by J. A. Kerley
“Garrido … she’s got the same address as Darlene. They were roomies. Maybe Garrido could add some input. Maybe the perp targeted the girls when they were on the street and Garrido saw something.”
“Track down Garrido’s whereabouts,” I told her. “See if she’s been busted since. Bet she has.”
Belafonte went to the computer and linked to MDPD, ticking at the keyboard. After a minute she shook her head. “Nothing. And before you ask, I just checked the obituaries.”
I called Letha Driscoll, Darlene and Vera’s former apartment manager. “You didn’t tell me Darlene had a roommate,” I said, not happy.
“You didn’t ask and it weren’t no big deal.” I could almost hear the ashes tumbling as she talked.
“You happen to know where Vera is now?”
“I saw her a month back, she dropped by to crow on her new job.” A dry and humorless cackle. “She’s in the bright lights, a marquee girl.”
“A little more information might be nice, Miz Driscoll.”
“She works at a place called Red Flash Productions. And when you ask for Vera, ask for Amaretto Fyre. F-Y-R-E. How’s that for a name … hot, huhn?”
The building was in Model City, an old stucco monstrosity from the forties, plaster crumbling away, lathe visible like rusting bones. The windows were barred, and the door was black-painted steel, looking strong enough to withstand cannon fire. A postcard-sized sign proclaimed Red Flash Productions. The letters rode atop a red lightning bolt.
There was a buzzer and intercom. I buzzed.
“Yeah?” crackled a voice. Whatever happened to Hello?
“We’re here to see Vera Garrido. Or maybe Amaretto Fyre.”
“Who the fuck is ‘we’?”
“The FCLE.”
“What’s that?”
“The Florida Center For Law Enforcement.”
“We’re not doing nothing wrong.”
“If you don’t open this door, the next sound you hear will be …” I leaned against the wall and counted. I was at seventeen when the door opened and a gorilla appeared.
“Be what?”
I held up my badge to a guy maybe six-four in a wife-beater tee, hirsute, as they say, not so much body hair as fur … arms, shoulders, neck, ears. Mr Fuzzy was muscled like a power lifter, wearing tight cut-offs straining at the quads. He had his eyes set on Tough, probably to disguise his confusion. I’ve gotten to the point where I can detect stupidity by smell, and this guy was reeking.
“Whaddaya want here?” he growled.
“We’ll ask the questions, bucko,” Belafonte said from behind me, smelling it too.
“Who is it, Kevin?” called an imperious voice from above.
I started past Mr Fuzzy – or Kevin as I now knew him – but he put a hand on my arm. I tend to give the preternaturally moronic a bit of leeway.
“That can land you in jail,” I said. “They’ll shave you there, you know. Lice control.”
“Hunh?” he said, but the hand came away.
“Kevin!” the voice repeated. “Who is it?”
Belafonte and I climbed the creaking stairs. A hall turned left at top and we saw a slender guy in jeans and a pink linen jacket. He was in his early thirties and wore a hipster goatee, a porkpie hat, and had a movie-director lens strung around a pencil neck. For some reason he had painted the nails on his index fingers black. I miss all the trends.
The guy stood in the center of the hall. Further down was a door and I saw bright light streaming out. I flashed the brass pass. “We need to talk to Vera Garrido.”
“She’s busy. Come back in two hours.”
“We’re here now.”
“I take it you have a warrant?”
“It’ll take a while to track down a judge, get a warrant issued, have it run over here.” I patted my mouth in a fake yawn. “We’ll wait. Can your people fuck with cops looking on?”
“I’ll run for popcorn,” Belafonte deadpanned, getting into the game.
C. B. DeMille sighed and rolled his eyes. “Break time, everyone. Amaretto! Unwanted visitors here to talk to you.”
The light died in the room as the crew trooped out, sound and lighting, cameraman, and a guy I took to be the star, since he wore only a towel. The guy seemed to like being a celebri-stud, grinning as he passed and – I swear – shooting a greasy wink at Belafonte.
