The Memory Killer

5

We elevatored down to a wide hall, a sign above the first door saying MISSING PERSONS. Opening the door revealed a thirtyish guy with his feet propped on the desk and reading a Hustler magazine. He stood, six feet plus, heavy in the shoulders, with hair so blond it had to be dyed. He wore it long over his ears and down his neck. His face was oddly lopsided, and his nose slanted off to one side. He slipped the mag into a folder as if filing official business.

“Where’s Lieutenant Beltrane?” Vince asked.

“Getting her ass fixed,” the big guy said.

“What’s wrong with her ass?” Vince said. “I always liked it.”

“Beltrane busted her hip falling off a ladder. She’s got physical therapy for six weeks.”

The guy glanced at the clipped-on temp IDs Gershwin and I had received at the desk. He made no effort to extend a hand, so neither did I.

“I need to speak to whoever’s running the department,” Vince said.

Big boy crossed his arms and leaned the wall. Even with full sleeves I could see the guy had guns. “So start talking.”

“You’re heading the unit?”

The guy looked irritated at Vince’s emphasis. “I came here two months before the loot took the big dive. Smith retired two weeks later, Jalesco transferred to Bunco. I outranked the others, so when Beltrane hit the floor, I was in charge.”

Vince simply stared like the guy was a scotch-generated mirage, the first time I’d seen Vince at a loss for words. I stepped in, glancing at the nameplate: Det. Figueroa.

“Look, Detective Figueroa, given certain insights into the case by the pathologist, the FCLE has decided to put Dale Kemp’s case under our jurisdiction.”

The guy scowled. Delmara’s phone buzzed in his pocket. He pulled it, muttered “Got to take this. A snitch who usually pays off.” Vince hustled to the bathroom across the hall, an appropriate venue for talking to a snitch.

I turned back to Figueroa, who was squinting in thought. “Your jurisdiction?” he said.

I tried upbeat. “Look on the bright side, bud: one less hassle to deal with.”

“Fuck your bright side, mister. This is Miami-Dade, not a bunch of county clowns with cowshit on their boots. We can handle it.”

Upbeat wasn’t his preferred métier, so I tried making nice. “I mean no disrespect to your abilities, amigo, but our interest in the case stems from—”

“I read the report,” Figueroa interrupted. “It smells bogus. I’m not even sure it should be here.”

“The victim was drugged, abducted and raped,” I said, puzzled. “How’s that not a crime?”

Figueroa shook his head like I was a moron. “A couple hot boys meet up at a bar, go somewhere to hook up and do drugs. They get all sexed up and time don’t mean jackshit. Then one guy decides he’s tired of it. The other has a hissy fit, gets his butt-buddy all dopey and drops him in the Glades to teach him a lesson. Don’t say you haven’t seen it.”

I had encountered variations of Figueroa’s scenario, and had considered it in this case, but the drug combo wasn’t anything near recreational.

“You didn’t see the tox reports, Detective Figueroa. He’d had some nasty stuff.”

Rod Figueroa smirked, probably his default expression. “I’ve seen these dudes on Ecstasy, heroin, crank, ice, PCP, mushrooms, glue, cough syrup, paint thinner, and mixes of them all … what you got to beat that?”

I thought about explaining the calculated potency and effects of the mixture given Kemp, but it would have been like trying to open a twelve-foot stepladder in a room with an eight-foot ceiling. And anyway, I was tiring of Rod Figueroa.

“If it’s your opinion that this wasn’t a crime, Detective,” I said, ju-jitsuing him with his own words, “then we’ve taken nothing from you. If you could be so kind as to send us any files you have, I’ll be appreciative. Have a nice day.”

I set my card on his desk and backed away. I nodded at Gershwin and we spun and left the office. I heard the sound of tearing paper, but didn’t turn. We retreated down the hall and waited until Delmara appeared.

“How’d it go?” he asked.

“Figueroa doesn’t seem cut out for the job, Vince, an obvious bias against gays. Most Missings cops I know are past that.”

“Figueroa’s an asshole. He comes by it naturally – his daddy’s an asshole, too. But a high-ranking asshole in MDPD, which is why junior’s got way too much pull for a guy barely thirty. Little Roddy was in Theft last I saw, but I guess Daddy wanted junior to get some Sex-Crimes cred on his way up.”

“Daddy is?”

