Strip Tease (36 page)

Pierre got back on the highway and drove until the town gave way to more green cane fields. Erin asked him to pull over.

“He doesn’t understand English,” Dilbeck said, impatiently.

“Is that so?”

Pierre steered off the pavement and stopped on the shoulder of the road. He left the engine running.

“Out we go,” Erin said, brightly. “And, Davey, don’t forget our jungle toy.”

Dilbeck peered into the night suspiciously. Before harvest, sugar cane is burned to consume the leafy tops, which are useless, and to drive the animals from the fields. In the heart of the season, smoke roils off the stalks in prodigious columns that sometimes block out the sky. Tonight, though, was crystalline—washed with constellations that one never saw in the city. A waning yellow moon hung low.

Pierre got out and opened the back door of the limo. The congressman emerged first, holding a slender brown package. He was followed by Darrell Grant, unsteadily; the protruding nine-iron dinged noisily off a rear fender panel. The last to emerge from the car was Erin, stepping gingerly in her heels. Pierre gave her a small flashlight to go with the pistol.

Darrell Grant complained of a gassy stomach. “Let me stay here and crash.”

“Sure. In the trunk.” Erin motioned with the gun. “Pierre, prepare Mr. Grant’s boudoir.”

The Haitian driver obliged. He popped the trunk and moved the spare tire, making room.

“The trunk?” Darrell Grant slapped the congressman on the back. “Didn’t I tell you she’s fucking murder on the ego?”

David Dilbeck looked worried. “Erin, I’ve got a heart condition.”

“Who doesn’t? Darrell, get in the damn trunk.” She shined the flashlight in his eyes.

“You gonna shoot me?” He gave a dopey laugh. “Somehow I don’t think so.”

Erin told him to lie down and take a nap.

Darrell Grant, slouching against the fender of the limousine: “One thing I been dying to ask: How do you do it? I mean shakin’ your poon at strangers.” He jabbed the congressman contemptuously with the golf club. “Sick old fucks like him, I don’t see how you do it.”

“The music takes over. That’s all.”

“You mean it’s an act? I ain’t so sure about that.”

“Men are easily dazzled.”

An urgent moan from David Dilbeck: “I have to pee.”

Erin waved the flashlight toward the cane rows. “So pee,” she said. Dilbeck waddled off, clawing at the buttons of his jeans.

Darrell Grant snorted drunkenly. “I never thought of you as a stripper. It’s actually funny as hell.”

Erin said, “You emptied the savings account. I had a lawyer to pay.”

“Plus you figured out the hustle at these nudie joints, am I right? You mess their hair, play with their necktie, tell ‘em how good they smell.”

“Maybe that’s why they call it a tease.”

“God, you’re a cold one.”

The congressman could be heard irrigating the sugar cane. From over his shoulder, he called: “I truly do love her!”

“Pity-ful,” Darrell said.

Erin smiled. “I rest my case.”

“Know what I think? I think you get off on it.”

“Darrell, you’re just full of theories tonight.” Was this a sermon, she wondered, from a wheelchair thief? “Get in the trunk,” she told him, “you like the damn car so much.”

He ignored her. “I ain’t givin’ up on Angie. Just so you know: I’ll track the both of you to hell and back.” He brushed past her and headed into the cane fields.

“Darrell, stop.” She raised the.32 in one hand, the flashlight in the other.

Her ex-husband turned. The beam of light caught him grinning. “You won’t kill me. Not the father of your only child!”

Erin was considering it. She pictured him hacking up Angie’s dolls, and her gun arm stiffened. “You told the judge I was an unfit mother. Is that what you believe?”

“It was lawyer talk, for Chrissakes. You always take shit so personally.” Beseechingly he spread his arms, the shaft of the nine-iron glinting. “Hell, you were a good mother. Same as I was a good daddy. It was lawyers talkin’, that’s all.”

At that moment Erin knew she wouldn’t fire. She didn’t need to; the sorry bastard was already finished. Broke, strung out, maimed, running from the law—Darrell Grant was history. Killing him would be redundant. “Come back,” she told him. “I’ve got plans for you.”

“You mean ‘plans’ as in jail? No thanks, cutie pie.” He gave a cocky wave and resumed his getaway.

