The Death Box (17 page)

“It’s that or talk to rental agents.”

He gave me a glance but didn’t ask, and we walked to his car. He pulled his keys, then paused, looking across his roof line at the Rover.

“How about you drive, Detective Ryder? I wanna see how it feels to be on a safari.”

24

After reluctantly leaving the wonderful blue pool, Leala had spent the night in a nearby park, snatching shards of sleep between a pink wall and a thick growth of scarlet azalea spiked with agave. The spot was small but concealed even from the moonlight, allowing Leala to sleep naked with the thin yellow dress drying on the spikes of an agave.

When the orange sun climbed past the trees and began brightening her hiding spot, Leala continued down the street, ready to leap from sight. What would they do to her for escaping?

A memory returned and Leala’s heart stopped. She wavered in the street on loosened knees. What had she been told by the Amili woman?

“If you don’t behave, we will punish your mama, Leala. If you do anything wrong, your mama will be hurt very bad. Do you understand?”

She had to call her mother. Leala ran down the block and saw two heavy women talking on the sidewalk. Pushing aside her fear, she approached.

“Pardon me, señoras. I must make a call to Honduras. How might this happen?”

The women looked at Leala’s bare feet and wrinkled clothes, then at one another. “Where are you from, little girl?” a woman said, her plump arms crossed and disapproval in her eyes. “What is your story?”

“Please, good lady. There is trouble and I must tell
mi madre
.”

The women again looked at one another. Silence until one of them pointed and said, “The
abacería
down the street. You can call from there.”

Leala ran until she saw a small sky-blue grocery on a corner criss-crossed with electrical and telephone wires, its walls spidered with crumbling stucco and its windows plastered with signs. One of the signs said,
TELEFONO A CENTROAMERICA Y SUDAMERICA
.
Another, hung in the front door, said,
OPEN/ABIERTO
. Leala stepped inside and saw an aisle crowded with crates of bananas, mangos, papayas and limes. Other aisles held canned goods, toiletries, spices, food mixes. There was a freezer for dairy products and soda pop and beer. Items hung from the ceiling and were piled against the walls.

An old man sat behind a counter smoking a cigarette. His yellow and wizened eyes wandered over Leala with approval.

“I would please like to make a phone call,” Leala said. “It is a hurry.”

“
Locale
?”

“Honduras.”

The man gestured to a rack of colorful plastic cards at his back, marked by countries and denominations and time allotments. “You will need a phone card, pretty one. I can sell you a five-dollar card good for twenty minutes. It is a good deal.”

“Five dollars?”

“Plus tax. Does the pretty lady wish a card?”

Leala’s head had been held under water. She had been raped, beaten with a stick and kicked. She had been slapped, fed slop, forced to live with rats and make her soil in a bucket. She had been made to do terrible, nasty things time and time again. But she had not earned a single
centavo
. She had no money.

But she had received lessons in making it.

Leala looked across the grocery and when she saw they were alone, stepped to the door and turned the sign from
OPEN
to
CLOSED
. She returned and leaned on the counter to better show the tops of her breasts as her mouth hung open.
Look sexy and stupid
, Orzibel had once instructed.
It makes money.

“I will trade you for a phone card,” Leala said.

“What do you mean?” the old man frowned, looking between Leala and the door.

Leala nodded toward the rack of phone cards. She smiled and pumped her fist slowly in the air.

After earning the card, Leala instructed the old man to assist her in the call, then go outside and leave her alone. He assented quickly, needing a cigarette and time to catch his breath.

“Leala?” her mother wailed upon hearing Leala’s voice. “Oh my baby!”

“Mama, shhhh. Please, Mama. I need to talk to you, fast. There are difficulties here. I am fixing them and then I will come home.”

“What are you doing? Are you worki—”

“There will be time to talk later, Mama. Now you must listen.”

“
You
must listen, Leala. You have to—”

“
Silencio
, Mama! You are in danger from the one who led me away. Terrible danger. Bad people wish to control me through you.”

“
Madre de Dios
,” Leala’s mother whispered. “What do I do?”

“Go to Tegucigalpa and stay with Aunt Esmel. Do not tell anyone where you are going. How soon can you leave?”

