The Death Box

by J. A. Kerley

  “What a hellhole,” I said, scanning the block, seeing a warehouse on the far side, flanked by a two-story strip club called the Paraíso, beside it a broken-down motel. Closer was a closed taqueria and a muffler outlet. On the other end of the block stood another strip joint called the Pink Pussycat, another brick warehouse, and a pawnbroker. I watched a skinny, miniskirted hooker step from between two buildings, make us – they were as fast to ID cops as I was – then turn and disappear into the bricks. “What brought Perlman here?” I wondered aloud.

  “Getting his knob polished,” Gershwin said.

  “On Friday mornings?”

  “Yeah, I’ve never been horny on a Friday morning, Detective. I save it for Tuesdays and Thursdays between two-seventeen and three twenty-two a.m.”

  I ignored the sarcasm as probably warranted and nodded toward the Paraiso. “Think he was looking for love at one of the titty bars?”

  “They don’t open that early. Gotta have time to mop up the previous evening’s diseases. Think Perl-O-Man might have been keeping the books for one of these joints?”

  I waited until traffic on the four-lane was stopped by lights and stepped into the street to study all the businesses. The lights changed and cars rushed my way.

  “I don’t see any of these ratholes bringing in enough money to need an accountant,” I said, jumping from the street as a garbage truck rumbled by, the driver giving me a blast of horn. “Unless they’re selling more than lap dances and tires.”

  “We can always ask. I’m sure they’ll be happy to answer our questions.”

  “Right now I got just one question, Ziggy,” I said.

  “What did Perlman do to end up in a cistern beneath a stack of Hondurans?”

  “Nope. Perlman’s hacked-off hands tell us he stole something. My question is, Who did he steal it from?”

  We jumped inside the Rover and I watched the rearview for an opportunity, squealing out a U-turn. I was looking into oncoming traffic when I snapped my head to follow a dented gray sedan rushing past in the oncoming lane, the suited, tie-wearing driver now seeming to duck away as he slipped on a pair of shades.

  “What?” Gershwin asked, seeing the swerving trajectory of my gaze.

  “That guy in the beater gray Caprice,” I said, looking in the mirror as the car turned a hard right without signaling. “I swear he looked just like Lonnie Canseco.”

  “A Latin-lover type?”

  “I know, not exactly a rarity in Miami. Plus there was a woman beside him, blonde like Valdez, but her face turned away.”

  “Canseco’s in Jacksonville,” Gershwin said. “And Valdez is off today. It’s on the board at the department. Besides …”

  “Yeah,” I realized, still shooting glances at the rearview. “I haven’t exactly spent a lot of quality time with my colleagues. I’m amazed I can remember their names.”

  36

  Gershwin and I retraced our steps to the department. I passed Degan’s office and saw him at his desk, sleeves rolled up, the huge revolver in a shoulder rig and looking like an upholstered cannon. A case file was spread across the desk. Tatum stood beside the hulking Degan. Instead of tormenting a Styrofoam cup, he was shuffling pages in a file. I stuck my head in the door.

  “Roy in today?” I asked.

  “Jacksonville,” Degan grunted. “In tomorrow.”

  “Hot case?” I asked, nodding at the file.

  Tatum shrugged, not looking at me. “Counterfeiters.”

  “I thought you were in Boca Raton today, Detective Degan.”

  “Guess I got back.” He didn’t look up.

  Six words from two colleagues, I tapped the door frame and continued down the hall. “You know McDermott’s in Jacksonville,” Gershwin said. “You told me that yesterday. What’s with the question?”

  “Just gauging today’s enmity quotient.”

  “And?”

  I waggled a hand. “Chilly but not frosty. I think they’re starting to love us.”

  “Yeah. And tomorrow’s forecast is for twelve feet of snow.”

  We went to the office and I kept my phone close, but nothing from the girl. I tried not to think of her brave face at the information desk a dozen stories below my feet, but kept wondering how she was surviving. Twice I stood from my desk and went to the window. Call me, I thought, trying to beam my thoughts through the city. Call me.

  My friend Clair Peltier – physician, pathologist, scientist – believed in synchronicity: hidden interstices below time and space where wishes, dreams, actions and events formed linkages unfathomable to the human mind. Clair might say that if I wished hard enough, I could create a ripple in the bosons that would nudge Leala to a phone.

