Dust

45

The train car looks like a one-bedroom trailer, and the photographs Benton texts show a single bed, a couch, a coffee table, several lamps, a TV and a kitchenette, very tidy and clean and unremarkable except for the masks.

“You should have Christmas dinner with us,” Lucy encourages Jake as he weaves palm strips together, the long, narrow green ribbons shiny side up and flashing as they whip in the bright sun.

The ceramic masks are displayed on stationary stands attached to a shelf high up on the wall, seven faces that in the spectral bandwidth of the nonvisible black light mounted over them shimmer iridescently. Bloodred, emerald green, bluish purple. Seven faces of seven women, only four Benton recognizes, he writes to me. The Washington, D.C., victims and, most recently, Gail Shipton.

“He’s killed before,” Benton’s next text lands.

“In Coral Gables,” Lucy says to Jake.

“I used to go to the Venetian Pool when I was a kid,” he replies as the hibiscus flower takes shape in his quick fingers. “The Gables are so expensive, nobody can live there anymore.”

“Where my grandmother used to live?” Lucy says. “A neighborhood off Seventy-ninth.”

“The worst street in Miami. I never go there.”

“It didn’t used to be. We had to move her.”

“To the Gables,” Jake considers. “I never go there. Too much money but that was a nice thing to do. Nobody’s grandmother should be a victim of crime.”

“I’d worry about the other guy,” Lucy says and Jake guffaws.

“Maybe Lucy can try facial recognition on 3 masks you don’t recognize,” I type to Benton. “Are there women missing & presumed murdered from cities where circus performs? If so compare masks to them?”

“Or victims could be women DL wanted out of the way,” Benton answers. “Could go back years.”

DL is Dominic Lombardi and the theory is that while he may have asked his troublesome sociopathic biological son to get rid of an occasional inconvenient human being like Klara Hembree, he never intended for Daniel Mersa to kill people for fun. But you get what you get, I always say. Benton believes Daniel was helping distribute the drugs that have been his downfall. Methylenedioxypyrovalerone. MDPV. Bath salts the organized criminals of Double S were getting from Chinese laboratories and distributing in cities across America including Cambridge.

“He would have had his car up north recently,” Benton continues to inform me of what’s going on. “Circus was in Boston early December then Brooklyn before going back south. SUV travels on flatbed & he has it wherever circus stops.”

Daniel Mersa’s Suburban would seat nine if he hadn’t taken out all of the seats except the two up front and I saw those pictures yesterday. A partition covered in black carpet is between the front and back and behind it is his studio, an empty plyboard space painted black and lined with soundproofing insulation where he suffocated his victims and made death masks of air-drying clay before posing the bodies in just the right position. One arm stretched out and cocked at the wrist, the way Gabriela Lagos’s right arm looked after he drowned her in her tub, and then he draped the body in a long white cloth reminiscent of a big white bath sheet.

The clay would set as rigor mortis did and he’d dress his latest victim in the panties of a previous one. And when he arrived at the location he picked he’d drag his morbid cargo on a bamboo stretcher that he kept in the back of his murdermobile, as Marino calls it. He and Benton have recovered colorful Lycra body socks, plastic bags from the Octopus spa shop, the designer duct tape, and several stun guns and dozens of cartridges, and white aerial silks, which also are made of Lycra. The long special fabrics are the stock-in-trade of performers like Daniel who fall, swing and suspend themselves from these silks and use them to fly through the air as they strike daring poses that thrill and amaze their audiences.

Also recovered from Daniel’s possession are hundreds of violent pornographic recordings, including ones of Gabriela Lagos bathing lewdly while her son Martin watched with his broken arm from the closed lid of the toilet, and there are also several recorded minutes of her being drowned by Daniel Mersa. Over the years he transferred his film library to DVDs, and more recently his iPad, and he had quite a collection of stories and recordings about notorious violent offenders, including ones Benton has written about.

There can be no question who the Capital Murderer is and exactly what he’s done but it continues to perplex me that his circus associates never questioned the strange reconfiguring of his SUV or the gaudy, shimmering ceramic masks inside the train car he’s lived in for years. But then the world he inhabits isn’t exactly a normal one, as he dresses in costumes, sometimes painting his face, before stepping into the ring to somersault onto horses or do backflips off elephants or hang and spin perilously from silks, ropes, and hoops or roll inside a human-sized hamster ball.

