CLYDE BEESON HAD fallen far. Life hadn’t just kicked him in the teeth; it had plugged the gaps with papier-mâché. He couldn’t even afford a house. He lived in a trailer park in Opa-Locka.
Opa-Locka was a shithole, one of Dade County’s most derelict areas, a small gray wart on Miami’s toned, bronzed, depilated, hedonistic ass. It was a nice day, with clear, light blue skies and unbroken sunlight drenching the landscape, which made the area, with its neglected and crumbling Moorish-inspired architecture, seem all the more desolate.
Max had got the address from the receptionist who manned the lobby of Beeson’s heyday home—a luxury apartment complex in Coconut Grove, overlooking Bayside Park with its joggers, yachting clubs, and postcard-perfect views of Florida sunsets. The receptionist thought Max was a debt collector. He told Max to break the puta’s both legs.
Depending on their dwellers and location, some trailer parks make a good go at suburban drag, masking their identities behind white picket fences, rose bushes, clean, close-cropped front lawns, and letterboxes that aren’t filled with dog shit. They even go as far as calling themselves cute, homely things like Lincoln Cottages, Washington Bungalows, Roosevelt Huts. Most trailer parks don’t go that far. They don’t bother. They hold up their hands, admit what they are, and pick their spot out in the scrapheap to the left of destitution.
Beeson’s neighborhood looked like it had been hit by bombs dropped through the eye of a passing hurricane. There was wreckage—stoves, TVs, gutted cars, fridges—and garbage strewn everywhere, so much that it had been incorporated into the landscape; some enterprising soul had built some of the waste into tidy mounds and then planted these with arrow-shaped wooden signs painted with the house numbers in large, seminumerate digits. The trailers were in such bad shape on the outside that Max mistook them for torched and abandoned wrecks, until he glimpsed the shadows of lives through the windows. There were no working cars in sight. No dogs, no kids. The people who lived here were off the radar and staying there—welfare dropouts, junkies, petty criminals, terminal no-hopers, born losers.
Beeson’s trailer was a battered and flaking off-white oblong with two shuttered windows set either side of a sturdy-looking brown door with three locks on it: top, middle, and bottom. The trailer was mounted on red brick blocks, permanently going nowhere. Max drove right up to it and parked his car.
He knocked on the door and stepped back so he could be seen from the window. He heard deep barks, the scratching of claws behind the door, and then a thud, followed by another thud. Beeson had himself a pit bull. The shutters blinked behind the left window, then spread a little wider.
“Mingus?!!? Max Mingus?” Beeson shouted from inside.
“Yeah, that’s right. Open up, I need to talk.”
“Who sent you?”
“No one.”
“If you’re lookin’ for a job, the toilet here needs emptyin’,” Beeson chuckled.
“Sure, after we talk,” Max said. Wiseass motherfucker hadn’t lost his ability to laugh at the misfortunes of others. Still spoke in that same voice, part growl, part squeak, caught between pitches, like he was losing his voice or waiting on his other ball to drop.
The shutter lifted and Max got a glimpse of Beeson’s face—round, pudgy, blood-drained pale—staring left and right of where he was standing, checking the background.
A few moments later, he heard the sound of maybe half a dozen chains being taken off hooks behind the door, followed by a tattoo of dead bolts thunking back and all three Yale locks springing open. The inside of the door must have looked like a bondage corset.
Beeson stood in a sliver of cracked-open doorway, squinting into the light. He’d left a thick chain on the door, level with his neck. At his feet, the dog stuck his snout out into the open and barked and slobbered at Max.
“Waddayawant, Mingus?” Beeson said.
“Talk about Charlie Carver,” Max replied.
He could tell from the way Beeson was standing, half-forward, half-back, that he had a gun in one hand and the dog’s leash in the other.
“The Carvers send you?”
“Not to you, no. But I’m looking into the case now.”
“You goin’ to Haiti?”
“Yeah.”
Beeson pushed the door closed, undid the chain, and pulled it back open. He motioned to Max to come in with a tilt of the head.
It was dark inside, even darker after the bright day, and this made the stench all the more overpowering. A huge, acrid blast of baked filth rushed up and smacked Max in the face and forced its way down his nostrils. He staggered back a couple of steps, his stomach contracting, a hint of a heave brushing the edge of his throat. He clamped a handkerchief over his nose and breathed through his mouth, but he tasted the evil smell on his tongue.
There were flies everywhere, buzzing past his ears, bumping into his face and hands, some settling and sampling him before he shrugged them away. He heard Beeson drag the pit bull away into a corner and strap it to something.
“Better watch that car you came in,” Beeson said. “Li’l fuckers here will strip the paint off a pencil it stays out there too long.”
He opened the left blinds and stood away squinting. In a loud, whizzing drone, the flies in the room all darted for the bright white light that split the darkness.
