The Death Box

by J. A. Kerley

  I sprinted to the far side of the fountain to scope things from that angle. No one seemed interested in me. I continued to circle the pool, hands in my pockets, studying everyone within sight. More office workers. A trio of teens playing hacky-sack. A group of tourists, German by their voices, cameras strung around necks craning toward the skyline.

  I heard footsteps and turned to see a woman passing behind me, face hidden beneath a pulled-low white scarf and large sunglasses, age indeterminate, but youthful in her profile. The blue dress needed a session at the ironing board and she seemed to have a slight limp.

  “Miss?” I called. “Excuse me, miss?”

  She turned. “Si?”

  I jammed my hands in my pockets and smiled benignly. “I’m Carson Ryder. Does that mean anything to you?”

  A pause. The shades seemed riveted on me.

  “No hablo inglés, señor.”

  “Sorry,” I said. She continued away.

  Leala moved quickly from the plaza, needing time to weigh information. The man was a gringo, bad. But he was not a hulking, stoop-shouldered monster, probably good. He was actually nice looking, slender, with dark hair and eyes. Still, there was something that seemed threatening about the man, but it did not seem directed at her. Perhaps it was his eyes, scanning all directions at once. Or maybe it was how he walked, almost carelessly but with surprising speed. She had seen him exit the building, but had looked away when distracted by a vendor. When she looked back, he was on the far side of the pool.

  Cats did that sort of thing, and cats could not be trusted.

  But when he’d spoken, there was no threat in his voice, only curiosity. That was good. Could such an hombre with such a concerned voice be bad in his heart? Or were he and the woman named Victoree wolves in disguise?

  What was true, what was a lie?

  Questions without answers. Leala passed a large building, her eyes catching the sign, seeing the word Library. That meant the building was a biblioteca, a place where the books lived. There was a biblioteca in the village six kilometers distant and Leala’s mother made sure Leala got there once a month for books.

  Books held the answers.

  She turned and darted inside, shaking back her hair and straightening her spine, acting like she belonged with the people entering the long building. She was halfway across the wide floor when her eyes saw a flash of uniform against a far wall: a guardia! He was looking right at her. Leala felt her knees loosen and her breath turn to ice. Keep moving, her mind said. Do not look his way. You are just one of many seekers of knowledge. She saw a huge counter with several workers behind it. One was a young man, not much older than her, shuffling books into a pile. She took a deep breath and stood before him.

  “Help you?” he asked.

  Leala had her story ready, created in the twenty steps it took to cross the floor. “I-I am an estudiante visiting from Honduras. May I see into the books? It is proper for me?”

  A smile. “Certainly. What are you looking for?”

  Leala handed him the poster from the laundromat. If Victoree Johnson was a trap to catch illegals, there would be nothing about her in the library. Would anyone be so tricky as to put a trap in books?

  “I seek the informacíon to this project. The who is it that they are.” Leala added a phrase from her class, one used by Americans a good deal. “And so forth and so on.”

  The man paused to digest Leala’s words. “You’re doing research, then?”

  “Si,” she nodded. That was the word. “I am to do the research.”

  The young man read the poster, nodded as he handed the poster back. “Aha. The director, Ms Johnson, gave two talks here. Quite unsettling, as you might expect.”

  Leala felt her eyes widen. Was she receiving a confirmation without having to figure out which book might tell her? The library was huge, big enough to hold her entire village, every house, every plot of land, every pig and every chicken.

  “The director, then … she es verdad?” Leala said. “One that is real?”

  “Pardon, miss?”

  Leala knew her English was falling apart. Was the guardia listening? Could he tell she was a criminal?

  “Victoree Johnson was here?” Leala asked, shooting a glance at the guard. He looked like he was yawning, but it might be a trick. “Señorita Johnson is the real woman?”

  “As you get, I expect. I was in the front row of the audience and …” the man paused, his eye narrowing. “Are you all right, miss?” he asked.

  The man’s eyes had turned into question marks. All he had to do was point at Leala and yell “Criminal!” and the guardia would throw a net over Leala and pull her away to be raped and tortured. She shot a concerned look at her bare wrist and slapped her forehead.