“I can come pick you up if you tell me where.” Lucy is still trying to talk Jake into eating Christmas dinner with us. “You won’t have much fun with Grans and would be best served to totally ignore my mother.”

“Well, that’s quite an enticement,” I remark as I look toward the red train where Benton and Marino are finishing up.

“Okay,” Jake says and he presents Lucy with his green woven flower, which is as close to looking like a hibiscus as something is going to get if it’s crafted from strips of a coconut palm frond. “You can pick me up here any time as long as you can fit my bike.”

“I can fit it. But I need a time.”

“I mostly tell it from the sun.”

“What time are we eating Christmas dinner, Aunt Kay?”

“It depends on my mother.”

“Everything depends on Grans,” Lucy says as an eye-rolling aside.

“I’m here most of the time so it doesn’t matter to me.” Jake has something on his mind he won’t say. “Tomorrow’s Christmas, I guess. I wouldn’t have thought about it. Everything for me is the weather. It’s all about where I go if it’s raining hard and I don’t like lightning.”

“They’re coming.” I get up from the seawall.

“The Red Coats?” Jake jokes but it’s as if a cloud has passed across the sun, his face shadowed by a wistfulness I can’t interpret.

“Marino wants baby back ribs.” I read the message from him that just landed. “He wants to know where to go. I recommend Shorty’s on South Dixie Highway.” I type my response as I talk.

“Janet can pick it up,” Lucy says.

“Marino will want to. Lighted beer signs, wagon wheels, cow skulls, and saddles everywhere. It’s his kind of place. We may never see him again.”

“I know where you can get the freshest fish you’ve ever put in your mouth,” Jake says and then I understand what’s happening with him.

“I’m in the mood for conch but it has to be just out of the shell and in cold salt water.” I see Benton and Marino walking away from the long red train, heading toward us. “And yellowtail on the grill with a simple Japanese marinade, very light is all that’s needed if the fish is fresh,” I say to Jake as if I’m giving him my order.

“You just follow Sixth Street to the Miami River. Not even ten minutes from here.”

“Can you show me?” I ask even though I know my way around.

“Sure I can,” he says.

My mother’s house is a twenty-minute drive from downtown when traffic is reasonable as it is right now.

Benton and Marino will meet us after they’ve picked up ribs, slaw, corn on the cob, and whatever else Marino decides to order at Shorty’s, a famous Texas-style barbecue restaurant with a big chimney in back that may have been the only thing left standing when the place burnt to the ground in the early seventies. I’d been to the original a few times when I was growing up, usually on my birthday, when my father’s health was good and he was still making a living at his small grocery store.

I follow Granada Boulevard deeper into Coral Gables where the foliage is old and lush, with ivy draping coral walls that go back to the 1920s and tall privacy hedges of lady palm and dense barriers of natal plum, with its fragrant white pinwheel flowers and sharp, spiny branches. The names of the narrow, quiet streets are painted in black on white curbstones and the white pavement is shaded by huge pin oaks with dense canopies and ficus trees with thick, ropy roots that crack roads, sidewalks, swimming pools, and penetrate plumbing.

Homes here range from small gems to villas and columned mansions, and the small rich city of some fifty thousand is where we used to sightsee at this very time of year when my father was well enough to drive us around to look at Christmas decorations that used to be far more outrageous than I’ve seen so far. I remember winterland scenes of snowmen and life-sized Santas in sleighs with reindeer on rooftops and so many lights that the illumination could be seen for miles away. My father’s car was a 195 °Chevrolet, white, with bumper wings and fender skirts, and I remember the smell of the fabric upholstery when it got hot in the sun while riding with my window cranked down.

My mother’s house wouldn’t be on any Christmas tour, with its electric candles in the windows and the small potted lemon cedar I found at a Whole Foods grocery store. Left to her own devices she doesn’t lift a finger to decorate or cook, and my sister usually hires somebody to do such things, depending on the financial status of her hombre del dia, as Lucy and I refer to whoever she’s dating on any given day. At least my mother won’t bat an eye when we show up with a homeless man we’ve invited for dinner — or maybe several dinners. She’s never forgotten what it is to be poor while Dorothy has no memory of it and is to the manner born, if you have the misfortune of witnessing the experience of her, which I don’t wish on anyone.

