Miami Noir

by Les Standiford

  Jordan Delreese asked his father Calbert to tie him to the cyclone fence in the backyard. Calbert smiled and turned on the TV. Let’s Make a Deal on the Game Show Network. Jordan said how that would be the best thing for all of us. Calbert told the contestant, a man in a hoop skirt and red baloney curls, to just take the cash and be happy with it. Cripes, he said, people don’t know when they have it good. Calbert sucked on a sour ball. The contestant went with whatever was behind Door #3. Greed, Calbert said. Jordan said, I have no way to control my stress. Jordan’s mother said she’d like to serve dessert out by the pool. Calbert said, Put on your sunscreen, Vernal. The contestant seemed delighted with his six-piece gray mica bedroom suite, complete with platform bed and Serta Perfect Sleeper mattress and box spring. Jordan said, That way I won’t fly way. Calbert said, What way? Tied to the fence with baling wire, Jordan said. And you’d better do it now.

  While they ate, Jordan brought up the time his father had caught him masturbating into a tube sock while he was watching Bewitched. His mother said now what she had said then. About Onan spilling his seed. And the thing which he did displeased the Lord: wherefore He slew him also. Calbert said he couldn’t remember what happened after he’d caught Jordan abusing himself, so Jordan reminded him. You took the TV cord off the old Motorola, plug and all, wet it, ran it through the sandbox, and put it in the freezer. Bringing back any memories, Dad? Then Mom filled a tub with ice-cold water and had me sit in it. Then you had me stand naked in the kitchen; you took out the cord and whipped me with it. I’ve still got the scars. Calbert said he wasn’t proud, but it had to be done. You were committing an abominable sin, son. You were no better than a viper. And look how you’ve turned out, Jordan. A success. A God-fearing, law-abiding man, a solid citizen, and a pillar of the community. You should thank me. Jordan poured his parents two glasses of sweet iced tea and proposed a toast to discipline. Calbert said, You might want to try a little tough love with your own kids, Jordan. That grandson of mine has a sassy mouth on him.

  Jordan finished his gingerbread and then his mother’s gingerbread and his father’s. He talked while his parents nodded off. He’d dissolved six Ambien in their tea. Worked like a dream. He told them about how if you wanted to get away with killing someone, you should kill them in a pool. Not that he was trying to get away with anything, you understand. Too late for that. Drowning is a diagnosis of exclusion, he said. It cannot be proven in an autopsy, cannot be disproved. He told them about the actor who drives a spaceship through the universe, how he drowned his wife in Beverley Hills, and everyone knows he did, but they can’t prove it. You could see this guy any week on his new TV show, and he behaves like butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. That’s acting.

  Jordan slapped his mother awake. He told her what he’d done this morning. Vernal blinked, looked at Calbert with his face in the bowl, and laughed. This is the strangest dream, she said. He told her how he’d carved Caroldean’s throat with a serrated kitchen knife, how it felt like slicing through a mango when he hit the larynx. Oh dear, Vernal said. Whee! Jordan reached out his foot and rested it on the seat of Calbert’s chair. He kicked the chair over. Calbert hit his head on the concrete skirt of the pool. A floret of blood bloomed on his teal Marlins cap. Jordan stripped his parents to their undies and slid them into the pool. He sat under the umbrella and watched, saw those brief spasms when the water first hit the lungs, and then the flutter as the body fought for air. He watched them float, knock against each other, sink to the bottom of the pool. He knew it would take a couple of days for the bodies to bloat with gas and rise again. He knew they’d be discovered long before that. He fetched his dad’s Sony Handycam, sat at the edge of the pool, and taped the bodies, looking like the last two pickled eggs in a jar. Then he turned the camcorder on himself and told his story.

  Jordan explained how he had a crew in his office tearing up the place. So could we meet at your place? he said. That way he could take some measurements, note the color scheme, kill two birds with one stone. I gave him my address. That’s over by the Fetish Box, isn’t it? Yes, it is. Twenty minutes.

  He said, “Determination is often the first chapter in the book of excellence.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Maybe the photo’s of a long-distance runner on her last leg, gritting it out to the finish line.”

  “Do you have one for honesty?”

