Buried on Avenue B (15 page)

 

CHAPTER 37

THE WALMART PARKING
lot is the size of Luxembourg. Toward the rear is a modest structure of cinder block and corrugated steel, and standing immodestly in front of it, his posture and accessories exaggerating his authority, is a man who looks like a mediocre high school football player gone to seed. He holds a two-way radio, a clipboard, and Styrofoam coffee cup, and wears pointy western boots that look to be ostrich, although his own view of his pricey footwear is challenged by his ample gut. As O'Hara and Wawrinka approach, he welcomes them by lifting the coffee cup and catching the thin brown sluice of saliva and tobacco he squirts through his lower teeth.

“Good afternoon. I'm Connie Wawrinka, with the Sarasota Police Department. This is Darlene O'Hara, a homicide detective from NYPD. Are you in charge of parking lot security?”

“Clint Eakins,” says the man, rearranging his items so that he can steady them with his left hand and extend the right. “And yes, I am. What the hell have I done now?”

“I have no idea, Clint,” says Wawrinka. “And I'm not sure I want to know.”

Because the language and customs of South Carolina are closer to Florida than New York, the two determined that Wawrinka would do the honors. “What I am concerned about is a vehicle involved in a homicide,” she says. “Specifically a dark green van, which may or may not have ‘Sarasota Water Authority' written on the side. We have reason to believe it was left in this lot several months ago.”

“Doesn't jump to mind. What makes you think it was left here?”

“We'd rather not get into it right now, Clint. Let's just say that we do.”

“I can appreciate that, but like I said, nothing like that comes to mind, and I've run this lot for the better part of two years.”

“All that responsibility, Clint. How do you sleep at night? In that time, how many cars have you recovered?”

“About thirty-five.”

“I would have thought there would have been more. When someone leaves a car here, how long before it comes to your attention?”

“Two, three weeks. This lot holds twenty-five thousand cars. In the run-up to Christmas we'll get forty thousand vehicles passing through in twenty-four hours. My men do a complete cruise-through twice a week. They notice a car been here long, we chalk it up, go back in a couple days for another look. Once we determine it's been abandoned, we call the state police in Columbia. It can take them a week or two to get around to it, but eventually they come down and haul it away.”

“You got a list of every vehicle abandoned here in the last year?”

“Of course I do, or should I say, I did. Until two weeks ago, when my silly computer crashed. Everything on my hard drive was wiped out.”

“You got to back that shit up, son.”

“I learned that the hard way, didn't I?”

Something over Wawrinka's shoulder distracts Eakins.

O'Hara turns to see an enormous bearded man lumbering in their direction. From his bandana to his work boots, everything is smeared with grease.

“Who do you deal with in Columbia?”

“Where?”

“With the state police. Who's your contact person?”

“It's not any one person,” says Eakins.

“Give me a couple names, then?”

“It's no big deal. Whoever I can get on the phone.”

“Well, they would have a list of every car they picked up, wouldn't they? Or have they had computer issues too?”

“Not as far as I know.”

Eakins raises his palm to stop the progress of the approaching man, but it's like trying to stop an ocean liner. It takes a couple steps for his boots to grab and bring him to a stop. “Buddy, as you can see, I'm kind of tied up here right now. I'll call you in a few.”

“Suit yourself,” says the man and turns around.

“Who's that?”

“That enormous son of a bitch is Terrence Porter, old fishing buddy.”

“Oh yeah. What kind of fishing you boys do?”

“Depends on the season, of course, but this time of the year we're still doing some grabbing. What you do is take a hook and dangle it from an overhanging limb. When the fish, suckers mostly, come schooling by, you yank them right out of the water. I live for grabbing suckers. Of course, you need to know the right spot, and I'd tell you.”

“But then you'd have to kill me,” says Wawrinka.

“ 'Fraid so.”

“Clint,” says Wawrinka, “you got a card, in case we need to get in touch with you again?”

FIVE MINUTES LATER,
back in the Crown Vic, Wawrinka is still holding Eakins's card by one corner.

“Something not kosher about that boy,” she says.

“I don't think there's anything kosher about him. That thing still damp?”

“Yes.”

A diesel gurgle cuts through their air-conditioning, and an eight-wheel tow truck with custom paint job slowly passes in front of them, dragging a five-year-old Saab. According to the fancy gold script, the tow has a name,
Mabel
, like a yacht.

