Nobody Rides For Free

by Neil S. Plakcy

  “Who are you?”

  The voice that came from behind the door was high-pitched, with a heavy French accent. I held up my badge to the eye hole. “Special Agent Angus Green from the FBI,” I said. “I’d like to talk to you about your grandson, Dimetrie.”

  The latch slid and the door opened a fraction. A short, wizened woman in a faded housecoat peered up at me. “He izz not here no more.”

  “I’m looking for Dimetrie,” I said. “Do you have any idea where I could find him?”

  “He have bah-won in him,” she said. “Pulling him strings like marionette.” She mimed a jerky dance move that seemed far from Dimetrie’s grace and I wondered if that bah-won was the Haitian demon that Manny Arristaga had mentioned.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted a skinny, flat-chested girl who was about thirteen, lurking by the street. But I ignored her for the moment to concentrate on Dimetrie’s grandmother.

  “Dimetrie may be in danger now. I’d like to help him.”

  “No help for heem,” she said. “He izz like heem mother, full of demons.”

  She tried to close the door, but I stuck my foot in it. “Do you know any friends he might be with? Any other relatives he’d go to?”

  “No one.” She pushed the door against my foot, and when I stepped back she slammed it and I heard the deadbolt click.

  Had she given up on her grandson because she feared that the demon had lured him into debauchery? Did she know that he had become involved in porn?

  I slid one of my business cards into the door handle, though I was sure Dimetrie’s grandmother would throw it away as soon as she saw it. It was sad that she had abandoned her own flesh and blood, a boy with so much talent.

  After waiting a moment in case Racine Beauvoir changed her mind, I turned and walked back out to the sidewalk. The skinny girl I’d noticed was gone, and the only sounds I heard were trucks on I-95 a few blocks away.

  I looked up and down the street. Did no one care enough about this boy to try and help him? Or were they sure I was trying to arrest him rather than rescue him?

  I looked down at the pavement, where a tiny yellow flower pushed up through the cracked concrete. It reminded me of the ones I’d picked with my friends—buttercups, I think they were. We’d rubbed them on our chins to prove our sweetness.

  Such innocent days. I’d lost that innocence at Quantico, when I learned how awful the world could be. It was sad to think that Dimetrie Beauvoir and Ozzy Perez had lost theirs even earlier.

  10.

  Baron Samedi

  I’d only gone a few feet back toward my car when I heard a voice behind me. “You a cop?”

  I turned around. The skinny girl was there, her hands on her hips.

  “I’m an FBI agent.” I smiled at her, trying to establish that I was a good guy. “My name is Angus.”

  “Why you looking for my brother?”

  “Because I want to help him. I think he’s in trouble.”

  “He’s fine. My grand-mére, she hates him because he likes to dance. She say both of us remind her too much of our mother.”

  She did look a lot like Dimetrie, with the same deep set eyes and flat black hair.

  The small grocery store, where the guy in the wife-beater had been lurking, was half a block away. “It’s really hot out,” I said. “Can I buy you a soda and ask you some questions about your brother?”

  She looked around furtively. I was sure that people were watching us from behind barred windows, but Dimetrie’s sister seemed to decide to trust me. “All right,” she said, and she started walking down the street.

  I hurried to keep up with her. I didn’t have a lot of experience talking to kids her age, and it was important to get her to open up to me if I had a hope of finding Dimetrie.

  One of the skills we’d studied in Quantico was elicitation, using apparently casual conversation to collect information that a target might not willingly provide. There were more than two dozen specific techniques, from simply being a good listener to making provocative statements in order to fool the target into rebutting.

  The first thing I wanted to do was establish a rapport with the girl. “What’s your name?”

  “Lucie.”

  “You look a lot like Dimetrie,” I said. “But I’ve only seen pictures. I have a couple that I printed out. Maybe you’d like to see them.”

  “Old pictures?” she said dismissively.

  “I don’t know. You can help me figure out how recent they are. But then again, they’re poor quality screenshots. You might not even recognize him.”