Erin remembered what Shad advised her about the gun: when in doubt, shoot at something, anything.

She fired twice at the ground near Darrell Grant’s boots. The crack of the shots was absorbed by the thickets of high cane. She heard her ex-husband yell the word cunt. When she aimed the flashlight where he’d been standing, he was gone, crashing like a deer through the crops. She panned the beam in a slow circle until it landed on the congressman, nervously buttoning his fly. He waded from the tall grass and asked, “Are you all right?”

The gun felt hot in Erin’s fist. She thought, Goddamn that Darrell. Maybe he’ll step on a rattler.

She wheeled on David Dilbeck. “Take off your clothes,” she told him.

“I knew it. You’re going to make me dance.”

Erin said, “You wish.”

After cane is cut and stacked, a machine scoops the stalks, thins the excess vegetation and dumps the load into a field wagon. When the wagons become full, a mechanical belt feeds the cane into long steel-mesh trailers attached to truck cabs. Each bin holds twenty tons and dumps from the side. The trailers are parked at intervals along the farm roads bordering the Okeechobee sugar fields.

At first Darrell Grant thought he had come upon the fence of a medium-security prison, a nightmare of ironies. Weaving closer, pawing at the darkness as if it were fog, he saw that the mesh edifice actually was the side of a long truck rig. Using a jumbo tire as a foothold, Darrell began to climb.

The cane trailer offered dual enticements: it looked like a safe place to hide from a homicidal ex-spouse and also a fine place to nap. It was important for Darrell to lie down soon, before he fell. The cancer pills had blown his circuit breakers; he accepted the likelihood that he’d guessed wrong on the dosages, seriously misjudged his tolerance. Oh well.

After scaling the mesh, he flopped into the damp sheaths of smoky cane and burrowed like a worm; he felt clever, invisible and safe. Had he been sober, he might have anticipated the destination of the truck and the disposition of its contents.

Once loaded at the fields, the trailers are driven to the mill and emptied on conveyors. The first stage of processing is the shredding of the cane, which is accomplished by many rows of gleaming, turbine-driven knives. The fiber then is mashed beneath five hundred tons of pressure. In this way the essential liquids are removed. Evaporators convert the purified cane juice into a syrup, which is heated carefully until it forms a mixture of sweet molasses and crystals. Separation is achieved using a high-speed centrifuge.

Usually it takes half a ton of cane to produce a hundred pounds of raw sugar. However, both weight and purity can be markedly affected by the introduction of foreign substances, such as human body parts.

Darrell Grant had medicated himself too heavily and concealed himself too well. He was deep in a junkie nod at dawn, when the cane trailer in which he’d hidden began rolling toward the sugar mill. Darrell did not awaken, at least not in a meaningful way. No cries, shrieks or moans halted the sugar-milling process; rather, it was the nine-iron strapped to Darrell Grant’s arm that jammed the turbine-driven blades and brought the boys from Quality Control scurrying toward the shredders.

The mill shut down for three hours while local police collected and bagged the remains. The Palm Beach Sheriff later issued a press release saying that a vagrant had died in a freak milling accident at Rojo Farms. Authorities appealed to the public for help in identifying the victim, who was described as a white male, early 30s, with blond hair. No composite sketch of the man was provided, as the shredder left precious little for the police artist to work from. The press release said that the victim wore jeans and boots, and was possibly a golf enthusiast. The Sweetheart Sugar Corporation was reported to be cooperating fully in the case.

At the mill, a memo went up assuring employees that the unfortunate mishap had not compromised the superb quality of the company’s product. In private, however, workers anxiously wondered exactly how much of the dead vagrant had ended up in the day’s tonnage. The consensus was that one drop of blood, one lousy pubic hair, one microscopic sliver of a wart was too much.

Distasteful rumors spread wildly, and many workers stopped putting sugar in their coffee and tea. Rojo Farms, like most cane processors, maintained a long-standing rule against the use of artificial sweeteners by employees on company property. Violation was regarded as an act of disloyalty—the agribusiness equivalent of a Chrysler salesman buying himself a Toyota. However, within days after Darrell Grant’s gruesome death, a clandestine network of body carriers began smuggling packets of Sweet ‘n Low into the Rojo company cafeteria. An internal investigation failed to identify the culprits or shut down the pipeline. To avoid the publicity of a labor confrontation, mill management quietly dropped the matter and rescinded its sugar-only policy. The Rojos themselves were never told.

