by Mark Dawson
Milton continued. The Best Burger Palace was the last business on the block, and Milton turned as he went by it and walked down Grand. There were two young men on the corner, both wearing hooded tops and dirty jeans, and they eyed him with baleful intent as he navigated around them and continued to the south. The area was even more dilapidated away from the main drag. The building on the other side was wreathed in scaffold and mesh, but it didn’t look as if any work had been carried out there for weeks. There was a big oak tree that had ruptured the paving slabs, a low iron fence around the tree against which two BMXs were locked, and an old Snapple-branded drinks cabinet that had been abandoned half on the sidewalk and half in the gutter. The snow was heavier here, and the road had not been ploughed.
Milton dawdled outside 501 Grand. It was a one-storey addition that had been constructed behind the Burger Palace. An awning extended out to cover the stoop and the steps that led down to the sidewalk. The door was protected by a heavy iron cage. There was an open doorway to the right that offered access to a workshop that was jammed full of catering equipment; the Snapple cabinet had been pushed out of the workshop and dumped in the road. There had been a second opening to the right of the workshop, but it had been bricked over save for a line of windows at the top.
Milton looked back at the young men he had passed; they were talking to a third man, whom they sent down the street to 501. Milton crossed the road and paused behind the trailer of an eighteen-wheeler that had been parked flush with the scaffold. The man climbed the steps, pressed a buzzer and waited beneath the awning. A slot was opened and the man reached through the bars to collect something that was proffered to him. He turned and walked away, stomping through the snow back up Grand to Atlantic. The slot shut again. The purpose of the premises was obvious now: it was being used to deal drugs. The two young men took the money and called ahead to whoever was inside number 501 to confirm that the customers were good to be served. The customers would then be directed over to the slot, where they were given the merchandise. It was a neat system. Keeping the money and the merchandise apart made it more difficult for rivals to rip off the business. And by making sure that the two parts of the transaction—payment and delivery—were separate, too, it was more difficult for law enforcement to make an effective bust.
Milton continued. The rest of Grand Avenue on the same side as the drug business was a single lot. A mesh fence secured it from the street and offered a clear view inside. Milton saw tractor units, boats, construction vehicles and cars. He continued to Pacific Street and looked into the lot. It backed all the way up to the rear of the buildings that faced onto Atlantic. Milton suspected that he might have struck it lucky; the lot would be easy to get into, and the abandoned vehicles would give him more than enough cover to get to the back of the building without fear of detection.
He would check that out later.
105
Milton walked onto Pacific Street and stopped. It was quiet, everything muffled by the snow.
He could see the rear of the club from here. There was a wide-open space that had been used to accommodate two dozen vehicles. There were cars, buses, an old boat and a truck, most of them wrecks that were no good for anything but scrap and all of them covered by inches of snow. Milton looked up and down the street and, satisfied that there was no one watching, he approached the first mesh gate that prevented access to the lot. It was secured by a chain and padlock; it would be an easy enough thing to snap through the chain with a pair of bolt cutters, but he didn’t want to alert anyone that the lot’s security had been breached. He went to the second gate. It was secured in the same fashion, but the chain was longer and, when Milton pushed the gate back, he was able to open up a wide enough gap that he could slip inside.
There were five distinct lines of vehicles arranged ahead of him. The densest concentration was to the left and he headed there, slipping into the space between a Volvo that had been totalled in a head-on collision and a red Chevy flatbed truck. He was leaving tracks behind him, but there was nothing that he could do about that. He crouched beneath the roof of the Volvo so that he was not visible from the adjacent Grand Avenue and moved forward. He passed around a tree and then into the narrow space between a boat on a trailer and a black pickup. He stopped again when he reached the stern of the boat. There was a low-loader truck parked in the space between him and the wall that marked the start of the single-storey rear extensions. Milton recalled the geography: the addition to the immediate left was where the drugs were kept; the one directly ahead of him led into the club and, above that, the second and third floors of the building; the addition to the right must have been connected to the Falafel Hut.
There was one final car ahead of him: a new Audi with tinted windows. The tracks that led to its wheels were fresh. Milton took out his phone and took a picture of the plate.
There was no sign of activity ahead of him, and Milton decided to take the opportunity to scout a little closer to his target. He ran forward and reached the wall. There were doors out into the yard from all three properties. They were all solid wood, with no windows, and they were all closed. There was a dumpster next to the first door and Milton clambered onto it, flinching a little at the clash of his boots against the metal lid. The dumpster was tall enough for him to be able to reach up and pull himself onto the snowy roof.
Milton took out his phone and started to take pictures. The roof had been turned into an outside space with a table and chairs. The table was equipped with a patio umbrella and there was a barbecue next to it. Milton crept to his left and hid behind a raised flower bed. The space was narrow, perhaps five metres wide by ten metres in length. It was separated from the roofs on either side by two-metre-tall brick walls.