  We reached the store and I opened the front door for Lucie and ushered her in ahead of me. The air conditioning was set to frigid and it felt great after being in the heat of the sun.

  “Screen shots?” she asked. “You mean from the Internet? Is he dancing?”

  I didn’t answer. I was afraid that if I told her the truth, she’d deny it, shut down, and I’d never get anything else from her.

  She pulled a can of Coke from the cooler and put it down on the cashier’s counter. I did the same thing, then paid for the two sodas.

  She grabbed her can and walked a few feet to the back of the store, where she sat down at a small table. “Dimetrie’s going to dance with a real ballet company.”

  I sat across from her. “I spoke to his teacher at the New World School of the Arts and he agrees with you. He said Dimetrie’s very talented.” The soda can was ice-cold in my hand. “Do you know where he’s living?”

  She shook her head. “He won’t tell me. But it’s somewhere in Fort Lauderdale.”

  “How do you know?”

  She looked down at the table. “He sends me money orders sometimes.”

  My heart sank. Lucie almost certainly did not know what Dimetrie was doing to earn that money. “He does? That’s great.”

  “He won’t tell me where he is or what he’s doing. But he says he’s still taking free dance classes.” She looked down at her soda can. “I like to sing, and he says I should use the money to pay for my lessons. That one day we’re gonna sing and dance together.”

  “That sounds awesome,” I said. “But here’s the thing. I’m afraid that someone is taking advantage of Dimetrie. I want to find him and make sure he’s OK.”

  “You don’t want to arrest him?”

  I shook my head. “He hasn’t done anything wrong.” I paused. “You said he’s sending you money orders from Fort Lauderdale?”

  She nodded.

  “Your grandmother doesn’t know?”

  “He sends them to my friend’s house,” she said. “I take them to this check cashing place where her brother works and he cashes them for me.”

  I knew that a money order had to indicate the specific location where it was sold. If I could see one, I might be able to track Dimetrie down through it.

  “The next time you get one, could you call me?” I asked. “I’d like to see where the money order was issued.”

  She looked down at the table and didn’t say anything for a moment, but then she reached into her pocket and pulled out a folded envelope. “My friend gave me this one this morning.”

  She held the envelope, but didn’t move to give it to me.

  “There’s nothing wrong with your brother sending you money,” I said. “You won’t get in trouble, and neither will he. But it would help me to know where the money order came from.”

  She handed me the envelope and I unfolded it. The postmark read “South Florida,” which wasn’t helpful. She had already opened the envelope so I was able to pull out the money order, wrapped in a piece of lined white paper, obviously a note from her brother.

  I put the note aside and looked at the money order for fifty dollars. It had been issued at a Publix grocery store on NW Fifteenth Avenue in Fort Lauderdale, at the border of Wilton Manors.

  I wrote down all the information on the money order and then handed it back to Lucie. “Does he send these regularly?” I asked. I thought perhaps I cou
ld stake out the Publix if he had a pattern.

  “Every few weeks,” she said. “The last one was maybe two weeks ago.”

  There went the idea of watching the Publix. “Is that a note from Dimetrie?” I asked, nodding toward the white paper.

  “You can read it if you want.”

  It was a quick scrawl, sending his love to her, and at the bottom he had written what looked like “rete bonjan.” I pointed to it and asked, “What does that mean?”

  “It’s Haitian creole,” she said. “It means stay strong.”

  I tried to pronounce it, and Lucie laughed. She said it out loud for me, and I mimicked her. “Thank you, Lucie.” I gave her my card. “If you ever have the chance to get word to Dimetrie, tell him that I want to help him, all right?”

  She took the card and nodded shyly. “You said you have pictures of my brother?”

  I pulled out my phone and showed her the head shot I had taken from the racetrack video. I’d cropped the shot from the scene where Ozzy was blowing him. Dimetrie’s head was tilted back showing his face. He was still wearing the cowboy hat, and his eyes were glazed over with lust.

  “Why is he wearing that stupid hat?” she asked. “Is that for a dance?”

