Thriller, page 12
“Hey there, Dwayne. A little late for you to be in school, isn’t it?”
“I have a job,” Dwayne said. He walked to where Ollie had paused with the cart. He put his hand on the mound of rugs. “What are you doing?”
“Remember that dust storm last week?”
“Do I ever. Aunt Rose and me had to sweep for hours.”
“Can’t just sweep these rugs, Dwayne. Got to knock the dust clean out of ’em. I’ll do it outside.”
“How?”
“Come on, I’ll show you.”
Ollie pushed the cart to a door at the end of the hallway, which opened onto a ramp that led down to the playground in the back of the school. The janitor jingled as he walked, the result of a big ring of keys that hung from a belt loop on his pants. Ollie had told Dwayne that on the ring was a key to every door in the schoolhouse. He wheeled the cart across brittle grass to the steel jungle gym, where he lifted the top rug and draped it over one of the horizontal bars. He reached to the bottom shelf of the two-tiered cart and came up with a long wooden paddle. The paddle had several holes cut in the blade.
“Step back, Dwayne,” Ollie cautioned. When the boy had done as he was asked, the janitor said, “Now watch this.”
Ollie drew the paddle back and swung, just like Dwayne swung a baseball bat. Dwayne never had much luck hitting a ball, but Ollie’s paddle slammed against the rug with a great thwack! A cloud of dust and grit exploded from the rug and settled on the ground.
“Want to try it, Dwayne?” he said.
He held out the paddle and Dwayne took hold. It was heavier than he’d imagined, heavier than any baseball bat he’d ever held. He gave Ollie a doubtful look.
“Go ahead. Beat it,” Ollie encouraged him.
But Dwayne still didn’t swing.
“Designed that rug beater myself, Dwayne. See those holes I drilled? They make it what you might call aerodynamic. Don’t worry,” Ollie assured him. “You’ll swing like a champ.”
Dwayne grasped the paddle with both hands, took a stance as he might have at home plate, and swung with all his might. The paddle connected to the rug with a loud thwack, eliciting a cloud of grit and dust, just as there’d been when Ollie himself had swung.
“Well, done, Dwayne.” Ollie gave him a pat on the back, and Dwayne grinned from ear to ear.
“All right, son. You’d best get to your work.” Ollie took the paddle from Dwayne, then said, “By the way, what’s this job of yours?”
“Mr. Carraway gave me a dollar. I have to clean the erasers in the science room.”
“That so? A dollar, eh?”
“I’m saving money to buy Aunt Rose a soft towel for Christmas.”
“Well, Dwayne, that’s just about the nicest thing I ever heard. Did you tell Mr. Carraway what you’ll do with the money?”
Dwayne shook his head. “He was busy with Mrs. Helgerson.”
“What’s that?”
“He had business with Mrs. Helgerson.”
A darkness came over Ollie’s face. It reminded Dwayne of when the dust storm had swept in and blocked out the sun and afterward everything was dirty.
“Go on to your chore,” Ollie said.
Dwayne left him and reentered the school building, which was still empty and quiet. He went to the science room, where there were two chalkboards, one along the wall at the front of the room, and one along the wall opposite the row of windows. On one of the boards was a drawing of the upper part of a person’s body and head. A kind of pathway led from the person’s mouth to the stomach. Beside the drawing were written the words “Alimentary canal.” Which made Dwayne smile. It was comforting to know that teachers made mistakes, too. Even he knew how to spell elementary.
There were four erasers, two for each chalkboard. He went about his business, sliding a windowpane up and clapping the dust from the erasers in the air outside. To test his work, he slapped the erasers against the dark green chalkboards. He wanted to do a good job for the dollar he’d been paid, and he took quite a while to be sure all the erasers were free of dust. He tested them again and again. They made a loud sound like the paddle had made when he beat the rug. Thwack! Thwack! Thwack! So loud, in fact, that he thought he could hear it echoing in the hallway outside. When the erasers finally left not a hint of ghostly chalk dust, he knew he was finished and was proud of himself.