“I'll be amazed if the state police have even heard of this motherfucker,” says O'Hara, pulling out her cell and making the call. O'Hara is connected to the State Police barracks, where she is promptly put on hold. While she hangs on the line, the big diesel comes back into earshot and stops three lanes in front of them. The promised thirty-second wait turns into minutes, and she is still on hold when Eakins steps out of the security hut and walks up to the side of the truck.

“You have binoculars in here?”

“Right in front of you. Glove compartment.” O'Hara pulls them out and focuses on the driver's-side window.

“Whoever's in the cab just slipped the Archduke of Parking a rather fat envelope,” says O'Hara.

“Nothing sadder in this world than a rent-a-cop turned bad.”

As the truck pulls away, O'Hara pans down the side of the cab to the name of the company: “TP Salvage, Ruffin, South Carolina.”

“Connie, what was the name of that biker dude who Eakins waved off—Terrence something?”

“Terrence Porter.”

“Well, a Saab just got pulled out of here by a tow named Mabel working out of a place called TP Salvage.”

“For once in his life, that slimy son of a bitch Eakins was telling the truth. He and Porter are fishing buddies.”

“Porter pays Eakins to fish in his pond.”

 

CHAPTER 38

THE RESOUNDING COLLISION
cuts through the drone as cleanly as a howitzer. It's the sound of a car hitting a wall head-on at sixty miles an hour, and although in this case it's the wall that's moving, not the car, the effect on the car locked inside the compactor is the same. The first blow compresses the hood like an accordion. The second flattens it flush against the engine wall. At the same time the rear and sides are also being battered, and after four mighty blows, what was once a Buick Skylark is a two-ton piece of carry-on. At first, O'Hara found the violence disturbing. It reminded her of the highway horror shows they made her sit through in drivers' ed. But after a while the violent rhythm is soothing.

“It kind of takes the edge off,” she says, “like watching the breakers hit the beach in Montauk after a storm.”

When O'Hara and Wawrinka rolled into TP Salvage forty minutes earlier, it was already 6:00.
Mabel
, with the Saab still hanging off the back, was parked just inside the wire fence. Behind her was a long, low shed with a marquee-style sign listing in press-on letters the newest additions to the inventory of parts on sale inside. The back of the shed, which is open but unattended, looks out on a clearing filled with hundreds of cars, arrayed in tall rusty stacks. In the midst of the wreckage squats the hulking three-story compactor, whose violent mastications are the only movement in the seventy-acre vista. Despite the scale of the operation, there's only one visible employee, the eponymous Terrence Porter. He sits fifty feet off the ground in the throbbing cab, bunkered so deep inside his Spector-esque wall of sound, the horn of the Crown Vic can't pierce it. All O'Hara and Wawrinka can do is repair to the shade of the back porch and wait for Porter to shut down for the day. Since then, they've sat witness to the final moments of a Camry, a Hyundai, and this light blue Skylark, which, having been stubbed out like a cigarette, is nudged down a rusty chute into a railroad car.

“It's also pretty damn depressing,” says Wawrinka. Sitting at their feet, her mottled tongue hanging from her mouth, is the mongrel bitch who crawled out from under
Mabel
soon after they settled in the shade, and Wawrinka reaches down and rubs her neck. “Knowing that sooner or later, the same thing is going to happen to my Crown Vic.”

“And my lesbian Jetta.”

“Not to mention the three of us. You were right about dogs. They definitely make the short list.”

To take her mind off the grim eventualities, Wawrinka gets up and walks back to the car, and returns with the binoculars. Back on the bench, she aims them at the compactor. Although still rattling, the cab is empty, and she sees that Porter has moved to the even higher cab of an adjacent crane.

“How late is this guy going to work?” says Wawrinka, handing the binoculars to O'Hara. “Now he's in the goddamned crane.”

Porter is using the second machine to reload the first. As she watches, he clamps the teeth of his shovel down on the roof of a Pontiac Fiero and pries it off the stack like a bouncer separating combatants in a brawl. He carries the Pontiac to the compactor, drops it into the chute, and rolls back to the stack for seconds.

“He's like a kid playing with his Tonka toys,” says O'Hara.

Now the vehicle at the top of the stack is a Cimarron, without question the lamest model to wear the Cadillac badge, not really a Caddy at all, and below it a Cherokee and a nondescript box of a van. As Porter lines up to grab the Cimarron, O'Hara sees that the van is dark green, and when she screws up the magnification, sees that the side panel is flecked with black. Panning the full width of the side panel, she can make out the outline of a
W
in the center.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” says O'Hara, jumping to her feet, “it's our van. We got to get this toddler's attention.”