  “Dios mio … I am mas late to an appointment. I will return in the mañana.” Leala pushed a bright smile to her face and turned for the door.

  “You’re not wearing a watch,” the man called to her back.

  But Leala was outside and ducking between and around pedestrians. She sprinted across the street, hastening down another block to a bus stop on the opposite side of the street from where she was dropped off. She boarded a westward-bound bus, the direction of her safe place. She paid her fare and sat behind the driver, her mind racing.

  “Damn,” I muttered, studying the surveillance video and watching a pretty teenage girl in a white scarf and blue dress speaking to one of the clerks at the Clark Center’s info desk. The building’s security office was in the basement, and the chief of security, a square-jawed ex-cop named Talbot, stood beside me as a minion ran a playback from a camera at the front desk.

  “I’m to speak to Señor Ryder,” the woman was saying, her soft voice picked up by one of the sensitive mics mounted in the desk. “He said I am to … to meet him in the lobby. But I cannot know who is he. Es possible you show me a fotografía please?”

  I watched the clerk pop my ID pic onto the screen, turn it to the woman. She was the one I had the fleeting interaction with on the plaza. She must have been terrified to be in a government building that housed a major police agency, but she held herself with amazing aplomb, the façade dropping for a split second as a uniformed cop walked to the desk. When the girl’s eyes saw the cop they widened as her shoulders tightened. When the cop turned away and the girl’s face re-assumed the mask of concerned citizen, standing on tip-toe to study my photo before thanking the clerk and retreating.

  Her story about having a meeting with me – at my request – and needing to ID me in the crowded lobby was pitch-perfect, delivered with sincere confusion and disarming innocence. Whoever the girl was, she had brains and bravery … getting me outside so she could look me over.

  Had I passed a test? Failed?

  “Someone you know?” Talbot asked.

  “Someone I’d like to.” I thanked him for pulling the video and headed back upstairs, nothing to do but go back to my office and hope the girl phoned.

  35

  The establishment known as O’s Cupboard sat a block off Duval and one of the delights of the workers was seeing the faces of middle-aged Midwestern tourist ladies stepping inside expecting a trendy bistro and beholding racks of rubber bondage suits, whips and riding crops, X-rated videos, and a display counter of dildoes and vibrators.

  Spyder Rockwylde, né Bruce Hastings, was in the back room finishing lunch. He tossed the sloppy remains of the tuna salad sandwich into the trash can in the corner. He belched and stepped into the tiny high-fenced courtyard out back and polished off the joint he’d started before work, then paused in the high sun to pull up his skin-tight black tee to admire his latest tattoo, a Gibson Les Paul guitar running from his pubic hair to his sternum.

  Too cool.

  He heard the door pull shut as he entered the front section, seeing his shift partner and drummer – when he could borrow a kit – pushing the drawer closed on the register. Billy T. Rexx, né Kent Buttram, jumped back up on a stool and tugged at the inch-round blac
k plug distending his ear lobe.

  “Yo, Spyd … just made two hundred-eighty bucks,” he smiled, holding up a fifty. “And a tip just for ringing things up. The man said to split it with you.”

  Rockwylde smiled. There was only one customer who tipped: Babyface Sanders.

  Neither knew the customer’s real name, the moniker coming from the man’s childlike visage and affectation for white suits à la Colonel Sanders. Both enjoyed inventing backgrounds for customers and speculated Babyface was the secret love child of Harlan Sanders and the Chucky character of horror-flick fame.

  “Babyface load up on more freaky teeny flickies?” Rexx asked, referring to the man’s devotion to Hispanic porn flicks featuring the most youthful-looking actors, preferably movies involving simulated kidnap and rape.

  “Bought all the latest titles,” Rockwylde said. “And this time he bought the Avenger Twelve.”

  “Fuck me,” Rexx said, checking the display case and seeing a dust-free pattern where the device, a lifelike though hugely outsized rubber penis held in place by a wide leather belt – a strap-on, in the lingo – had resided. “The Babyface jumped up a notch since last time.” He paused and frowned. “You don’t think a weirdo like Babyface is gonna actually, uh …”

  Rockwylde laughed. “No fucking way. This place is the guy’s girlfriend.”

