The Death Box (Carson Ryder, Book 10)

by J. A. Kerley

  “True. I’ll be the first to admit cases of recidivism. Not, thankfully, very many. But given that the possibility exists … what may I do for you, Detective?”

  “First, sir, what can you tell me about this sample?” I opened my briefcase and handed over a bone-free chunk of concrete. Kazankis flicked a thumbnail over its surface.

  “Low aggregate. Mainly sand and cement with a dye, one of the umbers. Is this part of the crime you’re investigating?”

  I nodded. “Have you ever had a loaded truck stolen?”

  “A truckload is mixed, then goes directly to the site. A person might steal a truck at night, but it would be empty.”

  “Maybe I’m looking for concrete diverted to another usage. This would have been around a year ago.”

  Kazankis frowned. “I’m sorry, Detective, but I can’t recall details that far back.”

  “Would it be possible to get a printout of all employees from that period?” I asked. “It would save us a trip to the Parole Board.”

  “Certainly.” Mr Kazankis sat by a computer, made some taps on the keyboard, and a printer behind the desk began humming. Our next move would be cross-checking employee names against violent crimes. Records in hand, we turned to the door.

  Gershwin halted. “One more question, Mr Kazankis. Do your employees ever take concrete home or anything like that? For use later?”

  “Like for next-day delivery? It would harden in the truck.”

  “I guess I mean their own projects. Like fixing a sidewalk or whatnot.”

  Kazankis thought a moment, brow furrowed beneath the silvered blowback. “Sure, lots of times an employee will lay a patio or a driveway. We give them the materials at cost. It happens too often to keep track of.”

  “I understand,” I said, again turning to go. “Guess we’ll have to keep digging into employees with records. Sorry if we …”

  When I turned to nod farewell to Kazankis his head was canted and his eyes were turned inward, as if doing calculations in his head. He snapped his fingers.

  “Paul Carosso, by gosh! Now I remember.”

  “Pardon me?” I said.

  “It was almost quitting time, Detective. Paul came in, said he’d been working on a new driveway. He’d hired a couple concrete workers for the following week and was gonna get the pour scheduled then. But Paul said if he could get the concrete, they could lay the drive that evening. I said sure, grab a load and return the truck in the morning. But make double-damn-sure that barrel gets washed out.”

  “I thought you didn’t remember such things,” I said. “Was something different?”

  “It was kind of unusual. Paul’s not a detail guy. He could do better at keeping his uniforms clean. He leaves candy and food wrappers in the cab. I have to get on him about washing the barrel completely clean. If the mix hardens you need to break it out, a real pain. When I got there in the morning I asked Burle Smith, the yard foreman, if Paul brought the truck back in decent condition, dreading the answer.”

  “And your yard guy said?”

  “Burle said Paul musta climbed into the drum with a toothbrush, it was that clean.”

  I looked at Gershwin. Would it be this easy? Kazankis caught the glance. “Are you going to want to talk to Paul?” he asked, an edge of nervousness in his voice.

  “Dunno yet,” I said. “And I’d appreciate if you didn’t mention this conversation to him.”

  Kazankis promised to keep our confidence. Gershwin and I were angling for the door when he called us back. “Excuse me, gentlemen.”

  “Yes, sir?”

  He started to speak but couldn’t. He cleared his throat and tried again. “The color in the sample of concrete you showed me, the rusty brown. It’s not dye, is it?”

  “No, sir.”

  His eyes fell. “I pray no one here was involved.”

  I nodded, not mentioning that I was hoping in the opposite direction. It would mean we had a solid lead.

  Paul Carosso lived near Richmond Heights in a tired suburban community within listening distance of highway 821 and I figured after a couple months you grew immune to the twenty-four-hour rumble of diesel engines. Or most people would; me it would drive nuts after about a half hour. The driver’s house was a single-story crackerbox bungalow with mildew on the siding and a piece of soffit hanging from the eaves. A palmetto squatted in the front yard, flanked by a banana tree with white rot on the leaves. The scruffy patches of grass were unmowed. The small yard was cyclone-fenced with a sign on the gate saying PRIVATE PROPERTY – KEEP OUT. The drive was outside the fencing and led to a single-car garage.