“Captain Alphonse Figueroa. A guy who started on a beat in Little Havana and made all the right moves. Knew he was making ’em, too.”

“Political type?” I asked.

“Understudied with the old school macho types who ran the place a couple decades back. They pushed Figueroa upstairs, gave him a cushy desk in Community Relations. Daddy Figueroa’s a piece of work … I think he’s on his fifth wife. Unfortunately, he’s high-profile in the older Cuban community, one of the department’s PR assets. So junior gets a lot of sway.”

“What’s wrong with Figueroa’s face?” Gershwin asked. “Looks like someone scrunched it in a vise.”

Delmara shrugged. “Some kind of accident when he was a kid, running a jet ski while drunk, plowed into a boat. No one’s ever really said.”

“Figueroa’s moving up in the department?” I asked.

“Daddy says, ‘Maybe my sonny boy should get experience in the Missing Persons unit’ and you can hear the yessirs and pens filling out transfer forms.”

“The asshole’ll probably be Chief some day,” Gershwin muttered.

Delmara slapped a hand on my partner’s shoulder.

“You are indeed old beyond your years, Detective.”

Gershwin and I crossed Biscayne to Miami Beach, heading to the Stallion Lounge, the last place Dale Kemp had been seen. I figured it had to open early to air out from previous evenings, the smell of beer and bodies and a gazillion drenchings of cologne thick as fog in the semi-darkness. It was booths and a few tables, half of the floor set aside for dancing. The walls were dark wood with sconces for light. A mirrored ball hung from the ceiling.

I saw four guys in a back booth. Two were in full black leather regalia, like they were rehearsing for the Village People, the others resembled prep-school wannabes, clean-cut, white tees tucked into dark jeans. Loafers at the end of long and crossed legs. Except when they turned our way, their eyes looked a thousand years old.

A guy stood behind the long bar rinsing glasses, and I knew he’d made us from the moment our heels slapped the floor. He was inches over six feet and looked carved from a block of chocolate, pneumatic biceps rippling as he toweled the glassware, his chest broad and ripped under a blue denim vest that glittered with studwork.

We walked his way, but his eyes stayed on his drying. “You’re wasting your time,” he said in a sing-song voice that didn’t fit the physique. “We card everyone.”

He meant they asked for proof of age, though I figured a faux driver’s license printed on construction paper would pass muster.

“Good for you,” I said, pulling Kemp’s photo from my jacket. “But that’s not why we’re here. Know this guy?”

The bartender flipped the towel over a cannonball shoulder, took the shot and held it closer to the light. “Dale. He’s in here pretty regular, though I haven’t seen him in a few days.” The eyes got serious. “He all right?”

“We think he may have had his drink spiked. It would have been about ten days ago.”

“That’s just fucking nasty.”

“Dale have any enemies you know about?”

He blew out a breath. “Dale could be cruel sometimes. Especially to ugmos who hit on him.”

“Ugly people?”

“Dale never dispensed charity.”

I took it that meant deigning to frolic with less attractive beings. “Anyone seem particularly interested in Dale that night?” I asked. “Hit on him?”

“Are there bees around honey? People are always scoping Dale out.”

“Anyone buzzing around that particular evening?”

“I can’t recall anyone who …” he stopped and frowned.

“What?” I asked.

“Dale got a call on the house phone. That doesn’t happen much, everyone having cells. He was at a table and I yelled over that someone wanted to talk. Dale took the phone and handed it back, said there was no one there.”

“Male voice?”

“Deep and kind of raspy.” He lowered his voice an octave. “‘Hello, is Dale Kemp a-boot?’ Those were his words.”

“You’re using a Canadian pronunciation,” Gershwin said. “Kind of.”

The barkeep nodded. “Or maybe it was kind of British.”

I leaned close. “Tell me this, if you remember. When Dale came to the phone, was he holding his drink?”

He closed his eyes. “He held the phone in one hand and put the other over the receiver, asked who it was. He must have left his drink behind.”

“That’s the picture in your head?” Gershwin asked. “For sure?”

“I always like looking at Dale.”

We returned to the Rover where I tapped my fingers on the wheel. “The perp sits in the corner, watches. When Kemp’s friends aren’t near, he calls the landline, asks for him. The barkeep calls, Kemp gets up …”

Gershwin finished the scenario. “The perp hangs up and walks by Kemp’s booth, pausing to spike his drink with homemade witches’ brew.”