Max had forgotten quite how short Beeson was—he barely scraped five feet—and how disproportionately large his spoon-shaped head was.
Unlike many a Dade County PI, Beeson had never been a cop. He’d started his working life as a fixer for the Florida Democratic Party, gathering dirt on rivals and allies alike and molding it into political currency.
He’d quit politics for private investigations after Jimmy Carter’s nomination in 1976. He was reputed to have made millions out of ruining lives—marriages, political careers, businesses—bringing down everything he snooped around in. He’d worn, driven, eaten, fucked, and lived in the fruits of his success. Max remembered the sight of him when he was king of the hill: designer suits, gleaming patent-leather tasseled loafers, shirts so white they virtually glowed, storm clouds of cologne, manicured hands, and a thick pinkie ring. Unfortunately, given his gnomic stature, pomp-and-prime-era Beeson hadn’t cut quite the dash he assumed a few thousand dollars worth of tailoring would give him; instead of looking like some Florida hotshot, he’d always reminded Max of an overeager kid on his way to First Communion in Sunday clothes his mom had picked out for him.
Now here he was, wearing a grubby tank top under an open cheap, black beach shirt with orange and green palm trees splashed over it.
Max was shocked at the sight of him.
It wasn’t the shirt or the tank top…
It was the diaper.
Clyde Beeson was wearing a diaper—a thick, grayish-brown toweling diaper held together at the waist by large, blue-tipped baby safety pins.
What the fuck had happened to him?
Max looked around the trailer. It seemed empty. Between him and Beeson was a linoleum-covered floor, an olive-green leather armchair with the stuffing popping out near the armrests, and an upturned packing crate he used as a table. The floor was filthy, covered in an oily-looking black grime, its original yellow color apparent through the pit bull’s claw gouges and paw-print streaks. There was dog shit everywhere: fresh, dried, and semidried.
How had Beeson let himself go like this?
Max saw cardboard boxes stacked against the wall, from the floor to the ceiling, covering the windows to his right. Many of the boxes were damp and sagging in the middle, their contents about to spill out.
The light coming through the blinds sliced through air that was hung heavy with layered cigarette smoke and dotted with bluebottle flies hurtling past them and smacking into the exposed window, thinking it was the great outdoors. Even the flies wanted out of this pathetic cesspit.
The dog growled in Max’s direction from a murky corner where the darkness had retreated and bunched up on itself. He could just about make out its eyes, glinting, watching.
He guessed the kitchen behind him was stacked with filthy dishes and rotting food, and he hated to think of what lay in Beeson’s bedroom and bathroom.
It was roasting hot. Max was already covered in a thickening film of sweat.
“Come on in, Mingus,” Beeson beckoned over with his gun-holding hand. He had a long-barreled .44 Magnum with solid steel cast, the kind of six-shooter Clint Eastwood used in Dirty Harry—no doubt a major influence on its buyer. The gun was almost as long as the arm that held it.
Beeson noticed that Max hadn’t moved. He was staying put, with his handkerchief clamped over his nose and a disgusted stare in his eyes.
“Suit yourself.” He shrugged and smiled. He looked at Max through sticky, toadlike brown eyes propped up on puffy cushions of grayish flesh. He couldn’t have been sleeping much.
“Who are you hiding from?” Max asked.
“Just hiding,” he replied. “So Allain Carver has got you looking for his kid?”
Max nodded. He wanted to take the handkerchief away, but the stench in the room was so thick he could feel particles settling on his skin in a fine dust.
“What d’you tell ’im?”
“I told him the kid was probably dead.”
“I never knew how you ever made a buck in this town wearin’ an attitude like that,” Beeson said.
“Honesty pays.”
Beeson laughed at that. He must have been smoking three or more packs a day, because his mirth triggered a loud, raucous chugging cough that tore chunks out of his chest. He hawked a tongue-load of phlegm up onto the floor and rubbed it into the filth with his foot. Max wondered if there was tumor blood mixed in with the spit.
“I ain’t doin’ your spadework, Mingus—if that’s what you come for—’less you pay me,” Beeson said.
“Some things haven’t changed.”
“Force-a habit. Money ain’t no use to me now anyways.”
Max couldn’t stand it any longer. He stepped back to the door and threw it open. Light and fresh air stormed the trailer. Max stood there for a second, breathing in deep, cleansing breaths.
The pit bull was barking, yanking at the chain and the thing that held it, probably desperate to flee the cesspool it had been living in.
Max walked back to Beeson, sidestepping a slalom path of dog turds leading into the kitchen. He’d narrowly missed standing in a tepee of turds that looked too deliberately arranged to be natural. Beeson hadn’t moved. He didn’t seem to mind that the door was open.
The flies were all fleeing past Max, tearing through the air to freedom.