Although Mr. Carraway had told him to leave when he’d finished, Dwayne mounted the stairs to the second floor and returned to Mrs. Helgerson’s classroom. He wanted to tell them about the good job he’d done. When he reached the room, however, he remembered that Mrs. Helgerson had told Mr. Carraway to lock the door. He looked through the glass pane but didn’t see them. He knocked, but no one answered. Finally, he tried the door and was surprised to find that it was unlocked.
When he stepped inside, he thought the adults must have finished their business and left. He was a little disappointed. He was proud of himself and wanted to share that. He was about to leave when he saw the spill of red paint on the floor of the coatroom at the back of Mrs. Helgerson’s classroom. He’d spilled milk in the coatroom once, from the thermos in his lunchbox, and Ollie had cleaned up the mess with a mop and bucket. Dwayne figured Ollie would have to come again to clean up the spilled red paint.
He walked to the coatroom to confirm his suspicion. And there were Mrs. Helgerson and Mr. Carraway, sprawled naked on a rug on the floor. Staring at their smashed skulls, he realized that the red spill wasn’t paint.
He needed to tell someone. He needed to tell Ollie. He raced from the classroom, down the stairs, and outside to the playground. A rug hung over the monkey bars, the same one he and Ollie had beaten with the paddle. And the cart was still there, but Ollie was not. Dwayne thought about Ollie’s office in the basement, and he turned and ran back into the school.
The basement, like the hallways above, was a long corridor. The rooms off to the sides were used to store school things—desks and chairs and empty aquariums and gym equipment, and also the cleaning supplies and machines Ollie used in his work. The furnace room was there as well, and next to it, the janitor’s office. Dwayne had been to the basement many times, where Ollie had shared with him all these subterranean mysteries.
He went straight to the janitor’s office. A brass plaque was affixed to the wall next to the door. The plaque read “Custodial Office.” Beneath that was the name “Oliver Helgerson.”
Dwayne didn’t find Ollie in his office. But as he stood there, trying to think what to do next, he heard a soft wailing come from the furnace room next door. When he stepped into the doorway of that room, he found Ollie standing before the furnace, which heated boiler water for the radiators. The door of the big furnace was wide open. In the janitor’s hand was the rug beater, covered in blood. Ollie was staring into the furnace. Dwayne could tell that he had added a shovelful of new coal to the fire inside and the flames danced high and hot.
Ollie turned toward Dwayne. In the firelight, the boy saw the glisten of tears streaming down the man’s cheeks. This was the first time Dwayne had ever witnessed a grown man crying, and it broke his heart to see his friend in such misery.
As Dwayne watched, Ollie threw the bloodied paddle into the furnace and shut the door. He turned to Dwayne and wiped at the tears. “Our secret?” he said quietly.
Dwayne thought a moment. It seemed to him that he and Ollie were both rafts on an empty sea now, and when this idea came to him, he didn’t feel so alone.
“Okay,” he said.
“Thank you, Dwayne. You’re a good kid. Best if you just beat it now.”
And so he did.
BILLIE JEAN
NEIL S. PLAKCY
“You know that sometimes I need a woman to be by my side at events,” Alex Reyes said, his Cuban accent making the words seem gentle, as we unloaded lumber from the trunk of my lime-green Chevy Bel Air. “The rules in Miami in 1968 are not as strict as those when I was growing up in Cuba, but they exist.”
“That’s a beard,” I said, intentionally making my voice a little rougher. It wasn’t hard; I came from working class stock on Maryland’s eastern shore, about as different from his private boarding school in New Hampshire as possible.
He looked at me. “Really? Where do you hear terms like that?”
I simply looked back at him. We had met at a gay bar a few months before, though at the time he was using the location as a cover for an anti-Castro group. “Oh,” he said. “The Cockpit.”
