by J. A. Kerley
“I’ve run a tab here since the Carter administration. You’re covered.”
I followed Vince to a booth in a far corner. There was a middling crowd, men and women in professional garb, dark suits prominent, few bodies overweight. The women tended to pretty, the men to smilingly confident. It reminded me of the book American Psycho and I wondered who kept an axe at home.
We sat and Vince set the fedora beside him on his briefcase. His hair was black and brushed straight back, which, with his dark eyes and prominent proboscis, gave him the look of a buzzard in a wind tunnel.
“You read the paper day before yesterday?” he asked.
“Out of town.”
Vince popped the clasps on his briefcase and handed me a folded Miami Herald.
“Page two, metro section.”
The table had a candle in a frame of yellow glass. I pulled it close to read five lines about a twenty-three-year-old prostitute named Kylie Sandoval found dead along a lonely stretch of beach south of the city.
“Sad, but not unusual, Vince.”
Vince rummaged in his briefcase and passed me a file. “Story’s missing a few details, Carson.” The file contained photos centering on a tubular black shape on sand studded with beach grass.
“Is that a cocoon?” I said.
“If so, this is the butterfly.” Vince passed me a second photo and I saw a woman on an autopsy table. Though her skin was charred, I discerned a caved-in cheekbone and a depression in the left temple.
“The cocoon was a thick wrapping of cloth. It was doused in accelerant and set ablaze. She was alive at the time.”
I grimaced. “She looks beat up. What’s the autopsy say?”
“Scheduled for tomorrow. The techs spent ten hours unwrapping charred strips of cloth from the corpse.”
I studied the photo. Burned alive. I had half my beer left and ordered a double bourbon chaser.
“How’d you make the ID?” I asked.
“One hand was balled into a fist, which protected several fingertips from the fire. Kylie Sandoval had a record of hooking, shoplifting, two possession busts, one for crack, one for heroin.”
“What are you looking at, Vince?” Meaning which direction was the investigation headed.
“Nothing right now.”
It took a second to sink in. “Every investigative resource is on the Menendez case.”
Vince’s eyes were hound-dog sad. “I’ve never seen a shitstorm like this, Carson. The press is shitting on the Chief, the Chief’s shitting on the assistant chiefs, the assistant—”
“Been there. And it’s all landing on the detectives.”
“No one’s gonna give a dead hooker a second glance until Menendez gets cleared. Can you help me here?”
“Who’ll I work with at MDPD? You got a detective ready?”
When Roy created the agency a few years ago, he wanted to avoid the antipathy between law-enforcement entities often arising when one swept in and took over, the hated FBI effect. To ameliorate some of the potential conflict, the FCLE always tried to partner with the local forces and detectives.
Vince said, “Investigative’s not going to spare an investigator for Sandoval right now.”
“I’m gonna need a liaison to MDPD, a detective.”
Vince sucked the last of his Scotch, rattled ice as his brow furrowed in thought. “I got an idea, Carson. If it works you’ll have a face in your office tomorrow. How well do you speak English?”
“Uh, what?”
But Vince was up and moving back out into the Menendez merde-storm.
Hoping to put something inside my head besides photos of a young woman’s fiery end, I pulled my phone, fingers crossed.
“Is this my personal detective?” said Vivian Morningstar in a pseudo-sultry voice that always quickened my breathing.
“Ready to detect anything on your person,” I acknowledged. “I’m in town. Is tonight a good night?”
The lovely Miz M had been my significant other – if that was the parlance – for almost a year, a record on my part. Until eleven months ago Vivian was a top-level pathologist with the Florida Medical Examiner’s Department, Southern Division, which basically served the lower third of the state. She’d had an epiphany and decided to “work with the living”. Much of the past year had thus been crammed with courses at Miami U’s Miller School of Medicine, where she was working on a specialty in Emergency Medicine.
“I’m an intern, which means rented mule. I finished day shift, now I’m on night shift. You’re staying at my place tonight?”