  The gate was unlocked so we went to the door and pressed the bell. No reply. Figuring the bell was in the same decrepit shape as the rest of the place, I knocked.

  A curtain parted on the front picture window. “I don’t want nothing,” a voice yelled. “Peddle your shit somewheres else.”

  “We’re not salesmen,” I said, holding up the shield. “We’d like to ask you a few questions.”

  The door swung open. Carosso was older than his pic in the prison discharge file, but it was the same face: round and poorly shaved, heavy-lidded eyes under a receding hairline. He wore a sleeveless white tee with sweat stains under the arms and the kind of uniform pants you get for ten bucks a pair, as formless as pajama bottoms.

  “Questions about what?”

  “A load of concrete you brought home from Redi-flow last summer.”

  “Concrete? I don’t know nothing about—”

  “How ’bout you invite us in or step outside?” I said.

  He rolled his eyes and stepped to the stoop, Gershwin and I backing up to give him space and to give our noses some distance between Carosso and his body odor.

  “I don’t bring concrete home. I deliver it to other people.”

  “Your boss remembers, Mr Carosso. You brought home a load of concrete to install a new driveway.” I studied the drive across the fence, a dozen feet away, cracked and studded with weeds, the same drive poured when the house was new, maybe forty years ago. “I don’t see any new driveway, Mr Carosso. I don’t see repairs.”

  “The fuckin’ workers never showed,” he said. “It never got done.”

  He looked down, thinking, and I stepped closer by a couple inches.

  “So where did the mix go?”

  “I drove it out by the glades and poured it into a drainage ditch. And no, I don’t remember where.”

  “Try.”

  When he looked west I moved another inch, brushing back my hair to cover the motion. He said, “It was over that way somewheres.”

  Carosso was sweating heavily. He turned his head to cough and I stepped into the edge of his personal space. “Mr Kazankis says you’re not a detail guy, Mr Carosso. It’s hit-and-miss whether you’ll get the barrel clean.”

  “What does that mean about anything?”

  Gershwin sensed it was his turn. “Mr Kazankis checked that day. Says the barrel looked like you climbed inside and scrubbed it out with a toothbrush. What made that batch so different you needed to eliminate every trace?”

  “I just fuckin’ hosed it out like always. Kazankis musta got the trucks mixed up.”

  I shuffled another inch forward. “Mr Kazankis doesn’t strike me as a man who gets much wrong. Except maybe the occasional hire.”

  Carosso’s face spun my way. He hadn’t seen me move, but his body felt my nearness and didn’t like it. “Whaddaya want with me? I drive a goddamn concrete truck for sixteen lousy bucks an hour. Look at the shithole I live in. Why you picking on me?” His last sentence was a peal of desperation, like a frightened child.

  “I need to see that load,” I said, knowing he could feel my breath on his face. “It’s important.”

  “I don’t know where it is. I don’t know nothing. Leave me alone!”

  He backed inside and slammed the door. Gershwin gave me a raised eyebrow. “Jumpy as a cat on meth. El schmendriko knows something.”

  “On that we
agree,” I said. “Let’s go back to the office and chase some paper.”

  We climbed into the Rover. “It’s an oven,” Gershwin complained. “We were out five minutes and you could bake cookies in here.”

  “The insulation is a bit thin,” I said as we pulled away. “But sweating clears toxins from the body.”

  Paul Carosso wiped his brow with his shoulder and pulled a fifth of Jim Beam from a kitchen cabinet, sucking down long, gurgling swigs. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and flipped open his cell phone. He dialed, missed the number in nervousness, dialed again.

  “It’s me,” he said, breath tight and voice strained. “The fucking cops just left. Tell me again how this makes sense.”

  13

  Gershwin and I headed to HQ to bang out the paperwork on Carosso. I still saw only one desk and a single chair, the disconsolate phone centering the floor. “I can swami on the carpet,” Gershwin offered, folding his legs and squatting beside the phone. He grinned and lifted the handset. “Plus I can be your secretary.”

  “Screw this,” I said. “It’s Friday. Let’s find somewhere we can work with a beer nearby, I’m thinking beside my elbow. You know anywhere?”

  “Most cops here head to Morgan’s Grill, eight blocks south. I been there once. Everyone looked at me like I had radioactive lice.”

