Hoo. Hoo. Sad.
Yeah. We had the funeral. Jasper came up to me and hugged me like a best friend should. And Pearly came up afterward and said, I shoulda give her that kidney. I shoulda give it. She wuzz my sister. I shouldna listened to Jasper. Jasper? I said. What does he got to do with this? She said, Don’t tell him I told ya, but he loved me so much, he forbid me to give the kidney. He wuzz afraid somethin would happen to me on the operating table. He wuzz too afraid to lose me. Jasper? But nah. I had that letter from the doctor. I ran home and got out the letter Pearly’s doctor had sent us. I read it and I reread it. When you know someone, you know someone. There wuzz one line in it that went somethin like the kidney being a fertile ground for disease. I kept lookin at that word fertile and I knew what Jasper had done and why...
Hoo. Hoo. You awright?
Nah. I’m not awright.
What he done to you wuzz wrong.
Maybe I wuzz wrong. Maybe I shoulda let him sleep with her. He wuzz my friend and he wanted kids and couldn have em. Maybe because I loved her so much my mind was closed on this point.
Hoo. Hoo.
So I aksed him to go fishing a month later. Jus me and him, like inna old days. I took him down to the Keys. It wuzz night. I pulled into a dark spot along the road where I’d left a marker pointin out the place where I had dug his grave. I took out the gun and stuck it in his ribs and I took outta flashlight and showed him his grave. He started a cry. Said he wuzz sorry. Real sorry. Said he’d pay me a lot a money if I didn kill him. I told him ta get outta the van. He said, No. I shot him in the shoulda and told him ta get outta the van or I’d shoot him like that a little piece ata time. He wuzz howlin and howlin, he didn like pain, tha’s why he had nevah played sports, but he didn get outta the van neither. I shot him again in the other shoulda this time. He howled and finally got outta the van. He wuzz beggin me and pleadin as I pointed him to the hole with the flashlight and the gun. He said, You know you’re not gonna get away with this. Too much blood in the van. They’ll check the van. You can never get all the blood out. You gotta know that. I said, I don’t expect ta get away with it. I figure Pearly will send the cops afta me when I get back and you ain’t with me. But they ain’t nevah gonna find your body. I want you gone forever like Kerly’s gone forever. He pleaded one more time. Got down on his knees. Said he’d give me a blowjob if I promise to let him live. I shot him in the face, and he tumbled into the hole. I shot him again to make sure he wuzz dead. He wuzz my best friend. I didn want him to suffer. It took me like a hour to cover up the hole. Then I got back inna van and drove to the hotel room we had rented in the Keys and lived there for a week.
And then?
Then I went home. The police came. There wuzz court, and I told em what I had done and why. Then I got life in prison, but now I’m here cause of my good behavior.
Hoo. Hoo. Tough.
Shit yeah. Tough.
Wuzz it worth it?
Shit yeah. I’d kill him again if he rose from the dead.
Hoo. Hoo.
The noir boudoir
by Lynne Barrett
Upper Eastside
On a warm Tuesday morning in late October, the tail end of the hurricane season, I sit in my car outside the Delphi and pretend I’m on stakeout: a honed tedium. Eight years retired, but you never stop being a cop. I sip coffee and look at the grand old apartment building, long ago converted to condos, recently rehabbed. The pressure-cleaned Sphinxes at the entrance cast sharp Sphinxy shadows, and fresh green awnings ripple up the front in the eastern ocean light as they must have in the Delphi’s heyday. I think of all the stories the place could tell.
At least it’s survived. On the next block I can see some foundation work and the signage for a new tower touting luxury living: Buy your piece of sky. The boom has reached this area north of downtown Miami. Deco buildings less cared for than the Delphi get condemned, knocked down, and replaced by glass towers that can’t emulate their cool lines and glamour.
I’m parked behind Alex Sterling’s white SUV, which was here when I arrived. Alex is young, gay, smart, a North Carolina boy with excellent manners and a work ethic. In three years he has built up quite a business: Sterling Estate Clearance. Old people die alone here in Miami and their children, living far away, often estranged or resentful, come in to take what they want, and then Alex appraises, bids for, and disposes of the rest. With his respectful tone and open face, his name that rings true, they trust him. As do I, as much as I trust anyone.
Right now, I know, he is inside going through the late Mrs. Dorsett’s pockets. Alex deals in fine china and what we call “smalls”: jewelry, silver, personal doodads which he sells at high-end shows around the southeast. He tells me that he learned the hard way that people hide their smalls, so now he combs through a place before we see it: He’s found mine-cut diamonds in a denture case and a Rolex under the insole of a running shoe. To the finder go the spoils.
Which might be the motto for our team. When Alex has identified what he’ll take, he brings us in for our specialities — depending on what the estate offers — and we give him a price for what we want.
Hank Kussrow & Son, Jeff, double-park beside me in their furniture truck. Jeff Kussrow is the one with the knowledge about furniture, his dad the muscle. Hank’s up in his seventies but still a big guy with thick gray hair. I’ve seen many a sideboard go downstairs on his back. He had a moving business, but his son was more into refinishing than lugging, Hank says, and persuaded him that’s where the money is. We get out and make idle conversation about the weather and what Alex has told us so far: The estate is small but choice.
I hear from a block away a chug and backfire. “The old guy,” says Hank, with a grin. The old guy’s van comes into view with his little white dog barking out the passenger window. Others of us may be variously old, but none as decrepit as him. Alex calls him Cash, which may be his name or the way he operates. He helps Alex, and then at the end Alex lets him take all the dreck. He sells the least likely things — rusty tools, old pots and pans, broken cameras — at the flea market in Fort Lauderdale, passing them on to other old guys like himself. He gets out, leaving the van running; it can take him a good six or seven tries to restart it.
In his usual faded tropical shirt and disreputable shorts, longish white hair under a baseball cap, feet sockless in sneakers, he comes over just as Guillermo Reyes pulls up in his peach-colored panel truck inscribed, The Gizmo Man. Guillermo fixes clocks and radios and toasters. His shop on the beach sells a lot of mid-century kitchen stuff, from jelly glasses to Streamline Moderne blenders. Guillermo is a year or two older than me, in good shape, small, bald, and dapper. “Nice place,” he says, as he joins us.