Milton kept snapping pictures. There were two windows ahead of him, but they had been bricked in. Milton looked up: there were three windows on the floor above. The roof was accessed through a door where the third window on this level would once have been.
He crept forward until he was pressed against the wall. He looked at the door. It was made of wood and looked solid. There was half an inch between the bottom of the door and the floor, but, as Milton lay down flat, he couldn’t get down low enough to see through it. It would offer a serious obstacle to anyone who wanted to get inside without an invitation. He took photographs of the door, including the hinges and the handle, checked that the yard was clear, and made his way back to the edge of the roof. He lowered himself down to the dumpster and then down to the snowy ground.
It was going to be difficult to get inside.
Difficult, but not impossible.
106
Milton went back to the entrance. A short line of customers had formed while he had been around the back, and he joined at the end and waited as they all slowly shuffled forward. The two corner boys were still there, but they paid him no attention; if they had seen him return, they would probably have thought that his walk around the block was to summon up the courage to go into the club.
Milton reached the front of the line. There was a booth just inside the entrance with a Plexiglas window and a slot above a narrow counter. There was a woman in the booth, and she stared out at Milton with barely disguised boredom.
“Twenty bucks.”
Milton pushed two tens through the slot.
“You been here before?”
“No,” he said.
“You gotta buy a drink. You want a private dance, you speak to the girl you like and arrange it directly with her. No touching under no circumstances. You put your hands on, they’ll take you out back and make you wish you hadn’t. You got it?”
“I do.”
The woman snorted disdainfully and indicated with a jerk of her head that he should go inside.
The club was small, with mirrors on all of the walls to try to make it seem larger than it was. There was a bar, where two topless bartenders served the clientele. There was a circular dais in the centre of the room with a pole and narrow catwalks t
hat extended out from the twelve and six o’clock positions. Seats were arranged along the catwalks and around the dais, and the club’s early afternoon patrons sat there and watched the show. They left their beers and glasses of spirits on the stage, reaching up to slip dollar bills into the garter belts of the dancers once they had finished their shows and solicited for tips. Milton looked at the men: they were glassy-eyed, ogling the dancers and reflexively putting their drinks to their lips. They were joined by an almost equal number of dancers dressed in very little as they worked the crowd, offering private shows. The girls on the stage watched themselves, too, glancing into the mirrors as their reflections whirled and spun. It was soulless and depressing.
Milton bought an eight-dollar beer and took an empty seat at the runway with the fewest patrons on either side of it. He put the bottle on the catwalk and looked around. There was a door at the back of the room; light spilled out of it as a man opened and closed it. Milton watched the man as he went to the bar. It was obvious that the newcomer wasn’t a patron; he didn’t spare a glance at the half-naked women and, as he reached the bar, he exchanged words with one of the girls with a bored ease that suggested that he knew her. He took four unopened bottles of beer—another discrepancy as compared to the patrons, since they all had their bottles opened at the bar—and returned to the back of the room. He opened the door and went back inside.
The MC introduced the next dancer up—a black girl with the stage name Pantera—and the routine began again. The women were as diverse as the patrons: they were black, white and Latino; tall and short. They shared a similar body type: small breasts, hard bodies covered in tattoos, and generous behinds. It seemed that the club’s focus was on that latter characteristic, with each thrust and jiggle and squat set to the pounding hip-hop soundtrack. Milton watched as the dancer on the stage eased herself up the pole, suspending herself just with her legs as she turned upside down and slid down to rest on her shoulders. She lowered herself all the way down and Milton pretended to watch as she simulated sex, first on her hands and knees and then flipping over onto her back with her high-heeled feet on either side of his bottle.
The track faded out. The MC came over the PA, encouraged the audience to show their appreciation, and introduced the next dancer as Sparkle. Pantera grabbed her discarded underwear and put it back on without a shred of self-consciousness. She teetered down the steps on her vertiginous heels and came over to him.
“You like the show, baby?” she asked.
“I did.”
“You want a private show? I’ll dance just for you.”
“Where do you do that?”
She turned and gestured to the doorway that Milton had seen at the back of the room. “Through there. We got our own booth, just me and you.”
“Sure,” Milton said.
107
Pantera led the way. The door was ajar, and she opened it and went through. Milton followed. There was a corridor beyond with five doors: four to the left and one at the end. Milton recalled the geography of the buildings from his tour of the exterior of the block. The door at the end of the corridor would open into the rear addition that was the twin of number 501, the premises that were being used to distribute the drugs. The three doors nearest to them were the same: plain, not particularly sturdy, and ajar. The final door was a much more serious affair. It was metal, with a peephole at eye level.
Pantera continued down the corridor. Milton glanced through a crack between the first door and the frame and saw a small booth. A man was sitting on a wooden chair, and a woman was dancing between his spread legs. She ground her backside into his crotch and, as she looked up at the sound of their passing, Milton saw the almost comical boredom on her face.