“Maybe by the day after tomorrow if I—”

“I mean minutes, Mama.”

In addition to everything else, the store also sold inexpensive clothing and shoes. Leala departed ten minutes later in a new blue cotton dress, new sandals on her feet, a bright white scarf to keep the sun from her head, and the largest pair of sunglasses on the rack. She had a colorful woven bag to carry her fruit and tortillas. Plus ten dollars in singles.

The old man was gasping as she left, his legs too weak to cross the floor, and Leala thoughtfully reversed the sign to read
OPEN
once again.

25

Orzibel stretched out on the couch and used one hand to pull his aloha silk shirt higher up his rib cage, the other drawing a dark-haired head closer to his body. “That’s right, baby. All the way down. STOP FUCKING GAGGING! You wanna make money you gotta learn to—”

The cell phone buzzed from the glass table beside Orzibel. He snatched it up, checked the number and put the phone to his ear. “Things OK down there, Chaku? The food get deliv—” Orzibel scowled and pushed the girl roughly away, his thumb yanking toward the door. “Beat it,
puta
. School’s out for now.”

He put the phone back to his ear, his voice a tense whisper. “I’ll be right there. Keep looking.”

Orzibel jammed his shirt into his pants, zipped up and ran to the basement, where Chaku waited with three Hispanic men in low-slung pants and bandana-wrapped heads.

“The Rosales girl is gone, Orlando,” Chaku said quietly. “Vanished. We have searched the whole of the basement. Every crack.”

“What? HOW?”

“Jaime and Pablo brought food and water through the tunnel last night. It’s possible she concealed herself until no one could see her escape.”

“What of the watchman in the warehouse?”

“He saw nothing. Neither did Jaime and Pablo.”

“Mierde!”
Orzibel’s fist slammed the door. “The girl will call her mama when she gets a chance, all they ever want to do is call mama. I will contact Miguel in Honduras. When Leala calls, Mama will tell Leala to get her tight little ass back here or Mama’s heart goes the way her eye did.”

“Eye?” Chaku grunted.

Orzibel mimed plucking out his eye. “I will amend the threat to include death if we do not see Leala Rosales soon.” Orzibel pulled his phone, paused. “Wait, Chaku … you have a photograph of the girl?”

Morales pulled a 3 x 5 picture from the pocket of a black velvet workout suit, a head and shoulder shot of Leala Rosales taken, as was the custom, of every piece of imported product, the photos typically used in the marketing aspect of the enterprise, giving potential employers a chance to study the goods.

“Put copies in the hands of our people,” Orzibel said. “And others whose eyes can see without tongues wagging. Say that good information will receive both my gratitude and a thousand-dollar gift. Also make it known that anyone helping this bitch will feel my steel in their bellies.”

Chaku edged close. “Rosales will be somewhere in Little Havana or very close, Orlando. She will feel safer near her heritage.”

“A good thought. I will handle Mama, you cast the net in the community.”

The huge man cleared his throat. “You will now go upstairs and tell Amili Zelaya of the trouble, Orlando?”

Orzibel’s eyes tightened into slits. “It falls on me to shovel the dung like I have always done. I will have Leala Rosales back very soon, and no one need know.”

“What will you do when Rosales is returned, Orlando?”

“I will fix the problem permanently, Chaku,” Orzibel said, nodding to himself as if a decision had been made. “And make big money at the same time.”

Miguel Tolandoro’s silver Toyota pickup led a plume of brown dust into the rural village. He was eating a piece of fried chicken and scattering chickens from the road as he wove down a street of brown dirt. Exiting the truck he tossed the bone at a pack of skinny dogs, setting off a fight. He tucked his shirttails into his pants, his voluminous belly making it a job of feel, not sight.

Tolandoro’s pointed boots clicked down the cobbled alley as he passed a large four-paned window looking into a simple kitchen, three panes of glass broken out and replaced with tin and wood scraps. The next address was the one he sought, the Rosales household. It seemed the timid little Leala Rosales was proving a handful in the States, but he’d soon make the proper adjustments in the situation.

Tolandoro’s rough knuckles pounded the sun-bleached wooden door and he spoke the words memorized on the drive. “Señora Rosales … I bring word from Leala, who is living an excellent life in America and working hard for you. She wishes you to have a gift from her labor and to call her on my telephone. May I enter your fine home?”

