Black Coral

by Andrew Mayne

  “Where did he go to school?”

  “I don’t know. He was maybe a year or two older. I think he was out of school.”

  I barrage him with more questions. “What else do you know about him? What did he look like? What was his real name? Where did he live?”

  “Uh, very little. Average, I guess. What were the other questions?”

  “Let’s start with appearance.”

  “Average, like I said. White guy. Brown hair? Average height. Used to wear an army jacket.”

  “Eye color?” asks Hughes.

  “I don’t know. He almost always had on sunglasses.”

  “At night?” says Hughes.

  “Those bonfires were pretty fucking big. He was kind of a loner. He’d just show up.”

  “What about his name?” I ask.

  “Sleazy Steve? Nobody knew his name. He got that one because I think the first time we met him, we caught him feeling up Lucy Pell while she was stoned and then some other chick. That was Sleazy Steve for you.” Rafferty laughs, coughs hard, and sucks on the vape.

  I want to punch this man so badly, but I keep my calm. “What else can you tell us?”

  “He always had a courier bag. That’s where he kept shit like his flask and photos.”

  Goose pimples run down my arms and back. “Photos?”

  “Yeah. That’s another reason he got the name. He liked to take photos of weird shit. Sometimes it was crotch shots of girls. Dead animals. That kind of thing. He’d buy beer for chicks and get them to pose.”

  Hughes is staring at his notes, trying not to react. I, too, am trying to keep my composure. “What else?”

  “He had a flask, right? I think he may have roofied girls with it. That was his MO.” This is our guy. “In fact, he was the guy that threw the cat into the bonfire. Huh. Now that I think about it, he was kind of a sick asshole.” Rafferty stares into the distance, finally getting some perspective on his teenage years. “I wonder what happened to him.”

  “You said you saw him get into the van.”

  “Oh yeah. Metal Moon. I figured he straight up killed them. That was the last I saw of them and pretty much the last I saw of him too. At least for a while. Things get hazy.”

  “Why didn’t you tell anyone?” asks Hughes.

  “I did. I told my guidance counselor at school everything. Well, just about.”

  “Did she have you speak to the police?”

  “What? No. She called my parents and said I needed to go into rehab. And that was the end of that. Goodbye, Tim. Goodbye, Dylan. Goodbye, Grace.”

  “What about Caitlin?”

  Rafferty gives me a cold stare. “Fuck her.” Jesus.

  “We’re going to need you to come to our office and make a more formal statement,” I explain.

  “Yeah, sure. Can I get my stuff first? These assholes will take it if you’re not careful.”

  Afraid of losing our single best witness, Hughes and I follow Rafferty back to the campground. We keep back a few paces to talk.

  “That was . . . something,” says Hughes.

  “Yes, it was. And a spectacular fuckup.”

  He raises his wrist. “I’ve had worse.”

  “No, not that. I mean that Rafferty did the right thing and told the only authority figure he knew about a suspect.”

  “You mean an average-looking guy wearing sunglasses?” Hughes says sarcastically.

  “Thirty years ago, there were a ton of people who knew Sleazy Steve. They could have ID’d him. They would have known there was a fifth potential victim or witness.”

  Hughes lowers his voice. “Did you listen to this guy? Would you want to be the one to take his report to the chief? How does ‘I have a witness who says a demonic demon did it’ sound?”

  “Crazy. But crazy doesn’t mean completely wrong. A good cop would have listened.”

  “Maybe. But his guidance counselor shut him up.” Hughes stops walking and appears to think something over. “I wonder how many crazy stories she heard? Maybe she knows a little more about Sleazy Steve before he became Serial Killer Steve.”

  “Sounds good. I’m curious to know who else was at the Metal Moon concert. Maybe there are more witnesses out there. It’s the last place we’re fairly certain the kids and their killer were seen together.”

  “That’s a heck of a long time ago to find witnesses. Where would we start?”

  “Oddly enough, my uncle.”