  “Then what’s the Babyface gonna use it for?”

  “Early Halloween shopping, maybe,” Rockwylde grinned. “He’s going as a horse.”

  I did catch-up paperwork in the office, hoping Leala would contact me. Gershwin arrived at eleven-thirty and I told him of my near-miss with the girl.

  “A dozen feet away?” he said, pulling off a banana-yellow blazer and hanging it from the back of his chair, his blue tee freshly laundered. The jeans looked new and the skate kicks had been replaced by sedate black cross-trainers. He’d upped his fashion game, either to look more professional or because he’d run out of clean tees and jeans.

  “I had no idea who she was.”

  “You think she’s the key, Jefé?”

  “All I know is that she’s in bad trouble.”

  My phone rang and I had it to my eyes before the second ring, saw the caller was Vince Delmara. I switched gears, hoping his snitch network had come up golden. Give me something, anything.

  “Vince … tell me a snitch came through.”

  “Nada on a blade man. You know the problem there, right?”

  “You rat out a knife pro, the knife starts looking for you.”

  “The worse the guy is, the less likely we’ll hear anything. Hey … I do have some good news. I get to close a MP case, Detective. The lab just confirmed dental records on a corpse named Perlman, Bennet J. Some called him Benny the Books.”

  “Bookmaker?” I asked. Though it didn’t affect me, I was always buoyed by someone else’s success.

  “Bookkeeper. Got his CPA degree from Indiana University in ’84, got hired by a manufacturing company in Elkhart, Indiana. I guess he found the winters a tad frosty and moved to Miami in 1990 and went to work for a private brokerage firm, long gone. Reason the firm died was the top dogs were running a pyramid.”

  “Uh-oh,” I said.

  “Perlman was keeping a fake set of records for the investors and FEC, one for his bosses. When the FEC took down the company – with help from FCLE, I should mention – the boyo lost his CPA accreditation and couldn’t get the big gigs. He played Bobby Cratchit for a couple of slinky bail bondsmen around town, then turned up not turning up. Like for last year’s family reunion. Not a sighting or financial transaction since. I figure Perlman fucked someone over and went swimming with the sharks.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “Perlman claimed the bail-bond accounts as his employment, doing basic payables and receivables. True, and they paid him thirty-two grand last year. But Mr P. has a big red Benz gathering dust outside his condo. And a flat-screen TV you could play handball off of.”

  “Expensive tastes, your Mr Perlman.”

  A barking laugh. “Your Mr Perlman, Detective. He is, or was, JDMS in the cistern. Second from the bottom. Wanna see where Perlman lived before he moved to the concrete condo?”

  Benny Perlman had lived in a complex in North Miami, a four-layer pink and aquamarine cake with six units per layer, each with a long balcony, a palm-shadowed swimming pool in back, numbered parking slots to the side. We pulled into the lot and saw Delmara relaxing against a red Mercedes beneath a carport, the paint dulled by dust and its tires soft from sitting.

  Delmara patted the Benz. “Two years back Perlman bought it second-hand off a two-year lease. It still cost seventy-three thou.”

  “Not bad for a man making under forty,” Gershwin said. “But as an accountant, you expect him to be good with a budget, right?”

  “Stellar,” Delmara said. “Given that Perlman was paying fifteen grand a year on the condo and upkeep.” He tipped back the hat and pointed down the opposite side of the street to a restaurant named The Cascades. “Toney joint, three bright stars in the Michelin. Big bucks, in other words. Credit-card records show the Perlster ate there three or four times a week.”

  “They must have been sad when he stopped showing up,” I said. “Anything else come from the cards?”

  “Only that his biggies in life were eating and drinking and a pretty car.” Delmara pulled his fedora and brushed the crown with his palm. “How about we head inside? You’re gonna love it.”