  My bosons weren’t rippling, and I was at the window a third time when my cell rang, Delmara. “We need walkie-talkies,” he said. “So I don’t have to dial every time I have something cool for you.”

  “I’ll get Roy to buy us some. What you got, buddy?”

  “A guy got busted yesterday for a smash and grab, Blaine Mullard. For some reason Mullard asked to see me, hoping I could get him a break. I asked what he had to trade. It’s a story you’ll want to hear.”

  “Mullard’s not your snitch?”

  “Never heard of him before. I checked the others in the can with the guy, nobody there I knew. It’s kinda strange that Mullard called me.”

  “Maybe the cop he usually snitches to cut him loose for lying.”

  “Possible. The guy’s a walking ball of nose drool. I had Mullard transferred to a holding cell here, so run on over.”

  We were at Delmara’s mid-Miami Division HQ in fifteen minutes. Delmara led us to an interrogation room, a twelve-by-twelve box with bland blue walls, a single table, four simple chairs, and a gray wastebasket in the corner. A horizontal mirror filled one wall, a one-way, behind it a room where interested parties observed conversations. The observation room would smell of coffee and perspiration and tobacco and no amount of cleaning could ever dislodge those signature odors.

  The occupant of the interrogation room was a small and twitchy man in his early thirties, his brown hair long and ragged, his cheeks hollow and pocked with acne scars not concealed under the wispy attempt at a beard. His brown eyes were tiny and seemed to operate on independent gimbals, the left one finding me before the right one did.

  “These are the guys you need to talk to, Blaine,” Vince said. “Tell them what you started to tell me, and maybe it’ll buy goodwill with the DA.”

  Mullard swallowed hard. “It c-can’t g-get out that I’m t-talking or I’ll b-b-be dead.”

  Mullard’s fingers twiddled at a button on the front of the soiled black shirt shrouding his bone-thin frame, the body of a man whose primary nourishment was junk food and methedrine. I figured his stutter was exacerbated by nerves and withdrawal.

  Delmara put a shiny loafer on a chair beside the man and laid a hand gently on his shoulder. “You’ll be fine, Blaine. Your words will never leave this room.”

  “Oh yeah?” Mullard challenged, pointing at the mirror. “Wh-who’s back there?”

  “No one, Blaine. These two gentlemen would customarily be watching from behind the glass, but that would be subterfuge, right?”

  “Wh-what’s a s-s-sutter-fuge?”

  “A cheap trick, Blaine. By having these gentlemen here rather than behind the glass, I’m showing you the only other people who will hear your story.”

  The guy was in his thirties but chronologically an adolescent, likely a permanent condition. I’d seen hundreds of Blaine Mullards, directionless, doomed by savage or absent parenting, and assuming the liquid mores of whatever group or gang they found in early teens, their nascent personalities and individualism replaced by a street culture that lacked any concept of responsibility or future.

  “I huh-heard you was a good dude, D-Detective D-Del-m-mara. That you might help me slip the beef.”

  Delmara shot me a look. “Who told you that, Blaine?”

  “I-I-I … i
t’s just s-something a guy said. I don’t remember his name.”

  “Some guy you met in jail?”

  “If y-y-you can’t help m-me I guh-got to …”

  Mullard started to rise but Delmara’s hand gently pressed the man back into his chair. “OK … so my rep got to you. But you’ve fucked up a bit, my man. Busting into a vehicle in broad daylight, snatching a laptop as a cruiser came down the block.”

  “I-I-I …”

  Delmara did empathy. “I know how it was … you were hurting and needed to score. The true idiot was the one who left the laptop on the seat, right? An unwarranted temptation.”

  Mullard nodded vigorously. “Y-you don’t leave a c-computer laying in puh-plain sight. It’s s-s-stupid. Wh-what’s wrong with p-people?”

  “Look, Blaine, I think I can convince the prosecutor that the temptation was too strong. You’ll have to do some time, but weeks, not months, right? Maybe in a program. Clean sheets, hot food, counseling you can sleep through.”

  A puppy smile. “Y-y-you’re a g-good dude, Duh-Detective Del-ma-m-mara. Like I heard.”

  “But you’ve got to tell the story. That’s the trade.”

