say she was found dead. Murdered.”
The calculator was pushed aside. “Oh fuckin’ Jesus … How?”
“I can’t comment yet. How long did Darlene work here?”
A shrug. “Shit, I dunno. A year, more or less.”
“Did she appear frightened of late? Nervous?”
A head shake. “Darlene came in, did her shift, boogied. Nothing seemed off.”
“Have you seen anyone suspicious about?” Belafonte asked. “Suspicious for a strip joint, that is.”
“It’s not a strip joint,” Dwell frowned. “It’s a gentleman’s club.”
Belafonte looked toward the bar: one guy in farmer’s overalls, two in white tees and jeans, a broken-down iron-pumper in a sleeveless black sweatshirt, and an obese guy in a blue seersucker suit jamming potato chips into a wet mouth. Overalls said something presumably amusing to Iron
-pumper, who slapped the bar and accidentally tipped his beer into his lap, jumping from his stool to grab at his sodden crotch and yell “MotherFUCK!”
Belafonte nodded. “And a fine lot of gentlemen they are, ma’am.”
Dwell’s insectine features tightened into a buggy scowl. “Listen, lady, I don’t know where the hell you’re from, but—”
“Bermuda, it’s a—”
I pushed between Belafonte and Dwell. My partner didn’t appear overly charmed by venues where women removed their clothes and swirled on shiny poles. “Have any of the, uh, gentlemen seemed particularly worrisome of late? Maybe focused on Darlene?”
A nod toward the bar. “If Darlene did have anyone she talked to regular, it’s that big guy at the end of the bar, Billy the Voice. Sometimes after she got off they’d sit in the corner and talk.”
She was indicating the fat guy in seersucker, the seams straining with his weight, perched on the stool like a teed-up golf ball. He was holding a beer mug in one hand, the other ramming potato chips between purple lips like they were his last meal.
“Billy the Voice?” I said.
“He’s here three–four times a week. Comes in at eleven, sits that stool, orders a Michelob Light, a bowl of chips, and watches the dancing. Always polite, too … not like a lot of these losers – manners like fuckin’ animals.”
Ten seconds later we were at the guy’s shoulder. He felt our presence and turned, a chip falling from his mouth to his lap. He brushed it away with a plump paw and when he said “Yes? May I help you folks?” my jaw nearly dropped. The guy had a voice like Johnny Cash bred with James Earl Jones.
He’d seen the drop-jaw look before. “I do voice-over work,” he explained. “Some commercials, but mainly documentaries and audio books. The name’s William Sutherfield.”
Belafonte stepped up with the photo. “We’re seeking information about this girl, Mr Sutherfield. We’re told she was a favorite of yours.”
A frown. “Not a favorite as a dancer,” Cash Earl Jones rumbled, “but as a kind of friend. Is Darlene in trouble?”
“She’s dead, sir,” I said. “Unfortunately.”
I watched his expression. Shock, yes, sadness, yes. Surprise, not so much.
“Oh, my Lord. What happened?”
“We’re not yet at liberty to say, sir. It’s still under investigation. You knew Darlene well?”
“Sometimes we’d take a table in back and have a drink. Or hit the coffee shop a couple blocks over.”
“Were you her confidant?” Belafonte asked.
The sadness again. “Darlene never let anyone that close.”
“Sounds troubled,” I said.
“Trapped by circumstance and limited education,” the big voice sighed. “She fought back by becoming hard, but sometimes the act failed and she was just a lost little girl.”
Music started blasting at jet-engine volume and a woman in a faux-fur bikini sashayed onstage in sequined shoes as tall as the first rung of a stepladder. Silicone had inflated her upper superstructure to soccer-ball dimensions and it strained at the fur. She licked her lips like there was jelly on them and tottered toward the pole.
“How about we repair outside?” Belafonte said. “I’m pretty sure I don’t need to see this.”
“Repair what?” Billy the Voice said. “Is something broken?”
I made the translation and we adjourned to brighter light and fresher air. William Sutherfield didn’t seem the average strip-club patron, but I’d found there was no average, only a bell curve measuring loneliness.
A convertible full of fraternity types blasted by, one kid yelling, “Hey fat-ass, try dieting.”
Sutherfield sighed. “I lost a hundred-fifty-seven pounds three years ago and my voice raised a half octave. I can’t tell you how many jobs that diet cost me.”
“What struck you most about Miss Hammond?” I asked, leaning the wall.
Sutherfield gave it a full minute of thought, as though getting it exactly right was important. “The depth of her anger,” he said quietly. “At men, mainly, but a surprising amount aimed at religion. Maybe not anger so much as bitterness. She went out of her way to mock people of faith … idiots, she called them.”
“She piss anyone off by mocking them?” Belafonte asked.
“It wasn’t to their faces. Just to me.”
I asked about threats, boyfriends, lovers. I also wondered if Hammond had made any sideline money in her off-hours.
“Prostitution? I don’t think sex was her thing. She made money by showing her body, not selling it. But maybe she had in the past.”
“What makes you think that?”
