Also recovered from Daniel’s possession are hundreds of violent pornographic recordings, including ones of Gabriela Lagos bathing lewdly while her son Martin watched with his broken arm from the closed lid of the toilet, and there are also several recorded minutes of her being drowned by Daniel Mersa. Over the years he transferred his film library to DVDs, and more recently his iPad, and he had quite a collection of stories and recordings about notorious violent offenders, including ones Benton has written about.
There can be no question who the Capital Murderer is and exactly what he’s done but it continues to perplex me that his circus associates never questioned the strange reconfiguring of his SUV or the gaudy, shimmering ceramic masks inside the train car he’s lived in for years. But then the world he inhabits isn’t exactly a normal one, as he dresses in costumes, sometimes painting his face, before stepping into the ring to somersault onto horses or do backflips off elephants or hang and spin perilously from silks, ropes, and hoops or roll inside a human-sized hamster ball.
“I can come pick you up if you tell me where.” Lucy is still trying to talk Jake into eating Christmas dinner with us. “You won’t have much fun with Grans and would be best served to totally ignore my mother.”
“Well, that’s quite an enticement,” I remark as I look toward the red train where Benton and Marino are finishing up.
“Okay,” Jake says and he presents Lucy with his green woven flower, which is as close to looking like a hibiscus as something is going to get if it’s crafted from strips of a coconut palm frond. “You can pick me up here any time as long as you can fit my bike.”
“I can fit it. But I need a time.”
“I mostly tell it from the sun.”
“What time are we eating Christmas dinner, Aunt Kay?”
“It depends on my mother.”
“Everything depends on Grans,” Lucy says as an eye-rolling aside.
“I’m here most of the time so it doesn’t matter to me.” Jake has something on his mind he won’t say. “Tomorrow’s Christmas, I guess. I wouldn’t have thought about it. Everything for me is the weather. It’s all about where I go if it’s raining hard and I don’t like lightning.”
“They’re coming.” I get up from the seawall.
“The Red Coats?” Jake jokes but it’s as if a cloud has passed across the sun, his face shadowed by a wistfulness I can’t interpret.
“Marino wants baby back ribs.” I read the message from him that just landed. “He wants to know where to go. I recommend Shorty’s on South Dixie Highway.” I type my response as I talk.
“Janet can pick it up,” Lucy says.
“Marino will want to. Lighted beer signs, wagon wheels, cow skulls, and saddles everywhere. It’s his kind of place. We may never see him again.”
“I know where you can get the freshest fish you’ve ever put in your mouth,” Jake says and then I understand what’s happening with him.
“I’m in the mood for conch but it has to be just out of the shell and in cold salt water.” I see Benton and Marino walking away from the long red train, heading toward us. “And yellowtail on the grill with a simple Japanese marinade, very light is all that’s needed if the fish is fresh,” I say to Jake as if I’m giving him my order.
“You just follow Sixth Street to the Miami River. Not even ten minutes from here.”
“Can you show me?” I ask even though I know my way around.
“Sure I can,” he says.
My mother’s house is a twenty-minute drive from downtown when traffic is reasonable as it is right now.
Benton and Marino will meet us after they’ve picked up ribs, slaw, corn on the cob, and whatever else Marino decides to order at Shorty’s, a famous Texas-style barbecue restaurant with a big chimney in back that may have been the only thing left standing when the place burnt to the ground in the early seventies. I’d been to the original a few times when I was growing up, usually on my birthday, when my father’s health was good and he was still making a living at his small grocery store.
I follow Granada Boulevard deeper into Coral Gables where the foliage is old and lush, with ivy draping coral walls that go back to the 1920s and tall privacy hedges of lady palm and dense barriers of natal plum, with its fragrant white pinwheel flowers and sharp, spiny branches. The names of the narrow, quiet streets are painted in black on white curbstones and the white pavement is shaded by huge pin oaks with dense canopies and ficus trees with thick, ropy roots that crack roads, sidewalks, swimming pools, and penetrate plumbing.
Homes here range from small gems to villas and columned mansions, and the small rich city of some fifty thousand is where we used to sightsee at this very time of year when my father was well enough to drive us around to look at Christmas decorations that used to be far more outrageous than I’ve seen so far. I remember winterland scenes of snowmen and life-sized Santas in sleighs with reindeer on rooftops and so many lights that the illumination could be seen for miles away. My father’s car was a 195 °Chevrolet, white, with bumper wings and fender skirts, and I remember the smell of the fabric upholstery when it got hot in the sun while riding with my window cranked down.
My mother’s house wouldn’t be on any Christmas tour, with its electric candles in the windows and the small potted lemon cedar I found at a Whole Foods grocery store. Left to her own devices she doesn’t lift a finger to decorate or cook, and my sister usually hires somebody to do such things, depending on the financial status of her hombre del dia, as Lucy and I refer to whoever she’s dating on any given day. At least my mother won’t bat an eye when we show up with a homeless man we’ve invited for dinner — or maybe several dinners. She’s never forgotten what it is to be poor while Dorothy has no memory of it and is to the manner born, if you have the misfortune of witnessing the experience of her, which I don’t wish on anyone.
I take a left on Milan Avenue and my mother’s house is on the corner, built of white stucco, with a red barrel tile roof and a one-car garage that conceals the Honda sedan I wish she’d no longer drive. I see the slatted wooden blinds move in a front window, which is my mother’s hallmark way of checking who’s arrived, even though I’ve told her countless times that once she’s made it obvious she’s home it’s a little more difficult not to answer the door. Of course Lucy and I made sure she has a peephole and an alarm system that includes front and back cameras, but she doesn’t check. She’d rather part slats in the blinds and peer out the same way she’s done all of her long, hard life.
I pull into a driveway that’s just long enough to tuck one car off the street and Lucy, Jake, and I get out.
“Who did you bring?” my mother’s voice precedes her as the front door opens a quarter of the way, another old habit. “It’s not that awful man everybody’s after!”
“No, Mother,” I reply. “He’s been caught and is in jail.”
I open the door the rest of the way and my mother is in the same housedress she had on yesterday, white with big colorful flowers on it, and the big floral design makes her look wider and shorter and white makes her hair not as white and her skin more sallow. It does no good at all to say a word and I never do unless there’s a question of hygiene and there rarely is, maybe a food stain she can’t see or an odor her sense of smell won’t pick up anymore.
“Why is Lucy dressed like that?” My mother looks Lucy up and down as we file in with an ice chest full of fish.
“It’s the same thing I had on this morning, Grans. Cargo shorts and a sweatshirt.”