  Delmara patted Mullard again and sat. Gershwin and I followed. Mullard picked at his beard. “I h-heard this a f-few times. It’s on the street but no one says it ou-ou-out loud. There’s this guy, a p-p-pimp. He had a woman, owned her, she was pure, y’know. Undone.”

  “You mean a virgin?” I said.

  “Some c-c-chick in her t-teens. Came here in a truck fresh from some Mexican f-farm or whatever. Never even s-saw a dick. The p-pimp was gonna sell her to some guy who paid buh-big bucks for a weekend with the chick. The g-guy wanted t-to open the b-bitch up, y’know.” Mullard gave me a grin like we were conspiratorial children. “Puh-party time.”

  I kept the grimace from my face. “When was this, Blaine? Recently?”

  “I-it’s bub-been a while. A couple years, at least.”

  “Go on, bud,” Delmara said.

  “A-anyway, some coyote on the c-crew bringing this ch-chicklet to town got drunked up and horny. He can’t help himself, buh-bangs the bitch. She’s ruined, so big bucks good-bye. The gangster who owned her stayed cool, told the crew boy he owed him twelve grand. The guy’s a low-level smuggler, says he c-can’t pay it all right then. So the gangster man says, ‘It’s cool, c-come to my place and we’ll puh-put together a p-payment p-plan.’ So the coyote goes to the g-guy’s place. Buh-buh-buh …” The nerves ramped up.

  “Take it easy, Blaine,” Vince crooned. “One word at a time, bud.”

  “Bu-but instead of a payment plan th-the g-guy is there with a h-huge bald fuh-fucker who strips the c-coyote’s clothes off and t-t-tapes the guy to a chair wi-wi-wi …”

  “Shhhhh. Easy.”

  “With his dick and buh-balls hanging over the e-edge of the chair. Then the guy puh-puh-pulls out a long buh-black knife and kisses it.”

  “Kisses it?”

  Mullard mimed bringing a knife to his lips and kissing it slow and lovingly. “Then he took th-th-that black fuckin’ blade and slices all the coyote’s junk off. He does it r-real slow and the gangster fuh-fucker’s smiling while he d-does it. And then he he he …”

  “He what?”

  “He has the huge bald dude hold up a mirror so the coyote can see his face as the guy jams the coyote’s p-p-pecker into his mouth. He … the guy … the m-m-man, he he …”

  Mullard was patting at his eyes in disbelief of something. I recalled a similar torture from years back in South Alabama, a psychopath who wanted to be sure a husband watched his wife’s rape.

  “The gangster cut off the coyote’s eyelids so he had to watch, right, Blaine?”

  Mullard started gagging. Vince smoothly moved a waste can into place and the guy spewed thin brown gruel into the bucket.

  “Others were there, right, Blaine?” I asked when the sickness passed and Mullard was wiping his mouth on the back of a dirty hand. “An audience. The torture was supposed to be a lesson.”

  The unhinged eyes stared at me. “M-m-motherfuckin’, yes. A s-s-s-serious lesson.”

  “Do you have a name, Blaine? For the knife man?”

  A long inward squint. Even the eyes stopped moving. “Sometimes when the story gets told he’s called Double Ought. Or maybe that was someone else.”

  Mullard wavered on the chair, his energy draining. “Anything else?” I pushed. Again Mullard retreated into his head for snatches of conversation or street lore, a difficult task, I figured, given the prodigious amounts of drugs the man had ingested over the course of a sad and small life.

  “Uh, uh … someone m-might have once said he wuh-worked in a club or something like that. Or maybe it was a strip j-joint. Was it a strip joint?”

  “You’re telling the story, bud.”

  “Oh, sure.”

  I looked at the guy, head heavy with the weight of his rancid recollections, his breath smelling of rotting teeth and vomit. From here, I knew, he would invent memories just to go to a cell, do his time, and get back to suicide by street life.

  Vince shot me a glance; he knew it, too. The guy was empty.

  “We’re finished here,” I said, reaching over and giving the man’s shoulder a squeeze. It felt like a Tinker-toy connection. “Thanks, Blaine.”

  He grinned lazily and looked at me as if he was wondering who I was and might I have a laptop he could steal. A uniform came and led Mullard back to his cell. The three of us leaned the wall by a water cooler.