“How d’you end up like this?” Max said. He’d never believed in fate or karma or that God—if there was one—really got involved in individual cases. Things happened for no particular reason, they just happened—and rarely to the right people. You had dreams, ambitions, goals. You worked for them. Sometimes you succeeded, most times you failed. That had been Max’s take on life. No more complicated than that. But standing there, looking at Beeson, gave him pause, made him question his beliefs. If this wasn’t what divine retribution looked like, then there was no such thing.
“What? You feel sorry for me?” Beeson asked.
“No,” Max said.
Beeson smirked. He studied Max, running his eyes up and down him.
“OK—what the fuck? I’ll tell ya,” Beeson said, moving away from the window, sitting down in his armchair with the gun rested across his lap. He took a pack of unfiltered Pall Malls from his shirt pocket, shook one out, and lit it. “I went out to Haiti September last year. I was there three months.
“See? I knew the case was a no-er from the moment Carver told me the specifics. No ransom, no witnesses, nothing seen, nothing heard. But what the fuck? I tripled my fee, seeing as Haiti ain’t exactly the Bahamas. He said fine, no problem. Plus he mentioned the same dead-or-alive bonus thing he probably told you.”
“How much did he say?”
“A cool mil if I dug up the body. A cool five if I found the kid alive. That what he’s promised you?”
Max nodded.
“Now, I know this guy’s a businessman and you don’t get to the kind of money tree the Carvers live in by spending it on hope. I told myself the kid is as dead as Niggerown cop chalk, and the dad just wants to bury the body or burn it or whatever shit they do to the dead out there. I figured it’d be an easy mil, plus I’d have myself a little vacation. Two weeks’ work max.”
Beeson smoked his cigarette to the brand name, then lit another off the end. He dropped the butt on the floor and ground it out with his bare heel without showing any sign of pain. Max guessed he was on some serious dope, hardcore painkillers that put the body on ice but kept the brain in a candlelit bubble bath.
All the while he was talking, Beeson hadn’t stopped staring Max dead in the eye.
“Didn’t work out that way. First three weeks I was out there, showin’ the kid’s picture around, I keep hearin’ the same name—Vincent Paul. I find out he runs the biggest slum in the country. And because of that people are sayin’ he’s the real power in the land. He’s meant to have built this whole modern town no one’s ever been to or knows where it is. They say he’s got people working there naked in his drug factories. He’s got ’em wearin’ Bill and Hillary Clinton masks. Like a fuck-you to us. Forget Aristide or whatever monkey puppet Clinton is putting in there. This guy Paul? He’s a major-league gangster. Makes all these nigger gangbangers we got out here look like Bugs Bunny. Plus he hates the Carvers. Never found out why.”
“So you guessed he snatched the kid?”
“Yeah, clear as day. He’s got motive and muscle.”
“Did you talk to him?”
“I tried, but you don’t talk to Vincent Paul. He—talks—to—you.” Beeson said the last slowly.
“And did he?”
Beeson didn’t reply. His eyes shifted downward, and then his head followed. He fell silent. Max stared at the front of his scalp, bare but for a few strands of long, reddish-brown hair. The rest was massed up behind in a rusty halo, like half an Elizabethan collar. He stayed like that for a long minute, not making a sound. Max was about to say something, when he raised his head slowly. Before, his eyes had been defiant pinpricks, daring in his squalor. Now the look was gone and his eyes had widened, the sacks below them deflated. Max saw fear creeping into them.
Beeson glanced out of the window and dragged on his Pall Mall until he started coughing and spluttering again. He let the fit pass.
He moved himself up to the edge of the chair and leaned forward.
“I never thought I was getting close to nothing, but maybe I was, or maybe someone thought I was. Anyway, one day I’m sleeping in my hotel. The next day I’m wakin’ up in some strange room with these yellow walls, no idea how I got there. I’m tied to this bed, naked, facedown. These people come in. Someone gives me a shot in the ass and—kapow!—I’m gone. Out like a light.”
“Did you see these people?”
“No.”
“What happened next?”
“I woke up again. Obviously. I thought I was dreamin’. ’Cause I’m on a plane. American Airlines, midair. I’m flying back to Miami. No one looks at me like there’s anything strange. I asked this stewardess how long I’d been there and she told me an hour. I asked the person behind me if they’d seen me get on, and they say no, I was lying there asleep when they got on.”
“You don’t remember getting on the plane? Going to the airport? Nothing?”
“Nada. I went through Miami airport. I picked up my bag. Everything was there. It’s only when I’m on my way out that I notice Christmas decorations. I grabbed a paper and saw it was December 14! That freaked the shit outta me! That’s two fuckin’ months I can’t account for!—two whole fuckin’ months, Mingus!”
“Did you call Carver?”
