325 River Street was an aged concrete block building that had probably started life as a corner grocery store. It was now boarded up, covered with some rather pedestrian graffiti, and surrounded by a sidewalk that was littered with so much broken glass and trash it looked like an obstacle course.
I parked and got out.
Except for 325, this half of the block was nothing but a large grassy vacant lot. Down on the far corner, two young black men stood watching me. They were probably wondering why anybody who didn’t absolutely need to would come into a neighborhood like this.
I walked around 325 twice, looking for some kind of peephole for a glimpse inside. Nothing.
I walked down to the end of the block and the two young men. The closer I got, the older they looked. By the time I reached them, they looked a lot older, mid-twenties probably, which made their worn-backwards baseball caps seem like a wistful affectation meant to bring back their youth.
“Morning,” I said.
They were a perfect Mutt and Jeff, one tall and rangy, one short and squat. Or Bud and Lou, if you prefer.
They nodded, said nothing.
“You live around here?”
The squat one grinned. “No, man, we live down to those penthouses along the river. We jus’ come over here ’cause the scenery’s so beautiful.”
“I guess it was a dumb question,” I said, grinning back.
“You a cop?” asked the tall one.
“Nope.”
“You look like a cop. The new kind.”
“There’s a new kind?”
“Sure. Them college boys. They’s real polite, man, till they gets you in the backseat. Then they kick the hell out of you jus’ like the old kind.”
“They busted us for no reason last Saturday night,” said the squat one. “They jus’ had a hard-on to bust them some niggers, and we happened to be the ones they found. All we was doin’ was walkin’ down the street. That’s all we was doin’.”
“An’ this’z what I got for it,” said the short one. He took off his ball cap and showed me a half-inch cut on the left side of his forehead. The wound was red and blue, against copper-colored skin.
“Like we don’t have no right to walk down the street, man,” said his friend.
Hard to tell. Two sides to everything. You sit down with the police officers who busted them and you’d likely hear that these two guys looked suspicious, late at night, shambling down the street, possibly drunk, possibly doped up, and who knew what they were up to? Better to be safe than sorry and all that. So they busted them. And the short one got mouthy. And one of the cops hit him — nothing serious, because if it had been anything serious, these two would have gotten themselves a lawyer by now and instituted some big suit against the city. Just doing their jobs, the cops were — at least that’s how they’d see it, and tell you about it.
While, of course, these two young men had a very different version of what had happened.
“You know much about that place?” I said to the short one.
“What place? That building down there?”
“Yes. 325.”
He shrugged. Glanced at his friend. Grinned. “Used to be like the place to go when we was kids and wanted some grass or beer or somethin’. Real good hidin’ place.”
“Have you seen people go in and out lately?”
Another glance, another grin.
“You sure you ain’t a cop?” the short one said.
“I’m not. Honest.”
The tall one shrugged. “The white Lincoln.”
“What?”
“White Lincoln. Guy always wheels in here real early in the morning, two, three in the morning, but I ain’t seen him for a long time.”
“Did you ever get a look at the guy driving the Lincoln?”
“Not a good one.”
“So you’re not even sure it is a guy?”
“Huh?”
“Could be a woman.”
He shrugged again.
“Could be,” said the short one.
“And he goes inside?”
“Right.”
“How long does he stay?”
The tall one shrugged. “Man, we’re usually asleep by then. Our wives, man, they kick our butts if we stayed out that late.”
“So the guy in the Lincoln could stay all night.”
“Could be,” the tall one said.
“Thanks,” I said, nodding to them.
“That’s all you wanted?” the short one said.
I smiled. “That’s all I wanted. See, I told you I wasn’t a cop.”
The padlock was a bitch to get open. Took fifteen minutes.
I got the back door free and stood in the dark doorway. I wrinkled up my nose as the odors hit me. The high tart tang of blood; the sour-sweet smell of bodily waste.
With great reluctance, I went inside, remembering a Cairo garage I’d entered one day looking for an informant that the Agency wanted to protect. I found him, all right, along with three or four of his friends, chopped up and piled up inside a closet. It took several weeks of showers before I felt clean again.
I got the light on. The place was one big room with three smaller rooms off to the right. The big room had an auxiliary battery and video equipment and a large cardboard box shoved into one corner.
I went over and looked into the box. I found wigs and black leather sex masks and handcuffs and women’s panties. I also found spiked belts and chains. The chains were dark and sticky with blood. There were also pieces of wound cloth that had obviously been used as gags.
I didn’t have to wonder what kind of videos were being shot here.
Two of the three small rooms looked to have been storage areas at one time. Now they held small cots and an impromptu makeup table complete with round theatrical mirror. Somebody had written a dirty word in the middle of it with red lipstick long ago dried out. A lone Polaroid lay on the table, shriveled like an autumn leaf. I picked it up and stared at it. There was a girl, no more than eight, naked and with her legs parted wide, spreading her sex for the camera. It was going to take an awful lot of showers to make me feel clean this time.
The third of the rooms was where I found the blood and the excrement, the blood splashed all over the walls, the way slaughterhouses sometimes look, the floor covered with large feces of the human variety. This is the way a lot of jail cells look in Latin America, after prisoners have been held there for a month, and been beaten regularly during the process.
Somebody had been held prisoner here. No doubt about it.
The air was dead and stifling in the small dusty room; cobwebs sticky to touch. The lone window high on the wall was pebbled glass to begin with. Filth made it even more opaque. You could hear screams echoing in here, what it must have been like for whoever had been kept here, crawling on the floor, clawing at the door like a sick animal. About knee-high on the door you could see fingernail scratches. She’d probably pleaded with them. Please please please. I wondered how old she’d been, or rather they’d been. Plural. There’d surely been many more than one here over the months designated on the rent receipts. Somebody’s little daughter; somebody’s little sister.
I went back out to the main room and looked around again. A few dozen businesses had probably been housed in this place over the past forty or fifty years — a few dozen dashed hopes of the small business person — until it had spiraled ignominiously down to this, a place where children were exploited for reasons of greed and some dark and unimaginable predilection of the human spirit.
A white Lincoln, I thought. A white Lincoln.
15
When I stopped by the motel office to check for any messages, a woman I hadn’t seen before said, “You’ve got a visitor.”