I found myself having to blink often and breathe deeply as I watched them move heavily past until I couldn’t see them anymore, and then I wandered back to the seawall where Lucy and I sit with Jake, who I find a pleasant comfort as we chat in the breeze off the water, the sun warm on my hair and the thin long-sleeved shirt and pants I wear. We’ve been happily resurrecting a past both of us remember well since we’re close to the same age. And while I’ve not lived outdoors most of my adult life, we have much in common, both of us children in Miami once, both of us feeling a bit like elephants in an overbuilt world that doesn’t understand much.
When I was growing up here and the circus came to town, the elephants would make a longer, more drawn out parade on the boulevard for the benefit of a massive crowd, and the entire world would stop, or so I thought. I’ve described things like this to Lucy because I want her to hear more about the past she’s from even if she didn’t live it. Before my father was too sick he took me to watch the elephants, I’ve explained, and I can still see their measured gait as they slowly plodded along, these massive gray creatures with patchy brown hair and crinkly small eyes and round, drooping ears carried on pillar-like feet, each elephant curling its trunk around the tail of the one in front as if they were holding hands to cross the street.
Today there was but a small straggle of spectators along the short segment of the boulevard closed to traffic, a few police cars and traffic cops in vests, and I doubt anyone had any idea at all why a young athletic-looking woman and with an older, less athletic-looking one were standing silently alone in poignant wonder. Then we retreated without a word to the seawall where the homeless man we hadn’t met yet was stripping palm fronds into wire thin ribbons that by now he’s fashioned into a lizard, a fish, a grasshopper, and a bird. I gave him twenty dollars for the grasshopper and that’s when I found out his name is Jake — not the grasshopper but the man who created it.
He has trash bags filled with his belongings in the baskets of his dented blue bicycle leaning against the railing of the seawall and just now he points out a dolphin charging after a fish, a streak of silvery gray underwater that ripples on top, and then I see the gray rolling curves before the bottlenose breaks the surface and it seems he’s laughing at his good fortune of having the small fish he holds in his mouth, throwing it back as if he’s going to toss it like a ball, and I smile at such a happy mammal.
Jake has watched the dolphins and the elephants for many years, as many years as he’s lived outdoors in a Florida sun that has weathered his skin to the texture of old brown leather, his graying blond hair tied back in a ponytail, scars and tattoos all over his sinewy arms. His eyes are almost the same blue as the shallow water in the bay, a light greenish blue that turns a deeper aqua when he turns philosophical and digs into his memories and offers his opinions.
“What are you doing for Christmas?” I ask him as I look at the latest photographs Benton has texted me, those of Daniel Mersa’s train car, where he’s lived for his past eight years on the road with the circus.
“I don’t do much.” Jake reaches for a bundle of coconut palm strips upright in a basket of his bicycle. “Every day’s the same. It’s all about the weather.”
“Why don’t you eat with us?”
“I could make an angel because that’s what both of you are,” Jake says. “But I think they’re boring.”
“I’m not an angel,” Lucy says and truer words were never spoken.
“What about a hibiscus flower?”
“My aunt’s a pretty good cook,” Lucy says.
“Pretty good?” I don’t look up from my phone, cupping my hand over it so the sun doesn’t white out the display.
45
The train car looks like a one-bedroom trailer, and the photographs Benton texts show a single bed, a couch, a coffee table, several lamps, a TV and a kitchenette, very tidy and clean and unremarkable except for the masks.
“You should have Christmas dinner with us,” Lucy encourages Jake as he weaves palm strips together, the long, narrow green ribbons shiny side up and flashing as they whip in the bright sun.
The ceramic masks are displayed on stationary stands attached to a shelf high up on the wall, seven faces that in the spectral bandwidth of the nonvisible black light mounted over them shimmer iridescently. Bloodred, emerald green, bluish purple. Seven faces of seven women, only four Benton recognizes, he writes to me. The Washington, D.C., victims and, most recently, Gail Shipton.
“He’s killed before,” Benton’s next text lands.
“In Coral Gables,” Lucy says to Jake.
“I used to go to the Venetian Pool when I was a kid,” he replies as the hibiscus flower takes shape in his quick fingers. “The Gables are so expensive, nobody can live there anymore.”
“Where my grandmother used to live?” Lucy says. “A neighborhood off Seventy-ninth.”
“The worst street in Miami. I never go there.”
“It didn’t used to be. We had to move her.”
“To the Gables,” Jake considers. “I never go there. Too much money but that was a nice thing to do. Nobody’s grandmother should be a victim of crime.”
“I’d worry about the other guy,” Lucy says and Jake guffaws.
“Maybe Lucy can try facial recognition on 3 masks you don’t recognize,” I type to Benton. “Are there women missing & presumed murdered from cities where circus performs? If so compare masks to them?”
“Or victims could be women DL wanted out of the way,” Benton answers. “Could go back years.”
DL is Dominic Lombardi and the theory is that while he may have asked his troublesome sociopathic biological son to get rid of an occasional inconvenient human being like Klara Hembree, he never intended for Daniel Mersa to kill people for fun. But you get what you get, I always say. Benton believes Daniel was helping distribute the drugs that have been his downfall. Methylenedioxypyrovalerone. MDPV. Bath salts the organized criminals of Double S were getting from Chinese laboratories and distributing in cities across America including Cambridge.
“He would have had his car up north recently,” Benton continues to inform me of what’s going on. “Circus was in Boston early December then Brooklyn before going back south. SUV travels on flatbed & he has it wherever circus stops.”
Daniel Mersa’s Suburban would seat nine if he hadn’t taken out all of the seats except the two up front and I saw those pictures yesterday. A partition covered in black carpet is between the front and back and behind it is his studio, an empty plyboard space painted black and lined with soundproofing insulation where he suffocated his victims and made death masks of air-drying clay before posing the bodies in just the right position. One arm stretched out and cocked at the wrist, the way Gabriela Lagos’s right arm looked after he drowned her in her tub, and then he draped the body in a long white cloth reminiscent of a big white bath sheet.
The clay would set as rigor mortis did and he’d dress his latest victim in the panties of a previous one. And when he arrived at the location he picked he’d drag his morbid cargo on a bamboo stretcher that he kept in the back of his murdermobile, as Marino calls it. He and Benton have recovered colorful Lycra body socks, plastic bags from the Octopus spa shop, the designer duct tape, and several stun guns and dozens of cartridges, and white aerial silks, which also are made of Lycra. The long special fabrics are the stock-in-trade of performers like Daniel who fall, swing and suspend themselves from these silks and use them to fly through the air as they strike daring poses that thrill and amaze their audiences.