We entered the room, a half-dozen lights angled down at a bed. A boom mic was near the ceiling. The place smelled like sweat and sex. The bed was dressed with two frilly pillows and a huge pink teddy bear. A small table in the corner held vibrators and sexual lubricants. A woman with a mane of wild blonde hair was sitting on the bed, pulling a white silk robe around her, sort of. Her eyes were like little green rocks.
“Wha’ you want?” she said, sounding three-quarters fried, the extra-crispy version. Amaretto Fyre, neé Vera Garrido, weighed about ninety-five pounds. That was without the silicone, however, which added ten. She had more tats than open skin: two rows of stars encircling her neck, a tiger climbing one thigh, a spider’s web on the other, a row of Oriental characters on the left shin. A tangle of roses entwined with skulls fell from a shoulder to her right nipple. She saw me looking.
“Like ’em?” she said, probably thinking I was having sexual thoughts. She wasn’t my type. I’m not sure whose type she was.
“Just admiring the art, Vera,” I said. “You’re a Louvre on legs.”
“Hunh?”
Belafonte moved closer. “We won’t take much of your time, Miss Garrido,” she said gently. “We just want to ask a few questions about your old roommate, Darlene Hammond.”
“Dar?” Life flickered in Garrido’s lithic eyes. Her hand clasped Belafonte’s forearm, as if needing to touch another human being. “Nothin’ happen to Dar, did it? She’s OK, right?”
Belafonte turned to me. “How about you let me talk to Miss Garrido? Alone, I mean.”
“I’ll be down the hall with my buddies.”
C.B. was in the next room down, a dirty mattress on the floor, the walls painted with fake graffiti. I figured it was a rape set, some men having fantasies about women taken against their will in filthy surroundings, though I use the word men only to denote gender. C.B. and Kevin and a camera guy were looking at a monitor and watching scenes shot earlier in the day, the star working on Vera, who made high-pitched squeals every time starshine thudded into her.
“Eeee … Eeee … eeeee …”
They glanced up when I entered, then looked back to the screen. Down the hall Vera Garrido started crying. It was almost the same sound as the squeals.
“You about done?” C.B. said without looking at me, unconcerned with Garrido’s despair. “We’re behind schedule.”
“Eeee … eeeeeeee …” The sounds of sex mixed with Garrido’s weeping and my stomach was churning. I walked to the monitor and turned it off. A rat used in a Hollywood-style production had more protection and rights than a porn performer, especially the women, who were debased and degraded and used like porta-johns. I’d met one who’d performed in so many anal sex scenes that she’d lost control of her sphincter and wore a diaper. She was twenty-three.
C.B. glared, but I gave him a smile. “So … a graduate of the UCLA Film School, right?”
“Fuck you.”
I crossed my arms and leaned the wall as the others studied a script and ignored me. Several minutes passed and I heard Belafonte calling.
“Detective Ryder? You back there?”
Finished. As I started out the door I heard Belafonte utter an expletive followed by a howl of pain. I sprinted to an anteroom near the stairs, the director and crew on my heels. We found star stud curled into the fetal position on the floor, towel at his feet, face tight with pain and hands cupping his meal ticket.
“The bitch hit me in the balls …” he gasped. “With a fucking stick.”
Belafonte was folding the baton back to purse-size. “He exposed himself to me,” she said.
C.B.
went ballistic. “Police brutality! My lawyers are going to eat you alive!”
“Really?” I said. “In one bite?”
“I’ll have your badge! I’ll have her in jail! I’ll sue!”
I leaned against the wall and stared into C.B.’s eyes, my hands in a weighing motion. “Let’s see, Director Boy … the word of a respected police officer, or the word of a porn actor? Which will a jury believe?” I gave him my most charming smile. “Plus, C.B., when the suit hits the news, your mama’s going to find out what you do.” I smiled. “What do you tell her … that you make dog-food commercials?”
A blind shot that hit something. C.B. looked down at his stricken star. “Just leave,” he whined. “You’ve ruined a whole day’s shooting.”
I declined praising a splendid double entendre, and we headed out into air untainted by sweat or stupidity. “He really exposed himself?” I said to Belafonte as we crossed to the Rover.