I take a left on Milan Avenue and my mother’s house is on the corner, built of white stucco, with a red barrel tile roof and a one-car garage that conceals the Honda sedan I wish she’d no longer drive. I see the slatted wooden blinds move in a front window, which is my mother’s hallmark way of checking who’s arrived, even though I’ve told her countless times that once she’s made it obvious she’s home it’s a little more difficult not to answer the door. Of course Lucy and I made sure she has a peephole and an alarm system that includes front and back cameras, but she doesn’t check. She’d rather part slats in the blinds and peer out the same way she’s done all of her long, hard life.

I pull into a driveway that’s just long enough to tuck one car off the street and Lucy, Jake, and I get out.

“Who did you bring?” my mother’s voice precedes her as the front door opens a quarter of the way, another old habit. “It’s not that awful man everybody’s after!”

“No, Mother,” I reply. “He’s been caught and is in jail.”

I open the door the rest of the way and my mother is in the same housedress she had on yesterday, white with big colorful flowers on it, and the big floral design makes her look wider and shorter and white makes her hair not as white and her skin more sallow. It does no good at all to say a word and I never do unless there’s a question of hygiene and there rarely is, maybe a food stain she can’t see or an odor her sense of smell won’t pick up anymore.

“Why is Lucy dressed like that?” My mother looks Lucy up and down as we file in with an ice chest full of fish.

“It’s the same thing I had on this morning, Grans. Cargo shorts and a sweatshirt.”

“I don’t know why you need all those pockets.”

“To shoplift just like you taught me. What happened to Janet and the dogs?”

“Doing potty in the backyard and she better pick it up. Three dogs? My house isn’t big enough. And Quincy won’t stop chewing things. Why would anyone name a dog after that silly TV show?”

“Where’s Mom?”

“Getting her nails done. Maybe it’s her hair. Who can keep up with her?”

“I doubt what’s-his-name can keep it up with her,” Lucy says, “he’s so old and still eats like he’s fat, won’t be pretty when he pops that rubber band around his gullet. But he’s rich, I guess. She’s not bringing him over, is she?”

“This is Jake.” I introduce him inside the living room and take the ice chest from him.

“How do you do, ma’am?” He hands my mother a flower he made.

“Well, isn’t that something. What is it?”

“It’s a hibiscus like all those you’ve got growing in front of your house.”

“They aren’t green. Do I need to put it in water?”

I carry the ice chest into my mother’s small kitchen with its terrazzo floor and painting of Jesus praying in the garden next to the refrigerator, and for the next half hour I rinse tuna filets and mix a marinade of soy sauce, fresh chopped ginger, Japanese sweet cooking wine, sake, and canola oil. Placing the fish inside the refrigerator, I take out a cold bottle of a very nice Sancerre and when I pull out the cork I smell grapefruit and flowers, and I pour a glass and get started on the fritters.

“Can I help?” Janet is in the doorway, very blond with bright eyes and a touch of sun, Sock and Jet Ranger at her heels, and then Quincy barges in, banging me with his swinging tail.

“There’s room for only one.” I smile at her. “How about a glass of wine?”

“Not yet.”

“If you could take our friends with you, please.”

“Come on, Quincy. Let’s go, gang.” She whistles at them and claps, and off they go.

I chop the tough conch meat, green pepper, celery, and garlic while I overhear voices in the living room of Lucy, Janet, my mother, and our guest chatting as if they’ve been friends for many years, and my mother’s voice is louder the more deaf she gets. The hearing aids I bought for her usually stay on top of the bathroom counter near all of the various cleaning pastes and brushes she needs for her dentures. And when she’s alone, which is most of the time, she wears the same housedress and doesn’t care if she can hear or has teeth.

I squeeze Meyer’s lemons and find the deep fryer in a cupboard when I hear the front door open again, and then I smell the baby back ribs Marino carries in, huge white bags with Shorty’s Bar-B-Q on them in red with their logo of a cartoon cowboy wearing a ten-gallon hat that has a big bullet hole in it.

“Out, out, out.” I take the bags from Marino and shoo him out of a kitchen that can’t possibly hold both of us. “I don’t think you bought enough.”

“I need a beer,” he says and that’s when I catch the look on his face, and then a different look on Benton’s face as he appears in the doorway.

“When you get to a stopping place,” Benton says to me and something has happened.

I dry my hands on a towel as I look at both of them in jeans and button-up shirts, their nondescript windbreakers hiding the pistols they carry. Marino’s face is stubbly and pink from long days and the sun while Benton’s looks the way it always does when something is wrong.

