The Little Death (14 page)

“Sure.”

“And you’ll let me know if there’s any truth to what Reggie Kent said?”

“Sure.”

Swann looked down at Labastide’s index card, then back at Louis. “I guess I’ll just have to trust you.”

Louis smiled. “Andrew, this could be the beginning of a beautiful relationship.”

Chapter Eleven
 

It was hotter inside than out. The sun was out in full Florida force, and after the rain, the glass walls of the orchid house were steamy with condensation. Louis was just inside the door, and already he could feel the tickle of sweat down his temples.

He had never been inside an orchid house before, but he suspected the moisture and heat were what the flowers needed. After all, they grew in jungles, didn’t they?

The kid outside had told him this was where he could find Chuck Green, owner of Clean & Green Landscaping and Lawn Service. “Look for the big guy in the Dolphins hat,” he’d said.

Louis made his way down a narrow aisle, ducking under hanging baskets of orchids and their long, stringy roots. He spotted a barrel-chested man in a dirty Miami Dolphins ball cap near the back, stacking empty baskets under a table.

“Mr. Green?” Louis asked as he approached him.

The man grunted and pulled himself erect. His face was round and sunburnt, his dirty skin cut with lines of sweat.

“That’s me,” he said.

Louis introduced himself. Then, without mentioning Durand’s murder or Reggie Kent, he told Mr. Green he was looking for Emilio Labastide. He figured Green probably saw a revolving door of immigrant workers and that he would need a reminder to be able to place the kid. But Green surprised Louis with a quick nod and a half smile.

“I remember Emilio,” Green said. “He’s not in trouble, is he?”

“No,” Louis said. “I think he may be a witness to something, that’s all. Does he still work here?”

“Hell, no,” Green said. “It’s been a good four or five years. One day, he just stopped showing up, and I haven’t heard from him since.”

“Do you remember what time of year it was?” Louis asked.

“Not exactly, but I know it was the middle of the season. I had a full crew and more business than I could handle.”

“When’s the season?”

“Thanksgiving to Easter, give or take.”

“Would you have kept any personal information on Labastide?” Louis asked. “Home address? Phone number?”

Green’s eyes skittered and finally settled on something over Louis’s shoulder. Louis turned to look. Green was watching a young Hispanic man hang baskets.

“Mr. Green?”

Green blew out a breath scented with Mexican spices. “Look,” he said. “I do the best I can. I pay my guys good, and I treat them with respect. But I got no way of knowing if the information they give me is accurate. The government says that if the ID looks good, I can take it.”

“I’m not Immigration, Mr. Green,” Louis said. “I just need a lead here. Somewhere to start.”

Green hesitated, then gave a small nod, indicating that Louis should follow him outside. Green led him to a small cinder-block building. The office walls were papered with schedules and flyers written in Spanish. Green
gave one of the file cabinets a sharp kick in the side, and the middle drawer popped open. It was stuffed to the brim with papers.

Louis waited while Green dug deep into the mess. From somewhere outside, he could hear a DJ chattering away in Spanish. A few seconds later, a song came on. It sounded a lot like that Mexican Christmas carol…
“Feliz”
something. The song had ended by the time Green pushed to his feet.

“Here it is,” he said.

Green handed him a Xerox of a form. Like the index cards in the old Palm Beach jail, it contained only the basic information: Emilio Labastide. Farm Workers Village, building 6, apartment 8. Immokalee, Florida.

“Can I keep this?” Louis asked.

“Sure,” Green said. “It’s been five years. Don’t see what I’d need it for.”

“You said he just stopped showing up for work one day. Is that normal for these guys to just disappear from the job?”

“Normal for most but not Emilio,” Green said. “He was reliable and steady. Didn’t have that chip on his shoulder many of ’em have.”

“I was told he worked over in Palm Beach,” Louis said. “Was that his regular route?”

“Hell, they all wanted to work on the island,” Green said. “Ocean breezes and lots of T and A. But the people there are damn picky, so I only send my best guys over there. Only send the honest ones, too, so they wouldn’t steal nothing—or get accused of it. Emilio worked there steady for over a year.”