“I finished with poor Vera and thought you were toward the front of the hall. Only it was him in that grubby towel. He let the towel slip to the floor. The silly arse grinned at me and gave his willy a wiggle.”
38
I felt diseased after being in an enclosed space with pornographers and needed fresh air and sun to burn porno-bacteria from my soul. I suggested that before we got into Vera’s back-story, we pick up some chow and take it to Morningstar Park on the upper east side, not overly distant.
“That sounds splendid, Detective. I forgot to eat brekkie. I had some files on my kitchen table. I sat down to think about eating …”
“And got caught up in the case. Been there.”
We stopped for carry-out Cubano sandwiches, heading to the bay shore and finding a picnic table under a spreading jacaranda tree. Vivian Morningstar and I joked about the park being named after her, and they shared attributes, like packing so much natural beauty in a small space. We spread out our meals as a group of kayakers paddled by in bright boats. At our backs a quartet of Lycra-clad bicyclists whizzed past. Across the lawn a young couple sat a few feet apart as their new-to-legs toddler practiced walking between them.
I took a bite of sandwich and turned to Belafonte. “So what’s the skinny on Miz Garrido?”
“Vera and Darlene spent four months together, mostly in a druggy haze. When their pimp got shot, Darlene went one way – exotic dancing – and Vera met up with Kevin, who promised he’d make her a rich film star.”
“And introduced her to Director Boy. I’ll bet she’s not rich yet.”
“She’s still paying off the money he lent her for the breasts. I took some insight into the religious stuff. According to Vera, Darlene was from a strict religious family in Arkansas. We’re talking church four times a week, all day Sunday, no dates in high school, made to kneel and pray for hours for various infractions, beatings for others. She ran away the day she turned eighteen. When she first came to Florida she ended up at a place called Hallelujah Jubilee. Vera wasn’t sure what kind of work it was, except that Darlene dressed up in various costumes. Vera said, and I quote, ‘It was like those soldiers that act out old wars, except from the Bible’.”
“Civil War re-enactments, I think she means.”
“When Vera asked Darlene more, like exactly what she did, she’d always change the subject.”
“From there?”
“She left the Jubilee place after a few months and headed to the bright lights of Miami. We know what happened here – hooking – then she lifted herself up a rung into dancing.”
“And now dead. How about you give this Hallelujah, uh …”
“Jubilee. It’s southeast of Kissimmee. I’ll call and find out what she did and when.”
After their lunch, Harry Nautilus and Rebecca Owsley continued through the park, Nautilus noting the kid craning her head to take in every detail, as if absorbing sights and scents and colors, and he realized she was emulating him.
They were walking through the mock Bethlehem, past a rough-hewn wooden manger scene populated by actors portraying Joseph and Mary and the Magi. A camel grunted near the rear of the scene, its bridle firmly in the hand of one of the Magi. A tethered goat stood beside the crib holding the infant Jesus, a lifelike doll mostly hidden under rough cloth. The actors were mouthing scripted lines as cameras clicked and guests looked on with joy or wept.
Nautilus again noted how young the actors were – late teens or early twenties – Joseph and the Magi made up with huge dark beards to disguise their youthful skin. Makes sense, Nautilus thought. The pay was probably little above minimum wage, but budding actors got a line for the résumé and the gig had to be more fun than flipping burgers at Micky Dee’s. Nautilus wondered if the kids had to get their own lodging or the park carried that expense.
“Some of these actors aren’t much older than you, Rebecca,” he said as they passed the Nativity scene. “Maybe you could get a job here in a couple years.”
“I’d rather go to Disney World and be Cinderella. She escaped, right?” Rebecca saw the look on Nautilus’s face and gave him a sly grin. “Just joking. You don’t have to ask if I want an ice cream.”
The cobbled road ended at a sign saying Watch Your Step, Maintenance in Progress. A pair of uniformed maintenance men were kneeling and replacing stones in the road, a wheelbarrow of orange-sized cobblestones beside them.
“Looks like hot work,” Nautilus commented to a man sifting gravel between newly installed stones.
The guy wiped his brow on his shoulder. “Someone snuck into the park last week and pulled up two square yards of stones. Probably sold them on E-bay as holy relics.”