  “Pick somewhere you like. No loud music, please.”

  “Yes, boss,” Gershwin winked. “I got just the place for a guy like you.”

  Gershwin pointing the way, I drove north on Biscayne for a bit, exiting into an area of older neighborhoods interspersed with strip malls and fast-food joints, everything a tad seedy, like maybe it had once been the place to live, but then everyone came back from World War II and wanted bigger houses on wider lots.

  “Here we are,” Gershwin said, pulling beneath a canopy of arching royal palms and into an asphalt lot bleached gray by the sun. The sign seemed like a relic from Vegas in the forties, crossed palms outlined in pulsing neon and framing the joint’s name.

  “Tiki Tiki?” I said.

  “It’s pronounced Ticky Tiki,” Gershwin corrected. “But only the regulars know that, and most of them have forgotten it.”

  We had our choice of parking spaces, the only other vehicles a scarlet Lincoln Continental of venerable age and two six-passenger golf carts under fringed fabric sunshields. The joint was a sprawling single-story stucco and rock structure with a false thatched-straw hairdo. The requisite palms bordered the front alongside a broad, foliage-filled courtyard with stone benches where folks might sit and ponder Polynesian thoughts, a fountain spraying a parsimonious strand of water into an algae-thickened pool where foot-long goldfish swam. A sound system played “Sweet Leilani” into the hot air.

  Flaming torches accompanied our walk up a pseudo gangplank into a décor seemingly from a university production of The Pirates of Penzance: weathered wood walls, ropes and hawsers strung willy-nilly from the ceiling, false windows like outsize portholes, the openings holding cheesy, over-bright paintings of imagined Polynesian scenes.

  I loved the place.

  “Zigs!” a voice trumpeted as the door closed behind us. “Is that my sweet boychick?”

  A woman nearly as round as tall slammed into Gershwin like a bowling ball and wrapped him in a hug. Her black hair fell to where a waist should have been, and she wore a flowered muumuu that could have tented a den of Cub Scouts. Her earrings were clusters of miniature coconuts and bananas and her fingers wore a blaze of rings.

  Gershwin cleared his throat and nodded toward the woman affixed to his rib cage. “This is Consuelo Amardara, Detective Ryder. An aunt.”

  “The aunt,” the woman corrected. “He has more tias than Bimbo has bread, but I am the tía … tia numero uno.” She reached up and pinched his cheek. “Right, mi bubbie?”

  Gershwin reddened and turned to scope out the interior. Two elderly men sat at the bar and a half-dozen women of the same generation played mah-jongg at a distant table, each with a brightly colored drink at an elbow. I figured they’d puttered over on the carts, probably from a nearby old-folks home.

  Ms Amardara patted Gershwin’s belly. “Skinny as a stick! When was the last time you ate, Ignacio? How about I fix you a poquito nosh?”

  I was enjoying Gershwin’s discomfort, but not as much as I was enjoying Miz Amardara, an amazing hybrid of Latina mamacita and Jewish mother, her speech the intersection of Crown Heights and Spanish Harlem. She turned an appraiser’s eye on me.

  “And you could use a few pounds, also. Let me fix a plate of sandwiches.”

  I shot a glance at the drinks at the ladies’ table. “Actually, I’d prefer a cocktail, Miz Amardara. What’s your best rum drink?”

  “Consuelo’s Delight: three rums – light, golden, and demerara. Plus coconut milk, lime, papaya, and my special secret ingredient.”

  “We’ll take two.”

  Gershwin shot a look at his watch. “Aren’t we still on duty?”

  “We’re detectives,” I said, moving toward a booth in a shadowy corner. “And I want to see if I can detect the secret ingredient.”

  Amardara shuffled to the bar and Gershwin followed me, looking dubious. I picked a seat in a back booth dressed with an orchid and candle flickering from the top of a squat, ceramic palm, giving Gershwin a raised eyebrow as he sat across from me.

  “Ignacio?” I said. “Your first name?”

  He nodded. “My father was Jewish, my mother Cubano. She got to pick the first name.”

  “And the middle?”

  He sighed. “Ignacio Ruben Manolo Gershwin. As a kid I was nicknamed Iggy. I was kinda hyperactive, zigging and zagging all over the place. A teacher started calling me Ziggy and it stuck.”