  “He’s playing a role in a video.”

  “Is he dancing? Do you have a link to the video?”

  “I don’t have the link,” I said. There was no way I was showing a ten-year-old girl her adored older brother having sex on camera.

  I had a feeling she knew my reasoning without telling her. She grabbed her soda and said, “I have to go. My grand-mére will be looking for me.” Then she hurried out of the store.

  I sipped my soda and considered what I had learned from Lucie and her grandmother. Mrs. Beauvoir had kicked Dimetrie out because she thought he was under the influence of a Haitian demon called the “bah-won.” He was obviously being paid for his movie work, because he had enough to send regular money orders to his sister. And he said he was still taking dance classes, too.

  Was it possible he was performing in porn without being forced? Either way, at sixteen, what he was doing was still illegal—whether he was being forced or not. I still had to find him. The address of the Publix in Fort Lauderdale was a good clue that he might be living somewhere in the Wilton Manors area—maybe right in my own neighborhood.

  When I got to my car, I turned on the engine and kicked the air conditioning into high gear, then drove back to the office. When I got there I opened a new FD302 and entered all the details of what I’d learned from Manuel Arristaga, Mrs. Beauvoir, and Lucie. It seemed like a lot of information, yet little of it was going to help me find Dimetrie and Ozzy. And none of it had anything to do with flakka distribution.

  I was falling into the trap that Roly had warned me about, worrying too much about these boys when my case, and our jurisdiction, was the drug angle. But I couldn’t help myself. I needed to find Dimetrie and Ozzy, and my gut told me that once I did, I’d find the drug distributors.

  Dimetrie had told his sister that he was still taking dance classes, so I did some searching and found a bunch of different offerings in the Wilton Manors area. I ruled out the ones that were clearly for amateurs—Dimetrie was too much of a professional already to bother with a group that learned different dances each week to explore self-expression. I didn’t see him at a bar learning to line dance, or taking swing lessons at a senior center.

  The Broward School’s adult education department offered a range of classes for kids and adults, including a free ballet class at Lauderdale High, on the edge of Wilton Manors. It met on Tuesday evenings and was led by a rotating series of volunteers. I put that in my calendar. It seemed like my best bet to find him based on what I knew.

  What about the demon that Racine Beauvoir had mentioned? The bah-won? I’d worked with a Haitian agent on my last case, Ferdy Etienne, so I walked through the narrow corridors of our office building until I found his office.

  He was a round-faced guy with a bald head, a mustache and a goatee, who favored neatly tailored suits with nipped waists. “You ever hear of a Haitian demon called the bah-won?” I asked.

  “Sure, Bahwon Samedi,” he said, giving the words the full French pronunciation. “In English he’s called Baron Samedi. He’s the spirit who accepts you into the realm of the dead. What’s your interest in him?”

  I explained the way that Racine Beauvoir had described her grandson as a puppet of the demon.

  “Makes sense.” He typed on his computer and then swiveled the screen around to show me. “This is a picture of him. See the top hat, black tail coat, dark glasses, and cotton plugs in the nostrils? That’s the way we dress a corpse for burial in the Haitian style.”

  Just looking at the character’s skull-like white face creeped me out.

  “I can see why this grandmother would be upset if the Baron has possessed her grandson,” Ferdy said. “He’s known for outrageous behavior, swearing, and making filthy jokes to the other spirits. And he lures people into debauchery.”

  “Sounds like what has happened to this boy.”

  “Baron Samedi is a loa, one of the gods of Haitian voodoo. They say that Papa Doc Duvalier, the Haitian dictator, modeled his personality on that of the Baron, speaking in a nasal voice and wearing sunglasses.”

  I thanked Ferdy for the help and walked back to my office. It must have been tough for Dimetrie to be torn between the crucified Jesus on his grandmother’s front door and the voodoo spirits inside. Would I end up in a tug of war between the two for Dimetrie’s soul? Where was he, and how did he and Ozzy tie into the distribution of flakka?

  11.

