Nick Stone: Mr. Clarinet

Max had got the address from the receptionist who manned the lobby of Beeson's heyday home-a luxury apartment complex in Coconut Grove, overlooking Bayside Park with its joggers, yachting clubs, and postcard-perfect views of Florida sunsets. The receptionist thought Max was a debt collector. He told Max to break the puta's both legs.

Depending on their dwellers and location, some trailer parks make a good go at suburban drag, masking their identities behind white picket fences, rose bushes, clean, close-cropped front lawns, and letterboxes that aren't filled with dog shit. They even go as far as calling themselves cute, homely things like Lincoln Cottages, Washington Bungalows, Roosevelt Huts. Most trailer parks don't go that far. They don't bother. They hold up their hands, admit what they are, and pick their spot out in the scrapheap to the left of destitution.

Beeson's neighborhood looked like it had been hit by bombs dropped through the eye of a passing hurricane. There was wreckage-stoves, TVs, gutted cars, fridges-and garbage strewn everywhere, so much that it had been incorporated into the landscape; some enterprising soul had built some of the waste into tidy mounds and then planted these with arrow-shaped wooden signs painted with the house numbers in large, seminumerate digits. The trailers were in such bad shape on the outside that Max mistook them for torched and abandoned wrecks, until he glimpsed the shadows of lives through the windows. There were no working cars in sight. No dogs, no kids. The people who lived here were off the radar and staying there-welfare dropouts, junkies, petty criminals, terminal no-hopers, born losers.

Beeson's trailer was a battered and flaking off-white oblong with two shuttered windows set either side of a sturdy-looking brown door with three locks on it: top, middle, and bottom. The trailer was mounted on red brick blocks, permanently going nowhere. Max drove right up to it and parked his car.

He knocked on the door and stepped back so he could be seen from the window. He heard deep barks, the scratching of claws behind the door, and then a thud, followed by another thud. Beeson had himself a pit bull. The shutters blinked behind the left window, then spread a little wider.

"Mingus?!!? Max Mingus?" Beeson shouted from inside.

"Yeah, that's right. Open up, I need to talk."

"Who sent you?"

"No one."

"If you're lookin' for a job, the toilet here needs emptyin'," Beeson chuckled.

"Sure, after we talk," Max said. Wiseass motherfucker hadn't lost his ability to laugh at the misfortunes of others. Still spoke in that same voice, part growl, part squeak, caught between pitches, like he was losing his voice or waiting on his other ball to drop.

The shutter lifted and Max got a glimpse of Beeson's face-round, pudgy, blood-drained pale-staring left and right of where he was standing, checking the background.

A few moments later, he heard the sound of maybe half a dozen chains being taken off hooks behind the door, followed by a tattoo of dead bolts thunking back and all three Yale locks springing open. The inside of the door must have looked like a bondage corset.

Beeson stood in a sliver of cracked-open doorway, squinting into the light. He'd left a thick chain on the door, level with his neck. At his feet, the dog stuck his snout out into the open and barked and slobbered at Max.

"Waddayawant, Mingus?" Beeson said.

"Talk about Charlie Carver," Max replied.

He could tell from the way Beeson was standing, half-forward, half-back, that he had a gun in one hand and the dog's leash in the other.

"The Carvers send you?"

"Not to you, no. But I'm looking into the case now."

"You goin' to Haiti?"

"Yeah."

Beeson pushed the door closed, undid the chain, and pulled it back open. He motioned to Max to come in with a tilt of the head.

It was dark inside, even darker after the bright day, and this made the stench all the more overpowering. A huge, acrid blast of baked filth rushed up and smacked Max in the face and forced its way down his nostrils. He staggered back a couple of steps, his stomach contracting, a hint of a heave brushing the edge of his throat. He clamped a handkerchief over his nose and breathed through his mouth, but he tasted the evil smell on his tongue.

There were flies everywhere, buzzing past his ears, bumping into his face and hands, some settling and sampling him before he shrugged them away. He heard Beeson drag the pit bull away into a corner and strap it to something.

"Better watch that car you came in," Beeson said. "Li'l fuckers here will strip the paint off a pencil it stays out there too long."

He opened the left blinds and stood away squinting. In a loud, whizzing drone, the flies in the room all darted for the bright white light that split the darkness.

Max had forgotten quite how short Beeson was-he barely scraped five feet-and how disproportionately large his spoon-shaped head was.

Unlike many a Dade County PI, Beeson had never been a cop. He'd started his working life as a fixer for the Florida Democratic Party, gathering dirt on rivals and allies alike and molding it into political currency.

He'd quit politics for private investigations after Jimmy Carter's nomination in 1976. He was reputed to have made millions out of ruining lives-marriages, political careers, businesses-bringing down everything he snooped around in. He'd worn, driven, eaten, fucked, and lived in the fruits of his success. Max remembered the sight of him when he was king of the hill: designer suits, gleaming patent-leather tasseled loafers, shirts so white they virtually glowed, storm clouds of cologne, manicured hands, and a thick pinkie ring. Unfortunately, given his gnomic stature, pomp-and-prime-era Beeson hadn't cut quite the dash he assumed a few thousand dollars worth of tailoring would give him; instead of looking like some Florida hotshot, he'd always reminded Max of an overeager kid on his way to First Communion in Sunday clothes his mom had picked out for him.

Now here he was, wearing a grubby tank top under an open cheap, black beach shirt with orange and green palm trees splashed over it.

Max was shocked at the sight of him.

It wasn't the shirt or the tank top…

It was the diaper.

Clyde Beeson was wearing a diaper-a thick, grayish-brown toweling diaper held together at the waist by large, blue-tipped baby safety pins.

What the fuck had happened to him?

Max looked around the trailer. It seemed empty. Between him and Beeson was a linoleum-covered floor, an olive-green leather armchair with the stuffing popping out near the armrests, and an upturned packing crate he used as a table. The floor was filthy, covered in an oily-looking black grime, its original yellow color apparent through the pit bull's claw gouges and paw-print streaks. There was dog shit everywhere: fresh, dried, and semidried.

How had Beeson let himself go like this?

Max saw cardboard boxes stacked against the wall, from the floor to the ceiling, covering the windows to his right. Many of the boxes were damp and sagging in the middle, their contents about to spill out.

The light coming through the blinds sliced through air that was hung heavy with layered cigarette smoke and dotted with bluebottle flies hurtling past them and smacking into the exposed window, thinking it was the great outdoors. Even the flies wanted out of this pathetic cesspit.

The dog growled in Max's direction from a murky corner where the darkness had retreated and bunched up on itself. He could just about make out its eyes, glinting, watching.

He guessed the kitchen behind him was stacked with filthy dishes and rotting food, and he hated to think of what lay in Beeson's bedroom and bathroom.

It was roasting hot. Max was already covered in a thickening film of sweat.