“What is it?”

“I’m surprised your office hasn’t called,” Benton says.

I check my phone and there’s an e-mail from Luke Zenner I didn’t notice while I was buying fish and driving and then distracted by my mother. Luke writes that everything is under control and not to worry, he won’t get started on the autopsy until later tonight when the Armed Forces chief medical examiner General Briggs is there. He’s flying in from Dover Air Force Base to assist and act as a witness, and what a shitty thing to happen Christmas Eve. They’ll take care of it and hopefully everyone can have tomorrow off. Have a nice holiday, Luke wishes me.

“It’s better you’re out of town anyway,” Benton informs me, and then he tells me what little he knows and there isn’t much to know, really. There rarely is when someone makes the simple decision to end life and end it easily.

Ed Granby waited until his wife had gone out to her spinning class today at around four p.m. and he locked all of the doors of their Brookline house, using the key on dead bolts that could be opened only from the inside so she couldn’t get back in and find him first. Then he sent an e-mail to the assistant special agent in charge, a close friend, telling him to drive to the house right away and let himself in by breaking out a window in the basement.

Granby’s e-mail has been forwarded to Benton and he shows it to me inside my mother’s kitchen as oil heats in the deep fryer.

“Thanks, buddy,” Granby wrote. “I’m done.”

He went down into the basement, looped a rope over the chin-up bar of a cable machine, wrapped a towel around his neck, sat on the floor, and hanged himself.

“Come on.” I turn off the deep fryer and grab the Sancerre and two glasses, and Benton and I walk out of the kitchen, past everyone in the living room, where piles of presents from my compulsive shopping are around the small tree.

My sister Dorothy has just arrived, wearing skintight faux-lizard designer pants, a low-cut leotard, and heavy makeup that make her look exactly the way she doesn’t want to look, which is older, flabbier, with oversized augmented breasts as rigid and round as rubber balls.

“I believe I will.” She eyes the wine and I shake my head Not now. “Well, excuse me, I guess I’ll have to serve myself.”

“We only came down so we could wait on you,” Lucy says.

“As you should. I’m your mother.”

Lucy doesn’t go after her the way she usually would, her eyes on Benton and me as I open the back door and feel the pleasantness of the late afternoon and see the long shadows in my mother’s small yard, not the yard from my childhood, and I always remind myself of that when I come here and don’t recognize anything, not the plantings or the house or the furniture, everything new or redone and soulless.

The grass is thick and springy beneath my feet, and the air is cool as it blows through old grapefruit and orange trees still heavy with fruit. We sit in webbed lawn chairs near the rock garden, with its palms and small statues — an angel, the Blessed Mother, a lamb — amid sunflowers and firecracker plants.

“So that’s what he does to his family the day before Christmas.” I pour wine and give Benton a glass. “I’m not sorry for him. I’m sorry for them.”

I lean back and close my eyes, and for an instant I see the key lime tree my mother had in her backyard when I was growing up. The citrus canker got it and it’s not the same part of town and not the same yard, and Benton reaches for my hand and laces his fingers through mine. The sun smolders a fiery orange over the low, flat roof of a neighbor’s house and we don’t talk. There’s nothing to say and nothing that’s happened is a surprise, and so we are quiet as we drink and hold hands.

When most of the wine is gone and the yard is in the shade, the sun too low to see, only a tangerine hint in the lower part of the darkening sky, he tells me he knew Granby was going to kill himself.

“I figured he might,” I reply.

“I knew it when Marino lifted him off the pavement by the back of his belt,” he says. “I could see it in Granby’s eyes that something important was gone that was never coming back.”

“Nothing was ever there to come back.”

“But I saw it and I didn’t do anything.”

“What would you have done?” I look at his sharp profile in the early dusk.

“Nothing,” he decides.

We get up to go inside because it’s getting chilly and if I drink much more, I won’t be safe with the deep fryer or the grill or anything.

Benton puts his arm around me and I wrap mine around his waist and the thick grass makes a dry sound as we walk on it. The grapefruit this year are huge and pale yellow and the oranges are big and pebbly and the wind rocks the trees as we move through a yard I pay to keep up but rarely sit in.

“Let’s get Dorothy to talk about herself so we won’t have to talk about anything at all,” I suggest as we climb the three steps that lead to the door.

“That will be the easiest thing we’ve ever done,” Benton says.