  Sexy Girl

  It was already Friday evening by the time I called it quits, and I went home to change clothes for my evening with Special Agent Katya Gordieva, trolling a Russian bar in search of bad guys and ex-girlfriends.

  I took I-95 south from Fort Lauderdale and got off at 163rd Street in North Miami Beach, then headed east. As I crossed the bridge over the Intracoastal Waterway, the familiar detritus of check cashing places and dollar stores gave way to a vista of skyscrapers in so many odd shapes—cylinders with wrap-around balconies abutted ziggurat towers which were next to sleek glass rectangles. You’d think the view was a geometry quiz.

  Evening had fallen as I turned left on Collins Avenue, the north–south road that paralleled the beach. The tourists lining the sidewalks had swapped their bathing suits for Hawaiian shirts and tasseled shawls over sleeveless dresses. I found the bar where I was supposed to meet Katya and snagged a tiny spot near the street. As I walked toward the entrance, I passed an elderly couple in matching track suits, and an Orthodox Jewish woman wheeling a double stroller, accompanied by two young boys wearing yarmulkes. It was a different world from Wilton Manors.

  I peered in at the bar and didn’t see Katya, so I ambled around the center for a couple of minutes, passing a cell phone store, a Russian deli, and a women’s clothing store with sparkly dresses on skinny mannequins in the window.

  I saw Katya coming through the parking lot and waved to her. She looked smoking hot in a tight black mini-dress, with a couple of gold chains around her neck. “Have to fit in with the crowd,” she said, when I mentioned how good she looked. She tucked her arm in mine. “Come on, I’ll show you some fun.”

  The bar, Tovarich, was little more than a double-wide storefront—much smaller than Lazy Dick’s—with a u-shaped bar lined with high stools and a glittering glass bar-back filled with one of the most extensive displays of liquor I’d ever seen.

  Katya led me up to the bar and peered forward, scanning the bottles behind it. She nodded, then turned to me. “You like oranges?”

  “Sure.”

  She spoke to the bartender in Russian and he nodded. We watched as he mixed a premium Russian vodka, Lillet, orange liqueur, and bitters, then topped both drinks with extravagant orange peel curls. She handed him a platinum credit card and said to me, “This is on me. I’ll say you’re a client consi
dering buying a condo here.”

  She lifted her glass to mine. “This is a Snow Queen Martini. I got hooked on them in New York.”

  The martini was miles better than the cheap beer and watered down margaritas I was accustomed to drinking. “Wow,” I said.

  “See? You’ve got to know what to order in a place like this. Otherwise, they’ll give you the cheapest vodka and charge you the highest price.”

  She leaned toward me. “Let me give you some background on this neighborhood. Ten or fifteen years ago, this part of Collins Avenue was a long strip of fifties motels. Then, somebody recognized it was undervalued beachfront property, and the building boom kicked off. The Russians moved in during that first wave, so the neighborhood got the nickname Little Moscow.”

  “Everybody here is Russian?”

  She shook her head. “Lots of other groups, too—South Americans, Cubans, Romanians. But because the Russians are concentrated here, rather than spread around, their presence is more visible. Last statistic I saw was that seven percent of residents here speak Russian as their first language.”

  She lowered her voice. “Look around. Tell me what you think of the clientele.”

  Most of those at the bar were men in their thirties and forties, in groups of two or three. They looked like they’d come from work, a mix of corporate-logo polo shirts and business suits. When I listened closely, I realized that the only language I could hear was the guttural tones of Russian.

  I told her that, and she nodded. “Most of these guys are from the southern part of Russia—I can tell from their accents.”

  “Is there that much of a difference?”

  She shook her head. “Only in the way they pronounce certain consonants, or their occasional word choice. When I was in college, I spent one semester in Moscow and another in Volgograd, so I learned the difference.”

  “Is the guy you’re looking for here?”

  “Nope. But those two guys up at the bar, with the close-cropped blond hair? They’re Berdichev’s drinking buddies, so he might be on his way. Let’s order some food and give him time to show up.”