  Perlman’s second-floor door opened to cool air and the scent of cleanser. The dark blue carpet held the streaks of a recent vacuuming. The living room boasted the huge screen noted by Delmara, before it one of those goofy, overblown loungers touted in airline publications, pillow-thick cushions, arms and foot-rest, the monstrosity about the size of a double bed and having angle and massage settings, plus a folding platform for food and drink that currently held controllers for a PlayStation, Xbox and Wii, all running through the screen. I’d seen smaller screens at art-house cinemas.

  “Pull the fridge closer, install a toilet, and I could live in a chair like that,” Gershwin said.

  “Perlman had a shitload of DVDs,” Delmara said. “Eighties porn was big, a classicist. He also had a yen for space opera: Star Wars and Star Trek and so forth. Plus all the Disney animation flicks.”

  “A boy at heart,” I said, imagining the hours Perlman must have spent in the geeky dream-chair switching between Captain Kirk, the Lion King, and Marilyn Chambers. I squatted to study a stack of DVDs set between the Wii and PlayStation boxes, all oddly without dust.

  “This place looks like it was cleaned yesterday,” I noted.

  Delmara nodded. “Mr Perlman’s sister has been paying a housekeeper for weekly cleaning. She’s convinced baby brother ran off to Mexico with a hottie girlfriend but he’ll be back when he comes to his senses.”

  I glanced at the chair set-up and doubted Perlman had ever had a girlfriend. Gershwin came in from the bedroom, frowning.

  “No reading material,” he said. “Zero.”

  “Maybe he didn’t like reading,” Delmara said.

  “I mean no accounting bulletins. My uncle Pete’s a CPA, has to read a shitload of IRS updates to tax laws. He’s got them everywhere, even by the crapper. Perlman’s got nothing like that. Probably means whatever funds he was accounting weren’t being reported.”

  We tossed the condo and found nothing to indicate where or how Benny the Book lived so nicely on thirty-two grand a year. It was a sad kind of place, and I pictured Perlman as an oversized child who rented his services to whoever paid him the bucks, and never asked questions about what the numbers added up to. We went back outside after a fruitless hour.

  “Got one other thing,” Delmara said, pulling a page from his dark jacket. “Traffic citations Perlman’s Benz gathered. Parkings and speedings, mainly, bullshit stuff. You wanna check them out?”

  “Might be a pattern there, Big Ryde,” Gershwin said.

  “Sure
, Vince,” I said, taking the copy of the cites. “The boy and I will see if they mean anything.”

  “Boy?” Gershwin said. “Ouch, Detective Ryder. Snap.”

  Gershwin scanned the seven addresses where the Benz had been parked overtime or picked up a speeding citation. “All over town,” he said. “Except for the two speeding cites, which were on I-95 between exits eight and ten, and two parking tix … one for parking too close to a hydrant, another for parking in a loading zone. They’re on the same block.”

  There are names for the location where we ended up. Some call it the Strip, to others it’s the Combat Zone. Some cities euphemistically refer to it as Nightclub Row, or Clubtown. I called such places Dregsville, because it’s where the dregs of society felt most at home: shot’n’beer bars, strip joints, pawn shops, used-car lots, liquor stores, storefront sandwich shops, hot-pillow motels; there was always a bail-bondsman’s office nearby. These establishments were interspersed with windowless warehouses and car-parts outlets and whitewashed shops selling second-hand tires, the sad stacks of balding rubber protected by high fences encircled with razor wire, like ten-buck tires were worth stealing.

  “What do you call this neighborhood, Ziggy?” I asked.

  “Technically, it’s part of Hialeah, but this part I call Shitsville.”

  “No argument there. Where’d the cites get issued?”

  Gershwin pointed at a fire hydrant. “The hydrant cite was here.” We continued slowly for another block and he had me pull to the curb. “And there’s the loading zone where he got ticketed.”

  “Times?”

  “Both Friday mornings, one at eight-fifteen, the other at nine twenty-five.”

  We got out. The smell of urine rose from a gutter clogged with cigarette butts, fast-food wrappers, broken liquor bottles, crack vials and used condoms. A bus roared past and added its oily exhaust smell to the miasma.