The bar was located out near Miami airport, so the name had a dual meaning. In the afternoon, it attracted airline employees who needed a pick-me-up before heading to work, or those on quick layovers. By nine o’clock, the clientele had transitioned to gay men who put different meanings on the words “cock” and “pit.”
Alex was slim and darkly handsome, with black curls he kept tamed with a pomade that smelled like bay rum. That day he wore a plaid shirt with the Brooks Brothers hanging sheep crest on the pocket, and Levi’s blue jeans. A couple of the buttons on his shirt were undone, displaying a few dark curls of chest hair I longed to run my fingers through.
But we were not at his house in Coral Gables to play—at least not yet. He wanted to build a wooden fence around his property, primarily to protect his driveway from the prying eyes of his neighbors, and I had volunteered to help.
Earlier that morning, we had laid out where the fence would go so we knew how much lumber to buy. Alex lifted one of the fence posts and carried it up close to the stucco side wall of his house.
“You were telling me about your beard,” I said, as I followed him, with a sledgehammer we had rented from Poe’s on US 1, where we’d bought the lumber.
“It was a dinner on behalf of the Historical Society.” Alex carefully positioned the post in the dirt, and then reached for the sledgehammer.
“Probably easier if you take that expensive shirt off first,” I said.
He unbuttoned the shirt, revealing a skin-tight white sleeveless T-shirt beneath it that hugged his pecs and his flat stomach. He hung the shirt off the branch of a mango tree, and I gave him the sledgehammer.
His arm muscles rippled as he raised it over his head and slammed it into the top of the fencepost, which sunk into the loamy Miami soil.
“Her name was Billie Jean, and she came here from Atlanta, where she was a debutante, to work in the bank in my building. A young woman whose family I knew in Cuba works there too and she introduced us.” He smiled. “When I picked her up that night, she looked like a beauty queen from a movie scene.”
While Alex fiddled with the post, I fetched another from the pile of wood on the driveway. He moved a couple of steps away from the house and positioned the next post.
He managed investments for his wealthy Cuban exile family and others in similar circumstances, from a high-floor office overlooking Lincoln Road in Miami Beach. “I met her a few times at the elevator, and we chatted.”
“Flirted,” I said.
He raised the sledgehammer and slammed it into the post.
“I wouldn’t call it that,” he said.
“But I would,” I said. “I’ve seen you in action. Your voice purrs, you blink those long eyelashes, you stare steadily into a young woman’s face.”
“Are you jealous?”
“I’d rather have you stare at my ass than my face,” I said, turning that body part toward him as I fetched another post.
“But what a handsome face it is, my George,” Alex purred. He was turning that same charm on me, and my dick rose to the occasion.
“Enough flattery. Let’s get this fence in place so we can go inside, strip down, and cool off.”
It was early spring in Miami, one of the best seasons. The sun was not too bright, cooling breezes came in from the ocean, and most of the snowbirds and tourists had left.
We worked for a few minutes, measuring and placing posts. “What about this girl?” I finally asked.
“She came to see me yesterday.” He wiped sweat from his brow in a move that excited me, watching his tanned skin ripple. “She announced that she is pregnant. And that I am the father.”
“What?”
Alex didn’t answer, just motioned for another fence post. And though I had only been dating him, if you want to call it that, for a few months, I knew I had to let him speak in his own time.
“I am not, I assure you,” he said. “I have not slept with a woman since I was seventeen, a prostitute my uncle purveyed for me in Havana.”
“Did you tell her that?”
“Of course not. I do not care to share my personal business with her. To do so would certainly open me to further threats.” He slammed another post in and we moved to the street edge of his property.
“She says that I brought her here after the party, made love to her, and impregnated her.” He frowned. “But I have an alibi for the evening.”
“Excellent. Bring that person forward and you destroy her credibility.”
“It’s not so easy,” he said.
I looked at him, sweat running down his white undershirt, pooling under his biceps and his armpits, and felt a wave of longing through my body. At the same time, I knew what he was saying.
“You were with a man after that dinner,” I said.
He nodded. “You.”