Vivian had recently commenced her residency at Miami-Dade General Hospital, where the 65,000-square-foot emergency center treated upwards of 75,000 patients annually, the work often involving thirty-plus-hour stints, catching sleep on a tucked-away gurney. Between the haphazard hours of our jobs, we managed to see one another about twice a week, me generally staying with Viv in the city.
“Got a case I need to hit hard in the early a.m. You don’t want details. You off tomorrow night?”
It seemed tomorrow would work out fine and I drove to Viv’s home, a lovely two-story in Coral Gables, the walls’ white expanses broken by vibrant art and photography. When we’d began dating, I’d figured her home shone with so much life because her work held so much death.
I started to pull the case files again, but their horror seemed discordant in Viv’s home, so I mixed a drink and reviewed them beneath a lamp in the back yard, nothing above but the lonely stars, which I figured had seen it all before.
4
Harry Nautilus was half-reclined on his couch and listening to a YouTube upload of a performance by jazz great Billie Holiday and thinking her voice was a trumpet, the words not sung as much blown through that life-ravaged throat, some notes low and growled, others bright as a bell on a crisp winter morning.
Fifteen years ago, give or take, Nautilus had sat in this same room with a half-baked man-child named Carson Ryder when the kid had asked Nautilus why he listened to “all that old music”. Nautilus had dosed the kid with Waller, Beiderbecke, Armstrong, Ellington, Holiday, Henderson … they started at sundown and met the morning with Miles.
Along with the intro to jazz, Nautilus convinced the kid his degree in Psychology and eerie ability to analyze madmen would be a gift to law enforcement. The next week Carson Ryder signed up at the Police Academy, blowing through it like a firestorm, impressing many, pissing off as many more. He’d put in three years on the street before solving the high-profile Adrian case, advancing to detective and Nautilus’s partner. They’d been the Ryder and Nautilus Show for over a decade. But today Carson was in Florida and Harry Nautilus was a retiree.
The show was over.
And tomorrow morning, Harry Nautilus was going to the home of Pastor Richard Owsley to meet the man’s wife and try for a gig as a driver. Last week’s interview with the Pastor had taken all of fifteen minutes, the man like a thousand-watt bulb in a room that only needs about a hundred, pacing, smiling, gesturing … all assurance and zeal and – like Southern preachers everywhere – stretching one-syllable words into two and often using larger words than called for, which Nautilus ascribed to latent insecurities perhaps caused by going to schools like West Doodlemont Bible College rather than Harvard Divinity School.
It had all happened so quickly that Nautilus realized he knew little more about Richard Owsley than the stacks of books he saw at local shops, the man smiling on the cover with bible in hand.
He took another sip of brew, set his computer on his lap, and checked YouTube for the Pastor’s name. There were several dozen hits, sermons, it seemed. In his youth Nautilus had been dragged from church to church by a procession of severe but well-meaning aunts, and figured he’d had enough sermonizing for a lifetime. He continued scanning the videos until he found a six-minute piece titled, Highlights: Richard Owsley on Willy Prince Show. Prince had a talk show out of Montgomery and was a regional favorite, a smug little fellow in his forties with shaggy, fringe-ce
ntric hair, and a slight mouth permanently puckered toward sneer.
Nautilus hit Play and the screen showed two men sitting at a round table in a television studio dressed with a pair of bookshelves and artificial plants. Nautilus figured someone once told Prince that slouching would make him look more like William F. Buckley, so he resembled a boneless puppet dropped into a chair. Prince sat on the left and was speaking.
“… then to recap, Reverend Owsley, you hold that Jesus wants people to have fine cars, boats, luxury items?”
Pastor Owsley was to the right, a dark-suited figure with narrow shoulders and a touch too much weight at his waistline, slightly pearish. His round and cherubic visage was topped by back-combed black hair. He looked pleasant and not particularly commanding, a small-town insurance salesman whose ready smile is part of the tool kit.
“Jesus wants people to enjoy abundance, Willy,” Owsley said in a Southern-inflected tenor and pronouncing the word in three distinct syllables, a-bun-dance. “In biblical times, abundance might mean having a donkey, chickens and a warm hearth. Today, it might be a new pickup truck and a house with a white picket fence.”
