“You know what I do?”
I leaned against the wall. “I know a lot, but I don’t know it all. I know your grandmother kicked you out. I’ve been told you’re a very talented dancer, and I know it’s illegal to film boys under eighteen in sexual scenarios. Why don’t you fill in the blanks for me?”
“Frank took me in,” Dimetrie said. “He gave me a place to live and put food on my plate. He pays me, and I get to hang out all day and fool around. Sometimes I have sex with him or with other guys he brings in, and he makes a movie out of it. Other times I sit in front of the camera and play with myself. It’s all good.”
“Who else lives here with you?” I’d noticed only one other bedroom on my way to Dimetrie’s room.
“Frank and Ozzy. But they booked yesterday.”
“You know where they went?”
“Nah. Frank was freaked out about something but he wouldn’t say what, least not to me. He packed up his stuff and Ozzy trailed off behind him.”
“Of his own free will?”
“Ozzy’s a loser, man. He thinks Frank loves him.”
There was something almost sleepy about his demeanor. “You’re high, aren’t you?”
“What’s it to you?”
“Getting high makes it easy to handle the pain, doesn’t it?” I asked. “How’d you like to live where you don’t have to feel that pain, and you don’t have to numb it?”
“What are you? A social worker?”
“No. But I know a guy who runs a shelter for boys like you. A place you can get back to dancing, kick off your career. Nobody will make you do anything like this.”
He shrugged. “Eric says I can stay here for awhile until his boss figures out what to do with me. Keep performing, make some money.”
“Is that what you want? Don’t you want to be somebody Lucie can be proud of?”
He was quiet for a moment. “You know my sister?”
“I talked to her a couple of days ago. She’s worried about you.”
He hesitated.
“Lucie believes in you, Dimetrie. So does your teacher at the New World School, Mr. Arristaga. You could have the career you want as a dancer. But you have to be willing to give this up and get to work.”
“You spoke to my teacher, too?”
“I did. And the dancer who substituted for him when he was sick. Everybody I talked to said how talented you are. Mr. Arristaga said he can put you in touch with people who could help you get back on your feet.” Then I played my last card. “You go back to school, go someplace safe, maybe Lucie can join you, get away from your grandmother and all her negativity.”
He nodded, then stood up. “I gotta put some clothes on and pack up my stuff.”
I walked back out to the living room where I called Katya and explained the situation to her. “Can you put together a search warrant for me?” I asked. “The detective from Lauderdale will get one, but she’s only looking for evidence connected to the murder of this kid on Lauderdale Beach. To collect what I need I’ll have to have my own warrant.”
“Sure. You have something I can get started with?”
“I have a couple of FD302s with all the details. I printed them out and they’re in a folder on my desk.”
She agreed to get them and put together the information for the warrant.
Cespedes was in the kitchen. “I found some nylon rope under the sink. I’ll have the ME see if it matches the marks on Dorje’s arms and legs,” she said. “The boy tell you anything useful?”
“He verified that Frank and Ozzy left together. He says Ozzy’s in love with Frank.”
She shook her head. “These poor kids. They don’t know what love is.”
I agreed with that. I was having a hard enough time figuring out my feelings toward Lester, and I was older and hopefully more mature than Ozzy and Dimetrie.
We heard the front door open and found Eric and the cheetah back in the living room. “You guys done yet?” he asked. “I’ve got an operation to run here.”
“Not anymore,” I said. “Dimetrie’s coming with me.”
“No fucking way. Dimetrie works here.”
The cheetah sat on the floor beside Eric and bared its teeth.
“You his boss?” I asked. “Because there’s a Florida statute against lewd and lascivious offenses committed against persons less than sixteen years of age. And if you’re running this operation that puts you behind bars ASAP.”
“Tough shit, Sherlock. Dimetrie’s seventeen. And he’s here of his own free will.”
“No more,” Dimetrie said, walking into the living room toting a plastic trash bag full of stuff. “I’m going with the FBI dude.”
“You are not,” Eric said.
“Stand down, Mr. Morozov,” Cespedes said. “I am not finished with my search of the premises, and you’re interfering. And you have no authority to prevent this young man from leaving with Agent Green, if that’s his choice.”
Eric dropped the cheetah’s leash and the big cat leapt at Detective Cespedes. I pulled my gun and shot by instinct, hitting the cat in its hind leg. He snarled and turned to me. “Call him off!” I said, but when I looked toward the front door I realized that Eric Morozov was gone.
The cat leapt at me as I fired again. The force of the shot sent him backwards toward the bedrooms.
“Out of here!” Cespedes said. “Now!”
Cespedes, Dimetrie, and I rushed out of the house and Cespedes slammed the door behind us. She pulled out her phone. “Good shooting,” she said to me, her voice shaky. “I owe you one.”
“Eric’s the only one who can control that cat,” Dimetrie said.
We heard the cheetah making chirping sounds inside the house as Cespedes called animal control. “Yup, a cheetah,” she said. “With at least two bullet wounds. Not having a good day.”
When she ended the call she said, “They’ll be here soon with a tranquilizer gun.”