  “I can give you serenity.”

  “I wish you could.”

  “Will truth do?”

  “Close enough.”

  “Okay. An old man, red jacket, floppy cap, walks through the autumn woods in New England. Glorious colors. Clear, crisp. We can see the steam of his breath. His head’s down. Below that the word truth—all caps—and below that, Purity is born of virtue.”

  Jordan Delreese knocked shave-and-a-haircut-two-bits on my office door, pushed the door open with his shoulder, and poked his grinning face into the room. He held his BlackBerry to his ear, rolled his eyes, smiled at me, and told whomever he was speaking with or pretending to speak with that he’d get back to them with the figures a.s.a.p. He scratched his nose. Okeedoke. He nodded. Ciao!

  He holstered the BlackBerry, clapped his hands, and stepped toward the desk where I sat. He said, “I pictured you bald, slight, with maybe a pitiful little mustache. Funny how a voice can fool you.” He admired my autographed Marlins baseball, gripped it like he was pitching a curve. “Well, here we are, Mr. Melville.”

  “Call me Wylie. All my friends do.”

  “I pegged you for a sociable guy.”

  “Except Carlos. He calls me Coyote.”

  “And you call him The Jackal, I suppose.”

  “Have a seat, Mr. Delreese.”

  He pointed to the wall above the sofa. “We’ll hang it there.” He put his fists on his hips, swivelled and looked left, then right, looked at me, and shrugged. “No photos of the wife and kiddies.”

  “No wife and kiddies, I’m afraid.”

  “Fag?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Are you a fag?”

  “That’s an inappropriate question, Mr. Delreese.”

  “If you say so.”

  “But a revealing one.”

  He sat, crossed his legs, folded his hands behind his head, smiled, and I knew that he knew that I knew. “No kids.” He clicked his tongue and shook his head. “Fruitless.” He raised an eyebrow, stuck out his lower lip, and cocked his head. “No regrets, Coyote?”

  “Plenty.”

  He picked up the photo of Dad and me squinting into the sun at the News Café. “They fuck you up, don’t they?”

  “Who?”

  “Your mom and dad.”

  “They did their best.”

  He smiled and aligned my Post-it note dispenser with my saucer of paper clips. Ordering his thoughts. He turned my little ceramic flamingo so she was facing me. He leaned back in his chair. I leaned back in mine.

  He said, “I see what you’re doing.”

  “You’re a perceptive man.”

  “Why didn’t you call the cops?”

  “Who says I didn’t?”

  “Your need makes you transparent.” He steepled his fingers, brought them to his lips. “So what do we do now?”

  “You tell me your story.”

  “And you process my behavior and feed it back to me.”

  “I listen.”

  “Why should I tell you my story?” “Why did you kill your family?”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s barbaric, illegal, immoral—”

  “Insane?”

  “Did you think you’d get away with it?”

  “I already did, dipshit.” He laughed. “They’re dead.” He put his face in his hands. “My parents had outlived their usefulness. They disgusted me. They smelled like rancid milk.”

  “How do you feel right now?”

  “Like I’m wasting my time. If you’re looking for credible motivation, Melville, you won’t find it here.
”

  “Every lie is a victory for you, isn’t it?”

  “You want to make sense of this so badly, you’ll believe anything I tell you so long as there’s an element of horror and remorse. Am I right? You want the world to make sense, but it doesn’t.”

  “It does if you bother.”

  “Most times nobody knows why they do anything.”

  “Most times they don’t want to know.”

  “Don’t you go to the movies? This is the twenty-first century, Wylie, the Age of Unreason. Kill someone in the morning; go to the theater at night. No reason, no resistance. Action is its own motivation. It’s kind of funny if you think about it.” Delreese pulled a snub-nosed revolver out of a shoulder holster, said he bet I wasn’t planning on this, and I told him he was right about that, and he told me he had nothing to lose, and I told him that I did. How on earth had I missed the signals? Had his lips narrowed while I blinked? Did the pitch of his voice rise, not in deceit, but in anger?

  He said, “You know what’s easy, Wylie? Lying to someone who wants to be lied to.” He aimed the pistol at my heart and asked me if I was a religious man. I told him I was not. He said, “Too bad for you then. You don’t get saved.”