A chorus of handclaps and Hallelujahs from the audience. A raised eyebrow from Prince.
“Or a Mercedes-Benz and a mansion in Miami Beach?”
“If that is your yearning and you honor God, God will hand you the keys to the Benz, the keys to the mansion and then, finally and best of all, the keys to His Kingdom. It’s in John 10:10: ‘There I am come that they might have life, and they might have it more abundantly.’”
The audience again expressed satisfaction with the answer. “Perhaps the abundance comes in the afterlife, Reverend,” Prince said. “In Paradise.”
Owsley nodded vigorous agreement. “Our prosperity in Heaven is boundless, Willy. We’re also supposed to taste of it in this life. Proverbs 15:6 … ‘In the house of the righteous is much treasure.’ Then there’s John 1:2 … ‘Beloved, I wish above all that thou prosper and be in health, even as thy soul prospers.’ When your soul prospers, so shall you.”
“So why did Jesus hang around with poor people, Pastor Owsley? I mean, Jesus wasn’t prone to spending his days with the wealthy, right?”
“Of course not, Willy. He treasured the poor.”
“But you just said—”
“Jesus Christ loves the faithful, Willy. If you have ten billion dollars and believeth not in the Lord, you are as poor as a cockroach. Conversely, if you have nothing and turn yourself over to the Lord, you have wealth beyond measure.”
“But you’re still poor, pocket-wise.”
“‘Keep therefore the words of this covenant, and do them, that ye may prosper in all that ye do.’ That’s Deuteronomy 29:9. It’s said even more directly in Proverbs 28:20: ‘A faithful man shall abound in blessings.’ Do you know the Greek translation of the word ‘blessings’, Willy?”
“Oddly enough, no.”
Owsley’s pink hands came together in a thunderclap. “Happiness! Blessings are happinesses. God wants His faithful children to abound in happinesses. It’s a three-step process, Willy. One, surrender your soul to Christ. Two, cast your bread upon the water. Three, watch the bread returneth a thousand-fold.”
A chorus of amens and hallelujahs. Prince studied the audience and turned to the preacher with an uplifted eyebrow. “You have a lot of followers here tonight, Reverend. Did you pack the crowd, as they say?”
A split-second pause from Owsley, followed by who-me? innocence. “I noted on my website that I was to be a guest. That’s all.”
“Really? I’d like to go to some video we took earlier in the day outside the studio, if that’s OK with you.”
“It’s your show, Willy,” Owsley said. The smile stayed as toothy as a beaver, but Nautilus detected irritation as the screen behind the interview table filled with two large buses emptying to the pavement a block from the studio, an attractive woman with a haystack of blonde hair organizing the passengers into a queue.
“All those folks went directly from the buses to the studio. I’ll ask again: Did you pack the crowd, Reverend?”
Murmurs of irritation from the audience. Owsley replayed the innocent face. “All I can say, Willy, is that I’m delighted so many faithful Christians chose to honor me with their presence.”
Applause. Whistles. Amens.
Prince tented his fingers and frowned in apparent confusion. “Faithful Christians, you say, Reverend Owsley. But what about people of other beliefs? Can they not be equally faithful to the creator of the universe?”
Owsley smiled benignly. “I can only preach the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ, who I hold to be the creator of all that is and ever will be.”
“So other religions are wrong?”
“I judge not, lest I be judged, Willy.”
Prince shook his head. “You’re a hard man to pin down, Reverend.”
“No, Willy, I am not. It’s all in my owner’s manual.”
“Owner’s manual?”
Owsley reached to his side and picked up a bible, holding it high with both hands, the thousand-watt grin ramping up another hundred.
The audience went wild.
“Thanks, Mama,” Teresa Mailey said, patting her child on his pink forehead as her mother pulled the baby blanket closer around Robert, just seven months old the day before. “It might not be like this much more.”
Jeri Mailey thumbed graying hair back under the red headscarf and smiled. “Like I care, baby.” Her voice was husky, a smoker’s voice.
