Nobody Rides For Free

by Neil S. Plakcy

  Between the gray skies and my gloomy thoughts, I was in a dark mood by the time I reached the address Nathan had given me. The School of Modern Ballet was located at one end of a 1950s-era shopping center. The grocery at the other end had ceded its property to a Haitian Apostolic Church. The street’s remaining tenants included a cell phone retailer, a tax outfit, and a dollar store.

  I parked in front of the studio and recognized Nathan at the front of the class facing the full-length windows onto the parking lot. He was in his mid-twenties, and had a slender, graceful body and a mop of brown hair that flopped in his face as he danced. I didn’t want to interrupt, so I sat in my car and watched the class.

  About a dozen girls and one boy, stood around the room beside a waist-high bar attached to the mirrored walls. They watched as Nathan grasped the bar on the back wall and lifted his right leg up, his foot extended. Then he stopped and the kids imitated his movement.

  He walked around the room, adjusting the set of a spine or the height of a leg. The session seemed to be finished when all the kids applauded him, and a barrage of moms approached the studio to pick up their kids. I walked inside against the tide of giggling ten-year-olds in tights and toe shoes. Nathan had a towel around his shoulders as he bent over to replace the CDs in their cases on a shelf. The wood floor was scuffed, the room smelled of sweat and mold, and the mirrored walls made the room seem larger than it was.

  “I was watching from outside for a couple of minutes,” I said. “You’re incredibly talented.”

  “If I was that great I’d be dancing Balanchine with the Miami City Ballet instead of teaching ten-year-olds and waiting tables on the side. But that’s a whole other conversation. What did you want to ask?”

  I pulled out the screen capture I’d taken of the ballet class with Nathan on one side and the boy from the video beside him. “Oh, yeah, I remember that,” he said. “A friend of mine got a stress fracture in his foot and had to stay off it for a few weeks, so I took over his classes at the New World School of the Arts in Miami while he was laid up.”

  “Do you recognize this boy?”

  He peered closely at the photo. “Like I said, I only taught there for a short time. I think his name began with D. Derick? David? Something like that. Manny could probably tell you more. Manuel Arristaga. It was his class I took over.”

  He folded up his towel and stuffed it into a gym bag. “You can call the school tomorrow and find out when he’s teaching,” he said. “The kid may still be studying there. That picture was taken last year and I don’t think he was a senior.”

  “The New World School,” I said. “Another dance academy like this one?”

  He shook his head. “A performing arts high school, like the one in the movie Fame. You have to audition to get in, and you have to have talent.” He tapped the photo. “This kid was good but raw, like he hadn’t had much training when he was little. But he could imitate any move you showed him.”

  He looked at his watch. “I wish I could stick around, but I have to be on shift in fifteen minutes and that’s barely enough time to drive there.” I thanked him and walked back out to my car.

  Here was a kid with talent, who’d been in the right place to develop what God had given him. Manuel Arristaga might hold the key that would unlock the mystery of this boy, and perhaps Ozzy Perez as well. Too bad I’d have to wait until the next day to get hold of him.

  So far I’d found two boys involved with the same website. Were there more? What if there was a whole stable of these kids performing? And how did the flakka distribution figure in?

  8.

  Dancing with the Devil

  After a shower and a quick breakfast the next morning, I joined the flow of rush hour traffic heading south, instead of my normal south-west route to the office. After a long slog, the towers of downtown Miami appeared on the eastern horizon like a kind of Shangri-La by the Sea. For a boy like me who’d grown up landlocked in the industrial Northeast, Miami seemed like a paradise of sunshine and palm trees, even though in my eight months there I’d already begun to explore its darker corners.

  I turned off the highway and into the maze of one-way streets that characterized downtown. The New World School of the Arts was housed in a nine-story building surrounded by parking lots and low commercial buildings. I’d read that the dance studios were housed in the main building, along with the academic classrooms and administrative offices, so after I parked in a city garage that’s where I headed.