“Takes all kinds,” Nautilus said, turning back. He looked at his watch, then at Rebecca. “Ready to call it a day?”
“Can you watch me again tomorrow? This was cool.”
“Depends on what your parents need,” Nautilus said, thinking today beat driving Celeste Owsley from store to store as she filled the trunk with purchases, or ferrying Richard Owsley around, either ignoring Nautilus to talk on his phone or expounding on his religious views.
They reached the gate. Nautilus heard a voice over his shoulder.
“Did you have a great day with us? I bet you did!”
Tawnya of the bouncy curls. The all-smiles and fuzzy words Tawnya, not the face-slapping, threatening Tawnya.
“We had an interesting time,” Nautilus said. “Both of us.”
Tawnya accompanied the pair to the parking lot. “You employ a lot of actors here,” Nautilus said, making conversation.
“Over a hundred. Some are characters, others sing and dance in the shows.”
“They seem so young.”
“The average age is about twenty-five. The characters are younger, the regular show people are older.”
“Where do the kids stay? Rents have to be high in the area.”
“Dormitories. They stay free as our employees. We also provide meals at very low prices.”
“Got to keep the workers happy, right?” Nautilus said.
“Everyone’s happy at Hallelujah Jubilee,” the good Tawnya chirped, her smile verging on beatific. “It’s Heaven on Earth.”
After our respite we headed to HQ to write reports and jump on the phone inquiries. Belafonte started to call Hallelujah Jubilee just as Roy walked by. I ran to the hall.
“Menendez?” I asked. “Tell me MDPD’s got a lead that’s not in the papers.” I worried about Vince living the Menendez case twenty hours a day.
“Not that I’ve heard. How about you, Carson? Anything on the burned hookers?”
“They were likely stoned to death, Roy.”
A confused stare until it sunk in. “Like with rocks? You’re keeping this one far from the press, I hope.”
“They’re fixated on Menendez. It’s our only break, if you could call it that.”
Roy blew out a breath and looked at Belafonte, lowering his voice to a whisper. “How’s she handling the hooker angle … holding up OK?”
An odd question.
“Fine, I guess. Why?”
“I checked out her vita last week, under the radar. Her mother died years before and she and an older sister were raised by Papa, a cop. You know that’s no guarantee against bad stuff, right?”
“What happened?”
“The sister fell into an ugly crowd, got hooked on smack and ended up in the life to pay for the habit. It wrecked the father’s health, he had a breakdown, was sent by the doctor to Miami to get help from a specialist at the U. Miss Belafonte came to be with her father and watched him decline over four years.”
“The father die?”
“He’s in an institution, hopeless. A political family friend back in Bermuda greased the citizenship papers. Belafonte had been looking at a law-enforcement career, put it on ice until her father was basically a vegetable. Started back up a few months ago.”
I recalled talking to Belafonte about her history at our initial meeting, how she’d changed the subject. Now I knew why.
“The sister?” I asked.
“In a grave in Hamilton. OD’d years ago.”
I shot a glance at Belafonte and wondered if Vince had installed her as liaison solely due to the Sandoval connection, or if he saw something in her and wanted to see if I saw it, too. I did, and in retrospect realized Vince had done me a favor.
“Keep pounding, Carson,” Roy said, patting my shoulder. “It’s always darkest before dawn.”
“I’m not sure we’ve gotten to midnight, Roy.”
He headed to the elevator and I turned back as Belafonte hung up the phone. “That was odd.”
“What?”
“Hallelujah Jubilee. I got human resources and asked about the employment dates of Darlene Hammond. The first thing out of the woman’s mouth was, ‘Oh! There’s no one by that name ever worked here.’” Belafonte changed her voice on the Oh, going up a register.
“Oh?”
“Like she was chirping. I said, ma’am, we have it on pretty good authority that Miss Hammond was employed at Hallelujah Jubilee. “‘Oh!’ she says. ‘I may have misspoken myself.’ Then I said, ‘Oh! … could you please check your records?’ She said she would, but it would take a while and she’d have to get back to me.”