We did not talk again for a while. We measured, and I took my turns with the sledgehammer, slamming the posts in. I was angry at this woman, for threatening Alex, and angry because even if I spoke up, ruined my own reputation and his, no judge would believe us anyway because we were homosexuals and couldn’t be trusted.
We installed the posts all the way to the driveway. Alex had bought beautifully carved wooden gates, but they needed special hardware, and he finally accepted that the job was beyond the both of us. “I will call my cousin Carlos later,” he said. “He runs a construction firm. He can finish the job for me.”
His house was a single-story in the Spanish hacienda style, with coral tile roofs and arched doorways. It was constructed as a square, with a central courtyard. You entered from the front door into a lovely living room that led directly into the open courtyard, shaded by palm trees. In the center was a small pool with water lilies, and when the water evaporated it cooled the air around it. The eaves all around the house were deep, keeping the hot air out, though Alex did have a window air conditioner in his bedroom.
The kitchen was to the left, and to the right was what had once been a dining room but which Alex had remodeled as a home office. His bedroom and the master bath were directly across the courtyard from us.
We walked through the courtyard, pulling off our undershirts as we did. When we got to his bedroom we both kicked off our shoes and socks and dropped our slacks. Then we went for each other with a wild passion, our sweaty bodies slipping and sliding together.
When I came out of the shower, Alex was reclining naked on the bed, reading the Miami Herald. I picked up his slacks from the floor, straightened them out, and removed his wallet. Then I laid the pants carefully over the chair by the door.
I crossed the room to him, feeling the terrazzo tile beneath my bare feet, and handed the wallet to him. “Give me a dollar,” I said.
He smiled at me. “I think what we just did was worth more than that.”
I kicked him in the shins, and he barked. “I want you to hire me to investigate this Billie Jean.”
“You can do that?”
“According to my private investigator’s license from the state of Florida.”
“I mean, because we’re . . . involved.”
I felt foolish, standing there naked explaining my job to my lover, but I persevered. “When I take on a case I look for evidence of what’s true and what’s not. You say you never slept with this girl, and I believe you. But someone did, and if I can find out who, I can get you off the hook without explaining what you and I were doing while Billie Jean says you and she were making a baby.”
Alex opened his wallet, a soft leather made from pampered Swiss cows and burnished by craftsmen with centuries of expertise. He pulled out a single bill. “You’re sure this is enough?”
“To create a contract between us. I’ll bill you for expenses.”
He gave me Billie Jean’s full name and her address, and after some time spent comfortably in his bed, I drove over to her apartment, in a modern building on Tigertail Avenue in Coconut Grove, the hamlet nestled between Coral Gables and the city of Miami. It was an area rich in local history, shaded by towering oaks, the streets lined with brilliant hibiscus and bougainvillea.
I had no idea if Billie Jean was home or not, and only the sketchiest description of her, but if she was the kind of young woman I thought she was, she’d be going out on Saturday night. I thought I might observe her from a distance before I jumped into any further research.
At about 7:00 p.m., a dark sedan pulled into the building’s parking lot, and stopped in front of apartment two on the first floor—the one where Billie Jean lived. Her Lothario beeped the horn with two quick toots, and a moment later she stepped out of the doorway.
I was sure it was her. She had a blond bouffant, as Alex had described, and she carried herself like she was in a pageant. She wore a blue long-sleeve blouse, with a single button open at the neck. Over it she wore a black-and-yellow plaid dress, with a kind of yoke front. It stopped several inches above her knees, and she wore black high heels and pantyhose.
She swung easily into the car. After a moment the driver backed out and turned onto Twenty-Seventh Avenue heading north. I followed at a sedate distance, keeping the sedan in view but letting other cars stay between us.
We crossed US 1, leaving the leafy hamlet of the Grove behind us, and moving into the commercial outskirts of Miami. The road was lined with hardware stores and drugstores, and increasingly the signs were in Spanish as well as English. Because of the three balls in front of a sign that read Casa de Empeño, I figured it was a pawn shop.
