P. Parrish - The Little Death

“Why do you care about service people?”

“I got a lead on another guy who was doing the same thing as Durand.”

“So?”

There was nothing to do but lie. “He’s missing.”

Swann stared at him. “What’s his name?”

“I only know his first name. And that he was a lawn guy.”

Swann looked like he had just bit down on something sour.

“Do you guys keep track of service people or not?” Louis asked.

Swann held Louis’s eyes for a moment, then looked around, like he was scouting out eavesdroppers. “All right,” he said. “About a year ago, some of the residents got together and told us to videotape everyone coming across the bridge and run checks on them.”

Louis shook his head slowly, thinking about those turrets out on the bridge. What a nice, convenient place for cameras.

“We didn’t do it, for God’s sake,” Swann said. “The lawyers told us it was probably unconstitutional.”

“No shit.”

Swan hesitated, like he had something else he wanted to say. Louis could tell the guy was struggling with something deep inside.

“You have something to tell me, Lieutenant?” Louis asked.

Swann blew out a slow breath. “We used to make all the workers carry ID cards. We even fingerprinted them,” he said. “We stopped it four years ago.”

Margery had said Emilio had been around the island about five years ago. That made it 1984. Could he be this lucky?

“Do you still have these cards?” Louis asked.

Swann nodded toward a large Spanish-style building half a block away on the median behind the fountain. “The station used to be over there, too. We have them stored over there.”

“Can I take a look?”

“I can’t let you in our storeroom alone.”

“Then go with me.”

Again, one of those strange frozen moments where it was almost possible to see the rusty grind of Swann’s courage.

“I have to go inside and check in,” he said. “Wait ten minutes, and meet me around back of that building at Devil’s Door. Look for the gargoyles.”

Swann went inside. Louis stayed where he was, a little surprised at Swann’s quick pivot from dickhead to detective. Maybe it was just another dimension of this strange place, where people saw nothing and knew everything, and doing the right thing required walking through something called the Devil’s Door.

Louis went across the street and around the building to the far side. The rain had finally let up, and he waited at the odd-looking door. It was heavy wood, framed by elaborate stone scrolling and two stone devil heads.

Swann came around the corner a couple of minutes later. “Why the weird name?” Louis asked.

“I don’t know,” Swann said as he unlocked the door. “Before my time. Probably because they thought they were bringing the prisoners into some kind of hell.”

Swann pushed open the door and quickly ushered Louis inside. When the door closed, a dusty gray light settled down around them. The place was stuffy and long abandoned, but it was far from hellish.

The walls were celery-green stucco, the archways and baseboards edged in colorful painted tiles, the terra-cotta floor chipped and scuffed. It looked more like a hotel lobby in Key West than a jail.

Swann led him down the hall and around a corner to what had once been two jail cells. The doors had been removed, and the cells were filled with plain white boxes neatly labeled with dates and the words GUEST PROFILES.

“Profiles?” Louis asked.

Swann gave a wry grin. “Better than labeling the boxes ‘people to talk to if someone is robbed.’”

“Very funny. Where’s 1984?”

Swann pointed to the bottom box in the tallest stack. It was partially crushed. “Right there, 1980 through ’85, when we stopped.”

Louis stepped into the cell and started shifting boxes. When he finally dragged the one needed to the middle of the cell, he was standing in a cloud of dust, and Swann was gone.

He sat down on the floor and took off the lid. Inside the box were hundreds of five-by-seven index cards, neatly filed in perfect rows. Given the meticulousness of the clerk who had been assigned the task of preparing these for storage, Louis was sure he would find 1984 in the back right-hand corner. He did.

Each card was exactly the same. A small photograph stapled to the upper left corner, the worker’s name printed across the top, and the individual’s data-age, address, place of employment-typed below. He had sifted through almost all of the cards when he realized nearly every face in the stack was black or brown.

And there were thousands more in this box and others. People with interchangeable faces who had moved unnoticed through the resplendent ballrooms and the safari bedrooms. People who often performed the most intimate of services yet remained strangers. The kind of people you pretended not to know when you met them on the street.

“You find your guy yet?”

Louis looked up. Swann was standing at the cell door, hand on the bars.

“Not yet.”

“Hurry it up. I have to get back.”

Louis went back to the cards. He was almost finished with the stack for 1984 when a name stopped him.

Emilio Labastide.

He was twenty-five years old, six foot one, and 170 pounds. He was a gardener, and his employer was a company called Clean amp; Green, located in West Palm. There was no social security number-something that would have made it easier to trace him.

Louis stared at the small photograph. Labastide was handsome in an earthy, unkempt kind of way. Black hair, hooded dark eyes, and an insolent half-smile probably directed at the cop taking his picture. Louis could imagine the bored rich women, sitting in the shade of their patios, watching the shirtless gardener sweat in the white-hot sun. It was something right out of a Harlequin novel.

Swann knelt down next to him. “That our guy?”

“I think so,” Louis said. “You recognize him?”

“No.”

“Why no social?”

“Probably an illegal,” Swann said. “They come and go like the weather.”

Louis pushed to his feet. “Can I keep this?”

“Let me make you a copy,” Swann said. “If Labastide turns out to be a witness or something, we’re going to need evidence of an investigative trail.”

Louis heard the “we” Swann had used but decided to let it go for now. He pulled his notebook from his pocket and wrote down the information, just in case he was wrong about Swann’s interest and Swann decided at some point to destroy the card. When he finished, he was surprised to see that Swann had picked up the open box and returned it to its stack. Swann dusted his hands and faced him. Suddenly, he looked like a kid caught behind the church with a cigarette.

“You’ll be real discreet when you talk to him, right?” Swann asked.

“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.”

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 amp; Green Landscaping and Lawn Service. “Look for the big guy in the Dolphins hat,” he’d said.