“She told me stripping was the cleanest job she’d had, called it a factory: ‘Put in your time, go home and wash off.’”
“She do drugs?”
A sad nod. “Sometimes I could see them in her eyes, hear them when she’d laugh. Darlene wanted to be happy. She just didn’t know how.”
“So nothing out of the ordinary happened recently? Everything seemed as always?”
Sutherfield nodded slowly, like processing a memory through a haze. “A man came in the last time I saw Darlene. A hard-looking fellow with a flat face and nose. He was in a suit, cheap and baggy. They were at the end of the stage. I was trying to hear, but the music was loud.”
“You heard nothing?”
“I heard the word Sissy twice. Church once. Darlene started off looking at him with disgust, like she wanted nothing to do with the guy, but then she seemed to become interested in what he was saying.”
“They leave together?”
“I’d, uh, had a drink or two too many. I don’t recall. But I do remember there was something about the guy that made me keep looking at him.”
“How so?”
“Like I could imagine heat pouring off his body. Does that make sense?”
Harry Nautilus sat on his balcony, beer in hand. He had seen something truly weird that morning. But what?
After Owsley had entered the building, Nautilus had returned to the motel. At noon Owsley called to say another shipment was due and he’d be gone all day. The Pastor had a ride back to Hallelujah Jubilee and Nautilus had the day to do as he wished. Evidently the missus and kid were being flown back to Mobile to gather additional clothing and necessaries.
Nautilus had driven up to Orlando and wandered the town until finding a decent gumbo joint for lunch that also served local microbrews. But try as he might, he couldn’t shake the morning’s events from his mind: the bible tumbling to the ground, the screaming old man, Owsley breaking from frozen fear and turning in a performance that fell somewhere between ecstasy and lunacy.
It was all weird, Nautilus thought, cracking a bottle of beer and sitting a lounge chair on the balcony, looking toward the park, the huge tract rides and attractions and the looming cross. The whole treated-like-royalty shtick at the motel and park, the private audience with the ailing Schrum, the aircraft of a multi-million-dollar broadcasting network seemingly at beck and call. All for a small-time preacher from Mobile.
Sure, Owsley had a book out and made television appearances, but the book was regional and the broadcasts were on a cable network confined to the Deep South. It stood in stark contrast to the Crown of Glory network.
And what the hell was in that tall, slapped-together building where Owsley had spent the day?
The sun was dropping in the west and the huge cross of Hallelujah Jubilee – either majestic or intrusive, depending on your point of view – was backlit, the shadow falling eastward across the green field where the Ark’s denizens pastured. Nautilus was again running the morning’s pictures through his mind when a brittle voice intruded.
“I see you up there.”
Nautilus paused in mid-sip. He looked down three stories to see a crinkle-eyed woman in a formless dress staring up at him, her hair to her waist and a stubby finger pointing like an indictment.
“Excuse me, ma’am?” he said.
“I see y
ou drinking up there. You shouldn’t be using alcohol. It’s a sin.”
“Didn’t your mother ever tell you not to talk to strange men?” Nautilus said, sitting back and resuming his thoughts.
Joe Grabowski waited for the forklift carrying a load of steel panels to roar past, then pulled a walkie-talkie and keyed it. “Got one more done, Walt,” Grabowski said. “Welded the seams, burnished the surface.”
“Be right there, Joe.”
A minute later Hillenbrandt buzzed up in a golf cart, the fastest way to travel the vast building where crews were building bridge sections, water towers and a host of custom steel assemblages. Machinery grumbled, sparks fell from welding torches, overhead cranes carried beams or partially assembled structures.
Hillenbrandt jumped from the cart. “I’ll call the shipper. That just leaves two more and 1025-M is finito.”
“We’ll have ’em done by next week,” Grabowski said. “No prob.”
“Five big shiny tubes,” Hillenbrandt said, revisiting the original order as he walked the length of a polished steel tube he could have stepped into without ducking. “One with a taper and end cap. Good work, Joe, we’ll all make money on this one.” He peered inside the fifteen-foot long metal tunnel. “Brackets all in place?”
“Per specs. Ready to lock together. Ever figure out what it is? Or what goes inside?”
Hillenbrandt started to rest his palm against the tube, stopped himself. It needed to be wiped down with an anti-corrosive, then wrapped in plastic to keep the surface bright and unmarred.
“Not mine to ask, Joe. Especially something this hush-hush.”
“All sections go to that Hallajubilee or whatever?” Grabowski said. “The religious park?”
“Yep. But I got no idea what it’s supposed to be.”
Grabowski reached into his pocket for his pack of smokes. He grinned and nodded at the hollow metal cylinder. “It’s empty inside now, Walt. But what if they put an engine in it?”
“Engine? For what?”
“A rocket engine. So they can fly to Heaven.”
35
Nautilus was outside Owsley’s hotel at nine a.m., leaning against the vehicle and sipping tasteless motel coffee. The door swept open at nine ten, the Pastor looking harried, though it was only in the eyes, the smile a luminous crescent of teeth.