“In here, baby,” Pantera said, opening the second door.
“What’s through the door?” Milton asked.
“What?”
“The door at the end of the corridor. Where does it go?”
“You don’t want to worry about that,” she said.
“Does the club continue upstairs?”
“No,” she said. “That’s management. Come on.”
She opened the door to a vacant booth and waited next to it with her hand on her hip. Milton looked inside: it wasn’t much more than a cubicle, with a single chair and just enough space for the girl to stand between him and the door.
“How you want me to dance?” she asked.
“It’s all right,” he said. “I don’t.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m Detective Polanski,” he said.
“You gotta be kidding me.”
“Afraid not,” he said. “I have a few questions for you.”
She shook her head vigorously. “I ain’t answering shit from you.”
“Really?” Milton said. “We can take this to the precinct if you like. I can arrest you now and drag you out there. Makes no difference to me. Might not look so good for you, though.”
“You ain’t got nothing on me, so don’t pretend like you do.”
“I’ve got reasonable cause to believe that you’re working as a prostitute. That’s enough for me to arrest you. I can be more creative if I have to be.”
Her eyes went wide. “I ain’t no prostitute!” she said, her voice throbbing with indignation.
Milton shrugged. “But you just offered to give me extras after the dance.”
“You motherfucker!” she said, quietening her voice.
“It doesn’t have to go that way,” Milton said. “I’m not interested in you.”
“So what do you want?”
“Information. That’s all.”
She looked at him, the fight draining out of her. “I fucking hate cops,” she said, defeated.
He could smell her: a mixture of perspiration and cheap perfume.
“What’s your name?” he said. “Your real name.”
“Sarah,” she said. “Look, the longer we in here, the more likely it is they gonna send someone back to make sure I’m okay. What you wanna know?”
“The club,” he said. “How long have you been here?”
“Six months? Eight… I don’t know.”
“Who owns it?”
She shrugged.
“Is it Carlos Acosta?”
She held his eye. “If you already know, you don’t gotta ask.”
“Is he in the club often?”
“Not usually,” she said. “But the last week or so, all the time.”
“You know why that is?”
“I heard one of the girls who spoke to one of his guys, she said that she heard it ain’t safe for him to be out on the street too much right now. This place, they say he thinks it’s safe. Can’t get to him once he’s in here.”
“When was the last time you saw him?”
“Today,” she said.
“Really?”
“I was here at eleven thirty. I parked my car out on Bergen Street out back and walked the rest of the way. Carlos has an Audi, parks it in the lot behind the building. It was there when I went by.”
“So you saw his car—but you didn’t see him?”
She shrugged. “Sure. But he always uses the Audi. He don’t go nowhere unless he’s in it.”
“What about upstairs? Do the girls go up there?”
She shrugged. “Sometimes. They have parties.” She left the implicit suggestion of what that might entail.
“How often do you go upstairs?”
“Not often.”
“But you have been up?”
Her weary frown was replaced by anxiety. “This about Carlos?”
“Yes,” Milton said.
“Then no way, man. No fucking way. There ain’t nothing you could do to me that he wouldn’t do a thousand times worse.”
“It’s just information, Sarah. I’m not asking for anything that could ever come back to you. No one knows who I am. You get to walk out of here with no one the wiser if you help me out. How often do you go upstairs?”
&
nbsp; She glowered at him resentfully. “Once or twice a week.”
Milton tried to be discreet. “So Carlos likes you?”
“Not him,” she said, shaking her head. “His brother—Savio.”
“Tell me what it’s like up there. Just imagine you’re out in the corridor, out there.” He nodded to the door. “There’s a door at the end, on the left. A big metal door. What’s inside?”
“You got a flight of stairs.”
“Describe them, please.”
She shook her head with a mixture of impatience and reluctance. “They go up to a landing. There’s another door there, halfway up; they usually leave that open. You step through that and then there’s a door that opens out onto the roof. They got a garden up there—they go out and smoke weed in the summer.”
“They keep it locked?”
She nodded. “It’s like the door downstairs. I tried to open it one time—it’s fucking heavy.”
Milton indicated that she should continue.
“So you go through the cage door, you turn left, then you go up the stairs again and then you get to the second floor. The whole floor is one big room.”
“Describe it.”
“It’s big. They knocked the walls through. They got couches, a big flat-screen TV, pool table.”
“Is it where Acosta lives?”
“No,” she said. “He’s on the next floor up, on the third floor.”
“Tell me about it.”
“It’s bedrooms,” she said. “I only been in the one Savio uses, so don’t ask me about the others because I can’t help you.”
“How many rooms?”
“Don’t know. Four?”
Milton concentrated hard, building a picture of the interior that he would be able to rely upon later. “That’s good, Sarah,” he said. “Nearly done. Last question. Did you hear anything about two people who might have been taken up there? A man and his son?”