“Enough!” said Al Garcia. “Christ, have a smoke.”

“Some fucking heroes we are.”

Garcia was doing ninety-four on the interstate. Shad’s slick dome whimsically reflected the blue strobe of the dashboard light. The highway wind howled through the shotgun-shattered window. Shad spit scornfully into the night.

“Easy,” Garcia said. “Hey, I gave up on being a hero a long time ago. Sometimes the best you can do is set things in motion.” The detective puffed expansively on a fresh cigar. “That’s why I put my card in the dead lawyer’s bank box. I had a hunch it would motivate Mr. Moldowsky toward foolish behavior.”

Shad said, “This ain’t a game. You said yourself.”

“Still, there’s plays to be made. We made ours.”

“And look what happened. Erin gets snatched.”

“Don’t underestimate the lady.” The detective lowered the window and tapped out an inch of dead ash. “You notice anything odd about the writing on that mirror? Besides it was lipstick?”

Shad hunched sullenly. He occupied himself with devising a suitable fate for the congressman. He thought in terms of muriatic acid and gaping facial wounds.

“Here’s what jumped out at me,” Garcia went on. “The words on the mirror weren’t printed in block letters, they were done in cursive. The style was beautiful, no? So tell me, chico, who writes perfect longhand when they got a gun to their head and they’re about to be kidnapped? Nobody, that’s who.”

Shad’s naked eyebrows crinkled in concentration. In the shadows, his silky pink orb suggested the head of a 250-pound newborn. “You’re saying she planned it all?”

Garcia said, “It’s possible, yeah.”

“No way did she whack that guy in the fishbox.”

“I agree.” The detective’s expression was obscured by a swirling shroud of blue smoke. “Still, she had a game plan.”

Shad remembered what Urbana Sprawl had said: that Erin was out to do some damage.

“In these situations,” the detective said, “I ask myself who’s holding the high cards? And it’s definitely Erin, not Dilbeck. Here’s this arrogant old fart who thinks he’s God’s gift to pussy, but all he wants in the whole wide world is the love of this one gorgeous dancer. I mean, he’d be in heaven if this girl just smiled in the general direction of his dick. You follow?”

Shad plucked a cigar from Al Garcia’s shirt pocket. He tore off the wrapper with his teeth.

Garcia chuckled. “All that champagne, I’ll bet old Davey couldn’t get it up with a block-and-tackle tonight. And Erin, she’s got thirty I.Q. points on him, easy.”

Shad said, “Men get crazy over her. I seen it before.”

“Dilbeck’s not your typical rapist, he’s too full of himself.”

“He don’t need to be typical,” said Shad, biting the nub off the stogie. “He just needs the idea to take hold.”

Garcia said nothing for several miles. The traffic thinned as they headed west.

Shad mumbled, “Belle Glade, shit. Where in Belle Glade?” He turned toward Garcia. “I suppose you got some ideas.”

“What I said before, about setting things in motion—see, people have this concept of justice. They talk about ‘the system,’ meaning cops, judges, juries and prisons. If only the system worked, they say, there wouldn’t be a crime problem! The streets would be safe, the bad guys would be locked up for life!”

Shad gave a desolate laugh. He pulled the lighter from the dented dash and fired up the cigar. He said, “Look at Erin’s crazy fucker of an ex-husband. That’s how terrific the system works.”

“Exactly,” Garcia said, chopping the air with his hand. “Darrell Grant was a snitch for the cops. Good guys putting bad guys on the payroll, in the name of almighty justice. Your average taxpayer can’t understand. See, ‘the system’ is a game and that’s all. Guy like Moldowsky, I can’t touch him. Same goes for the congressman. So what I do then, I try and set things in motion. Make the shit fly and see where it sticks.”

“Because you got no case,” Shad said.

“None whatsoever. But it doesn’t mean there can’t be justice.”

“Man, you’re a dreamer.”