“Me waking you up at four thirty in the morning when I come to pick Bobby up?” Teresa said.
“Hush up that stuff. I go right back to sleep.” Jeri paused as her smile shivered and her eyes moistened. “I never thought I’d have days like this, baby.”
“Come on, Mama, not again,” Teresa said, her voice gentle.
Her mother brushed a tear from the corner of an eye. “I’m sorry, baby. It’s like every day has been a gift this past year. Taking care of you and Bobby is a gift from God.”
Teresa kissed her mother’s cheek. “It’ll keep giving, Mama.”
Teresa’s mother nodded and pulled Bobby tight as she crossed to the door. “See you later, baby. Have a good one.”
“Thanks, Mama.”
The door closed and Teresa Mailey was alone in the tiny first-floor apartment, the bulk of the rent paid by a charitable organization that helped the fallen regain their feet. She looked out the window and watched her mother put Bobby in the child seat in the rear of her blue Kia Optima and snug him tight. Just before her mother closed the door, Bobby waved goodbye.
OK, only a waggle of his arm, but it looks like he’s waving bye-bye to his mommy.
Teresa went to the mirror and straightened her uniform, the fabric flat and wrinkle-free, the uniform immaculate. Satisfied that she was a suitable representative of her employer, she glanced at the clock, 9:32 p.m., and headed to the door. Pausing, Teresa ran back to her bedroom and grabbed her necklace, a tiny gold chain holding a small cross, and put it around her neck.
I’m ready for this again.
Teresa exited to a third-hand Corolla. She had to be at work at ten, and the Publix was twenty minutes distant. She was to do night restock until four a.m. Yesterday her supervisor had spoken of moving Teresa to daytime as a permanent deli worker. Permanent!
“You’ve gotten noticed by a lot of people upstairs, Teresa,” the super had said. “Your attitude, work ethic, ability to shift positions … we’d like you as a permanent member of the team.”
The year had been a gift, Teresa thought as she drove through the warm Miami night. Of finding out who am I, and that I have worth.
The traffic was thick with homecoming day workers, but Teresa pulled into the Publix lot with eight minutes to spare, aiming toward the far edge where the employees parked. She grabbed her purse, exited the vehicle, and started for the store when she felt a tingle on the back of her neck, like eyes were watching.
Te
resa turned to see a light van parked three slots distant, a hard-worked vehicle judging by the dinged body and dented hood. A man was sitting in the driver’s seat, face hidden behind a newspaper, the halogen-lit lot bright enough for reading. He was tanned and ropy and shirtless, a line running across his upper chest, a weird tattoo.
No … not a tattoo …
A nasty, puckery scar.
The man shifted in his seat and the scar stared at Teresa. Feeling an odd void in the base of her stomach, Teresa turned and hustled toward the supermarket.
5
It was eight a.m., the oblique sun lighting a soft mist that rose from a brief morning rain, giving a ghostly cast to the tree-canopied streets of Spring Hill, Mobile’s finest old neighborhood, many of the homes dating back to antebellum times. Harry Nautilus pulled to a two-story house set back a hundred feet from the avenue, a square, white, multi-columned Greek Revival monster Nautilus thought as charmless as it was large, redeemed by the landscaping: oaks and sycamores standing in hedge circles further bordered by azaleas and bougainvillea. Lines of dogwoods paced the high fence of the side boundaries.
He blew out a breath and pulled into the long drive. His red 1984 Volvo wagon had recently expired at 377,436 miles and he’d found a 2004 Cross Country model truly owned by the little old lady who only drove it on Sundays, the odometer registering 31,000 miles.
Nautilus parked behind a gleaming red Hummer with smoked windows and was rolling his eyes when he realized it was probably what he’d be driving. He exited the Volvo wearing the suit he’d worn to the interview with Richard Owsley, coal black, the suit he wore to court and funerals. His shirt was blue with a button-down collar and the tie a red-and-blue rep stripe. The whole drab get-up was already beginning to itch.