“I woulda done, except…” Beeson took a deep breath. He touched his chest. “I had this pain here. Like a tearing, a hot tearing. So I went to the airport bathroom and opened my shirt. This is what I found.”
Beeson stood up, slipped off his shirt, and lifted up his grimy tank top. His torso was matted with thick, curly, dark brown hair that spread out in a vague butterfly shape, starting below his shoulders and finishing at his navel. But there was a place where the hair parted and didn’t grow—a long, half-inch-thick pink scar than ran from the edge of his neck, down the middle of his chest, passed between his lungs, and rode over his round stomach before ending at his guts.
Max got the chills, a sinking feeling in his stomach, as if the ground had opened up right there in that fucked-up trailer and he was falling into an endless abyss.
Of course, it wasn’t Boukman’s handiwork, but it all looked so familiar, so like those poor children’s bodies.
“They did this to me,” he said, as Max looked on, horrified. “The mother-fuckers.”
He dropped his tank top and fell back on the chair. Then he buried his head in his hands and started crying, his fat body shaking like Jell-O. Max reached into his pockets for his handkerchief but he didn’t want Beeson getting his pestilential hands on it.
Max hated seeing men cry. He never knew what to say or do. Comforting them as he might a woman seemed to violate their masculinity. He stood there, feeling awkward and idiotic, letting Beeson weep himself out, hoping he’d finish up quick because there was a lot he needed to know.
Beeson’s sobbing gradually broke up into diminishing puddles and sniffs and snorts. He scraped the tears off his face with his hands and wiped the damp off on the hairy back of his head.
“I checked myself straight into a hospital,” he continued, once he’d gained control of his voice. “There was nothing missing, but—” he pointed two fingers down at the diaper “—I noticed after I ate my first meal. Went straight through. Them Haitians fucked up my sewage works full-time. No one could fix ’em here. I can’t hold nothin’ in too long. Permanent dysentery.”
Max felt a twinge of pity. Beeson reminded him of those cellblock bitches he’d seen in the exercise yard, waddling around in diapers because their sphincter muscles had been permanently loosened by multiple gang-rapes.
“You think it was this Vincent Paul who did it?”
“I know it was him. To warn me off.”
Max shook his head.
“That’s a hell of a lotta trouble to go through just to warn someone off. What they did to you takes time. Besides, I know you, Beeson. You scare easy. If they’d burst into your room and stuck a gun down your throat you would have been outta there like a fart on a match.”
“You say the sweetest things,” Beeson said, sparking up another cigarette.
“What were you close to?”
“Whaddayamean?”
“Had you turned up something on the kid? A lead? A suspect?”
“Nothin’.”
“Are you sure?” Max asked, searching Beeson’s eyes for signs of lying.
“Nothin’, I’m tellin’ ya.”
Max didn’t believe him, but Beeson wouldn’t give it up.
“So why d’you think they fucked with me like this? Send a message to Carver?”
“Could be. I’ll need to know more,” Max said. “So what happened afterwards? With you?”
“I fell apart. Up here,” he said matter-of-factly, tapping the side of his head. “I had this collapse, this breakdown. I couldn’t work no more. I quit. Gave it up. I owed clients for jobs I didn’t finish. I had to pay ’em all back, so I don’t have that much left, but what the fuck? At least I’m still alive.”
Max nodded. He knew all about the place Beeson was in now. Going to Haiti was pretty much the only thing that was stopping him from finding his own shit-covered trailer to live in.
“Don’t go to Haiti, Mingus. There is some bad shit out there in that place,” Beeson said, his voice a steady, even whine of cold wind passing by a warm house, whistling through the cracks, trying to get in.
“Even if I didn’t want to, I haven’t got much choice,” Max said. He took a last look around the trailer. “You know, Clyde, I never liked you. I still don’t. You were a two-bit shamus, a greedy, double-dealing traitor scumbag with a morals bypass. But you know what? Even you don’t deserve this.”
“Take it you don’t wanna stay for dinner?” Beeson said.
Max turned and made for the door. Beeson picked up his Magnum and stood up. He padded over to Max, squishing a fresh turd on his way.
Outside the trailer, Max stood in the clean air and sunlight, breathing deeply through his nose. He hoped the stench hadn’t stuck to his clothes and hair.
“Hey! Mingus!” Beeson shouted from the door.
Max turned around.
“They fuck you in jail?”
“What?”
“Was you some nigger’s bitch? Some nigger call you ‘Mary’? You get some o’ that ole jailhouse lurve from the booty bandits, Mingus?”
“No.”
“Then what the fuck special happened to you, make you come over all sympathetic? Old-school Max Mingus woulda said I got what I deserved, woulda kicked me in the teeth and wiped his foot on my face.”
“Take care of yourself, Clyde,” Max said. “No one else will.”
Then he got in his car and drove away, feeling numb.