“Maybe so,” said Al Garcia, “but I’m sure Moldowsky arranged the murders of Jerry Killian and that sleazoid lawyer and the lawyer’s cousin. And I’m also sure I couldn’t put the case together in a trillion years.” He arched a shaggy black eyebrow. “But this much I also know: Tonight I open a stinking fishbox and find Mr. Malcolm J. Moldowsky permanently expired. Fate, irony, call it whatever. Least now I got something to tell my boy.”

“Your boy?” Shad said.

“He’s the one that found the body in the river.”

Shad grunted somberly.

“Least I can tell him it’s over,” said Garcia. “For once the bad guy got what he deserved.”

Shad said, “I ain’t ready to celebrate. I want to see Erin alive.” He took a loud, noxious drag on the cigar. “You better hope you didn’t set the wrong damn thing in motion.”

“Yeah,” the detective said quietly. “There’s always that chance.”

Shad settled in for the ride. He felt better, kicking around the possibility that Erin was on top of the situation.

“Just promise me one thing,” he said to Al Garcia. “Promise you ain’t got another human head in the Igloo.” He jerked a thumb toward the trunk of the Caprice.

Garcia grinned. “The night is young,” he said.

The congressman stripped to his boxer shorts and cowboy boots. Erin’s flashlight played up and down his gelatinous physique. She was mildly embarrassed for him, but the feeling passed quickly.

“What now?” Dilbeck said, swatting at the bugs.

“Time for you-know-what.”

“Ah.” His tone changed. Excitedly he unwrapped the brown package. He held the machete with both hands, the blade flat across his palms, to show Erin. “Willie Rojo loaned it to me. It hangs on the wall of his private study.”

“Very tasteful,” she said.

The congressman ran a finger along the squared-off blade. With a coy smile: “I think I understand what you’re after.”

“Doubtful,” Erin muttered.

“You’re into games,” Dilbeck said, hopefully.

“Oh, please.”

“Role playing—”

“No, sweetie.”

“You’re the master, I’m the slave!”

Erin thought: The creep is really getting turned on.

Dilbeck said, “So how does it work, your little game?”

“Here’s how it works: I want you to cut some sugar.”

He chuckled anxiously. “But I don’t know how.”

“Oh, give it a try,” Erin said. “For me.”

“I’d feel much better if you put the gun away.”

“Soon,” she said. “That’s a promise.”

With the flashlight she directed the congressman to a row of maturing cane. He stepped forward and swung the machete sidearm. The stalks shook but didn’t fall.

Erin said, “You do better with a champagne bottle.”

David Dilbeck snorted. “Just watch,” he said, and began whaling. Each blow brought a high-pitched grunt that reminded Erin of Monica Seles, the tennis star. The congressman’s reaping technique needed improvement, too; the cane wasn’t being cut so much as pulverized. Erin kept the flashlight aimed at the crop row, so Dilbeck could see what he was hacking. She didn’t want him to harvest his own toes by accident.

After less than a minute, the congressman stopped. His face was flushed, his chest heaved and the blotched flab of his belly was sprinkled with sweat. The boxer shorts had slipped below his waist, exposing the crack of his marbled buttocks. He was panting like a toothless old lion.

Erin said, “Sweetie, don’t quit yet. You’re giving new meaning to the term ‘public servant.’ “

Dilbeck bent at the waist, sucking to catch his breath. Momentarily he said, “You’ve still got your dress on.”

“I certainly do.”

“Fine, fine.” He wiped his palms on his underwear. “How much more till we can play?”

“I was thinking at least a ton.”

“Very funny—”

“A migrant,” Erin said, “cuts eight tons a day.”

“Eight tons,” the congressman murmured. That’s what Chris Rojo had told him, too. It seemed absolutely impossible.

“One cutter, all by himself,” said Erin. “I read up on cane farming so we could have a meaningful discussion.” She kicked off her high heels. “I figured you knew all there was to know about sugar, considering the Rojos own your ass.”

“That’s a damn lie.” Dilbeck stiffened.

Erin put the flashlight on him—he was pissed, all right. It wasn’t easy to look indignant in boxer shorts. She said, “Guess what the Rojos pay their cutters.”