“I got it covered,” says Wawrinka, getting to her feet.

“What are you going to do?”

Wawrinka reaches for the Sauer automatic holstered in the small of her back, undoes the safety, aims it straight over her head, and fires three times.

 

CHAPTER 39

IN THE FADING
light, the green van is little more than a dark rectangle. It's not until the Caddy and the Cherokee have been shunted aside, and the van brought closer to the ground, that O'Hara can see that the tires and wheels have been stripped along with all the glass—front windshield, passenger windows, and side-view mirrors. There are no windows in the back of the van.

Using a forklift, Porter lowers the van to within four feet of the ground, then turns toward the edge of the clearing. As he navigates the rutted track between the outer stacks and the first line of surrounding woods, O'Hara, Wawrinka, and the dog walk behind the front-loaded vehicle like mourners following a loved one to the grave. The evening smells of damp clay and pine, and the air buzzes with moths, gnats, and mosquitoes. After half a mile, a clean boxlike structure materializes in the woods. “Could you pull up the door in the middle,” asks Porter over the idling engine, “then pull it shut as soon as we're in. Maybe we can keep most of the bloodsuckers out.”

O'Hara grabs the handle and braces her back, but the door flies up the well-oiled track so easily she nearly loses her balance. Inside, the darkness is complete. The echo of Porter's clomping steps are followed by an electrical
thwunk
, and a bank of fluorescent lights come on in succession across the high ceiling. Rather than a backwoods shed, O'Hara finds herself in an immaculate three-bay garage with whitewashed cement floors.

Porter parks the forklift in the center bay and gently lowers the rusted axles to the floor. To the left an automotive shape is covered by a tarp, and to the right on a jack is number 57—a black dirt-track racer, its front end almost as banged up as the Skylark after the first blow inside the compactor. Surrounding the number in scripts of various size and color are the car's sponsors—
MABEL'S TOWING
,
EZ EXCAVATING
,
TP SALVAGE
, and
BO'S BAR & GRILL
—and on the wall behind it a large poster:
CHEROKEE MOTOR SPEEDWAY, THE PLACE YOUR MAMA WARNED YOU ABOUT.

Slowly, O'Hara circles the van. She is so stunned and relieved to have found it and so riveted by the dazzling sight of it in front of her in the operating room light, she is half afraid it's a mirage, and for several minutes forgets she isn't the only person in the garage. Outside, there was just enough light for O'Hara to make out the little bits of black and the
W
in the middle. Under the powerful fluorescent lights of the garage it's clear that those flecks of black are what remain after someone hurriedly scraped off letters painted on the side panel with a stencil. Standing to the side, the outlines of even the most thoroughly scraped-off letters are plain:
SARASOTA WATER AUTHORITY
, word for word, letter for letter, exactly what Sharon Di Nunzio remembered seeing briefly in Banyan Bay visitor parking more than six months ago.

“God bless her heart,” says O'Hara, talking out loud for the first time. “That ninety-year-old slut got it exactly right.”

“Excuse me?” Porter's drawl brings O'Hara out of her thoughts and back into the room. Porter, who goes about six-four, two-fifty, with the kind of NFL lineman infrastructure that could handle fifty more, stands in front of her, both hands shoved into the pockets of his greasy jeans. Size notwithstanding, Porter doesn't evince a shred of menace. His fleshy jug head, and furrowed brow, suggest a benevolent mastiff. On the other hand, Porter has every incentive to put his best foot forward, and since O'Hara and Wawrinka abruptly got his attention, he has been projecting goodwill in buckets.

“I need some answers,” says O'Hara. “They are sufficiently important that for the moment, I'm going to move off to one side your dealings with that Clint Eakins and how you happened to come into possession of this vehicle. First of all, what is it exactly?”

“A 2004 GMC Astrovan.”

“How long have you had it?”

“I picked it up about five months ago. Except for my sister's boy, who comes in a couple afternoons and Saturdays, it's just me here. So the vehicle would have sat in the yard for another two months easy before I got around to doing anything to it.”

“As in stripping it for parts?”

“That's right.”

“So how long has it been exposed to the elements?”

“About three months, and unfortunately, this time of year, you can count on a thunderstorm every week.”

“One last question for now. What's the name of your dog?”

“Mabel.”