“Did you ever get complaints on him?”

“Not a one.”

“Did he ever talk about his personal life?”

“The kid never said much about anything except his sister, Rosa. He worried a lot about her.”

Louis looked back at the paper. Labastide had listed a Rosa Labastide as the emergency contact at the same address in Immokalee. Louis had been to Immokalee once before. Set in the middle of state land and vegetable fields, it was a dusty, nondescript town of rough-and-tumble bars and immigrant camps. It was a place where people came and went with the seasons but also a place that had the feel of a close-knit family making do in a hostile, foreign land. Louis hoped that if Labastide had moved on, someone there might know where he had gone.

“Did he ever talk about any of his customers in Palm Beach?” Louis asked.

Green shrugged. “Probably bitched about ’em once in a while, like they all do,” he said. “Not that I’d understand much of it, since his English was kinda bad and my Spanish ain’t good. But I don’t remember anything specific.”

“Is there any way to find out exactly whose yards he worked on?”

Green shook his head. “I have five or six different guys working the island at any point, and I wouldn’t have kept daily route sheets from that far back, so there’s no way I could know.”

Louis folded the paper, thanked Green, and headed toward the door. When he got outside, he paused and looked around. Three men were loading sod onto a flatbed. Another was carting potted palms across the lot.
Two more were pruning pink bougainvilleas in the shade of an awning. All were Hispanic. All were sweaty and dirty, with whisker-stubbled faces. From the sounds of it, most didn’t speak English.

You can screw upward. You can screw sideways. But you never screw down.

“Mr. Kincaid.”

Louis turned to Green, who had come up next to him. “I just remembered something,” Green said. “Don’t know if it will help or not, but there was one time Emilio asked if he could work the Emerald Dunes golf course in West Palm instead of the island.”

“Did he say why?”

“No. Just came to me one day and asked real politely if he could transfer crews.”

“Did you reassign him?”

“I couldn’t right then,” Green said. “Landscaping those places over there takes a special kind of talent, and Emilio had that artist’s eye. I couldn’t just stick anyone over there, so I told him it would be a few weeks.”

“How long after did he stop showing up?”

Green scratched his chin. “Now that I think about it, it was only a few days later. He wasn’t the type to get mad, so now I’m wondering if someone over there was giving him a hard time and he was afraid to say something.”

“Afraid he’d be discovered and deported?”

“Yeah,” Green said. “These guys live in fear of that. That’s why they slink around here, taking whatever shit people heap on ’em. They got no choice. They speak up, and they’re gone.” Green snapped his fingers. “Just like that.”

The idea that Labastide was back in Mexico was depressing. He was the only solid lead he and Mel had at this point, maybe the only person who could firm up the sex connection to Mark Durand.

The question was too big to ignore: Why had Labastide wanted a transfer away from the work—and the easy sex—of Palm Beach? It had to have been quite a powerful drug for a young guy like Labastide.

Had he been threatened by a jealous husband, as Margery had said? Or had he gotten himself in too deep, maybe fallen in love with one of the women? Or had he gotten himself mixed up with a man?

Green interrupted Louis’s thoughts.

“If you find him, you let him know he’s welcome back to work here anytime,” Green said. “He was a real nice kid. Real nice.”

It was late afternoon by the time Louis got to the Farm Workers Village. It was just a few miles outside Immokalee, set in the vegetable fields, just off the sun-bleached main highway that ran through town.

Louis parked next to a rickety pickup and got out of the Mustang. He had the feeling he had stepped back in time, onto an abandoned military base where everything had been torn down but the concrete barracks.

There were six two-story, boxy buildings with peeling paint, stairwells littered with plastic toys, and balcony railings draped with laundry. Children with dirty feet and long black hair played in the yard. A few men had found shelter from the sun under a mango tree, hats pulled down over their eyes, fingers wrapped around Tecate beers.