  “There’s no salvation for you either, Delreese. Every child knows that this is our only life. Every pig knows it. Every snake. Just people like you who don’t.”

  “People like me.”

  “People who feel that the world has let them down, who can’t imagine existence without their own presence. Dishonest people.”

  “The only honesty is a lie well-acted.”

  I told him to put the gun away and let’s talk. I said it like I was soothing a feisty dog.

  Delreese picked up the Marlins baseball, lobbed it across the room, fired the pistol at it, and put a bullet through the window. “I suspect we don’t have much time now.” He pointed the gun at my face. I squeezed my eyes shut. I tried to breathe deeply to keep my heart from exploding out of my chest. I trembled and held onto my chair. I thought about my father waiting for me on Sunday, sitting with the cigarette-smoking attendants on the shady bench outside the Clover House lobby, tapping his foot, chewing his lip, trying to remember why the hell he was sitting there, and I understood that without me around to fight for him, the health-care system would swallow him up, strap him to a bed in some shadowy ward, and let him waste away. When they told him I was dead, would he know who they were talking about?

  Delreese said, “Cat got your tongue?”

  I thought if I could talk, maybe I could save my life, but in order to talk I’d have to think; only I couldn’t think; I could only remember. I saw my brother Cameron and me, and we’re six and on the floor in the den with Oreos and milk watching The Lone Ranger. Dad’s snoring over on the couch, and Mom’s out on the patio smoking up a storm and reading another Harlequin romance. This bad guy from the Cavendish gang has the drop on the Lone Ranger and tells him to nice-and-easy-like take off his mask, which looks like my father’s eyeshade, and which, of course, he will never do, even though I kind of want him to myself, which is sort of a betrayal, I know, and the Lone Ranger pretends that someone’s behind the bad guy by making these not-so-subtle head and eye gestures that arouse the desperado’s suspicion, and then the Lone Ranger says, “Get ’em, Tonto,” and when the bad guy turns and fires, the Lone Ranger jumps him, grabs the six-shooter, and knocks the bad guy out with a single punch.

  Delreese said, “I call this game Meet Your Maker.” He laughed. “Ten Mississippi,” he said. “Nine…”

  Cameron changed the channel and told me to stop crying. I told him I wasn’t crying, but I could taste the tears on my lips. Bugs Bunny aimed a pistol at Elmer Fudd, pulled the trigger, and a flag popped out of the barrel of the gun, unfurled, and said Bang! Bugs gave Elmer a big wet kiss. I couldn’t remember my mother’s face, just the back of her head. I knew I wouldn’t hear the gunshot, wouldn’t feel a thing. Everything would be over before I knew it. What would be the last thought I thought, the last picture I saw?

  “Five Mississippi.”

  What I did remember about Mom was her silence, her ratty chenille robe, and her pink Deerfoam slippers. When she thought I was lying, she’d tell me to stick out my tongue, said that if I was lying it would be black. It was always black, even those times I was sure I wasn’t lying. She’d wash my mouth out with Lifebuoy soap or spoon horseradish on my tongue. Cameron called her The Beast. Cameron, my twin, who looked exactly like me, people said, but was somehow more handsome, who always knew what I was thinking and could make me laugh at the drop of a hat, who fell into a life of drug addiction and robbed my parents blind, died in room 201 at the Pirate’s Inn in Dania, beaten to death by his playmates with a studded mace and a stone war club. He was twenty-four.

  I realized that Delreese had stopped counting, and I waited and thought maybe I was dead already, that this dark stillness was life after life, that I’d already been shot, that I’d been wrong about death too, and Willis had been right after all; there is no pain, no past, no present, no future, just the everything all at once, just a floating toward a resplendent and cleansing light, so I opened my eyes to see it, to let it wash over me, and I saw Delreese, who must have been waiting for this moment, with the black barrel of the gun in his mouth, saw him smile and wink. I reached for his arm, and he squeezed the trigger.