  “The one . . .” His voice trails off, not completing the sentence with who was arrested for drug trafficking.

  “Yeah, him. I just hope he’s willing to talk to me.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  SMOKEY JOE

  Shady Tree Villas has few trees and no villas, as far as I can tell. What it does have are lots of mobile homes in various states of disrepair and the highest concentration of sex offenders and parolees in South Florida. Like a tide pool that collects garbage, Shady Tree collects men—many of whom aren’t allowed near children, schools, or places where children might congregate, which is pretty much everywhere. One of the few remaining spots in the county for them is this mobile home park.

  We’re here thanks to my uncle Karl. He doesn’t live here—he’s a mere drug trafficker—but the one person he said I should talk to does call Shady Tree Villas home. When Karl said I should find Joseph Raymond “Smokey” Viccola, aka Smokey Joe Ray, I wondered if it was a snide FU to me for not doing more to get Karl’s sentence lifted. I’d already pulled what strings I could to get him out of lockup after he assisted us in our last case, but since half the people we had arrested still had friends on the bench, I’m amazed we were able to get that far.

  Hughes glances out the passenger window at the rows of almost-identical mobile homes. The grass is uncut, and the men sitting outside in lawn chairs—talking, listening to the radio, or contemplating their situation in life—all look identical in some way. I can’t quite place it.

  “It’s fraternity row with the most pathetic guys you ever met, forty years later,” says Hughes. “A pervert tailgate party.”

  That’s it. These men reek of pathos, but I don’t quite know how I feel. Some are evil bastards who tried to lure children online. A few are men who hired prostitutes and either had terrible lawyers or didn’t realize the sex companion they were hiring was underage. Some are here for “crimes” that don’t exist in other states; some should be locked up and never allowed to leave.

  Hughes and I spot a short man, almost clinically a dwarf, walking into a mobile home.

  Would he have been here if he’d not dealt with a lifetime of insecurity? I don’t know. It’s not my place to psychoanalyze. My job is to find the people who did the crime and let the courts figure out what to do with them.

  This is what I try to remind myself. But deep down, part of me believes that my own difficult childhood, caused in part by the actions of Uncle Karl, whose drug conviction put the family in a negative light, may have turned out differently if Grandpa had put Karl and my dad on a surer footing—or at least taught Karl by way of a better example.

  As angry as I am with Karl, I can understand the moral confusion for a young man who knew food was put on the table because his father smuggled artifacts and pirated shipwrecks—not to mention the endless stories about our smuggler grandfather and great-grandfathers, who ran rum through the same canals I now patrol.

  I check the address against the GPS and come to a stop in front of a double-wide mobile home at the very end of the road. A brown mutt is lying on the grass with the same sense of resignation as the men who live here. He can barely manage to lift his nose to look at us before going back to pondering his own fate.

  “I wonder what he did to get sentenced here?” jokes Hughes.

  I don’t know about the dog, but in the case of Smokey Joe Ray, it was the third time he got arrested for being with an underage girl that the judge decided he should be incarcerated for a much longer time and remain on parole longer yet.

 
The story of Smokey Joe Ray’s multiple trials was major news when the public learned that one of South Florida’s most beloved radio DJs of the 1980s and 1990s had a problem with underage girls. What may have been acceptable in a different era finally had become recognized as child abuse or rape, but Smokey Joe Ray never got the memo.

  His first conviction was a suspended sentence in the 1990s. He was fired from one radio station and rehired a couple of years later. Then came the second and third convictions. Also came the news that Smokey Joe Ray had been quite the pervert, with an enormous collection of pornography, both commercial and amateur. He tried to resurface again as an internet radio-show host interviewing porn stars, but that only lasted until a judge decided it was a parole violation.

  Smokey Joe Ray’s lurid interests aren’t why we’re here. Uncle Karl told us that, in the late eighties, Joe was everywhere in the South Florida music scene. He was emceeing concerts, producing them, and, as it turns out, partying hard with fans and rock bands alike. Everyone had a story about running into Smokey Joe Ray at a high school party or in a concert parking lot.