  “Double Ought?” I said. “Sounds like a gang handle. Double Ought make any connections, Vince?”

  “I think of double-ought buckshot, the heavy-gauge stuff.”

  I saw Gershwin frowning over pursed lips. “Got a thought in there, Ziggy?”

  “If the gangster’s a blade man, how does he get a handle you’d use for a shotgun killer?”

  “Nice thought,” Delmara said. “I’ll talk to our gang people, see if they have anything.” He paused, pushing back the fedora. “It’s so weird, but cool, you think about it. You’re looking for a blade man, Mullard calls me with his story.”

  “Freaky,” Gershwin agreed.

  “Yeah …” Delmara said, shaking his head in disbelief. “It’s like someone beamed him to me.”

  37

  It was past two when we left the precinct house and drove to Tiki Tiki for lunch. I once looked into my rearview and saw a couple that looked like Degan and Valdez. When I slowed, so did they, turning off at the next light.

  No way, I thought. You’re getting flaky.

  Ms Amardara hovered less, thankfully, staying in the kitchen to supervise a catering job for three hundred people. Ziggy and I shared its largesse, making sandwiches from ropa vieja and chomping pickled jalapeños. A minute of resolute No’s by Gershwin had restrained her from pushing a dozen-item banquet cart to our table.

  “I’m gonna operate on the assumption the coyote is John Doe Bottom Layer,” I said, sandwich in one hand, papaya juice in the other. “It fits Morningstar’s time frame and Mullard’s time speculation.”

  “Mullard’s brain is gooey. But I’ll buy in.”

  “So we got a guy with a knife who kills a coyote. Though it happens two years ago, it revolves around human smuggling. He goes into the ground first. One year later Mr Knife gets ripped off by Perlman, so he removes the accountant’s hands as punishment. I figure a sadist like this guy probably watched Perlman howl for a bit, then sliced his throat.”

  “Ouch. Bet the Perlster wished he’d been watching Johnny Wadd beaming aboard Princess Jasmin while Mr Spock locked on.”

  “No doubt,” I said. “And somewhere around that time the shipment of Hondurans went bad. It must have been right after Perlman got whacked—”

  “Because he got dumped in the cistern first.”

  “Yep. A separate incident. Next came the Honduran problem, when Carosso got called: ‘Hey Paul, could you come over here with a truck full of concrete? We need you fast.’
”

  Gershwin nodded and sucked a gulp of mango soda. “Carosso shows up and loads bodies into the mixer, an inspired solution. The mixture goes down the hole and it’s all over. ’Cept no one figured on developers.”

  I stared aimlessly into the restaurant. The lunch crowd was gone, the ubiquitous Bert and Lenny kvetching at the bar, the ladies playing their mah-jongg. I heard clatter from the kitchen and snatches of Amardara’s voice as she orchestrated the proceedings.

  “You in there, Big Ryde?” Gershwin asked after I’d spent a stretch in the ponder zone.

  “I’m still bugged about who knew the cistern was there. The damn thing is in the middle of the center of the nexus of nowhere and surrounded by brush, besides.”

  “That why you stare at the brush and kick at the ground at the site? Pissed off that it’s got secrets?”

  I grunted, not having noticed. “Maybe. Subconsciously.”

  “Could it have been Carosso? He drove the truck there, after all.”

  “Nothing links Carosso to the area, never lived nearby, never pulled a job below Fort Pierce. Miami and points south were outside his comfort zone.”

  Criminals, especially the dullards, tended to operate in circumscribed locales, places they knew and were comfortable within. I put Carosso in that batch.

  “But Delmara did the due diligence,” Gershwin said. “A rancher had it for years, then it was owned by a guy who didn’t go near the parcel, afraid a python would bite his tootsies.”

  “Someone knew. We figure that out, we’ve got a window into this thing.”

  I started the thousand-yard stare again.

  “You’re not going to be happy until we visit the site again, are you?” Gershwin said.

  We stepped outside and found the sky was a roiling, unsettled gray as an afternoon thunderhead swept over the city, the sun buried and the air thick with the smell of incoming rain. The gulls seemed lost in the imposed twilight, wheeling without purpose or joy, and winging for cover amidst the low buildings of the neighborhood.