  I walked in under the theater-like marquee and marveled at how clean and bright the building was. The walls were splashed with color and student art work—from woven tapestries to graffiti-like murals. It sure didn’t look like the high school I’d attended back in Scranton.

  I showed my badge to the young woman on duty at the sleek wooden reception desk and had her establish that Mr. Arristaga was in the dance studio. I filled out a form and got a visitor’s pass.

  It must have been between classes, because the halls were filled with a diverse group of teens that could rival the United Nations. Boys, girls, and those whom Shane had called gender fluid, were dressed in everything from T-shirts and low-riding jeans to tight outfits I’d expect to see in a club, not a high school. Every color of hair was represented, from scarlet to purple to green.

  They all seemed so happy, as if at every moment they realized how lucky they were to be in such a great environment. I took the elevator up to the dance studio level with two boys and a girl, and the girl began singing the chorus of Adele’s “When We Were Young” a cappella. Then the boys joined in with her, all three of them completely unself-conscious.

  Their enthusiasm was infectious, and I was humming the song myself as I made my way to the main studio, where I spotted a slim man in black slacks and a white shirt exercising at the bar along one mirrored wall.

  The contrast to the studio where Nathan taught was striking. This room was high-ceilinged and bright, with a baby grand piano in the corner instead of a CD player. The wood floor was the same, but here it had been polished to a high gleam, and the room smelled of makeup, canvas, and rosin.

  I waited until the dancer turned and noticed me. “Can I help you?” he asked.

  He was older than I’d expected, probably fifty or so, with graying black hair. As I approached him I said, “Nathan Clemens suggested I speak with you. My name is Angus Green and I’m a Special Agent with the Miami office of the FBI.”

  “The FBI? Is Nathan in trouble?”

  “Not at all.” I explained that I was trying to track down a boy who might have been one of his students, and I showed him the photo of Nathan and the group of students. “I’m interested in this young man here,” I said, pointing.

  “That’s Dimetrie,” he said. “Why are you looking for him?”

  Once again, I chose not to mention the flakka—at least not right away. I thought I’d get more from Arristaga by focusing on the boy. Now that I knew he was young, like Ozzy, there was a compelling case to be made that he needed rescuing.

  “I think he’s being exploited.”

  I explained about the video featuring Dimetrie. I showed him a head shot from the video, and he confirmed that it was the boy he knew.

  “That’s awful. If you find him, let him know that he can call me. The school has a counselor who could try and get him into foster care, at least so that he can finish high school. I’ll do whatever I can to help him.”

  “I will. Do you know his last name?”

  “Beauvoir.” He spelled the first and last name for me. Then he stopped. “Technically, I shouldn’t release any information to you without Dimetrie’s written permission. We have to follow the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act guidelines.”

  “If I knew where Dimetrie was, I wouldn’t need your information,” I said. “But can you at least give me his family contact? That’s not protected.”

  He agreed and led me through a doorway to a small office behind the studio. The walls were plastered with p
osters from dance competitions, and there was a brand-new box of toe shoes on the visitor’s chair. “Sorry for the mess,” he said as he walked behind the desk and began tapping on the computer keyboard.

  A moment later, the printer beside the desk began to hum, and he handed me a single sheet of paper. “You’re in luck. Dimetrie updated his information at the beginning of the term.”

  His guardian was Racine Beauvoir, with an address on Northeast 60th Street, in the heart of Little Haiti. Dimetrie had been born in Miami on April 11, 1999, which made him a few months shy of his seventeenth birthday.

  “I’m going to this address,” I said. “But it would help me a lot if you could give me some background.” I hesitated, wondering how far I could push. Then I decided. “If you insist, I’ll go back to my office and get a warrant prepared. But that can take time, and if I’m correct, then Dimetrie is being sexually abused, and every day that we delay adds to the danger that he’s in. There is documented evidence of the connection between sexual abuse and anorexia, self-harm, and suicide. Do you want that on your conscience?”