  Hughes and I walk up the steps to the screen door. The interior door is wide-open, revealing a torn-up couch and magazines on the floor. The inside smells like cigarettes and sweat.

  “Joe?” I call into the home.

  There’s a coughing sound, and the whole structure shakes as a stocky barefoot man with gray hair down to his shoulders and a half-unbuttoned shirt hanging over shorts comes to the door.

  He glances at Hughes and wipes his eyes. “FBI?” he asks in a deep, deep voice.

  “No,” I reply.

  He makes a melodramatic “Whew!” and wipes his forehead. He stares at me for a moment. “Hey, you’re the lady cop that found those kids.”

  I point a thumb to Hughes. “We’re the ones that pulled the van from the lake.”

  “What a tragedy,” he says. “What can I help you with?”

  “We’d like to ask you some questions about back then.”

  “Inside or outside?”

  “Inside is fine.” I really, really don’t want to step in there and sit on that couch, but you always learn more when you’re in someone else’s space.

  “Sure, sure,” he says, motioning us inside. He gives me a look up and down. “You don’t look like a cop. He does. Not you. You ever think about doing music videos?”

  “Has that line worked this century?” I fire back.

  “Sadly, no.” He directs us to the couch while he takes an easy chair opposite of us in the small living room. “I was there that night,” he offers freely. “The night the kids went missing. I introduced the bands, in fact. It’s a strange thing to think that I saw their faces out there in the crowd.”

  “Did you ever meet them?”

  He shakes his head. “I don’t think so. I used to sign autographs in the parking lot before the shows. The kids loved that.”

  It was probably a great place to pick up underage girls too. “But you don’t remember them?”

  “I stared at those photos for a while, trying to. But no. And I’m pretty good with faces.”

  Attractive, young, female faces, I’m sure.

  Joe seems eager to help, but there’s a sense of unease about him. If I had to guess, he’s concerned that we might find out about some parole violation. That could be anything from possessing marijuana to having a dead girl under the house.

  “Do you remember anybody strange or odd from that night?” asks Hughes.

  “You ever been to a rock concert?” says Joe. “The lead singer of Metal Moon had a tattoo of a snake that started at his Adam’s apple and ended at the tip of his dick. Their manager was a former New York wiseguy who was a person of interest in three murders back in the 1960s. We had to kick a pro football player out of the backstage area because he was dealing out in the open to the stagehands. I’ll tell you what would have been weird—someone who wasn’t weird. That’s why god invented rock and roll. It’s an industry built on insanity.”

  “What about the crowd? What about when you walked through the parking lot? Or the kids you knew?” I ask.

  “What about them?”

  I realize we’re not going to get anywhere without being more specific. “This is confidential, you understand?”

  “Yeah, sure. What?” He leans in on the armrest.

  “We think the kids were murdered and the van was dumped into the water to cover the evidence.”

  “Holy shit. Murdered?” He says it with a radio announcer’s exclamation.

  “You’re the only civilian we’ve told this to,” says Hughes. “If it leaks from you, we won’t be happy.” He makes a show of looking around the mobile home, as if to suggest we’ll come back and ransack the place for something incriminating.

  “Shit. These lips are sealed. Are you asking me if I saw a murderer that night? A few. Besides Metal Moon’s manager, half the roadies probably. Maybe not that many, but more than a few had done serious time.”

  “What about among the kids? Was there anyone you saw at multiple venues who gave off a vibe?” I ask.

  “A vibe?”

  “There’s a difference between someone who kills a man in a bar fight and someone who does it for fun. Think Ted Bundy—someone who seems especially creepy or just ‘off.’”

  He thinks this over. “No. Not like that. You have a description?”

  “Nothing specific. Average white male with brown hair and possibly sunglasses.”

  “Shame. But we might be able to tell who he is by who he was hanging out with.”

  “How would we know who he was hanging out with?” asks Hughes.

  “By who he was standing next to,” replies Joe as if it’s plainly obvious.