Nothing. Tolandoro tried again, louder. A face at the neighboring hovel peered out the remaining glass window, then disappeared. Seconds later the door opened and a wizened woman looked out, her eyes filled with anger.

“She is gone. Go away. Stop your noise.”

“Where is she, old one?”

“You took her daughter, did you not?”

Tolandoro puffed out his chest and his chin. “Leala Rosales wanted to earn her fortune. It is my business to make the beautiful dreams come true. Where is the mother?”

“You are a pimp,” the old woman hissed.

Tolandoro’s jaw clenched and his eyes slitted. “Where is the mother, old woman? Tell me before I—”

“She has left for unknown places. She knows her daughter is gone forever. Stolen by a liar and procurer.”

“Do not address me like that!”

The door slammed but the old woman continued to yell. “Filth! Pimp! Stealer of babies!”

Miguel Tolandoro started away, but halted after three steps to snatch a rock from the gutter. He turned and smashed it through the last window, which would now need covering to keep out the flies.

“Live in the dark, crone,” Tolandoro called through the hole before striding back to his vehicle.

26

Hattie Doyle was in her seventies, wore a pink housedress, fluffy matching mules, and too much lipstick. After apologizing for hair in curlers – “I gotta set it ev’ry day or it looks like I’m wearin’ a windstorm up there” – she invited us into her home, small and tidy and filled with inexpensive souvenirs from places like Rock City, Nashville and Branson. Ms Doyle was a transplant from the coal fields of West Virginia whose husband, Delbert, had died three years back from black lung.

She held a cigarette in one hand, an ashtray in the other, and nodded toward the former Carosso household, eighty feet distant over a chain-link fence threaded with moon vines. A sickly twelve-foot palm tottered in Carosso’s side yard, held in place by two-by-fours.

“Mr Paul had some ornery-looking critters over there at times, men mostly,” Ms Doyle remembered between sucks on the smoke. “A few ladies who didn’t really look much like ladies, if you gennelmen get my drift. They’d barbecue burgers out back and get drunked-up. I figured they was folks he worked with at the concrete plant.”

“Did you speak to him very much, ma’am?” Delmara asked.

“A little. Mr Paul, he weren’t a big talker.”

“He have this crowd over much, the ornery critters?”

“Purty regular, twict a month or so.’ She paused in thought, tapping the cigarette on the tray. “’Cept I never saw them there when he had his niece visitin’.”

“Niece?”

“A year or so back. He had his niece come and stay with him for a couple months. He was keepin’ the girl while her parents went through tough times. It was sad.”

“Tell me about the niece, Ms Doyle.”

She frowned through curling blue smoke. “Hardly ever saw her cuz she stayed inside. Sixteen or thereabouts. Pretty li’l thing, skinny as you git, though. Big sad eyes.”

“Caucasian?”

She shrugged. “Musta been a mix to be his blood niece, with Mesican or Cuban or whatever. I been livin’ in Floridy almost eight years an’ I sure cain’t tell. Them people seems able to, but I cain’t.”

“The girl never came out? Went places?”

“I only found out she was over there when she came busting out the door onct, cryin’ her eyes out. Mr Paul grabbed her up in his arms and carried her back inside. He looked over and saw me watching. That’s when he come and told me the story.”

“About tough times?”

She stubbed out the smoke and shook her head. “The father – he musta been the white one – had cancer in his backside, y’know, and was dying. But since he couldn’t be like a man to her no more, the mother had found herself a boyfriend and wanted the daddy to sign the papers so she could get married to the boyfriend. When Mr C told me, he ’bout near busted down crying and I understood the troubles that poor girl was going through. And now I understand about the parties being stopped whilst the girl was livin’ there.”

“The barbecues?”

“Makes sense, you think about it,” Miz Doyle said, lighting another smoke. “As young and pretty as that li’l girl was, Mr Paul didn’t want them rough types around her, bad influences and all. Musta been why he kep’ her in the house all the time: He was watchin’ out for her.”

I shot a glance at Gershwin. His eyes crossed and his mouth dropped in mock amazement.

“Did you get the niece’s name?” Vince asked.