“Will they be able to treat the cheetah? I didn’t want to kill it.”
“Sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do,” she said.
33.
La Di Dah
Cespedes and the two uniformed officers were going to wait at the house for animal control. While I waited for Colin Hendricks to show up, and for Katya to get the search warrant I needed, I focused on getting Dimetrie settled at Lazarus Place. I called Shane and arranged to meet him there.
Dimetrie tossed his trash bag of belongings in the back of my Mini and then folded his long legs into the front seat. He spent most of the trip texting on his cell phone. When we pulled up in front of Lazarus Place, he said, “This is it? Doesn’t look any better than the house where I was.”
“Yeah, but here nobody’s going to force you to have sex.”
“Nobody gonna pay me, either,” he grumbled, but he got out of the car.
Before we went inside, I asked, “You have any idea where Frank and Ozzy might have gone? Frank say anything at all?”
“I know Frank had some bucks,” he said. “A whole bag of coins and bills.”
The erotic bookstore. If I was right, Frank had made his regular Monday pickup from the XXX Factor, and he had the cash from the register and the back rooms.
“Anything else? Anything he said to Ozzy?”
“Frank said he was gonna go somewhere and lie low for a while, some la-di-dah type place. He didn’t want Ozzy to go with him but Ozzy begged and pleaded. Dumb ass.”
Shane opened the door and I introduced him to Dimetrie. “Come on in,” he said. “Let me show you around.”
While Shane took Dimetrie upstairs to the boys’ dorm, I saw Yunior playing a video game with one of the other boys. “Hey, sugar,” he said to me, in that exaggerated voice of his. “You can’t stay away from us, can you?”
“Can I talk to you for a minute?”
He handed the controller for the game to another boy. “Don’t lose this for me,” he said. Then he turned to me. “What’s up, sugar?”
“I have some
bad news. Dorje’s dead.”
“Oh shit,” he said. “I liked that dude. What happened to him?”
I explained that he’d been murdered in the building where he was squatting, but I left out the gory parts. “You know anybody who had beef with him?”
He shook his head. “He was a very sharp dude, always working the angles. I saw him a couple of days ago on Las Olas, and he said he had a deal cooking that was going to get him enough cash to launch his modeling career. Head shots, plane ticket to New York or Paris, the whole thing.”
“Any idea what kind of deal it was?”
“He wouldn’t say. It was all on the down-low. I figured he had hooked some sugar daddy who was going to front him the money.”
Or he had decided to take what he knew about Frank, or Eric, or whoever, and use it to leverage himself into a cash bonus. And instead of walking the runway in Paris, he was lying on a slab at the morgue.
I thanked Yunior and he reclaimed his place at the video game. Shane was waiting for me. “Dimetrie told me that Ozzy ran off with the guy running the porn house. This is your fault. If you’d let me talk to him when we knew where he was he’d be safe now.”
“You don’t know that, Shane. Dimetrie says that Ozzy’s in love with Frank, so he might have blown you off.” I took a deep breath. “Listen, Shane, I’ve got some bad news.” I motioned to the front door and he walked outside with me. I told him about Dorje’s death, but this time I included all the details. “You know any reason why someone would want to hurt him that way?”
“It’s a rough world out there,” he said. “Lots of bad people who want to take advantage of kids. Dorje probably picked up a trick who got mad at him.”
I doubted that Dorje had been killed by a trick and I wondered why Shane had latched onto that idea. “Mad enough to kill him?”
He shrugged. “You never know. Anyway, thanks for bringing Dimetrie by. I’m going to try and get him into the performing arts program at Dillard High so he can get his diploma. And he thinks he might be able to get some part-time work teaching dance to kids through a program he went through himself.”
“That’s awesome. Let me know if you hear anything more about Dorje, all right?”
He agreed, and I got back into my car. In the brief time it had been locked up, the temperature inside had skyrocketed and I had to turn the air on full blast. I sat there for a moment with my face against the vents, thinking of what I ought to do next.
As I fanned myself, Katya called. “I filled in the warrant request for you and I’m on my way to the judge’s office to get it signed. I can meet you at the house in about an hour, assuming the judge signs off.”
“Excellent. Can you get one of the computer guys to meet us there, too? Ask Wagon. He knows me.” Wagon was a Chinese-American guy I’d worked with on my previous case.
She agreed, and I checked back with Cespedes, who told me that animal control had arrived. “I’m going to get a search warrant for the house, but I can’t do anything about the video equipment.”
“I’ve already got an agent putting together my own warrant. Can you have a uniform wait at the house until she and I get there? Could be an hour or more.”
Cespedes said she could, and while I waited for Katya and Wagon to get organized, I made a detour to The XXX Factor. It was a single-story building in an industrial neighborhood down the street from Second Star, the bar where I’d gone with Yunior. The windows and glass door were all blacked out but there were neon signs advertising what the store had to sell.
The store was empty except for a bored clerk at the register, hunched over a video game system. I’d been in a couple of places like this in my life. Like the others, it was an ordinary room with fluorescent lights and wire racks—a K-Mart of porn. Next to the register was a flat open display case filled with dildos and cock rings and various kind of anal massagers. Straight material was in the front—books and magazines and movies displayed face-out. I figured the gay stuff was in the back.