  “And how would we know that?” I ask.

  “From the attendance photo.” He looks at us, confused. “You didn’t pull that up? Skyshow, the promoter for the label? That was Skylar Bancman back then. She handled money for the band. She didn’t trust the venue to do an accurate count—they were always undercounting the box office and screwing artists over. So at the start of every show, after everyone was inside and waiting for the band to start, she’d have a photographer go out and take a wide-angle photo, and he’d go develop it in a custodian closet converted into a darkroom while everyone was kept waiting.”

  “What was the point of that?” I ask.

  “Skylar’d get the photo guy to blow up a poster-size print of the photo, and she’d use a sewing pin to poke a hole in every face and a clicker to count them all. If she counted so much as one extra person, she’d threaten to cancel the concert if they didn’t pay up. You ever wonder why sometimes it takes forever for a music act to take the stage? It’s not always because they’re hungover or counting green M&M’s. It’s because their manager’s backstage yelling at the local promoter to pay up or else they’ll leave.”

  “Wait,” I say. “You’re saying there’s a photo with everyone at the rock concert?”

  “You’re slow for a cop. Maybe you should take me up on that music video offer. But, yes. Skylar probably has all those negatives. She kept everything.”

  If Caitlin, Grace, Tim, and Dylan are in that photo, then there’s a good chance Sleazy Steve is too—possibly right next to them.

  Hughes is on his phone already, probably looking up Skylar Bancman.

  I decide to probe Joe’s memory a little more. “Did you ever hear of someone named Sleazy Steve?”

  Joe smiles. “That’s a hell of a nickname. I don’t suspect it’s one he gave himself.”

  Hughes’s phone vibrates; he rises and moves out of earshot, putting it to his ear.

  “No,” I agree with Joe. “He had a reputation.”

  “That can mean a lot. What was his?”

  “He liked to molest unconscious women,” I reply.

  “Jesus. That’s when they’re the least fun.” Joe shakes his head.

  “Uh, yeah. He had a Polaroid camera and took photos of them. Not always against
their will, but often when they didn’t know it. He also photographed more depraved things.”

  “On instant film?”

  “Yes.”

  He makes a small headshake. “Never heard of that.”

  Hughes returns to us and tells me, “We can pick up the negative in an hour.”

  Joe whistles. “That was fast.”

  “I guess Ms. Bancman’s pretty active on email. Ready, McPherson?”

  We thank Smokey Joe and leave him in his dark, shoddy lair. Something’s not sitting right in the back of my mind, but I can’t figure out what it is. I have a feeling Joe knows more than he’s saying, but to get those answers, we’ll have to come up with the right questions.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  RUINS

  “It looks like a forgotten Aztec temple,” says Hughes as we stare at broken concrete slabs poking out of the earth. The setting sun, visible through the trees that have grown over the remnants of the Black Coral Amphitheater, casts an orange glow, adding to the eerie tableau.

  The roof of the Family Ford dealership that now sits where the parking lot for the amphitheater was located is barely discernible from where we’re standing—on a small hill of dirt and rubble that used to be the stage. The band shell and everything inside, including the backstage rooms and offices, were demolished decades ago.

  The only part of the amphitheater that’s left is the broken concrete of the seating and the bowl-shaped landscape.

  There are no physical clues to be found here. Years of graffiti, loitering, and vandalism have erased any evidence that could have possibly remained; Hughes and I still decided to come here to get a sense of the place and to understand the last hours of the victims. We also thought it might help in making sense of the audience photo we got from Skylar Bancman.

  “How about here?” says Hughes, unfolding a stand to hold the blown-up poster of the negative.

  I stand a few feet behind the spot and imagine the thousands of faces staring back. The sides of the hill line up with the edges in the photograph. “Yeah. This looks right.”

  Hughes sets the photo on the easel, and we both stare at it. Six thousand faces crammed into an amphitheater meant for half that, originally, but the photo’s so detailed that you can make out the expressions of even the kids in the back row.