“I couldn’t care less,” the congressman snapped. “It’s better than starving to death in the barrios of Kingston.”

“So that’s it—a humanitarian enterprise!” Erin dabbed an imaginary tear. “Please forgive me, Congressman, I misunderstood. Here I assumed your pals were just greedy businessmen, taking advantage of poor desperate souls. Now I find out they’re saints!” She motioned with the gun. “Keep cutting, sweetheart. And by the way, Jamaica doesn’t have barrios. They’re called slums. You’re getting your Third World cultures mixed up again.”

Reinvigorated by anger, Dilbeck went at the sugar cane like a dervish. Between grunts: “Who are you to lecture me!”

“Merely a constituent,” Erin said. She reminded him that his drinking buddy, young Senor Rojo, had given her a thousand dollars for one of her shoes. “But I guess he can afford it,” she remarked, “considering what he pays the migrants.”

The congressman paused in his cutting: “That’s a very simplistic view, young lady. Very simplistic.”

“Davey, when does your committee vote on the sugar subsidies? I wonder what the Rojos would do if you didn’t show up.”

Dilbeck couldn’t understand how an evening that had started with such promise had deteriorated to this: a stripper with a pistol, in the middle of fucking nowhere—and him, up to his sweaty aching balls in sugar cane. Ruefully he concluded that wild cowboy sex was no longer on the agenda; more harrowing scenarios began to wheel through his imagination. All this talk of slave labor, the Rojos, the House committee vote… why would a woman speak of such things?

He swung at the cane until his arm was numb. He dropped to his knees, braced himself upright with the machete.

“Good work,” said Erin. “Only nineteen hundred pounds to go.” She wondered what her mother, the cruising opportunist, might make of this scene. David Dilbeck was the sort that Mom would view as a matrimonial prize—wealthy, prominent and presentable, when properly attired.

He said, “What is it you really want?”

Erin crouched beside him. “You remember a man named Jerry Killian.”

Dilbeck nodded guardedly. “He’s the one who tried to blackmail me. That’s when I spoke to the judge about, uh, ‘reconsidering’ your custody case.”

“And what happened, Davey?”

“Judge said no deal. Got on his high horse.”

“And what about Killian?”

“Was he a boyfriend of yours?” The congressman spoke hesitantly. “I don’t know what happened. Malcolm said it was taken care of. We never heard from the man again.”

“That’s because he was murdered.”

Dilbeck fell forward to his hands and knees. “My God,” he said. “Is that true? It can’t be.”

“Oh, it’s true.” Erin stood up. “All because of you, because of the Rojos,”—waving the handgun—”because of all this sugar out here.” She watched him struggle to a sitting position. “A man’s dead, Davey, all because you’re a crook.”

The congressman looked ashen and haggard. He told Erin to get the damn light out of his eyes. “Nineteen years,” he said, hoarsely. “Nineteen years I’ve served in Washington, D.C. Don’t you dare belittle me.”

Erin said, “A man is dead.”

“Go look up my record, young lady. I’ve voted for every civil rights bill that’s come through Congress. The vital issues of our time—Social Security, equal-opportunity housing, lower cable TV rates—go look up my votes. And farmers, yes, you’re damn right. I support the family farmer and I’m not ashamed to say so!”

Erin sighed inwardly. Dilbeck was parroting a boilerplate campaign speech.

“—and who singlehandedly blocked the last congressional pay raise? Me! I cast the deciding vote. You don’t think that took courage?”

Hastily Erin moved to derail the monologue. She said, “I phoned your office once myself.”

Dilbeck paused. “In Washington? Why?”

“To ask about Jerry Killian. You were busy.”

The congressman said, “If I’d known—”

“What did the Rojos do for you? Parties, girls, boat rides— what else? Las Vegas? The occasional vacation to the islands?” Erin circled him. “I think you’re a man who can’t say no to anything that’s free.”

Dilbeck dragged a forearm across his brow. “My father,” he said with well-practiced reverence, “was an ordinary working man with ordinary dreams. Know what he did for a living? He pumped septic tanks!”

Erin said, “We could sure use him now.” She walked back to the limousine to double-check a detail with Pierre. She returned carrying a martini in a plastic glass.