The establishment known as O’s Cupboard sat a block off Duval and one of the delights of the workers was seeing the faces of middle-aged Midwestern tourist ladies stepping inside expecting a trendy bistro and beholding racks of rubber bondage suits, whips and riding crops, X-rated videos, and a display counter of dildoes and vibrators.
Spyder Rockwylde, né Bruce Hastings, was in the back room finishing lunch. He tossed the sloppy remains of the tuna salad sandwich into the trash can in the corner. He belched and stepped into the tiny high-fenced courtyard out back and polished off the joint he’d started before work, then paused in the high sun to pull up his skin-tight black tee to admire his latest tattoo, a Gibson Les Paul guitar running from his pubic hair to his sternum.
Too cool.
He heard the door pull shut as he entered the front section, seeing his shift partner and drummer – when he could borrow a kit – pushing the drawer closed on the register. Billy T. Rexx, né Kent Buttram, jumped back up on a stool and tugged at the inch-round black plug distending his ear lobe.
“Yo, Spyd … just made two hundred-eighty bucks,” he smiled, holding up a fifty. “And a tip just for ringing things up. The man said to split it with you.”
Rockwylde smiled. There was only one customer who tipped: Babyface Sanders.
Neither knew the customer’s real name, the moniker coming from the man’s childlike visage and affectation for white suits à la Colonel Sanders. Both enjoyed inventing backgrounds for customers and speculated Babyface was the secret love child of Harlan Sanders and the Chucky character of horror-flick fame.
“Babyface load up on more freaky teeny flickies?” Rexx asked, referring to the man’s devotion to Hispanic porn flicks featuring the most youthful-looking actors, preferably movies involving simulated kidnap and rape.
“Bought all the latest titles,” Rockwylde said. “And this time he bought the Avenger Twelve.”
“Fuck me,” Rexx said, checking the display case and seeing a dust-free pattern where the device, a lifelike though hugely outsized rubber penis held in place by a wide leather belt – a strap-on, in the lingo – had resided. “The Babyface jumped up a notch since last time.” He paused and frowned. “You don’t think a weirdo like Babyface is gonna actually, uh …”
Rockwylde laughed. “No fucking way. This place is the guy’s girlfriend.”
“Then what’s the Babyface gonna use it for?”
“Early Halloween shopping, maybe,” Rockwylde grinned. “He’s going as a horse.”
I did catch-up paperwork in the office, hoping Leala would contact me. Gershwin arrived at eleven-thirty and I told him of my near-miss with the girl.
“A dozen feet away?” he said, pulling off a banana-yellow blazer and hanging it from the back of his chair, his blue tee freshly laundered. The jeans looked new and the skate kicks had been replaced by sedate black cross-trainers. He’d upped his fashion game, either to look more professional or because he’d run out of clean tees and jeans.
“I had no idea who she was.”
“You think she’s the key, Jefé?”
“All I know is that she’s in bad trouble.”
My phone rang and I had it to my eyes before the second ring, saw the caller was Vince Delmara. I switched gears, hoping his snitch network had come up golden. Give me something, anything.
“Vince … tell me a snitch came through.”
“Nada on a blade man. You know the problem there, right?”
“You rat out a knife pro, the knife starts looking for you.”
“The worse the guy is, the less likely we’ll hear anything. Hey … I do have some good news. I get to close a MP case, Detective. The lab just confirmed dental records on a corpse named Perlman, Bennet J. Some called him Benny the Books.”
“Bookmaker?” I asked. Though it didn’t affect me, I was always buoyed by someone else’s success.
“Bookkeeper. Got his CPA degree from Indiana University in ’84, got hired by a manufacturing company in Elkhart, Indiana. I guess he found the winters a tad frosty and moved to Miami in 1990 and went to work for a private brokerage firm, long gone. Reason the firm died was the top dogs were running a pyramid.”
“Uh-oh,” I said.
“Perlman was keeping a fake set of records for the investors and FEC, one for his bosses. When the FEC took down the company – with help from FCLE, I should mention – the boyo lost his CPA accreditation and couldn’t get the big gigs. He played Bobby Cratchit for a couple of slinky bail bondsmen around town, then turned up not turning up. Like for last year’s family reunion. Not a sighting or financial transaction since. I figure Perlman fucked someone over and went swimming with the sharks.”
“What makes you think that?”
“Perlman claimed the bail-bond accounts as his employment, doing basic payables and receivables. True, and they paid him thirty-two grand last year. But Mr P. has a big red Benz gathering dust outside his condo. And a flat-screen TV you could play handball off of.”
“Expensive tastes, your Mr Perlman.”
A barking laugh. “Your Mr Perlman, Detective. He is, or was, JDMS in the cistern. Second from the bottom. Wanna see where Perlman lived before he moved to the concrete condo?”
Benny Perlman had lived in a complex in North Miami, a four-layer pink and aquamarine cake with six units per layer, each with a long balcony, a palm-shadowed swimming pool in back, numbered parking slots to the side. We pulled into the lot and saw Delmara relaxing against a red Mercedes beneath a carport, the paint dulled by dust and its tires soft from sitting.