I put the safari wagon in gear and we pulled into a balmy afternoon, the street a festival of brightly plumaged youth bustling from bar to bar, called by music or hormones, the world an endless caravan of vibrant moments. They were young and beautiful and invulnerable.

Or so they supposed.

Debro left his downstairs apartment and walked upstairs with his feet crunching on the wood-plank steps. The ancient building had been a small auto-parts warehouse and the red-brick walls were crumbling on to the steps. The door at the top was metal. He unlocked it and stepped into a spacious antechamber furnished with a table beneath a wall-mounted cabinet. The far end of the chamber held a door with a small wire-reinforced window at eye level.

Debro went to the window and flipped a switch on the wall. The room beyond the chamber lit up, the light from track-mounted spots screwed into the ceiling joists. After purchasing the building last year, he’d machine-sanded the floor to be an inch higher in the center, sloping down to small gutters, the gutters feeding into the drainage system from the roof. He’d then covered the floor in linoleum, caulking the seams.

All he had to do to clean up after his penitents was hook the hose into the wall faucet and rinse the floor. Debro allowed his boys twenty ounces of water a day, which was easily mopped up, food a few nutritional gel packs squirted past their lips daily, nothing solid.

It took time to do things right … to make things right.

Debro put his eyes to the window. Two lovely sluts were in attendance, Brianna in the corner, and his latest penitent, Harold, propped against a wall and dodging invisible birds or missiles or whatever. He tried to scream but only wet croaks emerged. Every couple of minutes he’d try to stand but even his glorious, dancing legs crumpled under the weight of the black locust.

Brianna was a different case, curled in the fetal position, pissing and emitting watery gruel from her sphincter. Brianna and her sphincter had ceased to be fun. Beside, she’d been here for over a week now, and had learned her lesson.

Debro nodded: the choice was made. He stared at Brianna for several long seconds. “Brianna’s leaving us, Brother,” he said. “It’s time to get another.”

Debro returned to his apartment to consult a map of South Florida. Part of his extensive planning had involved sites where the punished could be sent, and over a dozen locations had been ringed in red. He closed his eyes, circled a digit over the map, let it drop. He had a place to drop a used one. Now all he had to do was get a fresh one.

No problem. It would soon be night.

6

We headed to Kemp’s apartment, a furnished house Kemp rented with two male roommates, flight attendants. Both had been away during the time Kemp had been abducted. One roomie, Lawrence Kaskil, arrived as we did, pulling up on a sleek racing bicycle in a white T-shirt over black Lycra biking shorts.

“I called the police on the second day I was back,” Kaskil told us, tossing his blue helmet into a closet and exchanging his biking shoes for neon green flip-flops. “It wasn’t unusual for Dale to be gone overnight, but after two days I got worried.”

“You got back from where?”

“Mexico City.”

“Your other roommate, Tad Bertram, was where during this time?”

Kaskil flapped to the small kitchenette and studied a calendar stuck to the fridge with a magnetic Scotty dog. “Tad overnighted in London, then to Cairo. He dead-headed to Rome for two days and is now back in London. He’ll be in tonight. I dread telling him about Dale.”

“Dead-headed?” Gershwin said.

“Taking a flight, but not working it. He took a couple days off to see the sights.”

I took a look at the calendar, new to us, the Missing Persons unit having neglected to do any follow-up. But Rod Figueroa had it all figured out: just a case of sexed-up boys. And why work when you can gawk at nekkid wimmen in your Hustler?

“These notes on the calendar,” I said, checking the previous month. “Dale – Tampa, Dale – SA, Dale – ORL … What’s that about?”

“Overnight sales trips. Tampa, St Augustine, Orlando. Dale put out-of-town days on the calendar.” Kaskil paused. “But sometimes he was gone overnight and it wasn’t indicated.”

“When he’d meet someone?” I said. “Like on a date?”

Kaskil nodded. “Those could be, uh, impromptu.”

“You and your other roomie, Tad Bertram … you’re gone a lot?”

“We’re here maybe eight or ten days out of the month. We joke that we each pay a third of the rent, but Dale gets the place to himself seventy per cent of the time.”

“When you arrived home from Mexico City, did anything seem amiss?”

Kaskil’s features tightened in thought. “It was like Dale had played with rearranging the furniture, then put it back almost in place, but not quite.”