I walked up to the clerk, introduced myself, and showed him my badge. “You know a guy named Frank Cardone?”
When he nodded, I asked, “He here now?”
The clerk shook his head. “He only comes by on Mondays to pick up the cash and credit card slips,” he said. “Or if there’s an emergency.”
“When was the last time he was here?”
“Monday like always. He left the paychecks for the staff and he took all the cash from the register, as well as the coins and bills from the machines. Pain in my ass because I didn’t have anything to make change with.”
“He say anything to you about where he might be going?”
“Nah. But the new manager might know.”
“New manager? Who’s that?”
“This Russian guy came by yesterday. Introduced himself, said he was going to be taking over for Frank.”
I found a photo of Eric Morozov on my laptop and showed it to the clerk. “Was this the guy?”
He shook his head. “Nah, the guy who came here had bushy black hair and a scar along his chin line.”
Someone else who’d gotten cut on his face like Dorje had? Was there a connection? “Did he give you a way to get in touch with him?”
“Nah. He said he’d be back next week. I was like, but what if something goes wrong? Who do I call? He was like, deal with it yourself. Yeah right.”
I thanked the clerk and left him my card. If I had to, I’d come back to the porn store the following Monday and hang out until this new manager showed up.
As I was leaving, I wondered where Frank could have gone. What had Dimetrie said—that Frank was going to some la-di-dah place? Did that mean something fancy? Somehow I couldn’t imagine Frank Cardone and his boy-toy checking into a high-class hotel—although maybe that was a good move, because I wouldn’t ordinarily think to look for Frank anywhere elegant.
Did he know that the FBI was after him? Or was he running from someone else—perhaps the same person who had killed Dorje and maybe even Alexei Verenich?
I didn’t think Frank would stay in Lauderdale—it would be too easy for him to run into someone who knew him. But which way would he go—north or south? Since I had my laptop with me, I decided to spend the rest of the time waiting for Katya and Wagon by doing something productive.
At a nearby coffee shop, I ordered a grande café mocha and plugged in the VPN software. Then I went online and started researching high-end resorts, beginning in Palm Beach and working my way north.
After a half-hour, no hotel or resort had jumped out at me, and I realized that I had no idea what Frank Cardone would consider a la-di-dah place anyway.
Was that even a term he’d use? My mother had called one of the women she worked with ‘la-di-dah,’ meaning she was the kind of person who thought she was better than everyone else. But that didn’t sound like something a guy like Frank would say. Could it be that La-di-dah was a specific place, not a generic phrase?
I went back to Google. But there were too many results for the phrase, and even when I added “gay” to my search, I got over four million hits. I hit pay dirt, though, when I added “Florida” to my terms.
The first link that popped up was to a hotel-restaurant-bar in Key West called La Te Da. The name came from La Terraza de Marti, a Spanish reference to the Cuban patriot Jose Marti. From the rainbow flags out front, to the mention of an adjacent bar, it looked like the place for Frank and Ozzy.
I called the hotel’s reservation line and asked to speak to the manager. I identified myself as an FBI Special Agent, and asked if he could tell me if he had a guest staying there by the name of Frank Cardone.
He came back on the line a moment later. “He hasn’t checked in yet, but he has a reservation for Sunday,” he said. “We’re booked up until then.”
I thanked him and hung up. The net was closing around Frank Cardone. It was up to me to make sure that I was in the right place to pull it up.
34.
Predators
“And very unhappy about being shot,” the officer said.
I called Cespedes and she agreed that the two officers could stay outside the house until my search was complete. “I put out a BOLO for Cardone’s license plate,” she said. “And the one registered to Eric Morozov, too.”
Colin Hendricks arrived a few minutes later with his own search warrant for materials related to the production and distribution of illegal substances. “Nobody to show it to,” I said. “The owner of the house is an LLC and the registered agent is dead. All three of the guys who were living here are gone now.”
“But you have their names and contact information?”
“I do. But I don’t have any evidence that implicates any of them in the flakka—just that one of the boys gave some to Brian Garcia.”
“I’ll work on that.” I showed him where I’d spotted the white crystals and he peered at the plastic container. “Sure looks like it, but I won’t be able to say for sure until I have it tested.”
“You can’t do field tests?” I asked.
“I have a kit back at the office, but it involves a respirator and eye protection so I’d rather do my testing in a controlled environment. This is powerful stuff and exposure to even a tiny bit can have very negative effects.”
Katya arrived as Colin was packing up the materials. She’d brought evidence bags and rubber gloves for both of us. As Colin began his search, we stood by the front door.
“When I went into your office to pick up the FD302s, I saw a Post-it note on your computer,” Katya said. “With Nicholas Geier’s name on it.”
“You know him?”
“He’s the guy I told you about—the one I was seeing in New York as part of my cover for the poker games. The one I got in too deep with.”
“His fingerprints were on Verenich’s boat.”
Her face paled.
Nobody Rides For Free Page 21