  Arristaga blew out a deep breath. “Dimetrie started here in ninth grade. His raw talent blew us away in his audition. He said he’d studied on and off with a woman who was a friend of his mother’s. Over the years I had a few heart-to-heart talks with him and he told me that his father was a white man who disappeared as soon as his mother got pregnant. She turned to prostitution and eventually was infected with HIV.”

  He crossed his arms over his chest. “That turned into full-blown AIDS when Dimetrie was about ten. They say AIDS is no longer a death sentence, that it’s a manageable illness now, but that’s true for rich white men,” he said. “Not for poor black women like Dimetrie’s mom. Eventually, she got so sick that she couldn’t work anymore, so he had to stop taking those dance classes, but his mother encouraged him to apply here. She was so proud of him. And we loved having him here, because not only was he talented, but he was tall.”

  I cocked my head in curiosity.

  “When our female students go up en pointe, on their toes, some of them reach nearly six feet,” Arristaga said. “We need tall boys to partner with them.”

  I nodded. “Is he still enrolled?”

  Arristaga shook his head. “He showed up for the first couple of weeks of his senior year this past fall, but he told me that his mother died over the summer and he and his sister had to move in with their grandmother. She’s very religious, and she didn’t approve of him dancing. She said something like, he looked possessed by a devil when he did. It was a shame to lose him. I assumed he transferred to one of the mainstream high schools.”

  “Are there any students around I could talk to? Anyone who might have kept in touch with him?”

  “I don’t know offhand,” he said. “There are about forty kids in the program who might know him, and they’re all in their academic classrooms right now. If you leave me your card I’ll speak to them this afternoon and see if I can get any information from them.”

  “That would be great.” I handed him my card, and scrawled my personal cell number on the back. “Call me anytime.” Before I left, though, I had to ask about the flakka. “Was Dimetrie into drugs at all?”

  “Not as far as I know. These kids, their bodies, are everything to them, so they tend to eat carefully, exercise, take care of themselves. Why? Do you think Dimetrie is involved in drugs now?”

  “I think he knows someone who’s dealing flakka,” I said.

  “So this isn’t about saving Dimetrie, is it?” Arristaga demanded. “You assume that a young black man has to be a criminal?”

  “That’s not what I said. I’ve been very clear to you about what I know. I have seen a video of Dimetrie performing sexual acts with another boy whose name is Ozzy. Both of them are under the age of legal consent. That’s wrong, and against the law, and part of my investigation is to find both these boys, and any others who are underage, and get them away from these porn producers.”

  I took a breath. “As part of this investigation, I have discovered that this other boy supplied flakka to a young man who went crazy on Tuesday morning.”

  “The face-eating zombie? I read about him.”

  “So you see why it’s important that I find Dimetrie, and through him, this other boy, and then through him, whoever is distributing the flakka. I don’t care if they are black, white, or green. I’m going to stop them.”

  My tirade seemed to have placated Arristaga. “I meant what I said. If you get hold of Dimetrie, please let him know that I want to help. Today is a half-day for most of the school system, so if you wait until about one o’clock, if he’s enrolled in another high school, he might be at his grandmother’s place by the time you get there.”

  “That’s good to know.” I thanked him once again, and returned to my car, full of righteous indignation I was prepared to unleash on Dimetrie Beauvoir’s grandmother if she wasn’t willing to tell me what I needed.

  9.

  Like a Marionette

  I went back to the same coffee shop where I’d met Katya, opened my laptop, and used the secure VPN software to get on my Bureau e-mail. I’d gotten a few more messages from groups that helped LGBT kids, but none of them were able to shed any light on local pornographers.

  There had to be something else I could do. But what?

  Colin Hendricks at the DEA had implied I had special insight into the gay porn connection. Was there any other way to leverage that?