  BOOZANNE, LEMME BE

  BY VICKI HENDRICKS

  Miami Beach

  I never needed “stuff,” so it was easy to live—till Boozanne come along. Most stuff is just to impress women, and I didn’t need them either—till Boozanne. I had a cute face—like a puppy dog, I heard—but being 4’10", I was too short for normal chicks, too tall for a dwarf. I didn’t try to fit in. I could afford a handjob now and then. Did me fine. Keep it simple was my motto. When Danny DeVito retired, maybe I’d head out to Hollywood, but for a young guy like myself, the deal I had going was almost as good—till Boozanne messed me up.

  Ma had always told me, if you’re gonna steal a VW, might as well steal a Cadillac. Well, Ma had that wrong. A VW would’ve been the right size for me. But when I got outta prison for stealing the Caddy, I gave up car theft altogether. My home was gone. Ma had passed on, bless her soul—Pop was never around. Being broke and alone, I hitched down to Florida, remembering how warm it was that winter when Ma and me took vacation, my best memory as a kid. I met Weasel in Miami, and he’s the one told me about this gig. It fit me perfect, even better than a VW.

  What you do is find a big old wood house, with two foot of crawling space underneath, and cut a hole in the floor under the bed. Easy, if you can look in and measure. Beds are never moved. Weasel burgled his way around the islands, so by the time each hole got discovered, he was long gone. With my carpenter experience, and considering I needed a home more than anything, I went him one better by saving the piece of floor, so I could latch it back in place underneath. Not many nice wood houses left in Miami, but one should’ve been enough. No mortgage, no taxes, and free food as long as you’re not greedy. Nobody would notice, even if they ran a dust mop over the hardwood, a thing that—I’m telling you—most people never do.

  My home with the Lamberts, Bob and Melodie, was walking-distance from the beach, came with Sports Illustrated and Gourmet subscriptions, cable, big-screen TV, and a cat. It had those wood Bahama shutters that hang down and cover the windows, so nobody passing by could see in. A carport instead of a garage was good for knowing if either car was home, and thick foliage around the perimeter made it easy to sneak to the back and go under, though I did most of my crawling in and out in the dark. I had plastic sheeting and a rug remnant from Goodwill under there, my clothes sealed up in black garbage bags to keep out the bugs, a flashlight, toss pillow, and a Playboy to pass the waiting time. I never needed toiletries like toothpaste, shampoo, or deodorant, cause the Lamberts were well supplied. Didn’t shave, or I would’ve got my own razor. It was like living in a full-service motel, except I had to cl
ean up after myself. I was set—till fuckin’ Boozanne.

  Bob and Melodie got home each night at 7 or later—depending if they ate out—so I’d drop down the hole around 6:30, crawl out at dark, and head to a cheap local bar, or out on a scrounge, then later to my chair on the beach to doze until it was getting toward dawn, time to head home. I’d picked ’em good—upper-middle-class workaholics, too distracted about their jobs to notice the house much, lotsa loose change and doggie-bag leftovers that they usually tossed into the bin within two days. Somebody might as well enjoy it all. Once in a while, I stuck a pepperoni down my pants at the grocery for extra meat. I didn’t take big chances, didn’t need much. Any violation would send me back to a cell.

  I didn’t have to be too careful at home, as long as I remembered to pick my long black hairs off the pillowcase, go easy on the tidbits and liquor, and wash my lunch dishes. Sometimes I got sick of looking at Bob’s coffee cup that he’d leave on the bathroom sink, and I’d wash that too. I was kind of a dark male Goldilocks, only nicer. I grew attached to the Lamberts, seeing that I knew so much about their food tastes, possessions, and living habits. Melodie was like the sister I never had, little and dark-haired, big-eyed and innocent in her pictures. I felt protective toward her. Bob was like an older brother I could live without.

  One day, Melodie came home early—I was lucky the lunch dishes were done—and I was in the living room to see the car pull in. I barely made it out the hole. She ran in and tossed herself on the bed and wailed. Her sobs broke my heart while I laid under there listening. I stuffed my face into my pillow not to make a whimper. I thought maybe her ma had died. After that, all signs of Melly disappeared for most of a week. Her black dresses were gone, and there were tons of used Kleenex left in the wastebasket in her bathroom. She must’ve had her monthly on top of it all, so I hoped no cramps. Eventually, from the sympathy cards, I figured out it was her pop that died.