“Let’s talk enemies – did Dale have any?”

“A lot of times Dale gets cruised, and if he’s not in the mood he can be fast with put-downs. But no, there’s, like, no one who has it in for him. Not enough to do such an ugly thing.”

We asked everything we could think of, then walked to the door. Kaskil asked if he and Bertram could visit Kemp and I discouraged it, telling them to wait until he regained consciousness.

I didn’t mention it was a crapshoot as to that ever happening.

We interviewed neighbors and friends of Kemp, getting nothing. When the day dwindled to dusk, Gershwin headed home and I decided to crib at the Palace, saving the hour-long drive. The Palace was a recent addition to the FCLE’s ongoing accumulation of confiscations. Gershwin and I had nailed a piece of garbage who’d made big money trafficking in human beings, hiding his gains in real estate. One property was the Palace Apartments, a small building on the west side of downtown, near the Tamiami Trail.

Roy McDermott was a director of the FCLE not for deductive abilities, but his artful wrangling of funds and favors from the lawmakers in Tallahassee, a group the masterful McDermott milked like plump cows. Roy had convinced legislators to sell off all Kazankis’s properties except the Palace, to be used as quarters for visiting FCLE staffers and an occasional safe house for witness-protection efforts.

I arrived and grabbed my overnight valise from the rear of the car. My ID card buzzed me through two bulletproof doors – an addition for the witness-protection aspect – and into a small lobby with framed seascapes on the walls. A clipboard on an elegant mahogany table indicated three rooms were occupied: two agents from Jacksonville and a departmental attorney from Tallahassee. They were on floors one and two, leaving the top floor, the fourth, fully mine.

My suite resembled an upscale extended-stay facility: twin couches and chairs in the main room, plus a large TV screen and modest sound system, a desk, a wardrobe, chest of drawers. The galley-style kitchen held cooking necessaries and a half-size fridge. The bathroom had both shower and Jacuzzi. The bedroom had a queen-size bed, another desk and chair in the corner.

Though a part of the FCLE’s inventory for three months, the Palace had already developed a fine tradition: if a visitor brought potables to the room and had something left when departing, the beverages stayed. I held my breath and opened the refrigerator …

Three cans of Bud, two of Heineken, two Cokes, and seven airline-sized bottles of liquor, including two Bacardi golden rums. Bless you, I thought, mixing a rum and Coke – no lime, but I could rough it – then tucking the file beneath my arm, and heading out. The fourth-floor suite had one aspect I prized above all others: a stairway to the roof.

I climbed and opened the door to the night skyline of Miami. Buildings towered like glass and metal hives with a skeleton staff of bees still buzzing within, whole floors dark, others alight for the cleaning staff and workers pulling all-nighters. A helicopter rumbled in the distance as traffic sounds drifted up from the street.

On my last stay I’d purchased a sturdy folding chair, and bungeed it to a vent. I set it up, put the drink beside me and my feet on the two-foot ledge. Below my soles was sixty feet of open air and three a.m. traffic, half taxicabs. I sipped rum and Coke, pulled my phone, and took another stab at my errant brother.

Per Clair’s instructions I thought so hard that my mouth formed the words Answer the phone, Jeremy. I visualized my brother cocking his head to the phone ringing in his office and lifting it to his ear … visualization another of Clair’s suggestions.

Answer …

The phone again directed me to his voicemail. Two dozen of my calls already lay in the electronic wasteland of my brother’s VM box … so much for synchronicity. Anger boiling in my gut, I held the phone to the night sky, growling, “God-dammit, Jeremy. Call me now and let me get on with my life.”

Five seconds later my phone riffed an incoming call. I checked the screen and saw the name AUGUSTE and stared in disbelief: Jeremy’s alter ego, Auguste Charpentier. I wondered if I’d already gone to bed and was dreaming.

Elmore replayed the riff, too strident for a dream, and a triumph for either Clair or coincidence. My finger hesitated over the connect button, wondering whether to voice relief or ire. Given the number of messages in Jeremy’s voicemail, I figured irritation was my due.

“Where the hell are you?” I snapped. “Why haven’t you been answering?”

“Goodness, so testy,” Jeremy said, his voice melodically Southern, not the Frenchified accent he affected with others. “I’ve been busy, Carson. No time for your idle chit-chat.”

“Idle chit-chat? I had no idea whether you were in Kentucky or Florida or … worse.”