  I sat back in my chair. What if I wasn’t an FBI agent, just a gay guy in Fort Lauderdale looking for some fun. Would I be willing to experiment with flakka?

  That required too much of a shift in my outlook. I’d never been much into drugs in college, and even if I was still working as an accountant, I doubted I’d dabble into anything so dangerous.

  But Jonas was another story. He got high occasionally, though he’d promised never to bring drugs into the house, or even have them in a car we were driving in together. Getting caught with drugs in my vicinity, even if Jonas vouched for them, could be the end of my law enforcement career.

  Would Jonas try flakka? Based on what I knew of him, I had to say yes, especially if a guy he was interested in offered it to him.

  And what if he did, and he liked it? Where would he go to look for it?

  Jonas had a profile on Grindr, the gay hook-up app, and one night a few weeks before I got shot, he’d convinced me to sign up as well. I’d never logged in since then, but I pulled out my cell phone and opened the app.

  I was surprised at how many men were nearby and online. It was the middle of the morning, and I wasn’t in what I thought of as a very gay neighborhood, yet the first profile that popped up was for a man less than a thousand feet away.

  I looked furtively around the coffee shop, as if I’d been caught sneaking a peek at some guy in the locker room. No one around me matched his description, so perhaps he was in one of the other stores nearby.

  I started scrolling through profiles, looking for anyone who liked to get high. I found a couple of guys, but I hesitated to contact any of them. As a Federal Agent, if I initiated a conversation about drugs with someone, and that later resulted in legal proceedings, my role could easily be construed as entrapment.

  It also didn’t seem fair or moral to contact a guy through a hookup app when I had no intention of hooking up with him. It was enough to learn that a gay guy like Brian Garcia or Ozzy Perez could find a drug source that way.

  I checked the URL for the webcam site, hoping I could catch Ozzy online, but he wasn’t one of the performers available at the moment.

  By then it was one o’clock, and I logged out of the app and headed west into the heart of Little Haiti. Like many of the inner city neighborhoods around Miami, it was undergoing gentrification, with newly renovated houses right next to vacant lots and derelict properties.

  I passed a restaurant painted in bright yellow and green, with a stylized palm tree painted over the door. The large-
scale menu outside showed pictures of a pork dish called griot and a bowl of bright-orange liquid called soup joumou.

  The address in Dimetrie Beauvoir’s file was on a side street, and I cruised along, searching for house numbers on a row of small bungalows, all in various stages of disrepair. The stucco on his grandmother’s mustard-yellow house was stained with leaks from a rusty water pipe. It was surrounded by a chain-link fence, with a sparse patch of grass inside. Iron grillwork covered the two small windows.

  I parallel parked a few houses down and sat in my car for a moment with the air conditioning blasting. My gun felt heavy against my chest, in the shoulder holster hidden by my suit jacket. Despite the steps toward gentrification, Little Haiti was still the kind of neighborhood where drive-by shootings occurred on a regular basis, often taking out innocent children. One girl had been killed while she sat on a front porch while her aunt braided her hair.

  A pair of boys who were about seven or eight passed my car, looking in curiously. Ahead of me, a heavy-set older woman in a brightly flowered dress pushed a grocery cart loaded with pineapples and mangoes.

  I stepped out of the car, straightened my tie, and locked the door. I felt very conspicuous as a white man in a suit in an all-black neighborhood, and I sensed people watching me—including a skinny guy leaning against the wall of a grocery on the corner. A low-riding car passed me, the speakers blasting fast tropical music.

  Despite the sunshine and the bright colors, I felt an ominous gloom in the neighborhood that contrasted sharply with the joy I’d experienced at the New World School. What had it been like for Dimetrie to commute between these two worlds?

  With a smile plastered on my face, I walked down the cracked sidewalk to Mrs. Beauvoir’s house, let myself in through the gate, and rang the bell on the front door. To my right was a large crucifix with Jesus grimacing in pain, his body twisted and drops of blood were painted on his hands and feet.