Delmara patted the Benz. “Two years back Perlman bought it second-hand off a two-year lease. It still cost seventy-three thou.”
“Not bad for a man making under forty,” Gershwin said. “But as an accountant, you expect him to be good with a budget, right?”
“Stellar,” Delmara said. “Given that Perlman was paying fifteen grand a year on the condo and upkeep.” He tipped back the hat and pointed down the opposite side of the street to a restaurant named The Cascades. “Toney joint, three bright stars in the Michelin. Big bucks, in other words. Credit-card records show the Perlster ate there three or four times a week.”
“They must have been sad when he stopped showing up,” I said. “Anything else come from the cards?”
“Only that his biggies in life were eating and drinking and a pretty car.” Delmara pulled his fedora and brushed the crown with his palm. “How about we head inside? You’re gonna love it.”
Perlman’s second-floor door opened to cool air and the scent of cleanser. The dark blue carpet held the streaks of a recent vacuuming. The living room boasted the huge screen noted by Delmara, before it one of those goofy, overblown loungers touted in airline publications, pillow-thick cushions, arms and foot-rest, the monstrosity about the size of a double bed and having angle and massage settings, plus a folding platform for food and drink that currently held controllers for a PlayStation, Xbox and Wii, all running through the screen. I’d seen smaller screens at art-house cinemas.
“Pull the fridge closer, install a toilet, and I could live in a chair like that,” Gershwin said.
“Perlman had a shitload of DVDs,” Delmara said. “Eighties porn was big, a classicist. He also had a yen for space opera: Star Wars and Star Trek and so forth. Plus all the Disney animation flicks.”
“A boy at heart,” I said, imagining the hours Perlman must have spent in the geeky dream-chair switching between Captain Kirk, the Lion King, and Marilyn Chambers. I squatted to study a stack of DVDs set between the Wii and PlayStation boxes, all oddly without dust.
“This place looks like it was cleaned yesterday,” I noted.
Delmara nodded. “Mr Perlman’s sister has been paying a housekeeper for weekly cleaning. She’s convinced baby brother ran off to Mexico with a hottie girlfriend but he’ll be back when he comes to his senses.”
I glanced at the chair set-up and doubted Perlman had ever had a girlfriend. Gershwin came in from the bedroom, frowning.
“No reading material,” he said. “Zero.”
“Maybe he didn’t like reading,” Delmara said.
“I mean no accounting bulletins. My uncle Pete’s a CPA, has to read a shitload of IRS updates to tax laws. He’s got them everywhere, even by the crapper. Perlman’s got nothing like that. Probably means whatever funds he was accounting weren’t being reported.”
We tossed the condo and found nothing to indicate where or how Benny the Book lived so nicely on thirty-two grand a year. It was a sad kind of place, and I pictured Perlman as an oversized child who rented his services to whoever paid him the bucks, and never asked questions about what the numbers added up to. We went back outside after a fruitless hour.
“Got one other thing,” Delmara said, pulling a page from his dark jacket. “Traffic citations Perlman’s Benz gathered. Parkings and speedings, mainly, bullshit stuff. You wanna check them out?”
“Might be a pattern there, Big Ryde,” Gershwin said.
“Sure, Vince,” I said, taking the copy of the cites. “The boy and I will see if they mean anything.”
“Boy?” Gershwin said. “Ouch, Detective Ryder. Snap.”
Gershwin scanned the seven addresses where the Benz had been parked overtime or picked up a speeding citation. “All over town,” he said. “Except for the two speeding cites, which were on I-95 between exits eight and ten, and two parking tix … one for parking too close to a hydrant, another for parking in a loading zone. They’re on the same block.”
There are names for the location where we ended up. Some call it the Strip, to others it’s the Combat Zone. Some cities euphemistically refer to it as Nightclub Row, or Clubtown. I called such places Dregsville, because it’s where the dregs of society felt most at home: shot’n’beer bars, strip joints, pawn shops, used-car lots, liquor stores, storefront sandwich shops, hot-pillow motels; there was always a bail-bondsman’s office nearby. These establishments were interspersed with windowless warehouses and car-parts outlets and whitewashed shops selling second-hand tires, the sad stacks of balding rubber protected by high fences encircled with razor wire, like ten-buck tires were worth stealing.
“What do you call this neighborhood, Ziggy?” I asked.
“Technically, it’s part of Hialeah, but this part I call Shitsville.”
“No argument there. Where’d the cites get issued?”
Gershwin pointed at a fire hydrant. “The hydrant cite was here.” We continued slowly for another block and he had me pull to the curb. “And there’s the loading zone where he got ticketed.”
“Times?”
“Both Friday mornings, one at eight-fifteen, the other at nine twenty-five.”
We got out. The smell of urine rose from a gutter clogged with cigarette butts, fast-food wrappers, broken liquor bottles, crack vials and used condoms. A bus roared past and added its oily exhaust smell to the miasma.
“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.”