Like in the nursery in West Palm, there was a peppy tune playing somewhere. Faded numbers painted on the buildings led Louis to the farthest building in the compound. He was acutely aware of the attention he was drawing from the folks on the second-floor balcony as he approached.

Building six stood in the shade of a gumbo-limbo tree. Apartment eight was on the second floor, last in a line of four doors, three of which were open to capture the cool air. But as Louis passed, the doors slammed shut, followed by the hurried closing of curtains.

At the last door, Louis ducked under a hanging red-flowering plant and knocked softly on the freshly painted blue door. From inside, he could hear a baby crying but no indication that anyone was coming to the door. He knocked again. A pair of beautiful brown eyes appeared suddenly in the gap of the yellow curtains. Louis had no reason to think Labastide’s sister still might live here, but he tried.

“Rosa Labastide?” Louis called.

To Louis’s surprise, the door opened. A lovely woman with flowing dark hair stood in front of him, a baby propped on her plump hip and a bold tilt tipping her chin upward. She and the baby were dressed in bright orange cotton dresses.

“¿Porqué usted busca a Rosa?”

Louis shook his head. “Do you speak English?”

She pursed her lips and shifted the baby to the other hip. He caught a glimpse of the inside of the apartment: blue sofa, brown throw rug, a gold-framed picture of Jesus dominating a wall of family pictures. A female voice, from a radio or TV, murmured softly in Spanish.

“I am Rosa,” the woman said. “And I am not afraid of you. I am Rosa Díaz now. All legal.”

“I’m not Immigration,” Louis said. “I’m looking—”

The door of the apartment next to Rosa Díaz’s opened. An older woman stuck her head out and spoke excitedly to Rosa in Spanish. Louis was sure she was asking Rosa if everything was okay. Rosa barked back at her, and the other woman quickly retreated. Rosa turned back to Louis, her eyes still wary.

“What you want, then?” Rosa asked.

“I’m looking for your brother, Emilio,” he said.

“Who are you?”

“I’m a private detective,” Louis said.

Rosa put a protective hand on her baby’s head and reached for the door. Louis gently held it open.

“Not
policía,
” he said. “A different kind of detective. Private, like…”

“Like Mr. Magnum PI?” Rosa asked.

Louis smiled. “Yeah.”

Rosa returned his smile with a small one of her own, but still, she kept her hand on the door.

“I mean Emilio no harm,” Louis said. “I’m not going to arrest him. I just want to talk to him.”

Rosa glanced behind her, then motioned for him to come inside. A portable fan stirred the air, which was thick with the smell of baking cheese and baby powder. The blue sofa was draped with cream-colored things that looked like big doilies. A tiny TV sat under the picture of Jesus, its screen filled with the snowy image of that Latina talk show lady, Cristina something.

“I not know where Emilio is,” Rosa said. “I not see my brother for long time. Almost five years now.”

“Fall 1984?”

Rosa laid the baby down on the sofa and lowered her head. The bodice of her cotton dress rose and fell. “
Sí.
Eight-four. It was Halloween. I remember because I give out candy to the little ones. Since then I have no word. No letters.
Nada.
”

“Can you tell me what happened?” Louis asked. “Did he just stop coming home? Did he say anything about leaving?”

Rosa dropped to the edge of the sofa and placed a hand on the baby’s back. Its eyes closed at the touch.

“One time, he just not come home,” Rosa said. “He never speak of going away. He would not do that. We come here to this place from Santa Teresa, Mexico. I sixteen, he twenty. He not want to work here, so he get job in Palm Beach, for Mr. Green, working on pretty houses.”

“When was this?” Louis asked.

“That summer before he go away,” Rosa said. “He only work for Mr. Green short time before he got new
trabajo
.”

“A new job?”

“Sí.”

The baby drifted off to sleep. Rosa brushed a few strands of hair from her eyes and looked up at Louis. It was obvious that she had gone on with her life, marrying and having a baby, but in her soft brown eyes, he saw a profound sadness, the kind that came with being suddenly abandoned and not knowing why.