  I smiled. “If I’m to judge by your aunt’s patois, there’s a big Jewish clientele here.”

  Gershwin grabbed a menu from a nearby serving cart. The first spread displayed pseudo-Polynesian offerings. I flipped to the next spread and gave Gershwin a raised eyebrow.

  “Pastrami is Polynesian?”

  “A lot of the surrounding community’s Jewish, has been forever. The bused-in clientele includes a lot of Jewish tour groups from New York. Auntie spent upwards of twelve hours a day here for over two decades and she’s part Jewish by osmosis. I grew up thinking chopped liver was a standard burrito filling.”

  “She raised you?”

  “For several years. It’s a long story.” His face didn’t invite asking for an explanation.

  Miz Amardara bustled up and set two tall and frosty glasses before us. I lifted the glass to my lips and pressed them through foam and took a sip. My eyes rolled back in ecstasy at a sweet taste leavened by tangy citrus tartness, a soft kiss heightened by a transient touch of teeth. And drawing all the tastes into harmony was a dry and elusive perfume that melted away the moment it appeared.

  “Magnificent,” I said, the hush in my voice displaying reverence. “And as a secret enhancement, the touch of cloves is perfect, Miz Amardara. You are a genius.”

  “Cloves,” she gasped, framing a dropped-open mouth with her fingertips as she backed away. “One sip and the man says cloves.”

  “Uh-oh, Detective R,” Gershwin said, shaking his head, “I think you just made a friend for life.”

  14

  Leala awakened on a mattress on the floor of the room that smelled like sweat. The clock on the floor showed 6.42 a.m. The day said SAT. She was in the basement of the discoteca, Leala knew, dark and cave-like with rooms in all directions. Some were locked, others weren’t. At the far end of the hall was a door made of thick metal fence with two big locks. You could see through the fence to the bottom of the stairs that came from the discoteca. Pipes ran along the walls and ceilings and you could hear music from above.

  Is Yolanda back? her awakening mind asked.

  Last night the man named Orlando entered and grabbed Yolanda and said she was going to be in a parade. When Yolanda told the man she did not want to go, he laughe
d and dragged her down the hall to a stinky bathroom.

  “Wash yourself,” Leala heard the man tell Yolanda. “Then put this stuff on. I’ve brought a lipstick and make-up … you like playing dress-up? Tonight is big time dress-up, little one.”

  The Orlando man had left the door open and Leala peeked down the hall. After a few minutes she saw Yolanda exit the bathroom, her face painted like a doll and a bright red ribbon tying her hair back. She wore a short pink dress and her feet were in pink canvas zapatas. The shoes were too large and made a clopping sound as the man unlocked the grated door and pushed Yolanda up the stairs.

  With no one to talk to, Leala had fallen into quivering dreams. Dreams of voices. Of doors opening and closing. She blinked her eyes and remembered Yolanda was going to a parade.

  What did that mean?

  Leala tiptoed to Yolanda’s confines. There, on the bed, staring at the ceiling, was Yolanda, a yellowed sheet over her body. Leala crept inside and closed the door at her back.

  “Yolanda,” she whispered, crossing the room. “What happened? What was this parade?”

  Yolanda stared past the ceiling pipes and ducts and thumping music, as if she was looking for God above. Her lips were puffy and smeared with lipstick. Pieces of her hair had been pulled out. When Leala eased the sheet down her breath froze in her throat. Yolanda was covered with bite marks, some just tooth shapes, others broken through the skin.

  “Oh, poor Yolanda,” Leala said. “What has happened to you?”

  Yolanda grimaced and stiffened. Leala heard a rustling sound and pulled the sheet further down: her friend was passing water. It was pink and sprayed down scratched legs smeared brown with dried blood. More blood crusted at the apex of her thighs.

  “Madre de Dios,” Leala said. “What caused …”

  Yolanda closed her eyes and turned away.

  “A terrible thing. Worn around the waist like a belt.”

  “We have to escape this terrible place. We must think of a plan.”

  “I cannot think now, Leala. I hurt too much.”

  Leala studied her friend. She looked roto, broken. “I will find a way out, Yolanda. Then I will be back for you.”